Books of Responsa

Literary products from the past do not always conform to contemporary notions of genre, and actual published works may look nothing like the books we would have imagined based on idealized definitions. This very shortcoming, however, can yield a fuller understanding of the historical significance of these texts.

The present article examines one such genre and its less-than-perfect finished products in the early modern period. Responsa, or she'elot u-teshuvot (ShUT), are rabbinic discussions (literally, questions and answers) of Jewish religious law (Halakhah). They typically take the form of letters prompted by specific situations such as marriage and divorce, holiday liturgy, dietary laws, or complex financial issues.

Given both its ubiquity throughout the history of Halakhah, from talmudic times to the present, and its straightforward origin—a rabbi replying in writing to questions posed in letters—it is tempting to consider the genre as a self-evident, distinct, and consistent category of halakhic writing. Menachem Elon, for instance, offers this definition: “The term ‘responsa’ includes all of the recorded rulings and decisions rendered by the halakhic authorities in response to questions submitted in writing.”Footnote ¹ Comparing responsa to common law, Elon calls them “Jewish case law,”Footnote ² the legal products of “real events.”Footnote ³ Books of responsa, which collect these writings beyond their initial moment of creation, are likewise described as a discrete and obvious genre of rabbinic literature. Elon regards such collections as the halakhic equivalents of common-law reports.Footnote ⁴

In reality, however, many responsa collections resisted conforming to any such straightforward characterization. From the Middle Ages until at least the end of the seventeenth century, especially as they materialized in early modern Ashkenaz, works of responsa were far less ordered and clear-cut products than we might imagine. The contents of the works diverged from the genre that these books were, ostensibly, meant to encompass, and the author to whom they were ascribed. They were poorly structured, barely arranged, and haphazardly edited. Elon declares the absence of redaction in sixteenth-century Ashkenazic collections of responsa, together with the “complete lack of system in the arrangement of the responsa” as one of the genre's “problems,”Footnote ⁵ noting that this situation improved only after the sixteenth century.Footnote ⁶ Shmuel Glick, who recently created a bibliography of responsa, was similarly confounded by the ways these works seemed to elude clear generic categorization: “We deliberated immensely regarding the definition of books that deserve to be called ‘works of responsa,’ and it is questionable whether one can even arrive at a clear-cut definition,” he writes.Footnote ⁷ Glick observes that what qualifies as a “work of ShUT” is “essentially a subjective decision.”Footnote ⁸ Thus, a genre that at first glance appears rather straightforward turns out to have generated books that do not neatly match up with its definition. Perhaps more surprising, authors and editors seemed not to have invested much effort in shaping responsa collections to fit such definitions.

Yet this “problem” for the contemporary bibliographer or legal scholar can be a great boon to the historian. Precisely those discrepancies between ideal definitions of the genre and its real, historical products disclose a great deal about the rabbinic culture in a particular time and place. Our expectations of literary works—shaped as they are by socially and culturally established behaviors and technological possibilities and limitations—are products of our historical context.

As a product of a particular intellectual culture, the very concept of genre—our expectations of what defines a type of literature—is influenced by material and technological conditions, social and cultural practices surrounding the literature, and the contingencies underlying this form of writing. What appears disorderly and abnormal to our eyes, is in fact commensurate with the reality of sixteenth-century responsa collections in the Ashkenazic cultural realm. Conventions for this genre did not originate from the world of published books, but from vigorous antecedent scholarly practices. The characteristics that seem peculiar for responsa collections as a genre of printed books thus open a window onto the scholarly environment from which these texts emerged.

Far from posing an epiphenomenal “problem,” then, the disorganized nature of printed responsa in the early modern period clarifies essential characteristics of rabbinic scholarly culture, including practices for composing, keeping, sharing, and consulting texts. In the second half of the sixteenth century, print was already ubiquitous, but not yet the sole or even dominant mode of textual circulation; manuscript culture still flourished. The works of responsa examined in this article are the products of this remarkable moment of transition: a scholarly culture still profoundly ensconced in manuscript practices ushered some of its manuscripts directly to print without much editorial intervention, despite the appealing avenues for editing that this new technology offered. What we perceive as deficiencies in the printed products of this transitional phase turn out to offer a valuable glimpse into its dynamic scholarly culture.

The present article first examines three works of sixteenth-century Ashkenazic responsa, including their peculiarities and ostensibly problematic characteristics. Second, the article introduces the context of scholarly practices related to letter writing and learned archives in early modern Europe, explaining the peculiar characteristics of the responsa collections in the context of similar rabbinic practices. The conclusion homes in on this moment of technological transition, highlighting manuscript practices that persisted into the early modern period and left their traces on printed responsa collections.

To examine scholarly practices surrounding early modern responsa, both in their epistolary and postepistolary lives, is to widen our comprehension not only of this halakhic genre, but more generally of intellectual culture in the century between the 1550s and the 1650s. The imperfections in these responsa collections prompt us to reconsider notions of order and disorder, and to appreciate the process of scholarship as distinct from its final product. That process, as we will see, bears a richness and dynamism that exceeds the confines of printed books.

Sixteenth-Century Ashkenazic Responsa: Print and Peculiarities

Among the three works of responsa written and published in eastern Europe in the sixteenth century, two were printed close to the author's death, and one only many decades later.Footnote ⁹ The responsa of Rabbi Shlomo Luria, also known by his acronym Maharshal (1510 – ca. 1574), were printed within about a year of his passing by Klonimus, son of Mordekhai Yaffe, in Lublin, where Maharshal had been the rabbi. The printing of a collection of some eighty responsa by Rabbi Yosef Katz (ca. 1511–1591), ShUT She'erit Yosef (The remnant of Joseph), commenced about a year prior to his death at the Prostiẓ press in his hometown, Cracow. Finally, the responsa of Rabbi Moshe Isserles (ca. 1530–1572), known by his acronym Rema,Footnote ¹⁰ were not printed until 1640. This collection, titled ShUT Rema, was brought to the Meisels press in Cracow by Rema's nephew. In each of these works, responsa appear as a series of successive entries, numbered by the letters of the Hebrew alphabet. All three works display various degrees of disorganization.

