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 Hungarian Succession

One of the questions that we think HaMapah can help answer is the dynamics of succession. When a posek dies or is otherwise incapacitated, who picks up the slack? Does it diffuse among multiple poskim or is there an heir apparent?

It is safe to say that we will see different patterns emerge as the project continues, but today we are going to look at a fairly elegant series of successions in Hungary during the latter half of the nineteenth century. Hatam Sofer, the subject of several posts thus far, was, by the time he passed away in late 1839, the leading posek in Hungary. Three poskim who served the same territory after his passing were Rabbi Yehudah (or Mahari) Aszod (1794-1866), author of Shu”t Yehudah Ya’aleh; Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Binyamin Sofer (1815-1871), the son of Hatam Sofer and author of Shu”t Ketav Sofer; and Rabbi Moshe Schick, author of Shu”t Maharam Schick (1807-1879).

Let’s look at a map of the responsa of these four poskim (including Hatam Sofer). As always, opening separately and using the selectors is recommended (but today more so than usual).

The similarity of each posek’s map to the others is remarkable, and we will come back to this.

Now let’s look at the dates of the responsa. The data contained in Mahari Aszod’s responsa is somewhat sparse, but we have dates for a good proportion of responsa by Ketav Sofer and Maharam Schick.

It should be noted that nothing is proven, and that the picture that we see is conjectural, and our roles but the pattern seems pretty clear: There is a “passing of the mantle” from Mahari Aszod to Ketav Sofer to Maharam Schick. Ketav Sofer, it seems, does not become the leading posek in Hungary until Mahari Aszod’s death (and subsequent portrait!) in 1866. When Ketav Sofer’s health began to decline, Maharam Schick took his place as the leading Hungarian posek. It is actually quite amazing to see how many of Maharam Schick’s responsa were penned in the last decade of his life.

The portrait in question

Returning to the similarity of the maps, Moshe has developed tools that will quantify the geographical similarity of the spheres of authority of any two poskim. This will be very useful for tracing things like succession, demarcating cultural boundaries, and demonstrating reach. We will devote a separate post to these. For now, it suffices to say that the geographic similarity of these four poskim is high enough that our categorization of them as “Hungarian poskim” holds water.[1]

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[1] Simply put, we create a vector of the number of responsa to each city for each posek, and then take the cosine of the angle between them. Alternatively, we’ll take that vector and map to a binary vector, again, with each city its own dimension, and then take the angle between those two.  We generally use an averaged version of the two methods.

World Cup Edition

In honor of the World Cup we thought we’d post a bit on responsa to France and Croatia.

Let’s start with France.

Though it lies outside our main focus (for now), at the beginning of this project we mapped Dr. Pinchas Roth’s data set for the responsa of Rabbi Isaac of Dampierre, or Ri HaZaqen. Dr. Roth has been thinking about mapping responsa for some time now, and has been a supporter of HaMapah from the beginning. He and Prof. Rami Reiner, another friend of HaMapah, are preparing a critical edition of Ri HaZaqen’s responsa.

The methodology here is slightly different, focusing not on explicit addresses but rather mentions:

The pattern is interesting. There’s a clear view of the Tosafist heartland, if you will, in Northern France. And then, remarkably given the era and vastly inferior communications, there are relevant areas quite far from Ramerupt, Troyes, and Dampierre. The distribution is not smaller than 19th century poskim, though the volume is. The enormous advancements in communications will get many more people within the bounds of your cultural sphere to ask you questions, but they didn’t make the sphere bigger.

France’s role in the history of halakhah is well known, of course, but we can still have some love for Croatia. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the city of Ragusa, today’s Dubrovnik, was a major financial hub. More than a hundred responsa from Ottoman poskim like R. Shmuel de Medina and R. David HaCohen mention Ragusa or are addressed to it.

Perhaps the most important posek to reside in Croatia was R. David Pardo (1719-1792), author of Mikhtam Le-David, who served in the rabbinate in Spalatro. Among his responsa, in Even HaEzer 9, he addresses how the name of the city would be written in a get. The contemporary name for this city is Split, but Rabbi Pardo, sadly, doesn’t add “דמתקריא Splitsville”.

