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Jewish Religious Traditions

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Prior to the mid-seventeenth century, the Jewish people of Europe were isolated from their gentile counterparts. These isolated communities needed a way to provide for themselves due to their negligent ruling governments. Their solution was to create a social structure known as the kehila, which literally translates to communal organization. There has been debate whether the idea of the kehila was based in Jewish tradition or was conceived to serve practical needs. While there are elements of tradition in the structure of the kehila, much of its structure was formed based on the Jews’ present needs of the time. While rational elements were most likely at the center of most kehilot’s operation, there is no doubt that Jewish religious traditions and values were very much of the emotional connection Jews felt towards their kehila. The kehila relied on the Talmud as one of the sources of authority for its procedural norms. of Part of the reason Jews so readily accepted kehila control was a desire to …show more content…

In this sense, the kehila derived from the attachment of its members to the shared Jewish tradition.
Jews used the kehila as a source of authority on matters of Jewish tradition. The idea of the kehila as a spiritual lead gave Jews a reason to partake in it. Another example of the emotional connection of Jewish traditions and the kehila was the power given to rabbis. In the kehila, rabbis acted as the community judge when it came to matters of the halakhah. The rabbi was also generally thought of as an authoritative figure in the kehila. Because of the communal importance of the rabbis, they were linked with non-religious powers within the kehila:
Thus, the two forms of communal leadership-that of the parnasim and that of the rabbis- were closely linked and dependent upon each other, and neither could exist without the aid of the

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