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Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain's Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks

Meir Persoff

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Description for Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain's Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks hardcover. Prior to the latest Chief Rabbinical selection process, seven eminent rabbis were appointed to British Jewry's highest ecclesiastical post, although only six were installed and saw out their terms of office. Persoff's scholarly yet readable account of these seven appointments draws on a wealth of hitherto unaccessed and unpublished material. Num Pages: 340 pages, Illustrations. BIC Classification: HRJ. Category: (G) General (US: Trade). Dimension: 236 x 165 x 29. Weight in Grams: 678.
Prior to the latest chief rabbinical selection process, seven eminent rabbis were appointed to British Jewry’s highest ecclesiastical post, although only six were installed and saw out their terms of office. The manner of their appointment was invariably coloured by intrigue, in-fighting and a host of other influences, not least an increasingly potent input by the dayanim of the London Beth Din, themselves not immune to strategic self-interest. Meir Persoff’s scholarly yet readable account of these seven appointments draws on a wealth of hitherto unaccessed and unpublished material, and on the stories of many of the protagonists involved, including those ... Read more

Product Details

Format

Hardback

Publication date

2013

Publisher

Academic Studies Press United States

Number of pages

340

Condition

New

Number of Pages

340

Place of Publication

Brighton, United States

ISBN

9781618111777

SKU

V9781618111777

Shipping Time

Usually ships in 15 to 20 working days

Ref

99-15

About Meir Persoff

Meir Persoff (PhD Middlesex University, London), now a freelance writer and editor, edited the London Jewish Chronicle's news, features, arts, Judaism, letters, and obituaries sections during a distinguished 40-year career at the paper. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was appointed a Justice of the Peace ... Read more

Reviews for Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain's Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks

Historians sharply focused on Anglo-Jewry will have reason to be grateful to Dr Persoff for the choice fare that he has here set before them. Whatever their views, and however they understand the personalities and interpret the events, they will find themselves in his debt for having drawn attention to such a wealth of source material and for having made ... Read moreavailable to them many items that were hitherto unknown or inadequately exploited." â Stefan C. Reif, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Hebrew and Fellow of St Johnâs College, University of Cambridge|â[T]his meticulously researched and footnoted book [adds] a valuable dimension to our understanding of a peculiar establishment that has wielded a fair amount of power in our age. . . . Sure to resonate most strongly with British and Anglophile Jews, as well as serious students of modern Jewish history, Hats in the Ring provides a wealth of insights into the effort to procure for Great Britain âa spiritual guide, competent to maintain piety and peace,â as the position was described in 1843.â âAbigail Klein Leichman, The Jerusalem Post Magazine, September 12, 2013|Persoff gives a blow-by-blow account of the twists and turns [of each election]. He has undertaken a prodigious amount of research and has given his readers a tremendous wealth of information which will be of lasting value to students of Anglo-Jewish religious history â¦ No one who wishes to understand the development of the office of Chief Rabbi and the lay and rabbinic figures who guided its fortunes will be able to ignore it.|Persoff is a painstaking historian with access to amazing sources of information, not only because he worked for the London Jewish Chronicle for 40 years, but because he lived through and documented many of the happenings he chronicles and has a broad network of contacts from whom he was able to glean much of the inside story. Additionally, he is a lucid writer and there is hardly a word out of place in this, as in his previous books. . . .I heartily commend his book. . . .Hats in the Ring should be bought, read, digested and enjoyed.|Hats in the Ring is not a compendium of deeds and accomplishments of Great Britainâs Chief Rabbis, but rather a history of the inter-communal fighting, discord, and dissensions leading up to the appointment of a chief rabbi. In addition to watching the âpower plays,â we come to understand many of the endemic problems and issues facing Britainâs Jews from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.... Drawing on a vast number of correspondence and other primary materials, Hats in the Ring shows us how the nature of the position and personal qualifications of Chief Rabbi changed with the times as a result of: the continual feuding between Orthodox Jewry and Judaismâs more modern sects, including the Conservative movementâs Masorti, and unprecedented international situations, such as the Holocaust and the birth of the modern State of Israel. Persoff does an outstanding job redacting a vast amount of information and blending it into a clear and comprehensive study of the Anglo-Jewish community as it searches for and selects religious leadership at the highest level.|Meir Persoff has mined an impressive range of communal records, memoirs, interviews and the available secondary sources to provide case studies of the communal politics behind each selection [of British Chief Rabbi]. . . . A major strength of the book is that by focusing on the election process, Persoff, a former editor at the Jewish Chronicle, provides insight into both the long-term tensions within Anglo-Jewry and a snapshot of intra-communal issues that dominated each Chief Rabbiâs selection. Persoff also provides the text of the inaugural sermon of each rabbi, thereby enabling the reader to see how the communal controversies often shaped the agenda of the office holder. . . . Persoffâs study reminds the reader of the tired (and probably not very funny anymore) joke about four Jews and five opinions. Persoff also implicitly addresses a topic related to the diversity, or chaos, of Jewish communal politics: the almost maniacal desire throughout the modern age, but especially in the post-Holocaust world, to achieve consensus or unity between warring/competing factions within the community. This desire for consensus is not unique to Anglo-Jewry, for in the aftermath of World War II, American Jewish leaders also pursued it with abandon. Show Less

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Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain's Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks

Meir Persoff

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