The Republic of Venice in the mid-18th Century. Note their control of the Dalmatian Coast.

A recurring pattern of note is the cities mentioned–the most prominently featured are Ragusa and Sarajevo. Modern Croatia, a pretty artificial construction, is split; the lower handle of the pliers, if you will, along the Dalmatian coast, on the Adriatic Sea falls into the Venetian, Greek, and Ottoman orbits, and most of the responsa from there are to Saloniki or Venice (R. Pardo was Venetian himself), and often dealing with travelers to and from Sarajevo, placing Split and Ragusa squarely within the context of traditional Balkan Jewry. However, from the northern handle of the pliers, we see responsa from Hatam Sofer to Osijek and Darda, giving us a rough lay of the land and the border between cultural appendages of Hungary and Balkan/Sephardic Jewry.

Among other notable responsa, are Maharshakh 1:138 and Maharashdam Hoshen Mishpat 438, which see the same case–nearly verbatim! A blatant case of historical posek-shopping!

At the end of day, though, much like on the pitch, Croatia can’t quite measure up to France. But a better run than you might have expected.

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.

Signal and Noise: Part I

[Note: Sorry for taking so long. Elli wrote the following post. We were going to post this earlier, but several long and fruitful arguments about signal and noise delayed it, and brought it to the point where it was best split up for size. We have more material ready on this, and we should be able to get back to posting more frequently. Enjoy. –Moshe]

We have given a lot of attention to the “shape” of rabbinic careers over time. Specifically, we have looked at R. Yaakov Ettlinger and R. Moshe Feinstein and tried to consider what may have affected the shape. Factors like R. Ettlinger’s editorship of Der Treue Zionswächter and R. Feinstein’s presence in the Soviet Union during the years of Stalin’s religious purges, as well as his writing and publishing spike in the late 1950s and early 1960s, we argued, can help explain and understand how their careers developed and how they related to their own writings.

More broadly speaking, however, the goal of HaMapah is not to explain these phenomena as much as it is to show that they exist. Let us illustrate this with a table that shows the number of published responsa written by Hatam Sofer by year.

[Note: the data here is based on Hebrew year – 3760, not the actual Gregorian year. Our date parsing tools are accurate to the day where possible, however, choosing where to assign dates with year only and no further data to the Gregorian year is a bit of a question and a possible noise source].
Another map shows where the responsa were written to (for those with both dates and addresses) during those years. (ideally, open it in a new tab)

What we see here is very uneven. There is a general upward trend from the turn of the nineteenth century until the end of his life, but there is lots of variance from year to year. Before we ask how to account for that, we must ask what exactly needs to be accounted for. We should expect a certain degree of variance from year to year simply because that’s how life works. But what should we expect?

Let us discuss baseball for a moment. Unlike most other sports, much of baseball can be broken down into isolated events: pitcher versus batter. The outcome of any individual event is wildly uncertain, but over time patterns emerge. Certain features of a batter’s performance–the rate at which he strikes out, the rate at which he walks, the rate at which balls put in play result in hits–stabilize over time. There are also local environmental factors that come into play. Smaller parks tend to inflate offense and depress defense, while roomier parks have the opposite effect. Factors like wind, humidity, temperature, and altitude also affect performance. Strength of opponent is, of course, a significant factor. And, of course, there are factors in the personal lives of the players that can have an effect (usually detrimental): injury, illness, exhaustion, and grief, to name a few.

And then there is also simple, blind luck. There is only so much control that a batter can have over a ball hurtling toward him at speeds approaching (or exceeding) 100 miles per hour. Sometimes a well-struck ball finds the glove of a well-positioned fielder. Sometimes the weakest contact results in a base hit. That’s the way the ball bounces.

A basic idea of advanced statistical analysis is to try and isolate the relevant factors, the “underlying” performance of a player, that will give a better picture of who the player really is. It allows us to quantify who has been lucky and who unlucky, and it allows us to determine the specific skill at which a given player excels (or fails). We are able to separate the signal from the noise.

Because of all of the factors mentioned–the “noise”–there is a great deal of year-to-year variance in the actual results of a player’s performance. The overall trend is toward a late-20s peak followed by decline, but the number and rate of hits, home runs, doubles, etc. varies greatly from year to year. Advanced analytics develop different kinds of tools that “smooth” the jagged edges of the year-to-year variance by eliminating or accounting for more and more noise.

