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Chapter 3

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Where Does Frankism Fit In?

The Contra-Talmudists

Emden’s strategy of involving the Christians in the campaign against the Sabbatians was designed to appeal to the sentiments of the priests. The mid-eighteenth-century Polish Church, determined to wage an intense battle against the religious dissent among the country’s Christian population, could be expected to be sympathetic to an anti-heretical case. In approaching Bishop Dembowski, the rabbis counted on his concern for established religious authority. For the Sabbatians, a natural response to this strategy was to resort to the prevalent Christian stereotype of “rabbinism” as an empty shell of legalistic casuistry and present their version of Judaism as more spiritual and based on direct divine inspiration of a mystical type. The battle lines were thus drawn: in their contacts with the Catholic clergy, the Sabbatians would play on the Church’s view of Jewish religion as “letter” without “spirit,” “law” without “grace” (and would even use this latter notion), while the rabbis would appeal to the priests’ distrust of “enthusiasm” and of private revelations extra ecclesiam. Various understandings of the fundamental nature of what was gradually becoming a mass religious movement forming around Frank were formulated, put forward, and tested against one another during the ongoing debate. Podolian Sabbatians, the Jewish authorities, and the bishop and his aides all tried to fit the developing events into their respective visions of history, redemption, and society; what we know today as Frankism emerged as a product of the clash of ideas, contradictory strategies, interests, and commitments of these groups.

As discussed in Chapter 1, after the public violation of the Fast of Esther in Kopczyńce and the hearing in Dembowski’s court in late March 1756, Frank left the Commonwealth and headed home to Salonika (according to a Polish source, those arrested in Kopczyńce were set free on condition that they would disperse to their homes).¹ He was not directly involved in the developments that took place in the Kamieniec diocese in 1756–57, and it is unclear what influence he did have on the course of events. Later Frankist sources imply that he did not authorize actions of the Sabbatian party in Kamieniec. He seems to have lost some authority: during Frank’s sojourn in Turkey, Yehudah Leyb Krysa assumed the leadership of the group in Podolia and was probably responsible for the strategy developed in the contacts with the bishop.² However, the Jesuit Konstanty Awedyk claimed that Frank was constantly pulling strings behind the scenes and that upon leaving Poland, he told his followers to present themselves as adherents to two main tenets: a belief “in the Holy Trinity, that is, in One God in three persons” and the rejection of “the Talmud as full of errors and blasphemies.”³ While Awedyk’s description of Frank’s role is probably an ex post embellishment (his book was published in 1760, when Frank had firmly established his leadership over those Podolian Sabbatians, who were Christians by then), the description of the subject of debate is accurate.

On 2 August 1756, a manifesto was submitted to the Kamieniec consistory. Twenty-one named Sabbatians from Jezierzany, Kopczyńce, Nadworna, Busk, Zbrzezie, Rohatyn, Satanów, and Lanckoronie claimed to speak on behalf of Jews in other countries who held similar beliefs. They asserted that, upon lengthy consideration, they had concluded that the Talmud was blasphemous and contrary to reason and God’s commandments. The signatories complained to the authorities that because of their anti-talmudic position, they had been persecuted, excommunicated, expelled, and falsely accused by their enemies, the “teachers and advocates of the Talmud.” They demanded that the Talmud should be rejected and consigned to the flames and stated their intention to “declare to the entire world” the principles of their faith, which they proclaimed themselves to prove true in a public disputation. Their principles were:

1. We believe in everything that was taught and commanded by God in the Old Testament.

2. The Holy Scriptures cannot be comprehended by human reason without the assistance of Divine Grace.

3. The Talmud is full of scandalous blasphemies against God and should be rejected.

4. There is One God who created everything.

5. This God is in Three Persons, indivisible as to their nature.

6. God can take a human body upon Himself and be subject to all passions except for sin.

7. In accordance with the prophecies, the city of Jerusalem will not be rebuilt until the end of time.

8. The messiah promised in the Old Testament will not come again.

9. God Himself will remove the sin of the First Parents. This God is the true messiah, incarnate.⁴

The manifesto was presented in Latin and signed with the full Hebrew names of its proponents. The Latin translation from Hebrew was executed by one of the most interesting characters in the early phase of Frankism, the Polish nobleman Antoni Kossakowski, called Moliwda (1718–86).⁵ Antoni grew up in the house of Dominik Kossakowski, father of the future bishop of Livonia and a member of the Targowica Confederation, Józef Kossakowski. Having secretly married “a peasant, daughter of a local mill man,”⁶ he fled his family’s wrath to Russia, where he became an “elder” of the Greek Orthodox sect of Philipovtsy (a radical branch of the schismatic Old Believers). Later, he claimed that “under the name Moliwda, he ruled one of the Greek islands”⁷ and reportedly spent time in one of the monasteries on Mount Athos.⁸ Contemporaries marveled at his mastery of oriental languages including Turkish, Tatar, Hebrew, and Aramaic, as well as his “profound knowledge of the Scriptures and Holy Fathers.”⁹

The Philipovtsy had numerous contacts with the Jews; in Poland, their faith was considered so close to Judaism that some members of the Polish nobility wanted them to pay the Jewish poll tax.¹⁰ Moliwda met Frank somewhere in the Balkans and saw in him a chance for a return to Poland. His exact role in the formulation of the Frankist manifestos and points for the disputations is a matter of conjecture, but it is certain that he was one of the most important sources of information on the selected Christian concepts that helped construct the Frankist teachings.¹¹