None of the three are limited to material from the author whose writings the book purports to collect. Each includes material unrelated to halakhic responsa. Moreover, each is haphazardly arranged, difficult to navigate, and unevenly edited. Some of these shortcomings trace back to the authors, while others resulted from the publication process. These characteristics hint at how rabbis initially created, shared, and kept these writings, and the state of these writings on the threshold of print. The works also furnish an understanding of how scholars, publishers, and readers at the time perceived responsa, as well as their expectations for the genre (how they deemed printed responsa ought to look).

Let us first consider the boundaries of these works—what they include and exclude. As mentioned, the works of responsa do not exclusively contain writings from the author whose name graces the title page. In Rema's responsa, almost a third of the collection was not penned by the author.Footnote ¹¹ Nor, despite the name “responsa,” are all entries in these books prompted by questions. In Maharshal's book, for instance, many entries include no question at all; lacking the heading she'elah (question), these entries launch into a discussion preceded only by the section number.Footnote ¹² Other entries do not derive from correspondence, lack particular addressees, and sometimes include testimonies or declarations of innocence.Footnote ¹³ One entry which lacks a question, for instance, includes a list of laws introduced simply as: “The laws of Hanukah in brief, from my big work called Yam shel Shlomo.”Footnote ¹⁴ A similar entry listing Passover laws is inexplicably followed by a riddle of Maharshal's invention.Footnote ¹⁵ Elchanan Reiner describes the work as follows: “As was accepted in responsa books of the time, it included materials related to various stages of the author's life, and encompassed texts and documents with different characters, of which only some fit the definition ‘teshuvah’ or ‘teshuvat-she'elah,’ meaning correspondence about explicitly halakhic questions between two or more rabbis.”Footnote ¹⁶ Although R. Katz's responsa are overwhelmingly answers to questions, the collection's contents are far from homogeneous. ShUT She'erit Yosef (the responsa of She'erit Yosef), as it is commonly called, is not the work's complete title. The title page reads: “The responsa and explanations on the Mordekhai … and on the Tur … clarified and glossed by Rabbi Yosef Katz, also known as She'erit Yosef.”Footnote ¹⁷ This more convoluted title accurately reflects the work's variety: its eighty responsa are followed by assorted glosses and explanations of two halakhic works: Mordekhai, a thirteenth-century compilation, and ʾArbaʿah turim, a fourteenth-century code. It is thus not solely a collection of responsa, nor even a collection of responsa with some appendices; fully a third of the book consists of nonresponsa material.

Many sections of ShUT Rema are clearly based on actual letters. For instance, Rema forwarded a responsum to Rabbi Meir Katzenelbogen (a.k.a. Maharam of Padua, ca. 1482–1565), mentioned the latter's reply to the missive, and copied his approving remarks in a postscript.Footnote ¹⁸ Other entries, however, seem more akin to court notes or diary entries.Footnote ¹⁹ Some material included in responsa collections is left entirely unexplained. The last entry of Maharshal's workFootnote ²⁰ concludes with a threefold repetition of tam (finis) on one line halfway down the page. Before the last reiteration of tam, two words—simanei dinim (signs of laws)—introduce a five-and-a-half-page list with summaries of halakhic points and source references. The rationale of the list or its relationship to the rest of the book is unclear,Footnote ²¹ and subsequent editions omit it.Footnote ²² Thus, though these books’ titles each begin with the word “responsa,” they include copious entries devoid of the questions and answers that define the genre.

A lack of unity is evident not only in the contents of these works, but also in their arrangement, preparation, and structure. In some entries, the salutations, signatures, and names of the addressees have been removed, and identifying details obscured for publication; in others, these elements remain. As was the convention, many questions used generic or biblical personal and place names to replace real names and locations.Footnote ²³ But such interventions are inconsistent, and numerous sections preserve identifying details.Footnote ²⁴ Nor do the responsa follow a prescribed order. In ShUT Maharshal, discussions of inheritance, holidays, and burial—to name some examples—reappear in no particular order, without attempts to group similar responsa together.Footnote ²⁵ The work lacks even a rudimentary thematic organization, such as a division based on the four main divisions of Halakhah known from the fourteenth-century code ʾArbaʿah turim (civil law; ritual law; time cycle; family law). Even where responsa with related contents appear in succession, the succession is often associative rather than thematic.Footnote ²⁶

R. Katz's responsa do demonstrate some degree of consistency and unity at the level of formatting. Almost all personal names have been removed, and the questions and salutations emended.Footnote ²⁷ R. Katz himself appears to have paraphrased and reported, or at least to have consistently provided one-line introductions to most entries. Nearly every entry is introduced by a variation on these formulas: “a question from the holy community,”Footnote ²⁸ “I was asked,”Footnote ²⁹ “this is what I responded,”Footnote ³⁰ “a question from,”Footnote ³¹ “before us came,”Footnote ³² “we were asked to judge,”Footnote ³³ “a thing that occurred.”Footnote ³⁴ In one case, he describes a halakhic question and adds, “I have been asked concerning this several times.”Footnote ³⁵A glance at the book as a whole, however, shows the limits of its editorial consistency. The responsa exhibit no clear order in their overall organization. For instance, no effort is made to gather together numerous questions concerning ḥaẓi-ḥelek-zakhar (a document ensuring inheritance for daughters).Footnote ³⁶ The vast majority of responsa deal with monetary conflicts, such as contracts, inheritances, wills, and other financial disagreements, with a smaller number devoted to other matters. But the responsa were not even systematically separated according to that general division.

Nor does ShUT Rema adhere to any overarching structure or pattern. Some clusters are related to one another; for instance, §3–9 all belong to correspondence with Maharshal,Footnote ³⁷ but additional instances of their correspondence appear separately. The earliest responsum is among the first entries, while the latest dated responsum is the final entry,Footnote ³⁸ but between them the responsa are ordered neither chronologically nor thematically.Footnote ³⁹ The work contains responsa neither composed by Rema nor addressed to him; they were likely found among his letters and included accidentally.Footnote ⁴⁰ A later hagiographer assessed that these responsa were “probably found among Rema's writings … and [the printers] thought that it is by Rema and printed it.”Footnote ⁴¹ The book most resembles a letter collection in which units of correspondence—not topics, or even addressees—constitute an inconsistent thread. The letters were probably printed as they were kept—roughly in order of receipt.

