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November 13, 2024

Uncovering the Legal Records of France’s Once-Largest Jewish Community

How an 18th-century rabbinic court dealt with everything from charitable trusts to illegitimate pregnancies.

In the late 18th century, Metz was home to some 3,000 mostly Yiddish-speaking Jews—making it the largest Jewish community in all of France. Like many European Jewish communities of its day, it enjoyed a degree of legal autonomy. The local rabbinical court or beit din, whose judges included two of the era’s most prominent talmudists, left behind a record book, known as a pinkas, for the years 1771 to 1789. Eliezer Brodt and Dan Rabinowitz explain:

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