I've enjoyed the historical analysis of this series, but a couple of the halacha vs kabbalah claims you make I have some questions. Too much for a comment, I'll respond via article
Those Cardazo quotes are wild. What's entertaining to me is that for the Christian Gnostics like the Cathars or Bogomils, they come to a similar conclusion of the OT God being a lesser Demiurge, and there being an absolute divinity like the First Cause or The One. But where they diverge from these Sabbatean types is they conclude that they need to bypass God and strive towards The One.
But the Sabbateans were like hell yes we love the Demiurge. The Sabbateans really do seem to arrive at Neoplatonist-style Gnosticism, but then are like we love the Cave, the Cave is awesome, look at this nice hole Yaldabaoth made for us with such pretty shadows, don't worship anyone except Yaldabaoth.
The thing is that Zoharists and later Sabbateans did actually overlap in terms of timeline and geography with these Gnostic Christian heretical movements -- the Cathars in Iberia and the Bogomils in the Balkans. I've questioned in the past if there was any sort of cross pollination, but while their cosmology is extremely similar, their conclusions are wildly different. The Cathars would be horrified I think by a movement that consciously declines worshipping The One to instead worship the Demiurge.
Also, Rav NonZionism, have you explored much the relationship between the Sabbateans/Frankists and the Bektashi Sufis? While interactions between Zoharists and Christian Gnostics is a matter of speculation, the relationship between the Sabbateans and Bektashis is more concretely documented.
As dour as the Salafis are and as harsh as Attaturk could be, when I look at the exuberant heresy that abounds in Israel, maybe shutting down Sufi lodges and shunning Sufism was the right move for any secular or religious Islamic authority.
I've ignored the possible connections with mystical and gnostic gentile movements for two reasons. First of all, all the scholarship is still very much in the realm of suggestion. Group X were in this place at this time, and it stands to reason that Jews would have been exposed to these ideas. But there is no mechanism for actually explaining how this happens, and why it would happen here and not there. Perhaps it's just beyond the bounds of what the historian can discover, or perhaps someone in the future will find a method of properly investigating it. But in the meantime, I ignore it.
Secondly, even if it's true, I think it distracts from the main issue, which is that Zoharism, regardless of its origins, grew into a fully Jewish form of theurgy that ate up Jewish law from the inside. We have to look into ourselves for the cure, rather than blaming outsiders, or trying to find a Jewish belief system by means of simple subtraction of foreign elements.
Agree about Salafis. They are the good guys, but it's a shame they are so violent and philistinical.
You present here a chain of arguments that may be necessary but are certainly not sufficient; they still do not establish the internal conditions under which your thesis could be accepted as anything more than an associative construction. Everything is too quickly reduced to “Kabbalah,” and then Kabbalah is flattened into Zoharic antinomianism (anti what?are you tutning to Aristotelian theology now?), as if Sabbateanism were the direct truth of the Zohar itself. And here is precisely the point where the structure breaks. It’s clear to me you don’t know the Zohar, the Zoharic mind, Lurianism, or basic Islamic esoteric Gnosticism... so how can we take seriously your critique of Sabbateanism? Many of your takes on Sabbateanism are precisely absorbed from the Zoharic front!!!! and you didn’t even realize it 😄. This is when real Jewish studies expose simplistic Yeshivaism hahaha. Call it lesbianism. Your reading presupposes "Sabbateanism is Zoharic in origin". My thesis is the opposite; and this is not a detail, it is the axis of the entire architecture. Sabbateanism is not Zoharic. It is not the “inner truth” of the Zohar, nor its historical unfolding. The Zoharic tradition: Sasportas, Emden, the Vilna Gaon line, and the broader rabbinic Sephardic-Ashkenazi containment structure, is precisely non-accelerationist (oh yeah, these lesbian concepts): it preserves it under halakhic continuity. Same material, different temporality. You might not like this halakhah lines, it’s clear you don’t like them, but it’s halakhah. Rabbi Yaakov Sasportas is central here, but not isolated: he stands within a wider anti-Sabbatean ZOHARIC snd Kabbalistic framework where the Zohar is fully retained, but its messianic activation is systematically contained. So the Zohar is not rejected; it is disciplined, it is used to defend halakhah against external gnostic and messianic elements. And that already destroys the idea that Sabbateanism is simply Zoharic truth unleashed. The Zoharic Messiah isn’t accelerationist. Period. Now: Kabbalah itself is not reducible to the Zohar either (is this the level? Truly?). Before the Zohar, there is already the problem of the Sefer Yetzirah: letter, number, permutation as generative cosmology. A pre-narrative metaphysics already operating inside the canon, cool, isn’t it? So Kabbalah is not born in the Zohar. The Zohar Corpus is condensation, amplification, saturation of earlier strata; not origin. And the canon itself is already permeated by mystical residues that later rationalist or Aristotelian readings try to smooth into “non-systematic elements,” but which never fully disappear.
