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intuitive, fervently-held belief that this is the best thing for rabbis in this situation to do. In this he demonstrates a fundamental truth about the use of precedent in legal reasoning: judges may rely upon past decisions as authorities, but the determination of which decisions(and which aspects of those decisions) will serve as their precedents is a matter of discretion,"a choice as to what the precedent shall be.®* The"law" does not compel Uziel to recognize Rambam ’s ruling as his precedent. In the final analysis, his choice to so recognize it is justified by his unprovable conviction that this is the best choice he can make and by the undeniable fact that, as a leading poseq, he has the power to make it. In Ouziel, therefore, we find one of those rare exceptions to the halakhic rule, a rabbi willing to countenance deviation from the established halakhah in order to realize the goals and purposes of Torah as a whole.
VI. Conclusion
To repeat, the intent of this essay was not to provide a comprehensive survey of the halakhah on conversion for the sake of marriage but rather to study some representative responsa on the subject using analytical tools developed by students of modern jurisprudence. The results, if tentative and sketchy, suggest the following conclusions(themselves tentative and sketchy; obviously, the topic deserves a much more extensive treatment than is possible here).
1. The application of these methodologies to the responsa literature is a promising field for future research. That vast literature has by no means been ignored by academic scholars, who have mined it for data on Jewish economic and social history, biographical material on the great respondents, details concerning religious currents and the like.* In doing so, however, they have necessarily ignored the responsum itself, as a genre of rabbinic writing, in favor of the information it happens to contain. They
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