Rabbi Hayim Nahum's Visit to Damascus

During the spring of 1910, having consolidated his position as ḥakham bashiin Istanbul, Rabbi Nahum resumed in earnest his reorganization of the rabbinic leadership throughout the communities of the Ottoman empire, a task he had begun two years earlier. His aim was to appoint rabbis who would be amenable to the norms and demands of the new rule. He may also have wished to entrench his centralized control over the network of rabbis throughout the empire by appointing men who would owe their office to him, rather than to the ancien régime . Many communities within the empire had experienced struggles over the rabbinate; among them was Jerusalem, which over time had become progressively weaker as a political centre of Judaism, and to a certain extent also as a centre of excellence in Torah—a fact which enabled Rabbi Nahum to promote Istanbul as a strong alternative. He called upon those communities in which there had been difficulties surrounding appointments to rabbinic office to convene their institutions and to elect new rabbis of the type described in the contemporary press as enlightened, educated, and non-fanatical. This call was coupled with an open threat that any community failing to comply with this instruction would be isolated from other communities in the empire, and that it and its institutions would not be recognized by the authorities.

Rabbi Nahum gave the leading members of the Damascus community a list of three candidates from among the rabbis of Jerusalem and asked them to choose the one they deemed most suitable to serve as their chief rabbi. So weak was the Damascus community at this point, and so unwilling were its members to take responsibility for their own destiny, that they had no local spiritual and political leader of any stature who could take such an office upon himself.