Historically, semicha traced an unbroken chain of ordination understood to reach back to Moses himself, though the original form of that chain, requiring ordination in the Land of Israel by an already-ordained rabbi, lapsed in late antiquity, and the modern practice of rabbinic ordination developed as a somewhat different institution, conferred by an individual rabbi or a rabbinical seminary upon a student judged to have mastered the required body of law, rather than as a literal continuation of the ancient chain. The major modern movements, Orthodox, Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist Judaism, each maintain their own seminaries and standards for ordination, differing considerably in their approach to Jewish law's binding authority and, correspondingly, in the specific curriculum and legal reasoning a candidate must demonstrate.
Women's ordination has followed a sharply divided path across the movements: Reform Judaism ordained its first woman rabbi, Sally Priesand, in 1972, followed by Reconstructionist and then Conservative Judaism, which began ordaining women in 1985 after extended internal debate, while Orthodox Judaism has not adopted women's rabbinic ordination as a mainstream practice, though a small number of Orthodox-affiliated institutions have in recent years begun ordaining women under alternative titles or more limited authorizations, a development that remains contested within Orthodoxy itself.