Now to the real disagreement: the genealogy.
My thesis is that Sabbateanism and Lurianism cannot be explained as internal Zoharic developments. The Zohar is not the engine of acceleration. It is precisely what the anti-accelerationist tradition stabilizes. The real structural break appears elsewhere: in the transformation introduced by Isaac Luria: tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim, tikkun. The world is no longer simply emanated; it is broken at its foundation. And once brokenness is ontologically primary, repair becomes participation, not contemplation.
But even here, the key point is internal: Lurianism itself is split. There is:
tikkun as a metaphysical horizon (non-historical, symbolic continuity),
and tikkun as a historical imperative (repair as urgency in time).
It is only at this second level that acceleration becomes possible. Not in the Zohar, and not even necessarily in Luria himself, but in the later reading of Lurianic structure under pressure. What structures both Luria and the later messianic crystallizations is not Zoharic symbolism, but a broader Mediterranean metaphysical field: Islamic cosmology. This includes: Ibn Arabi and waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being as refracted multiplicity), Al-Ghazali’s interiorization of certainty, Suhrawardi’s illuminationist ontology, and the wider Sufi metaphysics of unveiling (kashf) and return (ruju). Here the structure is not rupture but continuity: unity-manifestation- return, not brokenness- repair as urgency.
So this Islamic esoteric field (what I call Sufism within the Islamic cosmovision, nowadays very into esoteric Shia+ terrorism of countries like Iran and their Jewish anti-Zionist “friends”, include all those duginists and dark accelerationist here and there) must remain conceptually untouched: it is not derivative, not subordinate, but structurally parallel, a metaphysical horizon of continuity rather than collapse.
Long story short: Sabbateanism is not Zoharic. It’s in an opposite line and it is related to Anti-Zionism 😄 and its Kabbalah (surprise, surprise). It is the historical crystallization of a Lurianic rupture logic read under conditions of temporal compression, within a broader Mediterranean metaphysical atmosphere (Neoplatonism+ some gnostic esoteric sufi Islam) where unity, emanation, concealment, and return are already structurally thinkable.
I’ve said this clearly: his arguments are necessary and they do have a basis, but that basis is heavily filtered through his own perspective (and I’m not the only one who’s noticed). That makes them insufficient; they simply don’t have solid grounding. So I go back to the broader thesis and the inferences behind it, points Maskil Binah has been making for a long time… There is a genuinely Zoharic front that is strongly anti-Sabbatean, and it essentially lays the foundation for anti-Sabbateanism. The letters of Sasportas are key evidence here: a major kabbalist who lived and breathed Zoharic thought and Zoharic messianism. Sabbateanism is far removed from the Zohar in both time and context. It develops in a completely different world. It has far less to do with the Zohar itself and much more to do with Lurianic Kabbalah as it evolved in the Islamic world; interacting with Islamic mysticism and the esoteric teachings and secrets and blahblahblah of the Ari. These were currents the anti-Sabbatean Zoharic camp barely knew btw, since they approached Luria through the Zohar rather than the other way around. That difference really matters. Even Scholem doesn’t fully account for it, as far as I remember. Now, if you start from the premise that all Kabbalah is false because the Zohar is false, then everything collapses into one undifferentiated mass: literally ALL (that he doesn’t like). Suddenly it’s all the same: all of it “comes from the Zohar,” and the Zohar is said to lead inevitably to Sabbateanism…???and even, by extension, to modern Zionism. Zoharic Halakhah is poor Halakhah; we all know this, even lesbians know this. But exposing the Zohsr as the jewish Pandora's Box? Sorry, that’s too reductionist, though the Zoharic thought is extremely problematic…! Why can't we just focus on that in first place???? Mmm
Not interested in wading into deep waters, but i think it is despicable to compare chayavei Krisos, and yahreg v'a yavor to a gezeira drabanan which the rishonim already say the reason is no longer applicable (especially on a day which you admit taht the Maharit already says that we found leniences for Kvod haTorah).
