Modern Jewish History Part vi

The Hayyun Controversy

To read previous items in the series, go here.

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.