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“Jewish World Federation,” founded in Paris in 1860 with the goal of globalizing the Jewish emancipation process begun in Paris. Before the First World War, the Alliance israélite universelle (AIU) was represented in almost all countries with Jewish populations. The highest level of membership by percentage was achieved in France and Italy; in absolute numbers, Germany contained by far the most members. The Alliance pursued a strategy of legal and cultural “amelioration” ( régénération) of disadvantaged Jews in Eastern and Southeastern Europe and in the Middle Ea…

The Jewish Theological Seminary (Fraenckel Foundation) in Breslau (today Wrocław), which was active between 1854 and 1938, was the first rabbinical seminary worldwide claiming an academic scientific character. As one of the historical centers of the Wissenschaft des Judentums, it was the point of departure of a religious orientation mediating between Reform and Orthodoxy which continues to the present day in American Conservative Judaism. In addition, the Jewish community of Breslau has been a sphere of important orthodox and liberal rabbis since the 19th century.1. The Jewish …

From antiquity to the present day, rabbinical conferences have been a means of further developing Jewish law (Halakhah), often in reaction to cultural crises and challenges, as well as a prelude to the successful establishment of lasting institutions. Fundamental decisions of significant importance were made at rabbinical conferences, especially in cases in which the usual route toward the consolidation of halakhic consensus by means of individual decisions and local customs did not see…

The battle cry of “emancipation,” coined with the Enlightenment, refers in its narrower sense to the “liberation” of the European Jews from their premodern status as autonomous foreigners through political-legal equality with the rest of the citizens. In addition to this, the term came to be used for the concomitant processes of social and cultural adaption (Assimilation). Legal emancipation was carried out in France and the United States in 1791 as a revolutionary act; in Central Europe and Ita…

After the Christian conquest in 1085, Toledo was the residence where the Castilian court stayed most frequently in the Middle Ages and was the ecclesiastical primatial seat of Spain. The capital of New Castile was also home to the largest Jewish community existing on the Iberian Peninsula (Sepharad) before the expulsion of 1492. Collective conversions to Christianity, in part by means of forced baptism during the pogroms of 1391, in part due to social pressure in the subsequent period, le…

After the loss of temple and statehood, the rise in late antiquity of a legally trained class, the rabbis, produced its own form of inner-Jewish authority. However, a standard office (the rabbinate), exercised by an officially appointed rabbi with decision-making powers in ritual matters and areas of civil law, only began to emerge in the Middle Ages. In the modern era, the sphere of influence of the community rabbi shifted to cultural, representative, and pedagogical duties. One charac…