[Avodah] Longevity of Minhag haMakom

[Micha Berger]

On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 07:10:49PM +0000, Ben Bradley via Avodah wrote:
: Further question: minhag hamakom seems to be a function of cities not
: countries. Yet recent poskim, both Ashkenazi and Sephardi, seem to assume
: such thing as 'minhag EY'. When was such a concept first discussed?

I think it has more to do with communication and transportation changes
than a change in principle. The new metzi'us is that we're much more
aware of what people five towns over are doing.

On Thu, Oct 04, 2018 at 02:51:23PM -0400, Zev Sero replied to my post:
: >ROY believes that if an Ashkenazi makes aliyah, they really ought to
: >switch to Minhagei Sepharad. On the grounds that the SA set minhag EY.
: >He does later find heterimg for Ashkenazim to continue with their old
: >minhagim, but he does believe it's just that, a heter, and if an Ashkenazi
: >Israeli wished to switch, by all means they should do so.

: But does he even address the question of what right the SA, or his
: whole Sefardi community, had to set minhag EY, or the minhag of all
: the other countries they colonised after gerush Sefard, when there
: were existing communities with contrary minhagim?  What argument
: works for them and not for the subsequent Ashkenazi mass immigrants?

Well, you might have a question about Edot haMizrach, but EY? Didn't
you just write about how the Jewish settlement of EY in the 15th cent
wasn't all that dense?

But I don't think this is relevent, anyway. Let's say they were wrong to
take their minhagim with them. Even if the change in minhag was wrong,
the normal practice in EY did indeed change.

Unlike the situation once that norm was lost and no new consistent minhag
emerged (on all but a few issues).

So, I could see ROY saying that right or wrong about its establishment,
the SA's minhag still stands as the minhag hamaqom.

OTOH, invoking the SA means that he is bringing a textual component to
the establishment of minhag. IIRC, ROY frames it in terms of the fact
that the SA was written in EY, not that the Mechaber got there due to
one of the first large yishuv in centuries, nor the yishuv itself.

So perhaps we need to know more about ROY's model of minhag before
spending so much time on guesses like the one above.

Tir'u baTov!
-Micha

-- 
Micha Berger             "The most prevalent illness of our generation is
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