Quantitative Analysis of Rabbinic Literature
We’ve got a new map of Rav Yosef Shaul Nathansohn’s Sho’el U-Meshiv. He wrote more responsa than there are pages of Talmud. If one learned Sho’el U-Meshiv Yomi it would take longer than Daf Yomi. That’s really something.
Anyhow, we mapped it. You can toggle both city maps and heat maps for Sho’el U-Meshiv and Maharsham. They were both Galician, one generation apart, so it really offers an interesting basis for comparison. I haven’t even started digging in.
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.
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.
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:
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!
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:
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.
Last week we used the Maharsham to take a look at some large scale phenomena, especially cultural boundaries. Now we’re going to zoom in on some of the things we noticed that are going on within those boundaries.
One of the major questions we are trying to help answer with this project is whether rabbinic authority can be quantified. Can we use metrics to give a sense of how important Maharsham is? And if so, how?
We have already looked at number of responsa and geographical spread. Those are important data. But are all responsa created equal? If a gabbai asks a rav whether the congregation should skip tachanun on Erev Tu BiShvat, and the rav sits down and writes a lengthy treatise in response, does it really tell us anything about his authority? There are certain types of questions that demonstrate real influence. If people carry on Shabbat based on an eruv approved by a particular rabbi, over and against competitors, it indicates authority. The higher the stakes, and the more lives the question affects, the more important the responsum, and the more authority demonstrated by the responding rabbi.
Let’s take a more concrete example. Through volume 8 of Igrot Moshe, there are 1805 published responsa of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (RMF). Of those, 48 are written to Rabbi Yaakov Kantrowitz (h/t Michael Pitkowsky). R. Kantrowitz was hardly submitting to RMF’s authority, as he was at least 20 years older than him. Moreover, almost all of these responsa are what we might call “recreational”. These are not responses to halakhic questions, but long letters written by a severely underemployed rabbi in the early years of the Soviet Union (there is not much for a rabbi to do when religion is effectively banned). These 48 responsa to not evince much rabbinic authority.
As for spread, RMF’s responsa are very clustered. He runs up his score in particular cities and with particular people–about 90 are to Memphis (mainly to Rabbi Ephraim Greenblatt), for instance, or 5% of the total (we’re still working on quantifying how many to NYC, and whether to count different boroughs as different cities, but we will get there).
The point of this exercise is not to minimize the greatness of RMF. Rather, it is to show what a big deal Maharsham was, and he was a Big Deal. This has largely been forgotten over the course of a century of Lithuanian supremacism. Hundreds of community rabbis from hundreds of communities asked him their questions. His influence in his time and place was massive. There’s even a book called Maharsham: The Last Posek.
Yet for all his influence, there are certain places that his authority simply did not penetrate.
Drohobych was a huge Galician community in Maharsham’s later years. In 1910 it had over 15,000 Jews. Yet Maharsham addressed not a single responsum there. It’s not due to a regional lack of influence–he has 19 responsa to Stryi, which is less than 20 miles away and two-thirds the size. Another glaring hole is Przemyśl (Pshemyshl in Yiddish; vowels are overrated). Przemyśl’s Jewish population was slightly larger than Drohobych’s. Again, there’s no broader regional absence, as many nearby villages and towns have responsa addressed there, yet the big city is missing.
A final example: On the eve of WWI, the community of Sighet numbered c. 8,000 Jews–a sizable community–while nearby Bychkiv had just over 1,000. Yet only 5 responsa were addressed to Sighet, while seventeen were addressed to Bychkiv. In contrast to the other examples, Bychkiv is punching well above its weight.
We can posit explanations for the three cities with low (or nonexistent) numbers. Przemyśl was the seat of Rabbi Yitzchak Schmelkes, author of Beit Yitzhak and probably Maharsham’s main rival in Galicia in the generation after R. Yosef Shaul Natansohn. He was rabbi of Przemyśl for a long time, whereupon he was succeeded by his nephew and disciple. So Przemyśl remained under his “jurisdiction”, so to speak, even after his departure to Lviv.
As for Drohobych, we note that Rabbi Yitzhak Leib Sofer (1848-1907) was the city’s rabbi, and he had other influences: he was the son of Rabbi Avraham Shmuel Binyamin Sofer (Ktav Sofer) and thus a scion of the greatest rabbinic family in Western Hungary. If anything, his presence in Drohobych indicates that the Sofer family’s sphere of influence was expanding into Galicia.
