Talk:Crown rabbi

One article or two?
When researching this, the question arises almost immediately whether there should be one article, or two–one about the kazyonny ravvin in the Russian Empire, and a second article about the rabino mayor in Spain. I can see arguments on both sides here.

Arguing for separation, is the fact that these positions were widely separated in both distance and time, and I see no evidence that there was any direct connection between the two. Arguing for keeping one article, is the fact that the kazyonny ravvin and rabino mayor were so similar in kind, being an intermediary position between the governing majority Christian government and a local Jewish community that lived in semi-autonomous urban pockets within the larger kingdom or empire, and where the post was given to someone who may or may not be a rabbi but in any case is selected not for the depth of his knowledge of Jewish law and traditions but rather for his ability to work well with the government due to his language abilities and other capacities useful to the government, and where the post may confer significant social, economic, political and other advantages to the person holding the post, which may lead to resentment within his own community.

But even so, this is not why I chose to create one article to start with, as I don't think that as a WP editor that that is our decision to make. Rather, we should follow the usage of experts in the field, and in particular what we can find in reliable sources. It was this latter consideration that tipped the balance, as I found that most references I came across used the term crown rabbi to refer to both concepts. There seems to be a lot more information about the kazyonny ravvin than about the rabino mayor to be found, and for that reason, I chose to place the Russian Empire case first in the lead paragraph, and in the body, even though they were prevalent in Russia six centuries after the rabino mayor first appeared in Spain.

A further note about the one-or-two question, involved the treatment in other language Wikipedias: there is no казённый раввин article in Russian WP yet, and the rabino mayor article in Spanish WP talks only about those in Spain. It would be interesting to see what was said in other Wikipedias not directly involved, such as Staatsrabiner in the German WP or rabbin de la couronne (or rabbin d'État) on French WP, but these articles do not exist yet. But concepts don't always translate one-for-one, a concept in one language can end up being two in another, so even if French, German or other articles are written and treat the topic one way or another, this is not necessarily persuasive for English Wikipedia (although they may make the wikidata links difficult to arrange, but that's a separate, and minor, issue). In fact, we should decide based on what's best for English WP, and the preponderance of usage by scholars writing in English should be the deciding factor.

So far, based on what I've seen, the term crown rabbi is used for both the Russian and the Iberian concepts, so I went with one article based on that. Mathglot (talk) 19:10, 3 June 2015 (UTC)


 * If we decide to split, the articles should probably be named Crown rabbi (Russia) and Crown rabbi (Iberia) (the latter because Spain isn't enough–some of them were in Portugal), and a disambiguation page should be created and named simply Crown rabbi since neither of the two articles is primary. Mathglot (talk) 21:49, 3 June 2015 (UTC)


 * I'm leaning towards splitting the article, now. First of all, I didn't think there would be enough material to support an article about the Iberian crown rabbi institution, but more and more is turning up, and I think there's enough now to make a decent-sized short article.  Another thing in favor of a split, is that the English term crown rabbi is used differently when referring to Jewish officials in Iberia vs. in the Russian Empire.  In the context of Russia, the English term refers to all the rabbis acting in each local Jewish community.  In Iberia, the same post exists at the local level as it does in Russia, but the term crown rabbi is not used to refer to them--instead, instead the English term is reserved for the high official presiding over all the local (and regional) rabbis, and reporting directly to the King. Mathglot (talk) 20:46, 6 June 2015 (UTC)