Everyone is interested in Chassidim. If you want stock footage of Jews for a documentary, you want Chassidim; if you’re a secular philosopher wannabe looking for something to solve your overwhelming feeling of ennui, you want Chassidus; if you’re trying to spice up Religious Zionism with something to keep the kids engaged once they go off to the army, you want Hassidut. Conversely, their opponents, the Misnagdim are boring. No-one cares about them or wants to think about them at all. Three decades ago, Allen Nadler set out to fill the strange hole in historical study with The Faith of the Mithnagdim, portraying for a wider audience the religious beliefs of this group from primary sources. Because they saw the Misnagdim through the eyes of the Chassidim whose radicalism and demotic instincts they admired, historians generally have been willing to accept Chassidic caricatures of their opponents as miserable misanthropists offering nothing to masses of ordinary Jews except contempt and demands for money. Nadler was determined to let the Misnagdim speak for themselves and it turns out that … yeah, actually, that was pretty much correct.

Adler starts the book by debunking the one apparently interesting thing that earlier historians had focussed on, namely the question of whether tzimtzum is literal or not, and, therefore, whether some kind of pan(en????)theism is true. Nadler argues that it is impossible to arrive at a consistent Misnagdik, as opposed to Chassidic, position on the matter: both sides thought it was not literal, but also that something ‘real’ had happened as well. The difference between the two groups was not ontological, but epistemological: Chassidim called upon Jews to look, by hook or by crook, beyond the visible world to the divine reality pulsing through it whereas the Misnagdim said, no, don’t do that, and even if you try you can’t. Nadler then goes on to summarise the key points of Misnagdik ideology as they were propagated in semi-popular tracts:

1. Zoharism, in particular its Lurianic version, is objectively true, and should only be studied by a tiny minority of scholars already fully expert in Talmud. Even for them, transcendent experience of mystical union is probably not possible on earth.

2. Because of the low spiritual state of Jews in general, the best they can hope for in prayer is concentrating on what they are saying. Any kind of connection to God, let alone mystical union, in prayer is impossible. It’s better to spend time studying than praying beyond the statutory amount.

3. All material pleasure is bad and distracts from your true purpose. Active asceticism is also pointless, though. Therefore, for example, you shouldn’t fast, except on days when it is required by halacha, but rather eat small portions of plain food quickly so that you can focus on studying.

4. The world we live in is one big test in which material pleasures tempt us away from mitzvot and, especially, study, and if we resist them well enough, we get bliss after death.

5. Chassidim and Maskilim are bad for the same reason, namely that they are optimistic about the potential of Jews to do anything except be miserable all the time and study.

6. Torah study is the thing that matters most, not because it leads to practical observance of its contents, or because it trains the intellect or character. It just simply is the only really worthwhile human endeavour.

This is an ideology almost uniquely tailored to fail in the marketplace of ideas, and its proponents were aware of this fact. The cultural-economic Jewish establishment and its semi-aligned rabbinical class wanted to preserve traditional Ashkenazi Judaism against the threats of the upstart Chassidic movement and the Jewish enlightenment imported from Germany, but, before the battle began, the true Misnagdim knew that they had already lost.

This was R. Eliyahu the Gaon of Vilna (henceforth Gra), at a time when he was the treasured celebrity of Vilna, employed to study full-time at the public expense, and with the ability to issue bans on whichever strain of Judaism he wished. But he knew: it was all hopeless. The modern state was hollowing out the institution of the kehilla from above, the Chassidim were replacing it from below, the winds of secularism were taking Jews looking for something more away from their community and faith. None of this had really happened yet, but the Gra saw it all, and his advice to his students was simple and consistent: withdraw, eschew rabbinical employment, focus on the pure service of God through study.

The Gra himself was, in a sense, cheating. His asceticism was entirely sincere, but he had no wish to die, and, because of his unique genius, he was supported by communal funds without having to ask for it. As brilliant as some of his students certainly were, you can’t build a social movement out of scholars showing up in Jewish communities and wowing everyone with their smarts so they give them free money unasked. Quite likely, the Gra had no plans for any such movement. We know so little beyond his myriad annotations of Jewish texts and legends of his piety and intellectual abilities that it is impossible to know much at all. However, his student R. Chaim of Volozhin did have a plan, and that plan was the modern yeshiva.

The idea of a yeshiva was nothing new, but R. Chaim innovated in multiple overlapping respects. First, the Volozhin Yeshiva was a permanent, freestanding institution, not tied to the local kehilla, and not dependent on the local rabbinical authority. Secondly, the purpose of the yeshiva was not to train future members of the rabbinate, but to promote full-time scholarship, as much as possible within its own walls. As such, the yeshiva solicited donations from wealthy donors around Europe, focussed on study of Talmudic tractates with little contemporary practical relevance, and cultivated a mentality of elite status among its students and graduates.

The new yeshiva movement grew quickly. It suffered terribly during the Holocaust, though less than Eastern European Jewry generally. The Mir, famously, relocated to Shanghai. After the war, it grew again, buoyed by the unexpected fillip of an Israeli state willing to fund it for all sorts of tactical reasons, as well capitalist modernity and the welfare state in general. It is arguably the most successful religious institution of the modern age. Anyone who wishes to think about how to do traditionalism for real, at scale needs to look at it.

In many respects, the yeshiva system has travelled very far away from its original impetus in the Gra’s heroic life of secluded study. He was entirely self-taught, whereas the yeshiva system holds lifelong institutionalisation as an ideal and stigmatises independent learning. He believed textual emendation to repair corrupted texts was both essential to proper study and a religiously valuable act in its own right, whereas the yeshiva world is famous today for holding the concept in suspicion, if not contempt. He rejected pilpul, for centuries the dominant scholarly mode, in favour of precise understanding of what we might call authorial intention and maximum breadth of knowledge, whereas the regnant model of yeshivish b’iyun study and chakiros today is essentially pilpul revived and stripped of epistemic safeguards through elevation to a madcap pseudoscience. However, any attempt to replicate genius at scale must involve distortions of this kind, if not necessarily scale.

In essence, the yeshiva system solves the dilemma of an elitist religious ethos in a democratic age. If only Torah scholars are really human beings in a meaningful sense, then just make everyone a Torah scholar, boom. In yeshivish communities, there are yeshivos where you can send your son with Downs syndrome. Everyone knows, I hope, that this is a feint, something to make him feel better, but there are innumerable institutions which are no less fake and a lot less cute. It is what is. Humans are what they are. Even with Ashkenazi Jews you can’t make a society of scholars and make it not fake. In the meantime, much else from the misnagdic ethos has fallen by the wayside. Litvaks are ascetic in the same way that LWMO keep shomer negiah. All sorts of Chassidic tools have been employed willy nilly to stop the inmates from going insane. The essence of idea, though, namely endless talmudic study for its own sake as the only real religious good, has been preserved. As I have written, after Shabtai Tzvi, Judaism gave itself constipation by refusing either to reject Zoharism or endorse its consequences. In the yeshivos, Zoharism, while never knocked off its pedestal, or even threatened per se, in practice receded ever more into the distance. This, too, was very much a departure from the Gra, who spent most of his time on kabbalah both in study and commentary. This bought, not a solution to the interminable problem, but space to pretend it didn’t really exist.

Matters, though, were a bit more complicated than that. R. Chaim was the Gra’s most influential student; the jury is out as to whether he was the most faithful. Some stranger things were happening elsewhere. Read about it here and here. How important is all this? In truth I don’t know. Chime in if you wish.

What can be said with a high degree of confidence is that the Gra believed the solution to the chronic tension in the Jewish religion since the advent of Zoharism was full integration. Zoharism was the essential content of Judaism, full stop, and, as such, could not contradict any part of it. If there appears to be such a contradiction it is because one of the contradictory items has been misunderstood (or is textually corrupt). On most occasions, the Gra resolved the contradiction by reinterpreting (or fixing) a Zoharic text, not a halachic one. Because Zoharism entered Jewish history about 150 years after most of its contents were written and in a haphazard and chaotic manner, the Gra was very often correct regarding the technical question at hand. He considered himself able to do this task of reinterpretation because he was a superior kabbalist not only, naturally, to the Chassidim around him, but to all other kabbalists alive, perhaps in some ways even to Isaac Luria himself. When the Gra could not solve the problem this way, he reinterpreted the Talmudic sources instead, with violence if necessary.

Anyone who has argued against Zoharism will have met with the retort ‘even the Gra believed in kabbalah’. It’s a bit of a strange claim, like saying ‘even Trotsky believed in Marxism-Leninism’. The genesis of this is that some Maskilim identified the Gra as their intellectual forebear on not very good grounds to get some clout, and because they hated Chassidim too, he got lumped in as some kind of rationalist. Thus, if even the arch-rationalist endorses the Zohar, then why purity spiral against it? This is so wrong it’s not even wrong. In reality, the Gra fixed Zoharism in the heart of Judaism perhaps more than ever before, while the movement built out of his example made it possible to ignore it in practice. Whether that’s a step up or a step down depends on who you’re comparing it to.

It’s actually two years and two months, but I am disorganised and it’s been busy recently what with stuff and other things.

In celebration of this momentous occasion, I present the second NonZionism reader survey. Click here to fill it in.

In addition, I’ve decided to do quarterly AMAs for paychads. The first one will be right now. If you are a paychad, leave a question in the comments below, and I’ll answer it in a future post unless it’s prurient or generally weird. The answer may be ‘I don’t know’.

Many have asked - I hear you asking even now - ‘what can I, a mere mortal, do to help NonZionism grow still further?’ Actually, it’s easy. Most growth comes from shares by big-name accounts. If you are friends with such a person, ask them to share me. They can say ‘look at this self-hating, bigoted retard, I hate him’. Literally doesn’t matter as long as there’s a link. If you don’t personally know such a person, then respond to pronouncements from big name accounts with relevant articles I have written.

On that score, I have been doing some preliminary market research and basically everyone tells me the same thing, namely that they would like to share a given article with more people, but they can’t because it contains a racial epithet or incomprehensible internet gibberish or sounds like it was written by an off-his-meds schizophrenic. If you have had a similar experience, please comment with which article you would like to share but can’t and I will consider presenting a parev version for normies.

Finally, paychad subscriptions are stacking up, but they can always stack up more. There is also a ‘Founding Member’ tier. There’s really not much I can offer you for this, except that it will encourage me to write more. However, as an extra inducement, if you take it up, you can request one article per year on a topic of your choice (if the choice is strange and idiotic, I guess I’ll still do it, but the article might say ‘I don’t know anything about this topic’).

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Item: some religious youths were hanging a sign over bridge calling for the release of Yigal Amir who is serving a life sentence for assassinating Yitzchak Rabin.

They say he didn’t do it, that he was tricked by Shabak into doing it, that he did a tremendous mitzvah in doing it. For all these reasons, and perhaps more too, he should be released immediately. However, some old dude objected, and they beat him up.

He subsequently developed a brain bleed and was hospitalized.

Item: Defence Minister and inarticulate buffoon who fidgets queerly when he talks, or doesn’t talk, Israel Katz, was on Channel 14 and was asked why he had not dealt with insubordination by Avi Bluth, military governor, so to speak, of the West Bank. Here is the background. Bluth has presided over a policy of decriminalising settler violence and incorporating the network of pioneer farms into the IDF’s security architecture. One can argue about the rights and wrongs of such a policy following October 7th, but either way he has given the settler movement everything it could reasonably demand and some more. However, a week or two ago he ordered Yinon Dardik to leave the West Bank. Dardik is suspected of some serious crimes including affixing a cable tie to the penis of a bedouin Arab and parading him in front of his extended family. Dardik refused to leave the West Bank and was placed in administrative detention upon which he commenced a hunger strike. This was unacceptable to Otzma MKs so Katz told Bluth to let him go home, but Bluth renewed the order. Katz, who is facing primaries in Likud and needs support from the core Likud electorate, was asked why he put up with that, so he said he’d fired Bluth like the massive boss he is.

IDF head, Zamir (appointed by Netanyahu) pointed out that the Defence Minister can’t fire generals on TV because the studio audience is giving him gyp. Katz dealt with the media fallout by blaming it on Leftist lies and denying he said what he said even though he said it on TV and everyone can see.

Item: On motzaei Shabbos, a group of religious teens surrounded a bus with no passengers at a red light, hit the side of the bus, and, when the Arab driver opened the window, they beat him unconscious and knocked out four of his teeth.

Item: A group of Breslev teens, who object to the deification of the wrong man and perhaps the relative coherence and intelligence of Christian theology, spat on the door of a monastery in the Armenian quarter in Jerusalem. When an elderly lady filmed them through the window, they threw rocks at her and called her the daughter of a whore.

Item: The Minister for prisons and police, Ben Gvir, who has presided over the largest spike in murder in the history of the country, did some nonsense with alligators that’s too ridiculous even to detail.

This could be any week more or less. The mayor of a major city was not arrested this week for fraud and embezzlement; no Palestinian grandmas were beaten unconscious with a baseball bat; I didn’t see anything about HaTzel (oh bugger, I did). So it’s not even a bad week. Just a week.

You have probably seen this video.

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(i) The Zionists wanted to conquer all of Palestine and empty it of its Arab inhabitants.

(ii) The Zionists accepted partition in 1937 and 1947 as a pretext to achieve the above. The Arabs rejected partition because they knew this was the Zionist plan.

(iii) The Arabs did not want war. They opposed partition, but their plan to oppose it was [honestly, I have no idea what he even wants you to believe here, but he doesn’t say anything].

(iv) The Zionists provoked the Arabs into a war, then used the war to ethnically cleanse the Arabs.

In the next part of the video, he shows how part (iv) happened. Shehada briefly discusses four massacres/expulsions at Tantura, Safsaf, Haifa and Deir Yassin and then, as if in some kind of sadomasochistic attempt to make clear that he considers his intended audience to be cognitively challenged children, declares, ‘Do you need more evidence on who was the oppressor and who was the victim? Because there is. All of this was the result of direct orders from David ben Gurion’.

This is a claim that literally no-one defends. Even Shehada wouldn’t defend it if he had to actually go back and trace his steps explicitly rather than relying on thought association and his audience being dopey. There’s been a good deal of debate about how much Ben Gurion knew about the various atrocities, how much he approved of them, and how much they were the result of local commanders executing what they had been given to understand was central policy. Those who ascribe to Ben Gurion a relatively high level of guilt seem to have the better of the argument, but the reason why there was a debate at all is precisely because there are no ‘direct orders’. And that’s concerning atrocities committed by the Haganah. It’s not even conceptually possible that he ‘directly ordered’ the Deir Yassin massacre committed by the Irgun and Lehi; that would be like claiming Yasser Arafat ‘directly ordered’ the Entebbe hijacking. What proof does Shehada bring for his astonishing and obviously untrue assertion?

This is the piece of evidence usually presented as the smoking gun, which is a good tipoff that that there’s no actual smoking gun. I’m inclined to think that the extract from the memoir is real (there’s some debate about it) and that Rabin correctly interpreted Ben Gurion’s gesture. However, this concerned what was to be done about the cities of Lod and Ramla, cities that were at that point under siege by the Haganah and about to be conquered.1 There is no evidence, even of the hand-gesture sort, for a general policy of expulsion.2

There’s a whole bunch to say about this. First of all, the full quotation is:

There is a need now for strong and brutal reaction. We need to be accurate about the timing, place and those we hit. If we accuse a family, we need to harm them without mercy, women and children included. Otherwise, this is not an effective reaction. During the operation there is no need to distinguish between guilty and not guilty

Which is pretty bad, but a bit different. Secondly, it’s a matter of dispute whether Ben Gurion is recording his own opinion here, or summarising Yigal Allon’s arguments during a meeting held by the Zionist leadership following the Al Khisas massacre in which different figures argued for and against the policy that had led to it. Thirdly, again, this was not about a general policy of expulsion, still less a general policy formed in advance, but about how to respond (it’s right there in the quotation) to certain Arab attacks that the Haganah had no other way to prevent.

However, I feel a bit Joseph Cohen now. ‘You say the IDF has bombed fourteen gazillion innocent children this week with cluster missiles, but actually it was only seven’. The truth is that if you want to make a case against Zionism, the War of Independence is kind of a layup; you can just say this:

(i) As a result of the war, the Zionists ended up with significantly more territory than they were awarded in the partition plan, which was already somewhat generous based on prior demographic realities.

(ii) Getting a Jewish supermajority in this expanded territory required a major population transfer, well in excess of the numbers envisioned in the Peel plan.

(iii) In many cases, this population transfer was achieved by terrifying the population into fleeing, sometimes by committing atrocities that would have been regarded as outrageous crimes long before Geneva Conventions.

(iv) Even in cases where the population fled to avoid fighting, they should have been allowed to return home when fighting ceased, rather than penalised for doing the right thing. To the contrary, the government continued pushing Arabs into the West Bank and Gaza even after the war.

(v) Both during and afterwards, the Zionist leadership shamelessly lied about all of this, and, because of sympathetic media, their lies were widely believed in the western world for many decades, and in some holdouts even today.

So why not just stick with that and dispense with the need to lie and say ridiculous things? You’d think it was out of a desire to portray Zionism as a uniquely evil and irredeemable political movement (though Muhammad Shehada supports a 2-state solution supposedly). I think that’s wrong though, the more important motivation (and one we Jews, at least, must be able to empathise with) is to dinduise the Palestinians, to absolve them of all guilt, to ‘make clear who is the oppressor’, but, much more importantly, who is the victim.

The problem with this is that, by anyone’s standards, the Palestinians have done some incredibly gnarly s**t. They did it, substantially on camera, three years ago, and they’ve been doing it in various forms for decades. Rashid Khalidi’s way out of this is to label the Balfour Declaration a declaration of war, after which everything is self-defence. However, that only works because Khalidi is willing to admit that mistakes were made during this defensive war, something he is happy to do because he has family beef from way back with the Husseini clan. Shehada doesn’t want to do that, so his only way out is to pin everything on 1948. However, just as history didn’t start on October 7th, it didn’t start then either. Though he is deliberately vague about many things, Shehada isn’t vague about his overriding moral principle: the side that starts the massacring is the one in the wrong, and whatever the other side does is resistance. OK then.

April 1920. Following incendiary speeches during the Nebi Musa festival, crowds of Arabs attacked Jews in the Old City of Jerusalem, killing 5 and wounding over 200.

May 1921. Following false rumours that Jewish immigrants were attacking Arabs, riots started in Jaffa and spread around the country. 47 Jews were killed in all, with British troops stopping the riots before more died.

August 1929. A wave of riots around the country was sparked by claims made by Al Husseini that Jews were trying to take the temple mount. The worst massacre happened in Hebron, where 67 Jews were murdered, often in appallingly brutal ways, without consideration of their Zionist affiliation (which most didn’t have). In the country at large, a total of 133 Jews were killed.

April 1931. The Black Hand organisation, formed by Sheikh Izz al-Din al-Qassam, ambushed and murdered three members of kibbutz Yagur.

April 1936. Members of the Black Hand stopped cars on the road between Nablus and Tulkarm and shot 3 Jews, killing two of them.

April 1936. Arabs rioted in Jaffa, killing 15 Jews and causing around 12,000 to flee.

April-October 1936. Attacks on Jews around the country killed 80 Jews.

August 1937. Arabs burst into a family home in Tzfat and murdered four family members, three of them children.

November 1937. Five JNF workers are ambushed and murdered by Arabs.

March 1938. Arab gunmen shot at Jewish passengers travelling between Haifa and Tzfat, killing 6.

June 1938. Arab gunmen attacked the settlement of Kiryat Haroshet, killing 3.

August 1938. Arabs kidnapped three members of a Jewish family living near the town of Atlit and murdered them.

October 1938. Arab militants attacked the Kiryat Shmuel neighbourhood of Tiberius, attacking civilians indiscriminately and killing 19, nearly half of them children.

For good measure, in 1947, when Shehada says the Arabs ‘didn’t want war’, but were being goaded into it by Zionists, we can cite:

November 1946. Arabs attacked Neot Mordechai, killing 2.

August 1947. Arab gunmen attacked a cafe in Tel Aviv, killing 5.

November 1947. Fajja bus attacks.

December 1947. Jerusalem riots.

And when war broke out for real, the Arabs committed their own massacres, many fewer in total than the Zionists, but more per town captured. It wasn’t, shall we say, for want of trying. We can note here that the Haganah (literally ‘the defence’) was created following the Nebi Musa riots and the Irgun was founded after the 1929 massacres. Transfer, as an idea outside of a diary entry here or some crank letter there, entered Zionist discourse following the waves of atrocities in the mid 1930s.

Of course, if Shehada was to acknowledge it at all, he could point out that the nearly 40 years of violence before the War of Independence against the Jewish community of Palestine had been committed by ‘Arabs’ and not ‘the Arabs’ (though in some cases, even that’s a bit of a stretch), but then you would have to acknowledge when the violence he describes was committed by ‘Zionists’ and not ‘the Zionists’. We’ll deal with that in the next installment.

That’s from February, since when things have got worse.

And all indications are that it will keep getting worse still. The simple explanation for this is that people around the world see news about Israel and then develop more negative views about Israel. Examples of this news include things like:

• >10 Palestinians being shot while waiting for aid every day for over a month.

• Settler militias, often visibly coordinating with IDF soldiers, or themselves wearing IDF uniform, on video raiding Palestinian towns and villages with the explicit intention of driving the residents out.

• Members of the Israeli government publicly calling for war crimes.

• Pictures of Gaza showing that most of it is rubble.

etc. If you saw news about [Country Name] and this is what you saw, then you’d probably have negative views about [Country Name]. However, if you know Jews, you will know that simply stating the above will generally inspire rage and sorrow, and, not infrequently, accusations of antisemitism. There are two lines of ‘argument’ that accompany this. The first is that criticism of Israel is motivated by antisemitism and antisemitism, by construction, is uncaused. Any sufficiently strong negative sentiment towards Jews is, also by construction, antisemitism, and so, as such, only ever reveals something about gentile societies, it never reveals anything about Jewish behaviour. Of course, they still have to explain why this recrudescence of antisemitism happened at the same time as the Gaza war, so you get something like the following:

I think for a lot of people, there has to be some kind of reason for all this antisemitism. “Oh, it must be Israel, it must be some sort of geopolitical conflict or dispute about territory.” But it sounds like what you’re saying is that there’s always been this kind of ambient antisemitism and that Israel just gave people an excuse, a justification, to finally let out this hate that had always existed—latent hate. I find that persuasive.

It’s hard to know what to do with this. On the one hand, it’s good we still have some smart, well-socialised guys batting for us; on the other hand, I think is mostly enabling people who actually need a glass of cold water to the face. What does it mean for antisemitism to be ambient? Where in the brain of the masses did it lurk waiting for ‘permission’ to move from latency to actuality? How in heaven’s name is that persuasive?

I’ve done my best to explain what is wrong with this line of ‘thinking’, so I won’t belabour the point here. Instead, I’ll deal with the slightly less mystical version of the argument, which goes like this:

1. Much criticism of Israel is clearly insincere and motivated by pre-existing animus towards Israel or Jews, not the specific action or policy that is supposedly being criticised.

2. Since the criticism of any given policy/event is not motivated by this policy/event, it follows that the policy/event has no causal relationship to the criticism.

