Ruderman David B. Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History

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74 C H A P t e r t W o

this point to see this emotional exchange as a direct con-

tinuation of the contest between rabbinic and lay inter-

ests in Leghorn some thirty years earlier. By the second

decade of the eighteenth century both the Mahamad

and the rabbinate were weakened and tired institutions

whose authorities were recognized by increasingly di-

minished numbers of their loyal following.

since

their

rhetoric could do little to change the existing political

and social realities of Jewish life in Amsterdam, both

parties engaged recklessly instead in a hopeless but vi-

cious war of words.

they could do little more.

Jewish Communal organization

in Germanic Lands

on the surface, the rabbi’s subordinate position to lay

leaders in the Jewish communities in Germanic lands

of the early modern era appears quite similar to what

we have already seen elsewhere.

take,

for example, the

rst rabbinic contract known to us, the ketav rabbanut

of rabbi Man

todros (theodoros)

in the community of

friedburg,

in Hessen, drawn up in 1575.

the

rabbi’s ap-

pointment as rav av beit din (head of the rabbinic court)

contains the following stipulations not unfamiliar from

those of other communities:

first and foremost, the said rabbi is contracted to the

community not to leave his residence for four years and

the community will likewise be contracted to him not

to seek another ofceholder during this period. second,

the latter will not issue a warning and certainly will not

issue a herem against any Jew without the permission of

the community [either an inhabitant or someone from a

C o M M U N A L C o H e s i o N 75

neighboring area]. But the community will have power

and permission to issue a warning without the permis-

sion of the av beit din. the rabbi will issue a warning to

any member of the community if requested by members

of the community council.

it would appear from this document that the rabbi

friedburg

was quite limited in his ability to act on

his own initiative. He could not issue warnings and cer-

tainly not the ban without the explicit permission of

the lay leaders; they could issue warnings without con-

sulting him at all; and he was compelled to issue warn-

ings on their behalf whenever they asked him to do so.

the

situation was no less grim in Prague in roughly the

same period.

this

time no less an eminent rabbi than the

Maharal (Judah Loew ben Bez

alel) complained bitterly

about the state of the rabbinate of his day:

How terrible it is that the dayanim—that is, the rabbis —

in these territories are all dependent on the roshim [the

lay leaders] and on the elite of the community, who

every two or three years review us . . . and possibly will

not renew us to be rabbis and it is worth saying that a

dayan like this is not allowed to judge . . . and all this

happens in this generation . . . that the landowners do

not believe in the rabbi since they fear he may fall out of

line. Moreover, one should also take into account that

the rabbi [too] will fear these landowners if he doesn’t

fulll their wishes.

these two testimonies on the decline of rabbinic au-

thority should be considered with one more source also

written roughly in the same time period, in

frankfurt

76 C H A P t e r t W o

am Main in 1603. the document and the subsequent

reaction to its drafting poignantly underscore not only

the weakness of the rabbinate in German territories but

the conspicuous loss of power on the part of community

leaders as well.

is interesting as a courageous attempt

to bolster a relatively insecure and disunited commu-

nity with strong guiding principles of organization and

enforcement that ultimately fail miserably, revealing

conspicuously the fault lines in German Jewish commu-

nal life by the beginning of the seventeenth century and

a somewhat different situation from other regions we

have examined so far. Written by the leaders of several

communities who elected to band together as a united

synod to regularize and systemize intercommunal co-

operation and coordination and enforce standards of

Jewish law, it appears innocuous enough and certainly

respectful and supportive of governmental authorities.

What is obvious from the tone of its narrative is the

sense of powerlessness and frustration the leadership

felt in trying to ensure some communal solidarity. Note

its repeated emphasis on those who challenge and un-

dermine the Jewish community:

the heads of the communities have gathered here at

frankfort at the order of our masters, the sages of Ger-

many, to sit in council and look into the needs of the

community and to make such ordinances and decrees as

appear to be needed by the time and the place, so that the

holy people may not be a sheep without a shepherd. . . .

it is a common offence among the people of our genera-

tion to refuse to obey Jewish law and even to compel

opposing litigants to present themselves before secular

courts. . . . it is well known that many persons have

C o M M U N A L C o H e s i o N 77

by the power of wealth sought to break down the or-

ganization of Jewish life in Germany, and have all but

destroyed it completely. it is hoped that at some future

time they will be brought to justice. . . . since we know

that we have in our communities wicked men of much

inuence who cannot be dealt with by local courts, we

have established ve central courts. . . . it is well known

that much trouble has arisen in Jewish communities and

settlements because of the wicked Jews who engage in

trade in counterfeit coins.

the rest of the document deals with regulations con-

cerning communal taxes, the qualications of ritual

slaughterers, prohibitions on buying wine from non-

Jews, setting the standards of rabbinical ordination, lim-

itations on the printing of Jewish books and on external

rabbis interfering with the authority of local rabbis, and

more. What could have appeared threatening to govern-

ment ofcials is not at all clear. Nevertheless, it seems

to have generated an excessively adverse reaction from

local authorities who learned of the document by way of

an informer.

