The Holiness of Sin

Gershom Scholem

Since its original appearance in Hebrew in the mid-30's under the title "Mitzvah ha-Ba'ahba-Averah," GERSHOM SCHOLEM'S study of those Jews of the 18th and 19th centuries who clungto their belief in the Messiahship of Sabbatai Zevi even after his conversion to Islam, hasbeen widely regarded as one of the classics of modern Jewish scholarship and one of thegreat works of the historical imagination in our time. What follows is the first translation ofthat essay into English, done by Hillel Halkin; the text has not been cut or altered in anyway except for the elimination of certain footnote references. The essay will also be included(with the footnotes retained) under the title "Redemption Through Sin" in The MessianicIdea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality which Schocken Books will beissuing shortly.

Among Gershom Scholem's other books which have been translated into English are MajorTrends in Jewish Mysticism and On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism. Readers of the presentessay will be particularly interested to learn that Professor Scholem's two-volume work onSabbatai Zevi, published about ten years ago in Hebrew, is being readied by the PrincetonUniversity Press for publication in an English translation within the coming months.

O CHAPTER IN the history of the Jew-ish people during the last several

hundred years has been as shrouded in mysteryas that of the Sabbatian movement. On one point,at least, there is no longer any disagreement: thedramatic events and widespread religious revivalthat preceded the apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi in1666 form an important and integral part of Jew-ish history and deserve to be studied objectively,to the exclusion of moralistic condemnations ofthe historical figures involved. It has come in-creasingly to be realized that a true understand-ing of the rise of Sabbatianism will never be pos-sible as long as scholars continue to appraise it byinappropriate standards, whether these be theconventional beliefs of their own age or thevalues of traditional Judaism itself. Today indeedone rarely encounters the baseless assumptions of"charlatanry" and "imposture" which occupy soprominent a place in earlier historical literatureon the subject. On the contrary: in these times ofJewish national rebirth it is only natural that thedeep though ultimately tragic yearning for na-tional redemption to which the initial stages ofSabbatianism gave expression should meet withgreater comprehension than in the past.

In turning to consider the Sabbatian movementafter Sabbatai Zevi's conversion to Islam, how-ever, we are faced with an entirely different situ-ation. Here we find ourselves still standing be-fore a blank wall, not only of misunderstanding,but often of an actual refusal to understand. Even

in recent times there has been a definite tendencyamong scholars to minimize at all costs the sig-nificance of this "heretical" Sabbatianism, withthe result that no adequate investigation yet existsof its spiritual foundations, its overall impact on18th-century Jewry, or its ultimate fate. It is im-possible, in fact, to read any of the studies thathave been done in these areas without being as-tounded by the amount of invective directedagainst the leaders and adherents of the variousSabbatian sects. Typical of this approach is DavidKahana's A History of the Kabbalists, Sabbatians,and Hasidim (in Hebrew), but the angry moral-izing that characterizes this volume has not beenconfined to any one historical school; rather, ithas been shared by writers of widely differingpoints of view, secular as well as religious. Theproblem itself, meanwhile, remains as reconditeas ever.

Two enormous difficulties, therefore, confrontthe student of the Sabbatian "heresies": on theone hand, there are the obstacles posed by thesources themselves, and on the other, those createdby the attitude generally taken toward them. To agreat extent, moreover, these two sets of difficultieshave always been related.

Why should this be so?The Sabbatian movement in its various shad-

ings and configurations persisted with remarkableobstinacy among certain sectors of the Jewish

Copyright ) 1971 by Schocken Books Inc.

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people for approximately one hundred and fiftyyears after Sabbatai Zevi's conversion. In a num-ber of countries it grew to be powerful, but forvarious reasons, internal as well as external, itsaffairs were deliberately hidden from the publiceye. In particular, its spokesmen refrained fromcommitting their beliefs to print, and the fewbooks that they actually published concealedtwice what they revealed. They did, however,produce a rich literature, which circulated onlyamong groups of "believers" (ma'aminim)-theterm by which Sabbatian sectarians generallychose to refer to themselves, down to the last ofthe D6nmeh in Salonika and the last Frankists inthe Austro-Hungarian Empire. As long as Sabba-tianism remained a vital force within the Jewishghetto, threatening to undermine the very exis-tence of rabbinic Judaism, its opponents laboredceaselessly to root it out and systematically de-stroyed whatever of its writings came into theirpossession, "including [even] the sacred namesof God [azkarot] which they contain," as thebans upon them read. As a result many of theirwritings were lost without a trace, and had itbeen left solely up to the rabbinical authoritiesnothing would have come down to us at all exceptfor certain tendentiously chosen fragments quotedin anti-Sabbatian polemics. In addition, althoughan extensive religious literature was still to befound in the hands of Frankists in Moravia andBohemia at the beginning of the 19th century,the children and grandchildren of these "believers" in Prague and other Jewish centers them-selves attempted to obliterate every shred of evi-dence bearing on their ancestors' beliefs and prac-tices. The well-known philosopher and historianof atheism Fritz Mauthner has preserved the fol-lowing interesting story in his memoirs: in thedeclining days of the movement in Bohemia,Frankist "emissaries" came to his grandfather(and undoubtedly to other members of the sectas well) and requested that he surrender to thema picture of "the Lady" and "all kinds of writ-ings" which 'he had in his possession. The emis-saries took them and left. The incident took placesometime during the 1820's or 1830's. In spite ofall this, at least two large manuscripts from thesecircles have survived.

One must therefore bear in mind in dealingwith the history of Sabbatianism that powerfulinterests and emotions have often been at stake.Each for reasons of his own, all those who havewritten on the subject in the past shared one be-lief: the less importance attributed to the Sabba-tian movement, the better.

UTHORS AND HISTORIANS Of the Or-Athodox camp, for their part, havebeen anxious to belittle and even distort the over-all role of Sabbatianism in order to safeguard thereputations, as they have conceived of them, ofcertain honored religious figures of the past. Such

apologetics have had their inevitable effect uponthe writing of history, as has the fundamentaloutlook of their proponents, tending as it does toidealize religious life in the ghetto at the expenseof completely ignoring the deep inner conflictsand divisions to which not even the rabbis werenecessarily immune. To acknowledge the Sabba-tianism of eminent rabbis in Jerusalem, Adriano-ple, Constantinople, or Izmir, Prague, Hamburg,or Berlin, has been in the eyes of such authorsopenly to impeach the integrity of an entire bodyof men who were never supposed to be otherthan learned and virtuous defenders of Jewishtradition. Given such an attitude, it is hardly tobe wondered at that one should instinctivelyavoid the kinds of inquiry that might lead to thediscovery of heretical opinion, to say nothing ofactual licentiousness, in the most unlikely places.One might cite endless examples of this kind ofmentality in historical literature dealing with rab-binical and congregational life in the 18th cen-tury, and in at least one case, A. L. Frumkin'sA Historical Account of the Scholars of Jerusalem(in Hebrew), the author goes so far as to "acquit"

some of the most dedicated Sabbatians of the"scandal" of heterodoxy!

Secularist historians, on the other hand, havebeen at pains to deemphasize the role of Sabba-tianism for a different reason. Not only did mostof the families once associated with the Sabbatianmovement in Western and Central Europe con-tinue to remain afterward within the Jewish fold,but many of their descendants, particularly inAustria, rose to positions of importance duringthe 19th century as prominent intellectuals, greatfinanciers, and men of high political connections.Such persons, needless to say, could scarcely havebeen expected to approve of attempts to "expose"their "tainted" lineage, and in view of their stat-ure in the Jewish community it is not surprisingthat their wishes should have carried weight. Fur-thermore, in an age when Jewish scholarship it-self was considered to be in part an extension ofthe struggle for political emancipation, the cli-mate for research in so sensitive an area was byno means generally favorable. In consequence,those Jewish scholars who had access to thewealth of Sabbatian documents and eyewitnessreports that were still to be found early in thecentury failed to take advantage of the oppor-tunity, while by the time a later generation ar-rived on the scene the sources had been destroyedand were no longer available even to anyone whomight have desired to make use of them.

The survivors of the Frankists in Poland and ofDonmeh or "apostates" in Salonika formed yeta third group having a direct interest in dis-guising the historical facts. These two Sabbatiansects, both of which formally renounced the Jew-ish religion (the D6nmeh converting to Islam in1683, the Frankists to Catholicism in 1759), con-tinued to adhere to their secret identities long

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after their defection from their mother faith; theD6nmeh, in fact, did not disappear until thepresent generation, while in the case of the Frank-ists, whose history in the course of the 19th cen-tury is obscure, it is impossible to determine atexactly what point in time they were finallyswallowed up by the rest of Polish society. Thereis reason to suspect that until the eve of WorldWar I many original manuscripts and documentswere preserved by both these groups, particularlyby a number of Frankist families in Warsaw; buthow much of this material may yet be uncovered,and how much has been purposely destroyed byits owners in order to conceal forever the secret oftheir descent, is in no way ascertainable.

Nevertheless, the total picture is not as dark asit may seem to have been painted: despite themany efforts at suppression, which supplemented,as it were, the inevitable "selective" process oftime itself, a considerable amount of valuable ma-terial has been saved. Many of the accusationsmade against the "believers" by their opponentscan now be weighed (and more often than notconfirmed!) on the basis of a number of the "be-lievers'" own books which were not allowed toperish. Little by little our knowledge has grown,and although many of the historical details wewould like to know will undoubtedly never cometo light at all, there is reason to hope that this im-portant chapter in Jewish history will yet be fullywritten. In any event, it is clear that a correct un-derstanding of the Sabbatian movement after theapostasy of Sabbatai Zevi will provide a new cluetoward understanding the history of the Jews inthe 18th century as a whole, and in particular, thebeginnings of the Haskalah (Enlightenment)movement in a number of countries.

I do not propose in this essay to trace the out-ward history of Sabbatianism in its several mani-festations over the century and a half in which itretained its vitality, nor (although I can hardlyconceal my opinion that the entire movement wasfar more widespread than is generally concededeven today) do I mean to debate the question ofwhether this or that particular individual was orwas not a Sabbatian himself. Suffice it to say thatthe sources in our possession, meager as they are,make it perfectly clear that the number of Sabba-tian rabbis was far greater than has been com-monly estimated, greater even than was believedby that anti-Sabbatian zealot Rabbi Jacob Emden,who has almost always been accused of exaggera-tion. In the present essay, however, I shall putsuch questions aside and limit myself to the areathat has been the most sadly neglected in the en-tire field, namely, the origins and development ofSabbatian thought per se.

If one accepts what Heinrich Graetz and DavidKahana have to say on the subject of Sabbatiantheology, it is impossible to understand what itsessential attraction ever was; indeed, if it is true,as both these writers claim, that the entire move-

ment was a colossal hoax perpetrated by degener-ates and frauds, one might well ask why a serioushistorian should bother to waste his time on it inthe first place. And if this is the case with Sab-batianism in general, how much more so whenone ventures to consider what is undoubtedly themost tragic episode in the entire drama, that ofthe Frankists, the psychological barriers to theunderstanding of which are incomparably greater.How, for instance, can one get around the histori-cal fact that in the course of their public disputa-tion with Jewish rabbis in Lvov in 1759 the mem-bers of this sect did not even shrink from resort-ing to the notorious blood libel, an accusation farmore painful to Jewish sensitivities than any oftheir actual beliefs? A great deal has been writtenabout this incident, particularly by the eminenthistorian Meir Balaban, in whose book, On theHistory of the Frankist Movement (in Hebrew),it is dealt with exhaustively. Balaban, who makesthe Lvov libel a starting point for his overall in-quiry, reaches the significant conclusion thatthere was no organic connection between it andthe Frankist "articles of faith" presented at thedisputation. The members of the sect, in fact,were reluctant to make the accusation at all, anddid so only at the instigation of the Catholicclergy, which was interested in using them forpurposes of its own, having nothing to do withtheir Sabbatian background. That they finallyagreed to collaborate in the scheme can be ex-plained by their desire to wreak vengeance ontheir rabbinical persecutors.

THUS, THOUGH the behavior of theT Frankists at Lvov must certainly be

judged harshly from both a universal-ethical anda Jewish-national point of view, it is importantto keep in mind that the blood libels against theJews (the indications are that there was morethan one) do not in themselves tell us anythingabout the inner spiritual world of the sect, in allof whose literature (written one and two genera-tions after the Lvov disputation) not a single al-lusion to such a belief is to be found. The trulyastonishing thing is that although several impor-tant texts of Frankist teachings actually do exist,not a single serious attempt has so far been madeto analyze their contents. The reason for this issimple. Graetz and A. Kraushar, two reputablescholars, one of whom wrote a full-length study ofJacob Frank and his Polish followers, were bothof the opinion that there was no such thing as aFrankist "creed," and that The Sayings of theLord, which has come down to us in a Polishversion alone, was incoherent nonsense. Ac-cording to Kraushar, Frank's sayings are "gro-tesque, comical, and incomprehensible," whileGraetz, whose attitude toward all forms of mysti-cism is well known, could hardly have been ex-pected to show much insight into the religiousmotivations of the sect. Balaban, on the other

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hand, is mainly concerned with the outward his-tory of the Frankists up to the time of their massconversion, and his reconstruction of their theol-ogy is based solely on the positions publicly takenby them in their disputations with the rabbis. It ishis reliance on these "articles of faith," in fact,which were actually far from accurate reflectionsof the Frankists' true beliefs, that leads him toconclude that after 1759 the history of the sectwas "determined more by the personalities ofJacob Frank and his disciples than by any intrin-sic religious relationship to Judaism."

I myself cannot agree with Balaban on thispoint, and in the following pages I shall attemptto show, at least summarily, that Sabbatianismmust be regarded not only as a single continuousdevelopment which retained its identity in the eyesof its adherents regardless of whether they them-selves remained Jews or not, but also, paradoxi-cal though it may seem, as a specifically Jewishphenomenon to the end. I shall endeavor to showthat the nihilism of the Sabbatian and Frankistmovements, with its doctrine-so profoundly shock-ing to the Jewish conception of things-that theviolation of the Torah could become its true ful-fillment (bittulah shel torah zehu kiyyumah),was a dialectical outgrowth of the belief in theMessiahship of Sabbatai Zevi, and that this ni-hilism, in turn, helped pave the way for theHaskalah and the Reform movement of the 19thcentury, once its original religious impulse wasexhausted. Beyond this, I hope to make thereader see how within the spiritual world of theSabbatian sects, within the very sanctum sanc-torum of Kabbalistic mysticism, as it were, thecrisis of faith which overtook the Jewish peopleas a whole upon its emergence from its medievalisolation was first anticipated, and how groups ofJews within the walls of the ghetto, while stilloutwardly adhering to the practices of their fore-fathers, had begun to embark on a radically newinner life of their own. Prior to the French Revo-lution the historical conditions were lackingwhich might have caused this upheaval to breakforth in the form of an open struggle for socialchange, with the result that it turned further in-ward upon itself to act upon the hidden recessesof the Jewish psyche; but it would be mistaken toconclude from this that Sabbatianism did not per-manently affect the outward course of Jewish his-tory. The desire for total liberation which playedso tragic a role in the development of Sabbatiannihilism was by no means a purely self-destructiveforce; on the contrary, beneath the surface oflawlessness, antinomianism, and catastrophic ne-gation, powerful constructive impulses were atwork, and these, I maintain, it is the duty of thehistorian to uncover.

Undeniably, the difficulties in the face of thisare great, and it is not to be wondered at thatJewish historians until now have not had theinner freedom to attempt the task. In our own

times we owe much to the experience of Zionismfor enabling us to detect in Sabbatianism's throesthose gropings toward a healthier national exis-tence which must have seemed like an undilutednightmare to the peaceable Jewish bourgeois ofthe 19th century. Even today, however, the writ-ing of Jewish history suffers unduly from the in-fluence of 19th-century Jewish historiography.To be sure, as Jewish historians we have clearlyadvanced beyond the vantage point of our prede-cessors, having learned to insist, and rightly so,that Jewish history is a process that can only beunderstood when viewed from within; but inspite of all this, our progress in applying thistruth to concrete historical situations, as opposedto general historiosophical theories, has been slow.Up to the present [1935-ED.] only two men,Siegmund Hurwitz in his From Whither to Where(in Hebrew) and Zalman Rubashov (Shazar) inhis essay "Upon the Ruins of Frankism" (inHebrew), have shown any true appreciation ofthe complexities of Sabbatian psychology, andtheir work has by and large failed to attract theattention it deserves.

AND NOW, one last introductory com-Ament. In dismissing the need for

objective research on the Sabbatian and Frankistmovements, it has often been asserted that sincethe phenomena are essentially pathological, theybelong more properly to the study of medicinethan to the study of history. Indeed, an article on"Frank and His Sect in the Light of Psychiatry"(Bychowski, Ha-Tekufah, Vol. XIV) has actuallybeen published, but it only succeeds in demonstrat-ing how incapable such an approach is of dealingsatisfactorily with the problem. From the stand-point of sexual pathology it can hardly be doubtedthat Frank himself was a diseased individual, justas there can be no question that at the center andamong the ranks of the Sabbatian movement (asin all radical movements that spring from certainparticular tensions, some of which are not so farremoved from those of "ordinary" life) it wouldbe possible to find cases of marked mental aber-rance. But what is the significance of all this? Weare not, after all, so much concerned with this orthat prominent Sabbatian personality as with thequestion of why such people were able to attractthe following that they did. The diagnosis of aneurologist would be of little value in determin-ing why thousands of human beings were able tofind a spiritual home in the labyrinth of Sabba-tian theology. We must refuse to be deluded bysuch convenient tags as "hysteria" or "mass psy-chosis," which only confuse the issue at the sametime that they provide an excuse for avoiding itand comfortably reassure one of one's own com-parative "normality." It is undoubtedly true thatJacob Frank was every bit the depraved and un-scrupulous person he is supposed to have been,and yet the moment we seriously ponder his

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"teachings," or attempt to understand why massesof men should have regarded him as their leaderand prophet, this same individual becomes highlyproblematic. Even more than the psychology ofthe leader, however, it is the psychology of the ledthat demands to be understood, and in the case ofSabbatianism, a movement built entirely uponparadoxes, this question is crucial indeed. What-ever we may think of Sabbatai Zevi and JacobFrank, the fact is: their followers, while they werecertainly not "innocents"-if there was one thinglacking in the paradoxical religion of the Sab-batians, it was innocence!-were sincere in theirfaith, and it is the nature of this faith, which pen-etrated to the hidden depths and abysses of thehuman spirit, that we wish to understand.

