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Chapter 2

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The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith

Prehistory of Eighteenth-Century Anti-Sabbatianism: Rabbi Jacob Sasportas

From the very outset, the Frankist case deviated from the established pattern of the rabbinic struggle against Sabbatianism in the first part of the eighteenth century. Frankism was unique in its extraordinary public profile, in the level of involvement of Gentile authorities in an ostensibly internal Jewish affair, and in the brutality of the rabbinic campaign against it. In order to understand these developments, we must extend our inquiry beyond eighteenth-century anti-Sabbatianism and retrace the strategies of opposition to Sabbatai Tsevi during his lifetime. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610–98) was the principal opponent of the messianic movement that arose around the figure of Sabbatai in the 1660s. Sasportas was born in North Africa and served as rabbi in a number of Sephardic communities in Western Europe. During the outbreak of Sabbatian enthusiasm, he was living as a private individual in Hamburg. Tsitsat novel Tsevi, his collection of letters and accounts pertaining to the period directly preceding and following Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, remains the indispensable source for any analysis of the early stages of Sabbatianism.

Rabbi Jacob Sasportas’s activities were first reconstructed in Gershom Scholem’s monumental monograph on Sabbatai Tsevi. Scholem had little sympathy for his subject: on just one page of his book, he managed to attribute to Sasportas harshness, irascibility, arrogance, fanaticism, hunger for the power and status of rabbinic offices, bitterness and frustration, arrogance and unsteadiness in human relations, egotism and excessive self-confidence. On the adjacent page, he called the rabbi “a Jewish Grand Inquisitor.”¹ If Scholem’s discussion of Rabbi Jacob’s character is, to put it mildly, somewhat biased,² his reconstruction of Sasportas’s polemical activities is masterful. What Scholem did not analyze, however, was the content of Sasportas’s ideas about Sabbatianism. Tsitsat novel Tsevi was presented by Scholem not as a text expounding a consistent theological position but as an expression of its author’s twisted character. Since Sasportas’s book described otherwise unknown events from the early phase of the Sabbatian movement, it had paramount significance for historical research, but it has not been subjected to a more in-depth conceptual analysis. In my opinion, Sasportas’s ideas should be treated with the utmost seriousness: in addition to his being the first prominent anti-Sabbatian strategist, the rabbi was the first to try to understand what the Sabbatian movement was all about.

Scholars have emphasized that Sasportas attacked Sabbatai well before his apostasy, and the target of his ire was not the messianic enthusiasm per se: the rabbi explicitly stated that he would be prepared to accept Tsevi as the messiah if the latter fulfilled the traditional criteria of the messiahship.³ Isaiah Tishby and Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer have argued that Sabbatianism was for Sasportas first and foremost a halakhic issue: the polemic was motivated mainly by Sabbatai’s systematic violations of the principles of religious law.⁴ Matt Goldish posited that Sasportas took issue with the rise of the “unauthorized” prophecy as a source of religious legitimacy independent of or even hostile to the rabbinic establishment.⁵ Thus, according to Goldish, Sabbatianism was for Sasportas “simply another chapter in the continuing onslaught against the Talmudic tradition and rabbinic authority,” and the rabbi largely lost interest in the movement after Sabbatai’s conversion: as the aspiring messiah was no longer Jewish, his purported claims had no significance for Jews and Judaism.⁶

Sasportas was certainly taken aback by Sabbatai’s antinomianism and worried about the subversion of the position of the rabbis brought on by popular prophets. Yet it seems to me that his true fears lay elsewhere. In the opening pages of Tsitsat novel Tsevi, Sasportas favorably quoted the young Sabbatai Tsevi’s teacher, Rabbi Joseph Eskapa, who stated, some twenty years before his pupil’s conversion to Islam, that “whoever forestalls him first deserves well, for he will lead many into sin and make a new religion.”⁷ In a letter to one of the believers, Rabbi Isaac Nahar (also written before Sabbatai’s apostasy), Sasportas remarked that whoever accepts Sabbatai’s messianic claim takes “a new Torah” upon himself and abandons his old faith.⁸ In July 1666, Sasportas described his dread that because of the upheaval surrounding Sabbatai, “before long, our religion will become two religions.”⁹ Around the same time, he wrote to the rabbi of Vienna: “our faith might become like two faiths and our people like two peoples. . . . So began the faith of Jesus and his followers.”¹⁰ In September 1666, upon hearing the news that Sabbatai Tsevi had instituted new festivals and abolished traditional fasts, Sasportas again expressed his fear that the “faith of the Lord would collapse and would be entirely uprooted and replaced by a new faith, unlike our Torah, for they accepted [as the messiah] a strange man . . . who will give a new Torah, like Jesus the Nazarene.”¹¹ Following the apostasy, he claimed that Nathan’s latest pronouncements finally made it clear to the sages that “from the outset, his intention was to deceive Israel and to create a new Torah” for them.¹² Sasportas’s understanding of Sabbatianism has been recapitulated as follows: “It seems to me that this is the beginning of irreligion [apikorsut] among the Jews and that it constitutes the foundation of a new faith and a different religion, as happened in the days of that man [Jesus]. And it is incumbent upon all the sages in every city to come together and gird themselves and hound those who follow this irreligion.”¹³

It is significant that Sasportas called Sabbatianism “irreligion” (apikorsut) and not “heresy” (minut). While rabbinic literature often used both terms imprecisely or even interchangeably, their strict technical senses were different. The term apikorsut— etymologically deriving from Epicureanism—denoted not so much a deviation from specific theological principles of Judaism as it did the absolute rejection of revealed religion combined with disrespect for religious authority: the Talmud defines the apikoros as “one who despises the word of the Lord” and “one who insults a scholar.”¹⁴ I believe that the author of Tsitsat novel Tsevi used the term in its precise meaning; he considered Sabbatianism a rebellion against the very fundaments of religiosity rather than a particular transgression against an existing religion.

