The simple fact that practically every follower of Lurianic thought in the time of Shabsai Tzvi accepted the theology he was presenting and recognized its main expositors as the legitimate heirs to the Arizal’s thought (including R Shmuel Vital btw. The fella from whom we have all of R Chaim Vital’s writings) should be sufficient proof that it was Lurianic thought, and by extension the Zohar, that allowed S”T to happen.
I don’t completely agree with your take on Kabbalah for other reasons, but this point shouldn’t really be a matter of dispute.
Tautologically, everywhere that Sabbateanism spread was receptive to influence from developments in the broader Jewish community. Chabad may be a global phenomenon, but I would not attempt to explain their growth without a lot of attention on the Holocaust, and no number of Sephardi Chabadniks in South America will convince me otherwise.
Further, to the extent that some communities were isolated from the apocalyptic disruptions all over Europe, they may have been isolated also from some of the weirdness and antinomianism. If far flung areas got low-fidelity reports that rov of klal Yisroel had acclaimed Moshiach, got very excited, then disappointed by evidence, that part of the phenomenon isn't all that outlandish. Looking at the aftermath, seems plausible that Europe was more deeply penetrated by radical doctrine, unless it is just my ignorance missing parallel centuries of turmoil purging and processing and relitigating Sabbatean influence and revivals in the Muslim world. Perhaps the Donmeh served as a pressure valve, but did they have much presence outside the Aegean?
Even after the Holocaust, Ashkenazim were 80% of global Jewry and, combined with their superior intelligence and level of development it's not surprising they were setting the new trends, but in the mid 17th century Ashkenazim were still peripheral to the main trends in Jewry. Indeed, I think there's a good case that it was partly that Sabbatean debacle that helped move the center of rabbinic study to the Ashkenazim because the Sephardi elite that had taken over across the North Africa and the Middle East had made such fools of themselves.
Anyway, the Sabbatean episode starts in EY, spreads first to Egypt and Turkey and only then to Eastern Europe. How can an event in Eastern Europe be a principal factor?
Personality cults around charismatic weirdos are not such a rare phenomenon. Before this one metastasized out to Italy and Holland and Central Europe, was it even remarkably successful locally? He gets driven out of Smyrna, Salonika, Yerushalayim, not dominating until money and followers start coming in from abroad. Italy and Holland may have been largely Sephardi, but still part of the general calamity of early modern Europe; Italy falling apart with economic collapse, plague, peripheral involvement in 30 Years' War, Holland thriving but on the knife's edge, constantly at war with larger powers and full of refugees, Germany and Poland-Lithuania soaked in blood. Millenarianism booming also among the Christians, for non-kabbalistic reasons that would hit the Jews just as hard.
Also, further suppressing the immune response, rabbinic leadership seems to have been significantly disrupted. While Sephardim may have been the cultural and economic elite, not too hard to make a case that the center of non-kabbalistic Torah was the Poland-Lithuania of the Shach, the Taz, the Magen Avraham, the Maharsha, and their like. That generation was coming to a close as the challenge of Sabbateanism hit, and (with all due respect), the density of major Ashkenazi acharonim doesn't recover until the mid-18th century, as one might expect when the next generation spend their youths weathering an orgy of violence unmatched between the Crusades and the World Wars.
Such personality cults were rare in Judaism. Now they are common because the Sabbateans won and their signature beliefs are mainstream in 'orthodox Judaism' (won't elaborate now, we'll get to it). However, you are mixed up in your order of events. SZ was kicked out of Smyrna, Jerusalem etc. when he was a wandering rando. He may or may not have told people he was the messiah during this period, but he had no following, there was no movement. The Sabbatean movement starts with Natan of Gaza having his vision; and the mass hysteria precedes the money coming. Actually, it causes it.
I'll think a bit more about your point about this being a peak of Ashkenazi Torah scholarship. I think you're probably right. However, the usual explanation for the persistence of Sabbateanism in Europe is the unusual situation of Podolia being passed back and forth between empires making it a free for all where heretics of all faiths could escape clerical authority.
You are saying that the whole global movement from inception to disgrace was only 1665-66? I am no expert, but Google suggests that Pinheiro was leading the Italian circle from well before that time, and Yachini in Constantinople. For what cause was he being kicked out, if he was not gathering followers and giving problematic teachings?
To what extent was Jewish clerical authority dependent on the state? In places where there was continuity of government, Sabbateans were turned over to the goyim, and that is why they had less anxiety and controversy around the role of kabbalah in the subsequent decades? That sounds dubious.