'The rishonim' don't say this, Tosefos do. The Tur doesn't mention it, and the Beit Yosef rejects it. Based on this, at the very least, Sephardim can't dance. I actually thought of a trolling campaign for normies claiming you can only dance on ST if you don't eat kitniyos.
So, a machlokes rishonim about a drabanan, at a time when then the Maharit says the minhag is to be maikil for kvod haTorah, is worse than חייבי כריתות and יהרג ואל יעבור.
Never said it was worse. I said that you can choose your own limits for antinomianism, but you don't get to choose other people's limits for antinomianism. You think it's a tremendous tikkun to do chilul shabbos (because it's 'only' a d'rabanan) and someone else thinks it's a tremendous tikkun to have a threesome. It's all made up, so it just comes down to preference.
The difference between a drabanon and a chiyuv misa, יהרג ואל יעבור, is not made up at all, and the rest weren't either made up by the 'Zoharists' but by some of the greatest poskim many years before them.
And by the way, was the sefer really originally called אנשי כנה"ג? Never saw it called that before? And, isn't it ironic that the one psak of his you highlighted was to strongly limit the reliance of Zohar in halacha?
It's a terrible sevara. People in Hazal's day weren't more boki in instrument tuning than in the middle ages, and, even if they were, it wouldn't be some principle that applies in all places and times. What if we become boki again today, does the prohibition kick in again?
Thanks. I meant to put this as a footnote, but I forgot.
The Maharik cites the teshuva of Rav Hai Gaon and uses it to argue for a kal v'chomer to justify the practice of the Ashkenazim of selling aliyos on Simchas Torah and/or Shabbos Bereishis. If Rav Hai Gaon permitted issurim gemurim, then it's surely OK to permit something that just seems a bit off. Many people quote him in support of dancing, but he doesn't know anything about a contemporary practice of dancing or contemplate reviving it. People just quote him 4th hand without reading his teshuva (actually 2 of them), which basically says never to change any minhag ever. Many such cases.
The Rema doesn't say anything about dancing, in fact he clearly says otherwise ועוד נהגו להקיף עם ספרי התורה הבימה שבבית הכנסת כמו שמקיפים עם הלולב. People just hallucinate that he did because that's what they do. Many such cases.
That probably gets your average baalabatish Ashkenazi schul in chul off the hook, but it doesn't absolve the Tzfatian practice which demands vigorous dancing for the tikkun to work (see e.g. the description in מעשה רב). If memory serves, Rav Moshe uses this heter, but it's just a classic example of Yeshivish incoherence. You dance on Yom Tov to get kabbalah points, but you don't dance properly to stay on the right side of halacha (maybe), thus losing the kabbalah points.
I've enjoyed the historical analysis of this series, but a couple of the halacha vs kabbalah claims you make I have some questions. Too much for a comment, I'll respond via article
Fantastic read, thoroughly enjoyed. In the words of America's greatest ever gaon, "Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship."
Those Cardazo quotes are wild. What's entertaining to me is that for the Christian Gnostics like the Cathars or Bogomils, they come to a similar conclusion of the OT God being a lesser Demiurge, and there being an absolute divinity like the First Cause or The One. But where they diverge from these Sabbatean types is they conclude that they need to bypass God and strive towards The One.
