374 A History of Judaism
powerful aunt, Gracia Nasi, obtained concessions in Palestine, repairing
the walls of the city of Tiberias and writing to the Jews of Italy to invite
them to settle there. But such toleration could never be guaranteed, and,
a few decades later but further east, in Persia, the shah Abbas I (1588–
1629), the first Muslim ruler in Persia to show an interest in the Hebrew
Bible, took against his Jewish subjects for reasons now hard to discover
and forced the Jews of his capital Isfahan to accept Islam. They returned
openly to their ancestral religion when Abbas I died in 1629, but con-
version to Islam was enforced again in 1656 by Abbas II, with the extra
imposition on Jews of oaths to break with their Jewish past, and a des-
ignation as ‘New Muslims’ (Jedid al‑ Islam ) which in effect recognized
their continuing secret devotion to Jewish practices.^15
The dispersion of Jewish communities to isolated places like the Carib-
bean, and the presence in some centres (such as Istanbul, Venice and
Amsterdam) of Jewish communities with different origins, liturgies and
customs, inevitably raised problems of religious authority, only partly off-
set by the growth of strong lay Jewish communal organizations such as
the Council of the Four Lands which administered a huge federation of
local and regional Jewish communities in eastern Europe. The more elab-
orate, complex and powerful such lay organizations became, the less
power lay in the hands of the rabbis, particularly in western Europe.^16
By the beginning of the sixteenth century, the work of a local rabbi
had become a profession, employed by the community to carry out
standard tasks, from deciding legal cases and dealing with marriages
and divorces to preaching in synagogue, giving classes in Mishnah to
any interested local Jew each day after morning prayers in the syna-
gogue and teaching Talmud to yeshivah students at a higher level.
Appointment continued to be for a fixed period. Ashkenazi congreg-
ations valued highly the services of a cantor able to lead the prayers
with a pleasant voice and musical skill regardless of his moral or reli-
gious standing, let alone his degree of rabbinic knowledge, and although
some rabbis fulfilled this role adequately, it was frequently handed over
instead to a separate professional. Sephardi rabbis were rather more
likely to find themselves asked to undertake the whole range of religious
duties required for the smooth running of the congregation.
The whole rabbinic system presupposed an essentially obedient and
conformist community such that religious challenges to rabbinic auth-
ority were inconceivable from within the community itself, and communi-
ties were therefore ill suited to such challenges when they occurred, as we
have seen in the cases of Acosta and Spinoza in Amsterdam. This general