3. Therefore, there’s nothing Israel can or should do to lessen this criticism.

Now, this is, obviously, just really stupid. The relevant variable we’re concerned about isn’t what your critics say, it’s how many people they persuade. However, it is important to grant the premise. Regardless of what Israel does, it has and will have many inveterately hostile critics from multiple groups: (a) The Arab and Muslim world that see Israel as an illegitimate state birthed in crime and permanently stained by it, (b) leftists who see Israel as ipso facto in the wrong because of being the wealthier, whiter, and more US-aligned party in a conflict and (c) antisemites. The last group has long been a tiny minority despite the fervent insistence of hasbarists otherwise, and is still a small minority even today, but it makes no odds for the substance of the argument. However, again, obviously, it matters much less what motivates your critics than how much of a receptive audience they find. In a sense, I could stop the article right there, but, instead, I’m going to offer some intuition pumps1 easy thought experiments to make things clearer.

First of all, let’s posit a cartoonishly simple model in which public opinion concerning any given person is a simple combination of (a) true information about him and (b) false information about him, with the split between them being 50-50. So, if we turn to our old friend Barry, let’s say that, on a scale from 1-10 , where 10 is fully evil and 1 is not evil at all, his actual behaviour is a 2, but he has malicious enemies who spread lies about him day and night, depicting him as a 10. With the exception of those who know him personally and his enemies themselves, everyone just splits the difference, concluding that he is a 6. However, if his actual behaviour is a 6, then they conclude he is an 8. What this means is that even if you are genuinely the victim of completely malicious criticism that bears no relationship to your actual conduct, then your behaviour still partially determines how you are perceived. The only way to avoid such a conclusion is to make the obviously absurd assumption that your own actual behaviour does not contribute at all to how you are perceived, which is the sort of thing you literally are supposed to go to a shrink to talk you out of.

You might, however, still come away from that analogy with a somewhat fatalistic attitude. After all, relatively large changes in your behaviour produce relatively small changes in how you are perceived. If the best you can do is act with perfect virtue and still be perceived as merely average, then maybe it’s not worth the bother. That’s clearly not true, though, because look at the graph above. Islamists, lefties and Nazis have been saying Israel is very, very evil for a long, long time, and, nevertheless, until 2018, American opinion of Israel was still trending slightly up. The extra assumption we need to make our model approximate reality to any degree is as follows: to be effective, malicious propaganda needs to be within range of what it is depicting.

Returning to Barry, let’s say he is an ordinary guy: has a wife, kids, likes a drink on the weekends, and klotzes in front of the telly too much. You spread rumours about him that he cheats on his taxes, that he sometimes has one too many sometimes and smacks his wife, that he likes Coldplay, people might believe you. However, if you spread a rumour that he is a prolific axe murderer, then people don’t believe you. They don’t think ‘if there’s smoke there’s fire’ and update their view of Barry negatively, they just ignore this obviously fake information. To put it another way, your actual conduct provides a sort of anchor to how you are perceived. Hostile parties can push this in a more negative direction, but there’s a limit on what they can do because, if they try to push the effect size too far, then they achieve nothing at all.

What this means, concretely, is that the unhinged, over-the-top and libellous nature of anti-Israel polemic has traditionally worked in Israel’s favour. It’s not that no-one was exposed to this stuff (if you went through an American college campus, you could hardly have avoided it entirely), it’s that they encountered it and discounted it. At some level, the hasbara community actually understands this mechanism, which is why so much of their output has been dedicated to identifying and exposing the most obviously hateful and bigoted forms of anti-Zionism.

We can now push this a bit further. If you are the victim of sufficient unmerited hostility, witnesses to this hostility will sympathise with you more. When Bob Dylan became an evangelical Christian and got interested in Israel, he grasped well that this was an effective PR weapon:

To take a well-worn example, the unpleasant obsession of the UN General Assembly with Israel has been an effective weapon in winning over normie libs in the West who respond negatively to unfairness and bullying, while in the Security Council, where things actually matter, Israel enjoyed routine protection via American veto. Best of all, if you are sufficiently perceived as the victim of malicious criticism, people will start to discount even perfectly fair and accurate criticism, a tactic that hasbarists draw upon whenever they invoke antisemitism against statements that are clearly not antisemitic.

A bonus additional layer is that criticism from people who are themselves very unpopular causes neutral observers to update their opinion of you more favourably. If some rando accuses you of being an axe murderer, people will probably just ignore it, but if that person is a racist paedophile, then people will think you might be better than you look if such an awful person hates you enough to spread malicious libel. Luckily for Israel, its critics have been extremely unpopular. Nazis are, literally, the most unpopular people in the world; leftist activists are unpopular with about 70% of Americans; and Muslims made themselves very unpopular too.

The problem with all this is that this malicious, unhinged and thus ineffective criticism that actually makes you more popular can suddenly snap back in your face if you mess up sufficiently enough. No-one took seriously all that stuff about you being an axe murderer until you got messed up at the pub and beat up a guy who took your ashtray. If only you would have stopped kicking him in the head when he was on the ground and five people were trying to restrain you … but you didn’t and now people cross the road when you pass and youths graffiti axes on your garage. In the strict sense, it’s still very unfair. You don’t even own an axe, and there’s not a strong connection between axe murdering and drunken pub beatings, but you messed up, and anyone telling you didn’t mess up - to concentrate instead all the blame on your detractors - may pose as your friend, but is really your enemy.2

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Anyway, that’s what I wanted to write about this week, but after our podcast the other week, recommended I check out a Palestinian writer from Gaza called . So I checked him out.

FFS.

No, seriously, FFS. Why do I have to do this? I asked a while ago who the Palestinian NonZionism was. There were a few suggestions, but whoever it is pull your finger out, OK. I don’t want to do this. I was born with some kind of biological malfunction, call it hyper-Judaism, where I want to culture-of-critique my own culture, to point out that we’ve lost the plot, we’re walking off a cliff etc. I don’t want to do it for Palestinians because (a) I don’t know enough and (b) I don’t care enough. No doubt you guys are interesting to yourselves, and that’s as it should be, but you’re not interesting to me; you’re just proximate. But what can I do? I watched a video. It sucked and now I’m going to spend the afternoon writing about it. You, subscriber, are going to read it. It’s a sorry tale, but we’ve all made questionable life choices. Here’s the video.

It starts off with Bibi Netanyahu saying some ridiculous nonsense. The point here is that it’s wrong for Zionists to say ridiculous nonsense so as to demonise their enemies and legitimate war crimes. Agreed. However, the principle that ‘it’s wrong for Zionists to say ridiculous nonsense’ is a special case of the general principle that ‘it’s wrong for people to say ridiculous nonsense’. If you are Palestinian, then I want you now to pause and read the previous sentence again. I don’t want to patronise, but you (plural) brought this on yourselves. Either it’s wrong to construct a fantasy world of lies to let yourself off the hook for all the gnarly stuff you’ve done, or it’s not, but it can’t be wrong for us and not wrong for you. Think about it. If you do, you’ll find the logic impeccable.

Preambles done, we can now move on to the argument, which is that Zionists have always been as bad as they are today, it’s just that now it’s better documented. The argument is made by stitching together quotations. So, we’re going to go through one by one:

Everyone agrees that the Zionists accepted partition and the Arabs didn’t. The implication, though, is that the Arabs were justified in rejecting partition because the Zionists were only using it as part of a plan to take ‘all of the land’ and make it ‘empty of Palestinians’. The problems are threefold. The first is that Haim Shapira, a non-Kookian religious Zionist (today known as Erev Rav) immediately asked Ben-Gurion ‘by force as well?’ and Ben-Gurion answered, ‘Through mutual understanding and Jewish-Arab agreement’. Secondly, here is the partition the Zionist movement under Ben-Gurion decided to accept.

In response to a wave of terrorism and multiple atrocities, the British tacitly concluded that the Balfour Declaration had been a mistake (duh!) and offered the Zionists a joke country in a tiny minority of the originally promised territory, mostly in the worst bits, and not even fully contiguous. A large proportion of the Zionist movement wanted to reject the offer; after all, it was clearly not what they had been promised. Ben-Gurion, by contrast, thought that any state was better than no state. If the Zionist movement wanted proof of concept, so as to persuade regional and global opinion that Zionist immigration was to the general benefit, then it had to take whatever it was given and make it work. And what’s wrong with that?

However, the third problem is the weightiest. Let’s say Muhammad wasn’t lying and Ben-Gurion really had said ‘we’ll get a tiny country and then with our pimped-out army, we’ll take over the whole region, bwahahahahahaha’, what would that mean? In his articles and our conversation, Seth’s central proposition is that when Arabs do this, Israelis shouldn’t freak out. First of all, any leader who wants to make a deal will have to deal with rejectionists, and thus have to sell his compromise as a prelude to future expansion. Secondly, even if he’s not just leading them on, it doesn’t necessarily matter, because his choices post deal will be shaped by the incentive structure after the deal not (at least not solely) his long-term aspirations going in. So the rational thing for the Arabs to do in response to the Zionist movement accepting the Peel plan was to accept it as well, and give the Zionist rump country reason to be content with arrangements as they stood, instead of chimping out.

There’s another point here. If accepting a state far smaller than you want and believe you deserve as a basis to achieve more in the future is such an amazing strategy why not do it? The Palestinians have rejected a state three times since Oslo. I accept the argument that what they were offered was less than (a) what they would be accorded by a simple application of international law (b) less than most Palestinians are willing to accept (c) less than they deserve from an impartial perspective. OK, but so what? Learn from the winners.

This is basically the same thing. Ben-Gurion continued:

We shall organize an advanced defense force... At that point I am confident that we would not fail in settling in the remaining parts of the country, through agreement and understanding with our Arab neighbors, or through some other means.

‘Or through some other means’ sounds a bit ominous, I guess. Lots of stuff Arab leaders have said sounds ominous, and heaven only knows what they were saying in private correspondence since they won’t open their archives. Again, Seth Ackerman is right: chill out.

Again, same thing. So he wanted to. At the time, there were 8 million Jews in Eastern Europe, a large proportion of which, perhaps the majority, wanted to leave. Weizmann thought that in due course they’d come to Palestine, which is fine - right? - no human is illegal, but, in the meantime, he was content for Jews to work on their patch in the north for 25-30 years. Major no-brainer how Arabs should have responded to this. Now we move on to something a bit meatier.

We’ve skipped ahead 10 years, and some things happened in the meantime that maybe are relevant. As is the case with many of the quotations here, it’s not a quotation, but a summary by Ilan Pappe in the form of a quotation, where in the endnote he says ‘this is what I feel he would have said’. I know Palestinoids think Ilan Pappe’s zany techniques are super cool, but they’re not. They stink; they make a mockery of the discipline of history; you degrade yourself and the human race at large by referencing him. I get that gentiles find Jews bewitching with our verbal tilt, but you can do better. Yes, even you. Further, Cunningham was speaking to Ben-Gurion, in order to try and make him rein the Haganah in, something that would have been pointless had he thought that Ben-Gurion was committed to provoking conflagration that would allow him to commit ethnic cleansing.

However, this is still a valuable piece of evidence if we make clear that by ‘Palestinians’ we are supposed to understand ‘the majority of the Palestinian leadership’ whom in Cunningham’s estimate wanted to avoid a civil war that they would get wrecked in. If by ‘Palestinians’ you mean ‘Palestinians’ though, then it would just be very obviously wrong since by March 1948 ‘Palestinians’ had conducted hundreds of sniper attacks, convoy ambushes, assaults of settlements, and sieges. Just a few weeks before, about 50 Jewish civilians were murdered in the Ben Yehuda street bombings. Of course, Cunnigham was entitled to his opinion about the overall strategy of the Arab leadership, but the implication of Shehada that Zionists were busy trying to goad Arabs in general into a war they didn’t want is false.

Ben-Gurion’s belief, which may or may not have been true, is that the Arab population at large was demoralised, and that therefore, it was possible to avoid war. OK So what?

So, I guess this is supposed to be the ‘so what?’ This is what really bugs me. Ben-Gurion was a smart guy; he said smart things. Every time he said something smart, we are supposed to treat this as an aha! moment, rather than a chance to learn, to understand. The very quality of seriousness and realism is treated as some kind of irredeemable flaw. Ben-Gurion was talking about the UN Partition plan, which was substantially more favourable to the Jews than the Peel plan:

But getting more territory came at a cost: it meant the Jewish majority was weaker. Ben-Gurion was right: 60-40 wasn’t good enough for a stable Jewish state, you need 80-20. So what was the solution? Well, the source doesn’t say, but there are three options (1) add more Jews via immigration (2) offload some of the territory with Muslims in it and (3) offload some of the Muslims. (1) was undoubtedly Ben-Gurion’s policy; (2) wasn’t, though maybe he could have been talked into it. What about (3)? Well, if some Arabs could take a 10-minute drive from Afula to Jenin, that would be swell, but how to do it? Muhammad’s contention is that Ben-Gurion sought to engineer a war to make it possible. What’s the evidence?

You’ll notice a lot of ellipses here. Ben-Gurion’s handwriting sucked,1 and there has been some debate about what he wrote in this letter, but the correct reconstruction appears to be:

We do not want to and we do not have to expel Arabs and take their place. All of our ambitions are built on the assumption that has proven true throughout all of our activities in the land [of Israel] — that there is enough room for us and for the Arabs in the land [of Israel]. And if we will have to use force, not for the sake of evicting the Arabs of the Negev or Transjordan, but rather in order to secure the right that belongs to us to settle there, force will be available to us.

So, completely different. As they say, if you had strong proof, you wouldn’t be using this.

There’s more to add though. Shehada here is taking us back again ten years to the aftermath of the Peel Commission, which did indeed recommend transfer as a way to create two stable states, one (small) Jewish one and one (larger) Arab one. While this particular source doesn’t prove anything, it is true that, in general, the Zionist movement, and Ben Gurion himself, was open to the idea. However, this has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with Shehada’s claim of provoking a Civil War. To the contrary, the whole point of the Peel plan was to put an end to the conflict after the Arab revolt, by getting Jews and Arabs out of each other’s faces, and the purpose of transfer wasn’t to allow Jews to seize all the land, but to confine them to a quarter of it. And now it gets really stupid as we skip forward again 10 years.

He did say this, but he said it in opposition to the Al Khisas raid. This attack (‘war crime’ would not be an unfair designation) was launched by local Palmach commanders in response to the murder of a Jewish man nearby. It was widely criticized within the Zionist leadership both on moral grounds, and because it would drive the Arab population at large to arms, which means that this was not their goal, but rather something they wanted to avoid.

OK, but Moshe Dayan did want to provoke a broader war? Well, maybe. While the first quotation was a quotation, this is one of Ilan Pappe’s patented ‘I get to be Thucydides and make stuff up’ quotations. Assuming it’s an accurate summary of Dayan’s position, it means he was in favour of escalation in the Galilee, which doubtless he was since rolling the dice was his thing. Does it prove that the purpose of the escalation was to create conditions for ethnic cleansing, as Shehada claims, rather than trying to deal with the problem of Arab terror attacks through deterrence? No.2

Now Shehada skips ahead to after the war is over and Shmuel Lahis is on trial for the Hula massacre. The trial is important as a rare example of evidence provided under oath about what Haganah units got up to over the previous 3 years. Maklef pointed out what is not under dispute, namely that atrocities were committed over the course of the war, and this caused civilians to flee. What does it have to do with Shehada’s ‘argument’ that Zionists had a crafty plan to pretend to be in favour of partition in order to provoke a war so as to ethnically cleanse all of Palestine? Beats me.

We’re only a third of the way through, so I guess this will be another series. Gosh, how silly this all is.

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2

The origins of the Chassidic movement are clouded in mystery. This is not an unusual thing historically, but it is unusual for something that happened in Europe (more or less) in the 18th century. We know, indeed, a great deal more about the origins of Frankism, despite it being an underground movement whose members were committed to secrecy both for practical reasons and as a matter of principle of sorts. There are eras where an industrious historian can eventually read every source there is to find, but even for a backwater like Podolia, by this point there is ample documentation for most topics you might be interested in researching (unless it’s something gay like women’s textiles). However, for Podolia’s most important contribution to global culture, we got bupkiss.

That we know little of the family background of the Ba’al Shem Tov (henceforth the Besht) is not in itself so irregular. People weren’t good on ‘Early Life checks’ back in those days, though, as a rule, important Rabbis came from rabbinical families that were careful to record and publicise their lineage. That we know nothing, or at any rate nothing that isn’t obviously fanciful, about the Besht’s intellectual influence is absolutely weird. According to Chasidic tradition, he received his teachings from a certain ‘Adam Baal Shem’, head of an underground pietist society and, in addition, by means of direct revelation from Ahiya the Shilonite.1 That these claims are fantastic barely needs to be said, but what does need to be said is that the origins of Chassidus are not just shrouded in mystery as a matter of fact; they have been deliberately shrouded.

The creation of a fictional origin story for the movement took place in multiple stages. It began in earnest with the publication of Shivchei haBesht, a collection of tales modelled on the (in)famous Shivchei Ari, which had, a few hundred years prior, been substantially responsible for elevating Lurianic Zoharism to authoritative status before most people had even had a chance to check what was in it. A second important episode was the ‘discovery’ of the Kherson documents purportedly containing original letters to and from the Besht as well as other early Chassidic luminaries. One common theme of these histories is that they emphasise something unknown from contemporary sources, namely the Besht’s energetic opposition to Sabbateanism and the ability of he and his followers to successfully identify and reject texts with Sabbatean origins.

Let us start, though, with what we do know. First, the followers of the Besht were not the first in early-modern Europe to identify themselves with the appellation of hassidim. There were preceded by the following groups.

• The leader of the Sabbatean aliyah which established a community in Jerusalem was Yehuda the Hasid and his followers were called Hasidim.

• The Sabbatean community of Mannheim, to whom were delivered Yonasan Eybeschutz’s tracts prayed together at the Chassidim Schule the leader of which was called Yishaya the Hasid.

• The closest pupils of Avraham Rovigo, a wealthy Italian Rabbi whose household beit medrash became perhaps the main center for the dissemination of Sabbatean literature into Europe, were known as hassidim.

• Yonasan Eybeschutz’s inner group of disciples in his yeshiva, which had to be closed after the discovery that they were learning Sabbatean texts, were called hassidim.

To pile on examples, though, is to miss the point. The term Sabbateans used to identify each other was ma’aminim (believers) vs. kofrim (deniers), and the term they used to identify fellow Sabbateans who were really into it was hassidim. This was even the term used for the followers of Jacob Frank before they got big enough to merit a more sectorial designation. This seems counter-intuitive to people today because to be a hassid is to go above and beyond the letter of the law, whereas Sabbateanism is known as a theology of ‘redemption through sin’. As we have explained, however, Sabbatean antinomianism is better understood as ‘hypernomianism’, the idea that adherence to the letter of the law was, in the throes of the messianic era, just not enough anymore. The Sabbatean calls to acts of extreme piety and penitence and the targeted violation of the law for theurgic purposes were not in tension with each other, but two aspects of the same thing: a rejection of the Rabbinic ethos of submission and moderation as inadequate for the new era. Those who took upon themselves the burden of a new higher and more demanding law for the incoming universal sabbath were naturally known as the ‘pious ones’ regardless of where precisely they lay on the Sabbatean spectrum of holy sin as a practical matter.

The second thing we know is that when the followers of the Besht started to become known around Europe, the ‘new hassidim’ as they were called by their opponents, were identified as a recrudescence of the Sabbateanism the Rabbinical establishment had spent the last 50 years trying to snuff out, with mixed, but slowly increasing success. This assessment was based both on the fact that the heartlands of the new Hassidic movement (Podolia and Volhynia) were the most stubborn Sabbatean strongholds, and also the strong resemblance they saw between the two. As we shall see, academics over the past two decades have converged upon the view that this was a mistake borne of small-minded bigotry and petty elitism on the part of talmudic scholars, aghast at the possibility that anyone might be having a bit of fun. More strangely, this is the view of orthodox Jews today, though they refuse to articulate it as such.

However, the hypothesis that the Rabbis knew what they were talking about neatly solves a problem in Jewish intellectual history. We know that the hassidim caused a revolution in European Judaism, but where did they get their radical ideas from? The answer that revisionist historians have converged on is essentially the same one Chassidim believe themselves: the Besht was vibing out in the woods, and it all came to him bang! and these new doctrines just happened to be perfectly designed for a proliferation among Ashkenazi Jewry worn out from being so dry and boring. However, if we look at the novel doctrines of the Beshtian movement, we see that almost none of them are, in fact, novel at all. By dint of apparent coincidence, they are all doctrines that we have seen developed by the Sabbatean theologians as they dealt with the apparent collapse of the messianic movement that Zoharism had heralded:

• The state of complete cleaving to God can only be achieved by the true tzaddik whose soul is specially bound up with divinity from creation. However, other Jews can achieve a form of this devekut by cleaving to the tzaddik himself since, despite his divine soul, he is nevertheless a man to whom other men can cleave.

• The true tzaddik must go through periods of acute spiritual turmoil in which he wrestles with the forces of evil, undergoing ירידה לצורך עליה (a doctrine found absolutely everywhere in hassidic literature).2

• God is not the remote and austere lawgiver of the Geonic-Maimonidean tradition, but something else in a way that has been hitherto hidden from the masses

• The kabbalah is not a doctrine reserved for a select few to be studied in secret, but can and must be spread to the masses as part of redemption.

• The dourness of Judaism since exile (emphasised perhaps to an excessive degree in Ashkenazi tradition) must now be replaced with overt joy and enthusiasm.3

There is, of course, one very major difference, and that is the role of the person of Shabtai Tzvi himself. There were various Chassidic figures who saw it as part of their role to rehabilitate the divine sparks in the Sabbatean movement, and we will look more closely at that in a future installment, but there were certainly none who saw him as a messiah in any meaningful respect. This transformation was ably described by Scholem:

All we really need to add here is that the demotion of Shabtai Tzvi from his place within the general complex of Sabbatean theology was not something the Besht initiated, but rather something he completed. We have already seen that in the most ‘profound’ text of the Sabbatean movement, ואבוא היום אל העין, Shabtai’s role is severely diminished, and this was true also of Frankism. While the paradoxes of his personality and the obvious failure of his movement to bring about national redemption were doubtless a great spur to the development of Sabbatean theology and spirituality, Shabtai Tzvi was also a deadweight on the movement, an element of absurdity whose incongruity only became more acute the more time passed and nothing happened. Jacob Frank’s desperate push for redemption right now was one way of dealing with this, but the Besht hit upon something much better: Sabbateanism without Shabtai Tzvi, the decentralisation of tzaddik-worship so it could function as a vibrant and growing social movement.

Objections

As mentioned, Gershom Scholem figured this all out when he delved into long-suppressed knowledge of Sabbateanism and found that the innovations of the Hassidic movement weren’t actually innovations at all. There are two main criticisms of his approach. The first is that it’s grossly offensive because Sabbateans were bad and Hassidim are good, or, to put it more precisely, Sabbateans were violating Judaism whereas Hassidim uphold it. We’ve already dealt with this, but to repeat: the Frankists were not representative of Sabbateanism generally, but its most extreme offshoot. The Sabbatean mainstream was consistently opposed to violation of the law as a practical matter for most adherents. R. Emden and others made a serious strategic error in overplaying (and often most likely fabricating) the antinomian behaviour in the fringes of the movement, which became a legitimating device for the movement at large: since they aren’t being fed pig by a hooker on Yom Kippur, they’re not really Sabbateans; it’s not so bad.

