In a fascinating chapter dealing with the “nature of eating” in Shulhan shel Arba, a short thirteenth-century manual on rabbinic eating rituals, R. Bahya b. Asher suggests that Torah scholars alone are fit to eat meat, based on the following passage from the Talmud: “it is forbidden for an ignoramus [am ha-aretz] to eat meat, as it is written, ‘This is the torah of beast and fowl’ (Lev 11:46); for all who engage in Torah, it is permitted to eat the flesh of beast and fowl. This passage raises many questions, especially for a vegetarian! First, why would an intellectual or spiritual elite use meat-eating as a way to distinguish itself from the masses? The field of comparative religions offers many counter-examples to this tendency: the vegetarian diet of the Hindu Brahmin caste, of Buddhist priests and nuns, the ancient Pythagoreans, the Neoplatonist regimen advocated by Porphyry in On Abstinence, or even contemporary eco-theologians, animal rights activists, and feminist vegetarians like Carol Adams.

Samuel ibn Tibbon (died ca. 1232) is best known as the translator of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed. But as Aviezer Ravitzky has shown in his doctoral dissertation and in a series of recent articles, ibn Tibbon was an important thinker in his own right. First and foremost, ibn Tibbon appears to have been the earliest significant interpreter of Maimonides' philosophical thought. He was also one of the most influential. While there had been suspicions, even during his lifetime, that Maimonides held radical esoteric philosophical views, ibn Tibbon was the first to lend sophistication to this viewpoint by developing an elaborate system of interpretation for unlocking the secrets of the Guide, one that would have a significant impact on subsequent interpreters of Maimonides.

Rabbinical appointments in modern times have been the subject of some study: in Ashkenaz it was customary for a son to inherit the office of rabbi from his father, provided he was deserving. Simḥa Assaf writes: “We do not find [in earlier periods] the practice which is widespread today, whereby a community, upon the death of its rabbi, appoints his son or son-in-law even if they are unworthy replacements. Previously, communities were not subject to this ‘dynastic imposition.’” Under the rule of the Ottoman Empire, in the seventeenth century, there are attestations of the rabbinical office becoming a dynasty reserved for certain families, notably Ṭayṭaṣaq, Ṣarfati and ‘Arameh, in Saloniki.Although the rabbinate was not perceived as the rightful monopoly of any particular family, interviews conducted with rabbis and community leaders on this point indicate that certain families had clearly been preferred over others. From the seventeenth century onwards this grew more pronounced: occasionally, the community would refrain from appointing a new rabbi and wait for a younger son to reach maturity so he could inherit his father's position.