Such disorganization in both content and structure could have been remedied either by the authors (as they collected and preserved their responsa) or by the publishers. Yet the editorial intervention in these works was haphazard, at best. One of these organizational contributions are the finding aids. Tables of contents present an overview of the topics discussed in the collections and the order in which they appear. Indexes, which arrange entries by topic rather than in order of appearance, represent how editors and publishers expected responsa to be consulted and read, and the degree of organization they considered necessary. Additionally, the choice of categories and particular descriptions of entries identify issues publishers considered the most salient.

The incomplete, inconsistent index in Maharshal's responsa collection only underscores the book's profoundly miscellaneous nature. The index leaves out some responsa,Footnote ⁴² and lists others repeatedly.Footnote ⁴³ Many details in the index seem superfluous.Footnote ⁴⁴ Organized by topical headings such as “Sabbath Laws,” the index provides short descriptions of the relevant responsa and references to their section number. These descriptions are sometimes reformulated from specific cases into more general terms, indicating more editorial intervention.Footnote ⁴⁵ More often, however, the case-specific descriptions are formulated exactly like the responsum itself. One question, for example, regards travelers’ practice of washing their hands in the morning in order to exempt themselves from additional ritual hand washing.Footnote ⁴⁶ Instead of presenting the topic generally, the index reads: “Travelers who are accustomed to be lenient regarding hand washing and wipe them on grass, etc.” By comparison, a recent edition uses general terms: “Whether travelers are allowed to stipulate a condition in the morning so as not to wash their hands all day.”Footnote ⁴⁷ The index also features outright mistakes—some subtle,Footnote ⁴⁸ others less so. Some entries feature the word “section” but omit section numbers.Footnote ⁴⁹ The entry concerning “whether a sick person may solicit magicians” is placed under the heading “Laws of Interest.”Footnote ⁵⁰ The index's unevenness mirrors the work's general lack of organization, unity, and structural coherence.

ShUT She'erit Yosef features a table of contents but no index at all. Two consecutive entries in the work are labeled §32, and the table of contents, a basic list of the responsa in their order of appearance with short descriptions, simply lists §32 twice, adding folio numbers.Footnote ⁵¹ Four responsa were added at the last moment and appended, in full, to the table of contents, probably because that section was the last to be printed. (These four responsa are, however, not listed as entries in the table of contents itself.) Even the number of responsa in a collection was unstable.Footnote ⁵²

ShUT Rema bears three traces of editorial intervention: its parenthetical remarks, table of contents, and strategic omission of some responsa. It is not clear who created the references,Footnote ⁵³ which provide sources, clarifications,Footnote ⁵⁴ and internal cross-references.Footnote ⁵⁵ Ostensibly, such referencing indicates a strong editorial vision. Yet these remarks—riddled with discrepancies, omissions, and mistakesFootnote ⁵⁶—lend the work little in the way of structure or unity.Footnote ⁵⁷ The table of contents, similarly error riddled, simply lists sections with cursory descriptions. Equally curious is the editorial decision not to print responsa that had a parallel in ShUT Maharshal. Although the responsa in question were omitted, the section number and sometimes a description remained, followed by a reference to that section in Maharshal's book. Puzzlingly, the editor maintained empty section numbers from ShUT Rema's absent responsa and kept the numbering, rather than simply tallying anew.Footnote ⁵⁸ Omissions and their location in ShUT Maharshal were provided both in the table of contents and again in the body of ShUT Rema, next to the number where they should have appeared. Yet these references in the table of contents do not always match those in the book itself.Footnote ⁵⁹

Countless additional signs of disorganization render the very contents of the work confounding.Footnote ⁶⁰ One instance of correspondence with Maharshal is made nearly incomprehensible by its esoteric subject matter and missing parts. The collection reproduces strongly worded but halakhically irrelevant insults that Rema and Maharshal hurled at one another. Maharshal kept his own copies of this correspondence, which were not included in his printed responsa.Footnote ⁶¹ If publishing these letters in ShUT Rema resulted from a conscious editorial decision,Footnote ⁶² why refrain from printing the missing letters, which could have clarified matters? More likely, the publishers simply printed whatever was at hand without much premeditation. In short, ShUT Rema was printed as a loose collection, with hardly an attempt at shaping it in accordance with any discernible organizing principle. Even several decades into the seventeenth century, its publishers saw no need to improve the cohesion and organization of this work.

Inconsistent attempts at fashioning unified, structured books out of these writings—whether on the part of author or publisher—reveal important clues about the conditions in which responsa were preserved and the expectations that governed their publication. For one, the disorder reflects an inherent difficulty of properly organizing responsa that both address specific cases replete with unique particulars and details and require the respondent to bring variegated halakhic sources to bear on those cases. Yet this difficulty alone does not render a more thorough organization of the works completely impossible.

Indeed, just such a thoroughly edited, supremely organized, highly consistent, and well-unified book of responsa was printed as early as 1519, in Venice.Footnote ⁶³ Terumat ha-deshen (Offering of the ashes) by Rabbi Israel Isserlein was the first fifteenth-century Ashkenazic work of responsa to be printed in the sixteenth century. Terumat ha-deshen contains only material in ShUT format, all from a single author. Each entry features one (and only one) distinct question, clearly separated from the response. The work bears a title (in itself atypical for responsa in this time and place), the numerical value of which hints at the number of responsa included (deshen has the numerical value 354), thus giving the book defined boundaries and unifying its content as encompassing only the 354 responsa promised in the title. The editor of the printed edition arranged its entries by subject and added a table of contents that, thanks to the topically ordered responsa, doubles as a topical index.

Few other responsa collections published in the next two centuries would exhibit this degree of editing. Manuscript research suggests that even before it came to print, Terumat ha-deshen was far better edited and organized than any contemporary responsa collections. Apart from the work's topical arrangement, which came later, its features (the limitation of the book to responsa; the consistent separation of question from answer; the stylistic and linguistic uniformity; the precise number of responsa; and the corresponding title) all appear to date from the author's lifetime, and were most likely added by R. Isserlein himself.Footnote ⁶⁴ So extraordinary is Terumat ha-deshen that the work was later often considered inauthentic precisely because of those features. Many suspected that the author had composed his own questions rather than answering genuine correspondents seeking his counsel.Footnote ⁶⁵ In other words, such a high degree of organization was both feasible and atypical.