In as much as Sabbateanism at large really was antinomian, so is the Hassidic movement. It is not necessary to get into what goes on even today in parts of Breslev, though nor should it simply be ignored (as it shamefully is today by our religious leaders). It is well known, practically a cliche, that the Hassidim, for example, placed devotion and emotional intensity in prayer above things like being particular about stipulated times for prayer or the prohibition on dancing on the Sabbath. That this is not seen as antinomian today demonstrates nothing more profound than that the Hassidim have been very successful. Despite this behaviour plainly contradicting the law, it’s not seen as actually wrong. Well, guess what, when Sabbateans contravened the law, they didn’t think it was wrong either!

There is, however, an additional argument currently in vogue in academia, which is more … complicated I guess. Here are various quotations from Hassidism: A New History.

So basically, ‘nu-uh’, ‘you can’t prove it’ and ‘look a balloon’. In as much as there is any argument I can find, it’s that distinctively Hassidic ideas all have antecedents in pre-Sabbatean kabbalistic texts, but this is just basic incomprehension. Sabbateanism is Zoharism; Zoharism is Sabbateanism. Sabbateanism wasn’t a perversion of Zoharism or an alien intrusion, it was an attempt to continue and develop Zoharic religion following the crisis that Zoharism had, by its own internal dynamics, brought itself to. What was inauthentic, in fact, was anti-Sabbatean kabbalah, which sought to simultaneously uphold the sanctity of 200 years of Zoharic tradition while repudiating its culmination. If Sabbateanism eventually solved its problems by transforming into Chassidus, then it is entirely to be expected that it could find the germs of its doctrines in earlier texts.

What, then, is the proper way to think of the issue? Readers will, I hope, be familiar with Moldbug’s Puritan hypothesis, that is to say the assertion that Leftism is Reformed Protestantism. Many readers of Moldbug, especially those who see in his writings a devious attempt to protect Jews from blame, have attacked him on historical grounds, but while Moldbug certainly oversimplifies and cuts corners, the core historical argument is not controversial. It is a commonplace of historical discourse that modern progressive movements evolved out of radical Protestantism. Moldbug’s argument was not historical, but analytic: to say that Protestantism became something else when it became leftism is to implicitly accept the truth claims of one or the other. If we zoom out, though, the distinction between ‘religion’ and ‘ideology’ is conventional and, if used unreflectively, misleading. Protestantism certainly evolved under selective pressures, but to understand it properly we should see it not as a new thing, but the same thing with new features.

It’s an argument you can take or leave, but, in as much as it works, it works even better here. First of all, Protestantism is still a thing, and distinct from Leftism, sometimes even opposed to it. This represents a good, if not conclusive, argument for looking at the matter in terms of speciation. However, there is no Sabbateanism per se today, except for a few LARPers maybe. Either Sabbateanism has ceased to exist, or it exists today as Chassidus. Secondly, the history of Leftism is an extremely complicated process, with dozens of different vectors, and it is a matter of some argument whether Protestantism is even the most important input. In the case of Chassidus, however, it doesn’t seem terribly complicated at all. The Besht, as even Aryeh Kaplan admitted, took his ideas from Hershel Tzoref and completed the process of stripping Sabbateanism of its obsolete content, allowing it to take off. The other inputs, in as much as they exist at all, are all pre-Sabbatean.

If you’ve been paying attention over the course of the series, you figured out a few episodes back that I was going to say this. However, some people aren’t close readers, so probably someone is angry right now. In part 13 or 14, I’ll cheer you up somewhat, but in the meantime, I’m going to close with something nice.

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Coleman is easily the best defender of Israel today. It’s a good thing he’s around because even a guilty man deserves good representation, and we sure as chips are chips can’t do it ourselves right now.1 Palestinians are blessed with plenty of people who can get on western media and sanewash their political aspirations and activities, so it’s fair for us to get a few too. I think Hughes must know that some of the things he says aren’t really true (I messaged him and explained some of them, so he must know), but he does a good job of showing how someone in our position would do kind of what we do if you zoom out and don’t look at the details. I believe that Hughes arrived at his robust pro-Israel stance because of negative polarisation against leftwing campus radicalism, his original signature issue. Zionists complain about the grotesqueries and stupidities of pro-Palestinian activism, but without them we’d have no supporters left at all, certainly not any of his calibre.

However, overall I’d say Hughes gets massively wrecked by Beinart, who isn’t an accomplished thinker, and certainly isn’t an accomplished debater. There are two basic reasons for this. First, Israel has spent the last three years frenetically cucking out anyone who steps up to defend it. ‘It is a ridiculous libel, explicable only in terms of two thousand years of entrenched prejudice, to suggest that Israel would use the withholding of food to a civilian population as a weapon of war, wait … ahem … you sure they did that? … so anyway, as I was saying, the concept of a siege is hardly a new one in the annals of warfare’. Imagine you are a lawyer tasked with representing a defendant on rape charge and that (though strictly it doesn’t matter) you are sincerely convinced of his innocence. You’re doing a good job, but then in the middle of trial your client pulls down his trousers and starts furiously masturbating. OK, that’s pretty bad, but it doesn’t prove anything; maybe, in fact, it’s his propensity to do that kind of thing that generates the false accusations. Interesting angle. You can move on from this if you’re deft enough. Then the next day he climbs on the table and shouts ‘I LOVE RAPE; RAPE IS GOOD; IT’S WHAT I LOVE TO DO’. That’s roughly what it’s like being endlessly demoralised as an Israel advocate, and Beinart has enough practice rattling off this kind of stuff to induce demoralisation.

The second reason, though, is our topic for today. Even when Hughes holds frame and keeps the topic on the genuine dilemma Israel faces in response to a century of Arab intransigence and terrorism, Beinart still comes out kind of top because there are places Hughes won’t go, and Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there, and Hughes knows Beinart knows Hughes won’t go there. So, it’s all a bit stupid, but Beinart looks better. The clearest example of this is how Beinart repeatedly steers the conversation towards the case of South Africa, showing how the arguments Israelis make against extending equal political rights to all those living under its military control were made by the Afrikaners defending apartheid. Hughes tries to draw distinctions between the two cases, but it’s not very convincing. If anything, once you add them all up, the Afrikaners who, in their heimat of Cape Colony at least, predate the Bantu population, come off looking better. But this is all completely missing the main point, which is that South Africa sucks!

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To recap where we’ve got to so far, the revelation and proliferation of the Zohar beginning in the late 15th century in Spain constituted a profound and revolutionary transformation in the nature and inner meaning of Judaism that culminated in the charade of Shabtai Tzvi’s messiahship. After this fell apart in a shambolic fashion, Judaism was stuck, unable to move forward and unable to move backwards and, most pressingly, unable to purge from its ranks the faithful Sabbatean believers who were the authentic heroes of the Zoharic tradition, and the majority of the intellectually vibrant part of the Jewish people. After the better part of a century in which the rabbinical establishment groped around erratically for a solution, the rise of a particularly daring Sabbatean theologian, Yonasan Eybeschutz, to the peak of rabbinical honour forced Rav Emden into desperate measures: a last-ditch attempt to cut the cord binding together Zoharism and its Sabbatean expression that ended up becoming a demolition of Zoharism itself. This offered European Jewry the opportunity to enter the modern world with their brains intact and next week we’ll see what they made of it. However, today, we are going to take a little detour to see what the Jews of the Islamic world were up to.

As with Zoharism in general, the centre of gravity of Sabbateanism had originally been the Sephardi diaspora all around the Mediterranean and, for the first three generations, it continued to be particularly prevalent among the speakers of Ladino. However, as the 1700s wore on, the situation became reversed: Ashkenazi Jewry lay practically prostrate and helpless before Sabbateanism as it got ever more cuckoo while it withered among the Jews of the Islamic world. There were three reasons for this surprising reversal.

First, the most dedicated followers of Shabtai Tzvi had followed his example and ‘donned the turban’ forming a group known as the Dönmeh. Originally, this group were Muslim in only the most formal sense, retaining their own version of the Jewish religion and, substantially, their associations and social bonds with the broader Jewish community. However, over time, and under pressure from Ottoman authorities, the community gradually became more Islamicized and separated from even the Sabbatean believers among the Jews. They did not become good Muslims by any means; in fact, orgiastic wife-swapping ceremonies appear to have continued until the late 19th century. However, they did become more Muslim in sociological terms, having more ongoing contact with various underground Sufi groups than Jewish ones. In due course, even the sages among them lost their facility with Hebrew, and the Sabbatean community was left bereft of what would have been its most vigorous intellectual and spiritual leaders.

Secondly, the Sabbatean movement had been especially popular among conversos who had returned to the faith after fleeing from the Spanish Inquisition’s persecution of marranos, including most famously the second most prestigious theologian of the movement, the fruitcake Avraham Cardoso. Much has been written about the special attraction that Sabbateanism had for these people, and it doesn’t take a genius to see how they might take to the idea that forcible conversion to another religion was not an ancestral stain but actually super based and awesome in the celestial realms. Some scholars have suggested it has something to do with their forming an idealised image of Judaism while living as Christians and then getting their brain fried by encountering the mess of Zoharism without the two-century period of acculturation Jewry at large had gone through, or, alternatively, their importing an essentially Christian set of assumptions about what a messiah is supposed to look like. Whatever the case however, ex-converso identity and its accompanying complex of neuroses and insecurities is something that can only be passed down for a generation or two. After that, you either feel Jewish enough to settle down or you don’t and leave. Thus, to the extent that MENA Sabbateanism had its social base in the ex-converso community, it had an inherent demographic sell by date.

However, the third reason is probably the most important: precisely the greater prominence of the Sabbatean movement in the Ottoman heartlands motivated orthodox forces to organise and defeat it. In Europe, Sabbateans were able to travel wherever they wanted and get away with saying the most out there stuff imaginable without molestation from local rabbinical authorities on the grounds of ‘if it sounds mental, it must be super holy’. As we have discussed before, even before Sabbateanism, in its marketing around Europe, Lurianic kabbalah acquired all sorts of mad gobbledygook and paranoid demonology supported with vague references to כתבי אר’’י. The European Rabbis had little to no ability to work out what was the authentic Lurianic kabbalah and what were Sabbatean developments. In the Islamic world, however, the rabbinate (many of whom had been Sabbateans) knew perfectly well what a reference to ‘the unthinking light’ or a descent in the klippot in a pamphlet meant. They also understood the critical importance of an authorised version of Zoharism that could be presented as an alternative to Sabbatean deviation (or, more precisely, to rewrite history to portray Sabbateanism as a deviation). It is this new version of Zoharism that we will discuss here.

The Beit El Yeshiva and Shalom Sharabi

In 1737, R. Gedaliah Hayun, who was probably, but not provably, a relation of the itinerant Sabbatean prophet Nehemiah Hayun, opened a new yeshiva for kabbalists in Jerusalem. His choice of the holy city was, in a certain sense, self-justifying, but it was also likely motivated by the fact that since the aliyah of Yehuda the Hasid in 1700, the Jewish community there had been dominated by Sabbateans, a source of great, and justified, scandal and embarrassment. A few years later, a Yemenite scholar named Shalom (who took his surname, Sharabi, from his family’s place of origin, though he himself was born in Sanaa) arrived following many years spent travelling around the Levant and promptly dominated the institution through his intellect and breadth of learning, receiving Hayun’s daughter as a bride in reward. Over the rest of his life, R. Sharabi, known as the Rashash, would work on developing a version of Zoharism that became synonymous with the term kabbalah throughout Eastern and North African Jewry and to a substantial extent even beyond. A century and half later, even a kabbalistic scholar as eminent as the Leshem, who inherited traditions of interpretation from the Vilna Gaon, had to meekly apologise in the introduction to his greatest work for having the temerity to disagree with Sharabi on certain points. Sharabian dominance endured until the establishment of the state of Israel led to the destruction of Jewish life across the Middle East, and the subsequent race to the bottom in Israeli religious life.

Before we proceed, it should be said that there is no good reason to believe that Sharabi and his disciples were anything other than sincere in their quest for true kabbalistic knowledge. Nevertheless, it is plainly the case that Sharabian kabbalah was a systematic reformation of the Zoharic tradition that precisely neutralises all of its elements that flow into Sabbateanism.

The first task of Sharabi was to define an authoritative and official interpretation of sephirotic theology, which he did very precisely. The only authoritative text was the Zohar; the only correct interpretation of the Zohar was that of Isaac Luria; the only correct interpretation of Lurianism was that provided by Chaim Vital; the only correct interpretation of Vital was that of Sharabi himself. All other material within the Zoharic tradition was categorised as introductory and superfluous (Cordovero) or wrong (Sarug). In this way, the Zohar was placed in the same general position that the Pentateuch occupies in rabbinic Judaism: its status is unique and unchallengeable, but it is wrapped in a protective layer of official interpretation beyond which appeal to the text itself is strictly inadmissible. By contrast, Sabbateans looked at Lurianism as correct, but only the penultimate step in the revelation of Israel’s true god. Famously, Shabtai Tzvi himself declared that Luria had ‘made a beautiful chariot, but did not reveal its rider’ and would primarily study the Zohar and an earlier proto-Zoharic work Sefer haKanah. His followers set themselves the task of scouring the primary texts to reveal as-yet-still-hidden secrets. Sharabi declared that this was all vain. Luria had completed kabbalah and, once his doctrine was properly understood, there was nothing left to discover.

As well as searching for the final boss of Zoharic madness, the Sabbateans also faithfully continued the Zoharic mission of the previous two and a half centuries to spread knowledge of the Torah’s secrets as widely as possible among the Jewish people so as to bring redemption. Sharabi did the opposite, and revived pre-Zoharic traditions, particularly associated with the schools of Provence and Catalonia, according to which kabbalistic knowledge was supposed to be the exclusive preserve of a scholarly elite. In so doing, Sharabi had to solve two problems: theoretical and practical. The first was simply that all of the masters of Zoharism had promoted dissemination of its contents and ascribed to this process messianic significance. Sharabi dealt with this through a sleight of hand. Luria was conflicted and, at least towards his death, seems to have decided that the innovations he added to Zoharism were not fit for general dissemination, an attitude that was faithfully upheld by Vital who kept his manuscripts under lock and key until death. Sharabi revived the (long-abandoned) obligation to maintain a protective wall around Lurianism, while at the same time condemning all non-Lurianic explication of the Zohar as either wrong or only valuable as preparatory to Lurianism. Thus Zoharism in its entirety was moved, for the first time, into the sphere of the esoteric.

Sharabi’s practical problem was that the Zohar had been printed alongside many hundreds of commentaries and practical guides. Many times already in the wake of Sabbateanism, rabbinical authorities had warned against popular consumption of these materials, imposing obligations to wait until the age of 40 and complete talmudic studies first, but what was really stopping someone who didn’t want to obey these decrees? Sharabi’s solution was, simply, to make kabbalistic study so boring and so difficult that no-one would be interested in learning it. Zoharism became esoteric in the same way that advanced theoretical physics today is esoteric. Of course, people can form opinions about quarks and mobwomgon fields by reading popular books and watching YouTube videos, but these opinions are understood by members of the academy and their loyalists in the general public to be simply wrong by default. Similarly, anyone could learn alternative understandings of kabbalah to the Sharabian version that were more engaging, but what they were learning was declared by the kabbalistic elite to the lay audience to be just nonsense. Instead of the impossible task of popularisation, Sharabian kabbalah offered the masses the opportunity to participate through financial support of the kabbalists themselves, pious observance of Jewish law, and the practice of running their fingers over the text of a Zohar, a work they could never understand and shouldn’t try to.

How did Sharabi achieve this? First, he took the already extremely cumbersome Lurianic system and made it an order of magnitude more cumbersome. Take it away Jonathan Garb:

Secondly, Sharabi and his heirs moved the location of essential metaphysical reality from the entities described in the Zohar and Lurianic writings that are kind of cool in a pagan way to the most intensely boring stratum of explanation, namely the system of divine names. Pinchas Giller explains:

This brings us probably the most important innovation of the Sharabian school. According to Sharabi, kabbalah was a completed discipline (and whatever innovations his students made, they were careful to justify with references to his own works, and never any prior source). There was nothing left to learn, and very few people to teach, so what was a kabbalist supposed to do? The answer was that he was supposed to pray, and pray, and pray. For the Sharabian adept, daily prayer takes a minimum of six hours, during which time the recitation of each word must be accompanied by mental concentration on dozens of other words and their relation within a system to hundreds of other words.1 This sounds incredibly boring, and it is incredibly boring, but the Sharabians believe that this is their solemn duty without which the Jewish people will be beset by plagues and famine. Giller has spent a lot of time observing goings on at the Beit El yeshiva:

If you are thinking, ‘this doesn’t sound very mystical’, you would be correct.

This, of course, is in clear opposition to the Safedian tradition whose members were constantly tripping their nuts off, experiencing vivid hallucinations induced by extreme sleep deprivation and fasting, as well as breathing exercises that approximate asphyxiation and probably drugs. Matt Goldish recently wrote a book on Shabtai Tzvi which adds very little to Scholem and is quite boring, but he does do a good job of establishing that the Sabbatean tradition was in complete continuity with Zoharism in basing doctrinal development on ecstatic visions, demonstrating that Nathan of Gaza’s famous Shavuot schiz-out was closely modelled on precedents by famous approved members of the tradition. In abandoning this tradition, it was Sharabian Zoharism, and not Sabbateanism, that deviated.

To sum up, R. Sharabi and his disciples achieved the apparently impossible and tamed Zoharism. When people use the tHAT’S nOT rEAL kABBALAH ‘argument’ in response to the latest monthly outrage committed by a Zoharist leader today it is because they are working on the assumption that something similar to Sharabianism is the normative version. And perhaps, indeed, they are right, or at least they were right. Sharabianism was clearly a deviation from the tradition, but since there is no actual truth behind Zoharism, it can be defined as what it is by what it does. Two hundred years of dominance is a long time.

I will say one more thing in praise of the Sharabians. One of the objections to Zoharism; not the only one, but a weighty one for sure, is that it violates monotheism. Anyone who has ever got into such a debate will know how fruitless it is, but what should perhaps be more readily accepted is that some versions of Zoharism are more amenable to explanation as being compatible with monotheism than others. In some senses, Sharabian kabbalah is worse than other systems because it is based on a strong realism regarding the entities that are parts of the Zoharic corpus, ruling out the most popular form of apologetic argument, namely that divine multiplicity is only from the human perspective. However, in its monumental complexity it offers a different kind of way out. Paradoxically, by multiplying the parts of the godhead into the thousands, it makes it impossible to focus on any one part to the exclusion of others. Zoharists have always stuck to the mantra of ‘it is all one’, but have violated it to various degrees in practice. The Sharabists patched things up by making the system so elaborate and cumbersome that it’s impossible to get a working pagan myth out of it. Luria’s genius was to take the mythic power of the Zohar and turn it into a mechanistic system, without losing (and in fact boosting) its mythic power. Sharabian orthodoxy drains the system of myth, leaving behind just one big snooze.

Gershom Scholem has often been criticised for undervaluing, if not ignoring outright, Sharabian kabbalah, importing normative considerations into supposedly objective historical research so as to dub the mainstream form of kabbalah a fossilized form of a once-vibrant and alive tradition, barely worthy of interest. However, as usual, Scholem was completely correct. It’s just that, compared to the alternatives, that’s a good thing.

Coda

So, after all that, have we arrived at the conclusion that Zoharism is actually basically fine after all? Sure, it started off pretty ropey, and everything went to hell in the mid-17th century, but after that, things got ironed out eventually and it became just a bit of harmless, well not fun, but harmless something. Haha. If we’re going to say something nice for a change, we’re certainly not going to sign off that way. My objections to Sharabian kabbalah are threefold.

First of all, that’s not Judaism. It’s a cliche to say that, in contrast to other faiths, Judaism aims not to facilitate the flight from impurity for a religious elite, but to sanctify the community at large, but it’s a cliche because it’s true. Sharabian kabbalists are like monks, except they don’t do anything cool or worthwhile like make beer or copy manuscripts of Aristotle. Sharabianism thus amounts to the degeneration of Judaism into a faith like that of the Druze (no offense Druze), which is OK for a goy, but obviously kind of a let-down if you believe in a unique one-of-a-kind covenant between God and a chosen nation.

Secondly, it’s an incredible waste of time. Whatever elegance Sharabian kabbalah might have as an intellectual system (and I’m not seeing it), none of the entities that its practitioners think about actually exist in any way whatsoever and so forming an immense and intricate mental map of how they are interconnected is totally fruitless expenditure of mental energy. Sephardi Jewry historically was like the Ashkenazim, but turned down a few notches. Then, in the eighteenth century, they just kind of dropped out of history, occasionally popping up to run a chain of factories in Iraq or something. In large part, that’s because their greatest brains were being sent to endlessly ponder figments of their imagination to no purpose. If the alternative is Sabbateanism, then I guess it’s better, but it’s still an ignominious finale for an accomplished ethnic group.

Thirdly, and most importantly, Sharabianism smothered the Zohar and Lurianic writings in multiple layers of protective theory, but underneath it all, they were still there, just as radical and blasphemous as before, and invested with supreme sanctity and authority. Sharabianism rescued Zoharism from Sabbateanism but because Sabbateanism is Zoharism it could only do so by making Zoharism something other than itself. Zoharism was attractive initially because it offered what medieval Judaism lacked: a place for emotion, and emotional turmoil, in religious life; a god that was accessible to the ordinary man whose powers of imagination exceeded his intellect; a way of imbuing ordinary Jewish ritual with cosmic significance. However, the Sharabian reformation of Zoharism produced something that was just as elitist, austere and irrelevant to the life of the multitude as any kind of Maimonideanism, but without its intellectual respectability.

The Sharabians argued that not only could the Zohar not be understood according to its plain meaning, but nor could large parts of the Lurianic writings. Their proof for this, however, was nothing more than that they said so. The conditions in which Zoharism was kept in suspended animation were fragile and contingent and, in particular, the Ben Ish Hai in Iraq used his prestige to re-embark on a project of popularisation without ever formally critiquing the Sharabian synthesis. How long it would have taken matters to crack up and go mental again is an interesting question, and one that is hard to answer in the absence of much research into religious trends in the early 20th century among oriental Jewry. However, it’s a moot point because these communities were emptied out one after another and their inhabitants dumped into Israel. The kabbalists of Beit El and its various offshoot yeshivot have done their best, in cooperation with R. Ovadya Yosef, to maintain a plausible synthetic traditionalism that could keep Zoharism in check, but they will fail. In fact, they already have and we’re just here to watch.

Here’s my article on why I don’t like Jabotinsky.

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As we have discussed in previous articles, the purpose of Zionism as a movement was not to provide a safe place for the Jewish people to live in. There were, it is true, Zionists who believed that it was, and some of them were even important at various stages, but, at the movement level, this was hashed out at the sixth and seventh Zionist Congresses where the orthodox Herzleans were marginalized. From then on, those whose primary concern was getting Jews out of harm’s way were confined to the fringes of the movement or left altogether. Zionism, after Herzl’s death, was not about safety, or at the very least not just about safety in the short to medium term, but about something else, namely bringing to an end the condition of the Jews as a stateless, wandering people in exile by bringing them home.

