Author: Elli Fischer

Etrogim from Poland?

A few days ago, a close friend and HaMapah fan sent a reference to Responsa Rema 126, an important source (along with Responsa Rema 117) for understanding the issue of etrog murkav, the etrog that was somehow not entirely an etrog, and therefore unfit for use (according to most authorities) on Sukkot. But the issue of etrog murkav, is, well, complicated (“murkav” in modern Hebrew), as there are two fundamentally different phenomena that come under the title “murkav”: grafting and crossbreeding. Grafting the branch of an etrog tree onto the rootstock of another (generally sturdier) citrus will produce fruits that are etrogim in every sense: the look, feel, and taste like etrogim, and they are genetically etrogim. Yet they are still unfit for the mitzvah because they did not grow from a tree that is entirely an etrog tree, and the command is to take “the fruit of the hadar tree”. That is, not only must the fruit be an etrog fruit, but it must grow from an etrog tree (see Responsa Hatam Sofer, Orah Hayim 207).

The other type of “harkavah” is the cross-pollination of an etrog with another citrus, yielding a fruit that is a hybrid of an etrog and something else. The etrog discussed in the responsum in question was clearly crossbred, as it mentions three ways of distinguishing pure etrogim from hybrids. The problem is that it was not until several centuries later that the distinction between these two types of “harkavah” was fully made. In practice, both grafted and hybrid etrogim are considered murkav and thus unfit for use.

Returning to the responsum, it has a few interesting features. Firstly, it was not written by Rema, but rather to Rema, by R. Shmuel Yehuda Katzenellenbogen, the great-grandson of Mahari Mintz, son of Maharam Padua, and relative of Rema. Secondly, it tells of how there were two congregations in Padua at the time of Maharam Padua: one Ashkenazic and one Italki. The two congregations shared an etrog. When a courier was bringing the etrog from one to the other, he was accosted by students (presumably from the venerable University of Padua), who held it ransom. Despite all of this, the community did not use any of the abundant hybrid etrogim in the area. R. Katzenellenbogen then goes on to list three differences between true and hybrid etrogim grown in the area of Padua, in northern Italy.

But before doing so, he emphasizes that these differences are not universal, and that other etrogim might have other features. This section includes a passage that tends to leap out:

And the hybrids (murkavim) that grow in these countries (medinot) are discernible and known to us, but from the region (mehoz) of Poland (Polin) come etrogim about which we are uncertain. And this year, most of our etrogim were from that region. I write to your honored Torah excellence three signs by which you can recognize the hybrids that grow in our land, because the ones from Poland (Polaniya) cannot reach you, for it is far away.

The geography here makes little sense, for several reasons:

  1. Etrogim grow in Poland? And are exported from there to Italy!? Granted, at the time that the responsum was written (late 1560s or early 1570s), Poland was experiencing its Golden Age and almost reached the Black Sea, but that is still not the climate for growing citrus, there is no record of etrogim growing there, and it seems extraordinary unlikely that etrogim would be exported from Poland to Italy. 
  2. Rema was in Krakow, so how could Polish etrogim, even if they existed, be too “far away” for Polish Jews to obtain? And yet still be accessible to Italians!?
  3. Poland, as noted, was huge at that time. It seems odd to call it a “mehoz”, which generally denotes a regional subdivision roughly equivalent to a county or district, not a large kingdom.

The image above is from the 1883 Warsaw edition of Responsa Rema, which has been the basis of numerous reprintings in the 20th century. It is also the edition digitized by Sefaria. However, if one goes back to earlier editions, things are a bit different. The Amsterdam 1711 edition, for example:

Poland (Polin) is mentioned in the first instance, but later we have ‘פוליי. In the three earlier editions (Krakow 1640, Hanau 1710, Hamburg 1710 – yes, it was printed 3x in 1710-1; seems significant, but I’ve got nothing), the place is called ‘פוליי in both instances:

Rabbi Dr. Asher Siev, in his 1971 critical edition of Responsa Rema (which the Bar-Ilan project uses), restores the original, notes that the emendation to “Poland” is erroneous, and comments that the reference is to “a region in Italy” (nn. 7-8):

Last year, a volume on the history of the etrog, aptly named Ha-Etrog, edited by Eliezer Goldschmidt and Moshe Bar-Yosef, was published by Mossad HaRav Kook. It has an appendix with several important responsa on etrogim, including Responsa Rema 126. It, too, restores the original print edition and identifies ‘פוליי with Apulia (Puglia in Italian), a region in southern Italy (the “high heel” of the boot). 

Suddenly it all makes sense. Apulia and nearby Calabria are some of the most venerable etrog-growing regions. The “Yanover” (= “Genoa”) etrogim originate in Calabria. And indeed, Apulia is quite far from Poland. 

The Prenumeranten Project and Other Good News

We’re part of Haifa U’s digital humanities lab, we won a nice grant to work on a really cool project, and in short, things are moving.

We have some good news to share. 

First, HaMapah is now a project of e-Lijah Lab, a digital humanities laboratory at The Department of Jewish History and Bible Studies in the University of Haifa. One of the e-lab’s goals is to provide digital platforms for the public to participate in research. We will be unveiling a crowdsourcing site in the near future, where users will be able to help our efforts, and where we will release functional tools as we develop them and reach a critical mass of data. 

We have also become big fans of the e-Lijah Lab ecosystem. At present, there are six or seven DH projects participating in the lab, and there’s a lot of synergy and cross-pollination. It’s relatively new, but there’s no other Digital Judaica incubator like it in Israel, perhaps in the world. We’re excited to be part of it.

The other big news is that we won a substantial and prestigious grant (from a foundation that prefers anonymity) for a project that we proposed together with Prof. Marcin Wodzinski of the Taube Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (and author of the astoundingly gorgeous and informative Historical Atlas of Hasidism; you can read Elli’s review here). Over the next three years, we will be developing a comprehensive database of “Prenumeranten” – the subscriber lists that appeared in c. 1500 Hebrew books printed primarily in Europe during the 18th – 20th centuries. These lists are a gold mine of information about all kinds of under-explored aspects of Jewish history and intellectual cultures (in addition to the obvious data points: hundreds of thousands of names, aggregate data on cities and towns, their functionaries, and the institutions that operated within them, etc.). We’ll be writing more about it here and elsewhere, but let us look at two examples.