II

A s A MYSTICAL heterodoxy Sabbatian-Al. ism assumed different and changing

forms: it splintered into many sects, so that evenfrom the polemical writings against it we learnthat the "heretics" quarreled among themselvesover practically everything. The word "practical-ly," however, must be stressed, for on one essen-tial, the underlying ground of their "holy faith,"as they called it, the "believers" all agreed. Let usproceed then to examine this common ground offaith as it manifested itself both psychologicallyand dogmatically.

By all accounts, the messianic revival of 1665-66spread to every sector of the Jewish peoplethroughout the Diaspora. Among the believersand penitents a new emotion, which was not re-stricted to the traditional expectation of a politi-cal deliverance of Israel alone, began to make it-self felt. This is not to say that hope for a divineliberation from the bondage and degradation ofexile was not an important element in the generalcontagion, but rather that various psychologicalreactions which accompanied it soon took on anindependent existence of their own. Prior to Sab-batai Zevi's apostasy, great masses of people wereable to believe in perfect simplicity that a new eraof history was being ushered in and that theythemselves had already begun to inhabit a newand redeemed world. Such a belief could not buthave a profound effect on those who held it: theirinnermost feelings, which assured them of thepresence of a messianic reality, seemed entirely inharmony with the outward course of events, thoseclimactic developments in a historico-politicalrealm that Sa'bbatai Zevi was soon to overthrowby means of his miraculous journey to the Turk-ish sultan, whom he would depose from histhrone and strip of all his powers.

In the generation preceding Sabbatai Zevi's ad-vent the rapid spread of the teachings of RabbiIsaac Luria and his school had resulted in a graft-ing of the theories of the Kabbalists, the de factotheologians of the Jewish people in the 17th cen-

tury, onto the traditional Jewish view of the roleand personality of the Messiah. Mystical Lurianicspeculations about the nature of the redemptionand "the restored world" (olam ha-tikkun) whichwas to follow upon its heels added new contentsand dimensions to the popular messianic folk-myth of a conquering national hero, raising it tothe level of a supreme cosmic drama: the redemp-tive process was now no longer conceived of assimply a working-out of Israel's temporal emanci-pation from the yoke of the Gentiles, but rather asa fundamental transformation of the entire Crea-tion, affecting material and spiritual worlds alikeand leading to a rectification of the primordialcatastrophe of the "breaking of the vessels"(shevirat ha-kelim), in the course of which thedivine worlds would be returned to their originalunity and perfection. By stressing the spiritualside of the redemption far more than its outwardaspect, the Kabbalists of the Lurianic school,though by no means overlooking the latter, grad-ually converted it into a symbol of purely spir-itual processes and ends. As long as the messianicexpectancies they encouraged were not put to thetest in the actual crucible of history, the dangersinherent in this shift of emphasis went unnoticed,for the Kabbalists themselves never once imag-ined that a conflict might arise between the sym-bol and the reality it was intended to represent.To be sure, Lurianic Kabbalah had openly edu-cated its followers to prepare themselves more foran inner than for an outer renewal; but inasmuchas it was commonly assumed that the one couldnot take place without the other, the procedureseemed in no way questionable. On the contrary:the spread of Lurianic teachings, so it wasthought, was in itself bound to hasten the com-ing of the historical Redeemer.

The appearance of Sabbatai Zevi and thegrowth of popular faith in his mission caused thisinner sense of freedom, of "a world made pureagain," to become an immediate reality for thou-sands. This did not of course mean that SabbataiZevi himself was no longer expected to fulfill thevarious messianic tasks assigned him by Jewishtradition, but in the meantime an irreversiblechange had taken place in the souls of the faith-ful. Who could deny that the Shekhinah, theearthly presence of God, had risen from the dust?

"Heretical" Sabbatianism was born at the mo-ment of Sabbatai Zevi's totally unexpected con-version, when for the first time a contradictionappeared between the two levels of the drama ofredemption, that of the subjective experience ofthe individual on the one hand, and that of theobjective historical facts on the other. The con-flict was no less intense than unforeseen. Onehad to choose: either one heard the voice of Godin the decree of history, or else one heard it inthe newly revealed reality within. "Heretical"Sabbatianism was the result of the refusal of largesections of the Jewish people to submit to the

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sentence of history by admitting that their ownpersonal experience had been false and untrust-worthy.

Thus, the various attempts to construct a Sab-batian theology were all motivated by a similarpurpose, namely, to rationalize the abyss that hadsuddenly opened between the objective order ofthings and that inward certainty which it couldno longer serve to symbolize, and to render thetension between the two more endurable for thosewho continued to live with it. The sense of con-tradiction from which Sabbatianism sprung be-came a lasting characteristic of the movement:following upon the initial paradox of an apostateMessiah, paradox engendered paradox. Above all,the "believers," those who remained loyal to theirinward experience, were compelled to find an an-swer to the simple question: what could be thevalue of a historical reality that had proved to beso bitterly disappointing, and how might it be re-lated to the hopes it had betrayed?

The essence of the Sabbatian's conviction, inother words, can be summarized in a sentence: itis inconceivable that all of God's people shouldinwardly err, and so, if their vital experience iscontradicted in the facts, it is the facts whichstand in need of explanation. In the words of aSabbatian "moderate" writing thirty years afterSabbatai Zevi's apostasy: "The Holy One, blessedbe He, does not ensnare even the animals of therighteous, much less the righteous themselves, tosay nothing of so terribly deceiving an entirepeople.... And how is it possible that all of Israelbe deceived unless this be part of some great divineplan?" This line of argument, which was adoptedby many persons from the very beginning of theSabbatian movement, is known to have impressedeven the movement's opponents, who were equallydisinclined to find fault with the entire Jewishpeople and sought instead some other explanationfor what had happened.

During the century and a half of its existenceSabbatianism was embraced by those Jewishcircles which desired to prolong the novel sensa-tion of living in a "restored world" by developingattitudes and institutions that seemed commen-surate with a new divine order. Inasmuch as thisdeliberately maintained state of consciousness wasdirectly opposed to the outlook of ghetto Jewryas a whole, of which the "believers" themselvesformed a part, the latter of necessity tended tobecome innovators and rebels, particularly theradicals among them. Herein lay the psychologi-cal basis of that spirit of revolt which so infuri-ated the champions of Orthodoxy, who, thoughthey may at first have had no inkling of thelengths to which it would be ultimately carried,rightly suspected it from the outset of striving tosubvert the authority of rabbinic Judaism. Here-in, too, lay the basis of all future efforts to con-struct a Sabbatian theology, to the considerationof which we must now turn our attention.

N THE HISTORY of religion we frequentlyencounter types of individuals known

as "pneumatics" (pnemnatikoi) or "spiritualists"(spiritunles). Such persons, who played a majorrole in the development of Sabbatianism, wereknown in Jewish tradition as "spiritual" or"extra-spirited" men or, in the language of theZohar, as "masters of a holy soul." These termsdid not refer to just anyone who may have hadoccasion in the course of his life to be "moved bythe spirit"; rather, they applied only to those fewwho abode in the "palace of the king" (hekhalha-melekh), that is, who lived in continual com-munion with a spiritual realm through whosegates they had passed, whether by actually dwell-ing within it to the point of abandoning theirprevious existence, or by appropriating from it a"spark" or "holy soul," as only the elect were priv-ileged to do. One so favored was in certain re-spects no longer considered to be subject to thelaws of everyday reality, having realized withinhimself the hidden world of divine light. Natural-ly, spiritualistic types of this sort have always re-garded themselves as forming a group apart, andhence the special sense of their own "superiority"by which they are characterized: from their loftyperspective the world of material affairs tends tolook lowly indeed. Here, then, we have all theprerequisites for the sectarian disposition, for thesect serves the illuminati as both a rallying pointfor their own kind and a refuge from the incom-prehension of the carnal and unenlightenedmasses. The sectarians regard themselves as thevanguard of a new world, but they do not there-fore need to renounce the parent religion whichinspired them, for they can always reinterpret itin the light of the supreme reality to which theyowe their newly discovered allegiance.

For a number of reasons, which cannot be goneinto here, such spiritualists were rarely allowed todevelop within the Jewish community after theperiod of the Second Temple. In part this was aconsequence of Christianity, to which many ofthem ultimately passed; but even when they con-tinued to exist within Judaism itself, it was alwaysas isolated and unorganized individuals. It is awell-known fact, for instance, that spiritualismparticularly abounds in the domain of religiousmysticism; and yet, as the history of Kabbalismamply demonstrates, despite the opposition be-tween conventional religion and the ecstasy, attimes even abandon, of the pneumatic, medievalJudaism was capable of absorbing the latter intoits orbit. Such was not the case, however, witheither Christianity or Islam: here the conflictbroke out openly and fiercely on numerous occa-sions, and the spiritualist sects which it producedwent on to play important roles in the develop-ment of new social and religious institutions,often giving birth, albeit in religious guise, to themost revolutionary ideas. To take but one ex-ample, historical research during the last several

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decades has clearly shown the direct connectionbetween Christian sectarianism in Europe and thegrowth of the Enlightenment and the ideal of tol-eration in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The existence of similar forces in Jewish his-tory, on the other hand, has been all but neglect-ed by the historians, an oversight facilitated bythe fact that Jewish spiritualism has either longbeen outwardly dormant or else, as in the case ofKabbalism, has always preferred to work invisiblyand unsystematically beneath the surface. In-deed, as long as Jewish historiography was dom-inated by a spirit of assimilation, no one somuch as suspected that positivism and religiousreform were the progeny not only of the rationalmind, but of an entirely different sort of psychol-ogy as well, that of the Kabbalah and the Sabba-tian crisis-in other words, of that very "lawlessheresy" which was so soundly excoriated in theirname!

N THE Sabbatian movement, which wasthe first clear manifestation (one

might better say explosion) of spiritualistic sec-tarianism in Judaism since the days of the SecondTemple, the type of the radical spiritualist foundits perfect expression. To be sure, illuminati ofthe same class were later prevalent in Hasidismtoo, particularly during the golden age of themovement; but Hasidism, rather than allow itselfto be taken over by such types, forced them aftera period of initial equivocation to curb their un-ruly spirituality, and did so with such success thatit was able to overcome the most difficult andhazardous challenge of all, that of safely incor-porating them into its own collective body. UnlikeSabbatianism, whose followers were determined tocarry their doctrine to its ultimate conclusion, itwas the genius of Hasidism that it knew where toset itself limits. But the Sabbatians pressed on tothe end, into the abyss of the mythical "gates ofimpurity" (sha'are tum'ah), where the pure spir-itual awareness of a world made new became apitfall fraught with peril for the moral life.

Here, then, were all the materials necessary tocause a true conflagration in the heart of Jewry. Anew type of Jew had appeared for whom theworld of exile and Diaspora Judaism was partlyor wholly abolished and who uncompromisinglybelieved that a "restored world," whose laws andpractices he was commanded to obey, was in theprocess of coming into being. The great historicaldisappointment experienced by the Sabbatian hadinstilled in him the paradoxical conviction thathe and his like were privy to a secret whose timehad not yet come to be generally revealed, and itwas this certainty which, in Hebrew literature ofthe period, imparted a special meaning to his useof the terms "believer" and "holy faith," the pe-culiar shadings of which immediately inform usthat we are dealing with a Sabbatian documenteven when there is not the slightest allusion there-

in to Sabbatai Zevi himself: by virtue of his "holyfaith" in the mysterious realignment of the divineworlds and in the special relationship to them ofthe Creator during the transitional period of cos-mic restitution (tikkun), the "believer," he whotrusted in the mission of Sabbatai Zevi, was exaltedabove all other men. Hidden in the "believer's"soul was a precious jewel, the pearl of messianicfreedom, which shone forth from its chamber ofchambers to pierce the opaqueness of evil andmateriality; he who possessed it was a free man bypower of his own personal experience, and to thisinner sense of freedom, whether gotten during themass revival that preceded Sabbatai Zevi's apos-tasy, or afterward, in the ranks of "holy faith,"he would continue to cling no matter how muchhe knew it to be contradicted by the outwardfacts.

All Sabbatian doctrine had as its aim the reso-lution of this contradition. The conflict was bit-terly clear. Those who were disillusioned by Sab-batai Zevi's apostasy were able to claim that noth-ing had really changed: the world was the same asever, the exile was no different than before; there-fore the Torah was the same Torah and the fa-miliar Kabbalistic teachings about the nature ofthe Godhead and the divine worlds remained inforce. A great opportunity had perhaps existed,but it had been missed: henceforth the one re-course was a return to Israel's traditional faith inits God. The "believers," on the other hand,could say, in paraphrase of Job, "our eyes havebeheld and not another's": the redemption hadbegun indeed, only its ways were mysterious andits outward aspect was still incomplete. Externalsmight seem the same, but inwardly all was in theprocess of renewal. Both the Torah and the exilehad been fundamentally altered, as had the na-ture of the Godhead, but for the time beingall these transformations bore "inward faces"alone.

The Sabbatian movement soon developed allthe psychological characteristics of a spiritual sect,and before long many of its followers proceeded toorganize themselves along such lines. The persecu-tions against them on the part of various rabbin-ical and congregational authorities, their ownspecial feeling of apartness and the need to pre-serve their secret, and the novel practices whichtheir beliefs eventually compelled them to pursue,were all factors in bringing this about. I do notpropose to dwell at length on the history of any ofthese groups, but I do wish to emphasize briefly atthis point that large numbers of Jews, especiallyamong the Sephardim, continued to remain faith-ful to Sabbatai Zevi after his conversion. Even suchopponents of Sabbatianism as Jacob Sasportas, whoclaimed that the followers of the movement werenow an "insubstantial minority," was forced toadmit on other occasions that the minority in ques-tion was considerable indeed, particularly inMorocco, Palestine, Egypt, and most of Turkey

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and the Balkans. Most of the Sabbatian groups inthese areas maintained constant contact with eachother and kept up a running battle over the correctinterpretation of their "holy faith." From theseregions came the first theoreticians of the move-ment, men such as Nathan of Gaza, Samuel Primo,Abraham Miguel Cardozo, and Nehemiah Hayonas well as the believers in "voluntary Marranism,"who went on to form the sect of the Donmeh inSalonika. In Italy the number of Sabbatians wassmaller, though it included some of the country'smost important Kabbalists; within a generationafter its appearance there, Sabbatianism haddwindled into the concern of a few rabbis andscholars (chief among them Rabbi BenjaminCohen of Reggio and Rabbi Abraham Rovigo ofModena), in whose hands it remained for a cen-tury without ever penetrating into wider circles.

In Northern Europe Sabbatianism was also re-stricted at first to small groups of adherents, de-votees of such "prophets" as Heshel Zoref of Vilnaand Mordecai of Eisenstadt in Hungary, but after1700, following the commencement of a "Pales-tinian period" during which organized Sabbatianemigrations to the Holy Land took place fromseveral countries, the movement spread rapidlythrough Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Em-pire. In Lithuania it failed to take root, but inPodolia and Moravia it became so entrenchedthat it was soon able to claim the allegiance ofmany ordinary Jewish burghers and small busi-nessmen (according to Jacob Emden, the numeri-cal value of the Hebrew letters in the verse inPsalms 14, "There is none that doeth good, noteven one," was equivalent to the numerical valueof the letters in the Hebrew word for Moravial).In Prague and Mannheim Sabbatian-oriented cen-ters of learning came into being. The influence ofthe "graduates" of these institutions was great;one of them, in fact, was the author of the hereti-cal treatise Va-Avo ha-Yom El ha-Ayin ("And ICame This Day unto the Fountain") which pro-voked so much furor at the time of the contro-versy surrounding Jonathan Eibeschiitz (1751)and led to a polemical "battle of the books"which has enabled us to trace the identities ofmany Sabbatians of whom otherwise we wouldhave known nothing at all. In the middle of the18th century many of the Sabbatians in Podoliaconverted to Christianity after the example oftheir leader Jacob Frank, but still others re-mained within the Jewish fold. Finally, a Sabba-tian stronghold sprang up again in Prague, whereFrankism was propagated in a Jewish form. After1815, however, the movement fell apart and itsmembers were absorbed into secular Jewish soci-ety, like the Frankist ancestors of Louis Brandeis.

It is now time to turn our attention to theactual content of the spiritualism of these Sabba-tian groups, for although the details of their the-osophical teachings cannot be understood by any-one not already familiar with the intricacies of

Kabbalistic speculation in both the Zohar and thewritings of the Lurianic school, other vital ques-tions which concerned them, as well as their doc-trine of the Godhead in its more general form,can be rendered intelligible even to those who arenot fully versed in the esoteric side of Jewishmystical thought.

III

HE QUESTION which first confronted the"believers" after the apostasy of

Sabbatai Zevi, and one to which they never ceasedreturning, was of the following order: since byall external tokens the redemption had alreadybeen at hand, and since the Messiah, the authen-ticity of whose mission was beyond doubt, hadactually revealed himself to his people, why hadhe forsaken them and his religion, and why hadthe historical and political deliverance frombondage which was to have naturally accompa-nied the cosmic process of tikkun been delayed?To this a paradoxically compelling answer wasquickly offered: the apostasy of the Messiah wasitself a religious mystery of the most crucial im-portance! No less an authority than Maimonideshimself, it was argued, had stated that the actualdetails of the redemptive process were not to beknown in advance; and although the truth of thematter was that everything that had happenedwas fully alluded to in the Holy Scriptures, theseallusions themselves could not be correctly under-stood until the events they foretold had come topass. All might be found to have been predictedin the relevant prophecies and legends whichNathan of Gaza, and even more so Abraham Car-dozo, now proceeded to expound in the form ofa new doctrine to which Sabbatai Zevi himself ap-parently subscribed.

