New Halachic Manuals in a Changing Early Modern Jewish Society

• In Event: Communal, Rabbinic, and Judicial Authority in Flux: Law As Lived in the Early Modern Kehillah

Abstract

Halachic manuals and books of customary practice reflect not only their authors’ own set of preferences and judgments, but also the milieux and communal norms of their respective places of residence. Such works are also a window onto the power structures and hierarchies of the authors’ home communities and the challenges that these countervailing forces often posed to their rabbinic authority.

Yosef Omets by Yosef Hahn Nördlingen, the Av Bet Din of Frankfurt-am-Main in the first half of the seventeenth century, is a particularly striking example providing a rich portrait of life as lived in a traditional Jewish community undergoing change. The author was a descendant of a long line of distinguished rabbis and a colleague known to many of his contemporaries in other localities. He often drew on their works, and the richness of his learning and experience served as an inspiration to his descendants, despite the fact that his work would not appear in print until a century after it was written.


One of his primary goals was to preserve the storied traditions of his ancestral home. Yet another very strong urge derived from the fact that Lurianic Kabbalah was coming to exercise a profound influence on practice and behavior all across European Jewry. Nördlingen himself spared no effort in exhorting his readership to new forms of stringency that derived from the teachings of this mystical school.

From a consideration of the sitz im leben of this work and an analysis of the issues that confronted the author as well as his descriptions of specific practices, I hope to provide a revised assessment of how an apparently traditional manual of practice both reflected and served as a force for change in Jewish communal life.

Author

• Aaron L. Katchen, Brandeis University