ALL ABOUT THE RESPONSA RETRIEVAL PROJECT—WHAT YOU ALWAYS WANTED TO KNOW BUT WERE AFRAID TO ASK

The Responsa literature?written mainly in Hebrew and Aramaic, but containing vernaculars like Arabic, Ladino, Persian, German, Yiddish? is a collection of over half a million queries and answers spanning 17 centuries, generated by several thousand authors and comprising about 4xl09 characters in some 3,000 volumes. The queries were and still are today posed by individuals from all over the globe to the outstanding Jewish authorities in each generation. The decisions rendered became valuable precedents for Jewish law, and many of them were subsequently incorporated into the codes. The bulk of the problems dealt with are of a practical nature, reflect? ing real life situations. Thus the historical-sociological milieu is depicted in concrete episodes, in a true-life fashion not normally available from any other source. Therefore the Responsa constitute an enormous store of material of interest to scholars in many areas, such as law, history, economics, philosophy, religion, sociology, linguistics, musicology, folk? lore, etc. Personages, realia, geographic sites, saints and scholars, wars and kings, together with those minutiae which bring the life of a com? munity into sharp focus?birth, marriage and death customs, recipes, taxes, medical practices?all these provide the scholar with a unique