Intellectual Networks in Sixteenth-Century Ashkenaz: Responsa and the Rabbinic “Republic of Letters”

The insight that books are not abstract entities containing disembodied knowledge but rather material objects has deepened book-history, encouraging the study of individual copies providing insight into a specific moment. The materiality of the book leads us to consider the porous border between the book and other texts. The printed book shares a permeable boundary with its textual surroundings. Printed pamphlets, manuscript collections, personal lists, notes, and glosses all surround, overlap and share space with the printed book. I apply this approach to rabbinic writings. Halakha was embedded within the culture of those who mediated and interpreted it; its texts were collected according to specific organizational methods, preserved in different material forms, and transmitted according to particular practices and technologies. I will study a cluster of responsa (she’elot u-tshuvot) written in Eastern Europe in the 16^th century among the circle of Rabbi Moshe Isserlis. Rather than studying the writings from the perspective of the printed responsa alone, I consider them as part of rabbinic correspondence that created intellectual networks across which law was discussed and adjudicated. I then embed this correspondence within a larger world of rabbinic textual material and “paperwork” and focus on rabbinical collections and archives that straddle the boundary between public and private, scholarship and administration. Finally, I study the editorial process that turned such archives into printed works, pointing to remnants of its prior forms preserved even within the finished products, thus further emphasizing the essential connections between the printed book and its surroundings.