Matt Goldish has noted that what first “tripped the sensors” of Sasportas was Nathan of Gaza’s claim that the messiah had the right and power to judge all men and to make “a new Torah.” Goldish has interpreted this assertion as a rebellion against the official institutions of the rabbinate and an attempt at a radical overturn of the authority of rabbinic tradition.¹⁵ This might have been the way that the Sabbatians themselves saw it: for all its rhetorical flourish, the Sabbatian talk about the “new Torah” and the new prophecies being “like the Torah of Moses”¹⁶ were meant simply to emphasize Nathan’s higher status as one possessing direct revelation unmediated by the rabbis. His followers saw in Sabbatai the fulfillment of the traditional redemptive promises; they regarded themselves not as founders of a completely new religion but as faithful Jews seeking to renew Judaism from within.

Sasportas, however, took the ideas about the “new Torah” in a deliberately literal fashion. Sabbatianism was for him not a narrow halakhic problem, which could be settled by legalistic decision, or a theological deviation, which could be countered by speculative argument. It was not a heresy challenging particular tenets of Jewish belief but a schism threatening the unity of Judaism as a whole; it might have led to the split of the Jewish people and the establishment of a completely new faith. In this context, Sasportas’s scattered remarks about Jesus and Christianity assume a special significance. The rabbi was not worried about Christian “influences” on Judaism introduced by Sabbatian theosophy or about messianic “enthusiasm” that might play into the hands of the Catholic priests.¹⁷ He displayed little or no interest in contemporary Christendom: in fact, all mentions of Christianity in Tsitsat novel Tsevi refer not to the seventeenth-century Church and her clergy but to the ancient Jewish sect that led some Jews astray.¹⁸ Before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas foresaw the danger that Sabbatianism would become a new religion, separate from Judaism, like early Christianity. He expressed hope that the Jewish sages would manage to do what they had failed to do in the case of Jesus: nip the new faith in the bud.¹⁹

It is in this context that Sasportas invoked the symbolism of the mixed multitude. As discussed in the Introduction, Nathan of Gaza’s idea that those denying Sabbatai’s messiahship were descendants of the mixed multitude was gaining currency among his followers. Sasportas knew Nathan’s statements about disbelievers coming from the erev rav and “laughed at them.”²⁰ Inspired by the writings of Nathan, Hosea Nantava, a Sabbatian serving as a rabbi of Alexandria, claimed that rejecting Sabbatai Tsevi was like rejecting the Law of Moses as well as the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. He, too, linked the rejection of the messiah with the symbol of the mixed multitude.²¹ Sasportas responded to the rabbi as follows:

And you destroyed your place in the land of the living [i.e., the afterlife] by saying: “Anyone who does not believe in [Sabbatai’s messianic mandate] is like one who rejects the Torah of Moses our teacher and the resurrection of the dead, and he is from the mixed multitude.” This was expressed in the letter of your prophet. May boiling liquid and molten lead be poured down the throat of the one who says such things! . . . How can he who denies your messiah . . . be like the one who denies the entire Torah?! . . . But you said that those who deny your messiah are not the [true] leaders and sages of the generation, but they are from the mixed multitude, the seed of Lilith, and the “caul upon the liver.”²² You opened your mouth to do evil and spoke about things you do not comprehend. He who does believe in him . . . is one of the mixed multitude! The truth is not what his prophet wrote but what was written by the holy Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai [purported author of the Zohar]: “The evil handmaid [Lilith] is a grave, and in it she imprisons her mistress, the Shekhinah, and she is cold and dry [as] Saturn [Sabbatai]. . . . “Her mistress” is a garden; “the handmaid” is a dunghill, and she is soiled from the side of the mixed multitude, a dunghill mingled with a garden in order to grow seeds from the side of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and from the side of idolatry she is called Saturn [Sabbatai], Lilith, soiled dunghill. It consists of all kinds of filth and vermin and dead dogs and donkeys are thrown upon it.”²³ And so you see that he who comes from the side of Saturn [Sabbatai] really comes from the mixed multitude and the seed of Lilith.²⁴

“Sabbatai” is the Hebrew name of the planet Saturn, and the Jewish tradition often linked “the reign of Sabbatai” (the astrologically elevated position of the planet Saturn) with the advent of the messiah. In a fascinating paper, Moshe Idel has argued that the outburst of messianism in the seventeenth century owed much of its potency to such speculations. Young Sabbatai Tsevi’s messianic convictions were shaped by the deep awareness of the astrological meaning of his name, and the nexus between Saturn and the coming of the messiah was of prime importance to Tsevi himself, his followers, and to many contemporary observers.²⁵

Sasportas was clearly well acquainted with astrological interpretations of the advent of Sabbatianism: in a letter to Rabbi Raphael Supino, he noted that “it is not enough, as you said, for the Gentile sages and astronomers to claim that the ascension of the planet Saturn hints [at the coming of the messiah] and is a sign of Redemption,”²⁶ and he linked the renewal of messianic claims among the Jews with the ascent of the “bloody star,” Sabbatai-Saturn.²⁷ In this context, Sasportas’s invocation of the quotation from the Zohar tying the symbolism of Saturn with that of the mixed multitude was an exegetical masterstroke: it drew upon previous separate Sabbatian interpretations of both motifs and, by connecting them, inverted their meanings: the ascension of Saturn was indeed linked with the advent of Sabbatai Tsevi, but it signified the beginning of the reign of the erev rav, not the coming of the messiah. The mixed multitude were not, as Nathan of Gaza would have it, the rabbis who opposed Sabbatai but the Sabbatians themselves. What is even more interesting is what Sasportas left out of the passage he quoted: in printed editions of the Zohar, the dead dogs and donkeys that are thrown onto the dunghill are equated with “sons of Esau and Ishmael,” the Christians and the Muslims, respectively. Some manuscript versions explicitly identified the dead dog with Jesus and the dead donkey with Muhammad.²⁸

The astrological notion that the advent of Sabbatianism paralleled the birth of Christianity was strengthened by the concept of the so-called coniunctio maxima, the conjunction between Saturn and Jupiter. Astrology—both Jewish and Christian—often interpreted the great conjunction as the moment of emergence of a new religion.²⁹ The Star of Bethlehem was taken to be a great conjunction,³⁰ and some astrologers linked the messianic pronouncements of Sabbatai Tsevi with the great conjunction that took place in November 1648. While Sasportas made no explicit mention of the 1648 conjunction, he linked the ascension of the planet Saturn with the rise of a threat of a profound rift within the Jewish people that “would turn the hearts of sons from their fathers and set husband against wife.”³¹

Intellectually fascinating as it must have been, this interpretation was far too radical for other rabbis; the subsequent rabbinic anti-Sabbatian works used the literary form of Tsitsat novel Tsevi (a collection of letters, firsthand testimonies, and polemical commentary) as a blueprint for polemics and borrowed many specific motifs from Sasportas’s writings, but they largely refrained from accepting his conclusions. Sasportas’s conceptualization of Sabbatianism as a new religion had no direct continuation: the most important anti-Sabbatian work of the early eighteenth century, Moses Hagiz’s Shever poshe’im (1714), contained only one reference each to the erev rav and the establishment of a new faith, and both terms were used loosely to suit the argument.³² It also lacked any mention of Sasportas.³³

During his lifetime, Sasportas was a lone fighter against Sabbatianism: his open opposition to Sabbatai during the height of the movement earned him little sympathy among the Jews of Hamburg and might even have endangered his life.³⁴ Tsitsat novel Tsevi had been prepared for publication but remained in manuscript.³⁵ In 1737, Sasportas’s son produced an abridged edition of his father’s magnum opus. However, leaders of the community, who were eager to suppress the memory of the involvement of their families in Sabbatian enthusiasm sixty years earlier, ordered that the entire print run be confiscated and destroyed.³⁶

The book would have disappeared completely, if not for the fact that a copy (allegedly the only remaining one) of this suppressed edition was found in Amsterdam by Rabbi Jacob Emden. In 1757, at the height of the polemics against the Frankists, Emden published this abridged version of Tsitsat novel Tsevi.³⁷ The publisher felt a deep affinity between himself and Sasportas: he emphasized that his namesake Rabbi Jacob shared the same anti-Sabbatian zeal and had been required to pay a similarly high price for his relentless campaign against the heretics. Like Sasportas—and in contrast to other rabbis of the period—he also believed that heresy should not be swept under the carpet but engaged in an open polemics, without regard for communal feelings, family ties, reputation, or the high social status of his opponents. Since the pattern of rabbinic apologetics established in the first half of the eighteenth century failed to eradicate Sabbatianism, and the conceptual tools employed in the battle against crypto-Sabbatians in Western Europe were not apt to engage their more outspoken brethren in Podolia, Emden abandoned the line of polemics exemplified by Hagiz and returned to the first major opponent of Sabbatai Tsevi, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas. He became the most important figure in the rabbinic campaign against the Frankists. Before analyzing his understanding of Sabbatianism, I shall discuss the practical side of his involvement in the Frankist affair.

The Contacts between the Council of Four Lands and Rabbi Jacob Emden

Shortly after the Lanckoronie affair, Rabbi Jacob Emden was contacted by one of the most prominent members of the Jewish establishment in eighteenth-century Poland, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć, a district rabbi in Brzeńć and a rabbinic judge in Tarle. The extant sources first mention him in 1751; despite his relative youth, he already belonged to the inner circle of trustees (ne’emanim) of the Council of Four Lands and signed the council’s approbation for the Amsterdam edition of the Talmud.³⁸ A year later, he became embroiled in the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy and denounced “the writer of the amulets,”³⁹ stating, nevertheless, that it could not be conclusively determined who this writer was.⁴⁰ In October 1753, when the council condemned the printing and distribution of pamphlets related to the controversy and ordered the existing writings to be burned (which, in practice, meant burning mainly of the writings of Emden), he signed the writ of condemnation together with other Polish rabbis.⁴¹ Nevertheless, Abraham of Zamońć was apparently not actually convinced of Eibeschütz’s innocence. Two months later, he wrote a letter calling for the public condemnation of Sabbatians and qualified some writings attributed to Eibeschütz as clearly heretical.⁴²

In 1755, the victory of the Eibeschütz supporters seemed to be complete: Rabbi Jonathan collected letters of prominent scholars in his favor and published them in Altona under the title Luhot edut. Within a few months, Emden responded with his refutation, Shevirat luhot ha-even. The Council of Four Lands’ 1753 ban on publications pertaining to the Eibeschütz controversy was still in force; however, in contrast to earlier polemical works by Emden, which all came from his private printing press in Altona, Shevirat luhot was first printed in Żółkiew. The edition featured an approbation from Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć:⁴³ the open violation of the council’s ban and his endorsement of the publication of the book in Poland constituted an unequivocal signal of support for Emden. Abraham became a leader of the anti-Eibeschütz faction among the rabbinic establishment in Poland.

The July–September 1756 sessions of the Council of Four Lands had two main items on the agenda. The first one was the wave of blood libels—in particular, the Jampol ritual murder trial, which had commenced in April of the same year.⁴⁴ The second was the rise of Sabbatianism, culminating in its repeated overt challenges to the authority of the rabbinate and in the involvement of the Catholic consistory of Kamieniec in the Lanckoronie affair. The blood accusations will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4; for now, suffice it to say that the council obviously spoke in one voice on this issue: in order to counter the accusations, the delegates decided to send an emissary to Rome, Elyakim ben Asher Zelig, and to seek an official papal condemnation of the libel.

