Haim Gertner's extremely thorough and carefully argued study of the rabbinate in nineteenth-century Austrian Galicia focuses narrowly on the rabbis of the four major Galician cities: Lviv (Lemberg), Kraków, Brody, and Tarnopol. It adds a crucial piece to the wealth of recent scholarship on the Orthodox rabbinate in the nineteenth century. Much of the existing literature focuses on Germany, Hungary, and Lithuania, as well as the hasidic rabbinate. Gertner usefully turns our attention to the Galician cities.

Certainly they did not lack for drama. Lviv, the largest of the four cities, with about twenty thousand inhabitants, was the scene of the shocking 1848 murder of the reforming Rabbi Abraham Kohn. (For a detailed account see Michael Stanislawski, A Murder in Lemberg [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007].) In Tarnopol, there was bitter opposition to the maskil S. J. Rapoport throughout the three years he served as chief rabbi, until he left for Prague in 1840. The rabbi of Lviv from 1857 to 1875, Joseph Saul Nathansohn, is perhaps best known for his decision to permit the use of machine-made matzoh, which became the topic of a major controversy. Dov Baer Meisels in Kraków was controversial in a different way: he became notorious for his support of Polish nationalism. Gertner reproduces an 1867 painting in which Meisels stands between the archbishop of Kraków and the Reform rabbi Marcus Jastrow at the funeral of a group of five Polish patriots (249). Some other figures of the time are famous today mainly in the yeshiva world, for instance, Joseph Babad, author of Min ḥat ḥinukh.

Many of the smaller Galician towns were hasidic centers, but Gertner excludes them from his study for the most part. He does include a short but very illuminating study of the inheritance of the rabbinate (335–253). Although this is stereotypically a hasidic practice, he shows that it both originated and was maintained—up until the Holocaust—in the nonhasidic rabbinate in Galicia.

Gertner argues that the nonhasidic rabbinate in Galicia had a distinctive profile. He argues first for a crisis in the Galician rabbinate in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, as the Jewish communities experienced difficulty in finding rabbis who would be acceptable to all parties (including the Austrian authorities). The chief rabbinate remained vacant in Lviv for ten years after Cohen's murder, and for almost twenty years in Tarnopol after Rapoport left for Prague. The chief rabbinate of Brody also suffered long vacancies. Between 1831 and 1894, the Brody post was vacant more than it was occupied.

These Galician communities had also, in addition to the chief rabbi, a post of chief dayyan (rabbinical court judge), who was often a considerable scholar himself. Gertner shows that in a number of cases, the chief dayyan became the spokesman of pious traditionalism, and engaged in controversies with the chief rabbi. For example, Nathanson's main opponent in the matzoh controversy was Solomon Kluger, who was chief dayyan in Brody. One of Rapoport's major opponents was the Tarnopol dayyan Joseph Joel Deutsch; in Kraków, Meisels had a series of conflicts with his chief dayyan, Saul Landau.

In tracing what he calls (in the English abstract) the “Orthodoxification” of the Galician rabbinate, Gertner also studies the development of the batei midrash of the nineteenth-century Galician cities. He contrasts them very effectively against the new Lithuanian model of the yeshiva. The Galician batei midrash, he shows, were much more traditional institutions than the Lithuanian ones, yet Galician rabbis like Nathansohn did also respond to the demands of the times by taking on many rigorous and formal duties as educators.

Gertner argues finally that many of these chief rabbis and chief dayyanim, perhaps nearly all of them, should be characterized as “responsive” to modernity. Gertner offers the notion of “responsive [or perhaps “reactive”—megiv] Orthodoxy” and its leadership, “the responsive rabbinate,” as categories alongside “modern Orthodoxy” on the German model, or “ultra-Orthodoxy” on the model of Hungary. “Responsive rabbis” in his typology are opposed to religious reform, but they do recognize that changing times require creative halakhic responses. They were also supportive of a traditionalist historiography, what is called in Hebrew me ḥkar torani, including local Jewish history and rabbinic historiography. Gertner chooses four outstanding examples of such rabbis, namely Nathansohn in Lviv, and three chief dayyanim: Abraham Jener and Haim Nathan Dembitzer in Kraków, and Reuben Rapoport in Tarnopol. The two former were creative halakhists who worked to adapt Jewish law to changing times; the latter two were not only dayyanim but also antiquarians; Dembitzer published scholarly articles in Haskalah journals.

This last element of the argument is not altogether convincing. It is certainly true, as Gertner shows, that the rabbinate in nineteenth-century eastern Europe, and more specifically in Galicia, was much more varied than it is sometimes portrayed, particularly by its enlightened opponents. It is also true that both the language of these Jews and our own are somewhat poor in descriptors that would bring out all of the nuances of difference between these rabbis. But “response to modernity” is a very broad notion that could characterize a great many groups besides this one.

Much of the distinctiveness of these Galician rabbis is perhaps rather what might be called their “centrism.” Placing themselves strategically “between” maskilim and hasidim, they maintained their hold over central communal institutions. A centrist strategy demands a less ideological, hence a more flexible, or in that sense, “responsive” approach.

The attempt to establish an ideal type of Galician rabbi, moreover, is to some extent undercut by Gertner's very success in showing the diversity of the Galician rabbinate. Gertner shows that Galician rabbis cultivated many different styles of Jewish learning and scholarship, and many different approaches to the relation of the rabbinate to the community. The institution of the rabbinate itself, he shows very effectively, even its very definition, was in transition in this period, and indeed in crisis; and nowhere more so than in Galicia.

Michael Steinlauf has asked, “How do we begin to talk about what made Galician Jews different?” (“Notes on Galician Jews,” Polin 23 [2011]: 421). In the realm of the rabbinate and Halakhah, Haim Gertner has given us an excellent beginning.