Rabbinic Writings Research Articles

The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers by Olga Borovaya

Reviewed by: The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers by Olga Borovaya Shon Hopkin Borovaya, Olga. The Beginnings of Ladino Literature: Moses Almosnino and His Readers. Indiana UP, 2017. ISBN: 978-0-25302-552-4. Olga Borovaya's persuasive work on the beginnings of Ladino literature serves as an important corrective to the commonly-held view that this literature did not truly begin until the eighteenth century. Borovaya works from a study and close reading of Moses ben Baruch Almosnino's writings from the sixteenth century—the Crónica de los reyes otomanos and several of his letters—to argue for a much earlier start point for Ladino literature. As the author describes in the introduction, Almosnino is considered the most famous Ottoman Sephardi writer, known to both Jewish and Christian audiences. Much of his influence among Christians was due to Jacob Cansino's liberal translation of Almosnino's Crónica into Spanish in 1638, published as Extremos y grandezas de Constantinopla, although Cansino's translation effectively changed the tenor and focus of Almosnino's work to mirror the travelogues that were popular at the time. Cansino's volume was used as a resource on Ottoman history by the Austrian Orientalist Jacob von Hammer in the early nineteenth century, even [End Page 168] though Borovaya demonstrates that Almosnino's original work should not be viewed as actual history. Ottoman Jews began to use Cansino's translation at the end of the nineteenth and first quarter of the twentieth century, and therefore Almosnino's Crónica was imperfectly preserved. For Sephardic Jews, however, Almosnino's Regimiento de la vida was much more famous and respected. The 1564 edition of this work was written in Hebrew characters and was accompanied by a shorter work, Tratado de los suenyos. The work was republished in 1729 in Latin characters. Tomás Antonio Sánchez de Uribe discovered it while compiling a catalogue of rabbinic writings and ensured that Almosnino's works would continue to be known when his mostly-positive assessment of Regimiento was quoted in the Jewish Encyclopedia. Borovaya laments that very few scholars have analyzed either this author or his literary production. Apart from a biography and a few articles, mostly concerned with Almosnino's life and language, there is really only a handful of studies on Almosnino's works, one of them the volume under review. Borovaya proposes that this paucity in scholarly attention is due to the fact that Ladino literature from the sixteenth century has not been properly categorized. On the one hand, since it has been labelled as "Spanish literature," it does not typically receive analysis by Ladino scholars, but on the other, the fact that it is written in Hebrew characters prevents most Spanish scholars from accessing it. Borovaya argues that Almosnino's literature should be classified as Ladino literature. She demonstrates that Almosnino's primary audience were educated conversos who had been forced to abandon their Jewish communities in Spain and who no longer were able to communicate in Hebrew. This group needed to be reeducated in Jewish traditions as they attempted to return to their Jewish roots in Salonika and elsewhere in the Ottoman Empire. The goals of Almosnino's work, in part, were to strengthen the Jewish community's relationship with the Ottoman Empire and to help these new members of the Jewish community to integrate into their community. As Borovaya states, "Almosnino's chronicles of Ottoman sultans . . . fundamentally differ from his contemporaries' Hebrew histories of non-Jewish monarchs represented in biblical terms. What we see is a skillfully constructed political, if not propagandistic, narrative aimed at making Sephardim feel that they were living at the right time in the right place, and that they should be good Ottoman [End Page 169] subjects" (11). Since Hebrew was mostly inaccessible to this group, Ladino became the vehicle through which written communication passed. Having set out the general arguments in the introduction, Borovaya proceeds in the prologue to set the stage for Almosnino's sixteenth-century works by discussing Jewish vernacular culture prior to the expulsion from Spain in 1492. The spoken language of Jews in fifteenth-century Spain was Ibero-Romance. Their...

Borders and bordering in Jewish geopolitical space

ABSTRACT Cultural and religious concepts of space inform contemporary social and political identities, confirming the inherent embeddedness of borders in social life. This study analyzes concepts of borders and bordering processes in socially heterogeneous and politically sensitive environments, as portrayed in classic Jewish texts. Jewish-legal rabbinic writings dated from the first to the fifth century reveal perceptions of both concrete and metaphysical aspects of a territorial homeland and of social-spatial bordering. These perceptions are echoed in contemporary debates of national sovereignty and borders. Like most legal systems, Jewish law prefers clear spatial separations and creates dichotomous spatial-legal distinctions. Yet textual analysis through lenses of geopolitics and law reveals nuanced concepts of borders and surprising perceptions of flexible and permeable borders despite this preference for clarity. This adaptability stands in contrast to widespread presumptions of rigidity of religion. Classic texts enrich social and political discourse in multi-cultural societies, particularly regarding holy territory. Their interpretation offer prospects of de-linking concepts of sanctity from sovereignty, thus presenting innovative channels to perceive and experience one’s homeland. Paradoxically, religious texts offer pragmatic geo-political insights, which could enrich contemporary discourse, challenged by over-simplistic perceptions of borders and bordering.

On Traditions Shared by Rabbinic Literature and Slavonic Pseudepigrapha

This article presents motifs shared exclusively by Slavonic minor pseudepigrapha and early rabbinic writings. It is suggested that these cases bear evidence of common early Jewish sources behind both rabbinic and East Christian traditions. This, it is argued, enables a much earlier dating of these rabbinic traditions (otherwise being dated to the period from the third to the twelfth centuries).

Sabbath-Temple-Eden

Despite repeated biblical mentions of the sanctity of the Sabbath and numerous imperatives to keep the day holy, there is little in rabbinic writings on the Sabbath reflecting these facets of the day’s observance. In contrast, Jewish writers from the Second Temple period and members of the Samaritan-Israelites actively sanctified the Sabbath by maintaining the day in a state of ritual purity. In this article, I reassess the exegetical and theological origins of this latter practice. I illustrate how non-rabbinic writers were attuned to the web of biblical connections between Sabbath, Tabernacle/Temple, and Eden, which they understood as bringing the Sabbath into the realm of cultic law. Just as access to the Temple demanded the ritual purity of the entrant, so too entering the Sabbath day. This “spatialization” of ritual time coheres with other known extensions of the domain of Temple laws. With these findings as a backdrop, I present the previously unexplained ritual purity tangents attested in Mishnah Shabbat as both responding to, and dismissing, the sectarian practice. This move coheres with an additional phenomenon, whereby the rabbis systematically disengaged the imperative to sanctify the Sabbath from the people. Whereas Jewish theologians see in the rabbinic Sabbath a temporal Temple, such an understanding is foreign to rabbinic literature and instead finds its best articulation in sectarian sources.

The Wilderness as a Place of the New Exodus in Mark's Feeding Miracles (Mark 6:31–44 and 8:1–10)

This article investigates the role of the wilderness in Jesus' feeding miracles in Mark 6:31–44 and 8:1–10, which connects God's provision of manna in the original exodus with Jesus' feeding miracles, envisioning the new exodus. In the exodus story, the wilderness was a special place where the Israelites established their identity as the people of God by witnessing God's grace, punishment, and power. In the later biblical writings, the Second Temple Jewish literatures, and rabbinic writings, the wilderness had been re-interpreted symbolically, cosmologically, and eschatologically, implying a chaotic state that should be transformed by God's grace and a place where God's people are gathered and fed with the hope of a messianic banquet. Mark accumulates these images and implications of the wilderness into Jesus' feeding miracles, and presents the feedings of the multitude in the wilderness in light of the new exodus. The wilderness is portrayed as the place where green grass grows; in the wilderness Jesus as the eschatological shepherd leads and cares for his people with compassion and gathers and feeds them with a messianic banquet. Jesus is manifested as the Savior and Feeder who guides, cares for, and gives abundant food to his people, in which the new exodus is unfolded.

On the Nuances of Reading Tosafist Literature and Other Medieval Rabbinic Texts for Trends in Religious Observance

In recent years, historical scholarship has increasingly turned to the literature of the Tosafists and other medieval talmudists and halakhists in order to establish or support trends in religious observance among the laity. However, the extraction of accurate societal patterns from these rabbinic writings, which is a most welcome development, must take into account the often complex thought processes, methods, and proclivities of the authors, along with the precise textual histories and scope of the literature itself. This methodological study provides examples of the possible pitfalls that can emerge if interpretive strategies, textual provenance, and breadth of erudition are not fully considered.

