Sabbateans, Frankists & Hasidim

Born in Hamburg in 1646, a Jewish woman named Glückel married at about fourteen, around 1660, into a merchant family of the town of Hameln, raised twelve children, ran a business in gold and pearls, and in her widowhood wrote her memoirs in Yiddish for her children. They are one of the great personal documents of early modern Europe. In them she remembers the winter of 1665–1666, when the news reached Hamburg that the Messiah had appeared in the Ottoman Empire. Some sold their houses and land; the Portuguese Jews of the city danced in their synagogue wearing broad green silk ribbons, the Messiah's colour. Her father-in-law in Hameln packed two great casks with linen and provisions, dried peas and beans and preserved meat, ready to set off for the Holy Land at a moment's notice, and kept them packed for years, waiting. Then word came that the Messiah had become a Muslim. That messiah was Sabbatai Zevi. The movement around him was the greatest messianic upheaval in Jewish history since antiquity, and its collapse, its underground survival and the revival of Jewish mysticism that followed it in the Polish borderlands, as Hasidism, are the subject of this chapter.

The background: catastrophe and Kabbalah

Two things prepared the way.

The first was Lurianic Kabbalah, the mystical system taught by Isaac Luria (1534–1572) in the Galilean town of Safed and spread by his disciples in the following decades (see ch26). Luria taught that creation began with God's contraction (tzimtzum) to make room for the world; that the vessels meant to hold the divine light shattered (shevirat ha-kelim), scattering sparks of holiness into the realm of the "husks" (kelipot); and that the task of Israel, through the commandments and mystical intention, was repair (tikkun), raising the sparks and so bringing the Messiah. History itself became a drama of cosmic restoration nearing its end.

The second was catastrophe. In 1648 the Cossack rising led by Bohdan Khmelnytsky against Polish rule in Ukraine brought massacres of Jewish communities. Jewish chronicles gave enormous numbers; modern estimates range from several thousand to tens of thousands of deaths, and the figures are debated. The trauma was real and lasting, and Jewish memory marked 1648 as a time of messianic "birth pangs".

Sabbatai Zevi

Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) was born in Smyrna (İzmir) in Ottoman Anatolia, a learned young man with periods of exaltation and deep depression; modern writers have often suggested a bipolar illness. In his exalted phases he performed "strange acts" (maʿasim zarim) that broke the law, such as pronouncing the forbidden divine name and "marrying" a Torah scroll. He was expelled from several communities.

In 1665 he met Nathan of Gaza, a brilliant young kabbalist, who had a vision that Sabbatai was the Messiah. Nathan became his prophet and theologian. Sabbatai proclaimed himself in May 1665, and Nathan's letters spread the news across the Jewish world, from Yemen and Persia to Amsterdam, Hamburg and Poland. Communities fasted and did penance; some prepared to leave for the Land of Israel; rabbis who doubted were silenced. Sabbatai abolished the fasts that mourned the destruction of the Temple, turning the Ninth of Av into a festival of his birthday. Even in London, the diarist Samuel Pepys noted in February 1666 that a Jew was offering bets on whether Sabbatai would be crowned king in Jerusalem.

In 1666 Sabbatai sailed to Constantinople, was arrested by the Ottoman authorities, and was brought before the Sultan's court at Edirne. Given the choice of death or conversion, on 16 September 1666 he took a turban and became a Muslim, under the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi. He died in exile in 1676 at Ulcinj, in present-day Montenegro.

The underground

Most Jews were devastated and ashamed, and communities later tore pages about the movement from their records. But a minority went on believing, and the theology that sustained them is one of the most remarkable in religious history. Nathan of Gaza taught that the Messiah had to descend into the realm of the husks, into Islam, to rescue the last and deepest sparks of holiness: his apostasy was not a betrayal but the most profound act of redemption. For a few, it followed that true believers should imitate him, and that in the messianic age the old law was superseded, and holiness could be reached through sin.

• The Dönme ("converts"), several hundred families in Salonika, followed Sabbatai into Islam from 1683, living outwardly as Muslims and secretly as believers in him for two and a half centuries, marrying only among themselves. After the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923 most moved to Istanbul and assimilated.
• Secret Sabbatean circles persisted inside Judaism in Europe, and suspicion of them poisoned Jewish life for a century. In the 1750s the rabbi Jacob Emden accused the great Talmudist Jonathan Eybeschütz of hiding Sabbatean formulas in the amulets he wrote for pregnant women in Metz and Altona, and the "amulet controversy" split the rabbinate of Europe. Scholars still debate whether Eybeschütz was a secret Sabbatean.

