Preface

Summary

GATHERING TOGETHER ESSAYS written over many years always leads the author to ponder whether these varied studies have an inner coherence. Do they reflect a preoccupation (conscious or not) with some underlying set of problems that found expression in what were seemingly unrelated research projects? I always knew that my attention as a historian was not held by pure studies in intellectual history, such as would be had, for example, by studying the gradual unfolding of many aspects of the Sabbath or Passover. Most of these observances were under no particular pressure, and their regulations grew and developed as legal ideas naturally do over the course of time. Not that I neglected studying these areas, but when I researched them, my purpose was more to see how the halakhah evolved in neutral, laboratory-like conditions as it were, so as to better recognize elsewhere when there was a deviation from its normal course—some uncharacteristic swerve in the unfolding of halakhic ideas and rulings that pointed to an undetected force at work there. I later termed this swerve ‘measurable deflection’ and discuss it in some of the essays that follow.

I equally had no interest in topics where social or economic pressures were so great that halakhah, in effect, abdicated its regulatory role. This took place in Poland, for example, towards the close of the sixteenth century, when the heter ‘iska was introduced. The ban on intra-Jewish usury was effectively eliminated, and the various strategies that were proffered and those that were chosen to better effect this circumvention had no purchase on my interest. I was attracted to issues of resistance and accommodation, to cases where strong forces impinged upon halakhic observance, and both the scholarly elite and the community as a whole had to grapple with upholding observance while maneuvering to adapt to the new set of adverse circumstances. The line between adaptation and deviance is a fine one, and where a society draws that line is revelatory of both its values and its self-perception. Was there a sense of loss, of religious erosion, in these adjustments, or did the performance of those on the periphery reasonably conform to the expectations of those at the center?