Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Rabbinical Conferences gathers three assemblies of Jewish religious authority separated by seventeen centuries, and one of the three, on close scholarly examination, probably never happened at all.

The Council of Jamnia is the gathering nineteenth and twentieth century scholarship spoke of confidently, an assembly of rabbis at Yavneh around the year 90 that supposedly closed the Hebrew canon and expelled the Christians from the synagogue. The rabbinic academy at Yavneh was real and important after the fall of Jerusalem, but the sources record discussions about whether particular books make the hands unclean, not a canon fixing council, and Jack P. Lewis showed in 1964 that the received account rested on inference rather than evidence; the atlas holds the entry because the phantom council is still cited as though it were real.

The Grand Sanhedrin of 1807 was a real assembly, seventy-one members styled after the ancient Sanhedrin, convened at Napoleon's order in Paris to give religious ratification to answers an Assembly of Jewish Notables had already given the previous year on Jewish civil loyalty, intermarriage and usury; it declared that Jewish law distinguishes eternally binding religious obligations from civil ones that could properly adapt to the laws of the country Jews lived in. The Pittsburgh Conference of 1885, a gathering of Reform rabbis, produced an eight point platform that defined American Reform Judaism for half a century, and almost every position it took has since been revised by the movement that adopted it, an unusually well documented case of a body reversing itself in public.