The international network that was coordinated from Istanbul from 1720 to 1820 to extend financial assistance to Palestinian Jewry by means of rabbinic emissaries is the subject of Matthias Lehmann's study. The records of the network's administrative officials (pekidim) supply the documentary foundation, along with the minute books of the Livorno Jewish community's lay leadership and relevant rabbinic texts, particularly the travelogue of Ḥayim Yosef David Azulai, the preeminent Palestinian rabbinic fundraiser.
The main point of Emissaries is that this kind of global network, constructed and maintained to enhance pan-Jewish solidarity, was an unprecedented phenomenon in Jewish history, and indeed anticipated the central importance of international solidarity and philanthropy for modern Jewish identity. At the same time, Lehmann notes that the demographic make-up of early modern Jewry contributed to new tensions between Jewish constituencies. In the Middle Ages, Jewish communities everywhere were ethnically homogeneous, even if they fragmented along other lines. The early modern period saw a new social dynamic, as multiethnic communities emerged in which the component ethnic groups, while struggling to maintain their ethnic identity within the community, felt and extended solidarity to their ethnic brethren in other communities, even beyond regional and national boundaries and indeed even between the realms of Christendom and Islam.
Lehmann's international perspective on the Palestine enterprise is radically innovative, for although the emissaries have been the subject of modern historiography, previous studies have focused on the history of Jewish settlement in Palestine, rather than on the significance of the emissaries and the fundraising campaign for world Jewry. This shift is emblematic of the decline of Zionist historiography and the concomitant foregrounding of the story of Diaspora Jewry.
Study of the Istanbul network highlights the significance of international networks for our understanding of Jewish identity in the early modern era. The Istanbul institution can be loosely described as Sephardic, although it also operated in the Ashkenazic orbit and consisted of Maghrebi and Middle Eastern elements as well as Sephardim. Indeed, previous studies of the shared identity of the Sephardic Diaspora confirm that it was post-Expulsion Iberian Jewry that constructed the global ties that contributed to what is termed pan-Jewish identity, notwithstanding the somewhat exclusionary nature of this identity vis-à-vis other Jewish ethnicities. Fundamentally, the Sephardic network facilitated international commerce, but also provided an infrastructure for the philanthropic enterprise.
The first chapter analyzes the network's operation and highlights principal social dynamics, particularly conflicts. One problem was the competition for funds between Palestine and places closer to home; another was the fact that power lay mostly in the hands of lay rather than rabbinic leaders; and a third was the tension between ethnicity and pan-Jewish unity. On these issues and others Emissaries portrays Palestine philanthropy as complex, exposing social forces that conflicted with its underlying ideology.
Chapter 2 focuses on the rabbinic emissaries, and here too the story counterposes idealism and social conflict. The shadarim needed to win the trust of the local communities, who were (justly) suspicious of fraud. Emissaries retained a substantial portion of what they raised, which generated pressure to replace them with impersonal fundraising mechanisms, but the pekidim recognized that the emissary arrangement was more lucrative. The emissaries were experts in Jewish law and mysticism, but during their travels they encountered different, competing, traditions.
The remaining three chapters are largely based on writings by emissaries, and deal more with ideology than social dynamics. Lehmann reads these tracts critically, showing, for example, that they were also responses to contemporary ideological challenges, including Sabbateanism and the assimilatory (and sometimes heretical) tendencies found among western Sephardim; on all these fronts Emissaries depicts rabbinic authority as an ideal no less central to the emissaries than Palestine. We also see that, notwithstanding the emissaries' rhetoric, Sephardic support for Palestine was unswerving and the lay leadership was committed to rabbinic authority. The concluding chapter draws attention to the challenges of the nineteenth century, with the decline of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of secularization and assimilation.
Lehmann's work is fluidly written and nicely organized. Unfortunately, the book has endnotes rather than footnotes, and no bibliography. Altogether, though, the volume represents a major contribution to the study of early modern Jewry, offering a fresh approach to an institution that was ubiquitous, long lasting, and highly influential.