As long as the last divine sparks (nitzotzot) ofholiness and good which fell at the time ofAdam's primordial sin into the impure realm ofthe kelipot (the hylic forces of evil whose holdin the world is particularly strong among theGentiles) have not been gathered back again totheir source-so the explanation ran-the processof redemption is incomplete. It is therefore leftto the Redeemer, the holiest of men, to accom-plish what not even the most righteous souls inthe past have been able to do: to descend throughthe gates of impurity into the realm of the kelipotand to rescue the divine sparks still imprisonedthere. As soon as this task is performed the King-dom of Evil will collapse of itself, for its existenceis made possible only by the divine sparks in itsmidst. The Messiah is constrained to commit"strange acts" (ma'asim zarim; a concept hereaf-ter to occupy a central place in Sabbatian theol-ogy), of which his apostasy is the most startling;all of these, however, are necessary for the fulfill-ment of his mission. In the formulation of Car-dozo: "It is ordained that the King Messiah don

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the garments of a Marrano and so go unrecog-nized by his fellow Jews. In a word, it is ordainedthat he become a Marrano like me."

Before proceeding to take a closer look at thisbold and heretical doctrine, one might well dwellfor a moment on Cardozo's own words, whichprovide in my opinion an invaluable clue to themotivation behind it, as they do in fact to nearlyevery other feature of the Sabbatian movementas well. Underlying the novelty of Sabbatianthought more than anything else was the deeplyparadoxical religious sensibility of the Marranosand their descendants, who constituted a largeportion of Sephardic Jewry. Had it not been forthe unique psychology of these re-converts to Ju-daism, the new theology would never have foundthe fertile ground to flourish in that it did. Re-gardless of what the actual backgrounds of its firstdisseminators may have been, the Sabbatian doc-trine of the Messiah was perfectly tailored to theneeds of the Marranic mentality. Indeed, we knowfor a fact that Abraham Cardozo, one of themovement's most successful proselytizers, was ofdefinite Marrano origin-he was born in Spain in1627-a particular which goes far to explain theremarkable zeal and sincerity with which he de-fended the new doctrine. Historians in our ownday have pointed out at length the degree of con-tradiction, of duplicity and duality, which was in-volved in the religious consciousness of the Mar-ranos. For these undercover Jews "to don thegarments of a Marrano" was by no means anunjustifiable act; in its defense they were fond ofciting the story of Queen Esther, as well as variousother biblical fragments and verses. Formal apos-tasy had never been considered by them to repre-sent an irreconcilable break with their motherfaith. And now along came a religious metaphysicwhich exalted just such a form of life to thehighest possible level by attributing it to the per-son of the Redeemer himself Certainly all kindsof implications, which we shall deal with later on,were contained in this original idea. Let us ex-amine it more closely.

To begin with, the new doctrine could no long-er be harmonized with the traditional messianicfolk-myth held to by the Jewish masses unlessroom could be found in the latter for such a "con-tradiction in terms" as the apostasy of the Re-deemer. At first it was no doubt believed that theMessiah's descent into the realm of the kelipotwas but an incidental aspect of his mission, "ashappened to King David [when he sojourned]with Achish King of Gath," but it soon came tobe realized that such an extraordinary event mustoccupy the center of any messianic schema, whichif necessary would have to be rebuilt around it:if the Messiah's task indeed contained a tragic ele-ment, as was now being proposed, support for thisbelief would have to be found in the sources andattitudes of Jewish tradition. What now tookplace in Sabbatianism was similar to what hap-

pened in Christianity at the time of the apostles,the chief difference being the shifting of the tragicmoment in the Messiah's destiny from his cruci-fixion to his apostasy, a change which renderedthe paradox in question even more severe. Andto this novel conception another was soon added,one which indeed had a basis in aggadic litera-ture, but whose hidden implications had goneunnoticed as long as no pressing reality had ex-isted to force its application outside of the do-main of pure theory and imagination; this wasthe notion that the King Messiah was to give "anew Torah" and that the commandments of theLaw (mitzvot) were to be abrogated in messianictimes. Speculations of this nature could be foundin various Midrashim and Aggadot, but possessedno particular authority and were easily chal-lenged by means of other exegetical passages tothe opposite effect, with the consequence that, inJewish tradition, the entire question had hithertobeen allowed to remain in abeyance. Even thosevisionaries who dreamt through the ages of a newWord of God in a redeemed world did not, infact, particularly connect this idea with the ac-tivities of the Messiah himself, and it was not un-til it was seized upon by the new "Marranic" doc-trine that its latent explosive power was revealed.

T HE DOCTRINE Of the necessary apos-tasy of the Messiah did not orig-

inate in the realm of literature, but was ratherrooted in new religious feelings that had come toexist. It was only after the initial manifestation ofthese that the effort to justify them on the basisof authoritative sources began, and with truly re-markable results, for practically overnight a newreligious language was born. From bits and piecesof Scripture, from scattered paradoxes and say-ings in the writings of the Kabbalah, from all theremotest corners of Jewish religious literature, anunprecedented theology of Judaism was broughtinto being. The cynicism of most Jewish histori-ans toward these "inanities" does not reveal anygreat understanding of what actually took place.Suddenly we find ourselves confronted by an orig-inal Jewish terminology, far removed from that ofChristianity, yet equally determined to expressthe contradictions inherent in the life of the Re-deemer and in redemption itself. Striking as it dida hidden wellspring of deep religious emotion,one can hardly deny that this gospel must havepossessed a powerful attraction, nor that it oftenmanaged to inject new meanings into familiarphrases and figures of speech with a fascinatingprofundity. Such a dialectical eruption of newforces in the midst of old concepts is rare indeed.Because Graetz and other historians insisted onregarding its articulation as being nothing morethan a pretext for a monstrous debauchment ofmoral and spiritual values, they completely over-looked its true significance. To be sure, the doc-trine of an apostate Messiah did serve as a pretext

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too, but it was also a great deal more; and had itnot appealed (and by virtue of its very paradoxi-cality!) to vital components in the spiritual make-up of the Jew, and above all to his sense ofspiritual mission, it would never have succeededin attracting a following in the first place. Thismissionary ideology reached a peak in the writingsof the Lurianic Kabbalah, which strove to incul-cate in every Jew a sense of duty to "elevate thesparks" and so help bring about the ultimatetikkun of the Creation.

Here the 53rd chapter of Isaiah played a keyrole, for as it was now reinterpreted the verse,"But he was wounded because of our transgres-sions" was taken to be an allusion not only to theMessiah ben Joseph, the legendary forerunner ofthe Redeemer who according to tradition was tosuffer death at the hands of the Gentiles, but tothe Messiah ben David as well, who "would beforcibly prevented from observing the Torah."By a play on words, the Hebrew ve-humeholal, "but he was wounded," was interpretedas meaning "from sacred he [the Messiah] willbe made profane [hol]." Thus,

all Gentiles are referred to as profane [hol] andkelipah, and whereas Israel alone is called sacred,all the other nations are profane. And eventhough a Jew commit a transgression, as longas he remains a Jew among Jews he is calledsacred and an Israelite, for as the rabbis havesaid, "Even though he has sinned, he is still anIsraelite." It follows that there is no way forthe King Messiah to be made profane except hebe removed from the Community of Israel intoanother domain.

Many similar homilies were written on the rest ofthe chapter, especially on the verse, "And hemade his grave with the wicked." Yet anotherfavorite verse was Deuteronomy 33:7 ("And thisfor Judah, and he said: Hear, Lord, the voice ofJudah, and bring him unto his people"), whichwas assumed to allude to the Davidic Messiah ofthe House of Judah, whose destiny it was to betaken from his people (hence Moses's prayer thatGod bring him back to them). Endless biblicalverses were cited to prove that the Messiah wasfated to be condemned as an outcast and criminalby his own people. Clothed in Messianic radiance,all the typical arguments of the Marranos wereapplied to Sabbatai Zevi:

And similar to this [the apostasy of SabbataiZevi] is what happened to Esther, who was thecause of great salvation to Israel; for althoughmost of the people, being ignorant, most cer-tainly despised her for having given herself toan idol-worshiper and a Gentile in clear viola-tion of the bidding of the Torah, the sages ofold, who knew the secret [of her action], didnot regard her as a sinner, for it is said of herin the Talmud: "Esther was the ground of theentire world."

In the same vein, the familiar aggadic saying that"the last Redeemer will be as the first" was takento mean that just as Moses lived for many yearsat the court of Pharaoh, so the Messiah mustlive with "the Turk," for as the exile draws to aclose the Messiah himself must be exiled to atonefor Israel's sins.

NEXT CAME the turn of the Zohar, andhere too, with the help of major or

minor distortions, a world of new symbols wasmade to emerge, such as the figure of "the kingwho is good within but clothed in evil garments."In vain it was argued against this interpretationthat the passage does not refer in this context to aking at all, much less to the Messiah; the image, soexpressive in its obscurity, penetrated deep intothe Sabbatian consciousness where it remained forgenerations to come. Two other writers whoseworks were mined in this fashion were RabbiJudah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague and RabbiJoseph Taitatsak of Salonika, one of the emigresfrom Spain in 1492: the former was found to havecryptically predicted that the Messiah would bebound to the world of Islam, while the latter wassupposed to have stated, "when the rabbis said thatthe Son of David would not come until the king-dom was entirely given over to unbelief [Sanhedrin97a], they were thinking of the Kingdom ofHeaven, for the Shekhinah is destined to don thegarments of Ishmael." In a word, the attempt tojustify the belief that the fall and apostasy of theMessiah were necessary actions was carried outassiduously and successfully and led to the com-position of many homilies, treatises, and books,some of which have not yet been recovered fromtheir resting places. Endless vindications and de-fenses of the new doctrine were brought frompractically every corner of Jewish literature. Atfirst the tendency was to assert that although theMessiah's conversion had been forced upon him, itwas qualitatively to be considered as a deliberateact; gradually, however, this motif disappeared,and the emphasis came to be placed squarely onthe paradox that the Messiah should convert ofhis own free will. The descent into the kelipotwas, indeed had to be, a voluntary one.

It was at this point that a radically new contentwas bestowed upon the old rabbinic concept ofmitzvah ha-ba'ah ba-averah, literally, "a com-mandment which is fulfilled by means of a trans-gression." Once it could be claimed that the Mes-siah's apostasy was in no way a transgression, butwas rather a fulfillment of the commandment ofGod, "for it is known throughout Israel that theprophets can do and command things which arenot in accord with the Torah and its laws," theentire question of the continued validity of theLaw had reached a critical stage. We know thateven before his apostasy Sabbatai Zevi violatedseveral of the commandments by eating the fat ofanimals and administering it to others, directing

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that the paschal sacrifice be performed outsideof the Land of Israel, and cancelling the fast days.His followers soon began to seek explanations forthese acts, and here began a division which wasto lead eventually to an open split in the move-ment.

IV

HE NEW DOCTRINE of the necessaryTapostasy of the Messiah was accept-

ed by all the "believers." In fact, it proved to besymbolically richer than was at first assumed, forit expertly expressed the contradiction betweenthe outward reality of history and the inward re-ality of the "believers' " lives. It was now no long-er to be wondered at that the outward deliver-ance had been delayed, for this could be ex-plained by the mystic principle of "good withinbut clothed in evil garments." In turn, however,other questions arose which the doctrine of neces-sary apostasy was in itself insufficient to answer.

First of all, it was asked, what was the nature ofthe Messiah's act? Was it intended to be an ex-emplar for others? Were all Jews enjoined to fol-low suit? Or was it essentially inimitable and tobe looked upon as a theoretical model only?

Second, what was the nature of the transitionalperiod during which the Messiah was in theclutches of the kelipot? Could it properly becalled the redemption or not? Since it was agreedby all that the Shekhinah had "risen from thedust," where was the Shekhinah now? Did it stillmake sense to speak of her "exile" and to mournfor her? What exactly was the relationship of in-wardness to outwardness in the present age?

Third, what was the status of the Torah duringthis period? Had a new aspect of it been revealed?How was the principle of mitzvah ha-ba'ah ba-averah to be understood? Could it not be arguedthat the change which had taken place in the re-lationship of the divine worlds necessitated a cor-responding change in the performance of thecommandments, the purpose of which had beento restore the harmony of the old, unredeemedcosmos that had been shattered by the primordialsin? Was not the Lurianic Kabbalah in its tradi-tional form now outdated?

These were the principal dilemmas which wereto shape the development of Sabbatianism in thecourse of the following hundred years, and in sev-eral countries to transform it from a messianicmovement into a nihilistic movement operatingwithin a religious framework. And just as thesequestions were themselves mutually related, so thenihilism which resulted from them was to be char-acterized by its internal unity and consistency.

Here, then, it is necessary to distinguish be-tween two opposing Sabbatian factions whichemerged from the clashes of opinion surroundingthese disputed points, as well as from differinginterpretations of the theosophical "mystery of

the Godhead" (sod ha-elohut) revealed by Sab-batai Zevi to his disciples: a moderate and ratherpiously inclined wing of the movement on theone hand, and a radical, antinomian, and ni-hilistic wing on the other. (Both of these factions,in turn, contained many subdivisions, but herewe are concerned only with the more general fea-tures of each.) In the case of some Sabbatians,who have left us no completely candid record oftheir feelings, it is difficult to determine to whichof these two camps they belonged.* As might nat-urally be expected, in face of the persecutionsagainst them the "believers" were not often in aposition to expound their beliefs undisguisedly,and certainly not to permit them to appear inprint. This was particularly true of the nihilists,who had good and compelling reasons for con-cealing their doctrines.

Moderate Sabbatianism, which we shall considerfirst, was a view shared by many rabbis and wasrepresented by men like Nathan of Gaza, AbrahamCardozo, and Abraham Rovigo. Of these three,Cardozo and Rovigo are the more valuablesources, especially the former, a large number ofwhose many treatises have survived thanks to therefusal of his disciples in London, Turkey, andMorocco to burn them in compliance with theinjunctions of the rabbinical courts.

According to the "moderates," the apostasy ofthe Messiah was not intended to serve as an ex-ample for others. To be sure, Sabbatai Zevi haddone what was necessary, but to attempt to followin his footsteps was to belie the significance of hisact, which was performed in behalf of everybody.In the words of Isaiah 53: "The Lord hath madeto light on him the iniquity of us all." Strictlyspeaking, "all were [originally] under the ob-ligation to convert," but God in His mercy per-mitted the apostasy of the Messiah to atone forthe sins of His people. Besides being strange andscandalous in its nature, Sabbatai Zevi's conver-sion was in a class by itself and was not an objectof imitation. The Jew was expected to remain aJew. True, a new world-era had undoubtedlybeen ushered in, the spiritual worlds had under-gone tikkun, and their structure was now per-manently altered; nonetheless, as long as the re-demption did not manifest itself outwardly in therealm of objective events.in history, as long as theexternal bondage continued and the phenomenalworld remained unchanged, no aspect or com-mandment of the Torah was to be openly tam-pered with except for the small number of inno-

* One might particularly cite in this connection thepuzzling case of the great Talmudic scholar Rabbi JonathanEibeschuitz, a psychological enigma that still needs badlyto be unraveled, although here is not the place to doso. I cannot conceal the fact, however, that after thoroughlyexamining both Eibeschiitz's own Kabbalistic writings andall the polemical works that they engendered I have beenforced to conclude that he was indeed a Sabbatian, as bothJacob Emden and, in a later age, Heinrich Graetz insisted.

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vations, such as the cancellation of the fast ofTish'ah be-Av (the day of the destruction of theTemple), which had been proclaimed by theMessiah and his prophets as symbolic tokens ofthe redemption's commencement. Even on thispoint, however, there was disagreement, for sev-eral Sabbatians, including Abraham Rovigo him-self, decided to reinstate the fast after a period ofhesitation lasting a number of years during whichthey had disregarded it-not because they had"gone back" on their beliefs, but because of thequestionable nature of the practice itself, as wit-nessed by the fact that Rovigo's disciple, MordecaiAshkenazi, had been bidden by a maggid or "spir-itual intelligence" to desist from it. On the whole,it was the view of the "moderates" that during thetransitional period under way the kelipot still re-tained a good deal of their power, which couldonly be eliminated by continued performance ofthe mitzvot: the facadee" of rabbinic Judaismmust be allowed to remain temporarily standing,although great changes had already taken placewithin the edifice. One unmistakable testimonyto this inner transformation was the abandon-ment by many of the "moderates" of the mysticalmeditations (kavvanot) of Isaac Luria. The firstto discontinue their use was Nathan of Gaza,whose reasons for doing so were as follows:

The kavvanot of the Lurianic Kabbalists wereinward actions of thought designed to relate theperformance of given commandments or prayersto specific stages in the dynamic chain of the di-vine worlds and thereby to reintegrate the latterby helping to restore them to the places they hadoccupied before their catastrophic fall. Thus,each kavvanah was a spiritual act demonstratingthat the outward undertaking which occasionedit harmonized invisibly with the overall struc-ture of the cosmos. Now, however, with the ad-vent of the Messiah, this structure had changed.The sense of inner freedom possessed by the "be-lievers" was not a subjective illusion, but wascaused by a real reorganization of the worldsilluminating the soul, as a result of which theLurianic kavvanot had become obsolete. This inturn led to a revaluation of the entire LurianicKabbalah, and on occasion both Nathan of Gazaand Abraham Cardozo went so far as to directveiled criticisms at Isaac Luria himself. Nathan,for example, writes: "In the present age it is nolonger in order to read the tikkunim composedby Rabbi Isaac Luria of blessed memory and hisdisciples, nor to meditate according to their kav-vanot, for the times have changed. The kavvanotof Rabbi Isaac Luria were meant for his own age,which was [like] an ordinary day of the week,whereas now it is the eve of the Sabbath, and it isnot proper to treat the Sabbath as though it werea weekday." Elsewhere he writes: "My meaningis that the kavvanot discovered by our teacherRabbi Isaac Luria, may his saintly and righteousmemory be blessed, are no longer appropriate to

our own time, because the raising up [of the di-vine worlds] has entered a new phase, so that itwould be like employing kavvanot intended for aweekday on the Sabbath. Therefore, let everyonebeware of using them, and likewise let none ofthe kavvanot or homilies or writings of RabbiIsaac Luria be read henceforward, for they areabstruse and no living man has understood themexcept Rabbi Hayyim Vital, who was a discipleof the master [Isaac Luria] for several years, atthe end of which he surpassed him in knowl-edge."