Below is an image of one of eight pages of subscribers to Sefer Zekhuta De-Avraham, a collection of homilies by R. Avraham Landau, the Rebbe of Tchechnov (Ciechanów, Poland), published posthumously by his sons in 1895. It is clear from the full list that a good chunk of the audience was Polish Hasidim. Among the institutions mentioned as subscribers are groups and shtiblekh of Hasidim affiliated with Polish dynasties: Alexander, Gur, Amshinov, and Tchechnov. This is informative, but not surprising. We also get names of rabbis, teachers, judges, and ritual slaughterers of the various towns – these are highlighted in yellow. 

There was one functionary, common to several towns, that was unfamiliar to us: “Gabbai De-Tikun Sefarim”. We asked several experts, none of whom had ever heard of this title, either. From what we can piece together, we tentatively suggest that this originally referred to a functionary whose role was to repair the books in the synagogue of beit midrash. As books became cheaper and more abundant, the role expanded to be a sort of librarian with the authority to acquire books on behalf of the community. Several of the contemporary gabba’im (and gabba’ot) de-tikun sefarim were very excited about this.

The second example is from R. Yitzhak Isaac Safrin of Komarno’s Nidvat Pi. Some readers may recall that Elli published the commentary on Mishnah Kinim from this book in honor of his son becoming bar mitzvah two years ago (if you didn’t, you can request access here; R. Yitzhak Isaac is the topic of Yakov Z. Mayer’s master’s thesis as well). At the time, Elli noticed a few interesting features of the list of subscribers that appears at the end of this book.

The orange highlights are patronyms. The blue highlights are surnames that derive from communal occupations. The yellow highlights are institutions. These are fairly commonplace.

More interesting are the purple and green highlights. The green highlights are surnames – not interesting in themselves, but note that there are only some people have surnames. In fact, it seems to depend on the place. In some places people had surnames, and in some places they didn’t. The book was published in the mid-19th century, and most of these towns are in what was then Hungary. Ruther research is needed, but it seems that what we have here is a snapshot from when Jews in the Habsburg Empire were assigned surnames. Places closer to the capital and larger towns seem to have gotten there first, followed by small towns and villages far from the center of the empire. It will be fascinating to trace this more systematically.

The purple highlights show where subscribers identified themselves by their mothers’ names. We have not seen this anywhere else (yet), so it is quite extraordinary. What is going on?The author of the book was a Hasidic Rebbe with a reputation for being a ba’al moyfes, a miracle worker. The prayers and blessings of such tzadikim were thought to be very powerful. Moreover, in his thesis (p. 65), Mayer points us to the author’s introduction to the list of subscribers:

Here, R. Yitzhak Isaac “stretches his hands out to the heavens” on behalf of all of those who are “engraved” in this book. He prays that “they shall be blessed with the blessings written in the Torah” and so forth. Traditionally, in blessings on prayers on behalf of another, the mother’s name is used. 

It seems, then, that the subscribers to this book were not only interested in adding it to their personal collection, but saw it as a way to gain the tzadik’s blessing (whether this was part of R. Yitzhak Isaac’s marketing strategy is unknown), and so they subscribed under matronyms, as it was considered more auspicious for such purposes. This sheds some light on the inner religious world of those who purchased such books. 

In short, there’s some fascinating stuff here, and we’re just seeing the tip of the iceberg. We apologize for not posting for a while, but we’ve been busy, and we can’t wait to share some of the fruit of our most recent labors.

The Search for שאהל

A lot of the hours we put in are devoted to identifying place names as they appear in responsa with geographical coordinates. We have discussed how many places have several names and that there was no standardization of spelling. Moreover, some of these places have been swallowed up by larger cities and many others are so tiny that there is very little documentation to go on. The search for these places is a challenge and a lot of fun, though it can be frustrating. But first, the fun.

Several months ago, our friend Yisrael Dubitsky, Senior Digital Manuscripts Bibliographer at the National Library of Israel, posted a query to a specialist Facebook group trying to identify a place called שאהל. In the 19th century, Rabbi Shmuel Kitze of this town sent a letter to a Rabbi Zalman; the letter ended up in the Karlin-Stolin Library in Jerusalem and has been digitized.

The problem with a place name like שאהל is that it is short and has only two extremely common consonants. Nevertheless, we were able to positively identify the place with 100% certainty.

Participants in the FB discussion made suggestions like Shal, Iran and Challes, France; I thought that the search should focus on the Austro-Hungarian Empire because the writer’s name, Kitze, comes from Kittsee, one of the Sheva Kehillot/Siebengemeinden/ Seven Dorfs (never gets old) of Burgenland, now Austria. But even within the Habsburg realms, there were lots of possibilities: Tekovské Lužany, Slovakia (Nagysallo in Hungarian), Šaľa, Slovakia (Hungarian: Vágsellye, German: Schelle); Szamossályi, Hungary; and Șoala, Romania (Sálya in Hungarian).

There were problems with each of these suggestions, though. For example, Šaľa is spelled שאלה or סלה in other sources, as Yisrael pointed out. Nagysallo may have been called just Sallo (we’ve discussed dropped prefixes in Hungarian place names), but that “o” is unlikely to have been dropped. The letter “y” at the end of a Hungarian place name is usually dropped, but not “o”. Șoala has no documented Jewish community, so it’s an unlikely candidate. That left Szamossályi, a town in Northeast Hungary with a Jewish population of 144 in 1900. We had nothing more concrete than that, but the fun was just starting.

The next step (which maybe should have been the first step) was to consult a reference book. There’s no comprehensive gazetteer, but Berl Kagan’s indispensable Sefer Ha-Prenumerantn (Hebrew Subscription Lists) has a lot of place names. Like almost 9000. He has an entry for שאל where he lists שאהל as a variant spelling. This entry (#8362) does not appear in the Latin spelling index at the end of the book. But Kagan gives us a list of several books that mention this place in its list of presubscribers. Looking up the entries, we find that in R. Meir Asch’s Homat Esh has one subscriber from שאל, but it adds in parentheses “בורשוד”. This is the name of a county in Hungary. Looking at a list of towns and villages in this county yields one good candidate: Saly, Hungary. This was still tentative, though; this town does not even have a separate entry in the JewishGen Communities Database, though it is listed by IAJGS as having a cemetery (“BAZ” is Borsod-Abauj-Zemplen County), and it also appears in several lists of smaller communities near Miskolc.

Saly (highlighted) in Borsod County, Hungary, just south of Miskolc

Moving down Kagan’s list, we find that R. Zvi Hirsch Friedman’s הישר והטוב, published in 1880, has no less than 10 subscribers from שאהל, with that very spelling. The first subscriber listed is the town’s rabbi, R. Shmuel Schlesinger.

