If this review is long in coming, Protocols of Justice has itself to blame. Jay Berkovitz has presented in this magisterial edition and companion volume such an embarrassment of riches that each time I opened it with intention to write a critical review, I found some new insight, reference, or fact that sent me on a search regarding a particular aspect of it.

While technically Protocols concerns a challenging text generated by an obscure body of legists in a very narrow time frame, it is by the same token a meditation on the constructions of justice, on the process of acculturation among the Jews of France, on the meaning of “Jewish autonomy,” and much else. Protocols consists of two volumes, the text of the rabbinic court record in one volume and a series of essays about the text in English in the second volume. The heart of Berkovitz's project lies in his edition of a record book documenting the cases that came before the upper rabbinic court in Metz. Spanning close to two decades worth of cases, just prior to the French Revolution, the edition is a scholarly triumph on multiple levels. Berkovitz has meticulously transcribed the difficult Hebrew, Aramaic, and French text (virtually all in Hebrew characters) in a clear layout and without intrusions of scholarly apparatus beyond the necessary minimum. In over a thousand densely packed pages, I sought but was unable to find one typographical error. For any person wishing to study or to teach the dense process of halakhic adjudication regarding inheritances, dowries, and commercial disputes of all kinds, in this time and place, this text edition can serve as a guide.Footnote ³

The English-language companion volume is written in clear prose, will be accessible even to scholars who cannot approach the original Hebrew, and is indispensable for its vigorous and deeply informed arguments. Protocols begins with an analysis of the genre of communal records known as pinkasim. They have become central to the construction of our knowledge of Jewish society in the early modern period when they flourished. At the same time, Berkovitz's work makes it clear that any pinkas is one piece of a larger mosaic: none can be appreciated without context, and the more extensive the context the more insights a pinkas can yield. Berkovitz deftly marshals rabbinic law in all its intricacy and eighteenth-century French law in its complexity to illuminate the materials in the rabbinic pinkas.

Berkovitz situates the French halakhists squarely within the larger discourse on the law in prerevolutionary France. The early modern conflicts between Roman and customary law in the various French jurisdictions and the growing power of the consolidating state form the backdrop for the astonishingly deep penetration of French law into the halakhic courts. Invoking the rising tension between the regnant legal pluralism in prerevolutionary France and the growing legal centralism demanded by the state, Berkovitz demonstrates that both the decisors of Jewish law and its consumers were deeply immersed in the French cultural, economic, and legal systems. They all understood the consequences of appearing before various venues, Jewish and French. The Jewish courts themselves worked closely with the French system and sometimes cited it as a legitimate venue. The development of this halakhic court from one that followed a line demanding unquestioned fidelity from Jews to one that responded by internalizing the values of the French courts took place over a relatively short couple of decades. To cite one example, in 1759, a Jewish woman, Rozette d'Alsace, dismayed when the rabbinical court of Metz refused to honor her husband's bequest to her insofar as it exceeded the amount halakhically mandated by her ketubah, turned to the Parlement of Metz for relief. The Jewish community of Metz viewed her resort to a non-Jewish power as a betrayal and put her under ḥerem. The Parlement then prohibited the issue of ḥerem by Jewish authorities against individuals who sought recourse in French civil courts. Far from concluding with this exchange that appears to draw contested lines of Jewish insularity and state encroachment, Berkovitz notes that some twenty years later the Jewish court in Metz routinely accepted the validity of similar bequests, although they continued to exceed the halakhic parameters (182). Aware of the discrepancy between the systems, the Jewish court internalized the standards of the French court on this and other matters, exemplifying legal acculturation over a relatively brief time. In similar instances, as well as in other notable categories such as guardianship over minor children, gender serves as a hidden pivot, as women and their agents sought relief from French courts against a halakhic system weighted heavily against their interests. Rather than lose their power to adjudicate altogether in the face of state scrutiny, the rabbinic court in Metz, under the leadership of the towering scholar Rabbi Aryeh Loeb Günzberg (known as the Sha'agat Aryeh) quietly adjusted its rulings in certain cases to conform to the French legal system.

Berkovitz's meticulous edition of the pinkas bet din of Metz and his illuminating discussions of its multiple areas of significance constitute a tour de force. This work will long remain vital for any discussion of the Jewish community and its place in the legal systems of premodern Europe, the process of modernization, and the questions of openness and insularity in rabbinic culture.