Evelyne Oliel-Grausz

While it was not common practice for Sephardi Jews in London, Amsterdam, Bordeaux, to resort to local resources to resolve disputes between Jews, my project explores to what extent the communities of the western Sephardi Diaspora did function as a forum of dispute settlement, as a legal resource, and how these community fora, in their various forms and functions, were articulated to local legal resources. The novelty of this project, which is already very much in progress in terms of the archival research, is threefold: First it examines a poorly explored function of the early modern corporate body of the kehillah, the Jewish community considered as a potential forum for dispute settlement; secondly, it develops a contextualised comparative approach, and the need to elaborate an analytical toolkit that could at the same time embrace and differentiate kehillot developing within political and legal contexts as different as Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, Bordeaux, colonial settings or a fortiori Livorno where the community court functioned as a first instance Jewish court. By doing so, it calls for a new assessment of the notion of “autonomy”, commonly used by historians as defining early modern Jewries. Last, as this project is built around the use of judicial records, it allows for a study of the uses of justice “from below”, and a “hands-on”, approach to legal pluralism in action.

The detailed study of a selection of cases calls for a further reflection on the meaning of early modern legal pluralism applied to Jewish societies. It seems relevant to add already that this project is based essentially on thoroughly new archival records, whether community records, which include lay and rabbinical judicial records, or records from the local courts, in Amsterdam, Livorno, London and Bordeaux.