Academic Studies Press Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain's Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks (Judaism and Jewish Life)

Product Description 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Meir Persoff’s scholarly yet readable account of these seven appointments draws on a wealth of hitherto unaccessed and unpublished material, and on the stories of many of the protagonists involved, including those who, by fair means and foul, failed to gain (or chose to reject) the coveted prize. Review "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 available to them many items that were hitherto unknown or inadequately exploited." – Stefan C. Reif, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Hebrew and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge “[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 ‘a spiritual guide, competent to maintain piety and peace,’ as the position was described in 1843.” -- Abigail Klein Leichman ― The Jerusalem Post Magazine 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 … 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. -- Benjamin J. Elton, Jewish Journal of Sociology, on Dr Persoff’s previous study, Hats in the Ring: Choosing Britain’s Chief Rabbis from Adler to Sacks (Academic Studies Press, 2013) ― Jewish Journal of Sociology, Vol. 55, No. 1 (2013) 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. -- Rabbi Dr Raymond Apple ― Australian Jewish News Hats in the Ring is not a compendium of deeds and accomplishments of Great Britain’s 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 ‘power plays,’ we come to understand many of the endemic problems and issues facing Britain’s 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 Judaism’s more modern sects, including the Conservative movement’s Masorti, and unprecedented international situations, such as the Holocaust and the birth of the modern S