Awedyk would have us believe that Frank was himself responsible for the formulation of the main points of the August 1756 manifesto. This seems unlikely: the anti-talmudic intent of the document had not appeared in earlier Sabbatian polemics, and it did not stem organically from any Sabbatian doctrines. The account of Ber of Bolechów, according to which this anti-talmudic element was the personal contribution of Bishop Dembowski, is more convincing. According to Ber, the Sabbatians told the bishop how they had been pursued by the rabbinate; they requested a formal edict granting them rights to establish an autonomous community, to engage in the same trades that other Jews engage in, and to be exempt from the jurisdiction of the rabbinate. The bishop responded: “We cannot set you apart and distinct from the whole community of Israel until you demonstrate that the statements of the Talmud are false and contain lies. Then you will be released from the [obligations] of the Talmud according to a verdict we will issue. And if you demonstrate the Talmud’s hostility toward the Christian faith, it will be possible to condemn it for burning, and you will easily obtain a royal writ of privileges.”¹²

Since the Jewish religion had in Poland the status of a recognized faith, religio licta, Dembowski (or the Frankists) could not launch a frontal attack on Judaism as such. They could, however, invert the strategy employed by the bet din of Satanów and condemn a particular form of Judaism for its alleged deviation from its own principles. Defining the target of polemics as “Talmudism” was a clever move: although formally the Sabbatians undermined only one text of a broader canon, for most Jews such a challenge would be tantamount to an attack on the very substance of their religion. Accordingly, Sabbatian tenets were presented as based solely on the text of the Pentateuch. Ber Birkenthal stated that at that critical juncture, “the Christians started to call [the Sabbatians] Contra-Talmudists.”¹³ Others maintain that the Frankists themselves “stopped calling themselves believers in Sabbatai Tsevi and started to call themselves Contra-Talmudists.”¹⁴ Whoever was behind the new denomination of the group, the intention was to adapt the Frankist case to the broader framework of the Catholic polemics against the Talmud.

The canon law principles giving the Church authority to defend Judaism against internal heresy, which I discussed in Chapter 1, were commonly employed by the priests in their polemics against the Talmud: in his argument that the pope may punish Jews for inventing heresies against their own religion, Innocent IV explicitly stated that this was the basis for his order to burn the Talmud.¹⁵ The anti-talmudic thread appeared also in Christian documents concerning the Frankists: the initial justification of the Kamieniec consistory court’s jurisdiction over the Jews arrested in Lanckoronie already contained a reference to Clement VIII’s bull Cum Hebraeorum malitia incipiente (1569), forbidding the reading of the Talmud and condemning it to be burned.¹⁶

In February 1756, this reference might have been included without giving the matter deeper thought or intention. By August of the same year, it became a crucial element of a deliberate strategy: “anti-Talmudism” became the focal point of the Frankist case, and Sabbatianism came to be presented in Christian sources as a branch of Judaism closer to its original biblical form than was the Judaism of the rabbis. Suddenly, the tables were turned: Jewish leaders who had tried to denounce the heresy of Sabbatianism to the Christian authorities found themselves vulnerable to the Christian accusation of heresy because of their talmudic belief. The definition of Sabbatians as contra-talmudic Jews invited, of course, an analogy to the Karaites.

The Karaite schism emerged around the middle of the ninth century in Babylonia and Persia and defined itself as an opposition to the postbiblical rabbinic tradition. As a matter of principle, the Karaites held the Hebrew Bible as the one and only foundation of Judaism and maintained that all tenets of belief and conduct must derive directly from the literally interpreted Scriptures. The fundamental disagreement between the Karaites and other Jews (called the “Rabbanites” for the purpose of polemics) over the authority of the postbiblical oral tradition as embodied in the Talmud led to heated dispute and the development of a substantial apologetic and polemical literature on both sides. Karaism spread among the Jews in Egypt, North Africa, and the Land of Israel, as well as in the hotbed of the schism, Persia and Babylonia. By the thirteenth century, however, the movement had decayed and the intellectual debate had essentially been won by the anti-Karaite rabbis: while Karaite communities continued to exist in the Orient, they were no longer treated by the Rabbanites as a serious threat to their hegemony.

The Karaites never managed to establish a foothold in the Western world, and for medieval European rabbis, they remained a subject of a (quite limited) scholarly curiosity rather than actual polemics. However, despite the absence of actual Karaites in Christian Western Europe, from the early seventeenth century onward the appellation “Karaite” began to appear in rabbinic works attacking contemporary dissenters who sought to subvert the authority of the rabbinate and reject the rabbinic tradition. Shalom Rosenberg, the first scholar to discuss the issue, maintained that this new rabbinic anti-Karaism was a “purely literary” extension of the medieval polemic: when the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century rabbis spoke about the Karaites, “they refer[red] strictly to contemporaries who have arrived at conclusions which resemble those of the Karaites, but who owe[d] no actual intellectual debt to the Karaites.”¹⁷

Other scholars have interpreted the phenomenon differently. In 1712, the Sephardic board of elders of Amsterdam excommunicated three local Jews for “following the sect of [the] Karaites and act[ing] as they do, entirely denying the Oral Law.”¹⁸ Yosef Kaplan, who analyzed the case in great detail, has argued that the “Karaism” of a few Amsterdam Jews was “nourished by growing interests [in the sect] among the Hebraists of Protestant Europe,” among whom the idealized Karaites came to represent “the original, pure Judaism, before it was infected with the superstitions of the Talmud and the kabbalah.”¹⁹ According to Kaplan, the self-proclaimed Amsterdam Karaites did have a connection to actual Karaites, but this connection was indirect, mediated by Christian accounts of Karaism. In the context of the confessional cleavage between the Protestants and the Catholics, the very existence of a Jewish group that advocated the return to the uncorrupted text of the Bible naturally provoked interest.