the

main plaintiff was the electorate bishop

of Cologne, who ordered three German translations of

the document in order to mount proceedings against the

Jewish leaders. He claimed that their regulations were

a provocation challenging the legal authority of the

territorial princes and other authorities.

these

actions

ultimately did little harm to the community, but they

did engender much anxiety and despair from those who

hoped that their efforts to build a supracommunal or-

ganization on the scale of earlier medieval synods might

bear fruit. No further rabbinical synod ever took place,

and the community leadership felt challenged from the

78 C H A P t e r t W o

encroachments of both the government leaders and the

wealthy individuals who deed their authority.

the

se three testimonies encapsulate quite well the

conditions of Jewish communal life in Germany be-

tween the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries: a mix-

ture of autonomous communities and larger territorial

entities controlled by princes; a community weakened

from without by a variety of oft-competing government

ofcials; and its autonomy weakened from within by

afuent Jews powerful enough to ignore the needs of

the community or to manipulate them for their own

purposes if they were so inclined.

in other words, what

marks the German Jewish community in this era as

somewhat different from Jewish communities elsewhere

eur

ope are two primary phenomena: the emergence

of court Jews and Landjudenschaften, those regional

Jewish organizations focusing on the needs of local

Jews organized and supervised by territorial princes.

esp

ecially after the

thi

rty

yea

rs’ War and the Peace

of Westphalia of 1648, Jews living in German lands

found themselves supervised by local authorities rather

than the Holy

rom

emp

eror directly. After 1648,

the old empire was divided among some 250 princely

territories.

see

king economic growth and revival in a

relatively underdeveloped society and attempting to

weaken previous concentrations of power of various

estates and churches, the princes hired individual court

factors—many of them Jews—to bolster their economic

standing; to acquire instant revenue; to serve as pur-

veyors of supplies for standing militia; to function as

intermediaries in transactions with foreign states; to act

as leasing agents for state monopolies; to trade in dia-

monds and precious metals; and even to perform the

C o M M U N A L C o H e s i o N 79

most insidious job of all, the reminting of coins with a

lower silver content in order to devalue the local cur-

rency and allow the prince to spend even more.

such Hofjuden, as they were called, often used their

entrepreneurial role to work in support of Jewish com-

munal interests, intervening on behalf of their com-

munities with local governments and nancing Jewish

communal projects. At the same time, many of them did

not feel bound by Jewish law and rabbinic authority;

they undermined communal authority by lling leader-

ship roles with their own relatives and associates; and

their own precarious positions and precipitous falls

from power as unpopular agents of the absolutist gov-

ernments they served could often have catastrophic re-

sults for the communities to which they belonged.

the

system

of patronage and privilege practiced by these ex-

ceptional Jews who stood above the norms of the Jewish

community would ultimately jeopardize and debilitate

the smooth functioning of Jewish communal life.

the

Landjudenschaften, on the other hand, became

in the seventeenth century the standard form of orga-

nization for the majority of Jews living throughout the

German regions.

the

y represented all Jews living in a

specic sovereign territory who were legally entitled

to live there.

the

se organizations well served the inter-

ests of the local ruler who could efciently supervise

the behavior of his Jewish subjects and exploit them

economically through heavy taxation.

the

se organiza-

tions especially served Jews in less populated regions,

including large numbers living in isolated rural areas.

Moreover, unlike the supragovernmental structures

that emerged among the Jews in Poland and Lithua-

nia roughly in the same period, they were composed

80 C H A P t e r t W o

of individuals rather than communities and did not

function as umbrella organizations with considerable

political clout.

the contrary, the Landjudenschaften

were limited in power by state ofcials and by local lay

aders including court Jews.

Nevertheless, it would probably be an exaggeration to

see the Landjudenschaften as merely the instruments of

German princely policy.

they

did organize and control

a Jewish internal life run by territorial rabbis who were

themselves often hired by local sovereigns to whom they

were subservient. As we have seen, the rabbis also an-

swered to lay boards that did not allow them to overstep

their authority.

some cases, however, the same person

may have accumulated the maximum power by simulta-

neously serving as community parnas, rabbi, and court

Jew. As in the case of the rabbis of eastern

europe,

the

most powerful were those who had become part of the

elite classes of their community.