The matter of Sabbatianism was more complicated. As noted, during the first part of the eighteenth century, the council avoided direct involvement in the campaigns initiated by anti-Sabbatian activists. Throughout the early 1750s, the parnas (president) of the council, Abraham ben Hayyim of Lublin, was a staunch Eibeschütz supporter and the major force behind the attempts to quash the accusations against Rabbi Jonathan, which led to the burning of Emden’s pamphlets in 1753. However, during the 1756 sessions, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć, Baruch me-Erets Yavan, and Isaac ben Meir of Biała⁴⁵ managed to convince the parnas that Emden’s writings did contain some true information (it is not clear if this referred to Eibeschütz himself or only to the cases of less prominent Sabbatians in Poland).⁴⁶ The former president of the council and a staunch rival of Abraham of Lublin, Abraham Yoski of Lissa, also threw his weight in favor of unequivocal and forceful action against the Sabbatians in Podolia: he agreed to disseminate anti-Sabbatian pamphlets among the rabbis and requested to be sent ten copies of each of Emden’s polemical works, “for we cannot prevail if we do not have a weapon” against the heretics.⁴⁷

In the summer of 1756, the competing factions of the Jewish establishment in Poland, which had so far been at odds over the matter of crypto-Sabbatianism and Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, agreed upon a common policy against the open Sabbatians in Podolia. In late September, the Council of Four Lands confirmed the herem previously imposed in Brody and extended its validity to other communities.⁴⁸ Bans of excommunications were pronounced in the major Jewish centers of the region, including Lwów, Łuck, and Dubno.⁴⁹ While the wording of the bans repeated the more or less standardized texts of earlier excommunications, this time there seems to have been a concerted effort to put them into practice and to publicize the general condemnation of the Sabbatians. Toward the end of September, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć informed Emden that the president of the Council of Four Lands had ordered the bans to be printed and disseminated among all the Jewish communities of Poland.⁵⁰

Concurrent with the July–September sessions of the Council of Four Lands, the investigation at the bishop of Kamieniec’s consistory was gaining momentum. At the end of July, since the rabbis ignored the calls to appear at the gatherings of the tribunal, the body dispatched priests who were supposed to interview the Jews and gather evidence locally.⁵¹ On 2 August, the Sabbatians submitted a Latin manifesto to the consistory detailing their position and attacking the Talmud and the “Talmudists.” This manifesto contained an early version of the motions that were later put forward during the public disputation, which I shall discuss in the following chapter. The legal battle at the episcopal court raised the public profile of the Sabbatian controversy and embroiled the Jewish authorities in an unwanted—and potentially damaging—conflict with the bishop. Yet the involvement of the Catholic authorities was seen by some rabbis as the opportunity to eradicate Sabbatianism once and for all. On 28 September, the shtadlan Baruch me-Erets Yavan wrote to Emden: “The lords, bishops, and leaders of the righteous among the Gentiles already heard of the matter: the issue became of great significance and already reached the highest lord of their faith, the pope in the city of Rome. And also we will go ready armed before them⁵² and will stand before the lords bishops here [in Poland] and will bring them to be burned [at the stake].”⁵³

The idea that Christians should be asked to burn Sabbatians at the stake for inventing a new faith had previously appeared in a letter that Emden wrote to the Council of Four Lands in 1751:⁵⁴ Yavan was quoting Emden’s own ideas to their author. Yavan’s proposed solution was to pursue Christian involvement to the hilt and obtain a condemnation of the Sabbatians for heresy. The remark that the pope had been already informed seems to be an allusion to the hopes concerning Elyakim’s trip to Rome. On 26 December 1756, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć wrote to Emden:

And they wrote a manifesto against the Talmud. . . . There is certainly no way they can be brought back into the fold. Especially now, when they offered to the bishop to uproot [the faith of] Mount Sinai, the Temple, and God of Jacob . . . and we already gave money to the bishop and we pronounced upon them a herem . . . so the rest of Israel will not do as they do and will keep apart from them. And now we seek your advice, for we have no refuge except to obtain from the pope the writ of excommunication against this evil faith [ha-emunah ha-ra-ah]. So we here [Poland] and you there [Germany] should write to the [Jewish] leaders in Italy to make efforts toward this end.⁵⁵

Since the priests of Kamieniec were already involved in the investigation concerning Sabbatianism, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć suggested that the rabbis should go straight to the highest authorities of the Catholic Church over the head of the local bishop. The fact that the Council of Four Lands was sending an emissary to Rome greatly helped to facilitate the matter in any case; indeed, in another section of the letter to Emden, Abraham explicitly confirmed that he had contacted Elyakim ben Asher Zelig on the issue of the Frankists.⁵⁶ Elyakim’s primary mission was to acquire a writ against blood libels from the Holy See; his secondary objective was to obtain a papal condemnation of Sabbatianism.

Abraham ha-Kohen was an official of the Council of Four Lands, and Emden interpreted the remark “now we seek your advice” as a formal request on behalf of the council. In his autobiography, he later described how, in response to the request for assistance from the leaders of the Polish Jewry, he “advised that the abominations [of the Sabbatians] should be publicly exposed in print, and their evil be proved on the basis of Christian writings, for ‘from the very forest itself comes the [handle of the] ax [that fells it].’”⁵⁷ He also mentioned that he had written an open letter to the council with the aim of “bridling the deceivers’ tongues.”

Such a letter was indeed written. It was composed sometime in the early months of 1757 and published for the first time as an appendix to Emden’s edition of the midrash Seder olam rabbah ve-zuta (before July 1757). An expanded version appeared in Sefer shimush (1758–60). This expanded version was given the title Resen mateh (Bridle for the deceiver). The title is an allusion to the Hebrew translation of the New Testament’s Epistle of James 1:26: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.” It is one of the most extraordinary documents spurred by the Frankist affair.