As to what the Jews should become once they had a state in their own land, there was a great diversity of opinion. One relatively minor strain, which has become increasingly common in recent years in the wake of inexorable demographic change brought about by differential birthrates, is the idea of a Jewish homeland in Israel as the vehicle for a religious revival, a place not to replace rabbinic Judaism, but to reinvigorate it, both by purging the corruptions and depredations of exile, and also by creating a truly pan-Jewish center of culture that contains all of its different branches, and thus can fully develop them into a greater whole.1 I recently came across this view expressed quite persuasively by Maia Zelkha in Yad Mizrah magazine.

Already, the identity of diaspora is fading away, whether we like it or not. Languages of exile are vanishing, and perhaps with the exception of Yiddish, will be gone within a single generation. My father’s first language, Iraqi Judeo-Arabic, was never transmitted to my generation. The same goes for my husband and his parents, who never knew or spoke Moroccan Arabic or Judeo-Malayalam. We each know a few words— his brother knows a song— but the languages are gone. The same is true for food, music, and rituals. They were already cultural fragments when we inherited them, and each generation becomes more fragmented.

…

And yet, for all their beauty, the traditions rooted in our diaspora can entrap us in an illusion. When we Jews shape our national self-perception through categories and differences, we fracture our collective soul and chain ourselves to the mental slavery of separation, superiority, judgement, racism, and ego. We’re not the first to experience it within the history of our peoplehood; even while enslaved in Egypt, not all Jews chose to leave when presented with liberation. They were too attached to the familiarity of Egyptian culture, routine, and society, even while under oppression. That said: a very real attachment to our diasporic identities still exists, perhaps because we cannot yet imagine what it means to be Jewish outside of them. That is for the next generations to imagine, because sooner or later, that will be their reality as Jewish cultural and ethnic distinctions fade into memory. A huge turning point in Jewish civilization is happening as we speak.

…

The great Rav Kook writes in Orot HaKodesh: “Just as this occurs in an individual, so it occurs with the nation as a whole: when the spirit of Israel gathers inward beautifully within its depths, it feels a supreme wholeness within itself.” That “gathering inward” doesn’t necessarily need to look miraculous; I think more realistically it looks like two Jews from vastly different regional and ethnic backgrounds falling in love and making babies. Rav Uziel, the first Sephardic Chief Rabbi of Israel, understood this clearly. He argues in Mishpetei Uziel that ethnic separation within the Jewish people was unnatural, even dangerous: “Just as we are commanded to be one unified body (agudah achat), we are also sternly warned: Do not make yourselves into separate factions — Lo ta’asu atzmechem agudot agudot.”

If that is true, then perhaps marriage and families that span across Jewish ethnic lines isn’t just a sociological transformation, but part of the slow, natural healing process of our remaining fractures of exile.

In a strange way, we move backwards as we move forward in our history, returning to a moment before our identities were split into Iraqi, Ashkenazi, Cochini, Moroccan, or Yemenite. The last time Jews lived together in one place, with a shared sense of peoplehood unmediated by exile, was before those divisions ever existed. The age of exile gave us extraordinary cultural diversity. But now begins a new transformation, one that we don’t have a name for now but that our children and grandchildren certainly will: the early formation of a post-diasporic— a truly post-diasporic— Jewish identity.

The view is attractive, and it’s not exactly wrong. Jewish civilization is turning a corner and there’s not much anyone can do to stop the process in which one dominant Jewish center composed out of all the others comes to increasingly dominate over the diaspora from which it grew. The problem is it sucks. The purpose of this article is to flesh out that claim, which I will do by comparing like with like, something that Israel simps never do. Some things I’ve already written about, some will be new. Let’s gooooooo!

Charedim

This part I don’t really need to explain. There’s an entire genre of Israeli discourse which is just ‘how can we get Charedim in Israel to be less messed up like the Charedim in America are?’. There are two aspects of this. The main one is the barmy idea that men not working so they can study all day should be the norm for an entire community of hundreds of thousands of people as it is among the yeshivish in Israel. The second one is just that a lot of Charedi neighbourhoods around here have litter everywhere, are dilapidated, and the inhabitants act as if they just don’t care at all about not resembling a bad bit of a third-world country. I was once on a bus from Jerusalem to Beitar Illit, and two chalmers with black hoisinzocken and big white cappelach got on and sat across the aisle from each other loudly schmoozing. That’s just normal in Israel, but what was not normal is that after five minutes the one on the right hocked up a big ball of phlegmy spit and then lobbed it into the middle. Then he did it again five minutes later, then again, then again; seven times in total. There in the aisle sat a puddle of the stuff, which everyone else had to step over because, y’know, the floor of a bus isn’t made of mud you disgusting retarded ape.

Anyhoos, like I say, we don’t have to justify the claim here, though Ash has a good compilation of Israeli Charedim acting like gutter trash in a way that is literally inconceivable anywhere in the diaspora if you’re interested. What I will point out, in passing, is that, as is generally typical, the normie Israeli perspective on this whole issue is diametrically wrong because it’s based on the idea that Charedim need to be made to integrate more into Israeli society. Precisely the problem is that Israeli Charedim are already much more integrated than Charedim are anywhere else in the world, as made most spectacularly evident during the Covid years when diaspora Charedim realized a few months in that it was ridiculous and made a big kiddush Hashem, showing everyone you could just ignore it and it was totally fine, while Israeli Charedim beclowned themselves with stuff like this:

There are three ways in which greater integration makes Charedim worse. The first is that when Charedim assimilate, they never pick up anything good from the surrounding culture, only bad things, and in Israel there are an awful lot of bad things to pick up. Charedim are exposed very little, if at all, to respectable middle-class Israelis, and so absorb the worst traits of the worst parts of the country. Secondly, the lower degree of cultural and practical day-to-day separation from the rest of society leads Israeli Charedim to double down on their ideology as a source of group identity, but their ideology is just a bit mad. In America, it’s OK because people don’t really believe it that much. It’s probably a good thing for your average Jewish businessman making bank to hear one or twice a week that it’s pointless trying to earn money and only learning Torah matters, but it’s definitely not good for some broke guy in Bnei Brak who spends 12 hours a day failing to learn gemara because he’s not smart to hear that over and over until he decides to up it to 14. Thirdly, their integration allows them to pursue a political strategy inconceivable in the diaspora, the harms of which do not need to be elaborated here.

Before we’ll close this section, it’s well to mention that, though the State of Israel gave the heirs of the Lithuanian yeshiva movement the ability to fulfil their dreams and create a cradle-to-grave education system of pure talmudic learning with no secular studies to impinge upon it (the system American Charedim profess to want if only the government would allow it), it completely fails even on its own terms. The Rosh Yeshiva of Chevron is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Slabodka is American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Mir inherited the position but his father was American; the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo is American. All of them received an education that would be considered chazer treif in Israel, but it is they who are consistently front and center of the campaign against the draft because, despite none of them even being especially proficient in spoken Hebrew (their third language), they are nevertheless better equipped to stand up and say consecutive sentences than anyone else in the Israeli yeshiva world. Prominent Israeli Roshei Yeshiva are, excepting the ones who inherited their position, older than the system they preside over and so literally too decrepit to do much more than whisper. Hence their representatives are Yankees and sound like this:

Or like this

(The whole channel is … illuminating)

Lubavitch

Usually, when I rag on Chabad, someone will chime in that my perspective is distorted because I live in Israel. Well, yes, I live in Israel, but the point is valid enough. In America, the split is, if we’re charitable 40-60 meshichist non-mechichist (though, in fact, the latter group also believe MMS is or will be the moshiach).2 In Israel, it’s 80-20 at the very least. In most diaspora countries, it’s possible with a bit of artful lying to maintain plausible deniability for the ‘I love Chabad, but I reject their tiny minority of extremists’ line, but in Israel you have to be an exceptionally clueless Anglo dipstick to still say this. A neat indication of just how off the rails Israeli Chabad is, was a brawl that happened on Rosh haShanah in America’s center of idolatry and general weirdness, 770 Crown Heights. In the states, this is the stronghold of the extreme of the extreme, but in Israel they are considered moderates, allied with the old-school meshichist yeshiva of Tzfat. This more extreme faction, centred around the yeshiva in Rishon leTziyon are waging a (racially inflected) campaign to take over 770 from the ante-nicene meshichists, as part of which they affixed a picture of MMS on the aron before prayers. The old-school guys are still embarrassed about stuff like that and took it down, so the Israelis started throwing tables at them.

What is even worse is that the off-the-chain levels of extremism of Chabad in Israel are not compensated for by their being relatively marginalised. In fact, they are even more mainstream and accepted than in the diaspora. I remember in Jerusalem at the local park, each week on shabbos two shluchim would hand out sweets to neighbourhood children in return for saying various pesukim. Everyone let their children join in, seculars and religious and in between. They ended each time with יחי, which is bad enough, but one week a sub changed the nusach to (note well) יחי אדוננו אלהינו בוראנו מלך המשיח לעולם ועד, but obviously I’m the weirdo for objecting to this. Here’s another example that’s relevant mostly because I saw it this morning. There’s a relatively new YouTube channel by a guy called Tamir Dortal who people point to as evidence against the claim that right-wingers are illiterate subhumans. It’s very thoughtful and stuff. He talks to Ben Shapiro about how the right can fight against the Left-Wing media through alternative platforms, and they bond over judicial philosophy and not liking postmodernism (the other week he had a similar convo with Dave Rubin). Anyway, here’s what he put out for Gimmel Tamuz.

Abolish. This. Country. I want to smash up my computer now and walk away, but this article has barely got started.

Breslov

There’s not a whole bunch to add about Breslov that I didn’t write already. The difference between the cases of Breslov and Chabad is that, while Chabad outside Israel is still massive but less bad, Breslov outside Israel is barely a thing at all. If you don’t look for it, you won’t find it. Over here, it’s really impossible to overstate just how big Breslov is. Unless you live in a very elitist Charedi community, or a very elitist secular community, you really can’t escape one of the hundreds of branches of a movement that was universally condemned as an insane heresy even by all the other chassidim because it’s that bad. And it’s even worse now than it was then. How bad is Breslov?

Item: The most influential Breslov leader for two decades was Eliezer Berland, a man who declared himself God to his followers, taught that he was more righteous than Moshe Rabbeinu and present in the room at all times with those who believed, and who shagged dozens, maybe hundreds of other people’s wives, then, after getting out of clink, got his operation back off the ground by selling mentos and tic tacs as kabbalistic remedies for chronic disease.

Item: In Lod, a guy called Netanel Deri set up a Breslov branch and had a thriving community until he was arrested for multiple counts of sexual abuse against minors.

Item: Some French immigrant dude called Daniel Ambash set himself up as cult leader in Jerusalem and married a bunch of women. When he got pinched, allegations included locking children in cages, forcing them to eat faeces and mandatory intercourse with animals.

Item: A younger son of a prestigious Satmar-affiliated Rav in the States got depressed and found Breslev cheered him up. He set up a community in America, but realised Israel was way more fertile ground and eventually his followers turned up in a nice secular yishuv and started wrecking it. Unlike other Breslov leaders, he was basically on the level and not some crazed pervert, but the whole thing is nevertheless a big disaster. To stop all the feral children in his utopian community shagging and raping each other, he started having them get married off at 14, but then they just started wife swapping instead. There’s a whole documentary about sundry goings on.

Item: Yosef Shovali is the Breslov leader in Meron and also a medium-level YouTube influencer retard. Earlier, this year he got arrested too. It’s the usual menu, but apparently he’s more into men.

Item:

Then, of course, there’s the hilltop youth guys, who for many years now have all been Breslov with various degrees of Chabad admixture. They particularly like to do arson on Shabbos, because, don’t ask me, probably some wanker from Arutz 7 can explain how it’s pIKUACH nEFESH.

Zoharism

I’ve written a lot about Zoharism3 and I shall be writing more. When I do, I usually get an American telling me to chill out. “If you don’t like kabbalah, just don’t practice it; no-one’s forcing you”. I don’t think that’s really true even in America, but it is sort of true at a day-to-day level. Here it’s not. You can escape it, but it takes ongoing daily effort. Apart from the religious issues involved, this means - even leaving aside the Breslov guys - there’s always some Goel Ratzon hypnotizing women and forcing them to work for him. Even completely-secular [ALLEGED]4 rapist Likud-Knesset-member genocidal- freaks are somehow also members of New Age kabbalah cults.

bUT tHAT’S nOT rEAL kaBBALAH. OK, well does being a Rosh Yeshiva whose seforim have haskamos by two chief Rabbis of Israel plus R. Dov Lior and R. Yakov Ariel make you a real kabbalist? Because I have bad news for you.

Why, though, is Zoharism so much bigger in Israel than elsewhere? It’s actually really simple. Starting with the founder of the Hurva synagogue, the Sabbatean Yehuda heChassid, in 1697, there had already been two centuries of mystical aliyah by Zoharists before Pinsker and the gang got in on the act. Many of these were legit schizo maniacs and they were responsible for setting ‘minhag Eretz Yisroel’. As we have discussed from time to time, the Zionists were totally wrapped up in their own Russian world of dreams, resentments and internal torments, and put precious little thought into how to approach the existing inhabitants of Palestine until it was too late. This applied to the Jewish population no less than the Arab one. Tzfat was ethnically cleansed of its Arabs in 1948 (Mahmoud Abbas is famously sore about it), but, in retrospect, the whole cursed city should have been burned to the ground and mined so no-one could ever go there again. And not just there. There’s no good reason for Meron to exist. If you want to find out what the Zionist plan was though, to deal with all the madness before it grew like a cancer into something out of control, you’re flat out of luck. They just figured everyone would become a moshavnik by magic in a decade or two.

Gerrer Chassidim

The largest Chassidic sect in Poland was Gur, and they were known for being relatively intellectual and generally nice to other Jews within the broad orthodox umbrella, co-ordinating with German neo-orthodox professionals who knew how to balance the books to build the Agudas Yisrael. Today, outside of Israel, they are almost-normal Chassidim. They wear an inferior-looking version of a shtreimel called a spodik, they daven stupidly fast, and they tuck their regular trousers into regular socks, so they look a bit ridiculous. They also have a general reputation for being a bit too interested in tznius, and like to join miscellaneous school boards they have nothing particular to do with so they can measure wigs and skirts with a ruler. However, with that said, they’re OK. Don’t marry your daughter off to a Gerrer, but don’t freak out about having one for a neighbour.

Ger in Israel, however, are an evil and violent cult. The extent of this became clear a few years ago when R. Shaul Alter set up a breakaway Ger splinter trying to go back to the OG version, doing big numbers in fundraising in America, and establishing a few schools and yeshivos. Some parents decided to affiliate with the breakaway, but were still working out logistical issues, and one day their daughters didn’t come home after school. It eventually emerged that they were living in a ‘home for orphans’ run by the Gerer Rebbes’ wife. There’s an almost infinite list of weird messed up stuff going on in Ger and a hell of a lot that hasn’t come out yet because of the police state. Gerer Chassidim literally teach their children that, if you are in trouble, you should close your eyes and visualise the criminal head of their movement and you will be saved.5

This would be bad enough if Ger was just a successful religious movement, but, in fact, its leader has a personal fortune of roughly 250 million dollars and controls the Agudas Yisrael and so, in effect, has four MKs under his command, in particular Minister for Construction Goldknopf, perhaps the single most obnoxious advocate of the synthesis of dopey expansionist nationalism and fanatical hostility to the military draft. It almost goes without saying, at this point, that they are the most Israeli of all the Chassidic groups, having switched to speaking Hebrew in the 1950s.

Modern Orthodoxy

There are a lot more sections of this article I wanted to write when I started. A whole section on synagogue architecture, something about Carlebach, and, obviously, Kookism. But it’s getting late and I feel sick. I haven’t even mentioned Yitzchak Ginsburgh, Menachem Mendel Vizhnitz, the Yanuka, Abergel, or Yitzhak Shapira, but it’s too bad. I’ll close by saying two things. The first is that religious groups in Israel are good precisely in proportion to how much they don’t embrace a new Eretz-Yisrael form of Judaism. The best, obviously, are the Baladim, who do exactly what it says in the Tichlal neither a jot to the right or to the left and cannot be moved from this position by any argument or other form of inducement. The various runners up are different Ashkenazi and Sephardi groups who stick stubbornly to Moroccan or Lithuanian or Iraqi identity (even a substantially imagined one), with its poems, tunes, foods etc. For various obvious reasons, I don’t find the ideological position of any of these groups persuasive at all. My siddur is Nusah Eretz Yisrael. But facts are facts, and the fact is that if you want to have anything good in this country at scale, then you need to get on board with fighting obstinately and dogmatically for an exilic identity, the more obstinately exilic the better.

The other point I want to make is about Modern Orthodoxy, which is probably where you’d focus if you wanted to argue in favour of Israel. It’s no secret that Modern Orthodoxy in America and elsewhere is perpetually unstable, with a new crop of young idealists popping up every three years asking whether now can we have gay marriage? In that sense, things are better here, but there’s a catch. All of Modern Orthodoxy abroad is strongly Zionist, usually in a pretty over the top way. They aren’t actually Religious Zionists, though they think they are, because they have no clue what Religious Zionism is (spending a year in the Gush doesn’t count, in fact it’s actively misleading). What this means, though, is that, in every generation, the most committed and dedicated members of the community, those who would have been a good gabbai, leave for Israel. This would be, from a national perspective, fine if the talents and energies they would have put into community building abroad were spent doing the same here. Generally, though, that’s not so and they just kind of go to waste. Some deal with this by becoming terrorists in the West Bank, some by sitting in silent despair as their children go OTD one after another, reading books about loving your son no matter what, some by finding a nice bubble of ex-Charedim in Bet Shemesh and kidding themselves into believing that’s Religious Zionism. I begrudge no man his cope if it works, but the negative-sum parasitism of aliyah is something the Modern Orthodox should think about if they are serious about this whole ‘religion fit for literate people’ thing being viable.

5

Get a load of the worksheets in Ger schools paid for by the general taxpayer:

1. Esoteric Bibi-ism is true. There is no military solution to the predicament of Zionism just as there is no diplomatic solution to the predicament of Zionism. There are military solutions to specific problems just as there are diplomatic solutions to specific problems, and that’s it. Yes, in some sense, it is intolerable to have countries and/or paramilitaries in rocket-range that believe you shouldn’t exist, but tolerate it you will nevertheless have to do.

2. Israel is over-reliant on its airforce because it is extremely casualty averse; for that reason it can’t function as a military superpower even though in other respects its armed forces are pretty awesome. In fact, it can’t even act as a local enforcer.

   

   

   This leaves you with only two options (a) somehow stop being so casualty averse or (b) give up pretensions to being a military superpower. I’m not saying you have to choose (a), but I am saying you have to choose (a) or (b). There isn’t a third option where you just get to kill infinity civilians and it’s completely fine, and if someone tells you can, it is very long past time to stop paying any attention to them.

3. Speaking of which, this is an interesting video for a whole bunch of reasons, but the main one is the obvious:

   People like the guy on the left are not rare. They’re not a majority of Israelis, they are probably not even a majority of right-wing voters, but they are the core right-wing electorate. To call this magical thinking is technically accurate, but it underplays the profound sickness of the intellect exhibited here. These are people deep in a murderous and fantastical daydream irresponsibly allowed to fester for decades by the Israeli state and, with complete and total justice, an object of revulsion and disgust to all mankind. All who see them wag their heads. It’s important to be clear about this: disenfranchising these people is a life-and-death matter for the Israeli state. The mechanism for doing so used to be esoteric Bibi-ism and that’s fully spent, so now you need something new, and stat. This is not a joke or hyperbole at all. None of the guys on the centre/left have an answer to this because they are a joke.

4. Back when I did my first ever podcast, I was broadly sceptical of the claim that Hamas had done October 7th in order to thwart the expansion of the Abraham Accords, but it seems that it’s pretty much true. So Hamas won, and they won big since they’re on course to crash our relations not just in the region, but with humanity at large (see what I wrote here which is perhaps partially vindicated and partially not).

   

5. Bibi is almost certainly going to lose the election now. I think Otzma will get a boost too. However, I think the center will regret winning these elections. A lot of bills have been racked up by this government and will shortly come due. When they do, we will talk ourselves into believing we were this close to regional hegemony if only we’d kept pushing. The great thing about military Zionism is that, no matter how much it fails, you can always explain it away on the grounds that we weren’t militaristic enough. You can always kill more civilians, you can always attack more countries, you can always send Breslov terrorists to seize one more hilltop. It’s forever possible to retard-max just that little bit extra. Every failure to convert the success of the IAF and Mossad into strategic advantage is met with ever more frantic antiquarian appeals to the Oslo Accords or to insufficient barbarity in 1948, in a way that makes American libs’ obsession with redlining and Emmett Till look reasonable. The only circumstances under which they’ll admit that ‘yes, we tried it our way, and it didn’t work’ are circumstances under which we’d all be dead. I call this the anthropic principle of Israeli rightoidism, a concept you might consider adding to your arsenal alongside blood libel parallax and the law of merited ethnic cleansing.

6. There are two whitepills. The first is that the medium-term impact of the war will be to increase investment in infrastructure for the production of and transport of oil and gas around the world, as well as to accelerate diversification with renewables. Iran played the Hormuz Strait option well, but actually it wasn’t all that bad. It was bad, but not anything remotely like as bad as it would have been even 10 years ago. If they play it again, it will be even less of a big deal, and eventually it won’t be a big deal at all. Iran is still a crap country, without even the ability to consistently provide water to urban centers, with 77% inflation, an economy in advancing collapse and multiple secessionist movements, whose average IQ sucks, and whose smart fraction substantially lives in California and cheers when the country is bombed. Things look grim right now, but this is the peak of Iran’s power unless someone comes in to buttress it. If Israel plays its cards OK, it will still win the generational war. The second, connected, whitepill is that, as well as eroding the ability of Iran to hold the world hostage, the inexorable decline of the Middle East as a proportion of the world’s energy supply will mean that, one day, most people around the world can just stop thinking about this stupid region and its stupid people with their stupid fights about stupid nonsense.

Those are my takes and they’re not grade A, so maybe consider this the first NonZionism open thread.

In the last instalment, we looked at the infamous Emden-Eybeschutz controversy which crashed the aura of rabbinic authority for European Jewry. To sum up, it’s obvious that Eybeschutz was a Sabbatean, and also that he believed a whole bunch of super weird things. The most material comes from his youth and it’s possible that he calmed down in later years, perhaps even probable given the sheer degree of graphic sex talk there is in אבוא היום אל העין, something that, in the way of things, usually loses its appeal with age. However, the claim that he was innocent is completely unsustainable.

Eybeschutz’s chief persecutor was R. Yakov Emden (though, in fact, R. Emden ended up getting a lot more persecuted than Eybeschutz did), an interesting figure for many reasons, and, in his breadth of learning and intellectual adventurousness, the rabbi of the period most similar to Eybeschutz himself, except not a crazy heretic. Both academics and normie orthodox defenders of Eybeschutz are wont to say uncomplimentary things about R. Emden in order to attribute his crusade to some kind of personality flaw or disorder. It’s true that R. Emden in his later years became rather a bitter man, and excessively credulous concerning allegations made about the secret practices of Eybeschutz and other Sabbatean rabbis,1 but it’s also true that he was the subject not only of violence and lawfare, but a full two and a half decades of relentless gaslighting. To state the truth and be rewarded with endless wading through nonsense arguments and evasion will, at best, make you in due course depressed and resentful.

