Codification and Other Strategies of Consensus-Building in Jewish Law

Abstract

Abstract This chapter surveys the strategies Jews have used to achieve consensus on matters of Jewish law and practice in the past and in the present. By the same token, strategies to achieve consensus are also strategies of group differentiation. In the Middle Ages and the early modern era, consensus concerning Jewish practice was achieved mainly at a local and regional level, both through formal processes of Jewish self-government and through the informal development of local customs. There was sufficient travel and communication to achieve a significant degree of transregional consensus as well, through the circulation of legal texts such as the Talmud, responsa, and legal codes. The rise of printing increased circulation, and the Shulchan Arukh, published in 1565, won wide acceptance as a legal code. The Shulchan Arukh also promoted the ethnic differentiation of Sephardic and Ashkenazic Jews. In contemporary Judaism, local and regional consensus have largely disappeared. Consensus on matters of Jewish law and practice is now achieved within transregional religious movements, such as Reform Judaism, Conservative Judaism, and the many Orthodox groups and subgroups. In this new system, strategies of laxism, centrism, and strictism are crucial ways of uniting and differentiating Jewish groups.