Jacob Frank

The most radical heir of the movement was Jacob Frank (1726–1791), a Jew from Podolia who had spent time among Sabbateans in the Ottoman Empire, and who from 1755 gathered followers in Poland. He taught that he was the latest incarnation of the messianic soul after Sabbatai, that the Torah and its law had been abolished, and, according to hostile witnesses, led rites that broke sexual taboos. Excommunicated by the rabbis, the Frankists turned to the Catholic Church. At disputations at Kamieniec Podolski in 1757, where the bishop then ordered copies of the Talmud burned, and at Lwów in 1759, they argued against the Talmud before Church authorities; the Lwów disputation also saw them repeat the blood libel against their former co-religionists, a charge that scholars regard as utterly false. Frank and more than a thousand of his followers were baptized in 1759–1760; Frank's godfather was the King of Poland. The Church soon suspected his sincerity and imprisoned him for thirteen years. He ended his life at Offenbach in Germany, holding court as a mysterious "baron". Frank's followers assimilated into Polish Catholic society. Nobel laureate Olga Tokarczuk's novel The Books of Jacob (2014) retold the story for a new generation.

The Baal Shem Tov

In the same Polish-Lithuanian borderlands, in the same decades, a very different movement began. Its founder in tradition is Israel ben Eliezer (c. 1700–1760), called the Baal Shem Tov, "Master of the Good Name", or by his acronym the Besht. A baal shem was a popular healer and wonder-worker who used divine names, amulets and herbs. The Besht lived in the town of Medzhybizh in Podolia from about 1740, where Polish tax records found by the historian Moshe Rosman show a "Baal Shem, doctor" living in a house owned by the Jewish community and exempt from tax. He was not, Rosman argues, a rebel against the establishment but a respected religious figure.

The Besht left almost no writings. A letter attributed to him, the "Holy Epistle", describes an ascent of the soul on Rosh Hashanah of 1746, in which he reached the palace of the Messiah and asked, "When will the master come?", and was told: when your teaching has spread and your wellsprings gush outward, so that others too can perform the mystical unifications and ascents you do. Hasidism has read that answer as its mission ever since. The stories collected about him in Shivḥei ha-Besht ("In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov", 1814) show a healer, a teacher and a lover of ordinary Jews.

Hasidism

What became the Hasidic movement was shaped above all by the Besht's successor, Dov Ber, the Maggid ("preacher") of Mezeritch (d. 1772), whose disciples spread it across Ukraine, Poland, Belarus and Lithuania. Its teachings took Kabbalah out of the study of the few and turned it into a spirituality for everyone:

• God is everywhere. Divine sparks are present in everything, even in ordinary actions, eating, work, conversation, and can be raised by doing them with the right intention.
• Devotion. Devekut, clinging to God, is the goal of life, reached above all in joyful, ecstatic prayer, with the whole body. Sadness is to be avoided; joy is a religious duty.
• The tzaddik. The heart of the movement is the tzaddik, or rebbe, a righteous leader who serves as a channel between his followers and God, praying for them, counselling them and working wonders. Followers travel to their rebbe, eat at his table (tish), and receive his blessing. Leadership became hereditary, and Hasidism grew into dynasties named after towns: Lubavitch (Chabad), Belz, Ger, Satmar, Vizhnitz, Bratslav and many more.
• Song and story. Wordless melodies (niggunim), gatherings (farbrengen), and tales of the masters became vehicles of teaching.

The movement had great thinkers. Shneur Zalman of Liadi founded Chabad and wrote its classic, the Tanya (1797), a systematic mystical psychology. Nachman of Bratslav (1772–1810), the Besht's great-grandson, told enigmatic tales and asked his followers to be with him on Rosh Hashanah; since his death, pilgrims have gone to his grave in Uman, Ukraine, now tens of thousands each year.

The opponents

Hasidism provoked fierce resistance. In 1772 the rabbinic leaders of Vilna, with the approval of the great scholar Elijah ben Solomon, the Vilna Gaon, excommunicated the Hasidim and burned some of their writings. Their opponents, the Misnagdim ("opponents"), accused them of neglecting Torah study for emotional prayer, of changing the liturgy, of worshipping their rebbes, and, remembering Sabbatai and Frank, of carrying the seeds of a new heresy. The quarrel was bitter, including denunciations to the Russian government that led to Shneur Zalman's arrest in 1798, but by the mid-nineteenth century the two camps had made common cause against a newer enemy, the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and secularism. Today both are part of Haredi (ultra-Orthodox) Judaism.

