Ḥayei ha-Torah (The Life of Torah): Rabbinic Culture and the Premodern Jewish Heritage Preserved and Adapted

This chapter moves to the Early Modern Period, delving into selective continuities and changes in rabbinic culture and its practice in communal settings, and paying attention to ways in which early modern Jews were not merely echoing their ancestors’ regard for the historical pillars of Jewish civilization, but rather interpreting them in ways that would shape the early modern Diaspora in unique ways. Of special interest here are discussions of Jewish culture as the way of life of an ethnic nation as well as an all-encompassing system of sanctification, rather than a “religion” in the Christian sense; the Jewish (textual) canon and its dynamic role in shaping Jewish imagination and behavior; the new demographic realities that shaped the Diaspora, including the rise of multi-ethnic Jewish centers; the dissemination of printed materials, which accentuated and homogenized patterns of mutual assistance, pietistic practice, and jurisprudence between far-flung Jewish groups; the professionalization of the rabbinate and the strengthening of non-rabbinic Jewish communal authorities; the rise of an important and prosperous cultural center of Ashkenazi Jewry in Eastern Europe; and the rise of a new class of “Court Jews.”.