In a similar vein: "It is no longer in orderto perform the midnight vigil, that is, to weepand mourn for the exile of the Shekhinah, forshe has already begun to rise from the earth, sothat whoever mourns for her is a blunderer andattracts the company of that guilty [demon]Lilith, since it is she now who weeps and wails."Many other passages like these could be cited. Asa matter of course Cardozo hastened to composea new series of updated kavvanot, but these werenever to prove popular with his fellow Sabbatians,who either gave up the practice of mystical medi-tations entirely, or else, like many of the Hasidimwho came after them, took to composing theirown as they individually saw fit.

IT WAS generally held by all the Sabba-tians that now, on the "eve of the Sab-

bath," the mystery of the Godhead that had eludedthe rabbis, philosophers, and Kabbalists through-out the ages was finally to be revealed. This wasnot to say that the secret had not been hinted atby the last of the Gnostics living in the Tannaiticperiod, who cryptically concealed it in the pagesof the Zohar and in several Aggadot, particularlythose known as the aggadot shel dofi or "offensiveAggadot," which had served as milestones for thecontemplation of the mystics and as obscure hintsat the mysteries during the dark night of exile.But the true meaning of these had been over-looked; nor could it be fully comprehended untilthe End of Days. On the other hand, althoughthe "mystery of the Godhead" was yet to be re-vealed in its entirety, a part of it had now beenmade known. Here again a rejection of Lurianismand the substitution of a new Sabbatian Kabbalahin its place were involved. The first written ex-position of the new system, which was to be sub-ject to a great many different inferences and in-terpretations, was the small tract Raza de-Mehe-manuta ("The Secret of the Faith") which wasorally dictated by Sabbatai Zevi to a disciple afterhis apostasy. Its effect was to prefix yet anotherstage to the theogonic speculations of the Kab-balists, for it treated (and quite remarkably) ofthe mysterious inner life of the Godhead beforeits tzimtzumn or primordial contraction, whereasLurianic Kabbalah had dealt only with thecounter-expansion of the deity once the tzimtzumhad taken place.

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We have already seen in connection with theirdoctrine of the apostate Messiah that the Sabba-tians were not in the least bit chary of paradoxes,and indeed, their theological reflections on thetrue nature of "the Faith" and its history inIsrael reveal a dialectical daring that cannotbut be respected. Here we are given our deepestglimpse yet into the souls of these revolu-tionaries who regarded themselves as loyal Jewswhile at the same time completely overturningthe traditional religious categories of Judaism. Iam not of course speaking of a feeling of "loyalty"to the Jewish religion as it was defined by rab-binical authority. For many, if not for most Sab-batians, the Judaism of the rabbis, which theyidentified with the Judaism of the exile, had cometo assume an entirely dubious character. Evenwhen they continued to live within its jurisdictionit was not out of any sense of positive commit-ment; no doubt it had been suited to its time, butin the light of the soul-shaking truth of the re-demption that time had passed. Taking into ac-count all that has been said here, it is hardly sur-prising that this attitude should have existed.What is surprising, however, indeed astoundinglyso, is the nature of the spiritual world that theSabbatians should have stumbled upon in thecourse of their search through the Bible for "themystery of the Godhead" which exilic Judaismhad allowed to perish, for here we are confrontedwith nothing less than the totally unexpected re-vival of the religious beliefs of the ancient Gnos-tics, albeit in a transvalued form.

HE GNOSTICS, who were the contem-T poraries of the Jewish Tannaim ofthe 2nd century, believed that it was necessary todistinguish between a good but hidden God whoalone was worthy of being worshiped by the elect,and a Demiurge or creator of the physical universe,whom they identified with the "just" God of theOld Testament. In effect they did not so muchreject the Jewish Scriptures, whose account ofevents they conceded to be at least partly true,as they denied the superiority of the Jewish God,for whom they reserved the most pejorativeterms. Salvation was brought to mankind by mes-sengers sent by the hidden God to rescue the soulfrom the cruel law or "justice" of the Demiurge,whose dominion over the evil material world, astestified to by the Bible, was but an indication ofhis lowly status. The hidden God Himself wasunknown, but He had entrusted Jesus and thegnostic faithful with the task of overthrowing the"God of the Jews." As for the claim of both Jewsand orthodox Christians that the God of Israelwho created the world and the transcendent Godof goodness were one and the same, this was agreat falsehood which stood in the way of truegnosis. This kind of "metaphysical anti-Semi-tism," as is well known, did not vanish from his-tory with the disappearance of the gnostic sects,

but continued to reassert itself within the Cath-olic Church and its heretical offshoots throughoutthe Middle Ages.

"The mystery of the Godhead" which Sabbati-anism now "discovered," and which it believedto be identical with "the mystery of the God ofIsrael" and "the faith of Father Abraham," wasfounded entirely on a new formulation of thisancient gnostic paradox. In the version made cur-rent by Cardozo it was expounded as follows:

All nations and philosophers have been led byirrefutable laws of the intellect to acknowledgethe existence of a First Cause responsible for set-ting all else in motion. Given the fact, therefore,that anyone capable of logical reasoning candemonstrate to his own satisfaction that such aCause exists, what need is there for it to be spe-cially revealed to mankind? What possible reli-gious difference can such a revelation make whenwe are no less the wiser without it? The answeris, none at all. The First Cause, which was wor-shiped by Pharaoh and Nimrod and the wise menof India alike, is not the concern of religion at all,for it has nothing to do with the affairs of thisworld or its creation and exerts no influence on itfor good or for bad. The purpose of a divine rev-elation must be to make something known whichcannot be grasped by the intellect on its own,something which has specifically religious valueand content. And indeed, this is precisely thecase with the Jewish Torah, which does not dwellat all on that Hidden Principle whose existencecan be adequately proven by the intellect, butspeaks only of the God of Israel, Elohei Yisrael,who is the creator of the world and the first ema-nation to proceed from the First Cause. This God,in turn, has two aspects, or "countenances" (par-tzufim), one male and one female, the latter beingknown as the Shekhinah; He alone it is who cre-ates and reveals Himself and redeems, and to Himalone are prayer and worship to be rendered. It isthis paradox of a God of religion who is distinctfrom the First Cause that is the essence of trueJudaism, that "faith of our fathers" which is con-cealed in the books of the Bible and in the darksayings of Aggadot and the Kabbalah. In thecourse of the confusion and demoralizationbrought on by the exile this mystery (of whicheven Christianity was nothing but a distorted ex-pression) was forgotten and the Jewish Peoplewas mistakenly led to identify the impersonalFirst Cause with the personal God of the Bible, aspiritual disaster for which Saadia Gaon, Mai-monides, and the other philosophers will yet beheld accountable. It was thus that the words ofthe prophet Hosea, "For the Children of Israelshall sit solitary many days without a king" (3:4),came to be fulfilled. At the exile's end, however,Israel's God will reveal Himself once more, andthis secret is a source of precious comfort to the"believers."

Here we have a typically gnostic scheme, only

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inverted: the good God is no longer the deus ab-sconditus, who has now )ecome the deity of thephilosophers for whom there is no room in reli-gion proper, but rather the God of Israel whocreated the world and( presented it with HisTorah. What daring labyrinths of the spirit arerevealed in this new creed! What yearnings for aregeneration of faith and what disdainful nega-tion of the exile! Like true spiritual revolution-aries, with an unfeigned enthusiasm which eventoday cannot fail to impress the reader of Car-dozo's books, the "believers" unflinchingly pro-claimed their belief that all during the exile theJewish people had worshiped a powerless divin-ity and had clung to a way of life that was funda-mentally in need of reform. When one considershow wildly extravagant all this may appear evennow, it is easy enough to appreciate the wrathand indignation with which such a theology wasgreeted by the Orthodox camp in its own day.Determined to avoid a full-scale revolution withinthe heart of Jewry, the rabbinical traditionalistsand their supporters did all they could to drivethe "believers" beyond the pale. And yet in spiteof all this, one can hardly deny that a great dealthat is authentically Jewish was embodied inthese paradoxical individuals too, in their desireto start afresh and in their realization of the factthat negating the exile meant negating its reli-gious and institutional forms as well and return-ing to the original fountainheads of the Jewishfaith. This last practice-a tendency to rely inmatters of belief upon the Bible and the Aggadah-grew to be particularly strong among the nihil-ists in the movement. Here, too, faith in paradoxreigned supreme: the stranger the Aggadah, themore offensive to reason and common sense, themore likely it was to be seized upon as a symbolof that "mystery of faith" which naturally tendedto conceal itself in the most frightful and fanci-ful tales.

HAVE alluded to the fierce discussionsthat broke out among the Sabbatians

over the issue of how "the mystery of the God-head" was to be interpreted. Several of the eluci-dations of the doctrine that are known to us dif-fer substantially from the version given by Car-dozo, who devoted his very best speculative pow-ers to the question. All of these treatises employthe terminology of the Zohar and the LurianicKabbalah, but proceed to attribute to them mean-ings that are entirely their own. Among the spec-ulations on the subject that have come down tous in detail are those of Nehemiah Hayon, Sam-uel Primo, and Jonathan Eibeschiitz. Despitetheir division of the Godhead into three hypos-tases (partzufim)-the First Cause or "Holy An-cient One" (atika kadisha), the God of Israel or"Holy King" (malka kadisha), and the She-khinah-all of these writers sought to uphold theessential dynamic unity of the divinity. The cen-

tral problems as they saw them-problems, e itsaid, which didl not exist for non-Sabbatian Kab-blah atll all-were first of all to determine thenature of the relationship, thie "three knots olfaith' as they called it, between the First Cause,the God of Israel, and the Shekhibiah, and se(-onlly to establish the exact content of the newrevelation concerning the essence of the God ofIsrael. Characteristic of the approach of theseSabbatian "moderates" was their stubborn refusalto leave any room in their gnostic theories for adoctrine of divine incarnation. Indeed, the litera-ture of "moderate" Salbbatianism is in generalfilled with violent denunciations of Christianityand of the Christian dogma of the Trinity.

According to several of the "moderates," "themystery of the Godhead" had not yet been fullyrevealed: during the original messianic revivalperiod of 1665-i66, they argued, there had been aninitial revelation which it was permitted to makeknown freely, but ow, during the period oftransition, eclipse, and uncertainty, the situationwas no longer the same. The Shekhinah had in-cleed "begun to rise,'' but "she has still not re-turned to her place entirely, for had she re-turned we would no longer be in exile." T'hesewords were written by Abraham Rovigo morethan thirty years after Sabbatai Zevi's apostasy,of the mystic meaning of which he had absolutelyno doubt, and they illustrate in a nutshell thepsychology of "moderate" Sabbatianism while atthe same time solving the riddle of how so manyrabbis who were confirmed "believers" neverthe-less managed to remain in their rabbinical posts.The redemption had truly begun, but it was agradual process: "[It proceeds] step by step. Inthe End the Holy One, blessed be He, will raiseher from the dust." This was not to say that theShekhlnah had not already begun to rise of herown accord, but "as long as He does not lift herup Himself it is said that she is still in exile." Itgoes without saying that those who subscribed tothis view were obliged to keep p all the tradi-tional practices of exilic, i.e., historic, Judaism.Even the midnight vigil for the Shekhinah wasultimately reintroduced.

In a word, at the same time that it was com-pletely transforming the historic inner world ofJudaism in its own unique manner, "moderate"Sabbatianism continued to adhere to traditionalJewish observance not for the sake of merecamouflage, but as a matter of principle. The in-ward crisis which every "moderate" underwentwas permitted little or no outward expression,and inasmuch as such an objectification of hisfeelings was barred by either the exigencies ofthe situation or the compunctions of his own re-ligious consciousness, he was forced to retreateven further into himself. But although the newsense of inner freedom bore purely inner conse-quences, we can nevertheless rely on the judg-ment of those anti-Sabbatian polemicists who saw

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perfectly clearly that the inward devastation ofold values was no less dangerous or far-reachingthan its outward manifestation. Whoever readssuch a volume as Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschiitz'sThe Book of the Eternal Name, a treatise on"the mystery of the Godhead" composed in thetraditional style of Talmudic dialectics, will read-ily see what abysses had opened up in the veryheart of Judaism. From these were to come thedeluge: pure founts of salvation and spiritual re-birth to the one camp, gross waters of corruptionand shameless sacrilege to the other.

V

W xT FE HAVE SEEN how the principal fea-ture of "moderate" Sabbatian

doctrine was the belief that the apostasy of theMessiah was sui generis. The Messiah must go hislonely way into the kingdom of impurity and"the other side" (sitra ahra) and dwell there inthe realm of a "strange god" whom he would yetrefuse to worship. The enormous tension betweenthe subjective and the objective which had de-veloped in the ranks of his followers had so farfound a legitimate expression in this one actalone. Whereas Sabbatai Zevi had actually donestrange and objectionable things in the name ofthe holy, the celebration of this paradox amongthe "believers" was restricted to the domain offaith. "Moderate" Sabbatianism drew a circlearound the concept of "strange holiness" and for-bade itself to enter: it was indeed the Messiah'sfate to scandalize Israel by his deeds, but it wasdecidedly his fate alone.

Once drawn, however, the line was clearly dif-ficult to maintain. The more ardent "believer"found himself becoming increasingly restive. Washe to abandon the Messiah entirely just when thelatter was engaged in the most bitter phase of hisstruggle with the power of evil? If the spark of theredemption had been experienced by all, whyshould not all do as the Redeemer? How couldone refuse to go to his aid? And soon the cry washeard: Let us surrender ourselves as he did! Letus descend together to the abyss before it shutsagain! Let us cram the maw of impurity with thepower of holiness until it bursts from within.

Feelings such as these formed the psychologicalbackground for the great nihilistic conflagrationthat was to break out in the "radical" wing of theSabbatian movement. The fire was fed by power-ful religious emotions, but in the crucial momentthese were to join forces with passions of an en-tirely different sort, namely, with the instincts ofanarchy and lawlessness that lie deeply buriedin every human soul. Traditionally Judaism hadalways sought to suppress such impulses, but nowthat they were allowed to emerge in the revolu-tionary exhilaration brought on by the experienceof redemption and its freedom, they burst forthmore violently than ever. An aura of holiness

seemed to surround them. They too would begranted their tikkun, if only in the "hindparts ofholiness."

Ultimately, too, the disappointing course of ex-ternal events had a telling effect. Though he pos-sessed the heroic soul of the warrior Bar Kokhba,Sabbatai Zevi had not gone forth to do battle onthe Day of the Lord. A yawning chasm had ap-peared between inner and outer realities, andonce it was decided that the former was the truerof the two, it was only to be expected that thevalue of the latter would increasingly come to berejected. It was precisely at this point that messi-anism was transformed into nihilism. Havingbeen denied the political and historical outlets ithad originally anticipated, the new sense of free-dom now sought to express itself in the sphere ofhuman morality. The psychology of the "radical"Sabbatians was utterly paradoxical and "Mar-ranic." Essentially its guiding principle was: Who-ever is as he appears to be cannot be a true "be-liever." In practice this meant the following:

The "true faith" cannot be a faith which menpublicly profess. On the contrary, the "true faith"must always be concealed. In fact, it is one's dutyto deny it outwardly, for it is like a seed that hasbeen planted in the bed of the soul and it cannotgrow unless it is first covered over. For this reasonevery Jew is obliged to become a Marrano.

Again: a "true act" cannot be an act committedpublicly, before the eyes of the world. Like the"true faith," the "true act" is concealed, for onlythrough-concealment can it negate the falsehoodof what is explicit. Through a revolution of val-ues, what was formerly sacred has become profaneand what was formerly profane has become sacred.It is no longer enough to invent new mysticalmeditations (kavvanot) to suit the changedtimes. New forms of action are needed. Prior tothe advent of the Redeemer the inward and theoutward were in harmony, and this is why it waspossible to effect great tikkunim by means of out-wardly performing the commandments. Now thatthe Redeemer has arrived, however, the twospheres are in opposition: the inward command-ment, which alone can effect a tikkun, has becomesynonymous with the outward transgression. Bit-tulah shel torah zehu kiyyumah: the violation ofthe Torah is now its true fulfillment.

More than anything else, it was this insistenceof the "radicals" on the potential holiness of sin-a belief which they attempted to justify by citingout of context the Talmudic dictum (Nazir 23b),"A transgression committed for its own sake isgreater than a commandment not committed forits own sake"-which alienated and offended theaverage Jew and caused even the "believers"themselves to undergo the severest of conflicts.

