Jacob Danon’s Appointment as Chief Rabbi of Damascus and its Consequences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter addresses the appointment of Jacob Danon as chief rabbi of Damascus and his response to the new situation that confronted him in the community in the wake of the revolution of the Young Turks in 1908. Rabbi Danon's official appointment as ḥakham bashi transformed Damascus from an isolated community to one that enjoyed ties with the wider Jewish world. For the first time, after centuries during which its closest links had been with Tiberias and Jerusalem, it was now connected primarily to the centre of Ottoman rule in Istanbul. The chapter then looks at Rabbi Danon's campaign against Jewish prostitution, which encountered numerous obstacles, notwithstanding the governor's support. One of the main problems lay in the relations established over the years between the prostitutes and members of the city police, many of whom enjoyed the women's favours in exchange for turning a blind eye to their activities. Muslim policemen and Jewish prostitutes thus joined forces against those who sought to remove the sex trade from the streets of the Jewish quarter. In addition, Rabbi Danon needed to rebuild the institutional framework of the community, which had collapsed years before his arrival in Damascus. The chapter also considers the parliamentary elections of April of 1912, which were the only ones in the history of Damascus under Ottoman rule in which Jews played a significant role, both ceremonial and practical.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".