Protestant scholars promptly interpreted Karaism as a Jewish embodiment of the sola Scriptura principle and thus an external confirmation of the Protestant rejection of papist distortions and corruptions of the original biblical message. Yet even Catholic scholars tended to view the Karaites with sympathy, emphasizing their rationalism and the rejection of rabbinic “fantasies and aberrations.”²⁰ On the basis of such accounts, some dissenting members of the Amsterdam Sephardic community took upon themselves the garb of Karaites, viewing them as a “positive reference group”²¹ and adopting the Christian ideal picture of Karaism.²² According to Kaplan, while the image of Karaism expounded by the Amsterdam Sephardim was based on literary accounts, their “heresy” was a concrete “attempt to free themselves from the yoke of traditional Judaism and form a new kind of Judaism in keeping with their spiritual desires.”²³

The movement of the Amsterdam “Karaites” was an abortive one: the idealized Karaism never became an organized religious movement. In the Polish context, however, the Karaites were more than just a “positive reference group” for contemporary Jewish dissenters. The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth boasted the only sizable Karaite group in the Christian world. At the end of the fourteenth century, Grand Duke Witold of Lithuania granted right of residence in Troki (near Vilna) to a group of Karaite families arriving from Crimea; by the fifteenth century, Karaite settlements existed in Troki, Łuck, and Halicz. The Karaites were treated as Jews by the state authorities and paid their poll tax through existing Jewish institutions, such as the rabbinic council of the Duchy of Lithuania.²⁴ In places where they lived alongside the Rabbanites, the two communities often shared cemeteries and bathhouses,²⁵ and, in some cases, they also initiated litigation in common rabbinic courts.²⁶ Intermarriages between Rabbanites and Karaites were very infrequent, but a few cases are known to have occurred.²⁷ There were even cases of individuals moving from one community to the other.²⁸ Both groups were often embroiled in bitter economic competition, protected their boundaries against the other, and sometimes expressed mutual derision in proverbs and folktales. Nevertheless, they saw each other as two branches of a single Jewry.

For Polish rabbis, the Commonwealth’s Karaites never became the subject of religious polemic. In addressing them in official writings, the Rabbanites of Poland-Lithuania used the expression anshe britenu ha-yekarim, “dear people of our covenant”;²⁹ in internal documents, they usually spoke simply of “the Karaite congregation,” edat ha-karaim,³⁰ without adding any positive epithets but also without dysphemisms habitually added by their Western counterparts. The Karaite leaders, in turn, addressed the rabbis as ahenu (our brethren).³¹ The Christian authorities also acknowledged the legal equality of Rabbanites and Karaites, sometimes emphasizing that the Crown’s grant of general privileges to the Jews included both communities.³² The multiethnic, multireligious corporative structure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth provided a framework for treating the Karaites as another legitimate Jewish denomination. In contrast to other Christian countries, which offcially acknowledged only one Jewish religion, the legal system of the Commonwealth explicitly allowed for the existence and free practice of Karaism as an alternative form of Judaism. The concept of rite, used in Poland to define the offcial status of Greek Catholics and Catholic Armenians (that is, recognized non-Roman denominations of Catholicism), was employed in delineating the status of the Karaites (that is, a recognized non-talmudic denomination of Judaism) as well: for instance, King Władysław IV guaranteed the freedom of confession to Judaeorum Trociensum rithus Karaimici.³³

There is no evidence of any direct contact between the Frankists and the Karaites. However, defining the Sabbatians as anti-talmudic Jews who—on the basis of royal privileges—demanded equal rights with other Jews was clearly a strategy aimed at deploying the Karaite precedent as a legal framework to govern the case of the Frankists. The Karaites enjoyed the same rights as the Rabbanites and shared some communal institutions, but in matters of faith and ritual were practically autonomous. Since the legal system of the Commonwealth had already recognized two legitimate independent Jewish rites, there was no prima facie reason that it could not recognize Sabbatianism as a third, or, alternatively, simply subsume the Sabbatians and the Karaites under a wider rubric of “contra-talmudic Jews.” Christian sources explicitly mentioned such a possibility; some later accounts even used the term “Karaite” when talking about Frank and his followers. Thus, the first dispatch of the papal nuncio in Warsaw concerning the Frankists defined the group as “the Jews of other religions, called Karaites [gli ebrei di varie religioni, detti caraiti],”³⁴ while Father Stanisław Mikulski, the administrator sede vacante of the Lwów archdiocese after the death of Bishop Wyżycki, described the Frankists as the “Karaites,” whom he characterized as “the Contra-Talmudists confessing the Trinity, Incarnation, and other dogmas of the [Christian] faith [Caraitarum nomine . . . non aliter interpretor, nisi Contratalmudistas profitentes Trinitatem, Incarnationem, et alia dogmata fidei].”³⁵

The Kamieniec Disputation³⁶

The first hearing at the Kamieniec consistory in materia perfidiae Iudaica took place on 4 September 1756.³⁷ This time, it was the Frankists who acted as plaintiffs against the “synagogues of the Kamieniec diocese.” They argued that the charges of immoral conduct in Lanckoronie constituted slander, and the subsequent excommunications were motivated by the desire to brand legitimate opponents of rabbinic Judaism as heretics: according to the Sabbatians, the real reason for the Council of Four Lands’ campaign against them was their rejection of the Talmud and the proximity of their position to some of the tenets of Christianity. They also demanded a written response to their manifesto. On 17 October, Bishop Dembowski sent a pastoral letter to the Jewish leaders of his diocese, commanding that the rabbis come to Kamieniec in person and provide answers regarding the earlier bans of excommunication and the motions presented in the manifesto.

