Metadata and Citation Clustering as Literary Features of Responsa

Responsa writers operate within a competitive environment. Questioners almost always have the option of choosing a different authority or answering questions themselves. As such, responsa writers accumulate authority in various non-coercive ways.

This paper will demonstrate how metadata (the names, dates, and places that frame the content of the responsum) and clusters of citations can be deployed by writers of responsa as rhetorical and literary techniques intended to persuade an audience, or a particular subset of an audience, of the writer’s credibility and authority.

One set of examples will focus on metadata and show how writers or their publishers shape perception through information that seems trivial and that, indeed, has long been ignored both by halakhists and by scholars. These examples will demonstrate not only that such information is deliberately included but also that it is shaped, edited, and incorporated with specific purposes in mind.

The second set of examples will focus on clusters of citations within individual responsa that indicate the writer’s engagement with a particular ethnic, geographic, or scholarly tradition and mark the responsum in question as a site of tension, struggle, or polemic.

The presentation as a whole will focus on the importance of developing digital tools to facilitate the detection and analysis of the types of data and rhetorical structures in question. Several such tools, particularly those developed by HaMapah, will be described and demonstrated as part of the presentation. It will include examples from responsa composed in the modern era, between the eighteenth and twenty-first centuries.