Emden’s Letter to the Council of Four Lands

Even before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, some rabbis expressed concern that the messianic enthusiasm that he had aroused would provide grist for the mills of Christian missionaries. Indeed, the Jews’ naïveté in pinning their hopes on the “new impostor” immediately became a target of ridicule for anti-Jewish writers.⁵⁸ The fact that shortly thereafter “the messiah became a Turk” made things much worse: the story of Sabbatai’s conversion was told and retold by Christians convinced that the obvious failure of yet another pseudo-messiah would finally pave the way for the Jewish acceptance of Jesus.

Sabbatian doctrines themselves offered Christian parallels as well. Many prominent Sabbatians, including the most important theologian of early Sabbatianism, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, were former Marranos who had been brought up as Christians and returned to Judaism only later in their lives. Cardoso’s opponents promptly pointed out that many of his ideas were, in fact, elaborations of Christian concepts that he had acquired in his youth, garbed in Jewish terminology and ornamented with references to Jewish sources. Although Cardoso vehemently attacked Christianity, his Jewish adversaries argued that he never truly freed himself from his Christian upbringing and that his tracts supplied ammunition for the missionaries. The task of purging Judaism of heretical elements thus became closely intertwined with anti-Christian polemics, as rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism routinely targeted the alleged and real links and parallels between Sabbatianism and Christianity.

Sasportas was the only one to pursue this issue to its ultimate theological conclusions; others worried mainly about the practical influences of Christians and Christian ideas upon Jews and Judaism. Emden accepted many of Sasportas’s⁵⁹ theses and often employed the characteristic rhetoric of earlier anti-Sabbatians. Nevertheless, he departed from the previous anti-Sabbatian apologetics (of Sasportas and of other rabbis) in one crucial regard: he went to great lengths to break the link between anti-Sabbatian polemics and resistance to Christianity. The crux of the argument of his letter to Council of Four Lands was that, with regard to Sabbatianism, Jews and Christians were in the same boat.

Emden’s letter to the leaders of the Council of Four Lands opened with praise for the rabbis of Poland, who had been divided on the issue of crypto-Sabbatianism, but after the Lanckoronie affair, they had finally taken a united and uncompromised stance against the heretics: they “excommunicated and cut off the mixed [multitude] from Israel, and gave their heretical writings to burning.”⁶⁰

The Podolian Sabbatians countered the excommunication, however, by telling the bishop and the Kamieniec clergy that the real reason for their persecution by the Jews was the similarity of the tenets of their belief to those of the Christianity: they portrayed themselves as representatives of a pristine version of Judaism who rejected the Talmud and accepted the Trinity and incarnation. By doing so, they immediately won the hearts of the Catholic clergy. Restoring the astrological symbolism of Saturn/Sabbatai (already discussed above in the context of Sasportas), Emden attributed the temporary advantage won by the Sabbatians and the support they had gained from Bishop Dembowski to the fact that the September 1756 consistory investigation took place at a time particularly propitious for the followers of Sabbatai: the autumnal equinox of that year fell on the hour ruled by the planet Saturn. However, continued Emden, astrology could not guarantee the victory of Sabbatians: even if Saturn stood like the sun in the middle of the sky, true Jews would reject the false prophets and triumph over heretics.⁶¹

The link between Sabbatianism and Christianity, seen so far in rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism intended for an internal Jewish audience, immediately became a pressing theme of Jewish-Christian debate. The outer layer of Emden’s writing provided Polish rabbis with handy arguments for confronting Catholic theologians. If the priests challenged the council about the Frankists’ claim that their belief was similar to Christianity or about their accusations against the Talmud, the rabbis would be able to argue on the basis of Christian writings that rabbinic Judaism had long been recognized by the Christians, while Sabbatianism—despite its apparent similarities with Christianity—actually contradicted the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Large parts of Emden’s letter were thus written in the second person, directly addressing a Christian straw man and providing the potential Jewish disputant with useful quotations and lines of argument. As some priests might have been tempted to regard Sabbatianism as a “more progressive” version of Judaism entailing the abolishment of the “ceremonial law,” Emden argued that Christianity’s own principles demanded something very different:

And it is known that also the Nazarene and his disciples, especially Paul, warned that all those circumcised are bound to keep the entire Torah of the Israelites. And you, the Christians, should accept this teaching and not the teachings of the new false messiah Sabbatai Tsevi. For truly, the Gospels do not permit the Jew to forsake the Torah. As Paul said in the Epistle to Galatians 5:3, “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law” and in the First Epistle to Corinthians 7:18, “Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision.” And the Acts of Apostles 16:1 also mentioned that he circumcised his disciple Timothy. And they [Christian theologians] did not know how to interpret it, because this act contradicted his own statement that circumcision is a temporary commandment that will be abolished in the times of the messiah, and this happened in the times of the Nazarene. But from this, we know that the Nazarene and his apostles did not come to abolish the Torah of Israel. It is written in Matthew 10:17–18,⁶² “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” And the episode with Timothy proves that, as he was the son of a Jewish woman and a Greek man, and Paul, who was a learned man and a disciple of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, knew that the son of a Jewish woman and a non-Jew is a Jew and therefore he should be circumcised and observe all the commandments.⁶³

In Emden’s view, the involvement of the Catholic authorities in the Lanckoronie affair was almost providential. Publicizing the deeds of the Sabbatians forced the hand of the rabbis and provided an incentive for using the Gentiles to quash the movement. While it put the Jewish community in temporary danger stemming from the Christian interference in an internal Jewish matter, it also opened an avenue for the ultimate eradication of Sabbatianism. What was needed was to demonstrate that, whereas rabbinic Judaism was legitimate according to Christian categories, Sabbatianism constituted a dangerous and heretical religious novelty: it not only contradicted strict Jewish precepts, but the teachings of the Church as well. Sabbatians were heretics, and Jewish heretics should be treated exactly the same way that the Church treated their Christian counterparts.