The rabbis failed to appear. Instead they sent a shtadlan, Simon Herszkowicz, who referred to the privileges of religious and judicial autonomy granted to the Jews by Polish kings, challenged the consistory court’s authority to rule on a case involving Jews and Judaism, and demanded the postponement of the proceedings until the issue of jurisdiction was resolved.³⁸ He also argued that the rabbis needed time to prepare answers to a manifesto in Latin. Dem-bowski rejected Herszkowicz’s arguments challenging his jurisdiction (stating that the Jews themselves had first approached his court) but agreed to give the rabbis time to translate documents and prepare answers. The cross-examination of both sides was postponed for four months, until 25 February 1757. Meanwhile, the consistory carried on with its interrogations of the Contra-Talmudists, who “continued to support their points and provided other interesting information.”³⁹

On 28 February, Herszkowicz presented the consistory with a written answer to the Frankist manifesto. This document is no longer extant; according to Ber of Bolechów, it “revealed to both Jews and Christians the abominations of the Sabbatians and exposed their misdeeds against the Torah and its commandments as well as against the natural law.”⁴⁰ The rabbis tried to convince the Kamieniec clergy that the points of the Frankist manifesto were deliberately couched in terms designed to mislead the priests and make them believe that these resembled Christian doctrine; as it turned out, they argued, Sabbatianism was much closer to Islam than to Christianity.

However, the rabbinic response to the charges of the Contra-Talmudists was deemed unsatisfactory by the consistory. The court questioned Herszkowicz’s right to represent the Jewish side and again demanded that the “elders of the synagogue” attend the hearing in person. It threatened to hold them in contempt should they fail to do so. Herszkowicz responded with pleas for clemency, to which the court responded by granting another postponement, until 23 March. When no representative of rabbinic Judaism showed up for the next hearing either, Dembowski issued an edict charging the rabbis with contumacy and obstruction of justice and imposed financial penalties on the Jewish communities in his diocese. He set the final deadline for the confrontation between the Contra-Talmudists and their adversaries for 20 June 1757.⁴¹

In early months of that year, the Contra-Talmudists composed an expanded version of their theses. As before, the original text was written in Hebrew and then translated into Polish and Latin by Moliwda.⁴² This expanded version of the manifesto contained the following statements:

1. We believe in everything that was taught and commanded by God in the Old Testament.

2. The books of Moses and the other books of the Old Testament can be compared to a richly dressed Maiden, whose face is covered and whose beauty cannot be seen. These books are full of the hidden wisdom of God, they speak of things mysterious and of the future, and therefore, they cannot be comprehended by human reason without the assistance of Efficacious Divine Grace.

3. The rabbis of old times sought to expound the Old Testament. These explanations are known as the Talmud and contain many fables, lies, and much nonsense and hostility to God and His teachings.

4. On the basis of the Holy Bible of the Old Testament, we believe that there is One God, without beginning or end, maker of Heaven and Earth and all things known and unknown.

5. On the basis of the same Scripture, we believe that there is one infinite God in three Persons, equal, indivisible, and [acting] in agreement.

6. We believe that God may take upon Himself mortal human flesh, be born, grow up, eat, drink, sense, sleep, and be subjected to all human passions save for sin.

7. In accord with Daniel’s prophecy, we believe that the city of Jerusalem will not be rebuilt until the end of time.

8. We believe that the Jews have waited in vain for the messiah to come, bring them happiness, and grant them power over other nations.

9. We believe that God Himself cursed all of humankind for the sin of the First Parents. The same God would descend to earth and save the world from the curse. He is the true messiah, not for Jews alone, but for all peoples. All those who believe in Him and do good will be given Eternal Grace, and those who do not will be cast down to hell.⁴³

As the consistory rejected the written rabbinic response to the first manifesto of the Contra-Talmudists, Bishop Dembowski demanded that the parties choose four representatives each and argue their respective positions in a public disputation. The representatives of the Contra-Talmudists were Leyb Krysa, Hayyim Moszkowicz, Leyb Rabinowicz, and Solomon Shorr; their opponents were represented by the rabbis Mendel of Satanów, Leyb of Międzybóż, Ber of Jazłowiec, and Joseph of Mohylew. The debate took place in the Kamieniec cathedral from 20 to 28 June 1757.⁴⁴ First, the Contra-Talmudists presented each motion orally and endorsed it with their signatures in the official protocol. Then the rabbis had a chance to put forward their response in a similar fashion. The live disputation was conducted in Hebrew with simultaneous Polish translation for the audience; the translation was provided by Moliwda.⁴⁵

The rabbis unconditionally accepted points one, two, and four. They accepted the first part of point three, rejecting at the same time its second part. As for points five to nine, they refused to enter into the disputation, referring only to their written answer to the earlier manifesto submitted via Herszkowicz. The debate in Kamieniec provoked great interest in both the Jewish and Christian public: the crowd was so large that the bishop had guards posted to manage access to the cathedral.⁴⁶ Kuryer Polski, the most important Polish newspaper of the time, provided systematic coverage of the disputation. Some of the reports were also reprinted by foreign press.⁴⁷

