13
13. Rabbis in the West (1000– 1500 ce)
The last of the Babylonian geonim to exercise influence across the Jew-
ish world was Hai Gaon. Following his death in 1038, authority within
rabbinic Judaism was dispersed to a number of new centres in the Medi-
terranean world and northern Europe, where Jews came under the
hegemony not just of Islamic rulers in Palestine, Egypt, North Africa
and Spain but also of a multiplicity of Christian states united by recog-
nition of papal jurisdiction in religious matters from Rome. In Spain,
France and Germany, rabbis with a shared respect for, and deep learning
in, the Babylonian Talmud as well as the biblical texts consolidated the
expression of the law as guidance for everyday life while evolving,
through mystical speculation as well as philosophical analysis, novel
theologies about the relation of God to his creation.
The connection of intellectual talmudic scholarship to the practical
concerns of European Jews was facilitated by a new role for individual
rabbis as local communal arbitrators in Jewish communities in the
Rhineland and in France from the eleventh century. As commercial
practices grew more complex in new settlements of Jews in urban cen-
tres along the great trade routes of northern Europe, communal
legislation by appointed or elected representatives and the authority of
rich merchants as lay communal leaders sometimes proved insufficient
for the resolution of internal disputes between Jews, and communities
turned instead to rabbis as experts in Jewish law. The selection of a rav,
the title used from the second part of the eleventh century to refer to the
rabbi of a city, seems to have been by consensus of lay leaders rather
than any formal procedure. The ability of local rabbis to exert control
over a community depended on the support of such leaders not least
because, if they wished to contest one of his decisions, they could in the
last resort appeal to the state authorities.
The extent to which in European countries or North Africa a local
rabbi controlled his community thus varied greatly. By the thirteenth