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Narrating Violence, Narrating Self: Exodus and Collective Identity in Early Rabbinic Literature

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

Space and Place in Jewish Studies

Os ditos de Jesus e os escritos rabínicos

O objetivo deste estudo é analisar e comparar algumas palavras e expressões dos ditos de Jesus transmitidos pelos Sinóticos, especialmente por Mateus, para podermos afirmar que as palavras de Jesus transmitidas pelos Sinóticos apresentam aspectos semíticos, sem nos preocuparmos com o idioma que ele falava. Essa coloração pode ser mais bem definida quando comparamos os ditos de Jesus com os escritos rabínicos (Talmudim, Mishnaiot, Midrashim etc.). Neste estudo comparativo, pode-se constatar claramente que os ditos de Jesus apresentados pelos Evangelhos Sinóticos faziam parte da tradição judaica, como bem testificam alguns escritos rabínicos aqui analisados.

Introduction: The Mediterranean Voyage

Introduction: The Mediterranean Voyage

“For Mark was Peter’s Tannaʾ”: Tradition and Transmission in Papias and the Early Rabbis

The fragments and testimonia of Papias’s Expositions of the Sayings of the Lord contain a number of terms whose precise meaning remains elusive, among them auditor , presbuteroi , hermēneutēs , and parakoloutheō . These terms, and the oral-traditional ideology in which they occur, are illuminated by comparison with the terminology associated with the Pharisees and preserved in early rabbinic writings. More broadly, the ideology of received tradition preserved in the latter sources offers a better analogue to Papias’s enterprise than does Hellenistic historiography, as Bauckham has influentially argued. In addition, Papias’s explanation that he set out to collect and order the sayings of the Lord from certified tradents, marks him as an important but heretofore largely unrecognized precursor to the rabbinic establishment of the Mishnah.

Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson (review)

Reviewed by: Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England by Jeffrey S. Shoulson Catherine Conner Fictions of Conversion: Jews, Christians, and Cultures of Change in Early Modern England By Jeffrey S. Shoulson. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 280pp. In his previous work, Milton and the Rabbis, Jeffrey Shoulson explored the connections between Milton and early rabbinic writings, drawing out the literary and historical implications of this connection. With his second book, Fictions of Conversion, he continues his scholarship on Jewish-Christian relations in early modern England. Here, Shoulson examines the anxieties and suspicions associated with conversion in the early modern period, beginning with the shifting boundaries of Catholicism and Protestantism in the sixteenth century and continuing throughout the course of England’s Long Reformation. However, as Shoulson points out, a pervasive sense of instability troubled the early moderns, and it was this anxiety about change and uncertainty that became directed outwardly toward an “alien identity,” that of the Jew. In particular, it was the Jew who refused to convert from Judaism to Christianity, or worse yet, one who admitted to having converted to Christianity under false pretenses—a converso—that was at the core of suspicions about the Jewish population. The figure of the Jewish converso was recognized by early modern English men and women as a “familiar religious chameleon” that challenged the notion of a cohesive identity and, further, destabilized the binaries of Christianity and Judaism. Yet, as Shoulson argues, the Jewish converso had broader implications for English identity that encompassed more than simple anxieties about change. The converso functioned as a trope for the wider cultural anxieties associated with the economic, social, and political changes that occurred in England from 1575–1675. In the first two chapters, Shoulson focuses primarily on “matters of religious conversion” by examining early models of Christian conversion, such as Paul and Augustine, and early Reformation discussions of conversion expounded upon in the writings of Luther and Calvin. The writings of John Foxe, Thomas Cooper, and Daniel Featley augment Shoulson’s investigation of the ways in [End Page 143] which texts interrogate religious transformation, especially in light of questions of authenticity. The last three chapters are focused on those texts which explore the anxieties and expectations the early modern English held about the rapid changes in the religious, economic, social, and political environments. Shoulson examines translated texts such as the King James version of the Bible (1611) and Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Iliad (1611) and Odyssey (1614) and argues that linguistic translation also functions as a “fiction of conversion” due to the changing connotative and denotative elements of the translation process. Shoulson’s pointed analysis of translation as its own fiction of conversion demonstrates the twofold nature of translation: language as transformer and transformed. As Shoulson observes, “Translation works to domesticate the foreignness of an alien text, but in the process, it also necessarily alters the culture of the target language” (88). Not only did conversion alter the converted, it altered the dominant culture into which the converted were assimilated. Shoulson also examines the effects of names in translation, which would be of particular interest to those whose fields touch upon semiotics and identity. Shoulson’s discussion of linguistic translation nicely foregrounds his exploration of the renewed interest in alchemy during the early modern period, and in particular, how alchemy became linked to anxieties about conversion. In his exploration, Shoulson uses the trope of alchemy to read the relationship between Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice and Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist, and he connects these works to the overriding anxieties about conversion as it relates to corruption of the finer element by the infusion of a base element. The final chapter of Fictions of Conversion concludes with a discussion of the discourses of transformation that betray a sense of anxiety about the authenticity of religious transformation, particularly Milton’s Paradise Regained. Shoulson juxtaposes mid-seventeenth century debates about religious enthusiasm against Milton’s epic poem to analyze Milton’s “ambivalent engagements” with the radical religious movements (the Quakers and the Ranters, for example) of his day. Fictions of Conversion contributes substantially to the study of...

