Reform Responsa- 49 ­

Ten of these, with an introduction, became the Rabbinische Gutachten. A year later a second volume was published containing seven more such Gutachten . These, then, were documents written by liberal rabbis in response to the published Orthodox attacks on Geiger.

With this background in mind, we turn to the materials themselves. The argument here seems clearly to be between rabbis, with the general public allowed to listen in. I say this because, on the one hand, the authors feel compelled to cite rabbinic documents to a much greater degree than was the case in the Theologische Gutachten. In most cases, furthermore, the citations are in Hebrew , and at least two of the seventeen essays contain end notes that are entirely in Hebrew (those of Aaron Chorin and of Moses Gutmann). This seems to indicate that for at least some of the contributors, the primary audience was thought to be their fellow rabbis. On the other hand, these authors invariably translated the Hebrew passages into German , presumable so that the general reader could follow the argument. The invocation of classical rabbinic texts, especially Talmud , Maimonides , and Shulkhan Arukh, makes these essays much more"responsa-like" than those of Theologische Gutachten. Nor is this all. A number of contributors have cast their essays in a recognizably responsa-like form, with opening sheelot(questions) and pietistic conclusions.(18) So we can still see here a lingering attempt to appropriate the responsa-form for the needs of Reform. It is certainly suggestive that not only was this struggle to appropriate the responsa-form no longer evident in the second volume of Rabbinische Gutachten, but was never tried again within German reform. This was due, I assume, to the same forces that doomed Noga Hatzedeq. There was, I submit, a basic incompatibility