The paradigm of a public disputation between Christians and Jews was established in the thirteenth century with the great debates in Paris (1240) and Barcelona (1263). The Paris disputation centered on the status and the authority of the Talmud. Explicitly drawing upon the arguments of the Karaites, the apostate Nicolas Donin argued that the Talmud challenges the unique position of Scripture as the embodiment of the revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai. He also maintained that it contains blasphemies against Jesus and Mary, as well as hostile remarks against Christians. The chief Christian protagonist of the Barcelona debate was also a convert from Judaism, Pablo Christiani. Christiani did not reject the Talmud outright; to the contrary, he claimed that the truth of Christianity can be proved on the basis of Jewish writings, including the Talmud. On the agenda of the debate were the thesis that the messiah had already come, the issue of his divinity, and the abolition of the “ceremonial law.” However, the disputation also touched upon other issues, in particular on the doctrine of Original Sin. A Christian account of the Barcelona debate (but not Jewish accounts) also mentions the introduction of the subject of the Trinity.

The period of great public ceremonial disputations ended with the debate in Tortosa in 1413–14. However, eighteenth-century Poland saw an endeavor to revive the tradition. In the early 1740s, Franciszek Antoni Kobielski, bishop of Łuck and Brzeńć, attempted to institute the practice of presenting missionary sermons in the synagogues of Poland to “demonstrate to the Jews the truth of the Catholic faith.”⁴⁸ The practice existed in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, but in the early modern period it was carried out only in the Papal States and in some parts of the Habsburg monarchy; although the Polish bishops were specifically reprimanded by Popes Gregory XIII (1584) and Clement XI (1705), no attempts to implement it in the Commonwealth ensued. Kobielski delivered a series of sermons in the synagogues of his diocese, and in January 1743 he challenged the Jews of Brody to a disputation about five points concerning the Trinity, the coming of the messiah, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the destitute state of Israel after the rejection of Christ.⁴⁹ The Jews of Brody prepared a written answer to Kobielski and complained to the owner of the town about the bishop’s encroachment upon their religious autonomy. They do not appear to have been particularly upset by his missionary efforts or even to have taken them seriously. As for the sermons in the synagogues, a Protestant (and hence admittedly biased) source described what really happened: “Bishop [Kobielski] was taken by religious zeal, and he resolved to bring to the Roman faith not only the Jews, but also the Protestants. . . . Once he went to a synagogue in Węgrów and started to preach a sermon. Since he was completely drunk, he fell asleep while talking. A vicar had to finish the sermon in his stead and the bishop was carried out of the synagogue. . . . While he spoke, his eyes constantly kept closing and it took him a quarter of an hour to complete one sentence. The Jews could not stop laughing during the entire spectacle.”⁵⁰

Kobielski’s sermonizing and his missionary ventures were more than a little pathetic and did not present a serious danger for the Jews. Still, they revived the memory of medieval public Jewish-Christian debates and set a precedent for such a disputation in Poland. The Brody precedent was almost certainly known to Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski of Kamieniec Podolski, especially since his brother (also a bishop) Antoni was also involved in Kobielski’s campaign.⁵¹

The Brody debate of 1743 might be seen as a prelude to the disputation of Kamieniec in 1757 (much more sophisticated and much more dangerous from the Jewish perspective). During the ensuing fourteen years, Kobielski’s rather primitive arguments became substantially refined. This process of refinement drew directly upon material from the medieval disputations. In 1681, the great Hebraist Johann Christian Wagenseil published a compilation of Jewish anti-Christian writings, Tela Ignea Satanae. Among other texts, the publication brought the Hebrew and Latin versions of the most important Jewish account of the Barcelona disputation, Nahmanides’ Sefer ha-viku’ah (Wagenseil’s Hebrew edition contained many interpolations, including some from the accounts of the earlier Paris debate).⁵² There is direct evidence that Wagenseil’s publication was known to some of the priests who became involved in the Frankist affair in 1759.⁵³ I suggest that in 1757, it was already known to Moliwda or some of the priests from the Kamieniec consistory. Five out of six controversial items on the Kamieniec agenda (the Trinity, the earlier coming of the messiah, the messiah’s nature both divine and human, Original Sin, and the cessation of Jewish self-rule after the advent of the messiah) had also been raised in Barcelona. It is certain that Christians not only translated the manifestos of the Contra-Talmudists but also influenced their content. The Frankist theses reveal substantial knowledge of Christian Scriptures and employ very specific technical theological terminology, unlikely to be known to the Jews. For instance, thesis two uses the technical notion of łaska Boska osobliwa (the standard Polish rendering of gratia efficax, efficacious grace) and alludes to the Epistle to the Romans; thesis four is a loose paraphrase of the Nicene Creed.

The Barcelona disputation had marked the beginning of a completely new strategy of Christian anti-Jewish polemics, whereby the Jews were to be convinced that their own texts recognized fundamental truths of Christianity.⁵⁴ Kobielski’s ventures show that five hundred years later, he was entirely unable to deploy this strategy: he merely repeated the pre-Barcelona apologetics, in which the arguments aimed at convincing the Jews of the truth of Christianity were drawn from typological exegesis of the Old Testament or based on scholastic logic. The few references to Jewish texts that appeared in his sermons had a clearly ornamental character: the bishop was not even able to get the names of the authors and the titles of the books right.⁵⁵

However, Kobielski’s primitive technique had one advantage over the more sophisticated counterpart first employed in Barcelona by Pablo Christiani. The apostate’s strategy was laden with inner tension: Jewish canonical texts were condemned for their alleged absurdity and offensiveness to Christianity, yet they were to serve as the basis for the Christian anti-Jewish argument. Rhetoric, if not logic, demanded that some theory reconcile these two elements. Hyam Maccoby has argued that such a theory was provided by the “two-tier conception of the Talmud”: the Christian position in Barcelona was based on the claim that the Talmud was “evil in its final redaction but the earliest strata, dating from the time of Jesus and before, contain material as yet undefiled by rabbinism.”⁵⁶ This broad structure of medieval argumentation recurred during the Kamieniec disputation of 1757. The argument, however, underwent an important modification. The tension between attacking Jewish texts and simultaneously using them in a missionary effort was resolved not by reference to the “two-tier theory of the Talmud” but to the idea of a dichotomy of the Talmud and kabbalah: the former was entirely rejected for its supposed blasphemies and absurdities, while the latter was said to contain—albeit in a distorted form—the basic truths of Christianity.

