The authority of the community of San'a in Yemenite Jewry

Abstract

Jewish communities throughout the world face the problem of how to maintain unity and adherence to a common code of practice, within a context of dispersion. In this essay, Yosef Tobi, Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and History at Haifa University, shows how this was tackled in Yemen during the past two hundred years. Unlike most of the contributors to this volume, Tobi's work shows how historians utilize documents to reconstruct social and political relationships. He infers ways in which the ancestry, personalfty and scholarly reputation of rabbinic leaders led to social acceptance, against a background of other forces which shaped the communities.