According to Emden, if the Christians became convinced that the self-proclaimed pro-Christian Jews deviated from the accepted forms of normative religiosity, “they would condemn them to burning, for they created a new faith that should not be allowed to be professed openly anywhere, even in the free countries where all old faiths are allowed, as it is the case in Muslim countries, or in Holland, or in England: nowhere is it allowed to invent a new faith.”⁶⁴ As I mentioned in the previous section, Emden floated the idea of having the Christians burn the Sabbatians at the stake as early as 1751; at that time, however, no one took him seriously. This time, leaders of the Polish Jewry were more receptive to his suggestions. Emden argued that the rabbis were not only permitted, but obliged, to demand that the authorities burn the Sabbatians as heretics; it was hoped that, he remarked, “they soon will be burned on the order of the pope of Rome.”⁶⁵

Emden’s argument had a deeper stratum, however. Besides providing the council with quotations from the Gospels and lines of reasoning for possible debate with priests, or even in addition to suggesting the general opportunistic strategy of having Sabbatianism eradicated by Christians, Emden wanted to convince the rabbis that the Christians should and could be their true allies in the fight against the Sabbatians. Whereas some fragments of the letter purported to defend Judaism from Christian charges and to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jewish religion on the basis of Christian writings, others amounted to an apology for Christianity addressed to the Jews. For Emden, the advent of Sabbatianism fundamentally changed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity: the Sabbatian movement constituted a common enemy, in the face of which erstwhile quarrels between Jews and Christians should immediately be set aside. The Christian should accept the validity of Judaism within the theological framework of his religion, while the Jew should understand that there was no real contradiction between Judaism and Christianity and that the mutual animosities stemmed from a series of misunderstandings: some Christian theologians misinterpreted the Gospels, claiming that Jesus called for abolishing the Torah of Moses, whereas “crazy people among the Jews who do not know left from right nor do they understand the Written or Oral Torah”⁶⁶ came to believe that Christianity was a bastardized, idolatrous faith.

The eradication of Sabbatianism required breaking the connection that the rabbis made between Sabbatianism and Christianity and concomitantly changing the stereotype of Christianity among the Jewish elite. Many arguments ostensibly aimed at Christians who disparaged Judaism were, in fact, aimed at the Jews, who mistook the existing Christian disparagement of Judaism for the true essence of Christianity:

And the writers of the Gospels did not claim that the Nazarene came to abolish the Jewish faith. Rather, he came to establish a faith for the Gentiles from that day onward. And even this faith was not new, but old: it was [based on] the Seven Noahide Commandments that had been forgotten and reinstated by the apostles. . . . And so Paul wrote in Chapter 5 of his Epistle to the Corinthians that everyone should remain in his own faith.⁶⁷ . . . And so the Nazarene did double kindness to the world: on the one hand he sustained with all his powers the Torah of Moses . . . and on the other he reminded the Gentiles about the Seven Commandments.⁶⁸

In rabbinic tradition, the Seven Commandments of the covenant between God and Noah (the prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, bloodshed, incest, theft, eating of flesh torn from a living animal, as well as the injunction to establish a legal system)⁶⁹ were considered the minimal moral standards enjoined by the Bible upon all mankind. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers universally maintained that the strictly monotheistic religion of Islam was in accord with the Noahide laws, while the status of Christianity was subject to debate; some rabbis argued that it violated the prohibition of idolatry. From the sixteenth century onward, it became more and more common to exclude Christians from the category of idolaters and therefore to consider the Christian religion, too, as compatible with the Seven Commandments.⁷⁰

Yet Emden went much further than his predecessors. Not only did he claim that Christian doctrines were congruent with the Noahide Commandments; he also argued that the very essence of Jesus and the apostles’ mission was to establish a faith based on Noahidism for pagans. In his commentary on Pirke avot (published in 1751), Emden had already stated that the “assembly” (a pun on the Hebrew word knesi’ah, which means “assembly” but also “the Church”) of the contemporary peoples could be adequately termed an “assembly for the sake of heaven” (knesi’ah le-shem shamayyim): its aim was to spread monotheism among “those who otherwise worshiped wood and stone, did not believe in the reward in afterlife, and had no idea of good and evil.”⁷¹ In the letter to the Council of Four Lands, he advanced the same argument. The main line of division did not lie here between Jews and Christians (or, more broadly, non-Jews) but between members of legitimate religious groups on the one hand and heretics on the other. From this perspective, Sabbatianism was a kind of universal heresy, denying general human moral principles and embodying the idea of reversion to paganism or even—along the lines of the mythology of the mixed multitude—the primeval “waste and void” and immorality that preceded God’s covenant with Noah: “O generation!⁷² Jews, Christians, and Muslims! The chief peoples, who uphold the fundamentals of the Torah of Moses and facilitate their proliferation in the world! Open your eyes and see . . . that there is no worse sect than the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi. . . . They are worse than all the ancient idolaters . . ., worse even than the generation of the Flood . . ., for they want to turn the world back to the state of waste and void [tohu va-vohu] . . . and they call good evil and evil they call good, they call light darkness and the sweet they call bitter. And such things are called heresy [minut].”⁷³

To the Jews, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas had argued that for their faith, the nascent Sabbatian movement constituted a danger akin to that of early Christianity rising around Jesus and the apostles: he had viewed both Sabbatianism and Christianity as new, cancerous growths on the body of Judaism. Emden accepted Sasportas’s idea that Sabbatianism was a new (and hence illegitimate and dangerous) faith but claimed that, from the Jewish perspective, Christianity had never been a new religion: early Christianity was not an illicit sectarian offshoot of Judaism; rather, Judaism and Christianity stemmed from the same roots and were equally legitimate, since they were intended for different people. Thus, in Emden’s view, Christianity and Islam were elaborations of the fundamental Mosaic revelation, parallel to Judaism and sharing Judaism’s moral principles and its redemptive goal.

