Jewish Community Leadership within the Eighteenth-Century Ottoman Empire

During the second half of the eighteenth century, the population of Aleppo incorporated dozens of different religious, ethnic, and linguistic groupings. Alongside the Sunni Muslim majority, which numbered about 90,000 people, there were two large religious minorities—the Christians and the Jews— each of which was made up of several smaller sub-groups, all with their own particular characteristics. In all, there were about 20,000 Christians and 4,000 Jews. Until the end of the century, the legal arrangements governing relations among Muslims, Christians, and Jews were accepted by all sides, providing a framework within which non-Muslim minorities enjoyed welldefined rights and a status mutually agreed by each community and the imperial rulers. As the variegated Ottoman society was structured on a religious basis, it was run according to the law of the various religions. The communities defined themselves by religion and each was organized around its place of worship, headed by an imam, a priest, or a rabbi; thus, each religious community was subject to its own religious leadership. Members of these minority groups, known as dhimmi , enjoyed considerable tolerance and broad autonomy in running their internal affairs. In exchange for paying the jizyatax, and accepting certain limitations reflecting the presumption of inferiority to Muslims, Jews and Christians were allowed to choose their own leadership, to organize an independent system of tax collection, to maintain an independent system of religious courts, to run an independent school system, and to conduct their own communal lives with a bare minimum of outside interference.

The Ottoman authorities gave practical recognition and even a degree of support to the Jewish leadership. The leading figure of the Jewish community, the chief rabbi, fulfilled a dual role: on the one hand, he represented the community to the imperial authorities; on the other, he served as spokesman for those authorities to the community. Alongside him served a public lay leadership of seven parnasim , usually selected from the hereditary elites of pedigree and wealth.