It is important to recognize that the “noise” itself has meaning. Poor performance is poor performance, even if it is not indicative of a player’s true talent level. A lucky win still goes in the W column. A player whose home run totals are inflated by Coors Field in Denver still has those home runs to his credit. When a batter faces a pitcher, he either will or won’t get on base. He either will or won’t strike out. This is what gives the game its drama: after all the analysis, the players must still go and play the game, whose outcome is far from certain. All advanced statistics can do is give a good idea of what to expect from a player–a better idea, in fact, than “traditional” statistics that count (noisy) results. They do not tell us what happened or predict with certainty what will happen, though they can predict what will happen with substantially better accuracy than traditional statistics. For instance, FIP predicts next year ERA better than ERA.

Can some of these insights be applied to the study of responsa? Certainly, although there is a certain tension here between the historian and the statistician. For the historian, each responsum is a discrete historical event to be studied on its own. To the extent that the “noise” is part of the event and can be determined, the historian wishes to do so. They are interested in what actually happened.

Statisticians, on the other hand, want to isolate performance from all but the most directly relevant factors. As long as the number of responsa that a given posek wrote in a year is somewhat consistent with expected year-to-year variance, it does not trouble them too much. Whatever may have inflated or depressed the number of responsa that year, even if it was not sheer luck, should be ignored when trying to determine the longer arc of the posek’s career, if the spike or dip is within the typical noise pattern. They want to see transition periods, when the posek breaks out (or in stages), if he declines at the end of his life due to health,  and other larger trends, not blips and aberrations. They’ll want this:

Hatam Sofer & EMAs
Hatam Sofer & EMAs

We’ll get in to more details soon. Stay tuned.

Ockham’s Razor and Hatam Sofer

Let’s start with a trivia question: Hatam Sofer (1762-1839) sent responsa to every single Jewish community (in existence at the time) in one modern-day country. What country is it?

Not long ago, I (Moshe) was in the backseat of my grandfather’s car, and we were schmoozing about HaMapah. I mentioned we were mapping the responsa of Hatam Sofer and his first question was: “and was he sent questions from all of Europe?”

We’ll get to that in a minute.

One of our central goals is to try to understand the halakhic world as it was perceived by people at the particular time, not as we presently interpret it. Today one might hear in the oylem that “Hatam Sofer sent teshuvot to all of Europe”. But is this assertion in fact, true?

Let’s try to refine the question a bit. Europe is a big place and Jews were only in some parts of it. Poskim only sent responsa to places with Jews, so “all of Europe” really means “every Jewish area in Europe.” So to answer the trivia question we opened with, Hatam Sofer sent teshuvot to the only two towns in Switzerland where Jews were allowed to live at the time.[1] Thus, trivial as it may sound, in Jewish terms, Hatam Sofer sent teshuvot to all of Switzerland.

But even on this relatively lenient standard, the prevailing assumptions are all wrong. Out of 675 responsa of Hatam Sofer for which we have place data, a grand total of three were sent anywhere within the vast Russian Empire. While it is possible that he in fact wrote several hundred teshuvot to Russia, and they were all chucked into a fire by some angry Hungarian muttering obscenities about Litvaks, this strikes me as incredibly improbable.[2] Ockham’s Razor tells us that we should dismiss the common belief. I also want to preempt an objection–“but look at how widely he’s quoted”–by noting that all of Hatam Sofer’s works were published posthumously.

Let us compare Hatam Sofer to the person with whom we would most intuitively associate him: his father-in-law and near exact contemporary–they were born within a year of each other and died within two–Rabbi Akiva Eger. Both established themselves far from where they were born but in German-speaking areas: Hatam Sofer was born in Frankfurt but established himself in Central Europe: first in Dresnitz (Strasnice, Czechia), then Mattersdorf (Mattersburg, Austria), and finally, for the last 30+ years of his life, in Pressburg (Bratislava, Slovakia). R. Akiva Eger, on the other hand, was born in Eisenstadt (Austria–very close to Mattersdorf; both are part of the Siebengemeinden, the “Sheva Kehilot” in Burgenland, or, in Elli’s preferred parlance, “the Seven Dorfs”). His rabbinic career took him north into Silesia and then to the territories that Prussia had recently sliced off of Poland. The last two decades of his life he was the rabbi of Posen (Poznan, Poland).