Rabbi Jacob Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands elicited substantial scholarly discussion. Jewish as well as Christian scholars were amazed by the rabbi’s great familiarity with Christian texts, for in his account of Christianity, he did not use Jewish sources but went directly to the text of the New Testament.⁷⁴ The extensive citations from the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul drew special attention. While there existed several Hebrew translations of Christian Scriptures, Emden’s renderings seemed original, and his consistent usage of Latinized personal names and titles of the books of the New Testament would suggest that he relied on a Latin or German text.

Some argued that the quotations might have been translated into Hebrew by Emden himself.⁷⁵ Such a possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand: there is no doubt that Emden knew some German, Dutch, and Latin and read numerous books in these languages in order—as he put it—to “know the views of different peoples in matters concerning their religions and customs and to understand their ideas about us and our holy faith.”⁷⁶ It is entirely feasible that he had some firsthand knowledge of the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is clear that his command of foreign languages was superficial,⁷⁷ and it is unlikely that he would have been able to undertake a sophisticated exegesis of the Gospels solely on the basis of his own study.

I submit that Emden’s ostensibly unmediated account of the New Testament’s theology was based on an earlier Jewish source, a little-known manuscript titled Hoda’at ba’al din.⁷⁸ The work was supposedly written in 1430 by David Nasi of Candia, brother of the duke of Naxos, Joseph Nasi, and a factor in the service of Cardinal Francisco Bentivoglio. According to David, the cardinal became convinced of the falsity of his Christian belief through independent philosophical investigations and undertook to ponder the truth of Judaism. He therefore asked, in great secrecy, to be supplied with Jewish anti-Christian works. David Nasi lent the cardinal several polemical books and composed a short tract, Hoda’at ba’al din, for him. The title (“admission of the litigant”) alludes to the talmudic principle according to which the admission of guilt by a person charged with crime takes precedence over witnesses’ testimonies.⁷⁹ In this case, the principle metaphorically referred to the writers of the New Testament: the tract aimed to demonstrate that the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles unwittingly affirmed the principles of Judaism and contradicted the dogmas of Christianity.

The impact and reception of Hoda’at ba’al din have not been studied. It is certain that in the mid-eighteenth century, a copy existed in Amsterdam. It belonged to the treasurer of the Sephardic community, David Franco Mendes; Mendes had numerous contacts with Emden’s father, Hakham Tsevi Ashkenazi, and might have had contacts with Emden as well.⁸⁰ Another manuscript might even have belonged to Emden himself.⁸¹ In his letter to the Council of Four Lands, Emden drew heavily upon Hoda’at ba’al din: the titles of the books of the New Testament and personal names have the same or very similar Hebrew forms in Hoda’at ba’al din and in Emden’s letter;⁸² the Hebrew translations of excerpts from the Gospels and the Epistles quoted in the latter exactly reproduce or closely paraphrase those in the former;⁸³ and Emden’s entire argument that baptism did not seek to replace circumcision is structured along the lines of Hoda’at ba’al din.⁸⁴ Moreover, the central thesis that Jesus and the Apostles never intended to abolish the Torah of Moses but wanted to perpetuate the fulfillment of the commandments of Judaism derives from the same source.⁸⁵

The strategy of demonstrating the internal contradictions and incoherency of Christianity on the basis of the New Testament had antecedents in Jewish apologetics.⁸⁶ Nevertheless, using the Gospel as a prooftext for the truth of Judaism was highly original, and possibly entirely unprecedented. In his forthcoming study, Hayyim Hames argues that Hoda’at ba’al din might be an eighteenth-century pseudepigraphic composition: neither of the names “David Nasi” or “Cardinal Bentivoglio” appear in any other source, and neither personality ever existed; the earliest extant manuscripts date from the eighteenth century; and there is no mention of the work in other medieval Jewish polemical tracts.⁸⁷

If Hames’s conjectures are correct, Hoda’at ba’al din was composed not in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian polemics, but against the backdrop of the internal Jewish debate on Christianity spurred by Sabbatianism. The rise of Sabbatianism highlighted the need to make a clear distinction between the two religions, and this was the main aim of Hoda’at ba’al din. The work’s central argument is that, since all major Jewish articles of faith are already present in the New Testament, conversion is an act of folly, and this, too, might be anti-Sabbatian in nature.

Despite its anti-Christian thrust, Hoda’at ba’al din legitimized Christian Scriptures in a way absent in earlier Jewish sources.⁸⁸ The same is true of Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands: Jewish and Christian academics have marveled at the rabbi’s “open-minded” or even “ecumenical” views of Christianity and other monotheistic religions. Emden has been portrayed as an “orthodox champion of religious tolerance,” “enlightened traditionalist” interested in comparative religion, or “rabbinic zealot” preaching openness to outsiders and their beliefs. However, this scholarly praise mostly missed the polemical context in which the letter was written (indeed, the existing translations of the excerpts from the letter into English and German conveniently left out most of the fragments devoted to Sabbatianism).⁸⁹ Emden’s aim was not to eulogize Jesus and the Christians but to combat Jewish sectarianism.

To be sure, the rabbi himself emphasized that his sympathetic views of Christianity were not empty flattery but a consistent theological position, which he developed and expressed also in other—non-polemical—works.⁹⁰ Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that his pro-Christian ideas took their shape in the context of a ferocious battle against internal Jewish heresy. To my mind, the real (if implicit) theme of Emden’s letter was not a tribute to the common Jewish and Christian values but the issue of religious legitimacy versus religious deviance. Legitimate religions such as Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) were juxtaposed with and set against sectarian and heretical religious formations. In Emden, the concept of heresy acquired a trans-confessional character and became the epitome of opposition to any legitimate religiosity, be it Jewish or not. Indeed, the author of the letter to the council did praise the Christian religion. Yet he praised Christianity not qua Christianity, but Christianity as opposed to Sabbatianism.

