The Bessarabian Book Tour and the Monumental Commentary that Wasn’t

R. Shalom Lukianovsky wrote a monumental commentary on two sections of Shulhan Arukh. Despite his best efforts, you have never seen it. Here is his story.

Have any of our readers studied Shulhan Arukh with the Yad Shalom commentary on Orah Hayim and Yoreh De’ah? We’d be surprised if anyone has heard of it. We didn’t until last week, and in truth it is very obscure. So why are we writing about it?

This little rabbit hole begins with the hypothesis that in subscriber lists (prenumeranten), when places are not listed in alphabetical order, they trace the route that the author or agent took when traveling from town to town, selling subscriptions to fund the publication of the book. This seems like a reasonable assumption that, if true, can provide all kinds of information. For instance, it can perhaps tell us about the routes themselves and the relationships between communities. It can show who the author considered his primary audience. Did he visit only the bigger towns or every one-horse village? And does the genre of the work affect such a decision?

We recently had an opportunity to test the hypothesis. Elli was working on identifying places that appear in responsa (the overlap between HaMapah’s initial project and the Prenumeranten Project is evident) and was stumped by Divrei Malkiel 5:152, addressed to one R. Shalom, the rav of a place called פליאריא. No such place appears in Kagan’s Sefer Ha-Prenumeranten, and JewishGen’s Communities Database turned up nothing. However, a Google search showed that פליאריא appears as the third entry in the subscriber list of a work called מפענח נעלמים (Piotrków, 1912). Now, פליאריא is nowhere near the beginning of the alphabet, and in fact, over 80 places appear in this subscriber lists, in an order that is not alphabetical. We could test our hypothesis here.

It also turned out that the author of Mefa’ane’ah Ne’elamim is R. Shalom Lukianovsky, the rav of פלאריא. He wrote another book, too: Yad Shalom (Piotrków, 1910). There, the title page and all of the approbations list the place as פליאריא. So we can establish that פלאריא and פליאריא are the same place, and that in all likelihood, the R. Shalom of פליאריא addressed in Divrei Malkiel is the same R. Shalom who penned these two books. We are also a bit closer to identifying the town, as the title pages place it in the Russian province of Podolia. 

Here was a good opportunity to test the hypothesis, and on a list of 80 places, no less. Let’s look at the first page of subscribers to Mefa’ane’ah Ne’elamim:

To be honest, none of these places are household names, but a few were familiar to us. Both Maharsham and R. Tenenboim wrote responsa to a R. Yehiel Aharon Lerner in אקנא, which we had identified as Okny, Ukraine. We had identified באלטא and באלטע as Balta, Ukraine, a long time ago, though we had to make certain that the sixth place here was not Balti, Moldova. Both Balta and Balti are relatively close to Okny (though Balta is much closer), so the hypothesis, at first glance, seemed reasonable. The next question was whether we could find קאסי and בערזילא along the route between Okny and either Balti or Balta. 

Enter JewishGen’s Community finder, a phenomenal resource. For present purposes, three features are really helpful: first, it lists historical names for each place, and second, it lists (with links) all places within a 30-mile radius that had a Jewish community, and finally, it shows the place on a map. It also has links to other resources on the given place. For instance, here is the page for Balta, Ukraine:

Right away, we see likely candidates for places adjacent to Balta on the subscriber list: Olhopil for אליפאלי and Savran for סאווראן. We also see that Krasni Okny (that’s Okny) is 29 miles from Balta. On the map, we see a place called Kosy, which looks like a very likely match for קאסי, though the site does not list it as having a Jewish community. Using the site’s tooltip, we see this:

Kotovsk used to be called Birzula, which seems a likely match with בערזילא. And it is right where we expect it to be. The route from Okny to Balta takes one straight through Kosy and Kotovsk:

We can now work back from Okny to find the first three places visited. Sure enough, all three are small villages to the north/northeast of Okny: Flora (פליאריא), Stavrove (סטאוויראווי), and Chubivka (טשובווקי). One other significant point is that the first town is listed as סטנציא טשובווקי – the first word means “station”, so we would expect to find a train station there. Indeed, “Chubovka Station” is in Chubivka. Another point is that in the front matter of Yad Shalom, the author’s mailing address is given as Okny. Given the proximity and size difference, this makes perfect sense.

