Each individual, apart from his relationships with other individuals and in his family, has group affiliations of one sort or another. The closest of these wider associations, so far as Judaism is concerned, is the Jewish community as a whole – ‘Am yisrael – and this, in turn, is divided into particular communities, each of which is known as the Kehilah (‘assembly’) or, in Eastern Europe, the Kahal. Another name for the community in a particular place is the tzibbur. In modern times the tzibbur often consists of the smaller unit organized around a particular synagogue. To take the example of Anglo-Jewry, an individual may belong to a particular synagogue, to which he pays membership dues, and the synagogue may be affiliated to a particular movement, Orthodox or Reform or Liberal or Masorti. Each individual Jew is, in turn, part of the wider Anglo-Jewish community, represented by the Board of Deputies. As a Jew, he is also a member of the Jewish people with duties and responsibilities to Jews everywhere but especially in the State of Israel, which, of course, has its own national structures. Human nature being what it is, tensions are bound to arise between the individual, with his own interests, and the communities of which he is part, as they will arise between the smaller units and the greater.

In the tightly knit Jewish communities in the middle ages, there was little possibility for the individual to free himself from communal control.