Rabbi

RABBI. - Title belonging to the doctors of Jewish law: rabh "master"; rabbî "my master". Rabbân was the title given to a very eminent master; the title of rabbî itself was originally reserved to heads of schools alone. Among the Sephardim the r. is called ḥâkhâm "sage". The Syriac translation of the New Testament renders rabbî with "archisynagogus", the person charged with the divine service. The task of the r. is above all teaching and preaching; he also had the power to decide in religious and sometimes civil questions, a task for the most part reserved to a special official, called dajjân "judge". This prerogative ceased when the civil authorities took to themselves every decisive power also with respect to the Jews.

The r. find their origin within Pharisaism. In the Mishnaic treatise 'Abâth, 1, 1, the r. of the first period after Christ down to Jôhânân ben Zakkaj are linked through an unbroken tradition back to Moses. The r. was not remunerated for his work of teaching; for this reason he practiced a profession, to which he generally devoted a third of the day. R. Gamaliel in 'Abâth, 2, 2 explicitly exhorts to work those who devote themselves to the study of the Law. The r. of our times is a layman, without hierarchical dignity. At one time, however, the title of r. was conferred with the sêmikhâh, the imposition of hands, a ceremony of a religious character. In 135 A.D. the Romans prohibited this ceremony and made R. Jêhûdhâh ben Babâ' pay with death for having transgressed their order. About a century later, in the time of Judah "the prince", who was on good terms with the Romans, the sêmikhâh was again permitted, but the same Judah limited it to Palestine and to scholars who promised not to leave it.

The Jewish Enlightenment movement (haskâlâh) that developed in Germany at the end of the 18th century, chiefly through the initiative of M. Mendelssohn, first provoked a crisis, then a transformation in Rabbinism. The r. gradually reconciled themselves with the new cultural spirit. A great champion of the necessity of such a reconciliation was Abraham Geiger (1810-74). The institutions where the r. received their training were transformed from Talmudic academies or jêthôth, where study was limited to the Talmud, into rabbinical colleges, where the studies of the young were broader and more varied. The first institution of this kind opened at Metz in 1824; there followed the Italian Rabbinical College at Padua, opened through the initiative of S. D. Luzzatto in 1827; at Breslau in 1854 the Jewish Theological Seminary was inaugurated; at Berlin in 1872 the "Lehranstalt für die Wissenschaft des Judentums" and in 1873 the Rabbinical Seminary. Other institutions of the kind followed in America.

Eugenio Zolli