Nor can it be said that sixteenth-century Ashkenazic authors were oblivious to conventions of printed works. Maharshal was aware both of the pitfalls of print and of the paratextual work necessary for successful print publication. He lamented that his students were easily swayed by printed works.Footnote ⁶⁶ Despite these misgivings, Maharshal prepared his own works for eventual printing. Maharshal had written and revised an introduction for his magnum opus, Yam shel Shlomo (first printed in Prague in 1616). Ahead of printing the work, he had also sought out haskamot—approbations from fellow rabbis, which functioned simultaneously as advertising, endorsement, and copyright protection.Footnote ⁶⁷

R. Katz had earlier directed the publication of a fourteenth-century Ashkenazic manuscript known as Sefer ha-ʾagudah, by Rabbi Alexander Zuslein Hacohen. In his introduction to this work's first printed edition (Cracow, 1571), R. Katz reveals his close acquaintance with the organizational and practical considerations of print publication. He praises the work's combination of brevity and comprehensiveness, and lauds the way it touches on all sections of Halakhah, including those habitually neglected, thus maintaining the full configuration of the legal corpus. He calls the book unique for being “spread over the entire Torah,”Footnote ⁶⁸ rather than treating select topics, and remarks that the work would have been forgotten had it remained in manuscript.Footnote ⁶⁹ He describes in detail the manuscript's dismal state and his desperate search for other copies from which to correct his exemplar. He adds both a table of contents, “as is the custom in all books,” and a topical index, which he calls “a new thing.”Footnote ⁷⁰ His familiarity with the realities and complications of printing are displayed when he complains that the many additions he had hoped to print were abandoned, “because … the workers of the labor of print are rushing to say, ‘Cease your activity.’”Footnote ⁷¹

Of the three authors, Rema displayed the greatest sensitivity to the importance of print. First, in an earlier work, he consciously decided to follow the pattern of a known book's popular printed edition, so as to be more accessible.Footnote ⁷² Second, his fateful decision to insert his glosses to the Shulḥan ‘arukh (Set table), Rabbi Joseph Karo's seminal halakhic codification printed in the 1560s, was no doubt prompted by that work's widespread reception in print. Despite recognizing the potential of print, and despite his explicit wish to print Darkhei Moshe in full, Rema exhibited no plans to print his responsa.Footnote ⁷³ They remained in his archive, to be printed decades later, roughly as they were found.Footnote ⁷⁴

In sum, given their familiarity with print, these authors could have fashioned from their responsa a more organized and unified product. There emerges a prevailing sense that neither author nor publisher was concerned with shaping these collections into structured, unified works. For all their inadequacies and imperfections, these works are, I suggest, in fact quite typical—not only for works of responsa in this time and place, but for early modern scholarly culture tout court. Rather than seeing these responsa collections as flawed, in light of our contemporary expectations, we can regard these works as perfect representations of responsa in their early modern context, dynamic components of its scholarly culture. To see how this is so, we may examine the production of responsa collections in the context of their material composition, creation, and practices.

Scholarly Practices

Our expectations of literary genre hew closely to an intellectual milieu's regnant scholarly culture, accepted practices, and available technologies. Rather than begin from an idealized notion of responsa books as finished printed products, let us consider the context in which these rabbis worked, the material conditions of their writing, their scholarly culture, and its practices relating to letters and erudite archives. A familiarity with that context makes the many peculiarities and imperfections of printed responsa appear far less jarring.

Seeing as responsa often originated in rabbinic letter writing, the world of letters and personal archives of the surrounding erudite culture forms an appropriate context. Early modern epistolary culture benefited from improved transportation and mail networks, as well as the cultural cachet that Renaissance scholars accorded newly rediscovered Latin letter writers like Cicero. Writing letters gave scholars a practical way of sharing knowledge, a tool to boost one's reputation by displaying erudition, and a crucial medium for the expansion and cohesion of a learned republic that crossed geographical boundaries. Elaborate letter-writing practices included sending one copy to the recipient (usually the neater copy, created by a professional scribe), while keeping the messier original for one's own records.Footnote ⁷⁵ Rema's responsum to a student states: “All my words are copied letter by letter from the body of my writing, because the burden of writing everything twice is heavy for me.”Footnote ⁷⁶

A variety of material and social practices determined how letters were stored. Peter Stallybrass “reads” a sixteenth-century portrait by Jan Gossaert of an Antwerp merchant surrounded by paperwork to illuminate how documents were organized and kept.Footnote ⁷⁷ Early modern merchants filed and organized their correspondence by pinning or stringing it together, sometimes hanging it on a wall. Jews used similar filing systems for their correspondence. In a collection of sixteenth-century Jewish correspondence, one letter writer pleads with his addressee: “My beloved friend, do not act in the way that people do, to read the letter and then pin the writing on the wall and leave it.”Footnote ⁷⁸

Others in the early modern world kept letters in loose pages, bound them into notebooks, and ran threads (fil—hence “filing”) through related letters. Sometimes, writers kept a record of a letter in a designated “letter-book” (often noting either a précis or a fuller description in a kind of notebook with various organizational options), or copied letters in their entirety and filed them in bundles, cabinets, or chests. Secretaries frequently filed copies of outgoing letters by folding them, adding an endorsement with a short description on the back (en dos) and bundling them with other letters.Footnote ⁷⁹ Many one-line descriptions introducing the responsa in R. Katz's collection, for instance, resemble the endorsements that functioned as short introductions to the letters.Footnote ⁸⁰ Rema reports that after rereading the scribe's copy, he would sign the copy, mail it, and file his original with associated incoming letters.Footnote ⁸¹ He probably placed his letters together with other halakhic notes related to his scholarly and judicial activities. We can easily envision preservation of these papers together with scholarly notes and rabbinical court-papers, such as testimonies and contracts; parts of these archives would be consulted, copied, and once again circulate via letters, print, or other means of dissemination to scholars, students, and rabbis.Footnote ⁸²

An exchange between Maharshal and Rema discloses still another practice for keeping letters. In one letter (omitted from the printed responsa), Rema objects to Maharshal's mention of esoteric matters in epistles. He invokes a talmudic prohibition against writing God's name on ephemera, lest “God's name will be thrown in the trash.”Footnote ⁸³ Maharshal bristles at the implication that his letters were being discarded. “Perhaps this is your habit of treating my writings, but your writings are like a golden crown to me.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Rema, who intended nothing of the sort, insists that he has stored Maharshal's letters “inside my other sacred books, as is appropriate.”Footnote ⁸⁵

Keeping responsa within sacred books may have been a common practice. Maharam of Padua, mentioned earlier as the senior authority to whom Rema showed one of his responsa for advice, collected responsa from his predecessor and relative, Rabbi Judah Minz, for print. In the introduction to that publication, he writes that R. Minz's grandson “checked in his books here and there and found a few booklets [kuntresim] hidden inside the books, scattered around, until he assembled sixteen decisions and brought them to me.”Footnote ⁸⁶ The grandson may have stored the responsa inside books, or inherited these books with the responsa already preserved within.