Today, they are considered transcendent figures. However, in their lifetimes, they were not transcendent. Consider this map of the two of them, and see for yourself what they did not transcend. (In a new tab)

(Hatam Sofer is blue, R. Akiva Eger is red)

The sorting effect is really dramatic–the choice between R. Akiva Eger and Hatam Sofer falls cleanly on Austrian vs. Prussian lines. The main outliers for both R. Akiva Eger and Hatam Sofer are one another. An inordinate number of responsa written by Hatam Sofer to Prussia were to R. Akiva Eger, and an inordinate number of responsa written by R. Akiva Eger to the Austrian Empire were to Hatam Sofer and his son, R. Avraham Shmuel Binyamin Sofer (Ktav Sofer).

Why does psak tend to stay within the same country? There’s no per se halakhic reason; the halakhic system and methodology, as generally laid out, should not assign any value to the Austria/Prussia border. However, how the system “should” work is ultimately not the point.

Halakhah, and I thank Russ Roberts and EconTalk for inspiring this point (Elli touched on some of this in our first post, but I prefer a different angle, specifically, less top-down and more bottom-up or agent driven, perhaps more Hayekian?) is a case of emergent order. Nobody designed our modern halakhic apparatus. Nobody assigned you to a specific posek, and no “posek ha-dor” was ever voted on and elected (at least not in the last millenium). It is an organic, spontaneous, informal system that arises from the decisions of independent agents. These independent agents might think that their posek should be a good Prussian, and there is little that can be done about it. A few generations later, different independent agents might decide that Hatam Sofer was the posek ha-dor of a generation when none of those agents were alive.

Today, any respectable beit midrash needs a Hiddushei Rabbi Akiva Eger and a Responsa Hatam Sofer, yet the converse is not true: Responsa Rabbi Akiva Eger and Hiddushei Hatam Sofer are not mainstays in the same way. No grand theory of halakhah can easily account for why their works should be so bifurcated in terms of importance. How is it that R. Shabbetai Cohen wrote arguably the most important commentary on Shulhan Arukh Yoreh De’ah, and an utterly forgotten book on Tur Yoreh Deah? This is emergent order created by the independent actions of independent agents.[3]

One last note: Hatam Sofer is interesting. Unlike almost everyone else we’ve done so far, who were usually “just” poskim, he was an influential pedagogue. His students express tremendous love for him, not just as a posek or a scholarly role model, but in a personal way, too. Our operative theory here is that his influence really begins to expand as his students take up positions around Hungary. This can be seen on a map of Hatam Sofer’s responsa as function of time:

(In a new tab)

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[1] These are Ettlingen and Lengnau, which are actually only a couple kilometers apart; they even shared their cemetery.

[2] Though as a dependent probability, if an angry Hungarian did chuck them into a fire, it seems pretty probable that he was muttering obscenities about Litvaks.

[3] F.A. Hayek writes (Law, Legislation and Liberty, pp. 118-119):

“The judge, in other words, serves, or tries to maintain and improve, a going order which nobody has designed, an order that has formed itself without the knowledge and often against the will of authority, that extends beyond the range of deliberate organization on the part of anybody, and that is not based on the individuals doing anybody’s will, but on their expectations becoming mutually adjusted. The reason why the judge will be asked to intervene will be that the rules which secure such a matching of expectations are not always observed, or clear enough, or adequate to prevent conflicts even if observed. Since new situations in which the established rules are not adequate will constantly arise, the task of preventing conflict and enhancing the compatibility of actions by appropriately delimiting the range of permitted actions is of necessity a never-ending one, requiring not only the application of already established rules but also the formulation of new rules necessary for the preservation of the order of actions. In their endeavour to cope with new problems by the application of ‘principles’ which they have to distil from the ratio decidendi of earlier decisions, and so to develop these inchoate rules (which is what ‘principles’ are) that they will produce the desired effect in new situations, neither the judges nor the parties involved need to know anything about the nature of the resulting overall order, or about any ‘interest of society’ which they serve, beyond the fact that the rules are meant to assist the individuals in successfully forming expectations in a wide range of circumstances.”

