Writing the History of Halakhah: Positivists and Contextualists (original) (raw)
For almost one hundred and fifty years, yeshivot of Torah study have mentioned the names of the "Noda B'Yehudah" and the "Chatam Sofer," in practically the same breath. The pair, Rabbi Yechezkel Landau (Aptow, 1713 – Prague, 1793), and Rabbi Moshe Sofer (Frankfurt am Main, 1762 – Pressburg, 1839), followed each other in taking center stage in the leadership of the traditional European Jewish society, and earned fame as "the greatest of the generation" in an almost unprecedented manner. In this work I scrutinize the unique "fingerprint" of each of the two, as disclosed by the structural design of the halakhic responsa they wrote. Likewise, I examine the relationship between the latter and the "revealed" life of the adjudicator and leader: his life story, his congregation, and his place in the "revealed" history of his age. This close inspection of halakhic texts and their integration within the overall historical-chronological picture is designed to facilitate an encounter between a particular type of intellectual history – one that focuses on internal patterns of thinking and conceptualization – and the stormy upheavals of "external"-social history. This investigation will be discussed on two distinct levels. The first focuses on the relationship between social history and halakhic writing. In this regard I examine the halakhic discursive style of the two aforementioned authorities, in their attitude towards a sequence of a pair of highly-influential trends: the eighteenth-century outburst of Frankist Sabbatianism, and the Reform and Haskalah movements in religion that date from the end of the eighteenth century, and continued through the first part of the nineteenth. The second level of the discussion concerns the deeper meaning of these events for the coding of the sources and the internal creative mechanisms of practical halakhah. Here I inquire into what can and cannot be considered a legitimate source for a halakhic ruling, and what the parameters are for such a determination. In particular, what specific set of circumstances governs the very formation of these, and only these, precise parameters? In this connection, I also consider "calmer" phenomena, such as the ongoing influence of the printing industry, and of scientific thought, on the methodology of reading texts, their decoding and elucidation.