Messianic Stirrings
If Talmudic learning and mystical speculations linkedjews in the many lands of their dispersion, it must also be noted that their most shared thought was the hope for redemption, for the coming of the Messiah.
This hope could live in dark or bright areas where they resided. After the Inquisition and the expulsion from Spain (1492) many of them had moved into Italy. The great Don Isaac Abravanel, the last of the great Jewish statesmen of Spain, turned from the world around him to the world of the Bible; but his son Judah (Leone Ebreo 1465-1535) wrote the famous Dialoghi di Amore, affirming the Renaissance culture surrounding him. Popes Leo X and Clement VII, in the first part of the sixteenth century, welcomed the Jews and even expressed interest in a strange messianic figure who arrived in Rome in 1524. David Reubeni claimed to be the brother of a king of a far-away Jewish kingdom and was accepted joyfully by Jews and Christians. One of the Converses (Jews whose families had been forced to convert to Christianity), called Diogo Pires, joined Reubeni when he came to Portugal with letters of introduction from Pope Clement. Diogo changed his name to Shlomo Molcho, and began to think of himself as the Messiah. He was killed as a heretic in Mantua in 1532; and Reubeni later perished in an auto-da-fe in Portugal. Yet they were early representatives of a yearning which brought about a tragic episode in Jewish life and thought: Sabbatai Zvi, born in Smyrna in 1626.The complex history of his life unites all trends within the Kabbalah in a figure of flesh and blood. He lived out the legends and the prophecies, much of this managed by Nathan of Gaza, a brilliant pseudo-Messiah figure happy to assume the lesser role of Elijah and able to fashion a religion around the charismatic, mysterious Sabbatai Zvi. Nathan was more like St Paul, busy in organising letters which covered all of Europe with the good tidings that the Messiah had come.
In most synagogues, prayers were offered on behalf of‘Our Lord, King and Master, the holy and righteous Sabbatai Zvi, Anointed of the God of Israel’. A vast literature of prayers, poems and exhortations drew the Jewish community together in a mass hysteria in the course of which children were married so that the remaining souls might enter bodies to hasten the coming redemption. Sober business people sold their possessions, and the Amsterdam stock-market crashed once 1666 was announced as the time of redemption. Spinoza saw no rational reason why Sabbatai Zvi’s claims might not come to pass; and Pepys informs us that Jews were offering odds of 10 to 1 in favour of the man from Smyrna being the King of the World. The end of the strange fantasy was arrest and imprisonment in Turkey, where the Sultan gave Sabbatai the choice between death or Islam. Sabbatai became a Muslim. Yet this was not the end. ‘He is testing us’, said the disciples. And many turned to Luria’s teaching on the light that had to be taken out of the husks. Sabbatai Zvi, they argued, had let the final degradation come upon him to suffer for the sake of the world and to liberate the sparks of divinity held captive in the shells of Islam. There are still believers of Sabbatai Zvi today, although the sect of the Donmeh in Turkey has all but disappeared.The Sabbatian heresy divided the Jewish community in the centuries which followed. Some of its followers questioned the oneness of God, believed in a return which would lead to the abrogation of the Torah, and even embraced acts of licentiousness and challenged the moral authority of the rabbis. There were corresponding excesses on the other side: saintly teachers like Moses Luzzatto were forced out of their communities, the most brilliant rabbis engaged in bitter fights (the Emden vs. Eybeschuetz controversy in Hamburg), and there were Sabbatian ‘cells’ in many communities challenging established authorities.
The Eastern Jewish community opened itself to this mysticism, just as it had become a stronghold of Talmudic learning.
A Podolian adventurer, Jacob Frank (actually Jacob Leibovitz), returned from Turkey as a messianic figure demanding and receiving royal honours from his people. He claimed to be the reincarnation of Sabbatai Zvi, and taught a cult of ending evil by entering upon acts of licence and thus fighting evil from within. Immorality became a religious commandment. Excommunicated by the Jews, Frank and his followers joined the Church, having maligned the Jewish community with the Blood Libel and causing the Talmud to be burned after disputations in Lemberg in 1757 and 1759. Frank was imprisoned for many years; but he and the Frankists continued to flourish. He died in 1791, in Offenbach, Germany, holding court as a self-styled baron, and his daughter Eve continued as the ‘Holy Mistress’ of the sect, surrounded by admirers. These and other excesses weakened the fire of messianic hopes, and Jews began to look elsewhere for salvation.