Now things connect with work we’ve already done. Rabbi Shmuel Schlesinger is in our database. He was the recipient of a responsum from Maharam Schick in 1878 (Orah Hayim 37), in which he is addressed as the the rav of שאללי בארשאדער קאמידאט. That is, the rav of שאללי, in Borsod County. So now we have an individual, R. Schlesinger, who is the rabbi of שאהל in 1880 and שאללי in Borsod County in 1878, and another identification of שאהל with שאל in Borsod County.

QED. שאהל is Saly, Hungary.

Funny enough, Kagan has another entry (#8372) for שאלי, which he identifies with Saly.

Borderlands: Maramaros, between Hungary and Galicia

[This post is based on a presentation that Elli gave on February 6, titled “The Geography of Post-Schism Responsa in the Hungarian Hinterlands”, at a conference in Budapest on “‘Unhealed Breach’ or a Good Divorce? The Hungarian Jewish Congress (1868-69) and the ‘Schism’ in Historical Perspective”.]

One of the key premises of the HaMapah project is that local rabbis have a great deal of freedom in choosing who, if anyone, to ask the tough questions. The resulting question–What informs that choice?–can be considered from the supply side and from the demand side. On the supply side, the question is how rabbis built their reputations and earned the trust of other rabbis. We have argues that this is not a naïve process by any means. On the demand side, of course, the desire for a particular answer may play a role, but the process is far more complicated than that. Conscience, precedent, and communal norms play roles. This topic–”Who decides who decides?”–was the topic of a Torah in Motion panel discussion between Elli, Prof. Chaim Saiman, and Judge Sharon Shore last month. It’s worth listening to the entire discussion (link to video), but suffice it to say that these processes, and the relationship between halakhist and audience, are sufficiently dynamic that attempts to reduce halakhic outcomes either to rabbinic fiat or to public will inevitably fall far short of the mark.

As a “case study” of how these dynamics play out, we decided to take a closer look at a phenomenon we addressed in one of our first posts, namely, that the Galician cultural sphere was shifting to the south and west in the late-19th and early-20th centuries.

We have pointed out that Maharsham wrote a relatively large number of responsa to places just across the border in Hungary, a pattern that comports with migratory trends. In a different post, we noted that Reb Fischel Feldman broke from his general habit of posing questions to Maharsham (once his daughter married Maharsham’s grandson) by posing a question concerning the permissibility of accepting monies from a government fund for Jewish institutions that was administered by non-Orthodox Congress (or “Neolog”) communal leaders. We now want to broaden the view to look at patterns within responsa sent by Hungarian and Galician poskim to Hungarian places near the Galician border.

It has been a while since we posted anything, but we have not been idle (and we have shared some things via our Facebook and WhatsApp channels). For one thing, we have done some work on Hungarian poskim from a century ago and have completely mapped four of them: Rabbi Simcha Bunim Sofer (Shevet Sofer), Rabbi Mordechai Leib Winkler (Levushei Mordechai), Rabbi Moshe Shmuel Glasner (Dor Revi’i–Yoav Sorek helped with the data), and Rabbi Yehuda Greenwald (Zikhron Yehuda). All four of these poskim were active in Hungary at the beginning of the 20th century, some at the beginning of their careers, and some at the end. This is also not a comprehensive list of Hungarian poskim who were active then, but it’s a good representation. Here is the map of these four poskim. As usual, it’s easier to open in a separate tab:

When comparing the four maps, do not be fooled by the size of the dots; R. Winkler wrote 76 responsa to Galanta, Slovakia, mainly to his son-in-law, Rav Yosef Tzvi Dushinsky, so all the other dots are smaller in comparison. However, R. Winkler wrote 1555 responsa, more than R. Greenwald (491), R. Sofer (245), and R. Glasner (199) combined. In terms of the number of places addressed, R. Winkler again far outpaces the competition, writing to 174 places (the other three wrote to 66, 85, and 65 respectively). Interestingly, though, Shevet Sofer gives Levushei Mordechai a run for its money when it comes to geographical spread.

This is also a good time to note a feature of our maps. Place names do not automatically appear, but if you mouse over a dot, the name and number of responsa written to that place will pop up, and if you click on the place, the Hebrew/Yiddish spellings and references to the individual responsa will pop up.

Now that we have had some fun comparing and contrasting these four Hungarian poskim, we can introduce the next map, which combines all of these Hungarian poskim into one dot, and all three Galician poskim we’ve mapped–Maharsham, Harei Besamim, and Beit Yitzhak–into a dot of a different color. By zooming in on the border areas, it becomes easy to see that the realms of these two groups were largely distinct, except for a few counties along the border: Ung, Bereg, and especially Maramaros. Here’s the map (separate tab):

In the three aforementioned counties, there were 125 responsa received from Galicia, 91 from within Hungary. In terms of places, 28 received from Galicia, 20 from Hungary. But if we focus in on Maramaros, the picture gets more interesting. The Hungarian poskim sent 37 responsa to 10 places in Maramaros. The Galicians sent 89 responsa to 20 places. If we take out the two largest cities in the county, Sighet and Khust, then we are left with 8 and 16 for the Hungarians, 18 and 60 for the Galicians. There are two towns n Maramarosthat received responsa from Hungary but not Galicia. There are 11 towns that received from Galicia but not Hungary.

There are a few things that seem to be going on here. Firstly, the Hungarian influence seems to have been greater in the larger towns and cities along the border. Presumably this was not accidental. Three leading pupils of Hatam Sofer–Hayim Sofer, Moshe Schick (Maharam Schick), and Meir Eisenstadter (Maharam Ash)–moved east and became the rabbis of Mukacheve (Munkacs), Khust, and Uzhorod (Ungvar), respectively. As Rabbi Dr. Levi Cooper has written, the appointment of a Hungarian rabbi like R. Hayim Sofer to head the Munkacs rabbinate was more the exception than the rule, but the attempt to “Magyarize” the Munkacs rabbinate was at least attempted, and in terms of responsa, Munkacs received 17 from Hungary and only 4 from Galicia. In Ungvar, the attempt was far more successful; not a single responsum was sent there from Galicia (8 from Hungary). Khust and Sighet, in Maramaros, remained more evenly split (and in the case of Sighet, famously riven by strife between different rabbinic factions).

Once we leave the larger towns, however, the story is very different. As is often the case, rural communities change more slowly than cities. The Jews in these towns and villages retained their cultural ties to Galicia and did not magyarize, so they tended to send their questions to rabbis that they trusted and felt comfortable with–Galician rabbis.