In the history of religion, whenever we comeacross the doctrine of the holiness of sin it is al-ways in conjunction with one or another spiritu-alistic sect. The type of the pneumatic, which I

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have previously discussed, is particularly suscepti-ble to such a teaching and it is hardly necessaryto point out the connections that exist betweenthe theories of nihilism and those of the moreextravagant forms of spiritualism. To the pneu-matic, the spiritual universe which he inhabits isof an entirely different order from the world ofordinary flesh and blood, whose opinion of thenew laws he has chosen to live by is therefore ir-relevant; insofar as he is above sin (an idea,common to many sectarian groups, which occa-sionally occurs in the literature of Hasidism aswell) he may do as the spirit dictates withoutneeding to take into account the moral standardsof the society around him. Indeed he is, if any-thing, duty-bound to violate and subvert this "or-dinary" morality in the name of the higher prin-ciples that have been revealed to him.

A LTHOUGH INDIVIDUALS with inclina-tions in this direction existed in

Judaism also, particularly among the Kabbalists,up to the time of the Sabbatians their activitieswere confined entirely to the level of pure theory.The most outstanding example of such specula-tive or virtual "spiritualism" to be found in Kab-balistic literature is the Sefer ha-Temunah ("TheBook of the Image"), a mystical treatise writtenin early 13th-century Spain, in which it is statedthat the Torah consists of a body of spiritual let-ters which, though they remain essentially un-changed, present different appearances to thereader in different cosmic aeons (shemitot). Ineffect, therefore, each aeon, or shemitah, possessesa Torah of its own. In the current shemitah,which is ruled by the divine quality of din, sternjudgment or rigor, the Torah is read in terms ofprohibitions and commandments and even itsmost mystic allusions must be interpreted in thislight. In the coming aeon, however, which willbe that of rahanllm, divine mercy, the Torah willbe read differently, so that in all probability"what is prohibited now will be permitted then."Everything depends on the particular aeon andthe divine quality (or attribute) presiding overit. Sensing the dangers inherent in such a doc-trine, certain Kabbalists, such as Moses Cordo-vero, attempted to dismiss it as entirely unworthyof consideration. But it was precisely those worksthat propounded it, such as the Sefer ha-Temunahand the Sefer ha-Kanah, which influenced the Sab-batians tremendously.

To the theory of the cosmic aeons the Sabba-tians assimilated a second, originally unrelatedconcept. The Zohar itself does not recognize or,more exactly, does not utilize the idea of theshemitot at all (a fact that was instrumental inmaking it suspect in the eyes of later Kabbalists),but in two later additions to the Zoharic corpus,the Tikkunei ha-Zohar and the Ra'ya Mehem-na, a great deal is said on the subject of fouremanated worlds, the World of atzilut or "Em-

anation," the World of beriah or "Creation," theWorld of yetzirah or "Formation," and the Worldof asiyah or makingg," which together comprisethe different levels of spiritual reality. In connec-tion with these we also occasionally hear of a"'Torah of atzillit" nd a "Torah of beriah," themeanings of which are not entirely clear. By thetime of the Kabbalists of the School of Safed, how-ever, we find these latter terms employed in a def-inite sense to indicate that there are two aspectsof the one essential Torah, i.e., the Torah as it isunderstood in the supernal World of atzilut andthe Torah as it is understood in the lower Worldof beriah. What the Sabbatians now did was toseize this idea and expound it in the light of thetheory of cosmic aeons. The Torah of beriah,they argued, borrowing a metaphor from theZohar (1I, 23) is the Torah of the unredeemedworld of exile, whose purpose it was to serve as agarment for the .Shckhinah in her exile, so thatwhoever observed its commandments and prohi-bitions was like one who helped clothe the She-khinah in her state of distress. The orah ofatzilut, on the other hand, is the "true" Torahwhich, like "the mystery of the Godhead" it makesmanifest, has been in a state of concealment forthe entire period of the exile. Now that the re-demption has commenced it is about to be re-vealed, and although in essence it is identicalwith the Torah of beriah, its way of being read willbe different; thus, all the commandments and pro-hibitions of the Torah of beriah will now be re-interpreted by the light of the World of atzilut, inwhich (to take but one example), as is stated inseveral Kabbalistic sources, there is no such thingas forbidden sexual practices. It was in this man-ner that assertions made in a completely differentspirit and in terms of a wholly different under-standing of the concepts "World of atzilut" and"Torah of atzilut" were pressed into service bythe "radical" Sabbatians as slogans for their newmorality.*

* Among anti-Sabbatian Kabbalists there were a num-ber of attempts to explain this monstrous perversion, asit seemed, of sacred writings. In his Divrei Sofrim ([1913],p. 32d), for example, R. Zadok Hacohen of Lublin cites anunidentified "book written by a saintly man" as his au-thority for asserting that the Sabbatians "came to the endthat they came to because they engaged in the study ofthe Kabbalah with their hearts full of lust and thereforematerialized much [of its spiritual meaning]; and in con-sequence of the fact that they saw references to copula-tion, kissing, embracing, and so forth [in what they read],they yielded to lascivious passions, may God preserve usfrom the same, and committed great evil." In much thesame vein, Rabbi Zevi of Zydaczow, one of the great Kab-balists of the Hasidic movement and possibly none otherthan Rabbi Zadok Hacohen's "saintly man" himself, writesin his Sur me-Ra va-Aseh Tov: "I once heard my teacher[the Seer of Lublin] comment on certain students by men-tioning the case of that well-known sect.... It [i.e., Sab-batian antinomianism] happened because they desired toachieve the revelation of Elijah and to prophesy by theHoly Spirit . ..without troubling to discipline their natureor their material selves...."

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The concept of the two Torahs was an extreme-ly important one for Sabbatian nihilism, not leastbecause it corresponded so perfectly to the "Mar-ranic" mentality. In accordance with its purelymystical nature the Torah of atzilut was to be ob-served strictly in secret; the Torah of beriah, onthe other hand, was to be actively and deliber-ately violated. As to how this was to be done,however, the "radicals" could not agree and dif-fering schools of thought evolved among them. Itis important to keep in mind that we are dealinghere with an eruption of the most diverse sortsof emotion. The Gordian knot binding the soulof the exilic Jew had been cut and a vertigo thatultimately was to be his undoing seized the newlyliberated individual: genuine desires for a recon-secration of life mingled indiscriminately with allkinds of destructive and libidinal forces tossed upfrom the depths by an irrepressible groundswellthat undulated wildly between the earthly andthe divine.

The psychological factors at work were particu-larly various in regard to the doctrine of theholiness of sin, which though restricted at first bysome of the "believers" to the performance of cer-tain specified acts alone, tended by virtue of itsown inner logic to embrace more and more of theMosaic Law, especially the biblical prohibitions.Among the leaders of the D6nmeh the antino-mian blessing composed by Sabbatai Zevi,"Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of theuniverse, who permittest the forbidden [mattirisurim],"* became a byword. In fact, two some-what contradictory rationalizations of antinomi-an behavior existed side by side. On the one handthere were those who said: in the world of re-demption there can be no such thing as sin, there-fore all is holy and everything is permitted. Tothis it was retorted: not at all! what is neededrather is totally to deny the beriah, "Creation" (aword that had by now come to denote every as-pect of the old life and its institutions), to tram-ple its values underfoot, for only by casting offthe last vestiges of these can we truly becomefree. To state the matter in Kabbalistic terms, theone side proposed to withhold the sparks of holi-ness from the kelipot until they perished fromlack of nourishment, whereas the other insistedthat the kelipot be positively filled with holinessuntil they disintegrated from the pressure. But ineither case, and despite the many psychologicalnuances which entered into the "transgressioncommitted for its own sake" and the sacred sin, allthe "radicals" were united in their belief in thesanctifying power of sin itself "that dwelleth withthem in the midst of their uncleannesses," as theyinterpreted the phrase in Leviticus 16:6.

*A pun on the blessing in the morning prayer, "Blessedart Thou 0 Lord our God, King of the universe, who freestthose who are in bondage [mattir asurim]." [Translator'snote]

IT WOULD BE pointless to deny that thesexual element in this outburst was

very strong: a primitive abandon such as the Jew-ish people would scarcely have thought itself ca-pable of after so many centuries of discipline inthe Law joined hands with perversely pathologi-cal drives to seek a common ideological rehabili-tation. In the light of what happened there is lit-tle to wonder at when we read in the texts of rab-binical excommunications dating from the 18thcentury that the children of the "believers" wereautomatically to be considered bastards, just as itis perfectly understandable that these childrenand grandchildren themselves should have doneeverything in their power to obscure the historyof their descent. One may readily grant, of course,as Zalman Rubashov justly observes in his studyof the Frankists, that "every sectarian movementis suspected by the church against which it rebelsof the most infamous misconduct and immoral-ity," a conclusion which has led to the hypothesisthat such accusations invariably tell us moreabout the depraved fantasies of the accusers thanthey do about the actual behavior of the accused.It is Rubashov's opinion, indeed, that althoughthe conduct of the Frankists was "in itself ade-quate cause for indignation and amazement,"there is also "every reason to assume that as amatter of course it was greatly exaggerated." Asvalid as the general rule may be, however, theplain facts of the matter are that in the case ofthe "radical" Sabbatians there was hardly anyneed for exaggeration. As Nahum Sokolow haspointed out in a note to Kraushar's history ofFrankism, no matter how thoroughly fantasticand partisan the allegations of the anti-Sabbatiansmay seem to us, we have not the slightest justifi-cation for doubting their accuracy, inasmuch asin every case we can rely for evidence on the"confessions" of the "believers" themselves, aswell as on a number of their apologias whichhave come down to us in both theoretical andhomiletical form.

All this has recently been confirmed by an un-expected discovery. For many years-well into thepresent age, in fact-the Sabbatians in Salonika,the Donmeh, regularly held a celebration on thetwenty-second day of the Hebrew month of Adarknown as "the Festival of the Lamb," the exactnature of which was kept a carefully guardedsecret until some of the younger members of thesect were finally prevailed upon to reveal it tooutsiders. According to their account the festivalincluded an orgiastic rite called "the extinguish-ing of the lights." From what we know of thisrite it probably came to Salonika from Izmir, forboth its name and its contents were evidentlyborrowed from the pagan cult of "the GreatMother" which flourished in antiquity and con-tinued to be practiced after its general demise bya small sect of "Light Extinguishers" in AsiaMinor under the cover of Islam. There can be no

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question that the Dbnmeh took over this ancientbacchanalia based on immemorial myths andadapted it to conform to their mystical belief inthe sacramental value of exchanging wives, a cus-tom that was undoubtedly observed by other"radicals" in the movement as well.

The history of Sabbatian nihilism as a massmovement rather than as the concern of a few iso-lated Jewish scholars who "donned the fez" likeSabbatai Zevi, began in 1683, when several hun-dred Jewish families in Salonika converted to Is-lam "so as to conquer the kelipah from within."From this point on organized Sabbatian nihilismappeared in four main forms:

1) That of the "believers" who chose "voluntaryMarranism" in the form of Islam. The researchthat has been done on the subject of the D6nmeh,particularly the studies of Abraham Danon andSolomon Rosanes, definitely establishes that thesect was purely Jewish in its internal character,not, of course, in the accepted rabbinical sense,but rather in the sense of a mystical heresy. Theapostasy of the D6nmeh aroused violent opposi-tion among the "moderates," for reasons which Ihave already made clear.

2) That of the "'believers" who remained tradi-tional Jews in outward life while inwardly adher-ing to the "Torah of atzilut." Several groups ofsuch individuals existed in the Balkans and Pales-tine (beginning with the arrival there of HayyimMalakh), and afterward, in the 18th century, inNorthern and Eastern Europe, where they wereconcentrated particularly in Podolia and in suchnearby towns as Buczacz, Busk, Gliniany, Horo-denka, Zh6lkiew, Zloczow, Tysmenieca, Nadwor-na, Podhaice, Rohatyn, and Satanow, but also inother countries, especially Rumania, Hungary,and Moravia.

3) That of the Frankists who "Marranizedthemselves" by converting to Catholicism.

4) That of the Frankists in Bohemia, Moravia,Hungary, and Rumania, who chose to remainJewish.

Despite the differences among these groups,all of them were part of a single larger entity.Inasmuch as it was believed by all the "radicals"that externals were no indication of true faith,apostasy was not a factor to come between them.A Jew in the ghetto of Prague, for example, whowent on publicly observing the commandments ofthe "Torah of beriah" while at the same time vio-lating them in private, knew perfectly well thatthe "believer" in Warsaw or, say, Offenbach whohad recently been baptized "for mystical reasons"was still his brother, just as fifty years earlier Sab-batians in Northern Europe had continued to re-main in close touch with the D6nmeh in Salonikaeven after their conversion to Islam. Essentially,the "radicals" all inhabited the same intellectualworld. Their attitudes toward the Torah, theMessiah, and "the mystery of the Godhead" were

identical, for all that they assumed new and un-usual forms among the Frankists.

VI

H E SYSTEMATIC violation of theTorah of beriah was considered by

the "radical" Sabbatians to be the principal at-testation of the new epoch ushered in by Sabba-tai Zevi. But exactly how was one to distinguishbetween what belonged to the lower World ofberiah and its Torah, and what belonged to thehigher World of atzilut and its Torah? Here opin-ion was divided. Baruchya Russo, better known asBerahya or Berochia, the leader of the radicalwing of the D6nmeh in the beginning of the 18thcentury, preached to his followers that even thethirty-six transgressions deemed worthy by theTorah of the ultimate punishment of karet, i.e.,being "cut off" from Israel and from God (a cate-gory that included all the forbidden sexual prac-tices), were aspects of the Torah of beriah only.By the same token it was decreed permissible toeat of the sinew of the thigh-vein, for with theadvent of the Messiah "Jacob's thigh has been re-stored."* In the opinion of some, who based theirargument on a passage from the Zohar, refrainingfrom the sinew of the thigh-vein and fasting onTish'ah be-Av were mutually connected obser-vances: "As long as it is forbidden to eat on Tish-'ah be-Av it is forbidden to eat the sinew of thethigh-vein, and when it is permitted to eat onTish'ah be-Av it is permitted to eat the sinew ofthe thigh-vein." Others went still further: "It iswidely known that belonging to these sects arethose who believe that [with the advent of theMessiah] the Torah has been nullified [bete-lah] and that in the future it will be [read]without [reference to] the commandments, forthey say that the violation of the Torah has be-come its fulfillment, which they illustrate by theexample of a grain of wheat that rots in theearth." In other words, just as a grain of wheatmust rot in the earth before it can sprout, so thedeeds of the "believers" must be truly "rotten"before they can germinate the redemption. Thismetaphor, which appears to have been extremelypopular, conveys the whole of sectarian Sabbatianpsychology in a nutshell: in the period of transi-tion, while the redemption is still in a state ofconcealment, the Torah in its explicit form mustbe denied, for only thus can it too become "con-cealed" and ultimately renewed.

There were, however, even more extreme casesthan these. Jacob Emden relates how he was told

* The prohibition against eating the sinew of the thigh-vein is to be found in Genesis 32, which tells of Jacob'swrestling with the angel: "Therefore the children of Israeleat not the sinew of the thigh-vein which is upon the hollowof the thigh unto this day; because he touched the hollowof Jacob's thigh, even in the sinew of the thigh-vein"(32:33). [Translator's Note]

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by a rabbinical associate of great learning, theRabbi of the Amsterdam Ashkenazim, that

when he was in Zh6lkiew he became involvedwith one of these heretics, a man named FishlZloczow, who was expertly versed in the entireTalmud, which he knew practically by heart,for he was in the habit of shutting himself up inhis room in order to pore over it, never ceasingfrom his studies (for he was a wealthy man) norengaging in idle conversation. He would lingerover his prayers twice as long as the Hasidim ofolden times and was considered by all to be amost pious and ascetic individual. Once he cameto him [i.e., to Emden's informant] in order toconfess his sins and revealed that he belongedto the sect of Sabbatai Zevi, that he had eatenleavened bread on the Passover, and so forth,carrying on contritely all the while as thoughhe had truly repented of his deeds. Soon after-ward, however, he was caught in the act ofcommitting grave transgressions of the Law andwas excommunicated by the rabbis of Lithuaniaand Volhynia. When asked why he had notcontinued his hidden sins in private instead of[committing acts that led to his exposure] inpublic ... he replied that on the contrary, themore shame he was forced to suffer for his faith,the better it was.

Here we are confronted with the type of the '.'be-liever" in its most paradoxical form, and, signifi-cantly, the individual in question was no ordi-nary Jew, but was rather conceded to be an ex-cellent rabbinic scholar by an eminent authoritywho was in a position to know. One could hardlywish for a more perfect example of the nihilisticrejection of the Torah of beriah, which in thiscase was studied for the sole purpose that it mightbe better violated in spirit The Jewish world wasindeed showing signs of inner decay if types suchas these were able to make themselves so easily athome in its midst. And yet underneath all thesevagaries there was obviously a deep-seated desirefor something positive which for lack of suitableconditions under which to function had come tonought.

Illustrative parables and homilies were alsobrought to bear on the doctrine of the sacred sinitself, and the reader cannot fail to notice thatthey are more than just paradoxical and highlyoffensive sayings. They breathe an entirely newspirit. "The patriarchs came into the world to re-store [le-takken] the senses and this they did tofour of them. Then came Sabbatai Zevi and re-stored the fifth, the sense of touch, which accord-ing to Aristotle and Maimonides is a source ofshame to us, but which now has been raised byhim to a place of honor and glory." As late as thebeginning of the 19th century we find a fervent"believer" in Prague commenting in connectionwith the verse in Psalm 68, "Thou hast ascendedon high, Thou hast led captivity captive," thatthe captive in question is the spiritual Torah ofatzilut, which is called a "prisoner" because itwas captured by Moses and forced to dwell in

the prison cell of the material Torah of beriah:

Such is the case with the inner Torah, for theouter is in opposition to the inner ... and mustbe annihilated before the inner can be freed.And just as a woman from Ishmael [i.e., from aMoslem country] feels as though she has beenfreed from her confinement when she comes toEdom [i.e., a Christian country] . . . so con-tinuing [to live] in Israel under the Torah ofberiah is called "captivity," nor can she begiven in marriage under the Torah of beriah butonly in Edom, whereas in Israel one must re-main a virgin-and [he who is able to, let him]understand.

