Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz by Jay R. Berkovitz

Abstract

Reviewed by: Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz by Jay R. Berkovitz Ronald B. Schechter Jay R. Berkovitz. Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz. Studies in Jewish History and Culture 60. Leiden: Brill, 2020. xv + 404 pp. Once upon a time, historians of eighteenth-century French Jewry believed that the Ashkenazic Jews of eastern France were isolated from the surrounding gentile society, that their institutions, laws, and attitudes separated them from their non-Jewish neighbors. I was one of those historians. Jay Berkovitz, in his magisterial Law's Dominion: Jewish Community, Religion, and Family in Early Modern Metz, has shown that we were wrong. The reason is that we relied on a corpus of published French and German sources, written by Maskilim—Jewish exponents of the Enlightenment—and gentile reformers, including prominent figures in the French Revolution, who fought for Jewish civic equality and citizenship. Berkovitz was in the highly unusual position to delve into a different kind of source, namely the pinkas of the beit din, or rabbinical court, of Metz, a city in [End Page 167] eastern France that was unique in having a legally authorized Jewish community, or kehillah. (The community of Nancy was effectively a colony of the Metz kehillah.) A pinkas was a register, and there were various types: pinkasei kahal, or communal registers; pinkasei beit knesset, or synagogue registers; pinkasim containing information about confraternities, financial records, wills, etc. These tell us a great deal about internal Jewish life, but the genre most valuable to social and legal historians is the pinkas beit din, or register of the rabbinical court. There are extant examples of this last type of pinkas, notably for the communities of Hamburg, Prague, and Frankfurt, though none is nearly as complete as that of the beit din of Metz. Housed in the archives of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research in New York City, this manuscript had been almost completely neglected by previous historians, who lacked either the linguistic and paleographic skills, or the patience, to explore in any depth the two folio volumes of 241 pages containing roughly 400,000 words and covering 1663 cases from 1771 to 1789. Berkovitz first began working with this source in 2003, and in 2014 he did a great service for historians of early modern Ashkenazic Jewry by publishing a meticulously edited volume of it—Protocols of Justice: The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court, 1771–1789. The pinkas beit din provides a wealth of information about commerce, inheritance practices, social hierarchies, family disputes, religious beliefs and practices, marriage, divorce, and the history of women, gender, and sexuality. In Law's Dominion, Berkovitz combines it with other sources, internal to the community and external, to produce the most exhaustive possible account of Jewish life in Metz. Chapter 1 describes the legal sources available to historians of the Jews of Metz, namely: responsa, or questions posed to rabbis by other communities and the rabbis' responses; communal registers, including records of the lay leaders' legislation; and the pinkas beit din. Chapter 2 provides a brief history of the Metz kehillah, with an emphasis on "ritual and identity," material culture, and "economic integration." Chapter 3 introduces the governing institutions that constituted and guaranteed communal autonomy and shows how they provided for social welfare and poor relief, policed moral and religious conduct, and interacted with the French civil courts that decided cases between Jews. Chapter 4 discusses the sources judges relied on, chiefly the Talmud and legal codes deriving from it, especially the sixteenth-century Shulḥan ʿarukh, and gives an account of judicial procedure and delineates the functions of the beit din. Chapter 5 is a fascinating analysis of the impact of French courts, law, and judicial procedure on the rabbis' jurisprudence, and the acculturation and integration Jews experienced with the legal culture of the surrounding gentile society. Chapter 6 delves into the social history revealed by the court records, especially practices of guardianship and inheritance, two perennial sources of dispute, and the establishment and funding of charitable foundations through legacies. Finally, chapter 8 explores the much-underestimated power of women in the community's...