In his indispensable study Ḥakhmei Ashkenaz ha-Rishonim,Avraham Grossman has characterized R. Shelomoh b. Shimshon (Rabbenu Sasson) as a decisor ( posek) who tended towards stringency without serious regard to the economic cost of his rulings. Moreover, he ‘opposed innovation, making any changes in the status quo’, and he ‘preserved custom studiously and defended the received communal practices with zeal’. Following Grossman, Rami Reiner recently extended Rabbenu Sasson's conservative outlook to include a blind acceptance of the Halakhot Gedolot. Grossman and Reiner naturally document these assessments. I have doubts about the aptness of their portrayal and would like to scrutinize the various pieces of evidence that they have adduced. In treating the issues invoked by Grossman I have an unfair advantage, as I have spent many years of my life studying three of them. One could hardly expect Grossman to have spent as much time on every ruling cited in his 450-page book as I have spent on these three. My remarks, thus, should be taken as a correction but not in any way as a criticism of his scholarship.

This essay does, however, highlight a problem in writing the history of halakhah. Can one reliably characterize a halakhist by merely citing phrases employed by him without studying the thought expressed in those words? Some would argue that this would place an impossible burden on the prosopographer, as it would require a study of every topic on which every important member of the group under scrutiny has written. Use this rule, it will be said, and you will get no characterizations at all. Others would contend that no characterizations are preferable to questionable ones, especially as other scholars then use these intellectual portraits to draw new conclusions that are even further off the mark.

I would like to suggest a middle path. One need not make a large-scale research project out of each topic. That clearly would place an intolerable burden on the biographer. Rather, one should study the relevant sugya with the basic medieval commentators (rishonim) to get a sense of the parameters of the issue in halakhah. Then one contextualizes the topic, focusing in greater detail on the texts of the culture in which the halakhists arose, so as to better assess the doctrine and its proponent.