THROUGHOUT most of the Jewish world, the modern period has been marked by political power struggles involving rabbis and Torah scholars. In the Middle East, this process of politicization began around the middle of the eighteenth century as European influences began to penetrate the region, and was exacerbated by the Ottoman imperial creation of the position of ḥakham bashi. One of the facts that strikes the student of this period is that very few of those rabbis elected to the office of ḥakham bashi either completed their term of office or avoided embroilment in acrimonious conflicts. This book explores the turbulence and controversy so characteristic of Syrian and Iraqi Jewry at this time by building up a detailed picture of the communities in which rabbis were active and scrutinizing the political, social, and economic developments that took place within them.

My interest in this subject began almost twenty-five years ago when, while perusing some musty old documents in the archive of Rabbi Jacob Saul Elyashar, I became aware for the first time of the controversy surrounding the removal from office of the ḥakham bashi Rabbi Abraham Ezra Dweck Hakohen of Aleppo. Over the course of time, I discovered, one after another, similar episodes involving other rabbis. As I gathered the facts and assembled an increasingly clear picture, I realized that these incidents were not exceptional but on the contrary almost routine. My curiosity as a historian was ignited, along with the desire to uncover the truth and present it without decoration or prettification. Admittedly, revealing the involvement of Torah scholars—including sages of considerable stature—in disputes of this type entails an element of iconoclasm. Indeed, the picture that emerges from these affairs is at times diametrically opposed to the accepted image of rabbinic scholars in the Middle East, the patterns of behaviour expected of them, and the status accorded to them. Nevertheless, it seems to me that to present the full picture is to illuminate the humanity of these rabbis, in the spirit of the old rabbinic aphorism, ‘The early ones were like human beings.’1 This approach enables us to scrutinize the personalities of these scholars in all their complexity and to become acquainted with their strengths and sublime qualities, as well as their all-too-human weaknesses and ambitions.