The Kabbalisshten

Strong emphasis on kabbalah and its study characterized Sabbatianism from the very outset: Nathan of Gaza already called upon the believers “not to dabble any more in halakhah, but rather to study the Zohar, tikkunim, and midrashim.”⁵⁷ He also stressed the prime role of kabbalah in determining halakhah, arguing that in matters not explicitly mentioned in the Talmud, the Zohar should be used as the basis for issuing binding legal rulings. Needless to say, the most important matters—from Nathan’s perspective—were to be decided on this Zoharic foundation: the Talmud did not provide the foundation for judging the messianic mandate of Sabbatai Tsevi, yet his messiahship could be unequivocally established on the basis of the Zohar.⁵⁸

Nathan’s statements provoked angry reactions from some traditionally minded rabbis (including Jacob Sasportas)⁵⁹ but were enthusiastically received by Sabbatians themselves. Abraham Cardoso presented the entirety of the past thousand years of Jewish history as a conflict between the rival camps of kabbalists and “literalists” (pashtanim) and argued that the Judaism of the latter was in no way better than the idolatrous faiths of the Gentiles: it did not contain even the slightest speck of the knowledge of the True God.⁶⁰ Nehemiah Hayon boldly called for printing and distributing all kabbalistic works,⁶¹ advocated open individual inquiry into esoteric matters, and demanded total abolition of any constraints imposed on the study of kabbalah.⁶² In 1700, Hayyim Malakh wrote to Rabbi Abraham Broda of Prague “to send him learned people skilled in the matters of kabbalah in order to debate the faith of Sabbatai Tsevi together with him.”⁶³ Two pupils of Broda went to Vienna to take up the challenge and suffered a miserable defeat in the disputation, in which Malakh argued that the Zohar unambiguously supported the truth of the faith in Sabbatai Tsevi. (Records of the Vienna disputation are not known to exist, but Emden—who did not witness them, either—mused that they might have formed a basis for the Kamieniec theses of the Frankists).⁶⁴

The presentation of Sabbatian belief as a legitimate corollary of kabbalah in general, and the Zohar in particular, was a source of constant difficulty for its opponents. The Zohar had firmly established canonical status in Judaism, and many respectable halakhists engaged in kabbalistic speculation. Some maintained that the Zohar was more authoritative than any other source, insofar as it did not explicitly contradict the Babylonian Talmud. Over time, “the golden rule evolved that whenever halakhic rulings contradict the kabbalistic precepts, preference must be given to the former; otherwise, the kabbalistic precepts become mandatory.”⁶⁵ Accordingly, Nathan’s position on the role of the Zohar in making legal decisions might have posed special problems in the context of the debate about the current advent of the messiah, but it was, in itself, firmly grounded in accepted tradition. Unbridled kabbalistic speculation not directly linked to the mastery of halakhah also had precedents within normative Judaism and was by no means necessarily objectionable: in the sixteenth century, Rabbi Hayyim Vital argued for placing limitations on the study of the Mishnah and Talmud so that students could devote themselves more fully to esoteric lore. Not only was, in his view, a command of Jewish law unnecessary for dealing with the kabbalah; it also deprived the student of the time needed for exploring higher secrets.⁶⁶

The polemics against Sabbatianism put an end to this relative laxity and the tolerance toward esoteric pursuits. Four out of six extant anti-Sabbatian bans pronounced in Poland between 1670 and 1753 forbade the dissemination of esoteric manuscripts (megillot setarim) and placed severe restrictions on printing kabbalistic works.⁶⁷ Mishaps such as the Vienna disputation made the matter urgent: in the eighteenth century, anti-Sabbatianism was increasingly taking the shape of a battle against all kabbalah. Following the arrest of the participants of the Lanckoronie ceremony, the rabbis of Satanów confiscated many subversive and heretical books and manuscripts.

In the course of its investigation of the case, the Kamieniec consistory issued an order to present the sequestered writings for inspection by the episcopal court. We do not know if this order was carried out by the rabbis, and we have no information concerning the titles or even the general character of the works in question. What we do know is that the consistory dispatched priests (sometimes accompanied by converted Jews who acted as interpreters)⁶⁸ to interview the suspected Sabbatians in loco. One of these priests was the Bernardine Gaudenty Pikulski, who later composed the most comprehensive Christian account of early Frankism. When recounting his meeting with Sabbatians in Lanckoronie in 1757, Father Pikulski wrote: “The tenets of [Sabbatai’s] belief were described by his followers in their books. And the books are: first—Or Izrael, which means “the light of Israel.” Second—Hemdas Cwi. Third—Keyser Josef. Fourth is the book published some seven years ago in Amsterdam by Emmanuel Chay Riky, and it is titled Joser Leywawa.”⁶⁹

