Modern Jewish History part iv

The spread of kabbalah in Eastern Europe

I started this by saying that modern Jewish history starts with the debacle of Shabtai Tzvi, a shattering of the vessels (ho, ho), and the story after that is a story of trying to put everything back together again, a story of one failure after another that ends in failure. Then I wrote two posts about the background to Shabtai Tzvi, so when are we going to get started with actual modern Jewish history? Well, not today, because we haven’t even said anything about Chmnielnicki.

In 1648, Bohdan Khmelnytsky commenced a Cossack revolt against his former master, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, which ended in the establishment of an independent Cossack state of sorts that immediately became a Russian vassal, eventually leading to the Cossacks becoming a Tsarist paramilitary in the 19th century. The rebellion was a disaster for the local Ukrainian peasantry, who were massacred by the bucketloads first by the Cossacks’ enemies, the Polish, and then by the Cossacks’ allies the Crimean Tatars. Today Khmelnytsky is especially popular among Duginists, and plays a key role in Putin’s stupid article where he gaslit himself into invading Ukraine, but Ukrainian nationalists also quite like him because he stopped Ukraine becoming Polish, which is good for some reason.

Anyway, Eastern European history is only moderately more interesting that Pakistan’s so the only reason I care at all about this is the effect it had on Jews, among whom it is known not as the ‘Khmelnytsky Uprising’, but the ‘Chmielnicki massacres’. The Jews had served as the tax collectors and enforcers of the Polish nobility, which combined with some Orthodox Christian anti-Judaism, and an injection of oriental savagery, led to brutal mass killings. These have lain heavy on the Jewish imagination ever since, with the Jewish years ת''ח and ת''ט, corresponding to 1648, still known for their gezeiros that go in the list along with the destruction of the two temples, the expulsion from Spain, and, now, the Holocaust.¹ Given how shortly this happened before the Sabbatean excitement (the killings continued until 1657), it has, naturally, been considered important background on the general principle that desperate people reach out for hope in messianic movements no matter how silly or even squalid.

Gershom Scholem pointed out that this only gets us so far since the excitement spread to areas like North Africa and Yemen that were untouched by, and largely unaware of, what had recently happened in the Ukraine. On the other hand, it’s certainly true that in Ottoman Palestine, where it all kicked off, the kabbalists were acutely conscious of what had happened because Eastern Europe had been a major area of their missionizing in the first half the 17th century, with many pietists responding by making aliyah to join them, some of them, such as the Shlah or Naftali Bacharach, becoming major figures in the development and proliferation of kabbalah. In addition, though it has been substantially forgotten today, the year of slaughter had actually been announced by the kabbalists beforehand as the year of salvation.

We have seen already that the Zoharist movement was a messianic movement from the beginning. The explanation for why the grand secrets of divine multiplicity and cosmic semen that had lain dormant in a box, or a cave, or whatever, were now revealed to the world was that it was both sign and cause of imminent messianic revelation. Since Zoharists had been beating this drum from around the 1470s, eventually the need to pick a date was overwhelming. The Zohar itself, with its typical wisdom, actually said that the Messiah was coming in the early 1300s, more than a century and a half before Zoharism even kicked off, but the last date found there that hadn’t happened already was the resurrection of the dead in 1648. With a little bit of interpretative magic, this was taken to refer to the Messiah, and the inevitability of redemption in this year had been explicitly predicted by Cordovero, Bacharach and others, providing that Israel failed to bring it forward through sufficient Zohar study.

The great strength of Zoharism is its ability to take knocks in its stride and turn them to its advantage. Over and over again, the Zoharists promise salvation and then, precisely when they predict, everything goes awfully, and the sum total of genuine introspection this summons up in them is nothing. No, it’s always because you weren’t Zoharist enough. Somewhere out there, there’s a cantankerous RATIONALIST daring to practice the religion of his ancestors and that’s why redemption didn’t happen after all the times it was predicted. The most overt signs from heaven you could hope for that Zoharism is not actually true, and actually God meant all that stuff about only worshipping Him to be taken literally, just get solved with a neat ‘the generation wasn’t worthy’, and it’s back to regular programming. Were this not precisely the attitude of the false prophets and their followers during the biblical period, it would be inexplicable. הלא השם בקרבנו לא־תבוא עלינו רעה, sorry השם יתברך תמיד אובה אותי ותמיד יהיה לי רק טוב.

But I am ranting. The point is that it’s not just that kabbalists predicted a specific date would be the advent of the messiah and it was the greatest disaster for hundreds, perhaps a thousand years, it’s that it happened precisely in the place where the kabbalists had had their most recent success.

First entrance

Zoharism had originally been a Spanish thing, and followed the Spanish diaspora wherever it went, which meant primarily the Mediterranean and then further East through the Ottoman lands. As well as the Land of Israel, Italy had emerged as a second center, developing its own homegrown versions, and the Netherlands also got its fair share. The Yiddish speaking Jews, however, were initially untouched, continuing either with earlier forms of Jewish mysticism or no mysticism at all. This started to change in the mid-17th century. The attitude of the rabbinical establishment at this stage can be summed up through three important figures, whose response was substantially overlapping, but distinct enough to describe separately for analytical purposes.

The first is that of the Maharshal, who emphasised the centrality of traditional Talmudic scholarship, and categorised kabbalah as a form of speculative or ethical literature that was firmly secondary. He wrote the classic defence of traditionalist halacha on the key litmus-test issue of tefillin on Hol haMoed, writing that even if Rabi Shimon had written the Zohar, it would not change the halacha, since Rabi Shimon’s purported expertise in theosophy granted him no special advantage in halachic debate, which was determined through the material recorded in the Talmud. The Maharshal did not attack kabbalah, and even read a little of it, but he refused to grant it the supremacy or centrality which, in the Sephardic world, it was assumed to have by virtue of its alleged prominence and elevated subject matter. (Naturally, because kabbalists don’t understand ordinary moral boundaries, in later generations a myth was generated of the Maharshal as a secret kabbalist who maintained the older insistence on esotericism, which was taken as a vindication of kabbala rather than the esotericism.)

The second approach was that of the Rema, who studied kabbalah in far more detail, and attempted a synthesis of the Zoharic literature with Jewish philosophy and astronomy. The resulting work Torat haOlah, is rarely studied today, having been the subject of rather sharp criticism by the Vilna Gaon. I haven’t read it, and I’m not going to, but, unless I am mistaken, the general thrust is to ignore the outrageous and blasphemous elements of the Zohar that excite academics today, to understand it more generally as a system of metaphor, and to translate its vocabulary into the terminology of Jewish philosophy. Kabbalah becomes a kind of cherry on the cake of Judaism, giving an extra layer of ‘meaning’ to the base of legalism, but not in such a way that it can change what lies beneath.

The third is that of the Maharsha, who, like the Rema, complained bitterly of the proliferation of kabbalistic material among the masses who had not first mastered the traditional Jewish curriculum. His answer was to, for the first time, properly deal with an old issue: the Talmud contains a lot of stories in it; quite a lot of them seem implausible, some of them are facile, a certain number are a bit offputting, and a dozen or so are properly iffy, at any rate if taken literally. The attitude of the Geonim and early Rishonim was very simply ‘don’t look at that stuff’. Some people still manage that. I once learned Daf Yomi with an old Yekke, and every time we got to that kind of thing he had the exact same routine: look down, look up, look down again, say ‘wow’, wait five seconds and we moved on. I think that this is literally the correct answer. The aggadic material, especially the bulk of it which is post-amoraic, and even some of the halachic sections of the Talmud, are subject to sensationalism- or counter-intuitivity bias, and this is provably so from a few places where it mentions offhand the alternative opinion that the verse just means what it says because that’s how Hebrew works. However, while this approach is correct and of impeccable lineage, it’s subject to stress when bad actors are around, and we see already from the Rambam’s famous comment in the introduction to the Perek Helek it was wearing thin. The Zoharic authors frantically combed over the Talmud for anything weird that they could spin out in their diseased imaginations, just like certain 20th century heterodox movements and their ignoramus readers.

Anyway, I’m ranting again, but the Maharsha set out to deal with this by producing the first comprehensive treatment of the aggadic material in the Talmud, explaining each story in ethical or homiletical terms, thus pulling out the rug (albeit after the fact) from the Zoharists, who saw in this material the basis of their reformation of Judaism. Aggada could have a deeper meaning without that meaning being kabbalistic. How well a job he did is for other people to decide, but I’ll note that in Satmar, which, paradoxically, but undeniably, became the only real organised opposition to antinomianism and feelgood paganism in recent decades, serious study of Talmud is considered to necessitate frequently consulting the Maharsha.

All in all, the response of the Eastern European rabbinate to kabbalah, was the same one we know today: it’s holy, but don’t think about it too much, and it doesn’t mean what it says, and that bit definitely doesn’t mean what it says, and don’t worry because we have a mesorah, and zog tehilim. The idea is that Judaism is big enough and battle-hardened enough to safely absorb Zoharism as a vehicle for encouraging meticulousness in halachic observance and a general pro religiosity attitude, without letting the nasty stuff do any damage. As I’ve said before, there’s only one problem with this approach, which is that it has never once worked at all. It didn’t work then, it’s not working now, and it’s never going to work. The next generation of Eastern European Jewry shows just how badly it didn’t work.