This was a time of schism within Hungarian Jewry. In the late 1800s, in response to the split between Congress (“Neolog”) and Orthodox factions, Orthodoxy emerged as a confession and as an independent identity, to the extent that mere identification with anything but Orthodoxy was deemed heretical.One of the arguments consistently raised by Hungarian rabbis in these contexts is that Galician rabbis, as great as they were, did not really understand the threat of Neolog or the absolute need to affiliate with Orthodoxy. The Galicians, for their part, were burned when they attempted to weigh in on these issues, and generally hoped that their communities would not be visited by such strife.

In the small towns and villages, Jews who had migrated south and west from Galicia could maintain cultural ties to their place of origin. However, the official rabbis or the de facto religious leaders of these small communities were keenly aware of the risks entailed by ending up on the wrong side of the rift between Orthodoxy and its competitors; this may have been out of simple fear for their jobs, social standing, or marriage prospects, or they may have internalized the divide between Orthodoxy and non-Orthodoxy (and even the sense that Galician rabbis were not equipped to deal with such dilemmas). Thus, questions dealing with controversial issues in Hungary would have been referred to Hungarian rabbinic authorities–and specifically to R. Greenwald and R. Winkler, whose reputations were far more “hard line” on these issues than R. Sofer and R. Glasner.

Thus, in addition to the question from R. Feldman to R. Greenwald, we have a question from Berehove (Beregsas) to R. Greenwald concerning the expansion of a synagogue in a way that would make the women’s gallery directly above the expanded part of the men’s section–a matter of significant controversy in Hungary (Zikhron Yehuda 1:79). R. Winkler was asked by the community of Viseu de Sus (Oberwischau) about synagogue remodeling as well (Levushei Mordechai 4:31). These are far from the only issues addressed in responsa from Hungarian rabbis to borderland communities in these years, but it seems that they crop up with greater frequency. A more systematic study of these borderland responsa is certainly warranted.

Incidentally, we also took two major Polish/Lithuanian responsa collections from this period, Avnei Nezer and Divrei Malkiel, to see how many responsa they wrote to these areas. The sum total is: 0.

Who Wrote the Late Volumes of Igrot Moshe?

Moshe makes his debut at The Seforim Blog with a post about applying authorship analysis to the late volumes of Igrot Moshe in order to answer some questions that have long been lingering. You don’t want to miss this!

Rivash Part II: Squeezing Out More Data

When looking at Rivash, it is quite apparent that there are series of responsa, sometimes quite lengthy, that appear to be part of a single correspondence. Take, for example, responsum #254: It is addressed to Rabbi Pinhas ben Shalamya in Xativa, and the next eight responsa all begin with the words “עוד שאלת”, “you also asked”. In fact, well over half of the teshuvot in the collection begin with such formulations.

Sometimes the series are numbered. Responsum #400 was addressed to Rabbi Moshe Maskaran in Huesca. It begins: “The first question…” The next three responsa, begin, respectively, “The second question”, “The third question”, and “The fourth question”. The first three responsa in this series of four questions relate to the laws of Pesah; was he cracking wise about the “four questions”? Perhaps. Either way, it is apparent that these four responsa were part of a single correspondence. It stands to reason that formulations like “you further asked” indeed preserve the original order of the responsa, at least within each series. Our inclination was therefore to conclude that all nine of the responsa from 254 to 262 were to Xativa, and plot the map accordingly. Likewise for all series.  

On the other hand, we saw with respect to R. Moshe Feinstein that one correspondence could be chopped in two and published in different places, even different volumes. The responsa of the Rishonim, moreover, are sometimes chopped up and scrambled into all different orders. These texts circulated in manuscripts whose orders were not uniform. In his work on on the various responsa collections of Rashba and Maharam Mi-Rothenberg, Prof. Simcha Emanuel takes on the massive project of cross-references the numbering schemes of the various collections and citations. Moreover, we noticed relatively early that Rivash’s responsa to North Africa appear at the beginning of the collection of responsa, even though he lived there only at the end of his life. The responsa seemed to be in reverse chronological order. This indicated that the order had been tampered with, and that we could not therefore trust that what seemed like series of responsa to one individual were in fact so.

There are no accessible digitized versions of any complete Rivash manuscript (at least not on KTIV – yet), so that was no help.

The first bits of resolution came from the introduction to the Machon Yerushalayim edition of Teshuvot Ha-Rivash, which records that R. Yosef Karo was working from a manuscript at one point, and only later obtained the print version of Teshuvot Ha-Rivash. Moreover, his manuscript was incomplete and contained only about one-third of the responsa in the collection.

We also discussed the question with Prof. Emanuel, who graciously provided us with several sources that discuss the issue. The most extensive and important one appears in Abraham Hershman’s work on Rivash. Hershman provides a full account of the manuscript and print history of Rivash’s responsa. He cites evidence of some mistakes in attribution (which we fixed in the latest update to the map), but confirms that, all in all, series of responsa are reliably preserved intact. Here’s the English version of Hershman’s book. The relevant discussion begins on p. 5:

Hershman gives an important accounting of the transition from manuscript to print. Rivash “published” his responsa in three different volumes, which circulated separately in manuscript prior to the first printed edition. These three volumes were from different periods of his life: One from the beginning of his career, mainly in Barcelona and Zaragoza (Vol I); one from the second part of his career, when he was in Zaragoza and later Valencia (Vol II); and one from the third part of his career, in North Africa (Vol III).

These three volumes were printed in reverse chronological order. Volume III corresponds to responsa 1-186; Volume II to responsa 187-359; and Vol I to responsa 360-518. Hershman and the Machon Yerushalayim intro both show places where a manuscript responsum of the Rivash is cited, but its number does not match the numbering in the printed editions – but does correspond to the numbering within the particular volume. For instance, Responsa Mabit #32 refers to Responsa Rivash #12. It’s not #12 in the printed editions – it’s #198, which is Vol II, #12 (198-186=12). This threefold partition seems to have originated with Rivash himself. He seems to have ordered each one, albeit not necessarily chronologically, but he keeps series intact. In fact, he did not necessarily think of them as separate responsa; it was later readers and copyists who presumably broke up these lengthy responsa for easier reference. Moreover, the three volumes, if they are not ordered internally by chronology, are from different periods of his career.

This gives us a pretty good picture of the multi-stage process by which Rivash’s correspondence was transformed from individual letters, into collections (by the author himself), to authoritative sources (by Beit Yosef, Mabit, and others who cite him, as reflected in the numbering of manuscript responsa), to a single printed volume.

