Journals and diaries have long provided historians and readers with unique insights into historical events. From Anne Frank to Virginia Woolf and more, the details in these accounts are of significant historical value.
While not at the individual level, Protocols of
Journals and diaries have long provided historians and readers with unique insights into historical events. From Anne Frank to Virginia Woolf and more, the details in these accounts are of significant historical value.
While not at the individual level, Protocols of Justice: The Pinkas of the Metz Rabbinic Court 1771-1789 (Brill Academic Publishers ISBN 978-9004265158) details the official register of cases that came before the Metz, France rabbinic court (beis din) in the two decades prior to the French Revolution. The register (pinkas) deals with a wide range of cases that the Jews of Metz dealt with.
Author Jay Berkovitz, Professor and Chair of Judaic and Near Eastern Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, has painstakingly transcribed the pinkas, which provides fascinating and new insights in the lives of the Jews of Metz. Through his work, Berkovitz has opened a manuscript long gathering dust in the YIVO archives, brought it to light, and created an invaluable resource for scholars.
But his contribution is not simply as a transcriber; rather his decipherment of the cases significantly changes our understanding of how the Metz rabbinic court interacted with French society at lar