Rabbinic Judaism Although there are now profound differences among Jewish denominations of Rabbinic Judaism with respect to the binding force of "halakha" (Jewish religious law) and the willingness to challenge preceding interpretations, all identify themselves as coming from the tradition of the oral law and the rabbinic method of analysis. Rabbinic Judaism is distinguished by belief in Moses as "our Rabbi" and that God revealed the Torah in two parts, as both the Written and the Oral Torah, also known as the Mishnah. All the laws in the Written Torah are recorded only as part of a narrative describing God imparting these
Sephardic law and customs basis of the later Sephardic tradition. The Catalan rite was intermediate in character between the Castilian rite and that of Provence: Haham Gaster classified the rites of Oran and Tunis in this group. After the expulsion from Spain, the Sephardim took their liturgy with them to countries throughout the Arab and Ottoman world, where they soon assumed positions of rabbinic and communal leadership. They formed their own communities, often maintaining differences based on their places of origin in the Iberian peninsula. In Salonica, for instance, there were more than twenty synagogues, each using the rite of a different locality in