Though we have a few quibbles with Hershman (תנס is Tenes, Algeria, not Tunis, Tunisia, for example), in all, his work is an unparalleled resource on Rivash, and through it we were able to refine and confirm many of the data points on the Rivash map. It has reinforced for us that much have our path has been paved by scholars who accomplished incredible research with a fraction of the tools and none of the computing power we have today.

We have updated the Rivash map accordingly, including a color-coding of the original three volumes. It bears out what we have seen in the past. Vol I, representing the early part of Rivash’s career, covers mainly just Aragon and Navarre. In Vol II, written during the peak of his career in Iberia, there are many more responsa to Castille in addition to Aragon and Navarre. Almost all of Vol III is to communities in North Africa, and the few exceptions are mainly to relatives who were still in Aragon. We suggest opening it in its own tab.

It is worth asking why he did not write any more than a handful of responsa to Iberian communities after his move to Algiers. It’s worth noting: volumes I and II are about as geographically similar to each other as two poskim from the same tradition tend to be. This isn’t necessarily so surprising, since the geographical spread of a posek isn’t much more predictive than the spread of his area (for example: an earlier volume of Hatam Sofer will be only somewhat more similar to a later volume than Ktav Sofer might be). However, volume III is as different from I and II as anything we’ve seen — it’s truly apples to oranges. We’d see similar numbers comparing German poskim to Galitzianers, and it suggests that to a substantial degree, Rivash “changed jobs” with his move to North Africa.

Rivash and the Raging Bull

We step away now from Ashkenazic poskim of recent centuries to take a look at one of the best-known halakhists of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, Rabbi Yitzhak ben Sheshet Perfet, best known as Rivash.

Rivash lived most of his life in Christian Spain before fleeing religious persecution and settling in Algiers for his last years. Although he does not date any of his responsa, and very few have information that can help us pin down dates, he almost always records where he sent each responsum (though often the place name appears only in the first of a series of responsa to a particular correspondent). So we can get a pretty good map.

Rivash wrote over 500 responsa. About 50 have no indication of the place of address, and there are still five places that we have not identified. (For those playing at home, they are: אופטי, אל פראנו, נאקה, פינה, קמראשה; if any of our readers have any idea about what these places might be, we would be grateful for the assistance.) In total, then, we have mapped 458 of his responsa.

There are two main clusters, corresponding to the two places where Rivash lived: the Kingdom of Aragon in Iberia (including the Balearic Islands and Sardinia) and the Zayyanid Kingdom of Tlemcen in North Africa. These two clusters account for c. 75% of his responsa. Note also that the two clusters are not distributed in the same way; he wrote to many more communities in Aragon than in North Africa, though the three cities that received the most responsa from him are all on the North African coast. We have not yet embedded borders from the year 1400 in the map, but compare the clusters in the map above to the borders in the map below:

Of the remaining responsa, most were sent to other Iberian kingdoms: Mostly to Castile, a handful to Granada and Navarre, and none to Portugal. (Within Castile, not even one was sent to the other Galicia.)

Other than that, there’s one to Fano, Italy, two to Perpignan, Provence, and three to “Ashkenaz”. These latter responsa were mainly about major halakhic controversies.

Having done this survey, I (Elli) also want to draw attention to one teshuvah in particular, which shows how our insights about metadata can converge with analysis of legal and rhetorical argumentation to yield new and surprising insights.

Teshuvot Ha-Rivash #394 was sent unsolicited to Rabbi Hayim Galipapa, after Rabbi Hasdai [ben] Shlomo shared a notebook containing several controversial rulings of R. Galipapa with Rivash. R. Galipapa had permitted some things that had traditionally been forbidden: combing one’s hair on Shabbat and eating certain types of cheese produced by gentiles. Interestingly, but not surprisingly, the editors of the masterful Jewish Encyclopedia saw him as a proto-reformer of sorts, writing about him: “Galipapa belonged to the liberal school, setting aside the strictly orthodox rabbinical authorities, and following even in advanced years those that inclined to a more lax discipline.” The evidence of his “liberalism” comes only from this responsum, which is why it is surprising to see the editors write that Rivash “seriously but gently reproved him”, as there was nothing gentle about Rivash’s reproof.

Rivash opens his responsum with a broader offensive. We will quote the opening lines in full, including translation and reference to the Biblical verses that Rivash invokes:

Daniel 8:4 I have seen you, a butting ram

ראיתיך איל מנגח

Habakkuk 3:4 And your horns come out from your hand

וקרנים מידך לך

Micah 4:13, 1 Kings 22:11 Horns of iron

קרני ברזל

Daniel 8:6 With the fury of your power you charge

בחמת כחך תרוץ

Daniel 8:7 You rage

תתמרמר

Psalms 22:13 Against the mighty bulls of Bashan

אל אבירי בשן

Leviticus 16:10 To hurl them to Azazel

לשלח אותם לעזאזל
Proverbs 30:27 You march forth

ותצא חוצץ

Habakkuk 3:6 To shatter age-old mountains, to bring low the primeval hills

לפוצץ הררי עד לשוח גבעות עולם

Rivash’s intro consists entirely of a string of direct quotes and paraphrases of Biblical verses, each of which describes a raging, charging, butting, trampling, goring beasts – specifically rams, goats, and bulls. He then goes on to accuse R. Galipapa of being overly dismissive of greater, earlier authorities like Rashi and Rabbenu Tam. The meaning of his metaphor, and his primary criticism of R. Galipapa, is clear: You, Rabbi Galipapa, are like a raging beast, completely out of control, taking on sages who are way above your pay grade. Indeed, Rivash goes on to explicitly assail R. Galipapa for his lack of deference to earlier sages and for the arrogance and hubris he displays by dismissing earlier opinions. One can imagine these criticisms and the “raging bull” metaphor being applied to rabbis in any age, if they are deemed overly dismissive of inherited tradition and canonic precedent, or who have no qualms openly and defiantly taking on venerated practices and accepted authorities, past and present alike.

There is a subtler point here as well. Rivash goes on to engage the substance of R. Galipapa’s positions and even accepts one of them (on the correct text of Kol Nidre). The introduction to the responsum is a rhetorical tour de force, filled with allusions and bitingly critical (not “gently reproving” at all), but devoid of prooftexts. Indeed, there could have been no text that required one to consult the views of the Tosafists before rendering a decision. Rivash is making a claim – a novel claim – about the canon that must be mastered in order to become a halakhic authority, and he backs it up with pure rhetoric. He clearly felt that simply refuting R. Galipapa’s arguments on halakhic grounds would have been insufficient. Rather, he felt it was necessary to directly confront a rabbi (several years senior to Rivash, it is worth noting) who was directly challenging the mode of study and decision-making that had developed in Christian Spain ever since Ramban, more than a century earlier, expanded the local rabbinic curriculum to include the teachings of the French sages.

