RABBINIC SUBJECTIVITY Innovation, Dispute, and Pluralism in a Revealed Religion Shlomo Dov Rosen The Yam shel Shelomo of Rabbi Solomon Luria (1510–73) opens with a depiction of Jewish intellectual practice that is clearly meant to offer a model in opposition to that of Maimonides’s encyclopedic Mishneh Torah , compiled in Egypt in the 1170s, and Rabbi Yosef Caro’s Shulchan Aruch , completed in Safed in 1563. 1 Luria, also known as “the Maharshal,” was angered that, in Poland, during his lifetime, this Sephardic approach was marginalizing the Ashkenazic tradition of tosafot, the accumulative, multiphonic commentaries on Talmud that conserved alternative halakhic opinions, including those rejected by rabbinic majorities (and, for that reason, excluded from the “authoritative” legal codes of Maimonides and Caro). Driven by this challenge to Ashkenazic practice, the Maharshal determined to Common Knowledge 23:1 DOI 10.1215/0961754X-3692665 © 2017 by Duke University Press 120 UNFINISHED BUSINESS: Peace by Other Means 1. Rabbi Solomon Luria, in the second introduction to his Yam shel Shlomo (Shtettin, Poland: Shrenttzel Press, 1861) on tractate Chulin, writes: “Something new has recently reached us, a book and work written by Rabbi Caro on the Tur, and he shows several innovations from early books that were not in our hands in the past, and foreign responsa . . . and he has almost left no space to maneuver. But he made compromises in halakhic rulings of his own accord, by intuitive logic in most cases, against the tradition that we have received and followed until now. And the students follow his words and rulings and do not know that it is a threat relevant to them, for he has decided several times against the Tosafot and authorities according to whom we are accustomed to rule. . . . They hold by the words of the book in which they found all the innovations, and thus small and great, and young and old, become equated.” חדש מקרוב בא לידינו ספר וחיבור שעשה מהר”י קאר”ו על הטורים,” והראה כמה חידושים מספרים הקדמונים שלא היו בידים בימים שעברו, ותשובות נכריות . . . וכמעט שלא הניח מקום להתגדר בו. אבל עשה פשרות בענייני פסקי הלכות מדעתו מסברת הכרס ברוב הפעמים בא”וה נגד הקבלה אשר קבלנו ונהגנו עד הנה. והתלמידים הולכים אחר דבריו ופסקיו לא ידעו שבנפשם הוא, שהוא הכריע כמה פעמים נגד התוספות והפוסקים אשר אנו נוהגין לפסוק כוותייהו . . . תופסים דברי הספר אשר מצאו בו כל החידושים ובזה הושוו הקטנים לגדולים והנערים לזקנים.” Common Knowledge Published by Duke University Press