The renewal of semichah in Safed: an attempt to bring back the Sanhedrin

True semichah — ordination running in a chain from Moses through Joshua and the elders — lapsed at the end of the talmudic age. With it went courts of full authority: none to impose the penalties of the law, none to sanctify the month on testimony, none to convene a Sanhedrin. The rabbi of later centuries is a scholar and a judge, but not a samuch.

In 1538 the sages of Safed ordained Rabbi Yaakov Berav, and he ordained four others, among them Rabbi Yosef Karo and the Mabit. The ground was a passage in Maimonides (Laws of the Sanhedrin 4:11): if all the sages of the Land of Israel agree to appoint judges and ordain them, the ordination holds.

The practical occasion is known from the dispute itself: after the expulsion from Spain, anusim — those baptised by force — were returning to the Land of Israel, and some of their transgressions carry karet under the law; lashes annul it, and only an ordained court may impose lashes. The messianic sense of the plan — "I will restore your judges as at first" — is drawn by scholars (Louis Ginzberg, Jacob Katz) from the Maimonidean line of thought; Berav himself did not put the matter that way.

The chief rabbi of Jerusalem, the Ralbach, refused the ordination. He set out his case in the Kuntres ha-Semichah: Jerusalem had not been asked, so the condition of "all the sages" was unmet; Maimonides himself ends the passage with "the matter requires decision"; and above all, an ordained court would claim the right to fix the calendar, and rival calendars would tear the Jewish world apart. He was supported by the Radbaz, chief rabbi of Egypt.

His opponents also informed the Ottoman authorities that Safed was preparing to restore a Jewish state, and Berav had to flee to Egypt — he ordained the four before leaving, so that the thing would not break off. He returned and died in Safed in 1546; with his death the dispute died down.

But the chain ran on some four generations: Karo ordained Alshich, Alshich ordained Chaim Vital in 1590, Yaakov Berav II ordained Elazar Azikri in 1596. And men returned to the plan: Rabbi Israel of Shklov in 1830 sought the lost tribes in Yemen in the hope that among them ordination had never lapsed; Rabbi Aharon Mendel HaCohen of Cairo gathered some five hundred rabbis behind his call in 1901; Rabbi Yehuda Leib Maimon proposed in 1948–51 to turn the Chief Rabbinate into a Sanhedrin. All three times without result.