312 A History of Judaism
century he was regularly expected to take responsibility for the pro-
cedures of local slaughterers and butchers in the preparation of kosher
meat, for the correct preparation of the mikveh (ritual bath) and the
granting of a divorce. Occasionally other members of the community
were able to lead the prayers and read from the Torah, but often the
rabbi would be expected to take a leading role in synagogue ritual. In
return he received honour and respect, but no guarantee of lifetime ten-
ure. Nor did he receive any direct salary (since payment for pronouncing
on the Torah was seen as sacrilege), although communities desiring to
keep their rabbis found other ways to reward their services through
gifts and privileges. Ultimately, the prestige of the rabbi depended on his
reputation for learning, much enhanced if he could attract students
from elsewhere to travel to his town for Talmud study in his yeshivah.
More ambivalent as a source of moral authority was recognition of a
rabbinic appointment by the Christian state, as in the appointment in
1270 by the king of Naples and Sicily of ‘Maborach Fadalchassem the
Jew, inhabitant of Palermo, our faithful who has been elected by you in
order to exercise the priestship in your synagogue, to slaughter in your
butchery and to hold the notary’s seal among you’.^1
Diversity encouraged by such local rabbinic jurisdiction was counter-
balanced by thriving interregional contacts along trade routes across
the Mediterranean and along the great rivers and old Roman roads of
Europe. Local rabbis sought advice in difficult cases from more learned
colleagues. In any one region there was often just one rabbinic sage
widely recognized as the ‘leader of his generation’. Books travelled
through the copying of manuscripts, of which increasing numbers have
been preserved in European collections amassed from the twelfth cen-
tury onwards. The number of copies made, and the number of citations
of one work in another, provide an insight into the comparative influ-
ence of ideas within rabbinic circles.
Rashi and the Development of Halakhah
of Halakhah
One consequence of powerful Karaite denigration in the tenth to elev-
enth centuries of the rabbinic project to promote the elucidation of oral
Torah as a valid expression of the law of Moses was the consolidation
of rabbinic affirmation of their understanding of the dual Torah. In the
ensuing centuries the halakhah (law), firmly based on the authority of