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”.
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.
