Bridge rectifier - min. required protective resistor
The main purpose of a protective resistor would be to limit the inrush current presented by a discharged capacitive load to the peak AC voltage the particular bridge can tolerate. This could be a fixed resistor or a task-specific negative temperature coefficient thermistor connected in series with the load.

You see these all the time in switching power supplies - quite often the resistor/thermistor will get bypassed by a relay or triac once the capacitors have charged up to the peak of the line to improve efficiency and prevent the element from burning power all the time.

(The resistor values compute to approximately 10A for the datasheet you specified - for a small bridge, my gut says this is reasonable.)