22 Mark Washofsky

of public administrative law and constitutional theory had the halakhah attained the necessary sophistication to address the exigencies of a modern society. Although classical halakhic literature does deal with these subjects,’ the loss of national sovereignty in 70 C. E. and the disappearance of Jewish juridical autonomy with the advent of Emancipation had removed these areas of private and public law from the practical jurisdiction of the rabbinical courts.'? The result was that, as Orthodox Zionists fully recognized,” the halakhah of statehood(hilkhot medinah) was terribly outdated and simply did not speak to the requirements of contemporary national political life. Accordingly, a group of Orthodox Zionist scholars took upon themselves the mission of reexamining and restating the existing corpus of Jewish law so that it might speak effectively to the requirements of the modern state.

The work of these rabbis can be seen as the religious counterpart to the mishpat ivri movement among secular jurists and legal academicians who sought to establish Jewish law as the legal structure of the new state. Unlike the latter, about which much has been written,'* we find comparatively little in the way of description or analysis of the literary product of the Zionist rabbis. Fortunately, a large-scale study is presently in progress;'® in the meantime, we can at least note the scope of their achievement. Among the authors were some of the leading figures of the rabbinical community in Palestine/Israel : Yitzchak Halevy Herzog, the chief Ashkenazic rabbbi of Palestine/Israel from 1937 to 1959, who devoted the most sustained and systematic thought to these matters;' Ben Zion Meir Chai Ouziel, chief Sephardic rabbi of Palestine/Israel from 1939 to 1953," regarded by many within the Mizrachi community as the Zionist posek par excellence;'® Shaul Yisraeli,“who committed the bulk of his public life to halakhic study and legal rulings on questions of Torah and statehood”;"” and Eliezer Yehudah Waldenberg, one of the most outstanding contemporary authors of responsa.”’ Their studies and comments appeared in newspapers, collections of