For Emden, Christianity was a legitimate, true, and even noble religion, which—on the basis of its own theological tenets—should recognize Judaism’s legitimacy, truth, and nobility. What this meant in practice was the acknowledgment of Judaism’s total separateness. Judaism and Christianity were parallel paths to redemption: they did not intersect and should not attempt to do so. Jews and Christians should respect each other, but they had nothing substantial to offer each other. According to Emden, Jesus’ intention was to reinstate the Noahide Commandments, thereby creating a sustainable moral creed for Gentiles; the founder of Christianity had no message for his contemporary Jews, and Emden’s contemporary Jews had nothing to look for in their contemporary Christian religion.

It is no coincidence that Emden’s account of Christianity drew so deeply on the Scriptures rather than on the works of later theologians or his own firsthand experience. Tolerant and open-minded as it was, this vision of Christianity was that of its early canonical texts, not of what he saw through his window: Emden had little to say about the Christianity of his own day but referred solely to the rather abstract and idealized vision of Christianity at the time of its inception. Despite the enlightened phraseology, the argument aimed at maintaining or even increasing the distance between the two religions; Emden wanted to preserve a utopian status quo, in which Jews and Christians deeply respected each other, but never met.

The letter to the Council of Four Lands depicted the ideal scheme of things, in which the two legitimate religious establishments—the rabbis and the priests—recognized each other’s legitimacy without making attempts to interfere with each other’s business or to proselytize in any way. Jew and Christian were to join in condemnation of Jewish and Christian heretics. What is really striking in Emden’s letter is not his explicitly tolerant view of Christianity but his implicit understanding of Judaism. The true novelty of Emden’s position did not lie in the view that Christianity was based on the Noahide Commandments (which, by the mid-eighteenth century, had been generally accepted among the rabbis, though most of them based their argumentation on the Talmud rather than the Gospels).

The true novelty was the idea that the theological and practical boundaries of Judaism could and should be unequivocally demarcated once and for all. What Emden proposed was a hard ontology of Judaism: the Jewish religion was eternal and immutable, like a Platonic idea; it had clearly defined boundaries, centralized structure, and well-defined dogmas. I believe that Emden imagined his ideal Judaism in clear—though probably unconscious—analogy to the Catholic theologians’ ideal vision of Christianity. In the rabbis, he saw a professional clerical caste, hierarchically organized, uniformly trained and disciplined, and controlling the minds and bodies of the wider Jewish community. In the herem, he saw not a localized and limited tool of social control employed within a specific community but a kind of universal ban of excommunication, condemning the excommunicated to eternal punishment and having validity everywhere and for everyone. In religious dissenters, he saw “heretics” who should be burned at the stake. He saw the Jewish religion as a set of systematic and systematized doctrines incumbent upon every Jew and believed that one could abandon Judaism not only by a formal conversion to another religion but through lack of correct understanding of theological tenets: a Jew who deviated from the right path was no longer a Jew in the proper sense of the term. He belonged to another religion entirely.

As Judaism had always been a religion without clearly defined dogmas and lacking centralized religious authority, earlier rabbinic attacks on heresy were proscriptive rather than analytical. No attempt had been made to establish a contrastive taxonomy of different heretical positions or to demarcate unequivocally what distinguished one “sect” from another. Names of ancient groups, such as Sadducees or Boethusians, were routinely used to designate modern-day heretics; terms such as Karaism were utilized as a generic synonym for sectarianism. Pre-Emden rabbinic polemics against the followers of Sabbatai Tsevi habitually conflated Sabbatianism with other Jewish sects of the past and systematically obfuscated differences among various heretical groups.⁹¹

Emden deeply internalized the Christian understanding of heresy as theological error and became a kind of Jewish Irenaeus or Hippolytus: a chief heresiologist. Such an understanding of heresy has no meaning if it is not relativized to some orthodoxy: a clear definition of deviance demands an equally clear definition of the normative. Following the studies of Jacob Katz, Jewish historians have been reluctant to use the word “orthodox” in discussions of phenomena preceding the advent of Orthodox Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. However, it should be noted that the term “orthodoxy” was already used in the 1750s by the Lutheran scholar Friedrich David Megerlin specifically to describe Emden’s position in his controversy with Eibeschütz.⁹² Emden was orthodox in the sense that he saw his version of Judaism as the only natural and true point of reference for all other versions of Judaism, which he considered inherently inferior, heretical, and deviant. This, in turn, made sense only within the framework of an organized church: it is little surprise that Emden’s vision of Judaism so resembled that of the Church and that his rabbis were so like the priests.

Emden brought into play the half-forgotten anti-Sabbatian apologetics of Sasportas and neglected anti-Christian works such as Hoda’at ba’al din. He then turned both on their heads. He accepted Sasportas’s idea of Sabbatianism being a new religion but used it as an argument for establishing a common front with Christianity. He employed Hoda’at ba’al din’s notion that Jewish principles were expounded in the Gospels but argued that this only proved the legitimacy of the Church in Jewish eyes. Like Sasportas, Emden believed that Sabbatianism was not Judaism and argued that the Sabbatians were descendants of the erev rav: they were ostensibly Jewish but, in fact, did not belong to the people of Israel.⁹³

After Sasportas in the mid-seventeenth century, no other opponent of Sabbatianism took up this line of argumentation; as Sid Leiman has noted, during the first stages of polemics against Eibeschütz in the early 1750s, Emden “was a loose cannon, if not worse.”⁹⁴ Yet, thanks to the mediation of Abraham of Zamońć and others, Emden’s highly radical (and highly original) perspective on Sabbatianism was accepted by the Council of Four Lands in their dealings with case of the Frankists. At the end of 1756 Emden became what he had dreamed of becoming but had never managed to achieve in his campaign against Eibeschütz: the mind behind the anti-heretical policy of the most powerful body in world Jewry.