I am still undecided (and frankly a bit uneducated) on the whole Zohar Question. My biggest issue with your ZQ theory is the quick, wholehearted acceptance of it in mainstream Jewish circles. We are notoriously very anti-changing any parts of the torah and it seems unlikely that the entire Jewish world would collapse like a cheap folding table and make halacha bend according to Zohar if there was not a clear reason to do so.
The reason they give is because it was written by Rabi Shimon. Since we know that's not so; they were fooled. You might say they were right for the wrong reasons, but maybe they were wrong for the wrong reasons?
It’s true that the imagination behind the opening of Pirke Avot is rather weak. But what you call lies I would call poetic imagination which comes in various strengths. Here is Blake: A MEMORABLE FANCY
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answered: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything; and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”
Then I asked: “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?”
He replied: “All poets believe that[23] it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.”
Then Ezekiel said: “The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception; some nations held one principle for the origin, and some another. We of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle, and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests and Philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours, and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius. It was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently, and invokes so pathetically, saying by this he conquers enemies and governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God that we cursed in His[24] name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled. From these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews.
“This,” said he, “like all firm persuasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the Jews’ code, and worship the Jews’ God; and what greater subjection can be?”
I'm not saying it's lies, I'm saying it's a contested opinion, only elevated to its central status later. The truth of rabbinic Judaism doesn't depend on it.
I meant your comment on Zohar which is clearly a product of poetic imagination. The Zoharic impulse seems to arise not long after Maimonides’ dissatisfaction with doing Babylonian homework and his negative theology. Since nothing one can say about God is adequate this loosened the gates for the Jewish poetic to reemerge in full force shortly after. And perhaps saved the rabbinic enterprise from dying of boredom. The unique terse and metonymic quality of Torah demands prolific poetic imagination from the reader. Lacking that the Torah becomes a book of laws. See Montaigne on that one—there’s no end to the making of laws.
Do you view the Torah primarily book of laws or as Blake did a triumph of poetic imagination. Kabbalah seems to me a resurgence of imagination in response to an exhaustion produced by misapplied reason. There’s certainly nothing reasonable about imagining a creator God who intervenes in history.
Best book is still the biography of Shabtai Tzvi by Scholem. There is a new book by Matt Goldish, but it is poorly written and doesn’t add all that much.
I am enjoying the build up towards your piece de resistance, at your leisurely, lachrymose cadence.
To flesh out your thesis - you claim Lurianic Kabbalah revolutionised the Zohar, inventing the system of rectifications, postponing the messianic fervour and extending the messianic timeline. What changed between then and Shabbtai Tzvi? Apart from Zoharism becoming more entrenched in Ashkenaz, which led to ST’s wider acceptance, what led the kabbalists writ large to go from the Arizal’s era, where the rectifications have not yet occurred, to Shabbtai’s era, where they had?
The analogy to marxism fails, in as much as Saadia Gaon’s and Rambam’s messianic expectations failing do not delegitimize the overall expectation of a messiah. All they do is delegitimize the art of predicting the redemption, which everyone knew they shouldn’t do but for whatever reason couldn’t help themselves.
I noticed you snuck in an inference to the Spanish expulsion potential being a consequence of the widening acceptance of the Zohar. This is presumably a building block towards the ultimate claim, that of the Holocaust being due to the acceptance of Chassidism. There are many refutations of this line of argument, but the main one is that in general history when God brought about punishments on the Jewish people, the medicine worked, at least for a time - the first Temple’s destruction mostly solved the polytheism issue, the seconds’ solved the sectarian issue. The Spanish expulsion and Holocaust, in these cases, did not, at all. But perhaps I’m getting over my skis here.
I won't respond to anything that will be covered in further instalments, but regarding Luria's tikkunim, the idea is that they are so effectual that once they are known messiah will come stat. 'Orthodox' kabbalah requires a drastic reinterpretation of this since nothing happened for 400 years (except rolling calamities).
How does this square with the fact you acknowledged, that both Arizal and R' Chaim Vital did their best to not make these teachings widely known? Would that not run counter to a messianic mission predicated on the wide knowledge and practice of the tikkunim?
Interesting theory about the messianic imperative. Do you have evidence that Rabbi Abuhav was particularly messianic? You're saying if we discovered a non-messianic Medrash that clarifies a certain halacha, we wouldn't use it? I think we would and that's probably what Rabbi Abuhav was doing.