We have now identified the first 9 places on the list and can see the route that the author took, starting at the closest train station to his place of residence. Once we had these, the next three were easy to find using the methods described above. 12 down, 69 to go:

Alas, the next two places, באמינעצק and באקימי remain unidentified, and the two after that seem to backtrack toward the starting point. The place after that, though, is another train station, this one in מארדארווקי, easily identified as Mardarivka. It is along the same rail line as Chubivka. Jumping ahead a bit, the only other station mentioned in the list is in Zatyshshya (זאטישי), which is along the same line. This indicates that the author’s travels were not only along roads, but also seems to have included train travel. It was also becoming clear that it was not just one journey, but a series of journeys, each of which covered a different territory.

In all, we managed to identify 76 of the 81 places (many of which we did not find in any existing databases. In addition to the two mentioned, we also could not identify פיטאצק (near Odessa), ציסארסקי (between Cahul, Moldova and Reni, Ukraine), and ניקולשפאן (which seems to be in the region of Otaci, Moldova and Mohyliv-Podil’s’kyi, Ukraine). [UPDATE: A follower on Twitter has identified פיטאצק with Severynivka, formerly Potocki. Right where it should be.]

We can also show that the author took 6 to 8 different trips, during which he covered the entirety of Bessarabia (which corresponds roughly to today’s Moldova) as well as the parts of the Podolia and Kherson governorates that border Bessarabia. Most of the trips began close to Flora and proceeded outward, away from it. On these trips he sold c. 850 book subscriptions. 

We compared the places we identified with the data that can be gleaned from a 1919 US survey map of Bessarabia, an astounding map that shows the ethnographic makeup of every populated place in Bessarabia.

In the interactive map below, each journey we hypothesize is in a different color, and the order corresponds to the order that the places appear in the subscriber list. The overall order is ironclad; how we split them up into journeys is our hypothesis. (If you open the full map, the journeys are numbered and can be toggled.)

For contrast, Yad Shalom has only a single page of prenumeranten, with 17 places listed. They are also not in alphabetical order. Mapping them out, we see that the places are all bunched up, but with one clear outlier. This book, Yad Shalom, also has an astounding 18 approbations, from Hasidim and Mitnagdim, Ashkenazim and Sepharadim (well, one Sepharadi rabbi), from all across the Pale of Settlement, from Kovno to the Crimea (plus one from Maharsham, in Galicia). Comparing the map of approbations to the map of subscribers shows just how astoundingly different they are:

There is very little overlap between the places where he sold subscriptions (to either volume) and the places from whose rabbis he solicited approbations: only Balta, Dubasari, and Olhopil.

It is clear from the front matter of both books by R. Shalom Lukianovsky that Yad Shalom, which is all of 80 pages (including 16 pages of front matter and several pages of segulot to assist those who have trouble having children at the end of the book), was part of a much larger work that he had in manuscript. The approbations, most of which are dated to a decade or more before the publication of the book, refer to material on Yoreh De’ah in addition to Orah Hayim. In his own introductions, he all but begs readers to buy his books so he could publish more material. On the title page of Mefa’ane’ah Ne’elamim, he writes that he has 6,000 pages of material to publish.

The intended audience of the complete Yad Shalom was the learned class – those who could handle relatively dense halakhic material – all over Eastern Europe. Consider: R. Lukianovsky was writing in the same generation that R. Yehiel Mikhel Epstein (who wrote an approbation to Yad Shalom) was writing Arukh HaShulhan and R. Yisrael Meir HaKohen was writing Mishnah Berurah. There was an audience for new works arranged according to Shulhan Arukh. 

After a decade of trying and failing to publish, he turned to the local communities and managed to publish a small excerpt, which covers only the first 8 simanim of Orah Hayim. Two years later, he trudged from town to town in Bessarabia to sell a shorter book of sermonic material, again with the hopes of raising money to publish his magnum opus. (It is worth noting that R. Eitam Henkin, hy”d, describes R. Yehiel Mikhel Epstein engaging in a similar process, publishing piecemeal and republishing other works to fund the publication of Arukh HaShulhan.)

Could R. Lukianovsky’s work have competed with the other two? Have the manuscripts survived? Will it one day be “redeemed”, like R. Yair Hayim Bachrach’s Mekor Hayim, a commentary on Orah Hayim that remained unpublished for 300 years because Magen Avraham and Taz beat him to the punch?