But the Sabbateans were like hell yes we love the Demiurge. The Sabbateans really do seem to arrive at Neoplatonist-style Gnosticism, but then are like we love the Cave, the Cave is awesome, look at this nice hole Yaldabaoth made for us with such pretty shadows, don't worship anyone except Yaldabaoth.
The thing is that Zoharists and later Sabbateans did actually overlap in terms of timeline and geography with these Gnostic Christian heretical movements -- the Cathars in Iberia and the Bogomils in the Balkans. I've questioned in the past if there was any sort of cross pollination, but while their cosmology is extremely similar, their conclusions are wildly different. The Cathars would be horrified I think by a movement that consciously declines worshipping The One to instead worship the Demiurge.
You should link the previous parts at the top, so we can more easily refresh our memories from stuff earlier in the sequence
Also, Rav NonZionism, have you explored much the relationship between the Sabbateans/Frankists and the Bektashi Sufis? While interactions between Zoharists and Christian Gnostics is a matter of speculation, the relationship between the Sabbateans and Bektashis is more concretely documented.
As dour as the Salafis are and as harsh as Attaturk could be, when I look at the exuberant heresy that abounds in Israel, maybe shutting down Sufi lodges and shunning Sufism was the right move for any secular or religious Islamic authority.
I've ignored the possible connections with mystical and gnostic gentile movements for two reasons. First of all, all the scholarship is still very much in the realm of suggestion. Group X were in this place at this time, and it stands to reason that Jews would have been exposed to these ideas. But there is no mechanism for actually explaining how this happens, and why it would happen here and not there. Perhaps it's just beyond the bounds of what the historian can discover, or perhaps someone in the future will find a method of properly investigating it. But in the meantime, I ignore it.
Secondly, even if it's true, I think it distracts from the main issue, which is that Zoharism, regardless of its origins, grew into a fully Jewish form of theurgy that ate up Jewish law from the inside. We have to look into ourselves for the cure, rather than blaming outsiders, or trying to find a Jewish belief system by means of simple subtraction of foreign elements.
Agree about Salafis. They are the good guys, but it's a shame they are so violent and philistinical.
Very esteemed NonZionism:
You present here a chain of arguments that may be necessary but are certainly not sufficient; they still do not establish the internal conditions under which your thesis could be accepted as anything more than an associative construction. Everything is too quickly reduced to “Kabbalah,” and then Kabbalah is flattened into Zoharic antinomianism (anti what?are you tutning to Aristotelian theology now?), as if Sabbateanism were the direct truth of the Zohar itself. And here is precisely the point where the structure breaks. It’s clear to me you don’t know the Zohar, the Zoharic mind, Lurianism, or basic Islamic esoteric Gnosticism... so how can we take seriously your critique of Sabbateanism? Many of your takes on Sabbateanism are precisely absorbed from the Zoharic front!!!! and you didn’t even realize it 😄. This is when real Jewish studies expose simplistic Yeshivaism hahaha. Call it lesbianism. Your reading presupposes "Sabbateanism is Zoharic in origin". My thesis is the opposite; and this is not a detail, it is the axis of the entire architecture. Sabbateanism is not Zoharic. It is not the “inner truth” of the Zohar, nor its historical unfolding. The Zoharic tradition: Sasportas, Emden, the Vilna Gaon line, and the broader rabbinic Sephardic-Ashkenazi containment structure, is precisely non-accelerationist (oh yeah, these lesbian concepts): it preserves it under halakhic continuity. Same material, different temporality. You might not like this halakhah lines, it’s clear you don’t like them, but it’s halakhah. Rabbi Yaakov Sasportas is central here, but not isolated: he stands within a wider anti-Sabbatean ZOHARIC snd Kabbalistic framework where the Zohar is fully retained, but its messianic activation is systematically contained. So the Zohar is not rejected; it is disciplined, it is used to defend halakhah against external gnostic and messianic elements. And that already destroys the idea that Sabbateanism is simply Zoharic truth unleashed. The Zoharic Messiah isn’t accelerationist. Period. Now: Kabbalah itself is not reducible to the Zohar either (is this the level? Truly?). Before the Zohar, there is already the problem of the Sefer Yetzirah: letter, number, permutation as generative cosmology. A pre-narrative metaphysics already operating inside the canon, cool, isn’t it? So Kabbalah is not born in the Zohar. The Zohar Corpus is condensation, amplification, saturation of earlier strata; not origin. And the canon itself is already permeated by mystical residues that later rationalist or Aristotelian readings try to smooth into “non-systematic elements,” but which never fully disappear.