If we discovered a hitherto unknown midrash, before using it, you would have to first authenticate it (obviously). Rabbi Abuhav cannot have authenticated it because, by his admission, he hasn't read it. But, then, who did authenticate it? He's the Gadol haDor, after all.
However, as I say, regarding explicit motives before the expulsion, we cannot say. All we see is snippets of this kind of mad unexplained rush. After the expulsion, we see that it is justified explicitly on messianic grounds, so we can extrapolate backwards. But if you think that is to go beyond the evidence, you just have to accept you don't know. For the background to Shabtai Tzvi it makes no odds anyway.
I hesitate to run into the circular saw of your powerful sarcasm. Your take on Zoharism cuts deep and is helpful but is Zohar any less a fiction than the lineage statement at the beginning of Pirke Avot that claims the oral Torah was passed on from Moses? The essential insight of what Einstein called the “cosmic religious feeling” namely that to think of ourselves as separate from the universe is “an optical delusion of consciousness” is a universal experience that is at the core of Judaism. I think Blake’s view in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that all religions rest on the poetic imagination and then are subverted and perverted by the priestly class to gain power is helpful here.
The simple fact that practically every follower of Lurianic thought in the time of Shabsai Tzvi accepted the theology he was presenting and recognized its main expositors as the legitimate heirs to the Arizal’s thought (including R Shmuel Vital btw. The fella from whom we have all of R Chaim Vital’s writings) should be sufficient proof that it was Lurianic thought, and by extension the Zohar, that allowed S”T to happen.
I don’t completely agree with your take on Kabbalah for other reasons, but this point shouldn’t really be a matter of dispute.
Feels strange to write about the background that enabled Shabsai Tzvi without any reference to Khmelnytsky or the Thirty Years' War.
We’ll get to it, but I think Scholem is basically correct. It’s a local explanation for a global phenomenon. Wrong practically by default.
Tautologically, everywhere that Sabbateanism spread was receptive to influence from developments in the broader Jewish community. Chabad may be a global phenomenon, but I would not attempt to explain their growth without a lot of attention on the Holocaust, and no number of Sephardi Chabadniks in South America will convince me otherwise.
Further, to the extent that some communities were isolated from the apocalyptic disruptions all over Europe, they may have been isolated also from some of the weirdness and antinomianism. If far flung areas got low-fidelity reports that rov of klal Yisroel had acclaimed Moshiach, got very excited, then disappointed by evidence, that part of the phenomenon isn't all that outlandish. Looking at the aftermath, seems plausible that Europe was more deeply penetrated by radical doctrine, unless it is just my ignorance missing parallel centuries of turmoil purging and processing and relitigating Sabbatean influence and revivals in the Muslim world. Perhaps the Donmeh served as a pressure valve, but did they have much presence outside the Aegean?
Even after the Holocaust, Ashkenazim were 80% of global Jewry and, combined with their superior intelligence and level of development it's not surprising they were setting the new trends, but in the mid 17th century Ashkenazim were still peripheral to the main trends in Jewry. Indeed, I think there's a good case that it was partly that Sabbatean debacle that helped move the center of rabbinic study to the Ashkenazim because the Sephardi elite that had taken over across the North Africa and the Middle East had made such fools of themselves.
Anyway, the Sabbatean episode starts in EY, spreads first to Egypt and Turkey and only then to Eastern Europe. How can an event in Eastern Europe be a principal factor?
Personality cults around charismatic weirdos are not such a rare phenomenon. Before this one metastasized out to Italy and Holland and Central Europe, was it even remarkably successful locally? He gets driven out of Smyrna, Salonika, Yerushalayim, not dominating until money and followers start coming in from abroad. Italy and Holland may have been largely Sephardi, but still part of the general calamity of early modern Europe; Italy falling apart with economic collapse, plague, peripheral involvement in 30 Years' War, Holland thriving but on the knife's edge, constantly at war with larger powers and full of refugees, Germany and Poland-Lithuania soaked in blood. Millenarianism booming also among the Christians, for non-kabbalistic reasons that would hit the Jews just as hard.
