Reform Responsa- 41 ­

Mediterranean basin would send written queries to the Babylonian Talmudic academies. These queries would be researched and answered, with a copy of the answer sent by post or courier back to the originating community.(9) In this way the literary genre of responsa seems to have begun.

The next stage in development occurred as the academies went into decline starting in the tenth century or so. At this same time, we witness the corresponding emergence of local rabbinic centers of learning in North Africa and southern Europe . Gradually, queries were directed more and more to local rabbis rather than to the distant Gaonic authorities in Babylonia . These local rabbis, in turn, began to author their responsa. By the Middle Ages, such responsa had become a major literary enterprise of local European and North African rabbis.(10) They dealt, of course, with every conceivable question and life situation. By the twelfth century a new dynamic began to take hold. As the number of rabbis grew and as rabbinic learning matured and deepened, responsa became not only a tool for the development of halakhah, but actually a forum for the display of individual rabbi’s intellectual virtuosity. That is, responsa became more and more excuses for intellectual gymnastics, occasions for citing Scripture and Talmud and then interpreting them in innovative and highly complex ways. By the late Orthodox period, that is from the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century on, this process reached a sort of logical conclusion: the argument itself- the display of rabbinic virtuosity- had become an end in itself. There was still a question to be answered, and an answer usually did emerge, but the bulk of the text, by now often some 20 pages or more, was devoted to argumentation itself, an intricate Arabesque of citations from all rabbinic literature,