Legal professionals, administrators, diplomats, clerics, merchants, scholars, students, and university men commonly kept letters in letter-books. We can assume that rabbis, who filled comparable roles, kept similar collections, and expected recipients to keep their letters. Rema tells one of his students: “All your questions from the day you parted from me, as well as my responses to them, are copied with me, connected to my responses … therefore, everything is before my eyes when I write to you…. And so, you, too, should act, so that the things will be tied to one another, every statement where it fits.”Footnote ⁸⁷ I emphasize the verbs “connected” (meḥubarim) and “tied” (keshurim), which denote both thematic connections among the epistles and the practice of attaching them physically. In this way, proper records allowed for the smooth continuation of epistolary conversations across time and space.

Others kept correspondence in order to solicit feedback from colleagues or teachers (as Rema had with Maharam of Padua) or to make letters available for reference in the event a decision was contested.Footnote ⁸⁸ But letter-books were not limited to administrative purposes, as can be deduced from the sheer variety in the types of letter-books that were kept. In his study of early modern English letters, James Daybell writes: “The habit of keeping letter-books varied widely, ranging from the official deskbound folio for regularly entering outgoing and incoming correspondence to the student notebook, improvised out of several single sheets of paper stitched together, where letters were recorded in ad hoc fashion among exercises and erotica.”Footnote ⁸⁹ The varieties of ways to preserve letters point to at least as many purposes for doing so.

Too sharp a differentiation between letter-books devoted exclusively to correspondence and general manuscript miscellanies risks ignoring how often they coexisted as hybrids. The same collection could perform multiple purposes at different times. Letter-books that initially served as a form of news later served the purposes of history or commemoration; such was the case for students of humanists such as Erasmus or Joseph Scaliger who posthumously published their teachers’ letters.Footnote ⁹⁰ A similar tendency may have motivated the first printing of ShUT Maharshal. The title page addresses the author's recent death, praises Maharshal with a long blessing for the dead,Footnote ⁹¹ and exhorts readers “not to guard those round coins. Like the world's life cycle, they roll. And take, in their stead, this most precious book,” singling out one subset of potential purchasers: “especially his honor's students.”Footnote ⁹² A poem by the printers likewise ties the publication to Maharshal's death.Footnote ⁹³ One more aspect links the book's first edition to posthumous publications of a teacher's Nachlass: some extant copies are bound together with poems and eulogies about Maharshal, arranged on the page in circular shapes, in a font very similar to the book.Footnote ⁹⁴ The circumstances surrounding the printing of this work, in other words, were closely connected to the author's death; the letter-book served both as halakhic literature and as a form of memorialization.

Students learning to pen their own correspondence preserved and copied letters as pedagogical models. An early letter by Rema to Maharshal contains a salutation copied almost wholesale from a fourteenth-century responsum, as the somewhat awkwardly adapted rhyme betrays.Footnote ⁹⁵ Letter collections were often created, copied, and printed specifically for this purpose.Footnote ⁹⁶

But letter keeping also served more far-ranging goals. Sefer ’iggerot shelomim (The book of familiar letters) was the first Hebrew printed letter manual, published in 1534 in Augsburg by the Shaḥor press. The book's introduction links its successive letters into a single narrative: “I began with the matter of a request, because this is the way of the world, a person asking his friend, and connected to it an issue of refusal, because this is the way of the world, that a person sometimes refuses his friend's request. Then I added one on anger and a threat, as the way of the world is to be angry at the person who refuses him.”Footnote ⁹⁷ This manner of linking letters foreshadows the later genre of epistolary novels, and points to yet another way of reading correspondence—as (fictional) diversion. This might explain some of the more piquant but wholly redundant descriptions in ShUT Maharshal's index: An entry under “Laws of Slander,” for instance, recounts gossip about a man and his married sister, “how he slept in one bed and washed in one bathtub with her.”Footnote ⁹⁸ Perhaps, some read responsa for entertainment.

Daybell posits letter-books “as a form of ‘self-writing,’ a way of textualizing a life … in an enduring letter form.”Footnote ⁹⁹ Early modern manuscript letter-books are marked by their notable variety in form, their idiosyncratic appropriations, the multiple functions they could perform, and their overlap with other types of notebooks (muster books, voyage journals, accounts, commonplace books, and almanacs).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ In this sense, the early modern letter-book illuminates the purposes, circumstances, and hybridity of rabbinic responsa. “Although often administrative in impulse, connected to office,” Daybell notes, “letter books were also compiled … for individual, spiritual and creative purposes.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ This multiplicity of practices and purposes rings equally true for early modern Jewish writers.

Rabbis, situated on the intersection of the administrative, the intellectual, and the creative, kept letters alongside other writings in order to create reference tools for their own use in studying and writing. Many early modern humanist scholars fashioned idiosyncratic reference tools, such as commonplace books, from their notes. In the words of Ann Blair, “Commonplace books served as storehouses and clearinghouses for all the questions, tropes, examples, and general information…. The commonplace book was a crucial, although often unacknowledged, tool of scholarship in all fields.”Footnote ¹⁰² Scholars did not merely dump material in archives; they consulted those archives for pedagogical reasons, for utilitarian purposes such as records for future reference, to continue an ongoing conversation, to provide material for a forthcoming book, or as a form of diary or diversion.

