Re-Presenting Judaic Law: Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg’s Popular Guides to Halakha and Their Significance
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Ira Robinson
Abstract
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries witnessed the re-presentation of halakha, in which rabbis compiled and synthesized many scattered halakhic teachings and created a new category of halakhic literature. This article examines this modern re-presentation of Judaic law through an analysis of a series of six popular halakhic guidebooks compiled in the early twentieth century by Rabbi Yehuda Yudel Rosenberg (1859-1935). All Rabbi Rosenberg’s halakhic guidebooks were responses to his perception of what the Jewish public wanted and needed to know. Taken together, these popular halakhic works give us an interesting and important perspective with which to better understand the ways in which turn-of-the-twentieth-century Orthodox rabbis sought to make halakha both relevant and accessible to ordinary Jews at a time when the halakhic process was being profoundly challenged and in the throes of significant change.
© 2018 by Academic Studies Press, Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Table of Contents
- From the Guest Editor
- ESSAYS
- Re-Presenting Judaic Law: Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg’s Popular Guides to Halakha and Their Significance
- Halakhic Guidance for Soldiers: The Emergence of a New Corpus
- Immodest Modesty: The Emergence of Halakhic Dress Codes
- From Ideology to Halakhah: Ultra-Orthodox Opposition to Modern Hebrew
- Preambles: An Insight into Rabbi Avraham Danzig’s Haye Adam
- The Medical Cosmology of Halakha: The Expert, the Physician, and the Sick Person on Shabbat in the Shulchan Aruch
- The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch and Its Impact in Hungary and Beyond
- A Matter of Life and Death: The Halakhic Discussion of Suicide as a Philosophical Battleground
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Adam Afterman, “And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2016
- Oded Porat, Sefer B’rit ha-Menuha (Book of Covenant of Serenity): Critical Edition and Prefaces [in Hebrew], Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Hotza’at ha-Kibbutz ha-me’uh ad, 2016
- Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, eds. Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017
- Sara Davidson, The December Project. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014
- Contributors
Articles in the same Issue
- Title
- Table of Contents
- From the Guest Editor
- ESSAYS
- Re-Presenting Judaic Law: Rabbi Yudel Rosenberg’s Popular Guides to Halakha and Their Significance
- Halakhic Guidance for Soldiers: The Emergence of a New Corpus
- Immodest Modesty: The Emergence of Halakhic Dress Codes
- From Ideology to Halakhah: Ultra-Orthodox Opposition to Modern Hebrew
- Preambles: An Insight into Rabbi Avraham Danzig’s Haye Adam
- The Medical Cosmology of Halakha: The Expert, the Physician, and the Sick Person on Shabbat in the Shulchan Aruch
- The Kitzur Shulchan Aruch and Its Impact in Hungary and Beyond
- A Matter of Life and Death: The Halakhic Discussion of Suicide as a Philosophical Battleground
- BOOK REVIEWS
- Adam Afterman, “And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism. Leiden: Brill, 2016
- Oded Porat, Sefer B’rit ha-Menuha (Book of Covenant of Serenity): Critical Edition and Prefaces [in Hebrew], Jerusalem: Magnes Press and Hotza’at ha-Kibbutz ha-me’uh ad, 2016
- Elisheva Baumgarten, Ruth Mazo Karras, and Katelyn Mesler, eds. Entangled Histories: Knowledge, Authority, and Jewish Culture in the Thirteenth Century. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017
- Sara Davidson, The December Project. San Francisco: HarperOne, 2014
- Contributors
