Introduction

Summary

Rabban Gamaliel considered appointing Rabbi Eleazar Hisma and Rabbi Yohanan ben Gudgeda as heads [of the Sanhedrin]. He sent for them and they did not come; he sent for them again, and they came. He said to them: ‘Do you think that I am giving you rulership? Rather, I am giving you slavery.

’ BTHorayot 10a

THIS BOOK is a story of dramas. Its central aim is to analyse the appointment and removal of chief rabbis in the communities of Aleppo, Baghdad, and Damascus, and the circumstances that led to these events, from the mid-eighteenth century up to the First World War. The initial inspiration came from an extraordinary phenomenon I noted—namely, that most of the chief rabbis in those communities, particularly during the second half of the nineteenth century, were at some point removed from their posts.

This period was one of profound change in the Middle East, affecting all aspects of life. People were constantly changing their manner of dress, adopting clothing of a new weave or a new cut; old institutions assumed new forms, and new institutions were created alongside them or in their place; new languages, new customs, and foreign literature pervaded the region; a dizzying range of concepts were either invented or insinuated their way into the local languages; trains and steamships shortened distances between places, while the telegraph heralded a revolution in communication. European domination of the world led to the adoption of new ideas, rendering obsolete or insufficient many of the old ways that had previously provided for all people’s needs. The mechanisms of the Ottoman state, including its judiciary and military, underwent a comprehensive reorganization based upon the European model, while financial and commercial markets expanded rapidly in the wake of revolutionary innovations in industrial manufacture and in travel and transport by land and sea.

Although this book is primarily concerned with the history of the rabbinate, and its main characters are rabbis, the history of the rabbis and of the rabbinate cannot be considered in a vacuum. Accordingly, I shall also examine changes in social patterns and in individual consciousness between the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth.