What is a rabbi?
Judaism in Five Minutes - Sarah Imhoff
Sarah Imhoff [+]
Indiana University
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Sarah Imhoff is Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Chair in Jewish Studies and Professor in the Department of Religious Studies and the Borns Jewish Studies Program at Indiana University. She is author of Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism (Indiana University Press, 2017) and The Lives of Jessie Sampter: Queer, Disabled, Zionist (Duke University Press, 2022). She is the founding co-editor of the journal American Religion.
Description
This chapter traces the role of rabbis from antiquity to the present. Beginning with late antiquity, when a rabbi was a male religious scholar who read and interpreted the Bible and Jewish legal texts and traditions. In the medieval period, rabbis functioned as interpreters of text and also of Jewish law. It was only in the modern period the role of rabbi became a job located primarily at synagogues with the expectation of similar duties to Christian clergy, such as pastoral care. It concludes with a discussions of Jewish communities’ ordination of women as rabbis.