ritual, civil and marital law, communal relations, and the contemporary political affairs of the Jews. The responsa of Solomon ben Adret fall into five parts. The first part (Bologna, 1539) contains 1,255 responsa; part two, titled "Sefer Toledot Olam" (Leghorn, 1654), contains 405; part three (ib. 1778) contains 445; part four (Salonica, 1803) contains 330; and part five (Leghorn, 1805) contains 298. Other responsa by him are included in the aforementioned "She'elot u-Teshuvot". A few examples of his decisions may be given. When asked concerning many discrepancies between the books of Chronicles and the other books of the Bible, he replied as follows (i., No. 12): "A change in phraseology without an alteration of meaning is not surprising. Even in the Pentateuch apparent discrepancies of this kind are found, so that one of the sons of Simeon is called Zohar in and , and Zerah in , but since both names signify 'magnificent', the double nomenclature is explained." In responsum No. 395 he describes his abolition of several superstitious customs, one of which was to kill an old cock, and to hang its head at the door on the occasion of the birth of a boy. Particularly noteworthy is responsum No. 548, in which he gives a decision regarding a marvelous child at Avila, who had originally been idiotic, but later frequently fell into trances during which he composed works whose contents he declared had been communicated to him by an angel. The chief representative of the German school in the thirteenth century was Rabbi Meir ben Baruch of Rothenburg. Many of his responsa have been preserved, the oldest collection being the "She'elot u-Teshubot" (Cremona, 1557) with 315 responsa, while another corpus, which contained 1,022 responsa, appeared under the same title at Prague in 1608. A collection of unedited responsa was issued at Lemberg in 1860, and in 1891 Moses Bloch published at Berlin a new corpus of unedited responsa of Meïr of Rothenburg under the title "Sefer Sha'are Teshubot Maharam". Maharam, famously, rules that a man may not hit his wife, "since,he may not hit another man, despite not owing him honour, whereas he owes her honour...". The special interest of Meïr's responsa is the picture they give of the condition of the German Jews of his time, and of their sufferings from the caprice of princes and from heavy taxation. The collections of the responsa of Meïr of