- 64- Peter J. Haas
too secular to justify themselves as Judaic literature. Given their rhetoric, one wonders why simple academic journal articles wold not work as
well. In fact such journal essays did become the primary vehicle for the expression and development of subsequent German Reform. In short both
forms failed for the same reason, neither type developed a format that was able to synthesize traditional Judaic rhetorical form with contemporary religious content.[Each settled on an extreme. This conclusion suggests what it was about the discourse found in the American responsa that allowed this mode to succeed. It shaped a rhetoric reminiscent of classical Judaic discourse that was nonetheless compatible with modern religious needs.
Before concluding, let me speculate briefly on the dynamic apparent in the development of American Reform responsa. In the early part of this paper, I compared the first generation of American Reform responsa to the responsa of the Gaonim, the heads of the Talmudic academies in Babylonia in the ninth and tenth centuries. At that time I pointed out as basic characteristics shared by both the general brevity of the responsa, the citation of little else than Scripture and maybe Talmud - that is, the most basic sources- and the claim to authority based on the office of the signee(Gaon, chair of the Responsa Committee). I now want to argue that what we see emerging in subsequent Reform responsathose published from the early 1950s oncorrespond in suggestive ways to the phase in the development of the classical responsa tradition that followed the Gaonic period. By the tenth or early eleventh century, as I said, the Gaonic academies in Babylonia were in decline. In their place there emerged a number of new rabbinic centers in the car-flung corners of the Jewish world, in North