Letter-books, too, contained commonplace material. Conrad Gesner's (1516–1565) famous reference work, the Bibliotheca universalis, started as his own collection.Footnote ¹⁰³ The Swiss physician and naturalist organized excerpts and copies, including letters, by topic, often by pasting pieces of paper in place.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ “After responding to letters,” Gesner wrote, “I am accustomed to put them into my piles of paper—even to cut them up—and distribute them among my papers according to their subject.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The Italian natural historian Ulisse Aldrovandi (1522–1605) likewise created his Pandechion epistemonicon for his own use, by copying information from his reading onto scraps of paper. Only much later did he compile and publish these scraps in book form.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Doctors like Adriaan van der Spiegel (1578–1625) also created such reference works.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the seventeenth century, Anglo-Irish natural philosopher Robert Boyle (1627–1691) famously organized and consulted his archive, which included many letters.Footnote ¹⁰⁸

Rabbinic paper collections also share much in common with adversaria, a less-ordered relative of commonplace books. Commonplace books would store excerpts, idioms, and other useful tidbits encountered while studying and reading; they were ordered systematically by “commonplace” or well-known themes, often aimed at aiding memorization.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Adversaria kept notes in the order of a scholar's reading—either following a book being read, or as a type of diary, chronicling thoughts, notes, and insights as they arose. Elisabeth Décultot thus sees these collections as testaments “to critical activity, a prelude to hermeneutic work.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ This “de-structured order”Footnote ¹¹¹ flourished in the humanist context after the popularity of the commonplace book waned. The adversaria's order represented freedom from the commonplaces’ topical tradition and reflected a scholar's intellectual progression. It was thus perfectly suited to collecting variegated material as it presented itself, without the need to impose a strict order.

Collections of rabbinic responsa, with their incongruous insertions and additions, resemble letter-books, commonplace books, and adversaria. These “paper archives”Footnote ¹¹² were simultaneously the product of reading, studying, writing, and reflecting, and the source of new raw material. ShUT She'erit Yosef, for instance, features not only disordered responsa but also, as mentioned, a series of glosses on two other halakhic works.Footnote ¹¹³ These glosses were puzzlingly disorganized. In the course of one such continuous gloss, for instance, R. Katz abruptly states which chapter is being discussed, despite it being obvious from the sequence. In light of scholarly practices, however, we can infer that R. Katz kept copies of his responsa and his notes on the halakhic works he was teaching and studying at the time. He noted his glosses on the margins of those works or on separate strips of paper stuck among the pages. The glosses appended to ShUT She'erit Yosef resulted from removing these notes from their original environment and printing them as a consecutive gloss appended to the responsa.Footnote ¹¹⁴ When transcribed into a printed work, they appear awkward; as adversaria, they make sense.

Maharshal, too, may have kept his halakhic correspondence together with related court documents, other notes, and summaries from various halakhic works; hence the otherwise inexplicable list at the end of the first edition of his responsa. Some consecutive entries in ShUT Maharshal that appear truncated, lacking salutations or signatures, are revealed on closer inspection to have belonged to the same letter, even if their topics diverged.Footnote ¹¹⁵ In composing responsa, rabbis consulted their own archives of letters and other writings. Maharshal's responsa contain sections copied from his magnum opus, Yam shel Shlomo,Footnote ¹¹⁶ and vice versa.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Rema mentions that in preparing his glosses he consulted an extensive collection of notes. He calls Darkhei Moshe: “my book,Footnote ¹¹⁸ according to which I compiled the laws in Shulḥan ‘arukh.”Footnote ¹¹⁹ Rema began Darkhei Moshe as marginalia on his copy of the Tur; only later did the book serve as a reference work, and as the basis for his shorter glosses on Shulḥan ‘arukh. In these glosses, Rema occasionally mentions cases from the responsa that he looked up in his notes, reformulated, and abbreviated to fit the genre of the legal code.Footnote ¹²⁰

Much like their humanist counterparts, then, rabbinic scholars created their own reference tools by combining notes, glosses, letters, and printed works in idiosyncratic ways. The disordered aspects of responsa are better understood through the prism of such reference tools. Since rabbis kept their correspondence together with other materials, not all responsa in a collection were from the same author. Likewise, with future consultation in mind, responsa might be ordered by the dates on which letters were received, by correspondent, by topic, or in some other manner—and this order was subject to change. Such collections were, in the first instance, not published volumes but the personal property of a scholar familiar enough with his own papers to know where things could be found. Thus, it would not be uncommon for them to be only loosely ordered. Seemingly superfluous or nonhalakhic material mentioned in a letter, or placed with halakhic papers and notes, likewise found its way into an archive. These archives acted as living repositories, only parts of which made it into print as a responsa collection. Viewed through this lens, the peculiarities in printed responsa of this period become less puzzling. If we consider works of responsa as embedded in early modern erudite practices, we can appreciate the advantages of their curious order, or lack thereof.

Responsa in a Transitional Culture

Although primarily put to personal use by the scholars who collected them, these reference tools also took on a public character. Students, colleagues, and relatives consulted these collections in manuscript form and sometimes copied from them, either in person or through correspondence. The French humanist Nicolas de Peiresc (1580–1637) amassed extensive archives including correspondence, but also assembled other material when colleagues would send him copies of documents.Footnote ¹²¹ The Swiss naturalist Caspar Bauhin (1560–1624) developed his herbarium by collecting samples and descriptions shared with him via letters.Footnote ¹²² One historian notes that Bauhin's herbarium turned from “personal memoranda” into a veritable “documentation center,” available for consultation.Footnote ¹²³ Herein lies another overlap between letter-book and archive: letters were stored in archives, and correspondence served to convey the contents of archives to others.

The same blend of scholarship, letter writing, and information sharing nourished rabbinic culture. In a responsum to his former student, Rema writes that he had recently taught a work that they had studied together. The teacher offers guidance should his correspondent wish to consult the notes of current students to copy any new teachings.Footnote ¹²⁴ Elsewhere, Rema alludes to a type of archive that held manuscript copies of Maharshal's writings. He thanks a student who had sent a letter with a copy from Maharshal's writings on a separate piece of paper: “I shall save your copy together with all the other copies of [Maharshal's] words that can be found in our town.”Footnote ¹²⁵ Maharshal, for his part, expected others to consult his writings prior to print. He attacked Rema for criticizing him without having consulted his writings on the relevant topic,Footnote ¹²⁶ although none had been printed at the time that Rema published said critique.Footnote ¹²⁷ Similarly, students copied Rema's glosses from the margins of his print copy of the Shulḥan ‘arukh before these appeared in print. In reply to a letter from a student inquiring about a difficult gloss, Rema writes that the printed book does not contain the confusing formulation “as it is written before you, which you copied from my Shulḥan ‘arukh.”Footnote ¹²⁸ Rema questions whether this was the student's own mistake or an earlier error of his own that had since been corrected.Footnote ¹²⁹ Since such archives were in constant flux, students would update their copies.