Perhaps Rivash thought he could persuade Rabbi Galipapa. Alternatively, he was almost certainly aware that his responsa, like those of earlier sages, were read and passed around among disciples and in centers of Jewish learning. In that case, his introduction was more for the broader audiences that for an audience of one. Regardless of his intention, and regardless, even, of which of them was correct with respect to the points of law under debate, the effect was that Rivash, more than 600 years later, still has an audience and remains an integral part of the study of halakhah, whereas R. Galipapa is barely remembered. Halakhic history has accorded Rivash and R. Galipapa the same respect that they accorded the Tosafists. The one who showed them honor is shown honor; the one who ignored them is ignored. This, I think, tells us a great deal about how halakhah functions and adapts within traditional Jewish societies.

What does this have to do with place names, though?

Around Yom Kippur time, I went to look up what Rivash wrote about Kol Nidre in responsum #394. After a few lines I burst out laughing. My family was surprised; hysterical laughter is not the sort of reaction one expects from someone studying a a book of she’elot u-teshuvot.

I had read the first few lines, the address and Rivash’s “raging bull” metaphor, and something clicked, something that makes this metaphor more than perfect, something that made me laugh out loud at a joke cracked by a major halakhist over 600 years ago. It was not until after Shabbat that I could confirm my theory, but I already knew that this was no coincidence. The very first word of this responsum is the name of the city where R. Galipapa was rabbi:

Pamplona.

Super Rabbi

Rabbi Yehezkel Landau (1713-1793) is one of the most fascinating characters in Jewish history and in the history of halakhah. He was involved in a number of major controversies affecting eighteenth-century European Jewry: the Emden-Eybeschutz controversy, attempts to purge Frankist and Sabbatean elements from Jewish communities, the Cleves get controversy and several other high-profile cases of agunot, divorce, and adultery. Mori Ve-Rabi, Rabbi Dr. Dovid Katz (he was my [Elli’s] first Jewish history teacher, in high school, 25+ years ago), demonstrates in his dissertation that it would me more correct to say that he inserted himself into these controversies, even while he was still a young prodigy studying in the Brody kloyz.

The masterful book by Mori Ve-Rabi Dr. Maoz Kahana (my [Elli’s] thesis adviser) analyzes Rabbi Landau’s return to the Talmud, its commentaries, and the classic halakhic codes both as an intellectual movement toward halakhic purism and empiricism – a movement that Kahana traces to the Brody kloyz – purged of the mystical practices and folk traditions that had accreted to the body of halakhah over the centuries (comparable to the movement of his contemporary, the Vilna Gaon), and as a pragmatic matter: by marginalizing the role of mysticism in halakhah, he could be more tolerant of those who studied mystical tracts and espoused mystical notions that were suspected of containing heretical elements, as long as such notions did not bleed into practice. Kahana’s work demonstrates the dynamism of Jewish intellectual currents in the eighteenth century, thus upending the prevailing view, primarily associated with Jacob Katz, that a relatively stable “traditional” Jewish society underwent a “crisis” beginning with the rise of the Berlin Haskalah in the last decades of the eighteenth century. It turns out that the preceding stability was not so stable after all, and elements of crisis emerged well before the Berlin Haskalah did. This implies a call for a revisionist view of modern Jewish history, one that will pay closer attention to the phenomenal Jewish creativity in the early modern period; Rabbi Landau is thus a key figure in this revision.

We should note that there is yet another scholarly treatment of Rabbi Landau’s career to be published recently: Prof. Sharon Flatto’s dissertation and book. We concede that we have yet read her work; however, the fact that Rabbi Landau is the subject of three doctoral dissertations over the past fifteen years or do indicates that he is getting his recognition as a major player in Jewish intellectual history.

Rabbi Landau was a prolific writer. We have his commentaries on the Talmud (Tziyun La-nefesh Hayah) and on Shulhan Arukh (Dagul Me-revava), numerous sermons and homilies, and, of course, his responsa, Noda Bi-Yehudah. The titles he gave to his halakhic works, which translated as “known in Judah” (based on Tehilim 76:2) and “preeminent among ten thousand” (Shir Ha-shirim 5:10) – both of which, incidentally, describe God Himself in their original contexts – exhibit no small amount of self-esteem and support Katz’s thesis that Rabbi Landau actively sought to bolster his reputation across the Jewish world.

The first volume of Noda Bi-Yehuda was published in 1776, during Rabbi Landau’s lifetime. It contains 276 responsa. The second volume was published posthumously by his son Shmuel in 1810. It contains 580 responsa, of which over 60 were written by Shmuel Landau, not his father. Almost all of the responsa in the second volume were written after the publication of the first. That is, volumes 1 and 2 represent distinct parts of his career. So when we mapped Noda Bi-Yehudah, we built in a tool that allows for a comparison between the first and second volumes. To be sure, there is evidence that a number of Rabbi Landau’s responsa were stolen during the course of a fire in 1775 (see p. 21 of Katz’s dissertation, n. 54), so volume 1 might not give an accurate portrayal of his sphere of influence during the early part of his career. Of course, as we have noted, published responsa are always curated and edited, so we must be careful whenever we map. That said, there’s something very counter-intuitive that emerges here:

Volume 1 of Noda Bi-Yehudah is scattered across a wider geographic area than Volume 2, even though it contains only about half the number of responsa and was composed earlier. His sphere of influence seems to shrink! Volume 2 is much more densely concentrated in Bohemia, Moravia, and Hungary, whereas Volume 1 includes more responsa to Germany and Poland. Some of this is not surprising: Volume 1 includes responsa he wrote in Brody, Yampil, and Prague, whereas the responsa included in Volume 2 were almost all written in Prague. This can explain the shift from Poland to Central Europe, but leaves Germany as an open question.

This requires further investigation, but we can tentatively suggest that Rabbi Landau wanted the contents of the book to reflect its title and shape his reputation. Whether he actively sought interlocutors in more dispersed communities or specifically selected for publication his more geographically diverse responsa, he wanted to show that he was “known in Judah”. Katz suggests that he published when he did because he was angling for the newly created post of chief rabbi of Galicia (for which, by dint of his Galician origins and Austrian patriotism, he was an ideal candidate, though he did not get the job).

The implication is that Rabbi Landau had a certain geographic consciousness. He was aware that a greater reach implied greater halakhic authority and had a mental map of his sphere of influence, or at least of the sphere of influence he wished to project to his readers.

