Hats in the Ring

Meir Persoff (PhD Middlesex University, London), now a freelance writer and editor, edited the London Jewish Chronicle's news, features, arts, Judaism, letters, and obituaries sections during a distinguished 40-year career at the paper. He is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, and was appointed a Justice of the Peace for the Middlesex Commission Area in 2001.

Historians sharply focused on Anglo-Jewry will have reason to be grateful to Dr Persoff for the choice fare that he has here set before them. Whatever their views, and however they understand the personalities and interpret the events, they will find themselves in his debt for having drawn attention to such a wealth of source material and for having made available to them many items that were hitherto unknown or inadequately exploited." – Stefan C. Reif, Emeritus Professor of Medieval Hebrew and Fellow of St John’s College, University of Cambridge|“[T]his meticulously researched and footnoted book [adds] a valuable dimension to our understanding of a peculiar establishment that has wielded a fair amount of power in our age. . . . Sure to resonate most strongly with British and Anglophile Jews, as well as serious students of modern Jewish history, Hats in the Ring provides a wealth of insights into the effort to procure for Great Britain ‘a spiritual guide, competent to maintain piety and peace,’ as the position was described in 1843.” –Abigail Klein Leichman, The Jerusalem Post Magazine, September 12, 2013|Persoff gives a blow-by-blow account of the twists and turns [of each election]. He has undertaken a prodigious amount of research and has given his readers a tremendous wealth of information which will be of lasting value to students of Anglo-Jewish religious history … No one who wishes to understand the development of the office of Chief Rabbi and the lay and rabbinic figures who guided its fortunes will be able to ignore it.|Persoff is a painstaking historian with access to amazing sources of information, not only because he worked for the London Jewish Chronicle for 40 years, but because he lived through and documented many of the happenings he chronicles and has a broad network of contacts from whom he was able to glean much of the inside story. Additionally, he is a lucid writer and there is hardly a word out of place in this, as in his previous books. . . .I heartily commend his book. . . .Hats in the Ring should be bought, read, digested and enjoyed.|Hats in the Ring is not a compendium of deeds and accomplishments of Great Britain’s Chief Rabbis, but rather a history of the inter-communal fighting, discord, and dissensions leading up to the appointment of a chief rabbi. In addition to watching the ‘power plays,’ we come to understand many of the endemic problems and issues facing Britain’s Jews from the mid-nineteenth through the mid-twentieth centuries.... Drawing on a vast number of correspondence and other primary materials, Hats in the Ring shows us how the nature of the position and personal qualifications of Chief Rabbi changed with the times as a result of: the continual feuding between Orthodox Jewry and Judaism’s more modern sects, including the Conservative movement’s Masorti, and unprecedented international situations, such as the Holocaust and the birth of the modern State of Israel. Persoff does an outstanding job redacting a vast amount of information and blending it into a clear and comprehensive study of the Anglo-Jewish community as it searches for and selects religious leadership at the highest level.|Meir Persoff has mined an impressive range of communal records, memoirs, interviews and the available secondary sources to provide case studies of the communal politics behind each selection [of British Chief Rabbi]. . . . A major strength of the book is that by focusing on the election process, Persoff, a former editor at the Jewish Chronicle, provides insight into both the long-term tensions within Anglo-Jewry and a snapshot of intra-communal issues that dominated each Chief Rabbi’s selection. Persoff also provides the text of the inaugural sermon of each rabbi, thereby enabling the reader to see how the communal controversies often shaped the agenda of the office holder. . . . Persoff’s study reminds the reader of the tired (and probably not very funny anymore) joke about four Jews and five opinions. Persoff also implicitly addresses a topic related to the diversity, or chaos, of Jewish communal politics: the almost maniacal desire throughout the modern age, but especially in the post-Holocaust world, to achieve consensus or unity between warring/competing factions within the community. This desire for consensus is not unique to Anglo-Jewry, for in the aftermath of World War II, American Jewish leaders also pursued it with abandon.