Scholars were even able to access Maharshal's paperwork posthumously. In the introduction to Ḥokhmat Shlomo (Cracow, 1581–82), the publisher notes: “If he who is studying this has trouble with any issue … he can send a messenger or come himself, as is the habit that everyone comes to the fair of Lublin, and there he can see it in the Talmud volumes of the gaon of blessed memory, which are in the hands of his son.”Footnote ¹³⁰ Rabbi Eliezer Altschul, who was involved in printing Yam shel Shlomo in 1616, describes copying that work from the rabbi's archive more than a decade earlier, as a young itinerant yeshiva student. He thanks God for leading him to his rabbi's study in Lublin “to harvest in the bundles … and I did not restrain myself from copying some books, old and new … including the great work Yam shel Shlomo … copying of the book from the handwriting of the author himself.”Footnote ¹³¹ Maharshal's writings on sixteen tractates—many of which since lost—were then still available.Footnote ¹³²

Rema's unpublished writings, too, were accessible after his death. For example, the author Rabbi Eliyahu Loenz, in the introduction to his kabbalistic work ʾAderet Eliyahu, recounts his life. In the course of his studies, he consulted and copied manuscripts in Cracow: “There I also found … more precious to me than any fortune … Darkhei Moshe, the copying of which was difficult for me, because it was a first draft, as the righteous author passed on to the next world … before he could remove from it the mistakes and stumbling blocks, and many things were written between the lines and on the margins [of the pages], and I copied at night and I was the first to copy it.”Footnote ¹³³

Since these collections were ensconced in living archives rather than in printed books, rabbis often postponed the publication of responsa to the end of their lives. R. Katz began printing his work in the winter of 1590, a year before his death. The work concludes with a prayer by “the printer who stands over the press,” beseeching God to restore the author's vitality and lengthen his life, implying that he was ill at the time.Footnote ¹³⁴ The title page added “of saintly and blessed memory” after his name, confusing some bibliographers.Footnote ¹³⁵

Rather than justifying his work as a unified literary product, R. Katz's introduction, replete with apologies, lists the various circumstances in which the different types of writing within came about. Some of its content originated from his years as a judge in Cracow's rabbinical court, he notes; other parts originated in “questions that arose from all the praised communities of Israel, near and far.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Additional halakhic commentaries resulted from teaching those works. The author presented the work as an accumulation of personal notes for his own memory: “I wrote this only … for the needs of my old age, out of fear of ‘guard yourself lest you forget’ [Deuteronomy 4:9].”Footnote ¹³⁷ By the author's own account, the book served primarily as a miscellaneous collection of notes for his own use. Those familiar with these tropes can guess the rest; his colleagues had begged him to print these personal notes.

According to common expectation, a rabbi's papers would be accessible to a certain circle even before publication. R. Katz's declaration now strikes us as a cliché that, nevertheless, contains much truth: these writings were his personal reference tool, which students and colleagues wished to consult.Footnote ¹³⁸ Rabbis who refused to share their notes typically complained about students having surreptitiously copied those notes.Footnote ¹³⁹ Consulting scholarly notes was an established—if sometimes halfheartedly endorsed—practice. A scholar's archive, then, can be deemed part of the broader early modern scholarly culture, by virtue both of the material possibilities and limitations, and of the expectation that this archive would to some extent make itself publicly available.

Maharshal's responsa were published within a year of his death. He had planned to publish several books, such as Yam shel Shlomo. But there are no signs that he prepared his responsa for publication. Nor did Rema make any preparations to print his responsa. This is perhaps due to his untimely death in his early forties; he may not yet have contemplated printing his constantly evolving archive. In introducing the printed book, Rema's nephew implies that the responsa were taken from a cache of his manuscripts, perhaps in his study:Footnote ¹⁴⁰ “These are the responsa secreted under the throne of glory of the author … he of the Mapah … the glosses on the Shulḥan ‘arukh.”Footnote ¹⁴¹ An opening poem mentions “the beloved responsa, hidden until now.”Footnote ¹⁴²

These archives were both more and less than a published book. On the one hand, they were not unified literary projects. On the other, they held many potential books in nascent form. The archives to which responsa belonged constantly changed shape. They could be utilized in various (not necessarily compatible) ways. This quality resists translation into printed form.

Rabbinic letters, together with the other writings constituting the scholar's archive, arrived into print in ways that resembled their archival predecessors rather than any ideal image of “works of responsa.” In the sixteenth century, Hebrew printing in Poland was still in its infancy: the first Hebrew book was printed in 1534, the responsa treated here just a few decades later. The archive-like qualities of these early printed collections stem from a dramatic transition: from earlier, more dynamic forms of publication to the more stable medium of print publication. This development required more than adjusting to unfamiliar technology; it touched on fundamental aspects of scholarly culture.

Continuities between early modern printed works and scholarly archives become more apparent when we examine how products of these archives came into print. Blair traces the idiosyncrasies of Jean Bodin's Theatrum to its origins as a commonplace book, which included both personal notes and knowledge from books.Footnote ¹⁴³ Aldus Manutius printed the Florentine Renaissance scholar Angelo Poliziano's collected Greek and Latin works (1498) together with 251 letters from his correspondence.Footnote ¹⁴⁴ These continuities are also apparent in the following century. Brian Ogilvie shows how Gaspard Bauhin's use of letters to collect information on thousands of plants for his personal commonplace book shaped his Pinax theatri botanici (Basel, 1623).Footnote ¹⁴⁵ French philosopher Pierre Bayle assembled the excerpts for what would eventually become the Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697) by collecting, copying, and inserting excerpts from his papers, including letters. Bayle sometimes simply sent these straight to the printer with typographic remarks on the letter itself for inclusion in his work.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ Such collecting practices, Anthony Grafton explains, underlie even those early modern published works whose highly streamlined and unified appearances belie such a past.Footnote ¹⁴⁷

Similar processes shaped the transition of early modern rabbinic archives into print. The papers in the rabbi's study became part of his reference material, a dynamic archive that served his works-in-progress. Since these scholarly archives included letters, the published letter collections came to include remainders of the archives from which they were drawn—actual fragments, but also organizational and structural carryovers that eventually found their way into print. The use of earlier manuscript reference practices continued in the sixteenth century, now coexisting with a relatively new and still inchoate possibility: printing material directly from those archives.

