{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.01968019680196802, 'fraction_numerical': 0.006150061500615006, 'mean_word_length': 5.35546875, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Shadarim in the Colonial Americas: Agents of Inter-Communal Connectivity and Rabbinic Authority

The Ottoman Empire rapidly decentralized following its defeat at the gates of Vienna in 1683. During the eighteenth century, local strongmen filled the power vacuum in frontier settings such as Palestine. These Beys, with the power to collect tax revenue, found an easily exploitable population in the small Jewish communities of Jerusalem, Hebron, Tiberius, and Safed.2 Local Ottoman rulers terrorized these Jewish communities through high taxation and extortion. The instability of the environment itself added additional stresses to communal life in Palestine. Over the course of the eighteenth century, fires and natural disasters, such as the Levantine earthquake of 1759, plagued the region. To alleviate their plight, the Jewish communities of eighteenth-century frontier Palestine looked to the diaspora for support. Early-modern Ottoman rabbinic authority was centralized in Istanbul through the council known as the pekidei kushta. This rabbinic council responded to the various crises of Ottoman Jewry by resurrecting the late-antique tradition of dispatching emissaries from the Holy Land to the diaspora in search of financial support.3 These emissaries are known by their Talmudic acronym sh”dr (sheluh ̇ ah derabanan), or the plural form shadarim. Shadarim traveled to diasporic communities as living embodiments of the Holy Land itself. They journeyed with a certain expectation of respect knowing that the success of their mission depended on their ability to represent the dignity and mystique of the Holy Land.