We may not know the answers, but we can better understand his quest that took him to a hundred cities, towns, and villages all over Southern Ukraine and Bessarabia.

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.

Measuring the Geographic Similarity of Poskim*

There’s a phrase that people like to quote, “labels are for cans”. While the statement’s intentions — either “stereotyping is bad” or “I’m a special snowflake”–are good and relatively inoffensive, respectively, it makes for bad epistemology. It’s a terrible approach to organizing information.

To understand, we need to generalize. To understand the course of any field, we need a broader understanding, a concept of a movement or a style. Sometimes, this division can take on an objective aspect. At an extreme, an artistic group like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood or the Wu-Tang Clan has a defined set of artists who comprise it. However, even that can quickly break down. Ford Madox Brown is stylistically part of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, he hung out with them a lot, and his work is displayed with theirs, but he was never a member. Broader characteristics run into issues like this too. Kanye West may be from the Midwest, but to the accepted meaning of a “Midwest Rap” style, as exemplified by Twista, Tech N9ne, Krizz Kaliko, Royce Da 5’9”, or Eminem, an emphasis on technical mastery, speed, and precision, with a smattering of themes from horrorcore, he’s certainly not that.

So when I try and discuss data-informed categorization, it’s important to clear up my intent up front. In terms of intellectual categories, I’m not trying to remove subjective judgements. I’m trying to inform. The goal here is to present another variable that can be incorporated into a broader stylistic judgement. The actual measured effect of a posek in terms of area of direct influence, implied or otherwise, should certainly factor into any intellectual taxonomy, and certainly ought to dominate a taxonomy of the landscape.

Our maps have their limits. When we have areas of influence that are completely disjunct, it’s trivial to draw the appropriate conclusions with the eyeball test. However, what to do with somewhat overlapping sets of a couple hundred points each? How do we meaningfully assess the relative similarities of multiple sets of a few hundred points of different sizes, all weaving in and out of each other?That’s where the math comes in.

Our basic metric is cosine similarity. For readers who don’t remember much about sines and cosines, here’s a little refresher. The cosine of 0 is 1, and the cosine of 90 degrees is 0. The more acute an angle, the closer it gets to 1.

Now, let’s imagine two poskim. Posek A writes responsa only to Minsk, and Posek B writes responsa only to Pinsk. Imagine that we plot this on a two-dimensional grid, with the X-axis representing responsa to Minsk, and the Y-axis representing responsa to Pinsk. Each posek can then be expressed as a point in the grid: Posek A as (M, 0) and Posek B as (0, P), because Posek A writes 0 responsa to Pinsk, and Posek B writes 0 to Minsk. That is, Posek A is expressed as a point on the Minsk axis, and Posek B as a point on the Pinsk axis. We can then think of our poskim as line segments, or “vectors”, from the origin to the grid coordinate. It’s obvious that the two vectors in our case are orthogonal. They form a right angle, and thus have a cosine of 0. This means that they are perfectly dissimilar; they have no places in common.

Now imagine Posek C who also writes only to Minsk. Her vector will form an angle of 0 degrees with Posek A’s vector, so they will have a similarity score of 1, which is the cosine of 0.

This exercise is meant to show how the cosine of two vectors provides a good metric for scoring similarity. It’s not perfect, but it’s good.

Two dimensional space is pretty easy to envision, but dealing with 500 place names requires a 500-dimensional vector space, which is impossible to envision. Fortunately, thanks to math, we don’t need to envision it. And since there cannot be any negative numbers (because it’s impossible to send a subzero number of responsa to a place), the angle between the vectors will always be between 0 and 90. We can compare any two poskim to obtain a similarity score between 0 and 1.

Let’s walk through the basic process again with vectors in 4 dimensions. We start with the data from two poskim.

So this table will become two vectors, for Posek D [7 4 7 1] and for Posek E [3 0 9 2]. The order of the cities doesn’t matter, provided that they are respective — that the nth place in each refers to the same place. We then take the angle between the two vectors. In this case, the angle is about 34.2 degrees, and the cosine of the angle is 0.827.[1] Since the cosine goes from 0 to 1, the similarity between the poskim is high. This passes the eyeball test, too; there is no city to which E writes that D does not write to, and only one that D writes to but not E. This is a lot more similar than we’d expect in reality. As we have seen, the career of a posek is dynamic; they move, and their sphere of authority grows and shrinks and shifts over time, and communities likewise change. When we divide a posek’s career in half chronologically[2] and compare the first half to the second, the cosine tends to be in about the 0.35-0.5 range (typically around 0.4). Therefore, when two poskim score 0.3 or above, it means they are very similar in terms of geographical reach. A score above 0.4 means that the geographic reach of the two poskim are as similar as two halves of the career of a single posek, or about as similar as can reasonably be expected.