If you want to read more about Emden’s life of travails, then look here, but the important point for our history is that, in his mounting frustration and bewilderment concerning the mixture of indifference and hostility his quest to rid the Jewish people of heresy had met, he saw the terrible truth. Sabbateanism could not be excised because it wasn’t a freak accident or a foreign import. It was, instead, the fruit of the great theological revolution that dated back to the proliferation of the Zoharic corpus in the late 15th century. Since Sabbateanism is Zoharism, and Zoharism was Judaism, its adherents, assuming they possessed a modicum of conscientiousness and wit, could endlessly swerve from motte to bailey and back again without ever being caught. There was no way of decisively defeating them without confronting the source of all their doctrine.

Or was there? R. Emden was an accomplished student of kabbalistic literature, and, over his decades of study, he had noticed one troubling thing in the Zohar after another until a picture emerged in his head, one which eventually he felt he had to share with the world. Now, I can already hear members of Charedi Substack feverishly tapping on the smartphone they have a ‘heter for business purposes’ to use to catch me in a lie. Don’t you know that Rav Emden was a kabbalist and believed in the Zohar? It was only the wicked maskilim and academics who took his words out of context to make him look like a sceptic. Well, yes, indeed. Emden’s intention was not to condemn the Zohar, but to vindicate it from false interpretation, to show, as in the opening line to Mitpachat Sefarim, that ‘the whole essence of the Zohar is holy, and like the essence of the heavens in its purity’. His goal was to detach the Zohar from Sabbateanism, and, more broadly, from the whole complex of popular and elite Zoharism into which Sabbateanism was inextricably tangled up. His way of doing this was to distinguish between the book ‘the Zohar’, which had been first printed at Mantua and Cremona two centuries prior, from the true Zohar, which contains the esoteric truths of the Jewish religion. In other words, in order to vindicate the true Zohar, a thing to be discovered, R. Emden became the first textual critic of ‘the Zohar’, the thing that actually existed.

Based on his encyclopaedic knowledge of the text, and, for his time, strong grasp of historical philology, R. Emden presented the following taxonomy of the zoharic corpus, a taxonomy that, in certain respects, holds up surprisingly well today.

1. The oldest layer of the Zohar contains ‘short statements’ containing the ‘principles of wisdom in a cursory and concealed form’. These principles were received at Sinai and passed down until the time of the amoraim who were the first to write them down. These parts of the Zohar are those introduced by the terms מתניתין, תוספתא or ‘secrets of the Torah’ (3-5% of the total).

2. The second layer, which also counts as being part of the Zohar proper, dates from the period of an otherwise-unknown Babylonian amora called Shimon bar Yohai until the time of the Geonim. This layer is attributed to the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yochai either on the grounds that the doctrines taught date back to him and were passed down by his students, or because the later amoraim were reincarnations of Rabi Shimon and his contemporaries. This section includes the running midrashic commentary on the Torah (guf haZohar in academic terminology), the Idrot, Sifra d’Tzniuta, and the saba and yanuka dialogues (50%)

3. The third layer was written by a Spanish medieval kabbalist, either Moshe de Leon or one of his colleagues, synthesising and explaining material from the ancient layers. This layer includes Tikkunei Zohar and Ra’aya Mehemna (25%).

4. The fourth layer is Midrash Ne’elam, an incompetent medieval forgery, written partly in Hebrew and partly in defective Aramaic. (15%)

5. The fifth layer consists of additions by medieval scribes inserted throughout the first four categories, which are identifiable because they make obvious mistakes, or because they say blasphemous or heretical things. R. Emden identifies 281 such mistakes he has found, though that is an understatement because many of the items include multiple passages that make the same or similar mistakes. He also states that these are only those he has been able to identify in the course of his personal study and a systematic search might identify more (5%?).

R. Emden closes his discussion by calling for the production of an authoritative edition of the Zohar, one that omits fake material and identifies the different strata among the first four categories. That was 265 years ago, and R. Emden’s research programme was clear enough, so there’s been plenty of time to get it done in the meantime. But it doesn’t exist, and it never will exist, for the following reasons:

1. Passages that R. Emden identifies as obvious fakes were relied upon by the authoritative kabbalists. A simple example is no. 45 on his list of fraudulent insertions, where he identifies six [!] places in the Zohar that state that the hilazon from which the techelet dye is produced lives in the Sea of Galilee, a freshwater lake, contradicting the Talmud, which states it is found in the Mediterranean Sea. This is, indeed, a gross mistake, only partially excused by the fact that the authors of these passages lived in Spain and knew nothing at all of Levantine geography. However, Isaac Luria, who had no such excuse, clearly interprets these passages literally and believed them to be true. Thus, even a beginner’s attempt to implement R. Emden’s agenda would explode the whole kabbalistic enterprise by showing that the most elite kabbalists had zero ability to distinguish between fake and real parts of their holy book.

2. Both kabbalists and halachists who quoted the Zohar over the previous two centuries freely attributed it to Rabi Shimon, regardless of what strata they were citing, including the roughly 40% of the Zohar that R. Emden identified as medieval. Often, they underscored the tannaitic attribution in order to give halachic weight to the passage cited. Thus, again, R. Emden’s vindication of the Zohar would, if carried out in anything but the most impressionistic manner, collapse the whole edifice of authority built upon the Zohar and mandate going back and starting from scratch without Cordovero, Luria and the rest of it.

3. R. Emden performed two different types of textual criticism on the Zohar. In order to identify the different strata, he used a form of comparative linguistics. However, to identify the fake passages found within these four layers, he looked at content. If a section of the Zohar mixes up two amoraim, or paraphrases tosefos, or says straight heresy, then it’s fake. However, what happens if you combine these two forms of textual criticism? The answer is that there are no linguistic grounds for separating the real material from the fake. R. Emden’s assumption is that everything in the Zohar is authentic (within the definition of authentic appropriate to each layer) unless it can’t possibly be, but that’s just preposterous. It’s not reasonable at all to assume that every medieval scribe who stuck in some material made some error that exposes him, every time he did it. The only fair way to proceed is to analyse all the clear examples of fakery, look for linguistic commonalities and then see what other parts of the Zohar were written by the same authors. But the answer to that is that all of it was.

To put it simply, it’s certainly true that R. Emden set out to vindicate the ‘true Zohar’, but the true Zohar doesn’t actually exist. If you admit the possibility that some parts of the Zohar are fake and that the tools of reason can be used to identify them, you will in due course come to the conclusion that all of it’s fake because that’s what’s actually true in real life. However, I’m still substantially underselling the instability of Emden’s Zohar vindication, for two reasons:

1. One of the most difficult problems R. Emden had to deal with was the fact that the main body of the Zohar (his second stratum) undeniably postdates the tana Rabi Shimon bar Yohai by many generations for simple and irrefutable reasons. His first answer to the question, which appears at the beginning of Mitpachat Sefarim, is that the compilers of the Zohar were students of his students, and their teachings trace back to him. This is the argument relied on today by Zohar apologists who aren’t just ignoramus buffoons. However, R. Emden knew too much to believe this argument was sufficient because, within the layer of the Zohar that must be much later than Rabi Shimon bar Yohai, Rabi Shimon bar Yohai keeps popping up, speaking, doing things, often in conversation with people who lived long after he died. R. Emden’s true solution to this problem, which he introduces in the fifth chapter, is that there were two Rabi Shimon bar Yohais, the one that appears in the Mishnah and Talmud and a later Babylonian amora that no-one before had ever before heard of or imagined, that appears in the Zohar.
   
   This is a neat solution to the problem, but unfortunately, it’s completely ridiculous. R. Emden tries to soften the blow by speculating that perhaps the second Rabi Shimon was the reincarnation of the first one, but that’s even more ridiculous. This whole line of argument is so patently absurd that, whenever you find anyone discussing Mitpachat Sefarim, whether in the cause of attacking the authority of the Zohar or buttressing it, they almost invariably leave this part of R. Emden’s theory out. However, the truth is that it’s a central pillar of his whole model, and therefore vindication, of the Zohar. If you ignore, as everyone wishes to do, the theory of the phantom Rabi Shimon II, there is only one conclusion left: the reason that Rabi Shimon keeps popping up in the Zohar talking to people who lived after his death, or to people who don’t even exist, or referring to things he could never have known or seen in ways that make the whole thing look like a clumsy forgery by shoddy scholars is because it is. The method by which R. Emden identifies individual passages of the Zohar as fake, if we remove the ridiculous cope, in reality identifies the whole thing as fake (with the hypothetical exception of the small first stratum).
   

2. R. Emden’s goal was to pull the rug from the false, popular kabbalah (and its Sabbatean extension), which was based upon the book ‘the Zohar’, in order to preserve the true esoteric, elite kabbalah. The problem was this esoteric kabbalah never existed or, to put matters more accurately, it existed, but Zoharism came to kill it. The kabbalists of Gerona (Ramban being the most famous example) believed and practiced a rigorous, elitist and esoteric faith of theurgic prayer and ritual. The kabbalists of Castille disagreed with them on a large number of crucial points, but, perhaps most importantly, they disagreed with them on their elitism. The fact that the Zoharic corpus was not widely distributed for the first 150 years after most of it was composed was not for any want of trying on the part of its authors. At every stage in its proliferation, the masters of Zoharic kabbala did their utmost to promote knowledge of the secrets of the Torah, which, since the ‘discovery’ of the Zohar, were no longer secrets. It is true that Luria claimed to have discovered a new, esoteric layer of doctrine within the Zohar and both he and his students wanted that bit kept secret, but that collapsed pretty soon too. In short, R. Emden wanted to recover an authentic Zoharism that never existed, that is precisely what Zoharism is not.

Influence

R. Emden had opened a can of worms. There were only two responses left. The first was to follow his logic into, at a minimum, a drastic downgrading of the authority of the Zohar and its recategorization as an optional work of medieval Jewish philosophy. The second was to retreat into pure obscurantism, to look at the huge burden of evidence R. Emden had presented (and the more that was to come) and to shrug it off. What may be surprising to modern readers is that the brightest stars of the rabbinic establishment leaned towards the former.

The Chasam Sofer

R. Moshe Sofer established what would soon become one of Europe’s most prestigious yeshivot in Bratislava (known to German and Yiddish speakers as Pressburg), and became the generally acknowledged preeminent Rabbi of Hungarian Jewry. He was among the first to see that secularizing trends beginning in his era were qualitatively different from generic laxity and indifference which any religion struggles with over the course of its history and pioneered the slogan ‘anything new is forbidden by the Torah’ (wittily repurposing a talmudic phrase about a different topic). Because the Jews of Hungary and, even more so, Romania,2 were much more likely to survive WW2 than anyone else in Eastern Europe except Bulgaria, his influence over Orthodox Jewry today is very great, with Belz, Vizhnitz and Satmar, as well as satellite groups, seeing him as their chief ideological inspiration.

It is relatively well known among interested people that despite (or, perhaps, because of) his uncompromising conservatism, the Chasam Sofer accepted R. Emden’s analysis of the Zohar, and understood that it implied more than R. Emden was willing to admit. He is quoted as saying that if it were possible to distil out of the Zohar only those parts that were really authored by Rabi Shimon that it would only come to a ‘few pages’.3

The Noda biYehuda

R. Yehekzkel Landau rose through the ranks to become Rabbi of Prague and authored probably the most important collections of teshuvot and talmudic chiddushim of the era. We saw him in the last installment as the chief architect of the policy to deal with the Eybeschutz problem by covering it up. This is obviously quite shocking, but the fault lies with Judaism in general, and not the Noda biYehuda, who accurately appraised a disastrous situation. Like the Chasam Sofer, the Noda biYehuda was a fierce opponent of secularising trends and the incipient haskalah movement, and, like the Chasam Sofer, he had read and agreed with R. Emden’s Zohar criticism.

The Noda biYehuda’s views were given their clearest expression in an essay he wrote that was later suppressed in printed versions of his drashot (you can read it here). Though he states that he can only say a fraction of his true beliefs for fear of what the kabbalists will do in response, he does say that the Zohar had no reliable history of transmission, a sine qua non for authority in Judaism, and that no-one can know whether any part of it is real (he also says the papers of Luria’s doctrines taken from Chaim Vital after his death cannot be trusted.4 However, the full extent of his views can be found stated by his student and successor R. Elazar Fleckeles who wrote that the Zohar is full of ‘forgeries and distortions’, that ‘one page of the Talmud Bavli … is holier than the entire Zohar’, that it was unknown to the editors of the Talmud and all the Geonim and Rishonim until ‘a certain group [church?] received it from a rabble’, and that ‘anyone with half a brain’ knows that it was written long after Rabi Shimon bar Yochai. He added that ‘from the day the Zohar was introduced many have stumbled’ and heaped praise on ‘our lord Kaiser Joseph II’ who had banned kabbalistic studies in his realms.5

A committed apologist will point out, and fairly enough, that none of these rabbis completely rejected the Zohar outright. However, what is really crucial to appreciate here is not where their opinions line up on an absolute spectrum, but the rapid direction of travel. The Chasam Sofer was the student of the eccentric kabbalist R. Nosson Adler; the Noda biYehuda was educated in the Brody Kloiz, the elite center of European kabbalistic study. They came from an intellectual world in which the Zohar was completely authoritative, entirely the work of Rabi Shimon and the epitome of holiness and wisdom. They arrived at the position that either nothing of the Zohar, or close to nothing, could be traced back to any tana, that it was full of clumsy and sometimes heretical forgeries, that it was a superfluous to Jewish religious life, that it was primarily a stumbling block, and that study of it should be prohibited by law.

It took one generation for the consequences of R. Emden’s application of critical reason to the Zohar to percolate through the European rabbinate. We cannot, of course, know exactly how far this process would have proceeded in due course. I like to think that it would have ended up where it should have, namely a serious and frank reckoning with what had happened over the previous three centuries, undoing what needed to be undone. More likely, though, I suppose, is that the Zohar would have drifted progressively into obscurity, its wild escapist fantasy realm of obscenity and narcissistic delirium reduced to traces and memory, just like the high-Aristotelianism of the medieval Spanish elite, the heichalot mysticism or whatever zany trends were current among Jews of the second temple period.

Regardless of internal developments in its religious ethos, the Jewish people were in short order going to have to face a number of challenges: modern science and technology, nationalisms, the opportunity for settlement in Ottoman Palestine, the rise of capital and then the proletariat as political force, the triumph of confidence in mechanistic rationality and its collapse. Thanks to R. Emden, the Jews had the chance to face it like adults, led by their natural leaders, the scholars of the oral law, firmly rooted in tradition, but with two eyes open. However, in the backwoods of the Ukraine, (and, in a different way, the narrow streets of Vilna) a different wind was blowing. The only viable option to preserve faith in Zoharism now was to abandon reasoned thought altogether, but there were some who were willing, eager even, to take the deal. In Mitpachat Sefarim, R. Emden noted that ‘there has arisen a new sect of hasidim in Volhynia, Podolia … whose entire activity is the Zohar and books of kabbalah … and they make strange movements in prayer and clap their hands…’6 It was already too late.

The man behind this stuff does not need to binge-read articles about bell curves and factor analysis to understand what it means to have an IQ of 80, like I imagine other people do instead of just being a normal human being. He just gets it. He knows exactly what to say to make people who struggle with the 'how would you feel if you hadn’t had breakfast?’ question go and vote so that, election after election, proportional representation go brrr. Some snooty people don’t like this. They find open, unabashed electoral appeals to the dull-witted viscerally revolting in their gut and then they come up with reasons like ‘it makes a nonsense of the concept of the Knesset as a deliberative chamber’ or ‘this will lead to escalating levels of corruption and vote farming until all institutions of state are gutted from the inside’. Look, you’re not wrong, but I say don’t hate the player, hate the game.

At this point some literal moron will be typing out a comment along the lines of ‘well if race realism is so true, how come Aryeh Deri is a genius?’. First, no-one cares what you think and, secondly, this is super-basic.

Anyway, the second reason I like Aryeh Deri is that he’s a filthy liar. He’s constantly saying mad, baboon nonsense, but he doesn’t believe a word of it, and we have proof. What Aryeh Deri really wants to do is steal and, because he loves stealing, he wants a dynamic 1st world economy to steal from, which means he does his best to put a spanner in the works of the policies his voters demand, then tells them to vote for him because God/Maran (does it make a difference?) says to. In short, he has the decency to be a hypocrite, which, in the current circumstances, is not something to sniff at.

However, with all that said, Aryeh Deri is a criminal, an unrepentant criminal perpetually on the lookout for new crimes, the very definition of אוהב כסף לא ישבע כסף. Even in Israel, you have to keep a lid on this kind of stuff, if only for form’s sake, which is why in due course every mayor in this dumb country will be in prison. Aryeh Deri got caught multiple times, and in 2022, in order to avoid prison he agreed to resign from the Knesset and not seek office. Then the election came and gave a ‘fully Right Wing’ government its first ever majority without some pesky Kahlon figure ruining everything, and Aryeh Deri asked for his old job of Interior Minister back. Bibi agreed, but the SECULAR GODLESS AND UNDEMOCRATIC SUPREME COURT said that ‘umm, you can’t promise to leave politics to avoid prison after being convicted a second time and then literally the next ****ing year become a government minister” (I’m paraphrasing). In giving this ruling, the court leaned on the controversial ‘reasonableness doctrine’, according to which they can order the government not to do really messed up stuff based on ‘because I said so’.

Then things kicked off. For decades, various figures on the Right had been demanding and/or promising judicial reform. The first fully Right-Wing government had a number of priorities, such as securing Israel’s borders (grade A), combatting crime (grade A+), and giving Israel dignity on the global stage by teaming up with based right-wingers (grade A+++ with cherries on top). Somewhere in the mix, though, was supposed to be judicial reform. Aryeh Deri would have been the main figure trying to delay and water down proposals for reform, but instead he got on board, and the government went full blast until October 7th.

A criminal lawyer

Israel’s constitution (in the Aristotelian sense of the word) is quite irregular for a modern state. First, like only six other countries, it has no document codifying the division of powers between different branches of state (a ‘constitution’ in gaylord). Second, like five other countries, it is a parliamentary system (with an almost purely ceremonial presidential office) in which executive power is wielded by whoever can command a majority in a unicameral legislature. Third, it has one of the most pure form of proportional representation in the world.1

Left alone, this would be a recipe for pure chaos, giving each government that could cobble together 61 seats limitless power to do whatever it wanted, and then the next one would have limitless power to reverse it. In the first two and half decades of the state, this was a substantially theoretical issue because the country was ruled by the same party, with political debate being primarily a matter of internal debates between more and less hawkish descendants of Borochov. However, the government screwed up with the Yom Kippur war, and Menachem Begin cheated by breaking the gentleman’s agreement not to openly campaign for Mizrahi votes, raising the spectre of electoral anarchy-tyranny. Begin confirmed suspicions that the untrammelled democracy thing was not a great idea by causing skyrocketing inflation and launching a disastrous invasion of Lebanon and into the breach stepped Aharon Barak who basically declared that, in the absence of a written constitution, whatever he said was the constitution.

The status of the judiciary in Israel is genuinely quite unusual. The Supreme Court picks new members itself (though there has been more Knesset input since 2008). It can strike down any law it wants based on incompatibility with certain ‘basic laws’. These basic laws were passed many decades ago when the secular ashkenazim owned the country. When the government tries to pass new basic laws, the Supreme Court tells them they can’t, while reserving the right to interpret existing basic laws creatively. When that doesn’t work, it leans on the ‘reasonableness doctrine’. Large areas of law usually considered in other countries to be political questions outside of the purview of judges, are considered justiciable. In short, Aharon Barak said, ‘yes it’s very nice that you are the majority, but I don’t want to live in a third world country, so get bent’.

To sum up, you can certainly take the weird things about the Israeli Supreme Court and, by completely ignoring the context, find enough material for Anglo cringelords who can quote Antonin Scalia and blabber on about ‘judicial activism’, but the key impetus for judicial form in the real world was to remove restrictions on the ability of ethnic machine politicians to commit crimes with impunity. However, it wasn’t just that. The Right is united in its opposition to judicial over-reach, but each faction has its own reasons, which we will now review.

Bibi Netanyahu

Bibi, like Aryeh Deri, has not traditionally been in favour of judicial reform, but switched sides for personal reasons. Some background here is required, and I will pull out my old hat as the internet’s most fanatic Bibi supporter. Netanyahu’s personal politics are defined by two belief systems, which, to put it mildly, exist in a certain tension. First, he inherited from his nutcase father a grim belief system, in which history is a perpetual zero-sum struggle between national groups, and the Jews exist in perpetual enmity with everyone else. The purpose of Israel is not, as Zionists (including the right-wing ones) traditionally had it, to transcend, defeat or, at least escape from antisemitism, but simply to continue the struggle from a place of strength, to have a gap of a few hundred years in the ‘history of Holocausts’. Secondly, he’s a generic cringelord neoliberal who believes in free trade and economic development through peaceful cooperation and the division of labour. Because Zionism was a dumb idea that was implemented spectacularly well, Netanyahu’s odd combination of beliefs proved to be the perfect combination for a state that needed a way to muddle through the mess it had gotten itself into without flaming out in the search for a solution.

Bibi’s ideology allowed him to take lemons and make passable lemonade. On the one hand, the state had a whole bunch of secular ashkenazim. If it was just left up to them, it would be the highest human-capital nation in the world by a country mile, but they would just endlessly shoot themselves in the face by lurching from socialism to la-la-land peacenikism to whatever weird thing they’d alight on next. On the other hand, there were the MENA Jews who were immune to all this nonsense, but if left to themselves would just be slightly-above-average Middle Eastern country, which would not be wealthy or strong enough to win out in the numbers game against the Arab world. Bibi’s solution was basically this: the MENA Jews would vote for him, and he would implement standard Chicago-school monetarism to put the Ashkenazism to work making bank, allowing Israel to develop into an economic, technological, and military superpower. If the MENA Jews started demanding he did something they wanted in exchange for their votes, he would just say some variation of ‘look, a balloon!’ and, in the meantime, he’d just kind of bob and weave through the fraught geopolitical environment until something came along to increase his freedom of action, or, failing that, forever.

It’s important to understand that, given the context, this plan worked incredibly well. I think Israel sucks, but GDP doesn’t care what I think:

Sure, there were various issues with how sustainable this was in the long-term, but the main issue is that the secular Ashkenazim were going progressively more round the bend about Bibi crushing them in one election after another and so, they, too, decided to cheat. Technically speaking, Bibi is clearly guilty of various misdemeanours, but his voters don’t care. Most of them admire criminality. Every country has things that are technically illegal, but are de facto decriminalized because too large a proportion of the country are OK with it to make police action feasible. That’s how it is with Bibi’s various petty gifts and favours secured for his crazy wife and dickhead son. It’s obvious that picking Bibi’s indiscretions from the millions of similar offences was actually a politicization of the legal system. Likud without Bibi is just a collection of the worst and most depraved people in the world that probably couldn’t even run an election campaign without someone stealing all the money, so the Left figured if they knocked out Bibi they could win an election after trying everything else and failing. The problem is that, technically speaking, they were in the right: a crime is a crime, and ‘everyone else does it too’ isn’t a defence.