The Hatam Sofer’s Umbrella (Signal and Noise: Part II)

One of the Hatam Sofer’s best known responsa is Orah Hayim 72 (with my [Elli’s] translation for Sefaria), where he discusses opening and carrying an umbrella (more specifically, a parasol) on Shabbat. Its fame is due largely to its relatively lenient ruling, which flies in the face of the commonly-accepted stringent ruling (in my young adulthood, black hats in blue plastic “Seven Mile Market” bags were de rigueur on rainy Friday nights in Baltimore).

This responsum can be situated more precisely: It was written in Pressburg (Bratislava, Slovakia) on Monday, Ta’anit Esther, 5573, or the Ides of March, 1813. There is no questioner listed; Hatam Sofer is responding directly to the stringent ruling of Noda BiYehuda (2:30). It is apparent that carrying parasols on Shabbat in Pressburg was somewhat common (it was all the rage in Europe); Hatam Sofer concludes by saying that even if it is better to be stringent, there is no reason to make a big fuss over the issue.

Adding a few data points sharpens the picture:

  1. Hatam Sofer became the rabbi of Pressburg in 1806.
  2. Even though R. Yehezkel Landau, the author of Noda BiYehudah and the greatest posek in central Europe in his time, passed away in 1793, the second volume of his responsa was not published until 1811.
  3. In a letter dated Tuesday of Parashat Tetzaveh of 5572 (February 22, 1812), Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Rymanow wrote to his hasid, Haim Tzartlis, in Mád, Hungary. In it R. Mendel criticizes the decadence of the westernizing Oberlanders, singling out three practices: the adoption of non-Jewish styles of clothing by Jewish women, carrying parasols on Shabbat, and wearing shirts that button left-over-right instead of right-over-left. R. Mendel instructs his disciple to admonish the townsfolk for this, and adds that if they won’t listen to a Polish rabbi, he should contact the rabbis of Alt-Ofen (Obuda, now part of Budapest) and Pressburg (the two largest communities in Western Hungary at the time), who will surely sympathize with his plight.

We now have a tight little story. Hatam Sofer becomes the rav of a prominent community in 1806, when he was 44 years old, just entering his prime. He sees that the locals carry parasols on Shabbat but does not admonish them for it. A few years later, volume 2 of Noda BiYehudah appears and suggests that this prevalent practice, which the rabbi tolerated if he didn’t approve it, constitutes a bona fide violation of the laws of Shabbat. Another year passes, and word reaches Pressburg that in the east there is opposition to parasols on the grounds that they are an affront to the dignity of Shabbat. Finally, after another year, Hatam Sofer pens a “responsum” (to no one) that explicitly fends off the halakhic argument of the (empiricist, anti-Hasidic) Noda BiYehudah and may implicitly take issue with the criticisms of the Rimanover.

Aside from presenting Hatam Sofer as a preserver of custom and tradition–even lenient ones–in the face of both new empiricist readings and reactionary movements from the east, thus throwing a monkey-wrench into the accepted view of Hatam Sofer as a zealot, we can ask how this story fits into the larger story of Hatam Sofer’s career. Maoz Kahana’s magnificent book on Noda BiYehudah and Hatam Sofer addresses the transition from the approach of the former to that of the latter and lays out the Hatam Sofer’s conscious and sustained “course correction” to the approach of Noda BiYehudah (he does not address the parasol in the book). How does this small story of Hatam Sofer “punching up” against the giant of the previous generation fit into the larger story of Hatam Sofer’s own career? Is it evidence of Hatam Sofer coming into his own?

Let us look at the data to see how it can help us and what its limitations are. It should be noted that, in the case of Hatam Sofer (unlike R. Feinstein), pretty much everything he wrote has been published by now, so unless we know of material that has gone missing, these are the entirety of his responsa. He meticulously recorded his correspondence (and lots more) in notebooks. Moreover, the publication of Hatam Sofer’s responsa began only after his death in 1839, so the idea of publishing responsa to establish authority, like R. Feinstein did, is off the table. Finally, we do not include piskei din, many of which are published in responsa volumes, in this analysis. While piskei din are valuable in their own right, they should be treated as a distinct genre. A rabbinical court often had real, albeit limited, jurisdiction; rabbis, in cases where litigants had no choice but to appear before them, exercised legal authority, not charismatic authority.

The initial temptation is to look at each year in isolation; doing so, we notice a spike in 1814. This gives rise to a theory: Perhaps the parasol responsum is not alone. Perhaps Hatam Sofer systematically reviewed the volume 2 of Noda BiYehudah and wrote responsa wherever he takes issue. That is, the 1814 spike seems to have a “dig here” sign on it.

I tested that hypothesis, and it is wrong. There are dozens of places where Hatam Sofer disagrees with rulings in Noda BiYehudah II, but they are distributed all across the years after 1811.

More fundamentally, though, the spike is not such an outlier. It pales in comparison to the spike we saw in R. Feinstein’s responsa in the late 1950s. It turns out that there’s no “dig here” sign there after all. That does not mean that there is no reason for the year to year spikes and dips, but that there is not necessarily a reason, or that the reasons, whatever they are, only interfere with our attempt to understand his career.

To illustrate, we can compare two dips: the one in 1806-7 and the one in 1809. We can hypothesize that the dip in 1809 is almost certainly related to the fact that Pressburg was besieged and conquered by Napoleon in that year. Indeed, Hatam Sofer wrote an account of the siege and the hardships endured by the community then. This dip does not tell us much about who was and was not writing to Hatam Sofer, and where his sphere of influence extended, because of Napoleon’s interference. The story of 1809 is interesting and significant, but the statistical perspective tells us to discount the dip as evidence of stagnation in Hatam Sofer’s career.

The lull of 1806-7, in contrast, may have a reason that relates specifically to his career. As noted, these years correspond to the beginning of his tenure in Pressburg. His duties in a new and much larger community could have kept him busier and more focused on the needs of the local community, at least at the beginning.

One bit of evidence that may support this hypothesis is that in 1808, when Hatam Sofer’s responsa-writing returns to normal, his sphere of influence is noticeably wider.

The geographical spread of Hatam Sofer’s responsa from 1798-1807

Geographical spread of Hatam Sofer’s responsa from 1798-1808.

 

 

 

 

 

So even though the dip of 1806-7 may be noise, it might not be. It might actually tell us something about the significance of the move to Pressburg in establishing him as a regional authority.