In his study of printing in Renaissance Venice, Martin Lowry describes the “violent shock” experienced by authors who suddenly faced the challenges of printing their work in their lifetimes. Aldus Manutius, founder of the Aldine press, encountered difficulties precisely when trying to print works of living authors, which “scared a number of literary men into delays, perpetual revisions, and evasiveness.”Footnote ¹⁴⁸ In the realm of Hebrew printing, Glick similarly mentions the “resistance among respondents to bring their responsa to print.”Footnote ¹⁴⁹ By the sixteenth century, numerous books had already been printed, and scholars were deeply familiar with printed books. Why then these hesitations to print responsa?

Although Hebrew printing was well underway in the sixteenth century, presses such as those in Venice or Cremona—and those of Prague, Augsburg, or Cracow until the 1570s (when the responsa of R. Katz and Maharshal appeared)—seldom printed works by living authors. They overwhelmingly chose to print canonical works, such as the Pentateuch or Talmud, or books in popular demand, such as the liturgy for holidays (maḥzor), the Passover Haggadah, or prayer books.Footnote ¹⁵⁰ The overwhelming majority of other printed works—in biblical commentary and Halakhah generally, and in responsa specifically—were by deceased authors.Footnote ¹⁵¹ Models for printing most of these works were self-evident: the boundaries and structure of canonical books were defined by tradition; the form and contents of more ephemeral or practical works were dictated by need and use. No obvious overarching structure suggests itself for responsa collections, especially since the individual responsa that make up the collection are separate units, independent from one another. But since printed works of responsa were posthumous publications, the extent of their contents, as well as the options for their rudimentary structures (if any), were determined by sheer availability.Footnote ¹⁵² No obvious model, however, dictated how to select or construct collections of responsa by living authors for print. Publishers seeking to fix dynamic, constantly fluctuating, hybrid archives in a defined printed work faced an uncharted path.

Responsa collections drew not on defined, structured, unified books but on “de-structured” scholarly archives, as Décultot defines the organizational and epistemological essence of the adversaria.Footnote ¹⁵³ To understand the rabbis’ difficulty in printing their responsa is to contemplate an early modern world in which a scholar used the ongoing assemblage of his writings as both a personal reference tool and as material to be consulted and copied by peers. Such practices defied the dynamics of print publication but at the same time yielded considerable advantages over printed works. This partly explains why books of responsa did not make for (by our standards) exemplary book-like printed products.

The advent of printing did not fill a void; it replaced earlier methods of transmitting knowledge belonging to particular learned practices and expectations, not all of which were smoothly translatable to print. When Peter Miller contemplated Peiresc's archive, he writes, he discovered a different culture, “one organized around research rather than writing.”Footnote ¹⁵⁴ Rabbinic responsa likewise represent a world centered on ongoing research rather than finished books. Responsa collections rest on the unique potential that this world offered—possibilities like continuous and repeated referencing, consultation, correction, and adaptation—that print did not perpetuate. Scholarly archives flexibly accommodated highly diverse contents in various states of completion, and allowed emendation and adaption by author and reader alike; one did not have to wait for the finished, printed book to engage in a scholarly conversation. Halakhic texts that took open-ended archival form enabled the dynamic consultations, flexibility, and variety that fueled this remarkably fertile scholarly culture.

Unprintable: Practices of Rabbinic Responsa

Even as print gained dominance, early modern responsa emerged within a scholarly culture in which manuscript archives, not printed books, limned the horizons of knowledge. Responsa collections mixed halakhic material of all genres in highly personal, flexible, and barely systematic fashion; they represented a lively manuscript culture in the dawning age of print. It would be anachronistic to expect responsa to emerge as ideal forms of the printed book. When these works first came to print, neither authors nor publishers saw anything amiss with publishing these collections in ways that bore traces of the scholarly culture in which responsa existed.

The printed book, however, was becoming ever more dominant. Overcoming initial opposition, Shulḥan ‘arukh ultimately gained acceptance as the halakhic code par excellence.Footnote ¹⁵⁵ As it gained dominance as the organizational paradigm for Halakhah, scholars would increasingly come to arrange their own writings in accord with its structure. Although the Shulḥan ‘arukh's structure had already existed since the fourteenth century, in ʾArbaʿah turim, only in the sixteenth century, when Shulḥan ‘arukh was printed, did it become the standard organizational paradigm in other works. The first Ashkenazic work of responsa with a finding aid patterned after Shulḥan ‘arukh was printed at the very end of the seventeenth century (Rabbi Yair Bacharach's ShUT ḥavat Ya'ir, Frankfurt, 1699).

This would eventually also affect responsa. Elon remarks, with evident relief, that after Shulḥan ‘arukh was published, “a substantial change for the better in the organization of compilations of responsa occurred. From then on, collections of responsa were usually organized according to the order of these … codes.”Footnote ¹⁵⁶ Unlike the publications discussed here, printed collections of responsa after the sixteenth century would increasingly arrange their contents according to the Shulḥan ‘arukh's structure. These works gradually came to include only writings from one author and excluded nonresponsa material.

Elon is justified in his expression of relief.Footnote ¹⁵⁷ The organization of responsa according to codes did lend these works more structure, infinitely preferable to a culture as biased as ours toward structured, finished, and unambiguous products. What was lost, however, is a precious glimpse into the prior life of these responsa. As early modern practices of learned archives show, this disordered culture of knowledge retains its own advantages, all crucial to vibrant halakhic scholarship: dynamism, multidirectionality, flexibility, and heterogeneity.

* * * *

Let us end with a legend:

In this account, the villagers imbued Rema's archive with amulet-like powers. The archive demanded appreciation not for its intellectual contribution, but as a powerful object in itself. In this article, I have also suggested treating the rabbi's archive as a material entity in itself: not as a talisman with magical powers to protect us from harm but as a repository with the power to evoke all-too-frequently forgotten approaches to knowledge.