Also, further suppressing the immune response, rabbinic leadership seems to have been significantly disrupted. While Sephardim may have been the cultural and economic elite, not too hard to make a case that the center of non-kabbalistic Torah was the Poland-Lithuania of the Shach, the Taz, the Magen Avraham, the Maharsha, and their like. That generation was coming to a close as the challenge of Sabbateanism hit, and (with all due respect), the density of major Ashkenazi acharonim doesn't recover until the mid-18th century, as one might expect when the next generation spend their youths weathering an orgy of violence unmatched between the Crusades and the World Wars.
Such personality cults were rare in Judaism. Now they are common because the Sabbateans won and their signature beliefs are mainstream in 'orthodox Judaism' (won't elaborate now, we'll get to it). However, you are mixed up in your order of events. SZ was kicked out of Smyrna, Jerusalem etc. when he was a wandering rando. He may or may not have told people he was the messiah during this period, but he had no following, there was no movement. The Sabbatean movement starts with Natan of Gaza having his vision; and the mass hysteria precedes the money coming. Actually, it causes it.
I'll think a bit more about your point about this being a peak of Ashkenazi Torah scholarship. I think you're probably right. However, the usual explanation for the persistence of Sabbateanism in Europe is the unusual situation of Podolia being passed back and forth between empires making it a free for all where heretics of all faiths could escape clerical authority.
You are saying that the whole global movement from inception to disgrace was only 1665-66? I am no expert, but Google suggests that Pinheiro was leading the Italian circle from well before that time, and Yachini in Constantinople. For what cause was he being kicked out, if he was not gathering followers and giving problematic teachings?
To what extent was Jewish clerical authority dependent on the state? In places where there was continuity of government, Sabbateans were turned over to the goyim, and that is why they had less anxiety and controversy around the role of kabbalah in the subsequent decades? That sounds dubious.
I am still undecided (and frankly a bit uneducated) on the whole Zohar Question. My biggest issue with your ZQ theory is the quick, wholehearted acceptance of it in mainstream Jewish circles. We are notoriously very anti-changing any parts of the torah and it seems unlikely that the entire Jewish world would collapse like a cheap folding table and make halacha bend according to Zohar if there was not a clear reason to do so.
Any thoughts?
The reason they give is because it was written by Rabi Shimon. Since we know that's not so; they were fooled. You might say they were right for the wrong reasons, but maybe they were wrong for the wrong reasons?
It’s true that the imagination behind the opening of Pirke Avot is rather weak. But what you call lies I would call poetic imagination which comes in various strengths. Here is Blake: A MEMORABLE FANCY
The Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel dined with me, and I asked them how they dared so roundly to assert that God spoke to them, and whether they did not think at the time that they would be misunderstood, and so be the cause of imposition.
Isaiah answered: “I saw no God, nor heard any, in a finite organical perception: but my senses discovered the infinite in everything; and as I was then persuaded, and remained confirmed, that the voice of honest indignation is the voice of God, I cared not for consequences, but wrote.”
Then I asked: “Does a firm persuasion that a thing is so, make it so?”
He replied: “All poets believe that[23] it does, and in ages of imagination this firm persuasion removed mountains; but many are not capable of a firm persuasion of anything.”
Then Ezekiel said: “The philosophy of the East taught the first principles of human perception; some nations held one principle for the origin, and some another. We of Israel taught that the Poetic Genius (as you now call it) was the first principle, and all the others merely derivative, which was the cause of our despising the Priests and Philosophers of other countries, and prophesying that all Gods would at last be proved to originate in ours, and to be the tributaries of the Poetic Genius. It was this that our great poet King David desired so fervently, and invokes so pathetically, saying by this he conquers enemies and governs kingdoms; and we so loved our God that we cursed in His[24] name all the deities of surrounding nations, and asserted that they had rebelled. From these opinions the vulgar came to think that all nations would at last be subject to the Jews.
“This,” said he, “like all firm persuasions, is come to pass, for all nations believe the Jews’ code, and worship the Jews’ God; and what greater subjection can be?”
I'm not saying it's lies, I'm saying it's a contested opinion, only elevated to its central status later. The truth of rabbinic Judaism doesn't depend on it.
I meant your comment on Zohar which is clearly a product of poetic imagination. The Zoharic impulse seems to arise not long after Maimonides’ dissatisfaction with doing Babylonian homework and his negative theology. Since nothing one can say about God is adequate this loosened the gates for the Jewish poetic to reemerge in full force shortly after. And perhaps saved the rabbinic enterprise from dying of boredom. The unique terse and metonymic quality of Torah demands prolific poetic imagination from the reader. Lacking that the Torah becomes a book of laws. See Montaigne on that one—there’s no end to the making of laws.
