the european renaissance and the new world 375
conformity is all the more remarkable in cities of mixed communities
such as Venice, where Jews of different traditions lived tolerantly along-
side each other. If a local rabbi had to fear anything, it was the possibility
that his contract might not be renewed at the end of its term by the
wealthy lay leaders to whom control of congregational finances in prac-
tice gave considerable influence, even if in theory they deferred in
religious matters to the rabbi’s learning and piety. A rabbi might be sub-
ject to the approval of a council of sages if they were asked to rule on his
behaviour or teachings, but in most of the Jewish world the opinions of
such councils had no authority beyond the moral stature of the partici-
pating rabbis.
An attempt was made in the first half of the sixteenth century by
Yaakov Berab, a Talmud scholar originally from Spain who had settled
in Safed after periods as a rabbi in Fez and Egypt, to reintroduce rab-
binic ordination, semikhah, of the same authority as was believed to
have been the case in Palestine in the times of the amoraim a thousand
years before (Chapter 11). According to the Babylonian Talmud, ordi-
nation could be conferred only in the land of Israel and only by those
who had themselves been ordained. Maimonides had taken this ruling
to imply that, because the chain had been broken since the end of the
fourth century, such ordination could be revived only by the unanimous
agreement of all the rabbis assembled in the land of Israel. In 1538
Berab declared that this condition had now been met and that the Jew-
ish people would be reunited under one spiritual authority, thus
hastening the redemption of Israel. The first rabbi thus to be ordained,
with the support of twenty- five rabbis in Safed, was Berab himself. He
in turn bestowed ordination on four other rabbis, including his former
student the kabbalist Yosef Karo, on whose code of Jewish law there
will be more to say in the next chapter. But this attempt to impose unity
ended, ironically, in deep acrimony. It elicited the vehement opposition
of R. Levi ibn Habib of Jerusalem, who had not been consulted by his
colleagues in Safed and wrote an entire treatise to prove the illegality of
Berab’s actions. Berab had hoped that the practical effects of restored
ordination would lead in due course to the re- establishment of a San-
hedrin which could impose fines and require flagellation for sins, but his
opponents feared that such innovation would arouse false messianic
hopes and that it would be better to await a divine initiative for the
Sanhedrin to be re- established. The opposition prevailed, and, after the
death of Berab in 1541, the ordination process he had begun gradually
lapsed.^17