Sephardi lives: a documentary history, 1700-1950

This ground-breaking documentary history contains over 150 primary sources originally written in 15 languages by or about Sephardi Jews-descendants of Jews who fled medieval Spain and Portugal settling in the western portions of the Ottoman Empire, including the Balkans, Anatolia, and Palestine. Reflecting Sephardi history in all its diversity, from the courtyard to the courthouse, spheres intimate, political, commercial, familial, and religious, these documents show life within these distinctive Jewish communities as well as between Jews, Muslims, and Christians.Sephardi Lives offer readers an intimate view of how Sephardim experienced the major regional and world events of the modern era-natural disasters, violence and wars, the transition from empire to nation-states, and the Holocaust. This collection also provides a vivid exploration of the day-to-day lives of Sephardi women, men, boys, and girls in the Judeo-Spanish heartland of the Ottoman Balkans and Middle East, as well as the emigre centers Sephardim settled throughout the twentieth century, including North and South America, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The selections are of a vast range, including private letters from family collections, rabbinical writings, documents of state, memoirs and diaries, court records, selections from the popular press, and scholarship.In a single volume, Sephardi Lives preserves the cultural richness and historical complexity of a Sephardi world that is no more.

Lived Experience, History, and Narrative Form in the Rabbinical Writings

Lived Experience, History, and Narrative Form in the Rabbinical Writings

Esotericism in Classical Rabbinic Culture

This essay addresses the function of the Talmud and other classical rabbinic writings in the study of Western Esotericism. It begins with an overview of the Talmud with reference to other postbiblical Jewish texts occasionally cited by contemporary scholars as ostensible witnesses to the esoteric practices of the ancient rabbinic sages. Next, it asks whether these texts actually support such a thesis. Finally, it considers how the Talmudic sages were misunderstood to be esoteric exegetes by Christian Kabbalists, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and Johannes Reuchlin, so as to validate their respective pursuits of the prisca theologia, a revelation of pre-Christian divine secrets. The contribution thereby proposes a revised empirical basis upon which to assess the contributions of the Talmudic sages to discourse about Western esotericism.

The Rabbinic Anti-Gospel in the Context of the Polemic between the Synagogue and the Church

This article tries to find the answers to the following questions: Can one find, in the Rabbinic writings (the Tosefta, Jerusalem Talmud and Babylonian Talmud), some texts that refer to Jesus and His followers? What is their nature? Do they include anti-Christian undertones and constitute a specific Rabbinic anti-gospel: the rabbis’ well-thought and thorough reaction to the content included in the Gospels? The author in his answers used the detailed research presented in his latest monograph entitled Jesus and His Followers in the Talmud. A Textological, Historical and Sociological Analysis, Lublin 2013. His investigation leads him to the conclusion that in Talmudic narratives Rabbis created a specific anti-gospel which was initially transmitted verbally and then written down in various contexts of their works. The aim of this anti-gospel is to challenge the authority of Jesus of Nazareth as the Son of God and the Messiah from the house of David. Rabbinic narratives wish to show in a clear way that Jesus must not usurp any messianic and divine prerogatives. In the earlier times rabbis warned Jewish community against magic power and the attractiveness of the doctrine advocated by heretics. Subsequent rabbis showed the weakness and stupidity of heretical teaching, whose contradictions and lack of logic were easy to disprove by making use of proper argumentation. Jewish sages wished to prove the superiority of the Rabbinic doctrine and the biblical presentation they offered, over the Christian faith.

Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar (review)

Reviewed by: Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 CE by Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Ra‘anan Boustan and Henry Gruber Handbook of Jewish Literature from Late Antiquity, 135–700 ce Eyal Ben-Eliyahu, Yehudah Cohn, and Fergus Millar Oxford University Press for the British Academy, 2012. Pp. xxv + 162. ISBN 0197265227. This accessible and well-structured handbook aims to guide the classically trained historian through the wealth of Jewish literature from Late Antiquity that scholars working primarily in Greek and Latin often overlook. The Handbook was designed to serve as a companion to the volume of state-of-the-field essays that emerged from a conference held at the British Academy in 2008 on “Rabbinic Texts and the History of Late-Roman Palestine.” The origins in the British Academy conference are still visible in its overriding emphasis on rabbinic literature. This is unfortunate because, while the book presents itself as a comprehensive guide to the full range of sources produced by and for Jews in the period from 135–700 ce, it largely neglects the abundant materials that elucidate Jewish life in Late Antiquity outside the orbit of the rabbinic movement. The Handbook is divided into three main sections: prefatory materials, a historical introduction, and eight thematically organized body chapters. The third section, which forms the book’s core, details the range of surviving Jewish literary materials from Late Antiquity and the available scholarly resources for accessing them. The book concludes with a rather sparse two-page subject index. In a foreword, the distinguished scholar of ancient Judaism, Philip Alexander, frames the book as a less specialist alternative to Gunter Stemberger’s still fundamental Introduction to the Talmud and Mishnah (Edinburgh, 1996). The prefatory section also provides a handy guide to the online collections of text-editions, manuscripts, reference works, and bibliographies currently available to scholars interested in Jewish literature from late antiquity. This section is capped by a convenient glossary of Hebrew and Aramaic technical terms that would otherwise puzzle the intended reader. The introduction lays out the historical contexts within which the major works of late antique Jewish literature were produced. This literature was composed in Hebrew and Jewish Aramaic and derives almost exclusively from Roman Palestine and Sasanian Iraq. The authors observe the curious fact that the Jewish communities of the western Mediterranean did not produce an indigenous literature—or, if they did, it was not transmitted through recognizably Jewish channels. Moreover, the rabbis, for their part, studiously avoided Greek genres and forms, such as biography or historical writing, despite the high degree of Hellenization within rabbinic circles. Thus, virtually no Jewish work in Greek, from either Palestine or the Diaspora, survives from Late [End Page 360] Antiquity. The authors speculate that this lacuna resulted from a conscious decision on the part of Jewish scholars and writers to avoid Greek language and forms precisely in the period that saw the rapprochement between Christianity and the Roman Empire—and with it the successful absorption of much of the “pagan” classical tradition within Christian literary culture. The authors treat in more cursory fashion the less well documented and still poorly understood contexts of Jewish literary production in the Sasanian Empire, perhaps missing an opportunity to capture adequately the recent and exciting advances in this wing of the field. In addition, the authors note that rabbinic literature does not survive in manuscripts from Late Antiquity but is mediated almost exclusively through the scribal activity of medieval copyists, thereby raising the specter of pervasive anachronism. But, pointing to what they view as positive inscriptional evidence for rabbinic activity and authority as well as the historically accurate use of place names in rabbinic sources, they argue that rabbinic literature does indeed date from and reflect the social and political realities of the late antique world. The authors leave open the question of whether these sources originally took a written or oral form. While brief mention is made of the distinctive formal conventions of rabbinic writings, the Handbook does not aim to provide sustained guidance regarding the interpretative challenges presented by this literature. Rather, the user must—and should...

Co-opting the Secondary Matriarchs

Sarah, Rebekah, Leah, and Rachel are termed the “Matriarchs.” In contrast to these women, Bilhah, Zilpah, Tamar, and Aseneth/Asenath are the “Secondary Matriarchs.” They are “foreign wives.” Bilhah and Zilpah are Arameans and the mothers of the eponymous ancestors of the tribes of Dan, Naphtali, Gad, and Asher. Canaanite Tamar bears Judah’s son Perez, who becomes the link to the Judah tribal line. The Egyptian Aseneth, Joseph’s wife, bears the eponymous ancestors of the tribes of Manasseh and Ephraim. The “foreignness” of these Secondary Matriarchs is not noteworthy in Genesis. Years later, however, Ezra/Nehemiah promote endogamy and reject foreign wives/exogamy. A similar pro-endogamy/anti-exogamy view is found in the Maccabean and Herodian times, although sometimes conversion – voluntary or forced – is another strategy. It is difficult to understand the growth of the Jewish people however defined or calculated – from the period of Ezra/Nehemiah to the destruction of the Second Temple – without these conversions. In the pseudepigraphic writings of the late and then postbiblical Second Temple period, as well as in rabbinic literature, the ethnic origins of the Secondary Matriarchs becomes an issue; consequently they become co-opted into the “Abrahamic” family – they are shown to be Jews. This article begins with a wide variety of examples in the Pseudepigrapha and rabbinic writings (Talmud, midrash) to address how the Secondary Matriarchs are understood to be ethnically “family” and not “foreigners.” It then analyzes the issue of endogamy/exogamy in Ezra/Nehemiah, as well as in the Maccabean-Herodian and rabbinic periods, as an explanation for the creation of the “additional biographies” of Bilhah, Zilpah, Tamar, and Aseneth.

Rabbinic Narrative: Documentary Perspectives on the Authentic Narrative in Lamentations Rabbah

Abstract Classification of its narratives reveals Lamentations Rabbah’s preferences as to narrative types and their functions. On the foundation of this knowledge we can correlate Rabbinic narratives with the boundaries defined by particular documents and, ultimately, are able, on the foundations of literary evidence, to describe the Rabbinic structure and system. Understanding the way the documentary evidence took shape and how it accomplished its compilers’ goals is required for that description. If we do not know whether or how narratives fit into the canonical constructions of Rabbinic Judaism in its formative age and normative statement, we cannot account for important data of that Judaism. The result of this study is to show that narratives, no less than expository, exegetical, and analytical writing, form part of the documentary self-definition of the Rabbinic canonical writings. Through the study of Lamentations Rabbah (referred to also as Lamentations Rabbati) in particular, it advances our ability to evaluate how a rhetorical form as represented in one document compares or contrasts with that form as it is used in other discrete rabbinic texts.

The Persona of a Poseq: Law and Self-Fashioning in Seventeenth-Century Ashkenaz

��� With the publication of Jacob Katz’s Masoret u-Mashber and Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson’s Hagut ve-Hanhagah just over a half century ago, rabbinic responsa gained wide recognition as a valuable historical source for the study of late medieval and early modern Jewish history. The two Hebrew works, composed by eminent Israeli scholars, drew heavily on this largely overlooked literature and from ethical-moral writings as well, in order to reconstruct patterns of leadership and authority that prevailed in Ashkenazic kehillot, to probe deep-seated social and religious tensions, and to examine the relations between Jews and the surrounding general society and culture. Over the past several decades, the historical literature has come to rely on these sources rather routinely. Historians have also regularly consulted rabbinic responsa in order to measure, substantiate or disprove—as the case may be—the impact of major historical events and trends. The spread of Sabbatianism, the reception of the Enlightenment, the decline of rabbinic authority, and the first stirrings of secularization are several of the major themes in early modern Jewish history that have been studied profitably with the assistance of responsa. But it is also clear from an extended exchange between Ben-Sasson and Katz that the use of responsa raises any number of methodological questions that continue to divide historians to this day. 1 This essay will not occupy itself with questions concerning the reliability of responsa or other rabbinic writings as historical sources, nor will it dwell on the perspectives they bring to certain historical events. Preoccupation with the decline of religious authority and ritual observance, viewed by many as an essential condition of modernity, has all too often obscured important themes in cultural and intellectual history. It has also reinforced the assumption that Jewish law remained largely intact prior to the nineteenth century. Instead of focusing so much attention on the growth or decline of rabbinic authority, historians might consider exploring the dynamics of rabbinic authority in broader terms. Intellectual creativity and independence,