Reform Responsa- 43 ­

interested in being led by prodigies in Talmudic learning or in intricate applications of rules mined from the vast legal codes of Medieval Jewry. They saw themselves in a new world in which modern secular cultures was vastly superior to anything people had known before. It was also a world in which spiritual truths were more important to their religious self-identify than traditional legalisms and in which modern science- Wissenschaft- was deemed more reliable than medieval pilpul in arriving at truth. In short, the virtues stressed by the new reformers were not the virtues of the classical responsa literature. It should come as no surprise, then, that the type of responsa authored by Chorin and others failed to resonate among later reformers. Their mode of discourse reflected an entirely different universe of values. The medieval form of their responsa clashed with their modernist content.

This‘brings me to the next epoch, the first responsa written well within the Reform movement for the Reform movement, and in a style that took shape in the context of the German Reform movement. I am referring now to the two German language publications mentioned earlier: Theologische Gutachten das Gebetbuch nach dem Gebrauch des Neuen Israelitischen Tempelverein in Hamburg and Rabbinische Gutachten ueber die Vertraeglichkeit der freien Forschung mit dem Rabbineramte.

Let me turn first to the Theologische Gutachten . The book, as its title makes clear, claims to be a collection of responsa(Gutachten ). Yet this collection is unusual, and so indicative of the self-understanding of the early German Reform movement, in a number of ways. First of all, the writings are in German , not in the rabbinic Hebrew that characterized, and still characterized,