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" An Intellectual Biography of an Early Modern Port Rabbi "
Levine, Yosie
Berger, David
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Latin Dissertation
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| Language of Document
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English
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| Record Number
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1113646
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| Doc. No
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TLpq2377361845
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| Main Entry
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Berger, David
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Levine, Yosie
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| Title & Author
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An Intellectual Biography of an Early Modern Port Rabbi\ Levine, YosieBerger, David
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| College
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Yeshiva University
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| Date
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2020
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| student score
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2020
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| Degree
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Ph.D.
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| Page No
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395
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| Abstract
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This dissertation follows the path of one leading rabbi who reaped the benefits and negotiated the maze of challenges that accompanied life in early modem port cities. While much scholarly attention has been paid to port Jews, little has been paid to port rabbis. Rabbi Zevi Hirsch Ashkenazi (1658-1718) spent the better part of his adult life in or around Constantinople, Salonika, Hamburg and Amsterdam. While the port rabbi may share many features with his urban counterpart, he represents an unexplored category that demands investigation. In particular, this work takes up five specific issues. First. I explore the sprawling rabbinic networks, the ease and efficiency of which characterized the communication among and around port cities. Engaged in an almost endless series of epistolary exchanges, port rabbis wrestled with the challenges of authority, jurisdiction and the implementation of pesak. They freely recognized that their halakhic rulings would seldom represent the final word on a given matter. Second, as port cities doubled as book centers. I examine the impact on a port rabbi of almost unfettered access to printed books. Third, port cities were typically religiously tolerant and culturally diverse and, consequently, home to the religiously lax. Hakham Zevi confronted the kinds of questions more prevalent among those less scrupulous about religious observance. Fourth, port cities were heterogeneous. At least on a literal level, the great geographic distances that had for so long separated Ashkenaz and Sepharad had suddenly collapsed. In cities where Ashkenazim and Sephardim were busy leading parallel but largely independent lives. Hakham Zevi became a beacon of cultural receptivity. And finally, because sectarians found comfortable homes in port cities. Hakham Zevi found himself taking a leading role in a controversy that reshaped the contours of eighteenth-century battles against Sabbateanism. By introducing a vocabulary that transcends the terms normally associated with rabbinic biography, this work assesses whether and to what degree a port rabbi was creative, independent, flexible and integrative — metrics that, before long, would become integral to the discourse surrounding tradition's confrontation with modernity.
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| Subject
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Ashkenazi
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Chacham Tzvi
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European history
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Judaic studies
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Modern history
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Rabbinic network
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