Nineteenth Century To Early Twentieth Century
In this period, many responsa deal with problems taken from modern experience. Responsa have been inspired or necessitated by economic growth, social movements, and advances in technology, which wrought sweeping changes in the lives and living conditions of the Jews in different countries, as well as within Judaic streams; e.g., those of Reform Judaism and Zionism.
The movements for the reform of Judaism evoked many responsa in reply to questions concerning the location of the bimah, organ accompaniments, the covering of the head in the synagogue, the seating of men and women together, and prayers in the vernacular.
Jewish settlement in Palestine had occasioned many responsa on questions connected with agriculture and horticulture in the Holy Land, including the problems of the cessation of all labor in the fields during the Sabbatical year and the use of etrogs from Israel.
Following are representative examples:
- In a responsum ("Hatam Sofer, Orah; Hayyim,"No. 28) Moses Sofer discussed the problem of whether the "bimah" might be removed from the center and placed near the Ark, as is now the case in all Reform and even in many Orthodox synagogues, but was then interdicted as an innovation. In another responsum (ib. "Yoreh De'ah," No. 128) he debated whether a Jewish sculptor was permitted by his religion to carve human figures.
- In a responsum Joseph Saul Nathanson discussed the problem of the transfer of a corpse from one place of burial to another ("Sho'el u-Meshib," i., No. 231). In another responsum (ib. iii., No. 373) he replied in the affirmative to a question sent him from New York asking whether a Protestant church might be changed into a synagogue. He was one of the first to permit the use of machinery in baking Matzah .
- Isaac Schmelkes passed judgment ("Bet-Yitzchak," i., Przemysl, 1901, No. 29) on the question of civil marriage, which is permitted by the laws of Hungary between Jews and non-Jews, and he debated also (ib. ii., Przemysl, 1895, No. 31) whether electric lights may be used for Hanukkah, and (ib. No. 58) whether the telephone or the phonograph may be used on the Sabbath.
Read more about this topic: History Of Responsa
Famous quotes containing the words twentieth century, nineteenth century, nineteenth, century, early and/or twentieth:
“The nineteenth century planted the words which the twentieth ripened into the atrocities of Stalin and Hitler. There is hardly an atrocity committed in the twentieth century that was not foreshadowed or even advocated by some noble man of words in the nineteenth.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“If the nineteenth century was the age of the editorial chair, ours is the century of the psychiatrist’s couch.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
“When I see that the nineteenth century has crowned the idolatry of Art with the deification of Love, so that every poet is supposed to have pierced to the holy of holies when he has announced that Love is the Supreme, or the Enough, or the All, I feel that Art was safer in the hands of the most fanatical of Cromwell’s major generals than it will be if ever it gets into mine.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“There is no greater wealth than Virtue,
and no greater loss than to forget it.”
—Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)
“Today’s pressures on middle-class children to grow up fast begin in early childhood. Chief among them is the pressure for early intellectual attainment, deriving from a changed perception of precocity. Several decades ago precocity was looked upon with great suspicion. The child prodigy, it was thought, turned out to be a neurotic adult; thus the phrase “early ripe, early rot!””
—David Elkind (20th century)
“One of the peculiar sins of the twentieth century which we’ve developed to a very high level is the sin of credulity. It has been said that when human beings stop believing in God they believe in nothing. The truth is much worse: they believe in anything.”
—Malcolm Muggeridge (1903–1990)