From the “Man of Jerusalem” to the Beit El Yeshiva: Late Nineteenth Century Rabbinic Leadership in the Jewish Community of Tripoli

2021 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-116
Author(s):  
Ronel Atia
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Foreign Language ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Educational System ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Muslim Countries ◽  
Spiritual Leader ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Land Of Israel

Abstract This article details a polemic among the rabbinical leadership of the Jewish community of Tripoli, Libya, in the late nineteenth century. At stake was an initiative of the community’s spiritual leader, Rabbi Eliyahu Bechor Hazzan, to change the traditional educational system to include secular topics and foreign language. The communal rabbis who opposed the idea wrote the rabbinical leadership of Jerusalem, requesting support in overturning Rabbi Hazzan’s proposal. This study details the issues at stake in this aspect of the infiltration of modernism into Jewish communities in Muslim countries and presents the letter written to the rabbinic authorities of the land of Israel that led Rabbi Hazzan to abandon his initiative and, later, to resign from his leadership post.

Introduction

2013 ◽  
pp. 1-2
Author(s):  
Antony Polonsky
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish Population ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Secular Culture ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Late Eighteenth ◽  
Late Nineteenth

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the Jewish population of Poland–Lithuania. During the years of its flourishing, it gave rise to a unique religious and secular culture in Hebrew and Yiddish and enjoyed an unprecedented degree of self-government. Even after the upheavals which marked the beginning of the downfall of the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Jewish community continued to grow and even to recover some of its vitality. In the late eighteenth century these lands saw the birth and development of hasidism, an innovative revivalist movement, which was eventually to win the allegiance of a large proportion of the Jewish population and which remains very much alive in the Jewish world today. The partitions of Poland at the end of the eighteenth century and again in 1815 divided Polish Jewry between the tsarist, Habsburg, and Prussian states. In all these areas, and particularly in the Pale of Settlement, the late nineteenth century saw the appearance and increasing ascendancy of ethnic and national conceptions of Jewish self-identification, in particular Zionism and Jewish autonomism.

Language Usage in Anglo-Sephardi Jewry

2000 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 99-108
Author(s):  
Bruce Mitchell
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Language Usage ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
History Of ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Official Records

Tracing the history of languages used among England's Sephardim, being the first study of its kind, presents a number of challenges. First and foremost, there is a severe lack of linguistic documentation prior to the seventeenth century, as Jewish communities were illegal on English soil between the mass expulsion of 1290 and the readmission under Cromwell in 1656. Although official records of the Spanish and Portuguese Synagogue do give some indications of language usage between the readmission of Jews to England and the late nineteenth century, actual linguistic monuments are few.

The Closure of the Volozhin Yeshiva

2012 ◽  
pp. 190-252
Author(s):  
Shaul Stampfer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The Real ◽  
Government Documents ◽  
Internal Politics ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Government

This chapter analyses the developments that brought about the Volozhin yeshiva's closure. It reveals surprising conclusions that illuminate both the yeshiva's internal politics in the late nineteenth century and its precarious status. The ostensible reason for the closure of the yeshiva was its refusal to accept the government demand for far-reaching changes in the curriculum so as to incorporate secular studies and to devote a significant number of hours to these studies. However, it is highly probable that this was not the real reason. The chapter draws from the archives of the former Soviet Union to conduct an examination of internal government documents from the tsarist period. These archives can reveal more about what really motivated the authorities in various episodes affecting the Jewish community. The chapter shows that the authorities knew a great deal about the internal affairs of the yeshiva, and certainly far more than most Jews ever imagined.

Abraham Dweck Hakohen (Khalousi): The Last Ḥakham Bashi Born in Aleppo

2015 ◽  
pp. 112-143
Author(s):  
Yaron Harel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Steering Committee ◽  
Community Leadership ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Clear Goal

This chapter details the transformations that took place in the Jewish community of Aleppo during the final decade of the nineteenth century and the controversy over the removal of Rabbi Abraham Dweck Hakohen from his office as ḥakham bashi. Socio-economic transformations in late nineteenth-century Aleppo, including the emergence of a prosperous and educated middle class and the decline of the class of wealthy householders upon which the institution of the rabbinate had relied for many generations, created an urgent need for a comprehensive reorganization of community leadership and institutions. The ascent of new forces within society, the distress of the weaker classes, and the decline in influence of those families who had constituted the old leadership all led to unrest throughout the Jewish public and a widespread desire for participation in running the affairs of the community. In practice, then, the deposing of the ḥakham bashi served a clear goal: to limit the power of the individual holding that office and to transfer some of it into the hands of the steering committee. This being so, the removal from office of Rabbi Abraham Dweck Hakohen can be seen as representing a revolution in the order of communal leadership, not merely the result of intrigue and conspiracy based upon personal hostility.

The Struggle Over Religious Reform in Nineteenth-Century Vienna

AJS Review ◽  
1989 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 179-221 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marsha L. Rozenblit
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Jewish Community ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
Reform Movement ◽  
Jewish Communities ◽  
Religious Reform ◽  
German Jewish ◽  
Traditional Manner ◽  
Land Of Israel

In 1871, the board of the Jewish community of Vienna attempted to reform Sabbath and holiday services in the two synagogues under its official jurisdiction. Following the guidelines established by the Leipzig Synod in 1869, the board decided to remove from the liturgy all prayers that called for a return of the Jewish people to the land of Israel and for the restitution of the ancient sacrificial system of worship. In addition, Vienna's Jewish leaders announced that the introduction of an organ, the symbol of the Reform movement, was a good idea. The board never implemented these radical reforms. An enormous protest from Vienna's Orthodox community, as well as from numerous individuals who professed no particular commitment to religious Orthodoxy but who preferred to pray in the traditional manner, forced the leaders of the community to back down from these ideological reforms and to implement only a few, relatively minor “modifications” in the services in the temples. Viennese Jews rejected the ideological changes which were gaining in popularity in German Jewish communities in the last third of the nineteenth century.

Contents of Western Sociology of Religion as a Science and Educational Discipline

2002 ◽  
pp. 106-110
Author(s):  
Liudmyla O. Fylypovych
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
International Society ◽  
Sociology Of Religion ◽  
Scientific Study ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Nineteenth

Sociology of religion in the West is a field of knowledge with at least 100 years of history. As a science and as a discipline, the sociology of religion has been developing in most Western universities since the late nineteenth century, having established traditions, forming well-known schools, areas related to the names of famous scholars. The total number of researchers of religion abroad has never been counted, but there are more than a thousand different centers, universities, colleges where religion is taught and studied. If we assume that each of them has an average of 10 religious scholars, theologians, then the army of scholars of religion is amazing. Most of them are united in representative associations of researchers of religion, which have a clear sociological color. Among them are the most famous International Society for the Sociology of Religion (ISSR) and the Society for Scientific Study of Religion (SSSR).

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