As for Sighet, by this time its rabbinate was firmly controlled by the Teitelbaum family.
To understand what’s going on here, we borrow a concept from astronomy. The International Astronomical Union (IAU) defines a planet as: “a celestial body that (a) is in orbit around the Sun, (b) has sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that it assumes a hydrostatic equilibrium (nearly round) shape, and (c) has cleared the neighbourhood around its orbit.”[1]
A major posek like Maharsham exerts a massive gravitational pull on the entire region. He vacuumed up the questions from hundreds of towns and villages in Galicia. However, there were a few cities whose rabbis “cleared the neighborhood”. They remained the dominant gravitational force in those cities. It seems that there were cultural institutions–like a family rabbinate, for example–that were able to resist outside influence, or individuals with enough authority. In turn, Galicia’s cultural identity and rabbinic tradition is powerful enough to clear its neighborhood and monopolize questions from within its territory, in contrast to regions like Volhynia and Podolia, which send a large chunk of their questions to Galicia. Another example of a city that cleared its neighborhood might be Prague, which seems to have sent very few questions elsewhere over an extended period of time.[2]
These observations are tentative. We need a lot more research before we have anything conclusive, but we would not have even known to ask the question without the data. And we think it holds promise.
For now, think of this post as a study aid and as a way to quantify (and appreciate) rabbinic authority. We will tweak the methodology as we have more data to work with and as we are able to use more advanced metrics and software. This is really just the beginning.
That, in turn, brings us back to a feisty little Carpathian town that punches above its weight: Bychkiv, to which we will return in the next post.
—
[1] For those wondering at home, Pluto lost planethood over (c).
[2] Expect more on this later, but, in short, we’ve come near completion on a few more poskim, starting from 1800 or so, and we’ve seen virtually nothing to Prague and fairly little to Czechia as a whole.
This divide also corresponds to the political division between the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania, and we see that the cultural divide persisted even after the political boundary became defunct. However, Gertner surmised that the Jews of different empires would converge internally and diverge from one another as time went on, thus reshaping these cultural borders. Galician Jews would develop stronger affinities with Austrian, Hungarian, and Moravian Jews, while ties with Volhynia and Podolia would be weakened, and so forth.
A better way of visualizing this is to plot the Maharsham data onto a map of Europe’s year 1700 political borders. 1072 (74%) were sent to areas within the Kingdom of Poland, against 18 (1%) to the Duchy of Lithuania. The internal division of a confederation that had ceased to exist a hundred years before Maharsham’s responsa-writing prime is the most salient border in his sphere of influence.
Returning to the Maharsham heat map, we can break things down more precisely. 790, or 55%, of his responsa were to Galicia. Looking at the dots of individual cities, we see that the responsa were evenly distributed throughout Galicia, more or less. Elsewhere in the Polish Jewish sphere of influence, there are 134 responsa addressed to Congress Poland (9%), and 227 to the eastern Ukrainian regions (16%; this includes the 13 responsa to Kherson, which were all to Odessa, and the 41 sent to Bukovina). Moreover, to the extent that Maharsham’s influence expanded beyond Galicia to the south and west, it was to regions that were very close to Galicia and to which Galician Jews were migrating in significant numbers, especially Northern Moldavia (37), Maramaros (78), and Transcarpathia (27). An additional 10% of his responsa went to these regions. That brings us to 90% of his responsa.
In all, there is a slight shift to the south and west in comparison with RSK. RSK wrote more responsa, both proportionally and in terms of raw numbers, to Volhynia, Podolia, and Kiev than Maharsham did, and most of the responsa that Maharsham sent into Russia were to places relatively close to the border with Austria. On the other hand, Maharsham had more of an influence in Hungary, especially those regions of Unterland that were near Galicia. One can even see that there were a number of communities between Budapest and Galicia–Eger, Mad, and Bodrogkeresztúr (Kerestir), to name a few–that sent their questions to Maharsham (2% of the total). The overall picture is one of striking similarity with a slight tilt away from the Ukrainian interior and toward Eastern Hungary.
Next post will delve a bit deeper into the data and look at some individual cities. For those who want to play along at home, look at Sighet, Przemysl, Cluj, Drohobych, and a town that readers will be becoming familiar with: Bychkiv.
