"What needs to be stressed here is the extent to which the exile communities were—because they had to be—little welfare states or welfare societies, whose members, for all their quarrels, were deeply committed to one another. The range of communal provision was very wide (though different in different times and places). It included distributions of food and clothing, care for orphans and widows, dowries, hostels for travelers, ransom for captives (a major claim on communal funds over many centuries), public physicians and midwives, and, perhaps above all, schools. In the l430s, a synod of Spanish rabbis proposed the creation of something close to a full-scale compulsory public school system. What justice meant to those rabbis is perhaps best revealed here, concretely, in their proposal to transfer funds from rich to poor school districts, an issue that continues to be argued about today"