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Jews and Judaism
 
Who is a Jew? · Etymology · Culture

Jewish leadership has evolved over time. Since the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE, there has been no single body that has a leadership position over the entire Jewish diaspora. Various branches of Judaism, as well as Jewish religious or secular communities and political movements around the world elect or appoint their governing bodies, often subdivided by country or region.

Historic leadership

Biblical leadership (before 70 CE)

During the era of the Tanakh, various forms of leadership developed. There were the heads of the original Hebrew tribes, and then also prophets such as Moses, Jeremiah and Samuel and whose words inspire people to this day, judges such as Samson, kings such as David and Solomon, priests of the Temple in Jerusalem, and the Sanhedrin which was the judiciary.

Mishnaic, Talmudic, Middle Ages leadership (70 to 1600s)

With the demise of ancient kingdoms of Israel and Judah and coinciding with the revolt of the Maccabees against ancient Greece and later Jewish-Roman wars, the sages of the Mishnah and subsequently the Talmud, referred to as the Oral Law in Judaism, took on a growing and central leadership roles. After the destruction of the Second Temple and the subsequent exile for almost two thousand years, the Jews scattered throughout the world turned to their most learned rabbis for local leadership and council.

During Bar Kokhba's revolt against Roman Empire (132-135), the supreme religious authority Rabbi Akiva sanctioned Simon bar Kokhba to be a war leader, whereas during the 2nd century Judah haNasi was not only the supreme temporal leader sanctioned by Rome, but also edited the original work of the Mishnah which became the "de-facto constitution" of the world's Jewry. The final editions of the Talmud became the core curriculum of the majority of Jews.

In Babylonia the Exilarch was almost always a rabbinical personality. The Geonim such as Saadia Gaon (892-942) were not only great sages but also political guides. The writings and rulings of those such as Rashi (1040-1105), Maimonides (1135-1204), Yosef Karo (1488-1575) who published the most widely accepted code of Jewish law the Shulkhan Arukh, Isaac Luria (1534-1572), the Vilna Gaon (1720-1797), the Chafetz Chaim (1838-1933) and many others have shaped Jewish religious law for almost two thousand years, as their religious rulings were published, distributed, studied, and observed until the present time.

Early modern leadership (18th and 19th centuries)

The loose collection of learned rabbis that governed the dispersed Jewish community held sway for a long time. Great parts of Central Europe accepted the leadership of the rabbinical Council of Four Lands from the 16th to the late 18th centuries. In the Eastern Europe, in spite of the rivalry between the schools of thought of the Vilna Gaon (or the GRA, Rabbi Elijah ben Solomon, 1720-1797) of the Mitnagdim, who spoke against Hasidic Judaism and Baal Shem Tov (Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, 1700-1760), the founder of Hasidic Judaism), rabbis were regarded as the final arbiters of community decisions. Tens of thousands of Responsa and many works were published and studied wherever Jews lived in organized communities.

Modern religious leadership (after 19th century)

Decline of rabbinical influence

With the growth of the Renaissance and the development of the secular modern world, and as Jews were welcomed into non-Jewish society particularly during the times of Napoleon in the 18th and 19th centuries, Jews began to leave the Jewish ghettos in Europe, and simultaneously rejected the traditional roles of the rabbis as communal and religious leaders. New leaders such as Israel Jacobson, father of the German Reform Judaism movement, launched an egalitarian, modernist stance that challenged the Orthodoxy. The resulting fractures in Jewish society has translated into a situation whereby there is no single religious governing body for the entire Jewish community at the present time.