ABSTRACT
Probing the relationship between personal liberty and communal authority in Judaism raises a host of methodological problems. This chapter examines the concept of personal liberty as it is taken up and articulated in the responsa literature. It proposes to illuminate only one aspect of personal liberty in the halakha, in this case, the intersection between individual liberty and the community’s power to coerce the individual in the name of the public good. Responsa from more local authorities thus develop halakha le-ma‘aseh in a way that was relatively unusual for the Geonic responsa. The style and substance of responsa changed significantly and dramatically in about the twelfth century. The thirteenth century was a critical time for the development of political theory in the halakha because the institutional basis for Jewish communal life in Spain and the Christian West was then undergoing a profound structural change.
