The Creation of Models of Leadership

One of the surprising aspects of the events described and analysed below— namely, those surrounding the deposition in 1895 of the ḥakham bashi Abraham Dweck Hakohen in Aleppo—is the absolute silence on them in all printed texts from the time, and the denial that it ever happened in the testimony of the elders of the city. At the time his removal from office was the cause of great turmoil and controversy, not only in Aleppo but also in Istanbul and Jerusalem. It was brought to the attention of the broader public and reported in the newspapers. Yet notwithstanding the contemporary attention devoted to the episode, it was subsequently deliberately erased from the annals of the Jewish community of Aleppo—evidently owing to the fear that it would have a negative effect on the image of the community as a traditional body that respects its rabbis.

In the middle of the nineteenth century there was no model of regional communal organization in Syria. Jewish leadership in the region was decentralized, with no official position of ‘chief rabbi’ of all the communities of the region. Each of the larger communities, and quite a few of the smaller ones as well, tended to appoint its own chief rabbi, whose authority was limited to the members of his particular community. There are no extant records documenting the appointment of a communal rabbi, making it difficult to determine the precise extent of his authority or the full range of privileges granted to him by virtue of that office. Nevertheless, we do have the document from 1862 by which Rabbi Raphael Kassin of Aleppo was appointed rabbi of a group set up outside the authority of chief rabbi Mordecai Labaton. From this document one may tentatively draw certain conclusions regarding the appointment certificates of other rabbis. True, the powers given to Rabbi Kassin were almost unlimited, but it would appear that most community rabbis enjoyed far-reaching authority. On the face of it, the community was almost completely dependent upon its rabbi, although in practice the relationship was not as one-sided as that might imply.