Narratives of Enlightenment 99

here, too, Katz is thinking like a historian and a social scientist. And while there is certainly nothing wrong with that— how else, indeed, should a historian or a social scientist think?— this approach misses the point of halakhic writing as halakhic writing. To the extent that a concentration upon social fact— that is, the non-legal realities that influence the decision— leads us to look through or past the language with which the jurist verbalizes the decision and communicates it to his colleagues and his community, we will arrive at a distorted view of the jurist’s role as a spokesperson of the law. Ironically, it was Professor Katz who long ago warned us not to fall into this trap. It was he who observed that rabbis are first and foremost scholars of the halakhah and that halakhah is the language that they speak, the means by which they respond to and shape their world. Thus, while the general historian can be satisfied to say that“social reality compelled the halakhists to arrive at a permissive ruling... the scholar of halakhic history must inquire as to how the concession to that reality was made coherent with halakhic thought.”"* What rabbis do, in other words, is not politics or social policy but halakhah, and they most certainly take their halakhic arguments with the utmost seriousness. So should we. If we hope to understand who these rabbis are and their particular role in history, we must seek to appreciate them in light of what makes them rabbis, namely their contributions as scholars and interpreters of Jewish law.

I propose, therefore, to read R. Ya'akov Ettlinger’s teshuvah as the sort of text it proclaims itself to be: a work of halakhic literature. I want to explore it, not as an artifact of history, but as a statement of law, parsing it with the aid of the tools of legal theory rather than those of sociology. I want, in short, to take his responsum seriously as an act of halakhic reasoning and thought. When we do 50, I think that Ettlinger’s halakhic argument assumes a stature and a substance that Katz would deny it.