Beit Din בית דין

To judge the people, Moses' father-in-law advised him: set judges over thousands, hundreds and tens, so every case finds its court. The Torah commanded judges "in all your gates", and the ladder of courts—three judges for money, twenty-three for capital cases, seventy-one in the Great Sanhedrin—carried the country's law.

When the state vanished, the court remained: three learned men make a beit din, and in every community on earth it divorced, judged, reconciled, oversaw kashrut and conversion. For a thousand years Jews hardly used foreign courts: their own law, with claim, oath and document, lived inside the community—the beit din was the Jewish state in exile.