2 - Legal Decision-Making in Fourteenth-Century Toledo: The Responsa of Rabbi Judah ben Asher

Summary

AMONG THE MOST IMPORTANT mirrors of rabbinic leadership in circumstances of conflict within the Jewish community are rabbinic responsa, answers to legal questions that local rabbis or judges did not feel fully competent to determine on their own and therefore sent to a recognized authority in the region. The approach to such texts, however, may vary.

Throughout the ages, most readers have consulted collections of responsa as a source for precedents in Jewish law (halakhah). The author, asked to render a decision on a doubtful matter, does so on the basis of his expert knowledge of earlier decisions, and his decision then becomes part of the body of authoritative precedents. Subsequent legal authorities therefore study these responsa for guidelines in determining the law under similar circumstances. Many such readers will, of course, go beyond just the decision rendered and concern themselves with the author's method in arriving at the decision, a question of considerable interest to modern scholarship as well. How did he use the talmudic sources, commentators, earlier decisors? How did he handle conflicting statements by authorities? Did he bring any novel interpretation to the traditional texts? Did he tend towards strictness or leniency? Did he allow extra-halakhic considerations to enter the decision-making process? Yet another approach is that of the social historian, using the responsa (and often even more so the questions that evoked them) as sources not for Jewish law but for insight into the society in which they were produced. To what extent do they provide reflections of external events, information on Jewish economic life, communal institutions, family relations, mechanisms and problems of self-government, relations with Gentiles, and so forth?

In Chapter 8, various sixteenth-century responsa will be used as sources of information about the events of a major conflict in early modern Jewish history. The present chapter focuses on a single rather small collection—the same collection that contains the sermon of 1281 analysed in Chapter 1— to examine the leadership of a rabbi facing internal conflict in fourteenthcentury Toledo, Rabbi Judah ben Asher (1270–1349).