I think every word here applies to halakhah, even more so than the original, given how the selection of the judge/posek is a case of spontaneous order in and of itself.

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.

The Shape of a Rabbinic Career: Rav Moshe Feinstein and Rav Yaakov Ettlinger

Until now we have mainly been looking at the distribution of responsa through space. In this post we will begin looking at their distribution through time.

What would we expect a typical respondent’s career to look like? When I (Elli) started, I imagined a relatively steep incline in the number of responsa written per year as the rabbi’s reputation grows, then a plateau, then a decline, either gradual or abrupt, at the end of the rabbi’s life.

Of course, the shape would not be completely smooth. Any number of factors over which the respondent has no control could affect his output during any particular period. Nevertheless, over the long run, we would expect the chart to look something like this:

The above chart has nothing to do with responsa or rabbis. It represents what Joe Posnanski imagines the typical baseball player’s aging chart should look like. There’s a slow start, then a “breakout” to stardom, followed by a peak, followed by decline.

Note from Moshe: I expected to see roughly the opposite shape – basically this chart flipped on the X axis. I think this was based maybe on my first-hand experience with R. Aharon Lichtenstein – slow ascent, then rise, peak, and precipitous decline. In baseball terms: the steroid aging curve. A grafting of two equations – “chashuv” increases as a function of age, but infirmity takes its toll at some point. I think this may loosely approximate a couple poskim, but it’s also not accurate too broadly. Back to Elli.

At this point, we have very good bar charts chronicling the careers of five major halakhists. Not a single one fits the pattern outlined above. Nothing is even close. We will look at two of them now and think about what they can tell us about their careers. The other three we will save for another time.

The chart below (once again, based on Michael Pitkowsky’s data) gives us the tally of responsa written by R. Moshe Feinstein broken down by year (as well as volume, which can be toggled).

plot from API (1)

 

We see that Rav Moshe wrote a significant number of responsa in the 1920s, but then, at the beginning of the 1930s, there a dip that lasts until the late 1940s. A gradual rise spikes in the late 50s and early 60s, followed by a decline and plateau that lasts until the early 80s and a short period of decline before his death in the mid-1980s.

What does this mean?

A full answer will require a much deeper dive. A lot has been written on Rav Moshe, and this could provide a good place for the next generation of research to start. In broad brush strokes, this is what we think we are looking at —

Rav Moshe began to emerge as a significant halakhist in the 1920s in Russia. Many of the responsa he wrote then were “recreational,” but there were rabbis to correspond with and real halakhic questions to answer.

All that changed in the 1930s, the height of Stalin’s campaign against religion. Rabbinic communication by mail became a dangerous endeavor. This campaign played a significant role in Rav Moshe’s immigration to the United States, where did not yet have much of a reputation as a halakhist. That changed after World War II, with the influx of (mainly observant) Holocaust survivors from Eastern Europe, who both knew of Rav Moshe from Europe and were more likely to ask questions of rabbis.

By the late 1950s, the leading American halakhist before Rav Moshe, Rav Yosef Eliyahu Henkin, began to slow down the pace of his halakhic output as he aged and took on more communal leadership responsibility (this was suggested to us by Rabbi Saul Berman). It was at that point that the number of responsa written by Rav Moshe spiked dramatically, and it is also when he began to publish Igrot Moshe. If one were to ask, “When did Rav Moshe become the poseik of America,” the answer is quite clear: between 1957 and 1963.

The subsequent decline and plateau can be attributed to several factors. One is that he, like Rav Henkin before him, began to take on more communal leadership roles. Another is that the growing Hasidic communities in America began to turn to their own poskim, like Rav Menasheh Klein (this, again, was suggested by Rabbi Berman). It is also possible that once he had cemented his status, he did not see as much need to write and publish responsa at such a breakneck pace. Poskim are very conscious of the public personas they create, and there is no doubt that the writing and publication of responsa help to curate and project that persona.

