Jakab Réka: Bérlőből polgár. Pápa város zsidó közösségének társadalom- és gazdaságtörténete 1748-1848 (Veszprém, 2014)
candidates for the role of judge from among the wealthier members of the community. The taxpaying members of the community, exercising their voting rights, chose the judge from among these candidates each year, and the other community leaders as well. At the beginning of the 19th century, voting rights were linked to seat ownership in the Synagogue. As well as these elected leaders of the community, the community also paid people to perform certain functions. Chief among these was the community’s notary. Other employees were the butcher, the cantor, the teacher and the rabbi. The rabbi, however, was engaged on the basis of a vote among the community. When a new rabbi had been elected and was about to be engaged, the community also had to seek the approval of the landowner. The community drew up a separate contract with the rabbi to define his responsibilities and remuneration. We examine the inner life of the community in a separate chapter, focussed primarily on its social aspects; especially the willingness of the community to integrate, and the closely connected contradictions in attitudes that developed between religious and liturgical matters on the one hand and matters of custom on the other towards the end of our period. By examining the conflict arising from the construction of the Synagogue and the election of Lipót Löw as rabbi, we tried to get a handle on the process whereby the responses to the expectations directed towards the Jewish communities in Hungary by the host society during the social and religious emancipation of the Jews were formulated. From the few extant sources on the inner life of the community, we can get an idea of the fault lines between the wealthier - and therefore more distinctly bourgeois members of the community, more open to religious innovations - and the less well-to-do members who generally lived in their richer coreligionists’ houses and made their living as craftsmen, itinerant merchants, or door to door salesmen. They were notably more conservative in religious matters and tended to cling more firmly to tradition and ritual. This research has produced fresh results in looking at the communitarian (religious) organisation of the Jewry of Pápa by shedding light on the social fault-lines and religious/ritual conflicts between members of the community that developed in the mid-i9th century. With the aid of the sources, we have helped make coherent - with Pápa as a case study - the divisions within Hungarian Jewry arising from the religious reform movements and emancipation. Before the construction of the new Synagogue, the old Synagogue, in use since the 1750s stood in its place; in the 19th century, an ancillary building 297