The cryptic Frankist allusions at the end of thispassage to Christianity and to "remaining a vir-gin" are rather obscure, but it is evident fromthe whole how strongly the rejection of the lower,or material, Torah of beriah continued to be up-held by Sabbatian Jews right down to the move-ment's last years. Elsewhere the author of theabove, a thoughtful and deeply religious individ-ual, explains that the commonly expressed beliefthat "no mischief can befall the righteous man[Prov. 12:21] nor can he be a cause of sin"must be understood in the light of the Torah ofatzilut to mean that no matter how sinful the actsof the righteous may appear to others they are infact always fully justified in themselves. He thenadduces a number of astute mystical reasons forthe necessity of certain transgressions, such as eat-ing on the fast days, which he defends by arguingthat fasting is a kind of spiritual "bribe" given tothe kelipot and as such is not in keeping with thepure spiritual nature of the Torah of atzilut.

A TO THE ultimate step of apostasy,the arguments presented by the

"radicals" in its behalf closely resemble thosebrought forward by the "moderates" to vindicatethe apostasy of Sabbatai Zevi himself. We happento have in our possession an illuminating docu-ment bearing on the disputes that arose over thisquestion among the "believers" in the form of ahomily by the well-known Sabbatian NehemiahHayon on the verse (Deut. 29:17), "Lest there beamong you man, or woman, or family, or tribe,whose heart turneth away this day from the Lordour God, to go serve the gods of those nations; lestthere should be among you a root that bearethgall and wormwood." The paradoxical solutionarrived at by Hayon toward the close of his longdiscourse, which I quote here in abbreviatedform, is an invaluable reflection of the perplexityand deep inner conflict experienced by those Sab-batians who were unable to choose between the"radical" and "moderate" positions:

It is supposed among those versed in esotericlore that the redemption can be brought aboutin either one of two ways: either Israel will havethe power to withdraw all the sparks of holinessfrom [the realm of] the kelipah so that the

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kelipah will wither into nothing, or else thekelipah will become so filled with holiness thatbecause of this repletion it must be spewn forth.

. . And this [fact], that the coming of the re-demption can be prompted in one of two ways,was what the rabbis of blessed memory had inmind when they said that the Son of Davidwould come either in a generation that was en-tirely guiltless (meaning when Israel by virtueof its good deeds had withdrawn all the sparks ofholiness from the kelipah), or else in a genera-tion that was entirely guilty (meaning when thekelipah had become so filled with holiness thatit split its maw and perished).... And it is inconsequence of this thesis that many, thoughtheir intentions are good, have mistakenly said,"Let us go worship other gods that we may fillthe kelipah to bursting that it die." . .. Nay, donot reason with yourself, "Since it is impossiblefor all to become guiltless so as to withdraw theholiness from the kelipah, it is better that I be-come a sinner and so hasten the doom of thekelipah in that way that it might die and salva-tion might come," but rather, "Wait for theLord and keep His way" [Ps. 37:34]: it is betterthat you endure the length of the exile and lookto salvation than that you sin by worshipingother gods in order to bring on the redemption.This brings us to the meaning of the verse,"Lest there be among you a root that bearethgall and wormwood [29:17], and it come to passwhen he heareth the words of this curse" [etc.;29:18]. In other words, when he hears the wordsof the curse that is threatened .. he turns awayhis heart from God and blesses himself in hisheart [29:18], saying: "What Moses has writtenis true" . . . but [he thinks that] if he does notturn away his heart from God and if his inten-tions are good, that is, if he means to quenchthe kelipah by giving it holiness to drink, thencertainly no evil will befall him, but on thecontrary, God will turn the curse into a bless-ing. And this is the meaning of the words "andhe blesses himself in his heart," for he saysto himself, "I am sure that no harm will befallme . . . because I did not turn my heart [fromGod] . . . and because my intentions are good. . . [namely] to water the kelipah, the thirsty,one, with the holiness that I extend to her thatshe may partake of it and die. It is of such a onethat Moses said, "The Lord will not be willingto pardon him" [29:19]. Even though hisintentions were good and he only desired tohasten the redemption, he cannot be forgiven.

. . Nor does [the principle of] "A transgressioncommitted for its own sake" [is greater than acommandment not committed for its own sake]apply here, since there [in its original context]it refers to an ordinary sin, as in the case ofJael [in killing Sisera; Judg. 4], whereas here,where it is a question of worshiping other gods,the Lord will not be willing to pardon him.... They [who act on this mistaken assumption]are powerless to destroy the kelipah; on the con-trary, he [who attempts to fill the kelipah withholiness] will remain stuck in its midst, andthis is why it is said that the Lord will not bewilling to pardon him.... There is also anotherpossible explanation [of the verse], namely,

that when Moses said that the Lord would notbe willing to pardon him he was not pronounc-ing a curse . . . but was thinking the following:. . . since he [the deliberate sinner] believes inhis heart that God will not account his actionsas sins, but will rather reward them . . . it is in-conceivable that he should ever repent for hedoes not believe he has done wrong.... Howthen can the Holy One, blessed be He, forgivehim? On the contrary, each time [he sins] heonly angers Him the more ... by thinking thathe has done good instead of evil . . . and by say-ing that the greater a sinner he is the morehe hastens the coming of the redemption. Sucha one undoubtedly incurs the full power of thecurse, since he deliberately violates all its in-junctions.... "And the Lord shall separatehim unto evil out of all the tribes of Israel"[29:20].... But perhaps one can interpret themeaning of the text as follows: since such aperson intends his deeds to redound to thebenefit of all Israel . . . if after sinning andpassing through the kelipah he reconsiders andrepents completely, he undoubtedly succeedsin raising up many sparks from the kelipah,just as in the case of the human body when oneis administered an emetic he does not simplyvomit up the drug itself, but rather havingopened his mouth proceeds to spew forth boththe drug and everything that was near it. Andso it is with the kelipah: sometimes it gainspower over a man whose soul is great and doeshim harm, but as soon as he repents he spewsforth all that was within him. And this is whatSolomon meant when he said [Eccl. 8:9] thereis a time when one man rules another to do himharm. [But since] There is a time [for suchthings] and miracles do not happen every hour,therefore Moses warns that one should not placehimself in this peril.... "And the Lord shallseparate him unto evil"; in other words, if he[the deliberate sinner] has been a cause of evilhe is singled out [for judgment] from thetribes of Israel, for [it is a halakhic principlethat] one cannot commit a transgression foranother by proxy even if one has been au-thorized to do so, much less if one has not been,so that having gone [and committed evil] ofhis own accord, there is no doubt that the evilwhich results [from his actions] will not be im-puted to Israel as a whole. But if he does good-that is, if he repents wholeheartedly and raisesup sparks from Israel by virtue of his repentance-then all the tribes of Israel have a part inthis good; it is only in the evil that they do nothave a part.

Likely as not, this entire passage has an auto-biographical basis. In any vent, it is clear thatthe attitude of its author toward the "voluntaryMarranos" whose conversion he decries yet un-derstands so well is far from being hostile or vin-dictive.

NE OF THE strongest factors in the de-velopment of a nihilistic mentality

among the "radicals" was their desire to negatean objective historical order in which the exile

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continued in full force and the beginnings of theredemption went unnoticed by all but the "be-lievers" themselves. Understandably, during theperiod now in question this antipathy towardoutward reality remained confined to the area ofreligion alone,, the world of ghetto Jewry still be-ing sufficiently stable to preclude its active poli-ticalization. Prior to the French Revolution, in-deed, there was no connection between the ideas ofSabbatianism and the growing undercurrent of dis-content with the ancien regime in Europe. It wasonly when changing times had widened the "be-lievers' " horizons and revealed to them the exis-tence of more tangible ways of affecting the courseof history than the violation of the Torah ofberiah that they too began to dream of revolu-tionizing the structure of society itself. In a sensethis was to mean the restoration to Jewish Messi-anism of its traditional political content, which,as I have shown, the Sabbatian movement trans-formed beyond recognition. As long as externalconditions were not conducive to this, even the"radicals" remained politically unaware, nor werethey able to conceive of any other method ofrevitalizing Jewish life than the subversion of itsmost sacred values; but it is not surprising thatonce the opportune moment arose the essentiallythis-worldly emphasis of Jewish Messianism whichSabbatianism had striven to suppress should havecome to be stressed again. I shall have more to sayon this important subject; first, however, I wouldlike to comment on a related matter, one whichwill serve as yet another example of the uniquelyparadoxical dialectic of Sabbatian thought: its at-titude toward Palestine.

MMEDIATELY AFTER the collapse of theI initial messianic expectations aroused

by Sabbatai Zevi, scattered groups of Sabbatiansbegan to express their opposition to the idea ofemigration to the Holy Land. As has now beenestablished, Nathan of Gaza himself was of theopinion that "for the time being it is best not to goto the Land of Israel." But this point of view didnot go unchallenged. A number of "believers,"especially after 1700, attempted to demonstrate bymystical reasons that in the light of Sabbatiandoctrine emigration was indeed desirable after all.Individuals from both the circle of AbrahamRovigo and the whole band of "Hasidim" centeredaround Rabbi Judah Hasid actually settled inPalestine as a result of specifically Sabbatian aspi-rations. One belief that was current at the timewas that on the occasion of Sabbatai Zevi's secondadvent, which would take place forty years afterhis "concealment," a true mystical knowledge ofhis nature would be revealed to those of his fol-lowers, and only to those, who were living in theHoly Land. Sabbatian nihilists like HayyimMalakh, who were contemporaries of such groups,also were in favor of going to the Land of Israel,from which they too undoubtedly expected special

revelation to come; in addition, they may have feltthat there was an advantage to violating the Torahof beriah on the most consecrated ground of all,on the analogy of "conquering the queen in herown home." As late as the middle of the 18th cen-tury Sabbatian nihilists in Podolia still had con-tacts and acquaintances in Palestine, while a num-ber of the emissaries sent by the Palestinian Jewishcommunity to raise funds in the Diaspora wereSabbatian scholars who acted on the side both assecret propagators of the faith and as contacts be-tween "believers" in different localities. Many ofthese, such as the author of the The Book of theAdornment of Days, a beautiful and detailed de-scription (in Hebrew) of the life of a Kabbalistdevotee all through the year, were undoubtedly"moderates," but regarding many others we willprobably never know exactly where they stood.

Toward the middle of the 18th century, how-ever, a reaction took place, so that we find a dis-tinct anti-Palestinian bias setting in throughoutthe movement. Whether or not the anti-Palestiniansermon cited by Jacob Emden in his Edut be-Ya'akov (44b) is really the handiwork of Jon-athan Eibeschiitz is uncertain, but in any casethere can be no question of its being a total fabri-cation, inasmuch as similar ideas to those ex-pressed in it can be found in other Sabbatian doc-uments which Emden could not possibly haveseen. Among the Frankists an astonishing andclear-cut ideology of Jewish territorialism (as dis-tinct from Palestine-centered tendencies) devel-oped at about this time, apparently as a result ofFrank's own personal ambitions. In a word, onthe very eve of its absorption of new politicalideas Sabbatian nihilism completely reversed itspreviously positive evaluation of the role of theLand of Israel, so that when shortly afterward itbegan to speak the language of a revived politicalMessianism and to prophesy the rebirth of theJewish nation as one outcome of an impendingworld revolution, there was no longer any real in-terest on its part in the idea of the Land of Israelas a national center. As stated by the Frankistwriter in Prague whom we have already had oc-casion to quote, Israel's exile is not a consequenceof its sins at all, but is rather part of a plan de-signed to bring about the destruction of the keli-pot all over the world, so that "even if severalthousands or tens-of-thousands of Jews are en-abled to return to the Land of Israel, nothinghas been completed." According to the same au-thor this new doctrine of the exile is "a secretmystical principle which was hidden from all thesages until it was [recently] revealed in Po-land." And thus we see how in the final stages ofSabbatianism the intrinsic nature of the exilecame to be reconsidered in an entirely new light.

The figure of Sabbatai Zevi himself was also re-cast by the passage of time, becoming entirelymythical: gradually the element of historicaltruth was diminished until nothing was left but a

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legendary hero who had inaugurated a new epochof world history. Even in Sabbatai Zevi's lifetimeone of his first disciples, Abraham Yakhini, couldwrite of him (in his book Vavei ha-Amudim):"Just as one of the seventy faces of the Torah isconcerned entirely with the resurrection of thedead, as is to be seen in [the commentaries of]the Zohar on several chapters [of the Penta-teuch], [the allusions to the resurrection in]the other chapters being inaccessible to us becauseof the limitations of our intellects, so one of theseventy faces of the Torah is concerned entirelywith the Messiah, our lord and master, may hismajesty increase, and shortly, when he revealshimself to us [completely], we shall be priv-ileged to understand the entire Torah in thisway." It is little wonder that the concrete histori-cal figure of Sabbatai Zevi came to be transformedby his followers in much the same manner asJesus's was by his, if not more so, since his con-version into a mythological figure was even morecomplete. Like the early Christians, in fact, the"radicals" eventually came to believe that theMessiah had not been a mere superior humanbeing, but an incarnation of God Himself in hu-man form. This new interpretation of "the mysteryof the Godhead" was accepted by all the "radical"groups down to the last of the Frankists and wasconsidered by them to be the most profound mys-tic truth in their entire body of doctrine. Whenceit came cannot yet be determined: perhaps fromthe collective memory of thousands of Marranos,perhaps from Christian books or anti-Christianpolemics, or perhaps from the "believers' " owninner conflict, the paradoxical cause of which-anapostate Messiah-may have led them to adopt thesame paradoxical solution that a like contradic-tion-a crucified Messiah-produced in yet anoth-er group of Jews caught in the toils of religiousturmoil. And perhaps, too, all of these factorscombined to work together.

HE DOCTRINE of an incarnate God,which immediately became a bone

of contention between the "radicals" and the"moderates" in the Sabbatian camp, was limitedat first to the figure of Sabbatai Zevi himself. Ac-cording to one view, when the redemption began,"the Holy One, blessed be He, removed Himselfupward and Sabbatai Zevi ascended to be God inHis place." Since in the Sabbatian faith "the HolyOne, blessed be He," was synonymous, as we haveseen, with "the God of Israel," this meant thatSabbatai Zevi had now assumed the latter's titleand become "the Holy King." Before long, how-ever, the "believers" in Salonika replaced thisteaching with another: "the Holy King" hadHimself been incarnated in the person of the Mes-siah in order to restore the world and nullify theTorah of beriah. It was in this form that the doc-trine was accepted by the Sabbatian nihilists inPodolia. A prayer of theirs that has come into our

possession reads: "May it be Thy will that weprosper in Thy Torah and cling to Thy com-mandments, and mayst Thou purify my thoughtsto worship Thee in truth . .. and may all ourdeeds in the Torah of atzilut [meaning: trans-gressions!] be only for the sake of Thy greatname, O Sefior Santo,* that we may recognizeThy greatness, for Thou art the true God andKing of the universe, our living Messiah who wastin this earthly world and didst nullify the Torahof beriah and didst reascend to Thy place to con-duct all the worlds.'

But this doctrine of a single incarnation did notlong remain unaltered in turn. Apparently amongthe Sepharclic converts to Islam the belief devel-opedl that the leaders of the "believers" in everyage were reincarnations of Sabbatai Zevi. Wheth-er this actually meant that these leaders-particu-larly Baruchya, who was one of the foremost pro-mulgators of the new belief-were thought to be,or considered themselves, divine incarnations noless than the Messiah himself is not entirely clear,btut there are good reasons for believing that thegospel preached by Jacob Frank at the beginningof his career was nothing but this Sephardicteaching with a number of modifications to suithis own personality, and Frank himself, thoughhe never said so in so many words, was correctlyunderstood by his disciples to imply that he per-sonally was the living God once again incarnatedon earth. Not without a certain "consistency" theFrankists held that each of the three hypostases ofthe Godhead had its individual incarnation in aseparate Messiah: Sabbatai Zevi, whom Frank wasin the habit of referring to simply as "the FirstOne," had been the embodiment of "the AncientHoly One," Frank himself was the personificationof "the Holy King," and the third hypostasis, theShekhinah, variously known in the writings of theKabbalah as "the Kingdom" (malkhut), "thel.ady" (mat-ronita), "the Maiden," and "theDoe," was to appear in the form of a woman. Itis hard not to associate this novelty-a femaleMessiah, referred to by Frank as "the Virgin,"who was yet to be revealed and whose task itwould be to complete the work of the redemp-tion-with the influence of certain mystical Chris-tian sects prevalent at about this time in EasternEurope that believed in a triad of saviors corre-sponding to the threefold nature of God and in afeminine incarnation of the Sophia, the DivineWisdom or Holy Spirit. With one of these groups,in fact, the "Philipovicites" in Rumania and theUkraine, the Frankists were in such close contactthat one of its former leaders publicly defendedthem before the Catholic authorities of Poland.

Interpreted in this manner the redemption wasa process filled with incarnations of the divinity.

* The Spanish term used to denote Baruchya of Salonikain the sect of his followers who saw in him the reborn Sab-batai Zevi and God incarnate.

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Even the "radicals" in Prague who clung to theirJewish identity and strove to defend their beliefsby means of Jewish concepts and sources werewon over to this view, and although their hostilityto Christianity as an institution knew no bounds,references to "the mystery of the incarnation" canbe found throughout their literature. The anti-Sabbatian polemicists who accused the "believers"of corporealizing the idea of God were perfectlyright in their assertions, but this. fact, whichseemed to them a damning admission of weakness,was in reality their opponents' greatest source ofpride! "Because the Godhead has a body the stingof death is gone," wrote one 'believer." On thesurface it would seem that the exaggerated spir-ituality of the World of atzilut and the yearningto see God in the flesh that was evidenced by thedoctrine of a messianic incarnation were two mu-tually opposed tendencies, and yet, after all thathas been said here, it should not be difficult tosee that underlying both was the struggle of anew sensibility toward life to express itself bymeans of a religious vocabulary inherited fromthe old. In such cases the paradox is always theonly solution.

