twentieth century Orthodox responsa. It would be interesting to know how and why this question was directed to the committee.
Jacob Z. Lauterbach(1922-1933)
Jacob Z. Lauterbach(1873-1942) taught at the Hebrew Union College for thirty-one years as professor of talmud from 1911 to 1934. He combined traditional Galicean learning with the modern critical approach to the text. When he came to the United States in 1903 at the age of 30 he brought rabbinic ordination from the Orthodox Hildesheimer Seminar and a doctorate from the University of Berlin . He began by writing hundreds of articles for the Jewish Encyclopedia and Otzar Yisrael, a Hebrew Encyclopedia. Subsequently he edited and translated the Mekhilta in a fine critical edition and wrote on the history of Jewish customs and practices. Lauterbach’s approach to all his studies combined a thorough review of the text and a close analysis of the material often laboriously assembled. This was followed by casting the tradition into a new and critical framework. His interest in customs and folklore became stronger with the passing years and was sometimes expressed in the form of responsa. As chairman of the Responsa Committee for a decade he moved the committee into a new direction. Kaufmann Kohler who retired in 1922 and became honorary chairman seems to have taken no further part in the work of the committee. Lauterbach had served on the committee from 1914 onward and so had some experience with it. Twenty-two responsa were written during the next decade including one by Samuel Cohon(Marriage with a Brother's Widow, 1925) and one in which Lauterbach endorsed the decision of Henry Berkowitz (Burial from the Temple with Reference to Suicide, 1923). During this period Lauterbach wrote the responsa himself and referred to the committee only six times in the signatures. The largest number of responsa continued to deal with burial(6), followed by(5) with the synagogue,(3) with marriage,(2) with the rabbinate,(2) with the Torah , and on all other subjects there was only a single
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