Printing and the History of Halakhah

This chapter assesses the impact of the printing, in the eighteenth century, of the ḥiddushim of Bet Midrasho shel ha-Ramban. First, it opened anew the halakhic discussion. With the infusion of thousands of doctrines of Ramban, Rashba, and Ritva, and the hosts of new positions registered in the Shitah Mekubbetset, rabbinical scholars were now required to reopen closed issues and weigh the established rulings against the claims of the new doctrines that were streaming into the system. They had to scour the Talmud to see whether there were passages that supported some of the new doctrines and to assess whether the new views of Ramban's school contained juridical insights that set past rulings at naught. Second, printing introduced a new level of halakhic thinking into the legal discourse. The solutions advanced by the Bet Midrasho shel ha-Ramban are more suasive than those of the Tosafists.