In summary, the five distinguishing beliefs of"radical" Sabbatianism are:

1) The belief in the necessary apostasy of theMessiah and in the sacramental nature of thedescent into the realm of the kelipot.

2) The belief that the "believer" must not ap-pear to be as he really is.

3) The belief that the Torah of atzilut mustbe observed through the violation of the Torahof beriah.

4) The belief that the First Cause and the Godof Israel are not the same, the former being theGod of rational philosophy, the latter the God ofreligion.

5) The belief in three hypostases of the God-head, all of which have been or will be incar-nated in human form.

These theses amply demonstrate, in my opinion,that in the onward course of the Sabbatian move-ment the world of traditional Judaism was shat-tered beyond repair. In the minds of those whotook part in this revolutionary destruction of oldvalues a special susceptibility to new ideas inevita-bly came to exist. Well might the "believers"have asked how long their newly released ener-gies and emotions were to go on being aimlesslysquandered. Were their lives required to be domi-nated by paradoxes forever?

But just as the character of the Sabbatian move-ment was dictated by the circumstances of themovement's birth, so, in turn, it was to dictate thecircumstances of the movement's disintegrationand death. For as the "believers" had meant tofire the sparks of- holiness with the kelipot, sothey were to wander in the blackest of blind al-leys; and as they had wished to "play" with "theother side," the dark side of life, so they were to

dance in the devil's own arms. And last and mostironically of all: as they had hastened to come tothe aid of the Redeemer-"to do as he did forstrange are his deeds, to worship as he worshipsfor his worship is alien" (Isa. 28:21)-so theywere to be induced in the end to play into thehands of a man like Jacob Frank.

VII

ACOB FRANK (1726-91) will always beremembered as one of the most fright-

ening phenomena in the whole of Jewish history:a religious leader who, whether for purely self-interested motives or otherwise, was in all his ac-tions a truly corrupt and degenerate individual.Indeed, it might plausibly be argued that in orderto exhaust completely its seemingly endless po-tential for the contradictory and the unexpected,the Sabbatian movement was in need of just sucha strongman, a man who could snuff out its lastinner lights and pervert whatever will to truthand goodness was still to be found in the mazelikeruins of the "believers' " souls. Even if one is will-ing to concede that the doctrine of the sacred sin,the mitzvah ha-ba'ah ba-averah, was not lackingin certain insights, there can be no question butthat these were thoroughly debased upon comingin contact with the person of Frank. But just asthe "believers" had deliberately chosen to followthat dangerous path along which nothing is im-possible, so it was perhaps precisely this that at-tracted them to Frank, for here was a man whowas not afraid to push on to the very end, to takethe final step into the abyss, to drain the cup ofdesolation and destruction to the lees until thelast bit of holiness had been made into a mock-ery. His admirers, who themselves fell far short ofhim in respect of this ability, were won over byhis intrepidness, which neither the fear of Godnor the terrors of the bottomless pit were able todaunt, and saw in him the type of the true saint,a new Sabbatai Zevi and an incarnate God.

If the full truth be told, however, even afterone has taken into account Frank's unscrupulousopportunism, his calculated deceits, and his per-sonal ambitions, none of which really concern ushere, he remains a figure of tremendous if satanicpower. True, neither the promises and pledgeswith which he lured his disciples, nor his vision-ary schemes for the future that was to follow thegeneral cataclysm of the times seem particularlyimpressive today, although of his territorialist pro-gram it may at least be said that besides reveal-ing his own lust for power it expressed in a bi-zarre yet unmistakable manner the desire of hisfollowers for a reconstruction of Jewish nationaland even economic existence; and yet for all thenegativism of his teachings, they nonetheless con-tained a genuine creed of life.

Frank was a nihilist, and his nihilism possesseda rare authenticity. Certainly, its primitive feroc-

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ity is frightening to behold. Certainly, too, Frankhimself was not only an unlettered man, butboasted continually of his own lack of culture.But in spite of all this-and here is the significantpoint-we are confronted in his person with theextraordinary spectacle of a powerful and tyran-nical soul living in the middle of the 18th cen-tury and yet immersed entirely in a mythologicalworld of its own making. Out of the ideas of radi-cal Sabbatianism, a movement in which he wasapparently raised and eclducated, Frank was able toweave a complete myth of religious nihilism.This, surely, is worthy of attention.

Frank was not an original speculative thinker,but he did have a decided talent for the pithy, thestrikingly illustrative, and the concretely symbolicexpression. Despite their nihilistic content, hissayings in The Sayings of the Lord (Slawa Paiskie)are not very different in form from those of manyfamous Hasidic Zaddikim, and for all his despoticnature he possessed a hidden poetic impulsewhich appears all the more surprising in the lightof his customary savagery. Even Kraushar, wholike his predecessors was intent on emphasizingeverything that seemed incoherent or grotesquein Frank's recorded sayings, was forced to admitthat on occasion they show vigor and imagina-tion. For my own part, I fail to see how any sen-sitive individual who reads the many excerptspublished by Kraushar from The Sayings of theLord with a degree of understanding-somethingwhich it is far from impossible to do-can contem-plate them without emotion. But how many haveeven troubled to make the effort?*

Frank was particularly gifted at the creation ofnew images and symbols, and in spite of its popu-lar coloration his language is full of mystical over-tones. Of the terminology of the Kabbalah herarely made use, at times even criticizing the Sab-batian sectarians in Podolia for their continuingabsorption in Kabbalistic ideas, which he called"madness." Anyone familiar with "radical" Sab-batian thought, however, can readily detect itscontinued presence beneath the new verbal fa-cade. Thus, in place of the familiar Sabbatian"three knots of the faith" we now have "the GoodGod," "the Big Brother who stands before theLord," and "the Virgin," terms which are highlysuggestive for all their earthy quality. The keli-pah, the Torahs of beriah and atzilut, the sparksof holiness, indeed all the conceptual usages thatare basic to Sabbatian theological discourse, havedisappeared entirely, to be replaced by a com-pletely exoteric vocabulary. Even the figure of

* Frank's sayings were never published in Hebrew be-cause the Hebrew translation of the second volume ofKraushar's history, in which they appear, was preventedfrom going to press at the last minute by the newsof Kraushar's conversion to Catholicism, which shockedthe Jewish public. I am deeply indebted to my friend MissHadassah Goldgart for furnishing me with an exact ver-sion of the original Polish text.

Sabbatai Zevi has greatly declined in importance.The world of Sabbatianism itself, on the otherhand, remains intact, or rather, has reached thatultimate stage of its development where it vergeson self-annihilation.

In the following pages I will attempt to presentan overall view of Frank's religious teachings, tothe extent, that is, that they can be fully recon-structed from his many sayings, and in a form thatthey apparently did not completely attain untilafter his conversion to Catholicism. Althoughthey will occasionally seem to contradict one an-other, they are for the most part mutually consis-tent. The somberness of their world or, more ac-curately, world-ruin, did not in fact encourage agreat deal of variety, although this did not pre-vent the "believers," including even the tradi-tionalists among them in Prague, from finding adlark fascination in its tidings, which Frank him-self brutally summed up in a single brusque re-mark: "It is one thing to worship God-and quiteanother to follow the path that I have taken."

CCORDING TO FRANK, the "cosmos"(tevel), or "earthly world" (tevel

ha-gashmi) as it was called by the sectarians inSalonika, is not the creation of the Good or Liv-ing God, for if it were it would be external andman would be immortal, whereas as we see fromthe presence of death in the world this is not atall the case. To be sure, there are "worlds" whichbelong to "the Good God" too, but these are hid-den from all but the "believers." In them aredivine powers, one of whom is "the King ofKings," who is also known as "the Big Brother"and "He who stands before the Lord." The evilpower that created the cosmos and introduceddeath into the world, on the other hand, is con-nected with the feminine, and is most probablycomposed of three "gods" or "Rulers of theWorld," one of whom is the Angel of Death. Inany case, it is these "Rulers," all of whom havebeen incarnated on earth in human form, whoblock the path leading to "the Good God," whois unknown to men, for mystic knowledge ofHim has as yet been revealed to no one, nor hasthe holy soul (nishmata) that emanates fromHim been in any creature, not even in SabbataiZevi. In the current aeon there are three "Rulersof the World," "Life," "Wealth," and "Death,"the last of which must be replaced by "Wisdom"-a task, however, that is not easily accomplished,for although "Wisdom" is in some mysteriousmanner connected to "the Good God," the latteris still not able to reveal Himself to mankind, "forthe world is in the thrall of laws that are nogood."

Hence it is necessary to cast off the dominationof these laws, which are laws of death andharmful to mankind. To bring this about, theGood God has sent messengers such as the patri-archs "who dug wells," Moses, Jesus, and others,

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into the world. Moses pointed out the true way,but it was found to be too difficult, whereuponhe resorted to "another religion" and presentedmen with "the Law of Moses," whose command-ments are injurious and useless. "The Law of theLord," on the other hand-the spiritual Torah ofthe Sabbatians-"is perfect" (Ps. 19:8), only noman has yet been able to attain it. Finally, theGood God sent Sabbatai Zevi into the world, buthe too was powerless to achieve anything, becausehe was unable to find the true way. "But my de-sire is to lead you toward Life." Nevertheless, theway to Life is not easy, for it is the way of nihilismand it means to free oneself of all laws, conven-tions, and religions, to adopt every conceivableattitude and to reject it, and to follow one's leaderstep for step into the abyss. Baptism is a necessity,as Frank said prior to his conversion, "becauseChristianity has paved the way for us." Thirtyyears afterward this same "Christian" observed:"This much I tell you: Christ, as you know, saidthat he had come to redeem the world from thehands of the devil, but I have come to redeemit from all the laws and customs that have everexisted. It is my task to annihilate all this so thatthe Good God can reveal Himself."

T HE ANNIHILATION of every religionand positive system of belief-this

was the "true way" the "believers" were expectedto follow. Concerning the redemptive powers ofhavoc and destruction Frank's imagination knewno limits. "Wherever Adam trod a city was builtbut wherever I set foot all will be destroyed, forI came into this world only to destroy and to an-nihilate. But what I build, will last forever."Mankind is engaged in a war without quarterwith the "no-good" laws that are in power-"andI say to you, all who would be warriors must bewithout religion, which means that they mustreach freedom under their own power and seizehold of the Tree of Life." No region of the hu-man soul can remain untouched by this struggle. Inorder to ascend one must first descend. "No mancan climb a mountain until he has first descendedto its foot. Therefore we must descend and be castdown to the bottom rung, for only then can weclimb to the infinite. This is the mystic principleof Jacob's Ladder, which I have seen and which isshaped like a V." Again, "I did not come into thisworld to lift you up but rather to cast you downto the bottom of the abyss. Further than this it isimpossible to descend, nor can one ascend againby virtue of one's own'strength, for only the Lordcan raise one up from the depths by the power ofHis hand." The descent into the abyss requiresnot only the rejection of all religions and con-ventions, but also the commission of "strangeacts," and this in turn demands the voluntaryabasement of one's own sense of self, so that lib-ertinism and the achievement of that state of

utter shamelessness which leads to a tikkun of thesoul are one and the same thing.

"We are all now obliged to enter the abyss" inwhich all laws and religions are annihilated. Butthe way is perilous, for there are powers and"gods"-these being none other than the three"Rulers of the World"-that do not let one pass.It is necessary to elude them and continue onward,and this none of the ancients was able to do,neither Solomon, nor Jesus, nor even SabbataiZevi. To accomplish this, that is, to overcomethe opposing powers, which are the gods ofother religions, it is imperative that one be "per-fectly silent," even deceitful. This is the mysticprinciple of "the burden of silence" (masa' du-mah; Isa. 21:11), i.e., of maintaining the great re-serve that is becoming to the "believer" (a newversion of the original Sabbatian injunctionagainst appearing as one really isl). Indeed, thisis the principle of the "true way" itself: "Just asa man who wishes to conquer a fortress does notdo it by means of making a speech, but must gothere himself with all his forces, so we too mustgo our way in silence." "It is better to see than tospeak, for the heart must not reveal what it knowsto the mouth." "Here there is no need for schol-ars because here belongs the burden of silence.""When I was baptized in Lvov I said to you: sofar, so good But from here on: a burden of si-lencel Muzzle your mouthsl" "Our forefatherswere always talking, only what good did it dothem and what did they accomplish? But we areunder the burden of silence: here we must bequiet and bear what is needful, and that is why itis a burden." "When a man goes from one placeto another he should hold his tongue. It is thesame as with a man drawing a bow: the longerhe holds his breath, the further the arrow will fly."

From the abyss, if only the "burden of silence"is borne, "holy knowledge" will emerge. The task,then, is "to acquire knowledge," "and the pas-sageway to knowledge is to combine with thenations" but not, of course, to intermingle withthem. He who reaches the destination will lead alife of anarchic liberty as a free man. "The placethat we are going to tolerates no laws, for all thatcomes from the side of Death, whereas we arebound for Life." The name of this place is"Edom" or "Esau," and the way to it, which mustbe followed by the light of "knowledge" (gnosis)and under the "burden of silence" through thedepths of the abyss, is called "the way to Esau."This was the road taken by Jacob the patriarch,"the first Jacob," all of whose deeds prefiguredthose of "the last Jacob"-Jacob Frank. "Esau"too was foreshadowed by the Esau of the Bible,though only in a veiled way: "Esau the son ofJacob was but the curtain that hangs before theentrance to the king's inner chambers." Hereinlies the mystical principle of the wells dug by tiepatriarchs, as well as the mystic content of thestory (Gen. 29) of how Jacob came to a well that

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had already been dug, rolled the stone from itsmouth, and encountered Rachel and her fatherLaban. Another who found the passage to "Esau"was the sorcerer Balaam. "Esau" belongs to therealm of the Good God where the power of deathis made nought, and it is also the dwelling placeof "the Virgin," she who is called Rachel in thebiblical stories about Jacob and is elsewhereknown as "the beautiful maiden who has noeyes." She it is who is the real Messiah (who can-not, contrary to traditional opinion, be a man)and to her "all the king's weapons are surren-dered," for she is also the much sought-after"Divine Wisdom" or Sophia who is destined totake "Death's" place as one of the three "Rulersof the World." For the present, however, she ishidden in a castle and kept from the sight of allliving creatures; all the "strange acts," in compar-ison with which the "strange fire" offered beforethe Lord by Aaron's two sons (Lev. 10) was buta trifle, are committed for the sole purpose ofreaching her. Again, she is the "holy serpent" whoguards the garden, and he who asked what theserpent was doing in Paradise was simply betray-ing his ignorance. As of yet, the place of "Esau,"the home of "the Virgin" and of true salvation,has not been attained by anyone, but its hiddenlight will first be revealed to the "believers," whowill have the distinction of being its soldiers andfighting on its behalf.

These are some of the main features of Frank'steaching. It is a veritable myth of religious nihil-ism, the work of a man who did not live at all inthe world of rational argument and discussion,but inhabited a realm entirely made up of myth-ological entities. Indeed, to anyone familiar withthe history of religion it might seem far more like-ly that he was dealing here with an antinomianmyth from the second century composed by suchnihilistic Gnostics as Carpocrates and his follow-ers than that all this was actually taught and be-lieved by Polish Jews living on the eve of theFrench Revolution, among whom neither the"master" nor his "disciples" had the slightest ink-ling that they were engaged in resuscitating anancient tradition! Not only the general train ofthought, but even some of the symbols and termsare the same! And yet, none of this seems as sur-prising as it may appear to be at first glance whenwe reflect that no less than the Frankists, theGnostics of antiquity developed their thoughtwithin a biblical framework, for all that theycompletely inverted the biblical values. They toobelieved that Esau and Balaam were worshipersof "the Good God," they too converted the ser-pent in the Garden of Eden into a symbol ofgnosis, salvation, and the true "Divine Wisdom"that guided men to freedom from the evil rule ofthe Demiurge by teaching them to disobey hislaws and institutions, and they too held that theLaw of the good and "alien" God, which enjoinedthe commission of "strange acts," was directly op-

posed to the Law of Moses, which was largely thepromulgation of the irascible Creator.

F RANK'S ULTIMATE VISION of the futurewas based upon the still unrevealed

laws of the Torah of atzilut which he promisedhis disciples would take effect once they had"come to Esau," that is, when the passage throughthe "abyss" with its unmitigated destruction andnegation was finally accomplished. In seeking toelucidate this gospel of libertinism I can do nobetter than to quote a passage from the excellentbook on Gnosticism by the philosopher HansJonas in which he discusses the development of alibertinist ethic among the nihilistically mindedpneumatics of the second century:*

The spiritualist morality of these pneumaticspossessed a revolutionary character that did notstop short of actively implementing its beliefs.In this doctrine of immoralism we are con-fronted both with a total and overt rejection ofall traditional norms of behavior, and with anexaggerated feeling of freedom that regards thelicense to do as it pleases as a proof of its ownauthenticity and as a favor bestowed upon itfrom above.... The entire doctrine rests onthe concept of an "extra spirit" as a privilegeconferred upon a new type of human beingwho from here on is no longer to be subject tothe standards and obligations that have hithertoalways been the rule. Unlike the ordinary, pure-ly "psychic" individual, the pneumatic is a freeman, free from the demands of the Law . . .and, inasmuch as it implies a positive realiza-tion of this freedom, his uninhibited behavioris far from being a purely negative reaction.Such moral nihilism fully reveals the crisis ofa world in transition: by arbitrarily assertingits own complete freedom and pluming itself onits abandonment to the sacredness of sin, theself seeks to fill the vacuum created by the "in-terregnum" between two different and opposingperiods of law. Especially characteristic of thisover-all mood of anarchy are its hostility to-ward all established conventions, its need todefine itself in terms that are clearly exclusiveof the great majority of the human race, andits desire to flout that authority of the "divine"powers, that is, of the world-rulers who are thecustodians of the old standards of morality.Over and above the rejection of the past for itsown sake, therefore, we are faced here with anadditional motive, namely, the desire to heapinsult on its guardians and to revolt openlyagainst them. Here we have revolution withoutthe slightest speculative dissemblance and thisis why the gospel of libertinism stands at thecenter of the gnostic revolution in religiousthought. No doubt, too, there was in addition toall this an element of pure "daredeviltry" whichthe Gnostic could proudly point to as an indica-tion of his reliance on his own "spiritual" na-ture. Indeed, in all periods of revolution humanbeings have been fond of the intoxicating powerof big words.

