MARK WASHOVSKY

have thus missed the purpose and point of responsa writing, which is to answer queries concerning theoretical and practical halakhah. Other academic scholars, studying the history of the development of Jewish law, have paid closer attention to the more purely halakhic aspects of the sheelot uteshuvot.®* Yet they, too, in focusing their energies upon the responsum’s halakhic"bottom line", have perforce had to overlook the document's essential nature as a decision, a literary reconstruction of the process by which a rabbinic scholar has drawn upon various sources in an attempt to reason from the known to the unknown. It just may be that the most interesting feature of a responsum is not the poseq’s final conclusion (the"holding", in judicial terminology) but the intellectual map which charts how he arrived at that destination. His reasoning and justification may well be that aspect of his responsum which exerts the most long-lasting influence upon future scholars. To analyze the responsa from this standpoint can yield us a better understanding of how the established halakhah, the law as expressed in the "codes" and through the consensus of rabbinic practitioners, came to be.

2. The decisions examined in this essay use a variety of methods of arriving at answers to the"hard case" of conversion for the sake of marriage. These correspond to the theoretical models of judicial decision put forward by the leading thinkers in the academy of modern jurisprudence. Some of our posqim display an openly pragmatic bent, justifying their answers on the grounds that a better(or less evil) conclusion follows from a decision which frankly departs from the standards of settled law(Rambam , Uziel), though we have also seen that the weakness of this justification is that it rests not upon legal reasoning but upon the poseq’s subjective, unprovable value judgement(Rashba). Others, who reach the same permissive conclusion as the pragmatists, are unwilling to take the step of deviation from the settled halakhah, and they therefore must support their answer by means of a narrow reading of the positive law(Kluger). Some find it necessary to

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