Bibi’s real attitude to the Supreme Court has traditionally been one of silent gratitude. The chief objection that principled right-wingers have about the Supreme Court, namely that it improperly removes political questions from electoral politics and makes them the domain of judges was exactly what he needed. Since his governing philosophy was ‘don’t do anything dumb’, which amounts to ‘don’t do anything’ since all the options are dumb, any state institution that tied his hands and gave him plausible deniability was a gift. Even better, when it was election time he could turn to his voters and say ‘look at these snooty European atheists who look down on you and consider you unfit to participate in government, vote for the European atheist who condescends to you. Aren’t Moroccan cookies yummy?’.

It was a true win-win, but, after exhausting all other options, Bibi realised that his only serious option for resolving his legal woes was getting the Knesset to pass a law saying ‘the Prime Minister has criminal immunity’, but the Supreme Court said it would just strike down any such law, and so Bibi decided that he was now pro judicial reform.

The Charedim

The Charedim want judicial reform for a simple reason. Since the 1952 agreement between Ben Gurion and the Chazon Ish, Charedi men have been exempt from the mandatory draft on the condition that they are studying Torah, or pretend to be studying Torah, or come from a family in which the expectation is pretending to be studying Torah. As the Charedi community has ballooned, an exemption originally given for 400 students now applies to something in the region of 70,000 young men, a number that continues to expand exponentially.

Since the late-1990s, the Supreme Court has become increasingly restless about this situation. The draft-exemption has never been codified in law, and the Court has, following repeated orders to rectify this system, gradually adopted the position that the exemption is therefore illegal. However, at the same time, the Court has also strongly indicated that any law that does formalise the current arrangement by giving a blanket exemption based on unverifiable membership of yeshivot from a particular religious community will be struck down as a violation of ‘basic laws’ guaranteeing equal treatment before the law. In other words, despite it having consistently passed the test of electoral politics, the Supreme Court wants to abolish the draft exemption by judicial means.

This would perhaps sound like a case of judicial over-reach except for one important fact: opinion polling consistently shows sky-high approval for ending the blanket Charedi draft exemption, with support never dipping below 65% and sometimes getting as high as 85%. In other words, no matter how many times the Right says that הרוב קובע, in this case of judicial over-reach, the Supreme Court is acting to promote the view of the majority against an electoral system which, for better or worse, systematically promotes committed and organised minorities.

For my part, I think the draft exemption is mostly a good thing, and certainly should not be abolished. The masses want to, but the masses are asses. No-one very much cares what I think, but it also seems obvious to me that in forcing the issue, the Left has allowed Charedim to slot their extremely unpopular stance of not contributing and being massive parasites into a broadly popular policy of ‘judicial reform’, which is dumb. If they were smart instead of dumb, they would instead suggest a law allowing an exemption to anyone willing to sign the following statement: ‘as a believer in Orthodox Judaism, I follow the opinion of all the great Rabbis that any involvement in Zionism is a grave moral and halachic offense, and therefore I cannot serve in the Zionist army’. The Charedim would feel mighty embarrassed, but they’d have no choice but to go for it, and the Right Wing alliance would collapse, making it basically impossible for them to form a government ever again.

Religious Zionists

Religious Zionists object to the Supreme Court mainly because it places obstacles in the way of settlement expansion. These guys have spent a lot (a lot) of time thinking about how to get more houses with Jews in them built in the West Bank and beyond, and they have the following objections to the Supreme Court’s treatment of the issue:

1. Well-funded foreign NGOs constantly trawl through records to show that some patch of a new settlement development is actually the private property of Abdul Mustafa, illiterate camel farmer, and bring armies of lawyers with the intention, not even of securing compensation for the supposedly aggrieved party, but simply obstructing construction. This is gaming the legal system for political purposes and the Supreme Court knows it and lets them get away with it.

2. Records of land ownership in the West Bank are a giant mess, but the Supreme Court takes ownership titles at face value.

3. Under the Palestinian Authority, it is illegal to sell land to a Jew on pain of death, and even in Israeli controlled areas and East Jerusalem, there is a constant threat of vigilante violence. This means that sales have to be conducted in secret, and it is easy for Arabs to subsequently deny they happened, but the Supreme Court makes no allowance for this.

All this is true enough, as far as I can tell, but anti-settler NGOs raise the following points, which are also true.

1. Despite the overwhelming opinion of lawyers around the world, and counsel the Israeli government itself has received, that all settlements violate international law (including conventions Israel has signed up to) under the prohibition of settling the civilian population in territories under occupation, the Supreme Court ignores this in toto and treats West Bank property disputes as just like any other area of property law.

2. Many settlements are built on land that the state originally confiscated on security grounds, and then reallocated for settlements. This is obviously cheating, but the Supreme Court looks at each act in isolation and waves it through.

3. The State of Israel recognises the right of Israelis who have claims to property in the West Bank and East Jerusalem that was expropriated in the War of Independence, but rejects outright Palestinian claims on a vastly greater amount of property they lost in Israel during the same war. The Supreme Court enforces the law on this basis even though it’s basically impossible to justify on rational grounds.

Overall, it’s pretty clear that the Supreme Court is trying to do its best to arbitrate difficult disputes in difficult circumstances, while in fact, being relatively restrained in not overriding political decisions. Regavim has a whole bunch of cases they are outraged about, and B’Tselem has a whole bunch of cases, and they are both justified depending on what set of normative assumptions you bring to the table. What the Supreme Court is really doing is just its job, namely trying to apply the concept of law to a particular sphere of human interactions. No ideological party is ever happy with the application of law as such, because the nature of the thing is to dissolve great narratives into a large number of individual disputes, some of which go one way, some of them the other. Maybe it’s silly to apply the law to a kind of cold warzone, it certainly feels pretty silly a lot of the time, but that’s kind of the point: to keep it a cold warzone. Maybe you think that you have more to gain than to lose from turning the war hot, but maybe you’re wrong.

Other stuff

To sum up, the different factions of the Right converged on opposition to the Supreme Court for reasons of their own, turning sectoral and unpopular issues into one meta-issue that commanded the support of a broad majority (and also bamboozled centrist dipsticks open to abstract argumentation). There are some other issues with the Supreme Court, but they are mostly total nonsense. One area of contention is its general stance in favour of restraining the IDF. Right-wingers are bombarded daily with social media telling them about how brave soldiers are endangered by a leftist judiciary tying their hands in service of postmodernizm.2 Again, the world is a complicated place, but at almost any level of simplification, this narrative is just a lie. IDF soldiers routinely get away with everything up to and including literal murder, even of Jews, and the longest sentence a soldier serving in the West Bank has served is three years. Probably that’s just how it has to be when you are running a military occupation with a citizen army, but there’s nothing to really complain about.

The other main area of concern is stuff like the Tiberias municipality trying to ban the sale of pork and the Supreme Court telling them to knock it off. You can see this as an intrusion on democratic politics if you want, but the reality is that Israel gives more communal autonomy than any western country, with the possible exception of the United States, and gives more financial support to sectarian institutions than any country without exception. Attrition rates in the Religious Zionist community are catastrophic not because the Supreme Court is imposing too much individual liberty on municipal institutions, but because they make a point of exposing their children to secularism as long as it is nationalist. As for justifying the Court’s rulings on these issues, one could just read verbatim any one of thousands of legal briefs the Agudas Yisroel in the United States has submitted to the Supreme Court in support of religious freedom and pluralism. Either it’s right or it’s wrong, but it can’t magically become right just because now you’re the majority.

There is, however, one issue where the Supreme Court has both over-reached and done harm, and, in a sense, it illustrates in a perfect way the real political dynamics of Israel.

Out of Africa

Until the early 2000s, Israel almost completely avoided third-world immigration. There are a number of reasons for this. Israel was a relatively poor country, with a weird language that was very far down the list of desirable destinations for aspirational citizens or poor countries. Until the Second Intifada, there was a practically unlimited supply of cheap Palestinian labour, and immigration from surrounding trashcan nations in a state of war with Israel was out of the question. However, the accelerating exclusion of Palestinians from the Israeli labour market coincided with the Eritrea-Ethiopia war and the last stages of the Sudanese Civil War. Israel started going through the same general thing experienced in western countries around the world with immigrant neighbourhoods becoming pits of crime and squalor, but it was even worse in Israel, because its immigrants came from basically the worst countries on earth, and it’s a small, crowded place with limited room to move into the suburbs.

Bibi put a stop to all this quite early on in the process, with the details worked out by Eli Yishai. As a technical matter, it was relatively easy because Israel’s borders are among the most heavily militarised on earth, but it required political manoeuvring to outwit pro-immigration lobbies on both the Left and Right. The barriers have been shut to further migration since 2012, but ever since then the Supreme Court has thrown one spanner after another into efforts to clear out those who had already come. As a result, large parts of south Tel Aviv have been uninhabitable for anyone else for over a decade. Supporters and opponents of the Eritrean government have mass brawls with batons, and there’s a whole gang ecosystem composed of second-generation Eritreans.

Here’s the thing though. Tel Aviv is the leftists’ city. In a certain way, it’s their only city (though they also have some nice suburban towns). It’s also expensive, in a crazy way. The natural thing for aspiring young leftists looking to make something out of themselves is to gentrify some relatively crummy part of Tel Aviv until they have the money to move into a better place. Unfortunately, they can’t because it’s all just Africans. In the rest of the country, you maybe see a Sudanese woman with a crucifix tattoo on her head cleaning toilets or something, but it’s really not a big deal. In other words, the members of the Supreme Court are waging class warfare against themselves.

What it’s all about

Yair Golan is a great guy. After an impressive military career, at the age of sixty-one he turned up on October 7th and rescued people from the music-festival massacre. I often look down on people without justification and it’s a bad character trait, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to look down on Golan because he’s just an objectively better person than the vast majority of mankind. He’s the only man in Israeli politics about which one could plausibly tell an ‘I cannot tell a lie’ story. If justice means anything, it’s that such a man should be honoured by society in general. In the real world, however, he can’t walk around without repulsive subhuman trash harassing him. There’s no need for a Camp of the Saints novel about what Israel might look like if feral third-world detritus made it intolerable for civilized people to live there. It’s a thing that is happening literally right now in thousands of little incidents up and down the country daily. And what does Yair Golan, literally himself a victim, have to say about this? Nothing, just endless muh Democracy and gay rights. Hopeless.

The Emden-Eybeschutz controversy tore European jewry apart and is generally considered to be the moment that the aura of Rabbinic authority cracked, leading to the haskala and, in due course, mass secularisation, Bundism, Zionism, Reform and the rest. To briefly sum up what happened, Yonasan Eybeschutz was generally regarded as the pre-eminent genius of Ashkenazi Jewry, not only a master of Talmud, halacha (then demonstrated through the discipline of pilpul) and kabbala, but also with a unique talent for drush, the repurposing of materials from across the Jewish corpus for the purpose of homiletics and exhortation. Originally a rosh yeshiva and then dayan in Prague, in 1750 he was appointed, as befitting his stature, Chief Rabbi of Hamburg-Altona-Wandsbeck, the most lucrative position in Europe. Students from around the continent flocked to his yeshiva, the continent’s most prestigious and intellectually vibrant institute of Jewish learning.

One of the few Rabbis in Europe who was considered Eybeschutz’s peer was Rav Yakov Emden, who lived in Altona and, it is widely believed, was sore about having been passed over in favour of Eybeschutz. Rav Emden was the son of Rav Tzvi Ashkenazi, the semi-successful heresy hunter we saw in the last installment. Upon inspecting some amulets that Eybeschutz had distributed for women during pregnancy, Rav Emden claimed to have discovered Sabbatean allusions and demanded that Eybeschutz be fired and placed under some kind of rabbinical ban. The rabbinate of Europe was split on the question of Eybeschutz’s guilt, but it is fair to say that the majority were more upset with Emden for his extremism and insistence on airing the Jewish world’s dirty laundry before the gentiles. Eybeschutz was protected by the King of Denmark, but the Hamburg Senate was more sympathetic to Emden’s claims. In the end, Emden never succeeded in his campaign against Eybeschutz who died in his post in 1764, and the main result was to leave a bad taste in everyone’s mouth and the credibility of the rabbinical establishment in the gutter.

Among Orthodox Jews, the consensus is that Emden was wrong and there is a moderately strong taboo against suggesting otherwise. Among academics, the consensus is that he was right as to the facts, but a nasty person because what’s wrong with a little heresy here and there? We will deal with the last part in due course, but let us first deal with the factual part of things.

The truth of the matter is that there is no legitimate debate about this question whatsoever. All the evidence is on one side, and the arguments for the other side don’t make sense and actually point to the opposite. Let us review. First, for the prosecution:

1. In 1724, an itinerant book-seller from the Sabbatean center of Żółkiew in Podolia, was arrested in Frankfurt upon suspicion of distributing heretical books to an underground Sabbatean network. Among the books discovered on his person were works attributed to ‘Jonathan of Prague’, most notably ואבוא היום אל העין, a genuinely bizarre kabbalistic cosmology full of graphic sexual imagery and startling theological assertions (we’ll get to it). There is no plausible candidate for ‘Jonathan of Prague’ other than Eybeschutz, and this was explicitly understood by the Sabbatean community of Mannheim who revered the book, the leader of which declared Eybeschutz divinely inspired. To this date, the only person apart from Eybeschutz that anyone has claimed to be the author of the tract was Jacob Frank, who was one year old at the time.

2. In recent years, the amulets identified by Emden have been inspected and it has been shown that Eibeschutz’s description of their contents that he provided to the authorities was misleading, and they confirm to Emden’s description.

3. Rav Emden was arguably the greatest sage of his generation, and, apart from ridiculous and impious slanders, no-one has been able to explain why he would put himself in physical and economic jeopardy over his Eybeschutz jihad had he not been on to something. Much less well known, however, is that Eybeschutz’s guilt was also affirmed by the only other candidates for gadol hador, namely R. Yehezkel Landau and R. Yehoshua Falk. Their differences with Emden were about how to deal with it. The Noda biYehuda favoured keeping the matter a secret because Eybeschutz was too powerful, well-entrenched and a genuine giant of Torah scholarship to be dislodged and trying to do so would only backfire on the prestige of the Torah in general. The Pnei Yehoshua took a middle position, and was willing to allow Eybeschutz to keep his position on condition of repentance, while Emden insisted that he was permanently unfit to hold any rabbinic position. It is true that many rabbis did affirm Eybeschutz’s innocence, but they all fall into the category of being (a) Sabbateans themselves (b) Eybeschutz’s students (c) nobodies or (d) all of the above. The only really great rabbi who thought Eybeschutz was innocent was Eybeschutz himself and affirming his innocence is tantamount to saying that the gedolei hador were clueless bigots.

4. Eybeschutz’s own son, Binyomin Wolf was not only a Sabbatean, but Jacob Frank’s main rival for leader of the Sabbatean movement in Europe. It is true that upstanding people can have sons going OTD, but it’s also true that the main predictor of religious identity is the one you grew up in. This is slightly more true than usual of Sabbateanism after the rabbinate started to crack down on it, which was well known to be passed down principally through families, in some cases for a surprisingly long time.

5. In the 1760s, there was a scandal when many of the students at Eybeschutz’s yeshiva were exposed as or confessed to being Sabbateans, and the yeshiva had to be closed.

6. Eybeschutz’s grandson converted to Christianity after, according to his testimony, reading a bunch of Sabbatean texts that had been passed down as family heirlooms.

7. Among Sabbateans, Eybeschutz was regarded as a fellow believer and their most esteemed intellectual. Of course, it’s possible that this was delusional on their part, like Religious Zionists today claiming the Vilna Gaon, but it’s simpler to say that they were correct.

8. On at least one documented occasion, Eybeschutz provided hospitality for Sabbatean pilgrims on their way to visit the court of Jacob Frank (specifically to pay homage to his daughter, believed to be some kind of goddess).1

Now for the defence.

1. It is argued that a great Torah scholar like Eybeschutz couldn’t have been a Sabbatean, but this is just ignorant nonsense. Accomplished talmudists who were Sabbateans include Nathan of Gaza, Raphael Mordechai Malachi, Herschel Tzoref, Yehuda heHasid, Eliyahu haCohen, Avraham Yachini, Moshe David of Podhajce, Avraham Rovigo and Elisha Shor. It’s true that Eybeschutz would still count as the greatest Sabbatean scholar, but, logically, someone would have to take that role. The assumption that Eybeschutz has passed some threshold of talmudic proficiency at which Sabbatean affiliation would be untenable is never justified or explained.

2. A related argument is that Eybeschutz couldn’t have been an antinomian because he devoted so much time to pilpul and obsessing about fine halachic distinctions. This argument is based on two complete misunderstandings. The first is that the extreme antinomianism of the Frankists was normative among all Sabbateans. In reality, many Sabbateans were known for their extreme piety and attention to halachic details. The Sabbatean movement contained a diversity of opinion on two questions: (a) whether antinomianism was something only the messiah engaged in or whether his followers needed to get in on the act too, (b) how far along the messianic process which necessitated/allowed antinomian behaviour had got. Clearly, Eybeschutz was a moderate Sabbatean, not a Frankist, though ‘moderate’ doesn’t mean quite what you might think it means, as we’ll see. The second, and even more important, point is that the antinomianism of the Sabbateans wasn’t like the ‘those laws are outdated and I don’t like them’ antinomianism of Reform today. Rather, it was based on a belief that the whole system of halacha is a set of tools for manipulating divine cosmic forces and that, as the nature of the cosmos changed with the advent of messianic redemption, then so must the appropriate tools.2 As such, a detailed knowledge of the law was a prerequisite for successful antinomianism. Some scholars have suggested using the term ‘hypernomianism’ to clear up this confusion.

3. A key part of his defence, and the one relied on most during his own lifetime, is that Eybeschutz signed multiple bans and condemnations of Sabbateans. First of all, this isn’t any kind of argument at all. We know that Sabbateans often signed such bans. However, when we look more closely, we see that actually it’s evidence in the opposite direction. Astoundingly, out of those who co-signed Eybeschutz’s original declaration against Sabbateans, all but one whose affiliation can be demonstrated were also Sabbateans. Further, his ban has all sorts of weird language that at first sight looks just rambling and irrelevant, but actually turns out to be coded Sabbatean allusions.3

So, to repeat myself, there isn’t really an argument here at all. It’s just facts vs. cope. We’re not going to stop there, though, because the crazy truth is that Eybeschutz’s Sabbateanism wasn’t even the weirdest thing about him, not even close. His aforementioned tract ואבוא היום אל העין does contain affirmations that Shabtai Tzvi was the messiah who redeemed the world, though these are relatively subtle and possible to miss if you read quickly. More to the point, however, it contains the following startling claims:

1. From the perspective of the Ein Sof, the creation of the world is a form of defecation.

2. Out of the Ein Sof proceeded a trinity composed of Atika Kadisha, the god of Israel, and the Shechinah.

3. Atika Kadisha is Esau, and thus the Christian god.

4. The god of Israel engaged in intercourse with Atika Kadisha as the feminine partner while unconscious, and their union created the Shechina, with which it mates as a male partner.

5. Atika Kadisha interacts with the world, via the Shechina, though pure kindness, but because this kindness is expressed without sexual union it destroys everything in its path. To save creation, the god of Israel then castrates him, and he becomes inert.

6. The god of Israel should now engage in ongoing sexual union with the Shechina, but, alas, he is asleep and also impotent, so therefore instead he … check the footnote if you really want to know.4

7. His son, the messiah, was created through his urine, because you can still urinate in your sleep.

8. The job of the messiah is to receive the ejaculate of Atika Kadisha so as to stop it destroying everything, which task he achieves by apostatizing. He then is to have vigorous intercourse with the Shechina, but without taking her virginity, which he does by the ahem, well … have you heard of the Silver Ring Thing?

I could go on but I think that’s really enough.5 It is not surprising, then, that the Noda BiYehuda had this to say about the work:

This book is that of a complete heretic, who does not merely cut down the saplings, but who uproots and destroys the very fundamentals of Jewish faith… I did not find such heresy even among all the religions of the Gentiles that ever existed…The tract is by one who plotted evil against Hashem and plotted wickedness and it denied the providence of the Ein Sof… He denied the entire faith of Judaism.

Now, that seems fair enough, but, remember, the Noda biYehuda’s position during the Emden controversy was, functionally speaking, pro-Eybeschutz!

In short, the Noda biYehuda believed that things were so bad that the most famous and revered scholar of the generation above him was worse than any gentile pagan, and thought there was nothing he could do but try and keep a lid on it. Looked at from a merely sociological point of view this was an absolute, unmitigated disaster. The enemy, the very worst kind of enemy, had risen to the top of Judaism’s hierarchy. However, from an internal religious point of view, it was even worse. The Torah is first and last a weapon against the perennial human urge to idolatry, but Judaism had contracted an autoimmune disease and the Torah itself had become the occasion for the most insane form of idolatry6 to ever be conceived in the history of mankind (allowing for a bit of poetic license and the Noda BiYehuda’s lack of detailed knowledge of Central American history). Becoming a great Torah scholar was, now, not only fully compatible with being a fruitcake with a brain full of sewage, the one was in some sense the condition for the other.7 Judaism, in short, was broken. Only one avenue remained to fix it.

1

Though I don’t think it can be really be considered evidence, another piece of relevant information is that Eybeschutz studied at Prossnitz in his formative years. While the head of the yeshiva there, Rabbi Meir Eisenstadt has no black marks on his orthodoxy, the town was a center of Sabbateanism, including the famous whackjob and messianic candidate Yehuda Leib. An analogy would be a student of Volozhin yeshiva becoming a Zionist.

[EDIT: since writing this, I subsequently learned that actually Meir Eisenstadt did, in fact, have a fair few black marks against his name:

Yelp. It’s always worse than you think].

Another line of inquiry is comparing ואבוא היום אל העין with Eybeschutz’s collection of kabbalistic writings published as שם עולם. In general, there are many point of commonality, with differences being explicable in terms of the difference audience for the two works, but also Eybeschutz’s views developing as he got older. However, this awaits proper study.

3

4

I disagree. The 1940s were a rough time for humanity. A lot of regrettable things happened and we should get over them and move on. Most people have, and it’s not that bad. In these parts, the Palestinians gave as good as they got, it’s just that they weren’t very good. You win some, you lose some and, in truth, what did they really lose? Someone who agrees with me is Salah Khalil Faisal Na’ameh. He was born in Dir al-Assad, but he decided that he could do better than gang feuds and ISIS, so he moved to Be’er Sheva where he works for the District Attorney’s office. A few weeks ago, one Friday evening, he was sitting on the balcony with friends listening to music. I imagine he was listening too loud, and Arab music is typically pretty annoying, prone to excessive repetition and rather crude melodies. On the other hand, this is Israel, so glass houses and all that. Anyway, someone took offense, as is their right, and perhaps their duty, and the police showed up. However, they showed up without a warrant so he told them to leave. Lawyers can be annoying that way. The police showed up again later the same evening. They didn’t have a warrant this time either, but they did have balaclavas on and they forced their way in, before dragging Salah to their car. This is what Salah looked like after:

Here’s my take: this whole new Jew thing, it’s not working out. Yes, I know you have a lot of nice words about how returning the Jew to his ancestral soil would unleash his native powers anew and allow him to round off the over-developed virtues of exile with those of a settled and free people. Words are nice, and useful too. I’m writing words right now, but facts are more useful. The results of the experiment are in, and I’m afraid to say they suck. It turns out that you kind of have to put some actual thought into building a new Hebrew culture. You can’t just take people from all over the world, put them into a war zone, funnel them through a massive hazing ritual posing as an education system, and allow criminals and lunatics to fill their head with insane, degenerate nonsense and unhinged racial narcissism moulded into a gruesome pastiche of a religion and just hope for the best. Well, you can, because that’s what they did, but you end up here. The best we can say is that, for now, there’s still enough of the old Jew - and some obsolete beta versions of the new Jew - around to keep it all from spinning out of control.