I agree that Rambamism backfired spectacularly and led to kabbalah.
Now I'm wondering if a backlash to Spinoza led to romanticism. It's not the only thing, but I suppose a case could be made.
Do you view the Torah primarily book of laws or as Blake did a triumph of poetic imagination. Kabbalah seems to me a resurgence of imagination in response to an exhaustion produced by misapplied reason. There’s certainly nothing reasonable about imagining a creator God who intervenes in history.
A book of laws.
But Rashi on Bereishit 1:1 disagrees. Further he says the verse cries out for poetic interpretation.
Any books you recommend to flesh out this story?
Best book is still the biography of Shabtai Tzvi by Scholem. There is a new book by Matt Goldish, but it is poorly written and doesn’t add all that much.
Would this include the development of kabbalah as well, or something separate for that?
I like Boaz Huss 'The Zohar, Reception and Impact'
I am enjoying the build up towards your piece de resistance, at your leisurely, lachrymose cadence.
To flesh out your thesis - you claim Lurianic Kabbalah revolutionised the Zohar, inventing the system of rectifications, postponing the messianic fervour and extending the messianic timeline. What changed between then and Shabbtai Tzvi? Apart from Zoharism becoming more entrenched in Ashkenaz, which led to ST’s wider acceptance, what led the kabbalists writ large to go from the Arizal’s era, where the rectifications have not yet occurred, to Shabbtai’s era, where they had?
The analogy to marxism fails, in as much as Saadia Gaon’s and Rambam’s messianic expectations failing do not delegitimize the overall expectation of a messiah. All they do is delegitimize the art of predicting the redemption, which everyone knew they shouldn’t do but for whatever reason couldn’t help themselves.
I noticed you snuck in an inference to the Spanish expulsion potential being a consequence of the widening acceptance of the Zohar. This is presumably a building block towards the ultimate claim, that of the Holocaust being due to the acceptance of Chassidism. There are many refutations of this line of argument, but the main one is that in general history when God brought about punishments on the Jewish people, the medicine worked, at least for a time - the first Temple’s destruction mostly solved the polytheism issue, the seconds’ solved the sectarian issue. The Spanish expulsion and Holocaust, in these cases, did not, at all. But perhaps I’m getting over my skis here.
I won't respond to anything that will be covered in further instalments, but regarding Luria's tikkunim, the idea is that they are so effectual that once they are known messiah will come stat. 'Orthodox' kabbalah requires a drastic reinterpretation of this since nothing happened for 400 years (except rolling calamities).
How does this square with the fact you acknowledged, that both Arizal and R' Chaim Vital did their best to not make these teachings widely known? Would that not run counter to a messianic mission predicated on the wide knowledge and practice of the tikkunim?
I'm not sure. I think they thought it was enough for just a few people to do them. And I guess people got impatient.
Interesting theory about the messianic imperative. Do you have evidence that Rabbi Abuhav was particularly messianic? You're saying if we discovered a non-messianic Medrash that clarifies a certain halacha, we wouldn't use it? I think we would and that's probably what Rabbi Abuhav was doing.
If we discovered a hitherto unknown midrash, before using it, you would have to first authenticate it (obviously). Rabbi Abuhav cannot have authenticated it because, by his admission, he hasn't read it. But, then, who did authenticate it? He's the Gadol haDor, after all.
However, as I say, regarding explicit motives before the expulsion, we cannot say. All we see is snippets of this kind of mad unexplained rush. After the expulsion, we see that it is justified explicitly on messianic grounds, so we can extrapolate backwards. But if you think that is to go beyond the evidence, you just have to accept you don't know. For the background to Shabtai Tzvi it makes no odds anyway.
I am but a simple woman. Does anyone ever use the phrase “rabbinic Judaism” that isn’t embedded in heresy?
I hesitate to run into the circular saw of your powerful sarcasm. Your take on Zoharism cuts deep and is helpful but is Zohar any less a fiction than the lineage statement at the beginning of Pirke Avot that claims the oral Torah was passed on from Moses? The essential insight of what Einstein called the “cosmic religious feeling” namely that to think of ourselves as separate from the universe is “an optical delusion of consciousness” is a universal experience that is at the core of Judaism. I think Blake’s view in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that all religions rest on the poetic imagination and then are subverted and perverted by the priestly class to gain power is helpful here.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43998223?seq=25
lel reading the first few pages of that severely downgraded my regard for academic talmud scholarship