The Early Modern Rabbis of Amsterdam: Urban Dynamics, Communal Tensions, and Diasporic Entanglement

In the early modern period Amsterdam developed into the largest Jewish urban centre in Europe. Its rabbis had to navigate the intersections of urban dynamics, communal tensions, and diasporic entanglements. This book considers the individuals who made up the rabbinate of Amsterdam in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the particular challenges (and successes) they had in building and preserving Jewish communities in the Dutch Republic. These rabbis faced formidable new challenges to their authority, unlike what their medieval predecessors encountered. Among these were building a religiously, intellectually, socially, and economically thriving community on the banks of the Amstel while integrating immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula and Central and Eastern Europe; the reintegration of former conversos into normative Judaism; the greater separation of administrative and religious leadership, with lay leaders taking over communal responsibilities and prerogatives formerly held by rabbis; new organization of rabbinic training; and changes in titles. The early modern rabbi was thus quite distinct not only from his medieval predecessors, but also from his modern successors, and Amsterdam was one site where the institution of the rabbinate found its rearticulation.

Bart Wallet is professor of early modern and modern Jewish history at the University of Amsterdam. He is co-editor-in-chief of Studia Rosenthaliana: Journal of the History, Culture and Heritage of the Jews in the Netherlands and editor of the European Journal of Jewish Studies.