That’s what I think, but not everyone agrees. Once or twice, it has been suggested that my sentiments arise not from reasonable interpretation of the facts, but rather from a more fundamental fact, namely that I am gay, a big faggy gay liberal. If I wasn’t gay, I would know that this is all just what humans do: they fight over land, and if they win, they fight over some more land, until they are a big empire. That’s what we’re here to do, and we’re going to do it. From the river to the sea. And we’re not talking about that river anymore.

OK, so let’s roll with it. Who can we learn from who knew how to build a large empire that lasted for more than a generation or two? Certainly no-one from our own history. So let’s take Julius Caesar, who conquered Gaul in 8 glorious years from 58 to 50 BC. Did the bald lecher commit some atrocities in the process? Wooh-boy did he commit some atrocities. After the siege of Avaricum, he had almost the whole population - 40,000 according to his estimate - put to death. When the old and sick fled Alesia, he starved them to death. Against the Eburones, he embarked on a campaign of extermination, burning everything in sight, and hunting down fleeing survivors. So, based, right?

And, sure enough, a few hundred years later there were no Gauls anymore. No druids, no names ending in x, no whatever else Gaulic culture consisted of. Everyone was Roman now. Job done. Except there’s a catch. Everyone living in Gaul circa 200 CE was a Roman, but they weren’t descended from Romans. They were descended from Gauls. It’s probable that Caesar was exaggerating about how many based points he had accrued through all the killing; people were prone to that. But even if he wasn’t, it wouldn’t have made all that much difference. Back in those days, population was limited by the carrying capacity of the soil. If you killed a bunch of people, as happened not infrequently, you just had to wait a bit and those who remained would breed a bunch more.

The point we’ve been working our way round to [wait, this is 1,000 words already before I even got to the topic? Oh, yeah that will make a neat topical intro, idiot] is that if you want to be all based and historical about it, just massacring everyone and bringing in your own people isn’t how you build an empire. It’s a strong move, one can’t really gainsay that, but it’s also kind of a bitch move. It’s what really primitive peoples do if they figure out how to build a new kind of chariot, or whatever the Indo-European secret sauce turns out to have been, and suddenly become militarily unstoppable without knowing what to do with it. It’s also what old empires gone squalid and senile do because they just can’t help themselves. But proper empires in their period of expansion and greatness don’t do that. Instead, they conquer and say ‘you’re not x anymore, you’re us’, and it happens. That’s why Mustafa from Nablus is called Mustafa, not Theophilus or some poof name like that.

So, learning from the proud conquerors of history, the solution to the Palestinian problem isn’t to expel them so they can sit at the border attacking you, until you conquer and expel them again in a pattern of infinite regress like a muppet. And it isn’t to murder them all like a monster. It’s to convert them. Though, as I said, the Jewish people have never been an empire, we did have a short period as a middle-rank regional power under the Hasmoneans, and that’s how it was achieved. The way this happened varied from conquered place to conquered place. The Idumeans, at any rate some of them, were forcibly converted on pain of expulsion. The Galileans were converted mostly by a process of acculturation promoted by settlers from Judea. The Itureans, well, if the Ancient Historians figure it out, they’ll let us know. In any case, the point is that expansion through acculturation worked pretty well until dynastic feuds brought the Romans in.

So, the genuinely based thing to do is to convert the Palestinians. However, you instantly sense that there is something absurd about this, and you are correct. One obstacle to such a programme is that converting to Judaism doesn’t protect you from being murdered by a retarded Likudnik soldier, but that’s not the real problem. It’s just very implausible that millions of people are going to abandon Islam for Judaism. Sunni Islam is a religion of 1.8 billion people. Its median level of human capital is, to put it mildly, not very good, but no matter how left-shifted your bell curve, quantity ends up having a quality all of its own. Thus Sunni Islam has thousands of universities and madrassas churning out clerics and influencers to comfort and fire up the people. If there was ever a serious campaign to convert the Palestinians, Judaism would just get overwhelmed with proofs for tahrif and reprints of Ibn Hazm. With all due respect to Aish haTorah, the Kuzari argument is not going to cut it. Converting the Israeli Druze to a pozzed version of Druzism in which Druze and Jews are best buddies going back to Jethro was feasible, but anything more ambitious than that is not going to fly unless we go to Africa and conquer some illiterate animists.

However, there is no need to despair because history provides an equally based and red-pilled option for practitioners of an inferior religion (talking in strictly sociological and material terms) who use their martial prowess to overwhelm older powers gone flabby. Over in Europe, the Visigoths did it, the Franks did it, the Ostrogoths did it. It’s a tried and true strategy, and also one very indigenous to our region: the Seljuks did it, the Ottomans did it, the Mughals did it too. You can just do things. Specifically, you can just convert to Islam. Job done.

By rights I should just end the article there with an epic mic-drop. Unfortunately, some of my readers, specifically the bums who don’t pay, aren’t smart, so I’m going to spell out for you how this is the obvious choice to advance the interests of Israeli militarism, and anyone who opposes it is ipso facto a big dummy pinko:

1. Precisely the most radical elements of the Palestinian national movement can now be leveraged to exterminate what’s left. As our brothers in ISIS have pointed out many a time, Arab nationalism is absolute heresy full of Christians and atheists and literally even Jews and now this motley crew of kuffar are trying to incite good Muslims against their fellow faithful members of the umma. Off with their heads!

2. As hasbara activists tell us all the time, nobody cares when Muslims kill other Muslims, and, guess what, now it’s gonna be Muslims killing Muslims - a whole lot of Muslims - until we get our land and security. No doubt, some of them will object, specifically all the ones we are going to kill, but the umma at large will be split between the ones on their side and the ones on our side, leading to the same kind of general malaise and irrelevancy that they exhibited during the Syrian Civil War.

3. The Israeli military is pretty good in many ways, but it is fatally hobbled by its extreme aversion to military casualties, something that is quite normal for gay liberal democracies, but is literally unheard of for expansionist military states. This gives the IDF a strangely comic, somewhat grotesque character, half Genghis Khan and half Dutch homosexual, with the result that we used about 100,000 tons of explosives in an area slightly larger than Dresden, and still didn’t really win. Fortunately, Islam is famously pro-martyrdom, so instead of wasting tens of thousands of dollars calling in an air strike every time Yossi thinks there’s a fighter in an apartment block, we are going to start sending thousands of troops into tunnels to achieve heroic deaths. With this faggy pikuach nefesh nonsense out of the way, the technological and manpower superiority of the IDF over the rest of the region can finally be used to full effect.

4. As we noted above, there are more than a billion Muslims in this poor planet of ours, and most of them are contiguous, creating an immense natural block which a strong military power can lead. (Un)fortunately, the Muslim countries, that presently exist suffer from chronic human capital issues and political dysfunction, leaving this empire in waiting rudderless and constantly beset by completely inane conflicts. As a Jewish state, Israel is in literally the stupidest place it could possibly be, but the Most Muslim Kingdom of Israel with an extra 6 million ex-Palestinians (just for a start) will be perfectly positioned for regional dominance. Turkey is going to get BTFOd.

5. Currently, a lot of powerful countries like China keep their relations with Israel to a minimum, because even if Israel was everything the hasbarists say it is, it would still make more sense to take the side of the Muslim world against it. Hence Israel is crippled by having only one possible superpower patron whose political system it can manipulate, so far, by appealing to diaspora Jews and miscellaneous weird Christians. However, the new Muslim Kingdom of Israel has no natural enemies and so can freely manoeuvre between different alliances to get the best deal.

6. Speaking of which, the best pitch we have for America right now was formulated by Yoram Hazony, namely that we act as the regional policeman/pitbull so America can retrench and focus on its own problems and/or preparing for World War 3 with China. The problem with this analysis is that it has no connection with reality whatsoever because the region’s countries won’t accept us as umpires in their disputes. We had to sit out both Gulf Wars, and even taking on the insane heretic state of Iran is pushing it. However, as an orthodox Sunni state with mild leanings towards fundamentalism, we can actually do this for real.

7. Now the country is Muslim, it can no longer get limitlessly cucked by Charedim exploiting the confused Israeli relationship with its Jewish heritage, and so the ultra-Orthodox (assuming they don’t get on the Muslim train with the rest of the country) will have to start flipping houses and trading diamonds like their diaspora cousins or get lost.

Even the slow kids at the back can now see that this is a no-brainer if you want to be the dominant regional, and one day maybe even global, power. Given that it’s so, why not do it? Really, why not?

I can only think of one valid objection, namely that it would be bad for Judaism. Now, to be perfectly frank, with how things are going with religion in Israel, I’m not 100% sure even that’s true, but let’s say it is and, as common sense would have it, the loss of millions of Jews and all the religious infrastructure they presently possess to another religion would be bad for our one. Fine, what that means is that the interests of the Jewish religion and the interests of the Israeli state are two different things. Maybe they overlap, maybe they don’t. It can’t be assumed until you check. If you do check, then often you’ll find that an idea that might be good for the state of Israel given its geopolitical predicament might be a terrible idea for Judaism or vice versa. To close off, we’ll look at two such ideas, one from the Left and one from the Right and see why, though they have undeniable benefits to the Israeli state, they are clearly not in the interests of the Jewish religion.

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Nehemya Hayyun was born sometime around 1650 in Ottoman Bosnia, which had been settled by exiles from the Spanish expulsion and become a relatively small, but moderately distinguished center of Sephardic culture, a status it retained until the 1940s when the Groyper state of Croatia largely liquidated the population in conjunction with their Nazi backers. He studied in Hebron, one of the major Sabbatean centers, and was appointed as Rabbi in what is now Skopje (another Jewish community created by Sephardi refugees to the Ottoman empire). He seems to have found small-town Rabbi-ing tedious, and became a travelling holy-man hustler, eventually turning up in Izmir, once the capital of Shabtai Tzvi’s clown-kingdom, and getting some of kind of rabbinical post while publishing his fruity theological treatises, to which we shall shortly return. The rabbinate of Izmir, however, cognizant of their embarrassment a half century prior, were not especially tolerant of this kind of stuff. Hayyun left for Jerusalem, where Yehuda heHassid (not that one, the other one) had established a Sabbatean community in the first conscious aliyah movement. However, the leaders of the Jerusalem rabbinate, also an anti-Sabbatean stronghold even from the beginning, were forewarned by their Izmir colleagues and excommunicated him before his arrival.

Hayyun, then, did something a little bit unusual and decided to leave Sephardim behind and try his luck in the barbarous lands of the North. He started in Prague, where the community rabbi Naphtali Cohen, learned in both talmud and kabbala, took a shine to him and gave his book approbation (without, according to his subsequent testimony, having read it). He travelled around Jewish communities of central Europe, and succeeded in finding a publisher in Berlin. In addition to publishing, he also made money through ‘practical kabbala’ i.e. magic, selling amulets, miraculous remedies and the like. Hayyun did quite well for himself, but he enjoyed an expensive lifestyle, so he decided to go to Amsterdam to make some real bucks.

The Jewish community of Amsterdam was, like Hayyun’s home, founded by Sephardim, but of a rather different type. The Jews of the city had not come in 1492, when the choice had been expulsion or conversion, but around a hundred years later, from families that had become Christians only to find themselves subject to persecution from the Inquisition for maintaining their Judaism in secret, sometimes accurately and sometimes not. Amsterdam was the global center of finance and, after a fashion, of religious and civic liberty and, as such, the Jewish community there had both a lot of money, and a lot of weirdos. Hayyun was a weirdo who liked money, so he thought it a perfect fit. He arrived in 1713.

Following the Chmielnicki massacres, Amsterdam had also acquired an Ashkenazi community originally composed of refugees, which, unusually for the times, established independent institutions according to their own customs instead of folding into the Sephardi community. The Rabbi of the Amsterdam Ashkenazim was Hacham Tzvi Ashkenazi, an interesting and well-connected figure who has been the subject of recent, and well-merited, scholarly attention. Hacham Tzvi had studied in the Ottoman Balkans, hence his Sephardi title of Hacham, and thought he recognised Hayyun as a Sabbatean troublemaker, but then retracted the allegation. Then it all kicked off.

Hayyun sought the approval of the Rabbi of the Sephardi community, a certain Shlomo Ayllon, himself a probable Sabbatean, to publish his books. Ayllon formed a committee to make a decision, some members of which showed copies of the books to Rabbi Moshe Hagiz, son of the great Jerusalem kabbalist and OG anti-Sabbatean Yaakov Hagiz we saw earlier, and a major legend in his own right.1 Hagiz had arrived in Amsterdam a year or so prior and become good friends with Hacham Tzvi. He showed Tzvi the books, and it was obvious to both of them that they were Sabbatean and heretical. Tzvi went to war over it, but this completely backfired. The committee unanimously approved Hayyun’s books as containing nothing contrary to the Jewish religion and proceeded to launch a campaign against Tzvi and Hagiz, both of whom were repeatedly attacked by arsim in the street, as well as pressurising the notables of the Ashkenazi community to terminate Tzvi’s contract. Eventually, the pair had to leave town, but they did manage to convince a number of Rabbis around Europe that Hayyun was treif, and in due course, the Amsterdam rabbinate decided it was better for their reputation if Hayyun left, which he did, returning to his life of itinerant grifting, though with more obstacles than he had previously faced.

The story of Hayyun is important for a number of reasons. First of all, it marks the shifting of the center of the Sabbatean movement from the Sephardim to the Ashkenazim. Despite Natan of Gaza himself being a white LARPer, the core of the Sabbatean movement had always been Sephardi, which was natural, if not inevitable, because Sabbateanism is Zoharism, and Zoharism is the ideology of degenerate Spanish Jewry which it developed to reconcile its grandiose self-image to the objective circumstances of its decline, and then justify it bullying the Jews of the Mediterranean and Levant into submission after its dispersion. Ashkenazim, like more or less all Jewry, got caught up in the general excitement of 1665-66, but they were peripheral to the movement as an active force, and relatively unaware of the specifics of the lunacy involved. When Shabtai Tzvi donned the turban, the cholent eaters mostly lost interest.

However, there were reasons for Sabbateanism to eventually make the jump to Central and Eastern Europe. Ashkenazim lack the majestic past of the Sephardim, but in other respects they are similar only more so: smarter, more neurotic, accomplished, but also a bit ‘off’. Shabtai Tzvi could only have been a Sephardi, but one rather suspects that Jacob Frank could only have been Ashkenazi. Always punching above their weight, Ashkenazim had been emerging as the clear center of gravity for Rabbinic scholarship before the Chmielnicki massacres, and so, after a generation or so to recover demographically, it was not surprising that they were once again becoming dominant. Sabbateanism was where all the intellectual energy in Judaism was concentrated, so they would by nature come to dominate it. Further, and as is generally the case, the Sephardi world, because it was where Sabbateanism was spawned, also had many more antibodies to it. The monstrous ease with which Hayyun got European Rabbis to sign off on his writings until he encountered Hacham Tzvi is a textbook case of how ideas that exist in some kind of equilibrium where they are birthed can spread like wildfire elsewhere.

This brings us to the second, and I think most important, lesson of the controversy. Hayyun was really obviously a Sabbatean and this is not one of those things that is only obvious in retrospect. His writings themselves are demonstrative enough: he believed in a triune god, the three parts of which were the hidden god, the king-messiah, and the shechina, with all sorts of details of the second part’s tribulations and sufferings that were clearly based on the life of Shabtai Tzvi. However, at a more basic level, his main book Oz Lelohim is a commentary on the short tract Raza DeMeheimnuta, cherished among Sabbateans as the only work authored by the messiah himself, in which he spilled the beans about the knowledge of the true God which it was his task to reveal (albeit not enough that it didn’t require further commentary). In fact, this was almost certainly not so. In reality, the movement’s no.2 theologian and total fruitcake, Cardoso, had authored it himself and passed it off as the work of the big guy to win an intra-Sabbatean debate. The pious fraud, however, was so successful that it even fooled Gershom Scholem.

So, given that, what was the controversy surrounding the book even about? Well, really, it wasn’t about anything at all. Hayyun’s accusers had the fairly simple argument that his book contained completely outlandish heresy and was literally an attempt to explicate Shabtai Tzvi’s own teachings, and his defenders had just random nonsense. ‘Why are you hounding fellow Jews?’; ‘yes that might sound a bit heretical, but have you spent 7 million years learning kabbalah? If not you can’t really comment’; ‘what’s the harm if some people find it inspiring?; ‘he’s not really saying a man is God, he’s saying, like, some really deep stuff’; ‘what’s your problem anyway, are you some kind of rationalist?’. You may know this drill. The key point is that the burden of proof for establishing Sabbatean guilt was set not only unreasonably high, but absurdly, preposterously high. This is essential background when we look at a more famous debate about a ‘suspected’ Sabbatean in the next installment.

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This series started off, like all other things on this blog, in a burst of energy prompted by someone being wrong on the internet. It continued because I rashly committed to finishing it. Nevertheless, I think it is by far the most important thing I have written. It do be that way sometimes.

Part 1. Introduction and Spoiler

Part 2. The culmination of the Kabbalah revolution.

Part 3. Sabbateanism is Zoharism

Part 4. The Spread of Zoharism in Eastern Europe

Part 5. Sabbateanism after the apostacy

Part 6. The Hayyun controversy

Part 7. The Eybeschutz controversy

Part 8. Rav Emden and the Zohar

Part 9. Anti-Sabbatean kabbala in MENA

Part 10. The origins of Hassidic Judaism.

Moo. You should have stuck with moo.

Iran has a much larger population than Israel. If Iran was in a land war with Israel, with armies facing off against each other, that factor would likely be determinative. If Israel was somehow to emerge from the battlefield nevertheless victorious, there would be something to explain. As Operation Barbarossa might indicate, the answer would not necessarily be special divine favour, but it would be at least one of the candidates. There would be something to discuss. Here, though, there is nothing to discuss because there is no land war. In a war fought by air, population is relevant only as a proxy for the state’s ability to raise resources, but you don’t need to use a proxy because you can just look at it directly.

There are two ways of measuring GDP, nominal and purchasing power adjusted (PPP). When it comes to a war of this sort, in which the tools of battle have to be bought on the global market, nominal GDP is the relevant figure. Iran’s is $450 billion and Israel’s is $550 billion. So, right off the bat, Israel has the larger economy and is thus at an advantage.

However, this drastically understates Israel’s advantage, because the contest is substantially a contest of brains. Who can design the best tech? Who can figure out the enemy’s strategy? Who can infiltrate the other’s security apparatus? To really contribute to this, you probably need to have an IQ of 130 or above. Iran has an average IQ of 84, so using a standard bell curve model, we would expect there to be about 99,000 130+ Iranians for the state to work with. If we do the same sum for Israel, using an average IQ of 95, we get about 98,000, but clearly this is wrong. Israel contains multiple different populations with their own curve. If we estimate that 30% of the population is Ashkenazi and they have an average of 112, then we get 345,000 people above 130, more than 3.5 times Iran, and with a smaller overall population, leaving more of them surplus to work in the military.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because Iran has been a victim of a five-decade brain drain since the “Islamic” revolution. A conservative estimate is that about half of the smartest fraction have left, so Israel’s real IQ advantage is probably closer to 6.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because despite what a hasbara cretin may have told you about symbolic votes in the UN or whatever, while Israel has received more than 150 billion dollars from the US over the years, Iran is subject to sanctions from the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Nations Security Council, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the G7 (through the FATF). Thus, Iran relied until this war on equipment they inherited from the Shah, which in its age was pretty nifty, but now is only a few steps less obsolete than muskets, and got blown up.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because, when Israel went to war, it did so not only with all of the above advantages, but alongside the most powerful military in the history of the world.

So, given all that, how did the war go? OK. There were some definite tactical successes for Israel, but then it kind of petered out as we reached the limits of what you can do from the sky. Strategically, it’s still kind of up in the air, but Iran came out of it a lot stronger than one would have thought in the first few days, so maybe they are the objects of divine favour. That’s ridiculous, of course, because they are grave worshippers who put the Koran on their head like clowns. Probably, it just comes down to a combination of defender’s advantage, the ruthlessness of the IRGC, and the ineptitude of Israel’s and Trump’s diplomacy. Reflect on the former point a little, though, because we are coming back to it.

Israel has had many military successes over the years. The 1948 war went pretty well. 1967 went really well. The most recent war against Hizballah went pretty well too, even if we cucked out before the end because Bibi cut a deal concerning his outstanding warrants. As I’ve written before, in as much as it’s possible to find a common factor in Israel’s successes, it’s when the Left-Wing secular establishment/deep state gets to run things themselves without interference.

Israel’s military golden age was achieved at precisely the time that the hilonim ran things with no-one else getting a say. If the baboons got too uppity, the Left just literally murdered them. Ever since Begin cheated in the elections by directly appealing to people incompetent to vote, it’s gotten gradually worse. For a religious Jew, obviously, there is a certain mystery involved in all this. You can have your answers, but you’d be better off having mine. However, regardless of your personal brand of cope, it doesn’t change the facts. With the Left you win, with the Right you lose, and not in a beautiful loser way either, you just commit a bunch of atrocities for nothing.

To attribute your successes and triumphs to God rather than your strength and the might of your hand is an act of piety. The Torah demands it of you. However, to ascribe other people’s success and triumphs to your special favour in the eyes of God isn’t modesty at all. It’s thinly disguised pride. Sure I didn’t fly the plane, or pay for the plane, or provide the intelligence for the plane, or, in fact, do anything at all, but it is not the wicked leftists who did all these things that should take the credit. No, they should be driven from the country to make it stronger. Instead it is I who am responsible, for I, err, davened.

This can be seen most clearly when Charedim do it. Here, for example, is the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo, a man who has made it his life’s mission to demonstrate in squirm-inducing detail that, probably, the Rambam was actually right about the consequences of taking money for learning Torah, declaring that it was really the Charedim who freed the hostages.

None of the Charedim who read this blog will even try to defend this because it’s so laughable and revolting. He’s high off his own supply, and no-one else is getting high off it. However, while it’s self-evidently absurd to claim that Charedim are making incalculable contributions to the war, it’s also, after only a very little reflection, self-evident that it’s no less absurd to claim that anyone religious had anything much to do with the successes against Iran. The decent thing for a man of the Right to do would be to pop into his car, go wherever it is the posh hilonim live, find a random one and say ‘thankyou’ and, maybe even apologise for trying so hard to turn the mediocre country they built into a third-world criminal slum. It’s certainly true that Religious Zionists made outsized contributions to the Gaza war and they can attribute their successes there, such as they are, to God all they want, but the bits that went well … sorry, you didn’t build that, you just got in the way.1

That’s the ranting portion of the article over. Jk/ there is no other part of the article. However, I’ve also been thinking about something else recently. I’ve argued before that the concept of antisemitism as understood by most Jews directly contradicts the Jewish idea of providence. If the gentiles hate you, you are supposed to see it as a sign of divine displeasure, but, instead, you see it as the result of some mystery virus that infects them for no reason at all, and definitely, never ever, because of any flaws on your own part. That’s antisemitic! This is so obvious, that you have to wonder why I had to point it out, but there’s something more obvious.