Or Izrael (Or Yisrael) was a commentary on the Zohar and Lurianic dicta published in 1702 by Israel ben Aaron Jaffe. Hemdas Cwi (Hemdat Tsevi) was a work on Tikkune ha-Zohar by Rabbi Tsevi Hirsh Hotsh, published in Amsterdam in 1706. Keyser Josef (Keter Yosef) was a kabbalistic prayer book by Rabbi Joseph ben Moses of Przemyńl, first published in Berlin in 1700. Finally, Joser Leywawa (Yosher Levav), by Raphael Immanuel Ricchi Hai, appeared in Amsterdam in 1742 and dealt with the mystery of tsimtsum as well as Lurianic kavvanot. Two of the four books mentioned by Pikulski had already aroused suspicions in the first half of the eighteenth century. Or Yisrael was found to be “tainted by Sabbatianism and pervaded with confusion” by Moses Hagiz⁷⁰ and qualified as a “heretical book” by Jacob Emden.⁷¹ Keter Yosef was similarly condemned by Hagiz,⁷² while Emden claimed that without its author’s knowledge, the printers had added Sabbatian elements based on the writings of Nathan of Gaza.⁷³ Yet Sabbatianism was alleged only with regard to these two of the four items and only by the most ardent heresy hunters such as Hagiz or Emden. None of the books in question was unreservedly condemned by the majority of the rabbis; all of them were printed with rabbinic approbations and were not generally regarded as contrary to accepted beliefs. What all four books had in common was not Sabbatianism (or at least not overt Sabbatianism) but their authors’ pronounced tendency to disseminate and popularize kabbalah among the wider strata of Jewish society. This was especially true about Tsevi Hirsh Hotsh:⁷⁴ in addition to Hemdat Tsevi, he was the author of the first adaptation of the Zohar in Yiddish, Nahalat Tsevi; in the introduction to the latter work, he asserted that “everyone should study kabbalah according to his perception and comprehension.”⁷⁵

Three of the books mentioned by Father Pikulski appeared in the first decade of the eighteenth century and Hemdat Tsevi in 1711: during that period, the idea that every Jew should study kabbalah “according to his perception and comprehension” might have still slipped by rabbinic vigilance. By the 1750s, the situation had changed: regardless of whether all or some of the four books listed by Pikulski were indeed “tainted with” Sabbatian elements, in the minds of many rabbis the dissemination of kabbalah among the unlettered and statements about a plurality of readings had become unequivocally associated with heresy. This became immediately clear in the rabbinic responses to the discovery of the Lanckoronie ritual. For its participants, the ritual might or might not have had kabbalistic underpinnings; for the rabbinate, it was directly linked with the spread of kabbalah, the unauthorized and uncontrolled study of esoteric matters, and possible forgeries creeping into the accepted kabbalistic works. The letters of rabbis involved in formulating the bans against the Frankists placed special emphasis on the issue of heretical literature.⁷⁶ The fullest expression of this tendency can be found in the closing section of the May 1756 herem of Brody:

We deem it necessary to place restrictions and create order with regard to those who . . . cast off the study of the Talmud and the codifiers and attempt to penetrate the deepest secrets of the Torah without learning first how to read its plain meaning and attaining the understanding of Gemarah. . . . And so we pronounce the ruling that we prohibit anyone to study these writings, even the writings that are certainly of the ARI’s [Isaac Luria’s] authorship. It is strictly forbidden to study them until one has reached the age of forty. The Zohar, the books Shomer emunim [of Rabbi Joseph Ergas], and Pardes rimonim⁷⁷ of Rabbi Moses Cordovero alone may be studied by one who has attained the age of thirty, provided they are in printed form and not in manuscript.⁷⁸

The idea of the prohibition of the study of kabbalah before the age of forty had a long history. However, never before did it receive the patronage and authority of a formal rabbinic assembly. Neither was it ever linked to the explicit demand that the mastery of halakhah must precede any kabbalistic inquiry.⁷⁹ The Brody pronouncement thus bore extraordinary weight and—in an unprecedented way—combined both conditions. The stipulations of the May 1756 herem were repeated four months later in the ban issued by the Council of Four Lands in Konstantynów; the endorsement of the council meant that the herem was to shape the official policy of Jewish authorities in Poland. For the first time, the restrictions were imposed on the entire Jewish population of the country and not only on the suspected or actual Sabbatians. In order to attack Sabbatianism, the rabbinate attempted to formulate a general rule about the study of kabbalah by all Jews.⁸⁰

The position taken by the rabbis was ultraconservative: virtually none of the great kabbalists of the past had refrained from studying kabbalah before attaining the age of forty (the most famous of all kabbalists, Isaac Luria, died at the age of thirty-eight). The strict adherence to the letter of the Brody herem would excommunicate most (or perhaps all) of the kabbalists active in Poland at that time, including quite a few signatories to the ban, many of whom belonged to one of the most important centers of kabbalistic study in the Commonwealth, the kloyz (house of study) of Brody. Hence, the Brody ban was probably not intended to be taken literally. Rather, it should be seen as an attempt to formalize the limits of the permissible in dealing with kabbalah and ensuring the rabbinate’s full supervision over esoteric pursuits.

More important than the exact age requirement demanded from would-be kabbalists was the fact that the rabbis offcially restricted kabbalistic studies to the recognized institutional framework: after the ban, members of the established institutions such as the kloyz of Brody would undoubtedly pursue their kabbalistic interests (almost certainly even before the age of forty), while those learning outside the pale of rabbinic supervision would be automatically excommunicated. The prerequisite of gaining full mastery of the Talmud before engaging in the study of kabbalah was meant to limit the latter to members of the rabbinic elite and to eliminate kabbalistic autodidacts and independent students who lacked the establishment’s formal seal of approval.