Now to the real disagreement: the genealogy.
My thesis is that Sabbateanism and Lurianism cannot be explained as internal Zoharic developments. The Zohar is not the engine of acceleration. It is precisely what the anti-accelerationist tradition stabilizes. The real structural break appears elsewhere: in the transformation introduced by Isaac Luria: tzimtzum, shevirat ha-kelim, tikkun. The world is no longer simply emanated; it is broken at its foundation. And once brokenness is ontologically primary, repair becomes participation, not contemplation.
But even here, the key point is internal: Lurianism itself is split. There is:
tikkun as a metaphysical horizon (non-historical, symbolic continuity),
and tikkun as a historical imperative (repair as urgency in time).
It is only at this second level that acceleration becomes possible. Not in the Zohar, and not even necessarily in Luria himself, but in the later reading of Lurianic structure under pressure. What structures both Luria and the later messianic crystallizations is not Zoharic symbolism, but a broader Mediterranean metaphysical field: Islamic cosmology. This includes: Ibn Arabi and waḥdat al-wujūd (unity of being as refracted multiplicity), Al-Ghazali’s interiorization of certainty, Suhrawardi’s illuminationist ontology, and the wider Sufi metaphysics of unveiling (kashf) and return (ruju). Here the structure is not rupture but continuity: unity-manifestation- return, not brokenness- repair as urgency.
So this Islamic esoteric field (what I call Sufism within the Islamic cosmovision, nowadays very into esoteric Shia+ terrorism of countries like Iran and their Jewish anti-Zionist “friends”, include all those duginists and dark accelerationist here and there) must remain conceptually untouched: it is not derivative, not subordinate, but structurally parallel, a metaphysical horizon of continuity rather than collapse.
Long story short: Sabbateanism is not Zoharic. It’s in an opposite line and it is related to Anti-Zionism 😄 and its Kabbalah (surprise, surprise). It is the historical crystallization of a Lurianic rupture logic read under conditions of temporal compression, within a broader Mediterranean metaphysical atmosphere (Neoplatonism+ some gnostic esoteric sufi Islam) where unity, emanation, concealment, and return are already structurally thinkable.
I think you bothered to read the article's thesis all the while ignoring any of the support presented for that thesis. Very impressive!
I’ve said this clearly: his arguments are necessary and they do have a basis, but that basis is heavily filtered through his own perspective (and I’m not the only one who’s noticed). That makes them insufficient; they simply don’t have solid grounding. So I go back to the broader thesis and the inferences behind it, points Maskil Binah has been making for a long time… There is a genuinely Zoharic front that is strongly anti-Sabbatean, and it essentially lays the foundation for anti-Sabbateanism. The letters of Sasportas are key evidence here: a major kabbalist who lived and breathed Zoharic thought and Zoharic messianism. Sabbateanism is far removed from the Zohar in both time and context. It develops in a completely different world. It has far less to do with the Zohar itself and much more to do with Lurianic Kabbalah as it evolved in the Islamic world; interacting with Islamic mysticism and the esoteric teachings and secrets and blahblahblah of the Ari. These were currents the anti-Sabbatean Zoharic camp barely knew btw, since they approached Luria through the Zohar rather than the other way around. That difference really matters. Even Scholem doesn’t fully account for it, as far as I remember. Now, if you start from the premise that all Kabbalah is false because the Zohar is false, then everything collapses into one undifferentiated mass: literally ALL (that he doesn’t like). Suddenly it’s all the same: all of it “comes from the Zohar,” and the Zohar is said to lead inevitably to Sabbateanism…???and even, by extension, to modern Zionism. Zoharic Halakhah is poor Halakhah; we all know this, even lesbians know this. But exposing the Zohsr as the jewish Pandora's Box? Sorry, that’s too reductionist, though the Zoharic thought is extremely problematic…! Why can't we just focus on that in first place???? Mmm
Not interested in wading into deep waters, but i think it is despicable to compare chayavei Krisos, and yahreg v'a yavor to a gezeira drabanan which the rishonim already say the reason is no longer applicable (especially on a day which you admit taht the Maharit already says that we found leniences for Kvod haTorah).
