FOR centuries the institutional structure and functioning of the Syrian Jewish community was grounded in enduring worldwide patterns dating back to the talmudic period. By touching upon the structure and leadership of the religious minorities in the Ottoman empire, the Tanzimat altered the traditional autonomy of the non-Muslim communities vis-à-vis the imperial regime. The mid-nineteenth century saw the reorganization and remodelling of the structure of the Syrian Jewish communities under the influence of the Ottoman reforms. The most significant measures related to the institutionalization of the office of chief rabbi (hakham bashi) and to the establishment of committees whose purpose was to control and to assist in administering the community. Although largely instigated by the Ottoman authorities, these changes also reflected social unrest and criticism of the communal leadership within the Jewish communities, as well as the impact of modernization and secularization.

During the pre-reform era, the inferior status of the Jews under Ottoman law, coupled with their ethnic, religious, and cultural distinctiveness from the surrounding society, promoted the creation and maintenance of an autonomous communal framework. Its function was to protect the community and its individual members and, where possible, to improve their quality of life. The Ottoman system of rule not only enabled but indeed fostered this type of autonomous organization. Each non-Muslim group in the empire was granted the right to maintain its own internal institutions, as well as to regulate the personal status of its members and to follow its religious law. Thus people were defined first and foremost, in administrative and communal terms, by their religious affiliation. Because Ottoman society as awhole was organized on religious lines, each of the various religious communities was held to be subject to the authority of its religious leader. The position of the rabbi as head of the Jewish community was thus recognized officially within the Ottoman administrative system, as well as voluntarily within the Jewish community, which accorded him an authority based above all on his expertise in halakhah, the basis of Jewish daily life.

Syria had no model of regional communal organization; consequently, Jewish leadership there was decentralized. There was no official office of chief rabbi of Syria, and the large Jewish communities—and smaller ones as well—chose or appointed their own chief rabbis, whose formal authority extended only to the members of their community.