Hatam Sofer & EMAs
Hatam Sofer & EMAs

The reason we look at exponential moving average (EMA) is because it provides a good balance between separating signal from noise and responding to changes (a simple moving average is a little too sluggish). Looking at the 10-year exponential moving average (the blue line), we can see major transition periods from 1798-1804 and 1809-1815. This, too, corresponds roughly with the move from Mattersdorf to Pressburg and with Hatam Sofer entering the prime of his career.

In this post, we looked at a relatively small snapshot of Hatam Sofer’s career, roughly from 1804-1814. We demonstrated how the historical setting can help us understand an individual responsum, the heart of the enterprise of studying rabbinic works. We also showed that it is very difficult and sometimes downright silly to draw broad conclusions from these wonderfully idiosyncratic individual examples that populate the larger corpus of responsa. Statistical tools like EMA can be far more helpful with the broad brush strokes.

The thing is, we need both the microhistories of individual responsa as well as the broad brush strokes in order to get at a more complete picture. And we need good tools to show us the signs that say “dig here”. Our hope is that scholars use the tools we are developing to figure out where to dig, to hypothesize, and to test their explanations.

What We Can and Can’t Learn from our Data on Rav Moshe Feinstein

Several readers have pointed out, in Facebook threads and private messages and via email (keep commenting!), that whatever data we have on Rav Moshe Feinstein is incomplete; not all of Rav Moshe’s responsa have been published, and Rav Moshe answered untold numbers of questions orally—in person or by phone. Both of these points are true and important. We alluded to this a bit in “Zoom In”, but, in light of these comments, we will flesh out what we think can and can’t be learned from the table that shows the shape of Rav Moshe’s career, especially since this addresses some of the underlying assumptions of our project.

Rav Moshe’s responsa were not the first to undergo a process of editing and curation; that distinction may belong to Terumat Ha-deshen (possibly resulting in the claim that its author, Rav Yisrael Isserlein, “made up” the responsa therein). The idea that a volume of responsa can be something other than a dropbox for a rabbi’s halakhic correspondence is a crucial one—and one that is just now being studied (in, for example, Dr. Tamara Morsel Eisenberg’s recently completed dissertation; several insights in this discussion are based on her work). Our hope is that HaMapah becomes a tool to further that study.

To take a specific example, after one of our earlier posts a reader asked about responsa written by Rav Moshe to R. Meir Kahane. It turned out that there are two such responsa—Oraḥ Ḥayim vol. 2 no. 32, and Oraḥ Ḥayim vol. 4 no. 36. The first was published in 1963, and the second in 1979. The most interesting thing is that both are dated to 2 Sivan, 5719 (May/June 1959). Clearly, Rav Moshe answered both of these questions at the same time, probably in the same letter. However, the editorial decision was made to publish one part of the letter and hold on to the other part.

The part of the letter published in 1979 is the most lenient of all of Rav Moshe’s responsa on the celebration of a bat mitzvah. Though he retains his generally negative attitude toward such celebrations even in this responsum, he allows the girl to speak before the congregation at a kiddush, and even, if the family had already been so promised, from the pulpit.

It seems clear, and has been subsequently confirmed in discussions with members of the Feinstein family, that Rav Moshe indeed waited until later in his career to publish some of his more surprising and controversial positions. This is one sense of the famous Talmudic dictum, “ko’aḥ de-heteira adif”: the authority needed to issue a lenient ruling and have it be accepted is much greater than what is required for an audience to accept a stringent ruling. In 1979, Rav Moshe spoke from a different place of authority than in 1963. Looking at the various editorial phases of the work can yield a great deal of insight about phenomena like these.

We will circle back to this, but first we have to answer the phone.

Israel L. Shenker’s 1975 New York Times article on responsa includes the above picture of Rav Moshe on the phone. It begins:

Tradition has it that young rabbis completing their training are given an ordination certificate and the telephone number of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein. He is the closest that Orthodox Jewry comes to a court of last resort.

During much of the day he sits plumped atop a fat cushion in a chair in his study on the Lower East Side, great volumes of religious law and opinion stacked from floor to ceiling behind him, his telephone in hand.

Shenker’s article places Rav Moshe’s answers by telephone within the tradition of responsa-writing, but in truth it is something new and different. Every posek, and every rabbi, probably answers more questions orally than in writing. However, until relatively recently, the questioner was limited by distance and modes of communication. Rav Moshe was one of the first great poskim who was instantly accessible to people anywhere on earth. The work Masoret Moshe consists of Rav Moshe’s laconic oral rulings, faithfully recorded by his grandson. We were told that there is enough material to fill twenty volumes.

Therefore, when trying to understand, measure, and describe Rav Moshe’s halakhic authority and how he accumulated it (his own answer in that NYT article: “If people see that one answer is good, and, another answer is good, gradually you will be accepted”), we must acknowledge that we are operating under limitations that do not exist with respect to other halakhists. In any given period, Rav Moshe received a certain number of questions. Of those, he answered a certain number. Of the answers he gave, only some were written. Of the written answers, only some were published. We are therefore looking only at the tip of a 4-tiered pyramid. What can we hope to learn from this? After all, it is possible that Rav Moshe received and even answered the same number of questions in 1947 and 1967 as he did in 1957.

It turns out that we can learn a great deal once we accept the basic assumption that Rav Moshe, like all great halakhists, was very deliberate in crafting his public persona.

It is clear that between 1957 and 1963 Rav Moshe made a huge effort to both write and publish his answers. Of the 101 responsa in the second Oraḥ Ḥayim volume of Igrot Moshe, all but four were written before 1958. The same pattern holds for Even Ha-ezer. In all, during the seven years between 1957 and 1963, he published the first four volumes of Igrot Moshe and also penned close to 400 (c. 21%) of his published responsa.

We may now return to the question of why there is such a marked spike in these years, and we believe that Rabbi Berman’s hypothesis is a good one. Rav Moshe recognized that Rav Yosef Eliyahu Henkin was aging, had too many other commitments, and in general could no longer shoulder the burden of being America’s leading halakhist. Rav Moshe, stepped into that breach by beginning a seven-year frenzy of responsa-writing and publishing. By the time the dust settled in 1963, Rav Moshe had cemented his status as America’s leading halakhist.

It is true that we still do not know how many questions Rav Moshe answered in a given year, though we suspect that his peak was in the late-60s and 70s, the period described in the NYT. Since he had a telephone, his published responsa cannot tell us as much about all the ways he communicated.

However, for that very reason, the responsa that he took the time to write and publish can tell us even more about how he shaped his public image and how he became Rav Henkin’s successor. In short, how he “became” Rav Moshe.

This, in turn, opens up new ways to hypothesize about Rav Moshe’s career and to test our hypotheses. This, ultimately, is our vision for HaMapah.

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