The herem חרם

The herem is exclusion from the community: one does not pray with the man, trade with him, sit under one roof with him or read what he has written. It worked differently in different communities, but the Amsterdam case is the best studied and so serves as a model — provided it is not misread.

Yosef Kaplan counted it from the communal registers, and the picture came out the reverse of the familiar one. In the Ascamot of Kahal Kadosh Talmud Torah the threat of herem was attached to nearly a hundred separate ordinances: appealing to a gentile court without the ma'amad's leave, printing a book without permission, insulting a parnas, quarrelling in synagogue, trading with Iberian territories against the ordinance, marital and financial matters. It was above all a means of enforcing the statutes — a penalty, not an anathema. Of some forty cases examined, four were maintained for life; the great majority were lifted within days or weeks. By the late 1670s the ma'amad had moved to a milder instrument — the revocation of communal rights and honours.

From which an important thing follows. The two famous theological cases — Uriel da Costa and Baruch Spinoza — are statistically atypical, and the institution cannot be judged from them. Spinoza's herem is famous precisely because it was exceptional: unusually violent in language, never lifted, and — uniquely — forbidding the reading of works the man had not yet written.

And one more thing, about power. At Amsterdam the herem was imposed not by a rabbinic court but by the ma'amad, a lay board of merchants, "with the consent of the honourable hakhamim." The rabbis were the ma'amad's salaried employees. That arrangement explains at once the da Costa affair, the Spinoza affair, the Hayyun affair and the reception of the Ramchal.