By the eighteenth century, a growing bureaucratiza-

tion and stagnancy characterized the structures of these

Jewish organizations dependent on the whim of petty

princes and the inconsistent support offered by imperial

diets and the emperor himself. While Jewish autonomy,

at least on the local level, remained intact throughout

this period, the heavy hand of local governmental inter

vention and

Hofjuden working as lackeys of the ter-

ritorial princes had taken its toll. Perhaps a possible

analogue to the aforementioned model of the early mod-

ern government of

florence

shaping Jewish affairs might

be the German principalities and their control over the

Landjudenschaften. Jewish communities in German

lands seem to display less independence and less self-

determination than those in other regions such as the

C o M M U N A L C o H e s i o N 81

dutch republic, Poland and Lithuania, and the ottoman

empire.

this impression might also explain in part the

relative lack of cultural production and creativity of the

Jewish elites of this region in comparison with other

Jewish communities elsewhere. With the sole exceptions

frankfurt

am Main and Prague, large academies of

Jewish learning ceased to exist in Germanic lands. Ger-

man Jews either sent their children to study in Poland or

hired local tutors from the

east.

Local institutions rarely

produced Jewish intellectual leaders.

the Jewish Community under ottoman rule

the standard view of Jewish communal life under otto-

man rule

is that Jews were granted almost complete

autonomy to a degree unparalleled in the rest of

eu-

rope.

earlier

historians of

ottoman

Jewry described the

communities of

istanbul,

salonika,

and

izmir

as self-

contained and self-administered units with relatively in-

dependent courts unhampered by state authorities.

this

view

has been reinforced by contemporary eyewitness

accounts of both Jews and Christians who described

the

ottoman

Jewish communities they saw in glowing

terms.

is also sustained by the large number of col-

lections of rabbinical responsa printed in the

ottoman

empire

from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries,

testifying apparently to the intense activity of Jewish

law courts and rabbinic judges.

More recent scholarship has rened this picture con-

siderably for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by

clarifying that the

ott

oman

emp

ire never legally recog-

nized the Jewish community or its law courts in the rst

place. As a consequence of this situation, the status of

82 C H A P t e r t W o

Jewish judicial activity always remained unstable. the

rabbis limited their decisions to religious matters, but

even in these cases, since Jewish courts had no ofcial sta-

tus, any hope of enforcement over the objection of one of

the parties depended upon Muslim ofcials.

the

internal

Jewish courts functioned primarily because of govern-

mental indifference or a certain reticence to supervise the

Jewish legal system and to interfere with its usually nor-

mal operations.

the

state ofcials might have assumed

that the Jewish judges were only functioning as arbitra-

tors rather than actual court ofcials. Jewish courts thus

often went unnoticed, and ourished as a consequence

of the benign neglect of

ott

oman ofcials.

the

system

failed to work when dissatised litigants appealed to the

Muslim law courts to overturn Jewish internal decisions.

these cases, often involving more serious nancial con-

sequences, and when Jews needed conrmation of legal

documents, Jews made use of the Muslim system at their

own initiative. When individual Jews bypassed the rab-

binic judges, the system was undermined.

other words, the Jewish courts were only legiti-

mate if both parties willingly accepted the validity of

their decisions and agreed to bypass the Muslim au-

thorities, who would usually not intervene unless pro-

voked by deant Jewish litigants.

those

outsiders—such

samuel

Aboab, the rabbi of

venice,

who painted an

idyllic picture of pious

ottoman rabbis deciding on mat-

ters of Jewish law in contrast to the subordinate role of

their

italian

counterparts—were incapable of interpret-

ing what they were actually seeing.

for

all appearances,

Jewish legal autonomy was solid and impressive; in ac-

tuality, it proved to be less stable and more like Jewish

legal structures throughout

europe.

C o M M U N A L C o H e s i o N 83

Another myth punctured by recent scholarship is that

ottoman

Jewry had its own chief rabbi, its h

akham basi,

who ruled over a Jewish millet system, a legal entity rec-

ognized by the

ottoman

government.

this

ofcial was

responsible for collecting taxes and running the Jewish

court system.

the

millet system was, in reality, a sys-

tem applying to Muslims, not Jews, and no ofcial rabbi

was appointed by the

ottomans

prior to the nineteenth

century.

there

was a chief rabbi in

istanbul

in the six-

teenth century, and two rabbis held this position jointly

izmir in the seventeenth century

the real heart of the system of Jewish governance,

however, was located not on the national but the local

level. When

istanbul

was made the

ottoman

capital after

1453, entire communities of immigrants, including Jews

from the West, were settled in the city according to their

places or origin.

thus

emerged a system of kahalim—

that is, small ethnic enclaves consisting more or less of

a synagogue of congregants from the same region with

common customs and ritual practices.

is not totally

clear whether these miniature communities emerged

because the government or the immigrants themselves

preferred them or perhaps because they suited the needs

of both parties.

from istanbul

the kahal system spread

elsewhere, to

salonika

and smaller towns as well, and

became a xture of

ottoman

Jewish life well into the

seventeenth century.

each

kahal functioned as an entity onto itself, encour-

aging the full participation of its members in manag-

ing the wide range of administrative, social, and judicial

services required of Jewish communal life. According to

Joseph Hacker, there were two kinds of kahal systems:

the

salonika

model, which allowed full autonomy to