Let us now turn to Rav Ettlinger. Here is a bar chart of his responsa output by year:

BZ - by year

 

This dataset is somewhat incomplete as many of Rav Ettlinger’s responsa are not dated, but we do have 310 out 362 – 86% of the his responsa – and also, we are confident about what we will find in the additional data, because most of the undated responsa were initially published in the same place as many of the dated responsa: in the rabbinic journal Der Treue Zionswächter, or Shomer Tziyon Ha-ne’eman, which Rav Ettlinger edited.

Consider: the majority of Rav Ettlinger’s responsa were written between 1847 and 1856, precisely when he was editor of the journal. The nature of the journal was that one rabbi would write in with a question or idea, which was then “peer reviewed.” Rav Ettlinger had control over whose answers and responses were printed, and, unsurprisingly, he often published his own answers, which were then collected in Binyan Tziyon. Once he stopped editing the journal, the number of answers he was writing (to questions that were not asked of him specifically) dropped off dramatically.

Stay tuned, Moshe will post about Chatam Sofer later this week (both dates and locations). You can follow us on Facebook or subscribe to email updates.

Introducing Binyan Zion (As seen in Ami Magazine!)

Readers who are also subscribers to Ami Magazine (and Ami Magazine readers who learned about us from Yossi Krausz’s awesome profile) know that we have mapped out Responsa Binyan Zion, by Rav Yaakov Ettlinger (1798-1871). R. Ettlinger gained prominence as rabbi of Altona, Germany, part of the famed triple community of AHU, along with Hamburg and Wandsbeck. This map gives us a look at a different region, a bit earlier in the 19th century.

For now, we want you to enjoy playing around with the map to see what you make of it. In a few days, Elli will post something about what we might be able to learn by plotting Binyan Tziyon geographically and by date, and I will analyze the similarity and dissimilarity of Binyan Zion to other poskim of the age. (For starters, look at Galicia on the maps below, and ponder what it means.) We’re mostly done with both Hatam Sofer and Maharam Schick, and we hope to post them both soon, once we’ve removed a few inaccuracies and filled in a couple of gaps.

The first map here is a heat map of Binyan Zion. You can enable Maharsham layers to compare if you want. I recommend viewing it in a separate tab, and viewing it on a computer will give you the best experience. Mouse over / click on cities for more info.

And to get ready for Elli’s post, here’s an animated view of the Binyan Zion (again, I recommend opening a separate tab). Note the bars at the bottom, which gives the number of responsa per year. Is that what you would expect a rabbinic career to look like? Either way, the date tools enable us to do some pretty cool things.

One final point: off to the right of the page there’s a box where you can enter your email address and automatically get an email when we post to the blog.

All the Bychkivs

We left the last post off with a question: why did Maharsham write so many responsa (in relative terms) to Bychkiv?

That turns out to be an easy question to answer. Of the seventeen responsa to Bychkiv, one is addressed to R. Zev Wolf Tirkel, and all the rest are addressed to either R. Fishel Feldman or his son, R. Moshe Yisrael Feldman. He refers to R. Fishel as his “mehutan”, which does not refer specifically to the father of one’s son- or daughter-in-law, but has a broader connotation of someone from a family that married into our family. In the present case, it was Maharsham’s granddaughter, Chantze who married R. Moshe Yisrael. Maharsham apparently took a liking to his grandson-in-law, because he brought him from Bychkiv to Berezhany, where he became a member of the rabbinical court. In all, twelve responsa are addressed to R. Fishel (who died in 1904) and four to R. Moshe Yisrael. R. Moshe Yisrael and Chantze Feldman perished at Auschwitz on May 19, 1944 (26 Iyar, 5704), 74 years ago this week. We mention this because such things should always, always be mentioned.

The thing is, in these seventeen responsa, Maharsham spells “Bychkiv” nine different ways![1] We started looking around to see if anyone had documented all of the variant spellings in Hebrew characters of every place name mentioned in rabbinic writings. It turns out that there are such projects, most notably Sinai Rusinek’s Kima, but they are not working on the same time period. Our relationship with them is complementary; we now help one another out when we can. There are also a number of databases of Jewish communities, but they generally use only one, maximum two, spelling variations. Some of these lists don’t even allow Hebrew characters in their search functions. So identifying all of the places and recording their variant spellings became the most research-intensive part of the project, but its byproduct was that that we might now have the world’s best gazetteer of Hebrew-character European place names: about 700 places, with about 1300 variant spellings.

