Responsa literature is a vast collection of questions and answers that discuss concrete events, in which the questioners seek the appropriate halachic (Jewish law) guidance from the Torah scholars of the given period. As Responsa literature spans over 1,300 year and across different geographic regions, its language is difficult to interpret as it is sometimes very concise, contains many acronyms, some of which have double meaning, Aramaic and Hebrew are mixed, and the writer assumes that the reader has a background knowledge in the field. To improve the accessibility of this corpus, the Responsa project was developed (Choueka, 1990) that contains about 120,000 questions and answers (version 28) in addition to other Jewish books.
The main objective of the current study is to use the digital texts from the Bar-Ilan Responsa project, in order to develop a semi-automatic information system for building cross-generation reference network of responsa literature, and enable its visual presentation and analysis.
In this study, we adopted the semi-automated approach for text analysis employed in previous related literature (HaCohen-Kerner et al., 2011), (Liebeskind et al., 2016), (Zhitomirsky-Geffet and Prebor, 2019). At the first stage of the project we analysed a subset of about 40 literary sources from the Rishonim (“the first ones”) period dated between 11 and 15 centuries. This study’s corpus comprised 5504 Responsa files which is about 30% of the Responsa literature available in Bar-Ilan project from that period. In order to analyse the corpus, a list of 78 authors from the study’s period was compiled which contained various names, nicknames and books’ titles for each author based on Brouner (1990). Then, this list was used to extract 9841 mentions of the authors and/or their books in the study’s corpus. Additional 9537 mentions have been extracted by searching for the pattern of multiple words followed by an apostrophe within brackets. To filter out incomplete references we used various lexical patterns with characterizing keywords, such as, “in section”, “in tractate”. As a result, 557 full references (including author/s, a book title and a section/page) were identified with precision of 87%. Figure 1 shows a fragment of the obtained citation network based on responses from the Tosafots (rabbis of north France and Germany, who lived from the 12th to the 13th centuries) and the Hachmei Provence (today’s south France) during overlapping periods.
In the next stage of the project, a rich ontology and bi-partite network among authors and books will be built based on the extracted references. The ontology will also be linked with external semantic resources, such as Wikidata. To the best of our knowledge, a large-scale quantitative analysis of the Jewish responsa corpus, has not yet been done. The ability to look at the big
 Nati.bengigi@gmail.com, Maayan.Zhitomirsky-Geffet@biu.ac.il, schler@gmail.com, Binyamin.Katzoff@biu.ac.il
    
picture of this important corpus, in order to identify the influential books and authors, and the relationships between them, might serve as a new research tool for researchers in the field.

Uncovering a cross-generation social network of Jewish scholars and their learnings in the Responsa literature

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