THE CONVENTIONS of traditional Jewish discourse have often been overly generous in describing spiritual leadership. Sometimes it borders on hagiography, liberally bestowing superlatives to the point where all praises seem debased. By contrast, modern Jewish historiography has been quite critical of Jewish leaders in the Middle Ages. Thus we learn from Graetz that after the death of Maimonides, ‘the Jews stood without a leader, and Judaism without a guide’, leaving the Jewish people helpless against the onslaught of the thirteenth-century papacy, spearheaded by Innocent III. And if Graetz is old-hat, consider the following astonishing passage by an eminent historian of medieval Europe, Norman Cantor:

From their rhetoric and substance, one would be hard pressed to prove that these lines were written by a professional historian. But rather than linger on this overblown picture and its highly problematic use of an analogy with the Holocaust, I prefer to approach the question of Jewish leadership by focusing on a specific historical setting: the generation of the Expulsion from Spain. Norman Roth has asserted that ‘an important, and hitherto littleemphasized, characteristic of fifteenth-century Spanish Jewry was the almost complete lack of leadership’. Is this kind of generalization justified?

Several leading modern historians have subjected the leaders of the last generation of Spanish Jewry before the Expulsion to a two-pronged attack.