Why so many different spellings? There are different reasons:

  1. A place can have different names in different languages, and German, Hungarian, Slavic, and Romanian names sometimes sound nothing alike. Pressburg-Pozsony-Bratislava is a bit extreme, but at first glance it’s not easy to see how Oradea Mare, Grosswardein, and Nagyvarad are basically the same name (the name WRD modified by the word for “big”).
  2. There are abbreviations: Mattersdorf (מ”ד), Pressburg (פ”ב), Grosswardein (ג”וו), and so forth.
  3. There are prefixes that sometimes detach. Thus one of the many towns named for St. George might be a variant of George with or without a “Saint” before it, and sometimes with a “S.” Same with prefixes for rivers, or provinces. So the Hungarian “Dunaszerdahely” drops the “Duna” (Danube) in Yiddish. Brest-Litovsk (בריסק דליטא) drops the Litovsk and is known simply as Brest (or Brisk). Even the “Velykyi” of Velykyi Bychkiv is dropped. There are a lot of prefixes and suffixes like this. Sometimes they’re there, and sometimes not.  An example that has all of these issues is Sajószentpéter, Hungary. It has an acronym: ס”פ; separate saint–“סענט פעטער”; abbreviated Saint–“ס. פעטער”; combined with saint–“סענטפעטער”, and added region–“סאיא ס’ פעטער”.
  4. Simply put, there was no standard orthography. Similar consonants and similar vowels were all but interchangeable. It was not deemed necessary in general. Maharsham himself just wrote it how it sounds and produced nine spellings for Bychkiv. And if one were inclined to research how the town is spelled in English, they will find at least that many spellings, many of which are not fit for publication on a child-friendly blog.

Here are a few examples of places with a particularly high number of spellings:

Budapest has the most variants, but only because it was once three different cities (Buda/Ofen, Old Buda/Obuda/Alt Ofen, and Pest). Throw in some abbreviations and the German convention of adding a ה to the end of a word that ends with at ‘t’ sound so that it doesn’t sound like a ‘d’, and voila. This is a bit of a fudge, though, as really we should count this as two places, or even three.

Peremyshliany and Tarnoruda, both in Ukraine, are better examples. Each has 8 or 9 variant spellings on one name. Bychkiv is also in this category (except for that one spelling that includes the county name, giving us the monstrosity of “בוטשקאוומארמארש”. But here we have thirteen spellings. Where are the other four from?

Well, it turns out that Maharsham was not R. Fishel Feldman’s only correspondent, and a look at other responsa addressed to him tell an interesting story, too. There is a good amount of information available on R. Fishel, both genealogical and historical (including a list of all the responsa addressed to him–this is a rabbit-hole that we’re about to jump down). He was a businessman who learned a lot; several of his works were published posthumously by his son Moshe Yisrael. There was no rav of Bychkiv in those days, so R. Fishel (and his father-in-law, R. Yehuda Avraham Aber Rosenberg) was one of the de facto rabbinic leaders in town. R. Fishel corresponded with a variety of Hungarian and Galician rabbis over the years, including . R. Shlomo Drimer (d. 1873); Maharam Schick (YD 246; d. 1879); and a R. Zalman Leib Teitelbaum (the “Yeitiv Lev”; d. 1883).

We have not (yet) found any responsa addressed to R. Fishel between 1883 (at the latest) and 1896. The responsa he received from Maharsham are not dated (except for one, from the late summer of 1897), but they all refer to him as “mehutani.” Chantze was born in 1877, so her grandfather’s correspondence with her father-in-law, which began after her wedding, could not have begun too much before the dated responsum in 1897. There are two responsa to R. Fishel in Responsa Harei Besamim of R. Aryeh Leibush Horowitz (d. 1909), the rabbi of Stryi and a “competitor” of Maharsham who did not manage to “clear his neighborhood.” These are dated to the month of Sivan in 1896 and 1897–the latter is two months before the date responsum from Maharsham. One of these responsa has a new variant spelling of Bychkiv. That brings us to ten.