[1] H. Gertner, “Gevulot ha-Hashpa’ah shel Rabbanut Galitzya be-Mahatzit ha-Rishonah shel ha-Me’ah ha-Tesha Estrei: R. Shlomo Kluger ke-Mikreh Mivhan” (“The Sphere of Influence of the Galician Rabbinate in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century: Rabbi Shlomo Kluger as a Test Case”), MA thesis, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, 1996. We thank Prof. Shaul Stampfer for referring us to this work.
[2] There are two maps of the Yiddish dialects out there. We like this one because it shows that Oberland (Western Hungary) transitioned from Western to Mideastern Yiddish, and we like this one because it’s demarcation of the border between Litvish and Southeastern Yiddish is more detailed and precise.
[3] Note that the line drawn on the map associated with this article does not correspond, in any meaningful way, to the actual dividing line between sweet and savory gefilte fish.
A true responsum, the answer that a rabbi writes to a query posed by another rabbi, is the basic unit of rabbinic authority. It orders the two correspondents hierarchically; the one asking acknowledges the greater expertise of the one answering, thereby expanding the latter’s influence. Moreover, because the hierarchy is, as Jacob Katz wrote, “unofficial” and “spontaneous,” emerging implicitly from the deference of the secondary and tertiary elite, it can tell us more about the dynamics of influence, reputation, and expertise than many other forms of legal authority.
Words like “authority” and “influence” are used, in this context, in contradistinction to “power.” If a rabbi was heeded, certainly by a distant correspondent, it was because the interlocutor voluntarily submitted to the rabbi’s decision. Aside from certain limited local powers, largely dependent on the approval of the lay leadership, there was no mechanism by which a rabbi could enforce his decisions. As Salo Baron wrote, this places rabbis in the “awkward position of theoretical supremacy and actual inferiority.”
On the other hand, since rabbinic authority is not dependent on enforcement, it can cross borders without encroaching on the sovereignty of any state. This does not mean that there are no borders or boundaries; there often are. However, the boundaries of cultural territories are sometimes more pronounced and significant than political borders. For instance, the old frontier between the Kingdom of Poland and the Duchy of Lithuania was still significant in the early 20th century – more significant, perhaps, than the border between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Russia or Romania.
These insights lie at the heart of HaMapah and its objectives. The “metadata” of responsa – When they were written, to whom, by whom, to where, etc. – can be quantified, plotted on a map, and visualized in different ways – akin to the “Mapping the Republic of Letters” project at Stanford. Given enough data, we can examine the effects of national and cultural borders on the spread of rabbinic authority; the effects of transportation and communication systems and technologies; we could compare the “reach” of halakhists who lived near one another, either at the same time or in succession; we could look at the dynamics of succession, when one authority passed away and another took his place; we could precisely plot out the growth of rabbi’s authority – whether it spreads gradually or abruptly, in all directions or in particular directions. There are new questions that did not even dawn on us until we started looking at the graphic representations, the maps and charts.
Eventually we want to get into some even deeper stuff, like the sources quoted by responsa in different ways (as support, to disagree; by name and anonymously; rabbinic sources and non-rabbinic, halakhic and non-halakhic, and so forth). We’d also like to map other corpora, like approbations and subscriber lists (“prenumeranten”). We’re on the cusp of something new, big, and exciting.
Initially, we are going to focus on the “long” 19th century – roughly from the First Partition of Poland in 1772 through the First World War. The first responsa we analyzed and mapped are those of Rabbi Shalom Mordechai Schwadron of Berezhany (Maharsham, 1835-1911), a leading Galician halakhist in the generation prior to World War I – that is, when Galicia was still part of the Habsburg Empire, before it was integrated into the reconstituted Poland after the war.
So without further ado, here is a heat map of “Maharsham Land”.
Each shaded region is a province that existed in 1900. The thick black lines are international boundaries. The darkest region is Galicia itself.
Here’s another visualization of the data.
Each dot is a community to which Maharsham addressed a responsum; the larger the dot, the more responsa he addressed to the community (you can open the map separately too).
These maps tell us a great deal, but before we get to that, we’d love to hear from readers about what leaps out at them, what grabs their attention. We will share some of our own insights in the next post. We hope to post fairly regularly, so follow us here and on Facebook.