'The rishonim' don't say this, Tosefos do. The Tur doesn't mention it, and the Beit Yosef rejects it. Based on this, at the very least, Sephardim can't dance. I actually thought of a trolling campaign for normies claiming you can only dance on ST if you don't eat kitniyos.
So, a machlokes rishonim about a drabanan, at a time when then the Maharit says the minhag is to be maikil for kvod haTorah, is worse than חייבי כריתות and יהרג ואל יעבור.
Thanks for enlightening me.
Never said it was worse. I said that you can choose your own limits for antinomianism, but you don't get to choose other people's limits for antinomianism. You think it's a tremendous tikkun to do chilul shabbos (because it's 'only' a d'rabanan) and someone else thinks it's a tremendous tikkun to have a threesome. It's all made up, so it just comes down to preference.
The difference between a drabanon and a chiyuv misa, יהרג ואל יעבור, is not made up at all, and the rest weren't either made up by the 'Zoharists' but by some of the greatest poskim many years before them.
You think it's OK to be antinomian as long as you stick to d'rabbanans?
And by the way, was the sefer really originally called אנשי כנה"ג? Never saw it called that before? And, isn't it ironic that the one psak of his you highlighted was to strongly limit the reliance of Zohar in halacha?
You're right. I had a brain episode.
I don't think it strongly limits it.
I didn't mean the rishonim pasken like that only that that they say this is the metzius.
And you are avoiding the real issue of your despicable comparison.
It's a terrible sevara. People in Hazal's day weren't more boki in instrument tuning than in the middle ages, and, even if they were, it wouldn't be some principle that applies in all places and times. What if we become boki again today, does the prohibition kick in again?
This is much better than most tenured profs could come up with.
Having buttered you up I'll ask:
Are you comparing Sabbateanism to modern political Zionism?
Patience! (The answer is no though).
Relieved.
Do you have a link to the screenshots about cardozo's god?
It's from the introduction to "Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings" by D. Halperin. I got it on libgen.
Thanks. I meant to put this as a footnote, but I forgot.
The Maharik cites the teshuva of Rav Hai Gaon and uses it to argue for a kal v'chomer to justify the practice of the Ashkenazim of selling aliyos on Simchas Torah and/or Shabbos Bereishis. If Rav Hai Gaon permitted issurim gemurim, then it's surely OK to permit something that just seems a bit off. Many people quote him in support of dancing, but he doesn't know anything about a contemporary practice of dancing or contemplate reviving it. People just quote him 4th hand without reading his teshuva (actually 2 of them), which basically says never to change any minhag ever. Many such cases.
The Rema doesn't say anything about dancing, in fact he clearly says otherwise ועוד נהגו להקיף עם ספרי התורה הבימה שבבית הכנסת כמו שמקיפים עם הלולב. People just hallucinate that he did because that's what they do. Many such cases.
That probably gets your average baalabatish Ashkenazi schul in chul off the hook, but it doesn't absolve the Tzfatian practice which demands vigorous dancing for the tikkun to work (see e.g. the description in מעשה רב). If memory serves, Rav Moshe uses this heter, but it's just a classic example of Yeshivish incoherence. You dance on Yom Tov to get kabbalah points, but you don't dance properly to stay on the right side of halacha (maybe), thus losing the kabbalah points.