The Missing Rabbis of Eastern Europe

This chapter examines the east European rabbinate. The rabbinate in modern eastern Europe was not significantly different from the rabbinate in other Ashkenazi Jewish communities up to the eighteenth century. In the following years, many aspects of rabbinical authority changed in almost every country of Europe. During the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a number of developments altered the conditions of rabbinic authority in eastern Europe in unique ways, and also made the selection of communal rabbis more complex than previously. Many of these changes contributed to a weakening of the power and status of the rabbinate — a power and status that were not exceptionally strong to start with. By the end of the nineteenth century, the patterns of the east European rabbinate were far from the traditional Ashkenazi model because the community, as a body that collected taxes and had internal authority, had ceased to exist.