This book is the latest installment of an undertaking I began a quarter-century ago to reassess modes of cultural adaptation to the manifold challenges Jews encountered at the dawn of modernity. I could not have predicted then that this venture would require quite the scale of resources and effort that have been invested over these years. There were two main reasons for this. First, in the mid-1990s, the full scope of the primary sources directly bearing on this topic was either unknown or underappreciated, even by specialists. Second, when I initially turned my attention to this subject, the conceptual frame of the early modern period as a distinctive era had not yet attained its current status as an area of research that holds such great potential for historical study and interpretation. The present work seeks to explain how âthe rule of lawâ served as the basic principle of Jewish social organization, as one of its core cultural values, and as the foundation for the relationship of the Jews to state and society. By âthe rule of lawâ I have in mind the process of juridification, that is, the manner in which the institutionalization of law and judicial frameworks evolved in the early modern Jewish community. In the course of this development, more and more areas of communal life were subsumed under the authority of the law, as the community took greater notice of external legal and judicial systems. Whereas the important place of law in the social, cultural, and political transformation of Europe has become the subject of increasing scholarly interest, its role in shaping the social and political culture of the Jews, especially in the early modern world, is inadequately understood.
In choosing the title Lawâs Dominion, I intended to convey the lawâs vital role in circumscribing the cultural, religious, and political universe in which early modern Jews lived. Whether they were altogether compliant with the lawâeither civil or religiousâis a question that pertains mainly to what was happening on the ground and reflects what this volume identifies as âjudicial culture,â that is, how courts render justice and enforce their judgments. âLegal culture,â in contrast, refers to how individuals navigate the options they face when they seek to resolve their differences. Whether the focus is judicial culture or legal culture, we are less concerned with the question of compliance per se. Indeed, the failure to obey the law, whether in deliberate opposition to legal norms or as a result of laxity, by no means negates the role and function of the law as an all-encompassing framework that defined the duties and responsibilities imposed by the state, on the one hand, and those required of Jews as members of duly constituted and autonomous communities, on the other. But our focus is not limited to the fulfillment or nonfulfillment of obligations; it also addresses a larger set of questions relating to how the law was interpreted, contested, and enacted. In short, Lawâs Dominion tells the story of how this universe worked, especially how the Jews in the early modern world negotiated the competing obligations, expectations, and norms that stemmed from their complicated status as a self-governing minority in an absolutist state.
To this end, I have expanded the thematic focus of my two previous books and have extended several of their main methodological assumptions in new directions within a larger analytical framework than was possible in either of these earlier projects. Rites and Passages (2004) investigated changes in religious life, specifically the intricacies of ritual, to uncover underlying structures of thought and unstated social and behavioral norms in the century leading up to, and in the two generations following, the French Revolution. Protocols of Justice (2014), presented the surviving records of the rabbinic court of Metz, a city in the Moselle region of northeastern France, where a sizeable Jewish community had formed in the sixteenth century. Those court records, which date from the last decades of the ancien régime, were compiled in a Pinkas (âregisterâ), property of the Archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York. During the two centuries since this rabbinic court met formally for the final time, on 1 July 1789, the Pinkas of the Metz Beit Din (ârabbinic courtâ) had gone largely unnoticed by historians and legal scholars. The underlying assumption in Protocols of Justice was that careful investigation of these legal texts would yield a novel perspective on cultural adaptation. To that end, I concentrated on how the Beit Din functioned alongside the French civil courts and how expectations of legal conformity from the point of view of the state, affected the internal processes of adjudication and jurisprudence. The proceedings of the Beit Din not only contain astonishing evidence of procedural cooperation with the French judicial system; they also point to a conception of Jewish law that is conspicuous for its capacity to adapt to the challenging social and political environment of the late ancien régime.
When I first decided to research the proceedings of the Metz Beit Din, my hope was to advance the conversation begun by Ted Fram on how rabbinic court records could be useful to historians. Long before the appearance of Framâs book on rabbinic court diaries in eighteenth-century Frankfurt, A Window on Their World, and my own Protocols of Justice, I sensed that the historical importance of the Metz rabbinic court records would exceed our initial expectations. The community itself was renowned for its important part in the pre-revolutionary debate on citizenship and, before that, for the quality of its life and culture made famous earlier in the century by Glikl (bas Judah Leib) Hamelnâs renowned memoir. But owing to the dispersal of archival documents and the destruction of numerous community records especially during World War II, the historical investigation of the Jewish community in early modern Metz, and in the northeastern provinces more generally, had not realized its full potential. Norâmainly because of the technical difficulties they poseâhad rabbinic court proceedings found their way onto the research agendas of Jewish historians.
My primary objective in publishing Protocols of Justice was to bring the large corpus of Metz court records to the attention of historians and legal scholars in an accessible format. In order not to delay the project longer than necessary, I chose to restrict my discussion of the judicial proceedings to major areas of litigation and jurisprudence painted with broad brushstrokes. These initial explorations of the Metz court proceedings dispelled the premise that, until the dawn of emancipation, the internal life of the Jewish community had experienced only limited exposure to the political and cultural forces at work in general society. Quite to the contrary, the Jewsâ legal integration into the deep structures of the larger society is richly documented throughout the deliberations of the rabbinic court. The evidence contained in the Metz Beit Din records told a story that varied sharply with the largely uncontested appraisal of the relationship between Jews and the surrounding society that dominates modern Jewish historiography. The use of court records to reassess basic assumptions about Jewish communal life and history was a critically important stepâbut only the firstâin what I envisioned as a far more ambitious project. The bigger story, however, was beyond the purview of a book whose purpose was much more limited.
A proper reassessment of early modern communal life calls for efforts that extend well beyond the work published to date. Lawâs Dominion enlarges the conceptual framework employed in Protocols of Justice, expands its chronological arc, includes additional historical context and further elaboration on legal topics. The present volume supplements the relatively concise analyses of the judicial decisions in Protocols of Justice with in-depth investigations, intended to yield more concrete data on how practitioners of Jewish law, as well as its consumers, navigated the systems of Jewish and French law. Lawâs Dominion also broadens the range of sources beyond those consulted in the previous volume to shed light on the complicated role of law in the life of a community that faced significant internal and external challenges to its political, religious, and cultural identity.