Between Court Jew and Jewish Court: David Oppenheim, the Prague rabbinate, and eighteenth-century Jewish political culture

Studies of the rise of the European state continue to evoke fascination and scholarly controversy. Drawing on theories of state formation, imperial administration, self-fashioning, and legal theory to approach state and personal archives in Bohemia, Moravia, Oxford and Jerusalem, this dissertation will use the career of David Oppenheim (1664-1736)---Jewish legal decisor, kinsman of Europe's most influential court Jews, and chief rabbi of the Czech crown lands---to examine changes in the relationship between the Habsburg Empire and local Jewish communities during the early eighteenth century. A unique but significant figure, Oppenheim was instrumental in Habsburg imperial administration as much as he was a leader of Jewish "state-within-a-state building," a political policy for a minority polity that had no interest in statehood but much invested in administrative autonomy. This project seeks to understand the role nobles, kings, and burghers played in shaping the internal constitution of the pre-modern Jewish community of Prague, and the converse role played by rabbis and other Jewish leaders in inviting increased state incursion into the affairs of the autonomous Jewish community. It argues that proponents of this policy were not solely the imposing powers of the state and Jewish Enlightened "modernizers," but an arrangement between state officials and traditional Jewish leaders that saw increasing value in cooperation between the two, which, ironically, would be inimical to Jewish autonomous communal preservation by the eighteenth century's close. It further explores the means by which those leaders fashioned themselves as authentic representatives of their Jewish polities with respect both to Habsburg authority and their own Jewish constituents, and inquires after the means by which such a career was assembled. In so doing, it seeks to contribute to the history of premodern Czech Jewry, and early modern Jews more generally. By placing Oppenheim's activities within their larger context as a story of empire and intermediaries, of communities and constitutions, of Talmudic academies and Jesuit colleges, the activities of this rabbinic life invite us into of one of Europe's most vibrant cities and dynamic religious theaters to explore the history of Jewish and Habsburg political culture. This dissertation follows the career of David Oppenheim (1664-1736)---Jewish legal decisor, kinsman of Europe's most influential Court Jews, and chief rabbi of the Bohemian crownlands---to examine the role nobles, emperors, and civil servants played in shaping the internal constitution of the pre-modern Jewish community of Prague, and the converse role played by rabbis alongside (rather than in competition with) other Jewish leaders in inviting increased state incursion into the affairs of the autonomous Jewish community. It argues that proponents of this policy were not solely the imposing powers of the state and Jewish Enlightened "modernizers," but an arrangement between state officials and traditional Jewish leaders that saw increasing value in cooperation between the two, not bilaterally but across a network of Jewish ties of kinship, economics, and scholarship. It pays special attention to the ties between rabbinic leaders in varying locales and between lay and rabbinic elites to challenge earlier models of communal leadership as rife with lay-rabbinic tension or of rabbinic decline in the eighteenth century. This is achieved by exploring Oppenheim's self-fashioning with respect both to Habsburg authority and his own Jewish constituents by examining his activities as a book collector, his role as an intermediary in and patron of the Jewish book trade, and his scholarship, all of which took place within the context of a regional---Ashkenazic---discourse of Jewish law and rabbinic standing.