(9)
among the nation settled here, resolution of all related questions and doubts, responsibility for the continuation of talmudic learning, and finally the most extensive jurisdiction over a large number of juridical cases arising among the nation such as inheritance, divorce, etc.’ The shift in perception of the rabbi, at least in the lay community, is impressively illustrated by a comment made barely a generation later, in 1820, by a leading lay member of the Berlin Jewish community, Ruben Gumpertz. Asked by the government of Saxony for input as to what the appropriate functions of a rabbi in Prussia should be, Gumpertz responded that“quite properly and fittingly, therefore, one could call the rabbis... kosher supervisors, since as indicated above, their functions relate primarily to decisions regarding permitted and forbidden foods, the kashrut of foods and drinks and what pertains to them.’ Clearly the role and stature of the rabbis were undergoing a revolutionary shift. As university-educated elites rose to positions of leadership within the Jewish community, as Geiger had in Wiesbaden and then Breslau , these men had to define themselves and their positions within this new context. Were they even rabbis at all, and if so, in what sense? If they took on the title of rabbi, then how did the content of the term need to change to accommodate them? These are the issues that stand constantly behind the debates of the 1840s. When we think about these kinds of questions and changes with German Judaism of the nineteenth century, we tend to think of them in terms of developments internal to Judaism . But as I shall argue below, the reality was more complex. As university-trained intellectuals gradually took over leadership positions in the German Jewish community, the debate over these issues moved out beyond the limits of the traditional talmudic literature. My claim is that these deliberations among the new university trained rabbis were in fact conducted more or less as extensions of controversies that were just then also animating the German academic world. In short, philosophical discussions of the nature of nation, law, and ethics in general were being applied by these men to Judaism in particular. The transfer of these discussions to the case of Judaism was in