Every Jew reads at least twice a day that if the children of Israel will do what they are told, then there will be rain, and if they don’t there won’t. Apart from the fact that it was promised to the Patriarchs (which only pushes the question back), it is the only time the Torah explains why the children of Israel were given this land and not some other. It is here, as opposed to a place where water comes via river or canal, that you will be acutely conscious of your reliance on the divine will. Well, that’s funny because two things happened recently. First of all, following October 7th, there was a massive religious revival in Israel, which you can read about here, here, here, here, here, here and a whole bunch of other places. Then there was a drought.

The rainy season 2024-25 was very bad, the worst in over 100 years in the western Galilee. The first half of the 2025-26 rainy season was also shaping up to be pretty bad, but then the second half was good and, overall, it came out pretty average, not enough to repair the environmental damage of the previous year, but enough to avert total catastrophe:

So, the year-and-a-half–drought was kind of a warning shot, but a warning shot for what? Didn’t we do all the things God wants us to do; shouldn’t we be getting some kind of reward?

I can think of two explanations. The first is to look at the nature of the religious revival, which occurred overwhelmingly through either (a) Chabad, (b) Breslev or (c) miscellaneous Sephardi miracle-worker social influencers or, to sum up in a word, Zoharism. Zoharism has different varieties, but the features common to all branches are that (a) regular monotheism is crusty and stale (b) Jewish ritual is really an elaborate system of theurgy (c) God has gendered aspects and when you do your rituals they, erm, well, maybe children read this blog so we can’t be too graphic. While not strictly essential to Zoharism, most contemporary variants also have (d) righteous holy men, identifiable principally by looking weird, who act as conduits of divine blessing because they are, well not exactly God, but, you know, not not God either. Most of these holy men are venal in an astoundingly crude kind of way, and rather a lot of them are literally criminals. Indeed, we might add that (e) outright, open contempt for the idea that bribery and fraud are actually wrong is another prevalent feature of Israeli Zoharism. Finally, we also have to mention the mysterious element of (f) Kookism, which is the belief that the collective soul of the Jewish people is even more not not God than the tzaddikim, which means that whatever the Jewish people do is ipso facto correct.

In short, Zoharism is precisely, in every single detail, the religion propagandized against throughout the prophets from beginning to end. So maybe that’s just it. Maybe they meant what they said? ‘I hate, I despise your festivals’. Of course, the Zoharists have their explanations. Everything means the opposite of what it says. When it says don’t worship Asherah it means this; when it says God created the heavens and the earth, it means this; when it says the ‘Hashem is one’ it means this. But maybe not. What if it does actually mean what it says?’. ‘When you stretch out your palms, I will hide my eyes from you, when you increase prayer, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood’.2

But I’m kind of sounding like some sort of ISIS maniac now, so let’s flip the script and suggest option number 2. A lot of people say we did a genocide in Gaza. I think this is silly hyperbole. It was grim, there were war crimes, but no genocide. Perhaps we would have done one if people weren’t watching (Turkish style, not German), but people were watching, so it’s moot. However, what is for sure is that a lot of people over here kept shouting about how we should do a genocide, and genocide is good, and you’re Erev Rav if you don’t want to do a genocide, and this is the age of the internet, so the goyim are waking up.3

You know my opinions. I am a contemptible bugman and, as such, I think we as a species did a good thing in inventing the civilian-combatant distinction and that taming war is a real, and fragile, achievement we should hang on to, not least because we know what happens when we don’t. Say I’m wrong, though, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with killing tens of thousands of children. It’s still the case that everyone thinks it’s wrong and is sickened when you loudly declare your desire to do it. The Talmud tells us that a scholar who walks around with a stain on his shirt deserves death because he brings the Torah into disrepute. Has the Torah ever been brought more into disrepute than it is today by one baboon ‘Rabbi’ after another loudly shouting ‘Hey Al Jazeera come and clip me saying insane, clownish, murderous nonsense and show it to a billion people’ over and over again for two years?4

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the real reason God was angry is because we didn’t kill enough people, or maybe because we didn’t do enough theurgy, or we didn’t give enough money to convicted felons to perform penances on our behalf. Let’s look at some representative examples of Israeli religious figures grappling with the question of why their apparently great successes in promoting religious observance and faith met with what is apparently the Torah’s paradigmatic sign of divine displeasure.

Oh, you can’t because they don’t exist. It never occurred to any of these people to grapple with the question, because it never occurred to any of them to do anything other than look at current events so as to congratulate themselves on the achievements of others, to cite virtues and accomplishments they neither have nor even aspire to have to prove that they are specially loved by the Creator of the Universe. And that’s my real point. To be honest, ISIS or not, I actually believe in my explanations, but you don’t have to. The take home message is simply this: it’s all just bollocks. You don’t have to take it seriously at all. They don’t bother to formulate their ideas in such a way that they could persuade anyone interested in thinking them through, so you don’t have to treat them as if they do. The only proper response is mockery, contempt, disgust.

שִׁמְעוּ־נָא זֹאת רָאשֵׁי בֵּית יַעֲקֹב וּקְצִינֵי בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל הַמְתַעֲבִים מִשְׁפָּט וְאֵת כׇּל־הַיְשָׁרָה יְעַקֵּשׁוּ׃

בֹּנֶה צִיּוֹן בְּדָמִים וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם בְּעַוְלָה׃

רָאשֶׁיהָ  בְּשֹׁחַד יִשְׁפֹּטוּ וְכֹהֲנֶיהָ בִּמְחִיר יוֹרוּ וּנְבִיאֶיהָ בְּכֶסֶף יִקְסֹמוּ וְעַל־יְהֹוָה יִשָּׁעֵנוּ לֵאמֹר הֲלוֹא יְהֹוָה בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ לֹא־תָבוֹא עָלֵינוּ רָעָה׃

לָכֵן בִּגְלַלְכֶם צִיּוֹן שָׂדֶה תֵחָרֵשׁ וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם עִיִּין תִּהְיֶה וְהַר הַבַּיִת לְבָמוֹת יָעַר׃

That’s it. Now have a coffee or something. I probably should.

There were two main responses among the Jewish intellectual classes who had accepted Zoharism as the theological core of Judaism (those who did not, though doubtless meriting great rewards in the World to Come, were too marginal to mention). The first response, which we shall title ‘orthodox’ was to pretend as hard as they could that it never happened. Yes, obviously, there was a man called Shabtai Tzvi who had proclaimed himself the messiah, but his followers had been a minority, mostly drawn from the ignorant rabble, and even those had been hoodwinked by a calculated conspiracy on the part of Tzvi and his inner circle of evildoers. Huge numbers of records demonstrating the breadth and intensity of the messianic fervour were eradicated. If you could get away with denying that you had been involved, that was best; if you were - say - literally Shabtai Tzvi’s Chief Rabbi in Izmir, as was the author of Kenesset haGedolah, a central text until today in the Sephardi halachic tradition, and widely cited more broadly as the source of the ‘correct’ function of kabbalah in halachic casuistry, then you apologised, excused yourself on the grounds that you meant well, and moved on.

The orthodox answer to the problem of how Zoharism had promised a messiah and came up with a pup was a shrug. Maybe the real messiah would come soon, or maybe by picking the wrong guy the Jews had delayed the promised time by another hundred or so years. In order to deal with the problem of how Zoharism had caused such as catastrophe, earlier traditions of esotericism were called upon, and a wave of decrees was made limiting kabbalistic study to those over 40 who were first thoroughly versed in Talmud. Zoharism was still the theological core of Judaism, but its contents were to be restricted somewhat lest they be again misunderstood. This wasn’t very intellectually satisfying, but the rough edges were smoothed over by vitriol aimed at Shabtai Tzvi and his remaining followers who were depicted as consciously malign agents who had knowingly perverted the pure kabbalistic doctrine. If you asked too persistently where the line was between interpretation and perversion, then that looked suspiciously like you might sympathise with them. So don’t do that. Eat your kugel.

Anti-Sabbateanism was, therefore, not so much a set of ideas as a mixture of evasion and irritable mental gestures. Like post-war American conservatism, it sought to re-arrange a cluster of concepts that clearly and ineluctably led precisely to the results that it was organised to oppose. In as much as it worked, it was because ideas aren’t everything. Jews wanted their religion to not be destroyed, so they said whatever they needed to say. It was not for a full century that anyone attempted to attack Sabbatean doctrines in a fundamental and principled way. We will get to that in due course, but in the meantime the Sabbateans, without doubt the majority of intellectually productive Jewry, had a more interesting task.

Antinomianism

Because he was the first to take it seriously, Gershom Scholem’s model of Sabbateanism is the starting point of discussion. According to him, Sabbateanism evolved under two pressures. The first was the refusal of some significant section of Jewry to admit that their inner experience of redemption had been in vain, and the second was the shock of an apostate messiah. Under such conditions, Tzvi’s remaining believers were forced into extrapolating from his scandalous act a doctrine that their messiah had come to redeem them from the law itself, drawing them towards a doctrine of ‘redemption through sin’ a term invented by Scholem himself, not used even by the most extremist antinomian Sabbatean sects. The focus on antinomianism as the characteristic feature of Sabbateanism was central to Scholem’s understanding of it as the wellspring of Jewish Reform movements and, ultimately, Zionism, and has also been accepted by the Orthodox who find in it an excuse to absolve a number of 18th century rabbinical figures of Sabbatean guilt. Scholem’s narrative, however, is sufficiently misleading that, while containing much truth, at a certain level of simplification, it is necessary to declare it false.

The first reason for this, which remarkably enough has barely been commented on, is that Shabtai Tzvi’s conversion to Islam was not in fact antinomian. Five-hundred years prior, the Almohads, a renegade Berber dynasty whose rebellion against the corruptions and compromises of the Abbasids had led them to jettison much of normative Sunnism in pursuit of purifying it, abolished dhimmi protections for people of the book and demanded Jews and Christians convert on pain of death. Whether the Jews of the Maghreb and Andalus who had fallen under their rule could save their lives by saying the shahada, or were rather required to accept execution was extensively discussed by the decisors of the time. The accepted view was that of Maimonides, namely that Islam is not Avodah Zarah, and that, as such, it was permitted (indeed, obligatory) to perform conversion for the purpose of saving a Jewish life. Thus, Shabtai Tzvi, in fact, did the correct thing according to Jewish law, all the more so since, had he refused, many other Jews would certainly have been killed by the Ottomans in punishment for his farcical quasi-rebellion.

What was scandalous about Tzvi’s conversion was that he told his followers that, despite being humiliated, he was still the messiah and his conversion was part of some messsianic plan. He absolutely did not tell his followers the plan was to redeem the Jewish people through sin; in fact, he didn’t tell them anything much, partly because his modus operandi was being a massive weirdo and dropping hints instead of ever just saying something clearly, and partly because he himself wasn’t clear what the plan was. The idea that he had to descend into the realm of darkness to liberate sparks still trapped there was Nathan’s idea, and is anyway not the same thing as saying that the sin of conversion itself effected this liberation. However, the other major theologian of Sabbateanism, Abraham Cardoso, interpreted it as Tzvi taking on the punishment of exile on behalf of the Jewish people as a whole, in a way roughly analogous to how Christians view the sacrifice of Jesus.

While the conversion, however, was not, at any rate not necessarily, an antinomian act, Shabtai Tzvi, both before Nathan declared him Messiah, and during the period from then until his conversion, had committed multiple serious and public violations of Jewish law, and had explicitly marked them as having mystical antinomian significance by repurposing the traditional blessing ‘who frees the bound’ to mean ‘who permits the forbidden’. The masses of believers were unaware of the full extent of this, but it was well known to his kabbalist core believers.1 Nathan had devoted his very first publications to explain the necessity of the messiah’s strange deeds in the scheme of cosmic salvation, and substantial detail was included in his letter to the Chelebi’s court which secured the movement financial backing and international support. Scholem arbitrarily chooses to find in this only the ‘seeds’ of an antinomian theology only realised after the apostacy, but it seems simpler to say that the theology of the movement was antinomian from the start. The developments in doctrine after the catastrophe of the conversion were not necessitated by a new need to explain a sinning messiah, but to explain away his failure. The presence of antinomianism from the start is not at all surprising because, as we have established at length, Shabtai Tzvi was the heralded messiah of Zoharism, and Zoharism is antinomian.

The essence of the Torah according to the Rabbinic understanding is that it is law. The nature of law is that (a) it requires compliance as its mode of engagement and (b) its details are determined by judicial means. Regarding the specifics of (b) there has always been disagreement about exactly what this entails, with different figures giving more or less weight to lawgiving institutions, textual interpretation, analogy, custom and other features familiar from other legal systems. However, generically, the use of judicial tools to determine what halacha allows and obligates was a fundamental assumption of everyone. Kabbala, however, involves a reimagination of halacha as a system of theurgy. It may be that what halacha obligates has been commanded, but that is not why it obligates. It is necessary to do this and not do that because in so doing one either fixes or damages the universe, and this would be so to exactly the same extent if it was uncommanded.

This change in the essential nature of halacha inevitably put tremendous and escalating strain on its subjection to judicial arbitration. Let us say that there is a dispute about the detail of a particular ritual act and the kabbalist has divined that one of the suggested alternatives is more effective in channelling positive cosmic forces. To subject his judgment to considerations like which alternative better comported to the probable meaning of an elliptical statement in the Talmud, or what a majority of jurists had hitherto decided, or what the prevailing custom was would be a sort of madness. This is especially so given that, as the Beit Yosef writes in his introduction, by the mid 16th century, the proliferation of hermeneutical techniques in the midst of institutional anarchy had rendered appeal to primary sources ineffective as a mode of judicial resolution, leading to the use of arbitrary and unsatisfactory ad hoc tools of decision making such as the one he outlines there. The fact that, for a century and a half, kabbalists mostly did so subject their judgment to halachic decisors is testimony to the tremendous taboo Judaism had erected on interfering with the legal process by quasi-prophetic means. However, this taboo had broken down long before Shabtai Tzvi was revealed. It is easy to cite examples, but perhaps the best one is Simhat Torah.

According to the Babylonian custom of completing the cycle of Torah readings each year, the final section is read on the second customary day of Shemini Atzeret observed in exile. In the Geonic period, this day came to be known as Simhat Torah, and certain liturgical innovations were made, most notably the seven hakafot. In one responsum of Rav Hai Gaon found quoted by Ri Migash, he reports two anomalous customs observed on this day which violate Jewish law, one lighting incense and the other dancing, justifying them based on custom and the lesser status of Yom Tov Sheni (itself an anomalous ruling). Both practices died out, but in Tzfat, the kabbalists took a fancy to this historical oddity, and decided to revive the first of these practices, with a key difference: since there is no second customary day of Yom Tov in the Land of Israel, they observed it on the biblical mandated day of Shemini Atzeret itself, in effect abolishing the original festival.2 The kabbalists demanded not merely dancing, but ecstatic dancing, the more ecstatic the better to effect cosmic repairs by means of open, overt and wilful violation of an unambiguous prohibition. Judgement was visited on Tzfat five years before Shabtai Tzvi’s revelation, but the new festival of joyous desecration spread first throughout the Sephardi lands, then to Poland, and then gradually everywhere, the last holdouts mostly giving up in the 19th century. Halachic ‘justifications’ found in major codes make the Disabled Lesbian Reconstructionist Rabbinical Seminary of San Francisco look like a peerless exemplar of intellectual honesty and strict fidelity to codified law.

Rant over. I hear, however, a reader call out ‘that’s not real antinomianism, like having sex orgies rolling in whipped cream on Yom Kippur like the Sabbateans did!' Dancing is nice and sweet’. Well, first of all, lots of things are nice and sweet. Wearing a linsey-woolsey suit is sweet; eating gammon and chips while reading the morning newspaper is sweet; watching the football after lunch on a Shabbos afternoon is sweet, but you’re not allowed to do all that, OK. All of those things are a lot more sweet than crashing around in a room full of plastic wrappers and screwed up disposable cups, incontinently slurring songs that sucked to begin with (sorry, we said rant over). You can pick which bits of antinomianism you like for yourself, but you don’t get to pick which bits of antinomianism other people like, and what a lot of people like is sex. However, more to the point, the vast majority of Sabbateans were not antinomians in that sense either. Even many followers of the biggest extremist, Jacob Frank, who we’ll get to, didn’t join in his shenanigans, but rather lived staid lives in compliance with normative Jewish law whilst being inspired from afar by his ‘strange deeds’. The mainstream of Sabbateanism didn’t go that far even. For them, the ‘strange deeds’ were part of Shabtai Tvi’s own personal tussle with metaphysical forces and not to be emulated by anyone. There might be a bit more antinomianism to go round, in due course, but that would have to wait for the completion of redemption. In the grey area where they now lived, only controlled doses of antinomianism were allowed.

This brings us to another point, which is that the idea that, since Jewish law is actually really a vehicle for repairing a broken cosmic reality, once that cosmic reality had been fixed there’s no point in doing it anymore. To return to our example above, the dancing on Simhat Torah was licit partly because the kabbalists of Tzfat were unanimously agreed that the messianic age was right around the corner, and hence you could afford to be a bit more creative with the boringer parts of Jewish law. This idea is implicit in all of kabbalistic literature, and it’s explicit in some of it, so the difference between the ‘orthodox’ kabbalists and the Sabbateans was not about antinomianism at all, but about whether the messiah had come. But that’s the whole dispute in the first place!

Antinomianism, then, is to a substantial degree a distraction in understanding what made Sabbateanism Sabbatean. Certainly, regular outbreaks of antinomian energy were a feature of the movement, but it wasn’t what it was really about. What was it about?

Simple Faith

It’s easy to overcomplicate things, so let’s repeat again: fundamentally, the difference between Sabbateans and non-Sabbateans was about whether the messiah had come. The non-Sabbateans had a problem, namely how Zoharism could promise the messiah and a messiah came, but he was a dud. They responded by trying to take an evolving tradition and freeze it right before the point at which it evolved into Sabbateanism, elevating Lurianic kabbalah into the final statement of Zoharism beyond which no progress was possible.3 The Sabbateans had a different problem: if the messiah had come, how come nothing had happened?

The Sabbatean answer at a basic level was the same as the Christians before them: the redemption had two stages, the full redemption with the end of evil and suffering was still to come, but an intermediate kind of redemption had already happened. The contents of this redemption were also the same, generically, as in the Christian version: the believers in Shabtai Tzvi felt a sense of liberation, from doubt, from the indignities of life, and to some extent from burdens of the Jewish religion, at any rate from it feeling so burdensome. This feeling, they declared, was not just a delusion it was an actual divine gift, given through His anointed, and all you had to do to be granted it was believe.

From the beginning of the Sabbatean movement, Nathan of Gaza had emphasised the need for a pure faith unevidenced by miraculous signs and argued that those who did not have this faith were ipso facto, of the Erev Rav. After the apostacy, he doubled down on the doctrine: the true Jew must believe not only without evidence, but against all evidence, ironically drawing on a famous statement of Maimonides that one should not expect the messiah to be accompanied by miracles.4 The renunciation of worldly wisdom, of common sense, was now the highest religious value. The term כופר (denier), which had always been used in Rabbinic discourse as part of a phrase (כופר בעיקר, כופר בתורה), now become a standalone designation for the unbelievers, opposed to מאמינים (believers) who, alone, had an unblemished soul.

However, faith must be faith in something. The Sabbatean elevation of faith as the supreme religious good had two doctrinal components. The first was belief in the messiah, the perfectly righteous person whose soul was uniquely attached to God, through whom the ordinary believer could attain spiritual heights he could not reach on his own. Different Sabbateans understood this differently, with the most extreme versions saying that Shabtai Tzvi was literally God (though, as with all kabbalists, they would then proceed to write a million words explaining how that was not literally true, but also was literally true, and was and wasn’t and [SCREAMS]). The moderates, however, saw him as elevated to some quasi-divine intermediary status by virtue of the unique tribulations he had endured in his fight with the forces of evil. In order to cultivate connection to the tzaddik, completely unprecedented practices, such as having a portrait of Shabtai Tzvi in the house, were innovated.

The classic text of this new doctrine was Tzaddik Yesod Olam, authored by Yehuda Leib Prossnitz, but often attributed to Isaac Luria, and not infrequently printed in editions of Chaim Vital’s Sha’ar Yihudim. This book presents the new doctrine צדיק גוזר והקב''ה מקיים (the tzaddik decrees and God establishes) based apparently on a garbled version of a talmudic passage. Originally, this cultivation of faith in the tzaddik was restricted to Shabtai Tzvi, but gradually it came to be extended more widely. Some of these tzaddikim were identified as reincarnations of Tzvi himself, or as supplementary messiahs (the doctrine of two messiahs being employed for the purpose). Eventually, though, the Sabbateans came round to the idea that there were no fixed number of quasi-divine intermediaries for them to adore, so long as they gave off the right vibes.

The second aspect of the Sabbatean faith was the search for a new doctrine of God Himself. As we have mentioned now a few times, the orthodox response to the Sabbatean farce was to try and freeze Zoharism in precisely the position it had evolved into just before the farce happened. Many moderns have pointed out, not without justice, that this turns kabbalah into a kind of parody of itself, a set of dogmas in place of what was once a dynamic intellectual system. The problem is that if you let Zoharism evolve any further, it evolves into Sabbateanism! For the Sabbateans, themselves, of course, this was a feature not a bug, and they set themselves the task of finally completing the job that had begun with the revelation of the Zohar and proclaim to the Jewish people of who their God had been all along:

That was Cardoso’s view, and he was the second most important Sabbatean theologian, but it would be a mistake to see his or anyone else’s version of Sabbatean theology as definitive. Like the early Christians, the Sabbateans had multiple figures frantically arguing about doctrine.5 A common alternative belief, attacked fiercely by Cardoso but quite possibly held by Shabtai himself, was that the true God of Israel was simply the Sefirah of Tiferet. What united the Sabbateans was, first, the search itself, and secondly the hatred for the ‘rationalists’ who had concealed the true God in their philosophy. What they sought to do was combine the intellectually sophisticated version of kabbalah articulated by Isaac Luria with the raw, blasphemous power of the Zohar itself, to complete the task of turning a mechanical God into a personal one via the kabbalistic concepts they had inherited. Unlike the Christians, they never arrived at a ‘catholic’ version of the fulfilled kabbalah because the movement died out before consensus could be reached. (Or did it? Stay tuned!)

Finally, the Sabbateans saw it as their duty to complete the job of spreading knowledge of the Zohar. The Jewish masses had by and large accepted the kabbalists as their doctrinal authorities, but they still knew relatively little of the contents of their doctrines. It was partly for this reason, the Sabbateans believed, that they had abandoned their messiah over a trifling matter like apostacy. While the orthodox did their utmost to halt and reverse the proliferation of Zoharic texts that had happened in the century prior, the Sabbateans continued to promote their publication and distribution. For the next hundred years or so, it was chiefly them who funded such work. New texts such as Hemdat Yamim (source of the Tu Bi’Shvat Seder and much else) freely mixed pre-Sabbatean and Sabbatean Zoharic material in a way that, even today, no-one can fully disentangle.

1

Regarding how much the masses did know, see this important detail:

3

The crispest statement of this I have seen is from one of the Substack OTDs.

4

David Berger שליט''א has a good article on this: