Quantitative Analysis

What Subscription Lists Tell Us about the Hungarian Yeshiva World

What subscriber lists can tell us about the Hungarian yeshiva world in the years before its annihilation.

When we talk about “the yeshiva world” we most often refer to the yeshivot established in Greater Lithuania in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and their transplants in the US, Israel, and elsewhere beginning in the interwar period. Rarely is there discussion of other yeshivot, and when there is, they are generally given short shrift.

There is no doubt that, structurally, the Lithuanian yeshivot differed from other yeshivot. One salient difference is that many of them functioned independently of the host communities and had their own fundraising networks. I recall learning this from Prof. Shaul Stampfer in the summer of 1999 and finding it to be quite a revelation. But there were, it must be noted, community-based Lithuanian yeshivot as well, most notably the Ramailes Yeshiva in Vilna. But Lithuanian yeshivot are not our topic today.

A number of months ago, I noticed that some books include rosters of yeshiva students within presubscriber lists (prenumeranten). Here’s an example that comes from a book called Shulhan shel Arba, a treatise on proper conduct at the table, composed by Rabbeinu Bahya ben Asher, a disciple of Rashba (late-13th and early-14th century Spain). In 1939, Rabbi Yitzchak Essner, a resident of Presov, (Czecho)slovakia, reprinted the work at Vranov (nad Topľou) with his own commentaries. There are four pages of prenumeranten, including sub-lists from five different Hungarian yeshivot. Here’s the beginning of the list from the yeshiva in Dunaszerdahely:

Student-subscribers in the yeshiva of Dunaszerdahely (Dunajská Streda)

Few outside of those who really study Hungarian Jewish history have even heard of Dunaszerdahely, know that it was the home of R. Yehuda Aszod, or are aware that it was actually home to yeshivot. But it was. A glance at this list (there are 2 or 3 more students on the next page) shows that, contrary to the common understanding, the students were not just local boys, but actually came from fairly far away. Their hometowns are listed, and I have highlighted them in green. Here’s a map of the hometowns:

And this is but a small cross-section of books bought by yeshiva students in Dunaszerdahely. Of the 20 or so books with Hungarian yeshiva subscribers that I have mapped thus far, about 5 have lists from Dunaszerdahely, and there were between 12 and 41 subscribers to each book. (Lest one consider that fluctuation in the size of the yeshiva accounts for the difference, note that the books in question were all printed between 1938 and 1940.) Here’s a look at the hometowns of all subscribers from the yeshiva of Dunaszerdahely. It’s zoomed out a bit to include the one subscriber from Poland and one from Prague:

Hometowns of yeshiva students at Dunaszerdahely

There are about 120 books that have lists of Hungarian yeshiva students (about 2/3 of these were published between 1920 and 1943), and thus far I have encountered about 35 yeshivot, which is a fraction of the 230 yeshivot listed by Rabbi Dr. Armin Friedman in his dissertation on the subject. Some of the yeshivot were tiny, but there were over 300 students at the yeshiva in Munkacs in the early 1940s.

Interestingly, I have not found such lists for yeshivot in Lithuania – or anywhere else, for that matter. This seems to be a strictly Hungarian phenomenon. It could be that it is a matter of social class. Interwar Hungary (including regions like Slovakia, Transcarpathia, and Transylvania that had been part of Hungary until 1920) was very much middle class. That does not mean that all the students had money, but that enough of them had disposable income to make it worthwhile for an author or agent to sell in the yeshiva.

The yeshivot were also somewhat institutionalized. Each one had a system of gabba’im in charge of various aspects of yeshiva life. The red highlighted text above identifies a student as ג”ר דחמ”ז – gabbai rishon de-hevra mezonot. He was in charge of either organizing meals for students at the homes of local community members or of procuring the food to be served in the yeshiva kitchen. While some yeshivot were linked directly to the rosh yeshiva (often the local rabbi), and followed him if he moved, by the late 1930s, several yeshivot had permanent buildings and several staff members, and so had attained a degree of institutionalization and perceived (though, in hindsight, tragically illusory) permanence.

This post covers much of the ground from my presentation at the AJS conference in Chicago last week. There’s a lot more to investigate and discuss. I’m posting the map from which I took the images above. As you will see, you can filter it by several variables. For example, you can look (better in a separate tab) at a particular book, a particular yeshiva, or a particular town. It includes some 2,000 data points, which is really only the tip of a very large iceberg.

Recent and Upcoming Talks

Back in May we participated in and helped organize a virtual conference that showcased the different projects going on at the eLijah Lab at the Haifa University. The lectures relating to our projects are up on YouTube. Here’s a lecture on the Prenumeranten Project by our lead researcher, Prof. Marcin Wodzinski, with a response by Prof. Avriel Bar-Levav:

Next is a talk by me and Moshe, in which we ask a new set of questions, namely: Why did writers of responsa feel it necessary to include the sorts of metadata that we have been analyzing here? We present some initial ideas and finding, with a response from Dr. Tamara Morsel-Eisenberg:

There are two other lectures that I will be giving in the near future. The first, in a conference celebrating the launch of a fascinating website that documents Jewish cemeteries in Turkey. The free, online conference will take place on October 18-19, and you can register here. My talk will be a basic introduction to the Prenumeranten project.

I’ll also be at AJS this year (whether in-person or virtually), where I will be presenting some initial findings on Hungarian yeshivot based on information culled from subscriber lists. Often, yeshiva students are listed separately, and their hometowns are given – as in this image.

Subscribers to *Even Bohan* (Mihalovce, 1931) from yeshivot in Mihalovce, Ungvar (Uzhhorod), and Tarne (Trnava)

This offers us snapshots of the size and geographical reach of each yeshiva at a particular moment. Thus far, I have found close to 70 books that include yeshiva students in separate lists. I’m looking forward to seeing what this yields, and already it has me wondering why the Hungarian yeshiva world vanished virtually without a trace while the Lithuanian yeshiva world was largely transplanted in the US and Israel. Perhaps the latter was based on a more independent (and thus portable) institutional model, but perhaps it is because the destruction of the former was gradual, beginning already with the rise of the Soviet Union, while the latter was destroyed swiftly. We will see what sort of results turn up.

I should also mention that we are going through something of a transition as Moshe adjusts to his new full-time position with a large corporation. We will get through it.

Jew In The City? Population and Responsa

Many of our readers are probably familiar with JewishGen, the premier resource for Jewish genealogical research. For quite some time, we’ve had our eye on their Communities Database, which contains information on the history, names, coordinates, environs, and population for Jewish communities in Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East. We have often used it to help us identify places, which involves a lot of guesswork since their search engine only allows Latin characters without diacritics.

You may have noticed the JewishGen logo to the right. We put that there because we recently met with the good folks at JG, and we agreed to all help each other out by sharing data and resources with each other and with the public.¹

What does this mean? It means new and better toys. For instance, that thing about not being able to search for places by Hebrew characters? Well check out our searchable map of Hebrew place names:

As of now, this table has a bit under 4000 place name variants in Hebrew characters. Once we complete the merge of our list with JG’s list, that number will more than double. And we have also started merging these lists with Berl Kagan’s Sefer Prenumeranten. Play around with it. There’s nothing like it, and this is just an “alpha” version.

It also means that Moshe got to play around with the population data in the Communities Database. We have wondered for some time whether there is any relationship between the population of a community and the number of responsa sent there.

So is there a relationship? The short answer: It’s complicated.

Let’s compare some of our favorites (a note: we used 1900 for availability reasons, surprisingly, there’s not a strong penalty for correlation when using earlier poskim). We’ve dropped communities with over 20,000 Jews from the graph, and also because there might be other effects going on over there.²

If this reads as a horrible mess to you, then you’ve read it correctly. This is the picture of statistical noise.

[We’re going to use a lot of numbers here, so for those who aren’t into mathy stuff, here’s the baalebatish version: A perfect positive correlation between number of responsa and population would mean that the bigger the city, the more responsa, no exceptions. It would have a score of 1. If it had a perfect relationship but it wasn’t a straight line, its Pearson correlation coefficient would be a bit lower while Spearman would remain at 1. A perfect negative correlation would mean that the bigger the city, the fewer responsa (or the more responsa, the smaller the city), no exceptions. It would have a score of -1 (again, with Pearson being lower if it isn’t linear). A score of zero means that there’s no correlation at all. With this, the numbers that express the correlation should be basically intelligible and always between -1 and 1.]

The strongest individual correlation here is Mahari Aszod at a whopping R=0.175, and he’s not even near contemporaneous. Among the poskim who were active around then, we have Avnei Nezer at R=0.04, Beit Yitzchak at R=0.11, Divrei Malkiel at R=-0.04(!), and leading the pack, Levushei Mordechai at R=0.14 (Pearson). Using Spearman it teases out a little higher, but still nothing awe-inspiring.

Let’s keep going: what happens when we sum the place counts together?

As evidenced by the trendline (or the eye test), it’s pretty grim.

Even just looking at the count of books we have, it doesn’t really get better. Regardless of whether you use Pearson, Kendall³, or Spearman, R<0.1.⁴

I don’t really know quite what to make of it. The main thing I suspect: as a place becomes bigger and more independent, it needs to ask fewer questions (i.e., larger towns “clear the neighborhood”), offsetting the increase in populations (or at least roughly). In that case, there would be a population “sweet spot” in which a town is big enough that it generates lots of questions but not so big that local talent can handle them adequately. And then we might see something like the curve we get if we wildly overfit a trendline:

This remains an open question for me, but I still wanted to publish this. Let me explain myself. Firstly, given the amount of noise here, it’ll take a long time for us to fully clarify the issue.

Elli asked me the following questions when I showed him the draft, and I think they’re interesting:

Maybe we should simply disregard towns that were known to have rabbis who wrote responsa, and then look at the rest?
There’s a “nudnik effect”: Like Levushei Mordechai to his son-in-law in Galante.
Or maybe it’s not about cities at all, but about people. The carryover we saw in Hungary – maybe it was really carryover of individuals, not cities.

With regards to (1), well, it wouldn’t bump off enough places to make a dent, and you’d probably just drop it even further. As for (2-3), well, it’s actually all the more striking. These are both very real effects (look for Yaavetz’s over the top disses of some of his questioners(!) in She’elat Yaavetz), but strangely, even this doesn’t bear some obvious statistical linkage to population. These are all real questions, and it’s really very possible the answer could change with more data, but given the data we have at the moment, it’s clear we’d need a lot more data to truly get clarity on this issue.

So why discuss this at all? Well, one of the scourges of modern science is ‘P-Hacking’. To quote Wikipedia: “[P-hacking] is the misuse of data analysis to find patterns in data that can be presented as statistically significant, thus dramatically increasing and understating the risk of false positives. This is done by performing many statistical tests on the data and only reporting those that come back with significant results.”

For a simple example, if we look at statistically significant as being P < 0.05 (less than a 5% probability of occurring by random chance), well, if we look at 50 different foods in a diet study, we’ve now got over a 90% chance of finding something ‘statistically significant’ by random chance alone.⁵

We’ve published stuff with attempts at very concrete findings — take our post on the handover of rabbinic leadership in Hungary, for example. Honesty dictates that we also on occasion say: ‘it’s hard to see a signal in the noise here’, even if you can’t get a journal to publish ‘nothing much to see here, folks’.

I wanted to title this post “Baby Keep It Real With His People”, referencing the hit song ‘Baby‘ by Lil’ Baby (feat. DaBaby). Sadly, despite my best efforts, the number of fans of both responsa and Atlanta hip-hop remains small, so it went. Suffice it to say, in both data and rap, HaMapah supports Quality Control.

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:

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

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.

Zoom In

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).

Top questioners in Igros Moshe. [Click to enlarge.] Note just how many questions the top few generate – there are 318 by the top ten alone.

Now let’s go back to Maharsham. Of more than 1600 responsa, very few are “recreational.” They are all based on real, practical questions. Moreover, the top destination is Krakow, which received 29. In total, he wrote to 437 different places (out of the 1427 addresses we’ve identified). That is simply a mind-boggling number. And no more than 2% of his responsa come from any one place or person, except perhaps for his hometown of Berezhany. Nothing like RMF’s 5% to Memphis.

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.

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