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Innovation and Authority recent legal writings as they might have been five hundred years ago. The male elite who claim responsa literature as their domain continue to converse only with one another and to render anony­mous the outsiders whose acts provide the content for the elite conversation. Hence, Rabbi Abraham Weiss in his book opposing Schachter ’s opinion, is hardly less reticent than Schachter about the social reality that occasioned its composition, nor does Weiss cite the women who created this new religious institution.” There is a“gentlemen's agreement” to converse about rather than with these mothers of inventions so that their accomplishments may be reframed for the purposes of the responsa literature as prob­lems detected by one rabbi and referred to another for solution. The problem is framed either as an upsurge of antinomian rebel­lion against halakhah and its legitimate interpreters which the decisor must put down or as an inchoate longing felt by anony­mous women for which the compassionate decisor will offer a remedy: the prayer group. Suppressing the social history of the prayer group, then, is a distortion designed to reinforce a rab­binic monopoly on authority.

Although the creators of responsa have excluded this social history as legally irrelevant, the student of responsa literature need not ignore it. As David Ellenson ’s pioneering work in this area demonstrates, applying sociological and historical methods to the study of responsa greatly enriches our understanding of the responsa themselves.’ The Schachter responsum is a prime candidate for just such an analysis. It offers an unprecedented diversity of extralegal sources. We have observers’ descriptions of women’s prayer group services and discussions of related concerns in the innovators’ own words, as well as news articles from the Jewish press that reveal political agreements and rab­binic motives unacknowledged by the responsum. A wealth of primary and secondary sources chronicle and analyze secular and Jewish feminist movements in whose contexts women’s prayer groups were conceived. Once these extralegal sources are consulted and the responsum’s author no longer exclusively controls information about the issue, the author’s representa­tion of the phenomenon that occasioned the responsum and his account of the legal facts about which he will reason, are revealed to us as a perspective on reality, rather than reality unmediated.