The polemics against Sabbatianism demanded the formalization of earlier unofficial restrictions on kabbalah study and the setting of clear limits to legitimate kabbalistic activity. While the rabbis stopped short of condemning kabbalah outright, they called for banning it from the sphere of public activity, confining its study to hermetically closed circles of authorized individuals. Not only did they downgrade the general importance of the Zohar; they denied its halakhic significance entirely⁸¹ and demanded a sharp separation of halakhah and kabbalah. Kabbalah was to be relegated to the private field of pure speculation and was not to have any influence on religious praxis and legal decisions governing the daily life of the Jews. Its study was to be confined to the members of establishment.

The Brody and Konstantynów pronouncements raised the process of framing the battle against Sabbatianism as the condemnation of illicit kabbalah to its highest point. A hundred years of polemics had caused the radical polarization of both parties’ positions vis-à-vis the nature and mutual relationship between exoteric and esoteric spheres of Jewish tradition. In the most extreme cases, the sides portrayed all of Judaism in terms of a battle between kabbalah and halakhah, between the Zohar and the Talmud. While this extreme dichotomization of opinion greatly facilitated the polemics by providing a clear target, it also oversimplified the respective positions of the sides almost ad absurdum.

The normative Judaism of even the most orthodox rabbis was never a Judaism of just the Talmud, and, in the opposing court, Sabbatianism also had sources other than kabbalah. Some of the known Sabbatians were acknowledged masters of Jewish law, while numerous anti-Sabbatians (including Emden) had a deep interest in kabbalah. Yet, as the Sabbatians were pigeonholed as “Contra-Talmudists” and “kabbalists,” their opponents unavoidably became “Talmudists” and “anti-kabbalists.” Both sides paid a high price for this mutual branding, yet the price paid by the anti-Sabbatians was higher by far: they placed themselves in constant danger of going one step too far and surrendering the entire esoteric stratum of Jewish religion to heretics.

This need to maintain the legitimacy of kabbalah within the framework of mainstream Judaism found its expression in the very language used in defining the Sabbatians by their opponents. According to Emden, the Frankists called themselves zoharishten (the “Zoharists”).⁸² His main supporter in Poland, Baruch Yavan, stated: “Ve-korim et atsman Kabbalisshten, she-omrim she-osim et ha-kol al-pi kabbalah min Sefer ha-Zohar (And they call themselves kabbalisshten, for they say they do everything according to a kabbalah of the book of the Zohar).”⁸³ Neither description used the Hebrew word for kabbalists (mekkubbalim). Instead, they both employed somewhat distorted transliterations of the vernacular terms, therefore suggesting that the Frankists were not “real” kabbalists but impostors lacking legitimate connection to the Jewish kabbalistic tradition.

The terms zoharishten or kabbalisshten are neologisms that have no precedent in earlier rabbinic writings, and their origins need to be examined. Neither term appeared in internal Frankists sources and—in contrast to what Emden and Yavan would have us believe—we have no evidence that the Frankists ever called themselves that. Frank’s view on kabbalah is a perfect example of the inadequacy of the categorization of all Sabbatians as “kabbalists.” To be sure, some of his followers saw Frank as a master of esoteric lore, and Frankist manuscripts contain numerous paraphrases of classical Zoharic stories and direct references to the Zohar. However, quantitatively (and, in my opinion, not only quantitatively), these references are overshadowed by references to the Pentateuch, the midrashim, Polish and Ukrainian folktales, and even—strangely for the alleged outright “Contra-Talmudist”—talmudic aggadot. More important, Frank himself repudiated the label of kabbalist. The following dictum from The Words of the Lord is the best illustration of Frank’s attitude toward kabbalah: “When Rabbi Mordechai was telling me about the ten sefirot, drawing them on paper, I asked him what they were. He said: ‘They are houses.’ So I asked: ‘But where is a privy?’ Because when they build a house in Bucharest, they first dig a deep hole in the ground, then pour into it quicklime that burns the earth, then on top of it they construct a privy, and only finally they erect a house.”⁸⁴

The dictum recalls the exchange between Frank and his patron, teacher, and initiator into the Sabbatian mysteries, Rabbi Mordechai of Prague. Like many believers of the older generation, Mordechai presented Sabbatian theosophy as kabbalistic lore, mystical interpretation of the Zohar in the spirit of Nathan of Gaza, Cardoso, and Hayon. His disciple, however, held different views. According to The Words of the Lord, Frank explicitly repudiated the Zohar: “The whole Zohar is not satisfying for me, and we have no need for the books of kabbalah.”⁸⁵ In contrast to some earlier Sabbatian texts, Frank’s dicta did away with the traditional kabbalistic terminology. Very few of the kabbalistic concepts that still appear in the Frankist manuscripts have been subjected to a radically demythologizing reading as in the fragment quoted above: if the sefirot are “houses,” they should also contain a privy!

Speaking of kabbalistic works, Frank always called them your books, therefore emphasizing his own break with Jewish literary canon: “But I tell you the truth that is not yet found in your books.”⁸⁶ He demanded that his followers “give away their old books for nothing” for “all books and laws will be broken like a potsherd.”⁸⁷ This demand was absolute: it referred not only to the Talmud and halakhic literature of the anti-Sabbatian rabbis but also to the Zohar and kabbalistic works of Frank’s own Sabbatian teachers.