314 A History of Judaism
established their authority among Jews in the Islamic world in the last
centuries of the first millennium. Correspondents asked geonim for clar-
ification of all sorts of issues relating to doctrine, liturgy and other legal
questions. Many responsa were very brief (just ‘forbidden’ or ‘perm-
itted’), but others were more extended. The geonim could express
irritation, as in the complaint sent from Sura by Nahshon Gaon to the
scholars of Kairouan in the ninth century about the practice of sending
an identical query to the two academies of Sura and Pumbedita: ‘Is this
not a profanation of the Divine Name ... that you will say, “They argue
with each other?” ... Now we ... warn you, that if you address a single
query [both] to us and to Pum[bedita], nothing [by way of answer] will
be sent to you either from Pum or from us.’
Towards the end of the tenth century scholars in other centres of rab-
binic learning (such as Cordoba, Kairouan and Lucca) began to take on
this role as deciders of case law often involving personal status, commu-
nal authority or religious custom. Many of the responsa survive of Moshe
b. Hanokh, who was reputed to have brought talmudic knowledge in the
tenth century to Spain, where he founded a yeshivah; according to the
Book of Tradition, ‘all questions which had formerly been addressed to
the academies were now directed to him.’ Responsa often used examples
from the Talmud as precedents for deciding contemporary problems, or,
in Islamic countries, precedents in the responsa of the geonim. But in
Christian countries rabbis generally relied on their own reasoning (includ-
ing casuistry from biblical or talmudic texts) in order to provide clear
answers to questions. The corpus of responsa from any individual rabbi
could be very large, and the decisions of such individuals were increas-
ingly collected into volumes for the benefit of later generations. Thus
R. Meir b. Baruch of Rothenburg, who died in prison in Alsace in 1293,
himself a notable posek (‘decider’) for the Jews of France and Germany,
began in his academy the collection of responsa by Ashkenazi rabbis from
the whole preceding 300 years. The resulting volumes, frequently copied
in the later medieval period, became a major source of Jewish law.^4
The dual stimuli of talmudic study and the need to apply the Torah
to real life combined to produce two further types of halakhic literature
intended to clarify the law in difficult cases for ordinary individuals
unable to get to grips with the esoteric dialectic of the Talmud, either
through their own study of this new literature or (more commonly)
through the advice of a local rabbi with access to the scholarly texts. On
the one hand, the rabbis in twelfth- century Germany and France pro-
duced volumes of hiddushim (‘novelties’), which apply sophisticated