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The shared religious traditions of Rabbinic Judaism allowed Jews who were spread all over the world to follow similar practices. Many aspects of life were codified in the vast corpus of Jewish law: the outlines of the prayer book, the basic prohibitions of the Sabbath and dietary laws, regulations on married life, the Jewish calendar and its holidays, circumcision, marriage and funeral practices, even which shoe to put on first. Jewish men everywhere wore a prayer shawl (tallit) and phylacteries (tefillin) every weekday morning and prayed in Hebrew three times a day. Jewish women went to the ritual bath every month after menstruation, lit the Sabbath lights, and (in remembrance of the Temple offerings) burned a portion of the dough they kneaded. All over the world Jews listened to the blowing of the ram's horn on Rosh Hashanah, built huts and ate in them on Sukkot, and sat at the family table on Passover for the annual Seder ritual with matzos, wine, and bitter herbs.

But no tradition, not even the Jewish one, can codify everything. Some aspects of life always escaped the formal legal enactments. Even though rabbinic Jews everywhere shared the same legal written texts, the Bible, Talmud, and Shulchan Aruch, there were still many aspects of these texts that were open to interpretation or that were simply not spelled out. The written tradition might prescribe a festive meal on the Sabbath, but it did not provide a detailed menu. It might require modesty in dress, but did not give a description of what garments one must wear. It prescribed the texts for prayer but did not determine what melody had to accompany them.

Jews in traditional societies did not see the gaps in the written regulations as an opportunity to escape communal norms; rather than leaving the uncodified areas to individual discretion, they tried to infuse them with religious and cultural meaning. It was characteristic of traditional Jewish societies to fill in the outline of Jewish law with ceremonies, folk beliefs, foods, music, and decoration. Codified Jewish law is like a blueprint that shows the general structure of a house, while the folk tradition is akin to the color scheme, decorations, and personal touches that turn each unit in a row of tract houses into an individualized and personalized home.

As an all-encompassing system, Jewish law itself contains a principle that regulates the relationship between what is codified and what is not. The codified part of Jewish practice, or great tradition, is known as din Gaw); the uncodified practice, or little tradition, is known as minhag (custom). The law itself contains the Hebrew maxim "Minhag yisrael kedin hu" ('A Jewish custom has the force of law")-a maxim that the folk tradition magnified in the Yiddish proverb 'A minhag brekht a din" ('A custom is stronger than [literally, breaks] a law"). The force of these sayings is to strengthen local custom and make it authoritative. A person brought up with one custom must continue to adhere to that practice; a community must continue its custom rather than adopt the ritual of another place; and within a community there should be a single liturgy and agreed-upon practices.

Because of the authority of local custom, Judaism was marked by dissimilar traditions existing side by side in different places, each equally authoritative, despite the variation in nuance. The law itself requires contrasting local practices: Passover must be seven days in Israel and eight days outside it; Purim falls on the 14th of Adar in most places but on the 15th in walled cities; Eastern European Jews must wait 6 hours after eating meat to eat dairy products, but German Jews need wait only 3 hours and Dutch Jews only 72 minutes; rice is a permitted Passover food for Yemenite or Iraqi Jews but is forbidden for Ashkenazim.

Historically the Jewish legal system has developed in such a way that the unwritten becomes written and custom tends to turn into law. Originally, only biblical law was written; the oral traditions were not allowed to be written down. They could be learned only through direct contact between teacher and disciple. Eventually, after the Roman authorities forbade the Jews to teach the tradition in public, the main oral traditions were written down in the Mishna (c. 200 CE). Later, the oral discussions of the Mishna were written down as the Babylonian Talmud (c. 500), followed by medieval law codes, the most authoritative of which was the Shulchan Aruch (1565). But the process continued even after this final codification, as the replies of each generation of traditional rabbis to new legal questions set new precedents. Often these questions and answers were published, creating a huge responsa literature. Practices that began as customs (sometimes even customs opposed by rabbinic authorities) eventually became codified. Examples of such practices are the bar mitzvah ceremony, the rejoicing of the law of the ninth day of Tabernacles (Simchat Torah), and the tashlich ceremony, in which people went to a body of water on the New Year to "throw their sins into the sea.

Esther Scroll, Austria, 18th cent., Silver Image courtesy Skirball Cultural Center	Esther Scroll, Ottoman, late 19th cent., ink on parchment, Silver Image courtesy Skirball Cultural Center
Ketubbah, Amsterdam, 1886, printed, ink, watercolor Image courtesy Skirball Cultural Center	Kettubah, Corfu, Greece,1714, parchment Image courtesy Skirball Cultural Center
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