We can formulate another version of this, where we turn the vectors into binary vectors — D now gets [1 1 1 1] and E [1 0 1 1], the effect here being to just ask about where, without regard to distribution. We call this “unweighted”. We use a third type here — “mixed” — a simple average of the two. Crucially, the size of the vector — the distance from the origin — doesn’t impact the angle, so we can measure between people with very different corpus sizes.

What can we get from this? For starters, can we justify traditional divisions? Let’s take a look.

We can see a pretty clear division here — with Hungarians and Galicianers following the expected division, and a showing for our Poles (Avnei Nezer and Divrei Malkiel) of “close but no cigar”. (Divrei Malkiel was the Rav of Łomża, close to Lithuania; some may protest his being lumped with the Poles.) Let’s drop them for now.

So we see a really clear division between the Hungarian and the Galicianers. The Galicianers are all quite similar to each other, and all mostly dissimilar to the Hungarians. But there’s another thing going here too. Let’s take a look at just the Hungarians. And we’ll rearrange it here.

We can tease out a couple more things here. We can see the Sofer family — Oberland cluster clearly; the Maharam Schick (who moved from Oberland to Unterland mid-career);belongs there too, but a little less; the two most Unterland Unterlanders pair nicely, and the Levushei Mordechai (who also moved) straddles the two.

Further data would be nice (and we’re working on it), but what we have thus far suggests that we can view Hungarians as a distinct species, as it were, with Unterland and Oberland subspecies (and those who straddle both).

I’ll add another point — preliminary results thus far delineate that Hasidic psak is a subgroup within regions. Hasidic poskim do not command broad loyalty beyond their region. This may also well be the case beyond just the geographical spread data, in terms of methodology and style as well; for one example that comes to mind immediately, we hypothesize that Chabad’s tendency to rule strictly about eruvin is linked with their being a Hasidic subset of Lithuanians, not a Lithuanian subset of Hasidim.

[*] Thank you to R. Dan Margulies, who hashed out the math here with me (Moshe).

[1] In reality, we don’t ever take the actual angle, we calculate it as dot(u,v)/(norm(u)*norm(v)).

[2] Meaningful divisions here are less similar than random divisions. People die, people move, and various other events mean that we see a grouping that is “lumpy” — dividing a corpus chronologically does not approximate an even division. In a random division, any discrepancy between the similarity and 1 would be pure noise. Here, there are signals going on too.

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!

Mountains of Spices

We haven’t been posting, but we’ve been busy. We have updated some of the earlier maps with improved data and better identifications. We also have some shiny new toys to share.

First up is Harei Besamim, by Rabbi Aryeh Leib Horowitz (1847-1909), a contemporary and “competitor” of Maharsham in Galicia. During his career, he served terms as the rabbi of Seret, Stryi, and Stanislav (I’ll take “Galician Cities that Start with ‘S’” for $500, Alex). (Yes, we are aware that Seret is in Bukovina, that Stanislav is now called Ivano-Frankivsk, and that he was also the rabbi of Zaliztsi early in his career.)

We have a map (click here) and a plot by year. The plot by year is fairly unremarkable; it’s in line with most of what we’ve seen before, a rise in his earlier career followed by a plateau, with a typically high degree of noise.

Responsa by year

He is not very well-known today; he doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. But he wrote over 600 responsa, to over 200 communities. His correspondents included major rabbinic and Hasidic figures. And he also provides some excellent contrast data to Maharsham. We haven’t formulated any hypotheses about what this means, but the data is good, and our mission is to provide good data. As for an explanation, tzarich iyun, or rather, tzarich data. Maybe once we map Beit Yitzchak and Sho’el U-meshiv, or digitize the census of Galicia from 1900, things will be clearer.

Look out for Moshe’s upcoming post on the Seforim Blog (Sunday) on whether data analysis can tell us whether the late volumes of Igrot Moshe are forgeries.

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.

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