It is worth noting that R. Fishel shifted his allegiance from R. Aryeh Leibush of Stryi to Maharsham around the time that his son married the latter’s granddaughter. Authority is accumulated in any number of ways, including family allegiances and fealties (or, from the other side, through strategic shiddukhim).

There are two other responsa written to R. Fishel in the summer of 1902. Both concern the dilemma about whether to accept a grant from a government fund for Jewish institutions that was administered by non-Orthodox Congress (or “Neolog”) communal leaders. One responsum appears in R. Yehuda Greenwald’s Zikhron Yehuda (where we find variant #11), and the other in R. Eliezer Deutsch’s Pri Ha-sadeh. The issue of cooperating with non-Orthodox bodies was characteristic of Hungary, but not Galicia, which did not experience the schism that Hungary did. It made sense for R. Fishel to consult the Hungarian rabbis on this specific issue, even if most of his questions were sent to his mehutan, Maharsham.

The last two variants are from 1909, when Bychkiv finally got an official Hebrew spelling, albeit under tragic circumstances. A young married man with no children had contracted typhus. On Hoshana Rabba, on the eve of a 3-day yom tov, he sensed that he was dying. He feared not for his life, but for his wife. His only brother was 4 years old, and his death would have chained his wife to the boy for nine of her prime years, until the lad came of age and could perform halitzah. He therefore decided to give his wife a get, to prevent her becoming an agunah. The problem was that no get had ever been written in Bychkiv before, so there was no accepted spelling.

In Bychkiv at the time was Rabbi Alter Shaul Pfeffer, a young Torah scholar about 35 years of age who was living with his wealthy in-laws so he could devote himself to Torah study. He was later known for his expertise in the laws of gittin, as can be seen from his three volumes of responsa, Avnei Zikaron, but at this point his status as a halakhist was not cemented. Indeed, perhaps this is where he “made his bones”. He hastily arranged the get on that Hoshana Rabba, and by the end of the three days of yom tov, the afflicted young man indeed no longer had the mental capacity to grant a get.

R. Pfeffer was not satisfied that he had saved this woman from being an agunah. Pre-empting anyone who might question his authority to issue a get, he wrote a long responsum explaining how he reached his decision about the proper spelling of Bychkiv and sent it to several leading rabbis. They all validated the get, though some of them had other ideas about how the name should be spelled going forward. In all, 25 pages of the first volume R. Alter Pfeffer’s Avnei Zikaron are devoted to the spelling of Bychkiv!

A handwritten responsum of R. Alter Shaul Pfeffer on a matter of gittin (from Kedem Auctions)
A handwritten responsum of R. Alter Shaul Pfeffer on a matter of gittin (from Kedem Auctions)

The last responsum was written by R. Pfeffer after he had moved to New York, where he headed the Beit Midrash Hagadol Anshei Ungarin and Kehilat Anshei Marmoros, to the new (and official, finally) rabbi of Bychkiv, reviewing the entire episode and the subsequent correspondence so that gittin could continue to be written in Bychkiv. His summary should not surprise us:

The Bychkiver Get
The first get of Bychkiv, by R. Alter Shaul Pfeffer

Each rabbi had a different idea about how to spell Bychkiv. R. Pfeffer insists, though, that nothing, not a single letter, should be changed from his suggestion (which was to have the full name as it was called by the local Jews–גרוס ביטשקיב/Gross Bychkiv–and the Hungarian name used by the authorities like the post office–נאד באטשקא/Nagy Boczko).

So here we have the twelfth and thirteenth (and final) variations of how to spell the name of this place–not including the hypotheticals that R. Pfeffer entertained, which would have added a whole bunch more!

[1] Two personal points about Bychkiv. The first is that my (Elli’s) great-great grandparents, Shmuel and Henye Fischer, lived in Bychkiv. Here is a link to a picture of Henye’s gravestone, which calls her “the wife of R. Shmuel Fischer of Bychkiv.” My wife and I have toyed with claiming the titles of Bychkiver Rebbe and Rebbetzin.

The second is that two unforgettable professors in Yeshiva University’s Computer Science department (of which I am an alum), Prof. Michael Breban and the late Prof. Aizik Leibovich, lived in Bychkiv. There’s more to that story, too. Perhaps another time.

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