* Hans Jonas, Gnosis und spdtuntiker Geist (1934), 1, 234.

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All of this is fully applicable to both "radical"Sabbatianism in general and to the Frankistmovement in particular; the mentality that Jonasdescribes could not possibly, indeed, assume amore radical form than Frank's nihilistic myth. Itgoes without saying, of course, that in a given agemyth and reality do not always coincide, and inthe case of Frankists the former was undoubtedlythe extremer of the two, even if Fran himselfwas not far from living up to it in actual practice,as emerged from the manuscript of The Chron-icles of the Life of the Lord which one of theFrankist families permitted Kraushar to use andwhich afterward vanished. But in any event thesignificant point is the fact that the myth shouldhave been born at all and that a considerable num-ber of ghetto Jews should have come to regard itas a way to "political and spiritual liberation," toquote the words used by the educated FrankistGabriel Porges in Prague to describe the move-ment's aims to his son after Frank himself was nolonger alive. Clearly, for the Jew who saw inFrankism the solution to his personal problemsand queries, the world of Judaism had been utter-ly dashed to pieces, although he himself may nothave traveled the "true way" at all, may even, infact, have continued to remain outwardly the mostorthodox of observers.

VIII

Ver E WILL apparently never knowwith any certainty why most of

the Sabbatians in Podolia followed Frank's leadand became Catholics while their counterparts inWestern Europe, who for the most part also re-garded Frank as their spiritual leader, chose toremain Jews. Our knowledge in this area, whichis of such crucial importance to an understandingof Jewish history in the countries in question, ispractically nil and we must content ourselves withmere speculation. Possibly the decisive factor wasthe differing social structures of the two groups.The majority of the Sabbatians in Podolia weremembers of the lower class and few (which isnot to say none at all) of those who convertedwere educated individuals. The Sabbatians inGermany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, onthe other hand, were largely from a more wealthybackground and many of them were men of con-siderable rabbinical learning. As is frequently thecase with religious sects, Sabbatianism was trans-mitted by entire families and not just by isolatedindividuals. Even today records exist to prove thata number of families, some of them quite prom-inent, which were known for their Sabbatian al-legiances about 1740, were still clinging to "theholy faith" over sixty years later. For such groupstraditional Judaism had become a permanentouter cloak for their true beliefs, although therewere undoubtedly different viewpoints amongthem as to the exact nature of the relationship.

Not all were followers of Frank, albeit the Frank-ists in Prague were spiritually the strongest amongthem and were extremely active in disseminatingtheir views. Most probably those Sabbatians whohad once been disciples of Rabbi Jonathan Eibe-schiitz were also to be found in this category. Inany case, the fact remains that among thesegroups the number of conversions was very small.Many of their adherents may have desired toreach "the holy gnosis of Edom," but few werewilling to pass through the gates of Christianityin.order to do so.

On the whole, however, in the years followingFrank's death the various Sabbatian groups stillin existence continued to develop along more orless parallel lines. Four principal documents bear-ing on this final phase of Sabbatianism have comedown to us: The Book of the Prophecy of Isaiahwritten by an apostate "believer" in Offenbach;a long sermon on the Alenu prayer published byWessely from a lengthy Frankist manuscript; sev-eral Frankist epistles as presented in substance byPeter Beer; and a commentary on the book EnYa'akov that came into the possession of Dr. H.Brody, when he was Chief Rabbi of Prague. All ofthese sources share the same world, differing onlyin that the first speaks in praise of baptism andheaps "prophetic" imprecations on the Jewishpeople, its rabbis and officials, whereas the others,written by Jews, preserve silence on these topics.Also found in the volume containing the com-mentary on the En Ya'akov was a Frankist com-mentary on the Hallel prayer, the joyous faithand emotion of which are genuinely moving. Theman who wrote these few pages was a pure andimmaculate spirit and his jubilant profession of"the redemption and deliverance of his soul" isobviously deeply felt. Like most of the Sabbatiansin the West, he may never have met Frank faceto face, but on the other hand, the author of TheProphecy of Isaiah, who did, also believed himto be the incarnation of the Living God, "the trueJacob who never dies," and clung to this feelingof salvation throughout his life.

In all of these documents the Frankist mythhas lost much of its radical wildness. Most of itscomponent parts are still recognizable in the formof "profound mysteries" that are to be revealedonly to the prudent, but these too have under-gone considerable modification. In many places,for instance, Frank's insistence that the "believ-ers" were literally to become soldiers is so com-pletely allegorized that it loses both its logic andits paradoxicality. The most striking change, how-ever, is that while the doctrine of "strange acts"remains, and continues to be associated with theappearance of "the Virgin" or "the Lady," thereis no longer the slightest reference to any ethic oflibertinism. Here radicalism has retraced its stepsand returned from the moral sphere to the his-torical. Even if we suppose that the authors ofthese documents were careful not to reveal them-

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selves entirely in their writings-an assumptionthat many of their cryptic allusions would indeedseem to bear out-it is nonetheless apparent thatlibertine behavior is no longer considered bythem to be a binding religious obligation. Insteadthere is an increased effort to understand the"strange acts" of the religious heroes of the past,particularly of the characters in the Bible, abook which the "believers" no less than the or-thodox regarded as the ultimate authority; heretoo, however, the emphasis falls on vindicatingsuch cases in theory rather than on imitatingthem in practice. In Offenbach, it is true, certainscandalous acts continued to be performed on noless than the Day of Atonement itself, but thishad degenerated into a mere semblance, whereas"in good faith" among themselves the "believers"were no longer in the habit of carrying on suchpractices. As for the mystic principle of the "con-jugation" of masculine and feminine elements inthe divine worlds that had played so large a rolein the unorthodox Kabbalistic theories of the ni-hilists and the "radicals," this too, to judge bythe sources in our possession, was now "toneddown." All in all, while the idea of violating theTorah of beriah reminded a cardinal principle of"the holy faith," its application was transferred toother areas, particularly to dreams of a generalrevolution that would sweep away the past in asingle stroke so that the world might be rebuilt.

OWARD THE END of Frank's life thehopes he had entertained of abol-

ishing all laws and conventions took on a veryreal historical significance. As a result of theFrench Revolution the Sabbatian and Frankistsubversion of the old morality and religion wassuddenly placed in a new and relevant context,and perhaps not only in the abstract, for we knowthat Frank's nephews, whether as "believers" orout of some other motive, were active in highrevolutionary circles in Paris and Strasbourg.Seemingly, the Revolution had come to corrobo-rate the fact that the nihilist outlook had beencorrect all along: now the pillars of the worldwere indeed being shaken, and all the old waysseemed about to be overturned. For the "believ-ers" all this had a double significance. On theone hand, with the characteristic self-centerednessof a spiritualist sect, they saw in it a sign of spe-cial divine intervention in their favor, since in thegeneral upheaval the inner renewal and theirclandestine activities based on it would be morelikely to go unnoticed. This opinion was ex-pressed by Frank himself and was commonly re-peated by his followers in Prague. At the sametime that the Revolution served as a screen forthe world of inwardness, however, it was also rec-ognized as having a practical value in itself,namely, the undermining of all spiritual and sec-ular authorities, the power of the priesthood mostof all. The "believers" in the ghettos of Austria,

whose admiration for certain doctrines of theChristian Church (such as Incarnation) wenthand in hand with a deep hatred of its priests andinstitutions, were particularly alive to this lastpossibility. Here the fashionable anti-clericalismof the times found a ready reception. In great andenthusiastic detail the Frankist author of TheProphecy of Isaiah describes the coming apoc-alypse which is destined to take place solely thatthe Jewish people might be reborn, repudiate itsrabbis and other false leaders, and embrace thefaith of "the true Jacob" as befits "the People ofthe God of Jacob." To the commentator on theHallel prayer writing in Prague, the verse in Psalm118, "The right hand of the Lord is exalted,"meant that "if the right hand of the Lord begins toemerge, the deceitful left hand of Esau and hispriests and the deceitful sword will retire"-anallusion, of course, to the combined rule of thesecular and ecclesiastical powers. Throughout thisliterature apocalyptic ideas mingle freely with thepolitical theories of the Revolution, which werealso intended, after all, to lead to a "political andspiritual liberation," to cite that illuminatingand undeservedly neglected phrase with whichthe Frankists in Prague, as we have seen, definedthe aims of their movement.

All this culminated in the remarkable case of"The Red Epistle," of 1799, a circular letter writ-ten in red ink and addressed by the Frankists inOffenbach, the last Mecca of the sect, to a largenumber of Jewish congregations, exhorting themto embrace "the holy religion of Edom." Thetheoretical part of this document-approximatelythe last third of it-is highly interesting. Here, ina single page, the epistlers summarize their beliefswithout a single overt reference to Christianity,the word "Edom," as we have seen, possessing amore specialized meaning in their vocabulary. Be-sides bearing all the markings of the Frankistmyth, the epistle contains the familiar ingredientsof the Sabbatian homily as well, particularly inits audacious exegeses of biblical stories, Midra-shim and Aggadot, passages from the Zohar, andKabbalistic texts. In sum, an entire mystical the-ory of revolution. The passage that I am going toquote exemplifies perfectly the thinking, style,and cryptic manner of expression of this type ofFrankist literature:

Know that "it is time for the Lord to work,[for] they have made void Thy law" [Ps. 119:-226], and in this connection the rabbis of blessedmemory have said [Sanhedrin 97a] [that theMessiah will not come] "until the kingdom isentirely given over to heresy" [this being themystical meaning of the words in Leviticus 13: 13]"it is all turned white and then he is clean,"and as is explained in the book Zror ha-Mor, hisservants are clean too. For the time has comethat Jacob [was referring to when he] promised,"I will come unto my Lord unto Seir" [Gen.33:14], for we know that until now he has not

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yet gone thither; and he [who will fulfill theverse] is our Holy Lord Jacob, "the most perfectof all" [Zohar, II, 23a] and the most excellent ofthe patriarchs, for he grasps both sides [Zohar,I, 147a], binding one extreme to the other untilthe last extreme of all. But although last, hewho will rise upon earth and say, "Arise OVirgin of Israel," is not least [i.e., he is moreimportant and favored than the first Jacob].Nay, he is certainly not dead, and it is he wholeads us on the true way in the holy religion ofEdom, so that whoever is of the seed of Abra-ham, Isaac, and Jacob must follow in their path,for they have shown the way that their sonsare to take at the End of Days, Abraham bydescending to Egypt [Gen. 12], Isaac [by jour-ney] to Abimelech [Gen. 26], and Jacob, themost excellent of the patriarchs, by leavingBeersheba and going to Haran [Gen. 28] [thatis], by leaving the faith of his fathers] and theLand of Israel for another realm of impurity,as is explained in the Zohar; for the Zoharexplains that the redemption must be soughtin the most evil place of all. Then he came tothe mouth of the well [Gen. 29] and foundRachel and rolled the stone from the mouthof the well and came to Laban and worked forhim [in the realm of evil] and brought out hisown portion. And afterward he went to Esau[Gen. 32], but he was still not done [with histask], for although he rolled the stone [from thewell] they rolled it back again Gen. 29:3],and therefore he could not go to Selr [the placewhere there are no laws] and all this was butto prepare the way for the last Jacob [Frank],the most perfect of all, at the End of Days. Foras the Zohar explains, the first Jacob is perfectbut the last Jacob is perfect in everything, andhe will complete [Jacob's mission in] everything.And it is said [in allusion to this] in the Zohar:"Until a man comes in the form of Adam anda woman in the form of Eve and they circum-vent him [i.e., the serpent] and outwit him,"and so forth. Therefore, we must follow in hispath, for "the ways of the Lord are right, andthe just do walk in them" [Hos. 14:10], andthough there is a burden of silence [about this]and the heart must not reveal [what it knows]to the mouth, it is nonetheless written [Isa.42:16], "And I will bring the blind by a waythat they know not, in paths that they know notI will lead them, I will make darkness lightbefore them and rugged places plain." And hereit was that Jacob "honored his Master," andso forth namely, by standing in the realm ofevil]-and look in the Zohar [I, 161b, wherethese words are to be found]. And herein willbe [found the mystical meaning of the verse]"Lord, when Thou didst go forth out of Seir,when Thou didst march out of the field ofEdom" [Judg. 5:14] and "Who is this thatcometh from Edom?" [Isa. 63: 1], for as is [stated]in the Tanna debe Eliyahu, there will come aday when the angels will seek the Lord and thesea will say "He is not in me" and the abysswill say "He is not in me." Where then will theyfind him? In Edom, for it is said, "Who is thisthat cometh from Edom?" And they who follow

him into this holy religion and cling to theHouse of Jacob [Frank] and take shelter in itsshadow-for it is said [Lam. 4:20], "Under hisshadow we shall live among the nations" and[Mic. 4:2] "Come ye and let us go up to themountain of the Lord and the House of theGod of Jacob; and He will teach us of His ways,and we will walk in His paths"-to them itwill be granted to cling to the Lord, for they[the ways of the Lord] are a way of life to thosewho find them. And it is written [Deut. 4:29],"From thence ye will seek the Lord thy Godand thou shalt find Him." Why does the textemphasize "from thence"? Because light will bemade known from darkness [Zohar, III, 47b], asit is written [Mic. 7:8], "Though I sit in dark-ness, the Lord is a light unto me."

The government officials who intercepted cop-ies of this epistle rightly suspected its authors ofbeing hidden revolutionaries, but for the wrongreason. The many obscure references to an indi-vidual called "Jacob" led them to surmise thatthey were in reality dealing with-the Jacobins,who in this manner were supposed to spread theirradical propaganda among the Jews of the ghetto.An investigation was ordered on the spot. Theauthorities who conducted it in Frankfurt andOffenbach, however, did not delve beneath thesurface of the affair and were quickly satisfiedthat it involved nothing more than an intrigue toswindle and extort money from ignorant Jews.In our own day, a historian who has publishedtheir official report, rather naively concludes byremarking, "and so the ridiculous theories of aFrankist plot which had proved so alarming tothese imperial bureaucrats were at last laid torest," thereby failing to realize himself that on adeeper level the authorities' suspicions were fullyif unwittingly justified Had they bothered toread and understand not just the debtors' notesof Frank's children in Offenbach which were inpossession of the town's bankers and moneylend-ers, but also The Prophecy of Isaiah that hadbeen composed within the four walls of the"court" itself, they would have been amazed todiscover how ardently these Frankist "Jacobins"yearned for the overthrow of the existing regime.

HE HOPES and beliefs of these lastSabbatians caused them to be par-

ticularly susceptible to the "millennial" winds ofthe times. Even while still "believers"-in fact,precisely because they were "believers"-they hadbeen drawing closer to the spirit of the Haskalahall along, so that when the flame of their faithfinally flickered out they soon reappeared as lead-ers of Reform Judaism, secular intellectuals, orsimply complete and indifferent skeptics. We havealready noted how deeply rooted the Sabbatianapathy toward Orthodox observance and Jewishtradition in general was. Even the "moderates"tended to believe that the commandments werefor the most part meant to be observed only in

70/COMMENTARY JANUARY 1971

the Land of Israel and that "in the exile there isno punishment [for not observing them], eventhough there is still as always a reward [if theyare kept]"-a doctrine that was ultimately tohave a catastrophic effect on all traditional tiesand to help prepare the way for the philosophyof assimilationism. A man such as Jonas Wehle,for example, the spiritual leader and educator ofthe Sabbatians in Prague after 1790, was equallyappreciative of both Moses Mendelssohn and Sab-batai Zevi, and the fragments of his writings thathave survived amply bear out the assertion of oneof his opponents that "he took the teachings ofthe philosopher Kant and dressed them up in thecostume of the Zohar and the Lurianic Kab-balah." It is evident from the commentary on theEn Ya'akov and from the letters that were inPeter Beer's possession that men like Wehle in-tended to use the Haskalah for their own Sa'bba-tian ends, but in the meanwhile the Haskalahwent its way and proceeded to make use ofthem.

Indeed, even for those "believers" who re-mained faithful to their own religious world anddid not share the enthusiasm of the Prague

Frankists for the "School of Mendelssohn," theway to the Haskalah was easily traveled. It wassurely no accident that a city like Prossnitz, whichserved as a center for the Haskalah in Moraviaupon the movement's spread there one genera-tion earlier, was also a bastion of Sabbatianismin that country. The leaders of the "School ofMendelssohn," who were neither Sabbatiansthemselves, of course, nor under the influence ofmysticism at all, to say nothing of mystical heresy,found ready recruits for their cause in Sabbatiancircles, where the world of rabbinic Judaism hadalready been completely destroyed from within,quite independently of the efforts of secularistcriticism. Those who had survived the ruin werenow open to any alternative or wind of change;and so, their "mad visions" behind them, theyturned their energies and hidden desires for amore positive life to assimilation and the Haska-lah, two forces that accomplished without para-doxes, indeed without religion at all, what they,the members of "the accursed sect," had earnestlystriven for in a stormy contention with truth,carried on in the half-light of a faith pregnantwith paradoxes.

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