Hasidism was devastated by the Holocaust, which destroyed its heartlands. It was rebuilt, above all in New York and Israel, and has grown rapidly since, with several hundred thousand adherents; Chabad-Lubavitch, under its last rebbe Menachem Mendel Schneerson (d. 1994), became a worldwide outreach movement, some of whose members believe that Schneerson himself is the Messiah.

The believer's lens

For traditional Jews, the Messiah is a real hope, and his coming is tied to the repair of the world. Sabbatai Zevi is remembered as a false messiah, and his story as a warning of what messianic longing can do when it runs ahead of God's time; his name was long a byword. For the Dönme and the remaining believers, he was the true redeemer whose apostasy was a hidden mission, a view now held by very few.

For Hasidim, the Baal Shem Tov restored the soul of Judaism: he taught that God can be found in every place and every act, that simple faith and joy are as precious as learning, and that the tzaddik can lift his followers to God. The rebbes are holy men whose prayers are heard, and the tales of their wonders are, for many believers, true. For Chabad, the Holy Epistle's promise, that the Messiah will come when the wellsprings spread, is the reason for its outreach to every Jew. The archive reports these convictions as belief.

The skeptical lens

The historian's first observation is that the modern study of this subject was largely created by Gershom Scholem, whose Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah (1957; English 1973) traced the movement to Lurianic Kabbalah and treated it as a turning point in Jewish history that prepared the way for Hasidism and even for modernity. Later historians have questioned parts of this picture: whether Lurianic Kabbalah was really as widely known in 1665 as Scholem thought, how much the 1648 massacres drove the movement, and how directly Sabbateanism led to Hasidism or to the Enlightenment. Moshe Idel argued that Hasidism drew as much on older magical and ecstatic traditions as on Luria.

The second is that the sources for Hasidism's origins are mostly hagiography, collected decades later. The historical Besht, Rosman showed, was a documented communal figure, but the tales of his miracles are the stories of his admirers, and the Holy Epistle has a complex textual history.

The third concerns the Frankists. What is known of their rites comes mainly from hostile sources, rabbis, converts and churchmen; how much is accurate is uncertain. What is certain is that the blood libel they repeated at Lwów was false, and that such libels had long been used to incite violence against Jews.

Symbology and sacred encoding

• Numerology of the end. Sabbatean and earlier kabbalists calculated the year of redemption from the letters of biblical verses. The Hebrew year 5408 (1648) had been expected by some as a messianic year, from a kabbalistic reading of Leviticus 25:13, "In this [zot, whose letters add up to 408] year of jubilee each of you shall return"; the disaster of that year gave the expectation a darker meaning. The date 1666, the year of Sabbatai's crowning in his believers' hopes, had its own resonance among Christian millenarians, who connected it with 666.
• Amulets and names. The Emden–Eybeschütz controversy turned on how to read the combinations of divine names on printed amulets: Emden decoded them as the name of Sabbatai Zevi; Eybeschütz's defenders read them as orthodox. A clear case of disputed encoding, still debated.
• Sparks and husks. Lurianic Kabbalah's image of sparks of light trapped in husks became, in Sabbatean theology, the justification for descending into sin, and in Hasidism the reason to sanctify ordinary life. The same symbol, read two ways.
• The white garments of Shabbat. Many Hasidim wear white or distinctive clothing on the Sabbath, and the gartel, a belt worn in prayer, divides the "higher" from the "lower" body: dress as a map of spiritual orientation. The fur hats (shtreimel) and long coats of Hasidic dress preserve the fashion of Polish gentry and have become signs of sacred continuity.
• The niggun. The wordless melody, sung over and over, expresses what words cannot; Chabad tradition counts some of its niggunim as compositions of its rebbes, and a niggun can be a teaching in itself.
• The rebbe's table. At the tish, followers eagerly take a morsel of food the rebbe has touched (shirayim), a sacramental sign of sharing in his holiness.
• Green, the Messiah's colour. In the frenzy of 1665–1666 some communities adopted green, which Glückel's memoir associates with Sabbatai, a small example of how a movement quickly creates its own emblems.

Connections

This chapter continues the story of Kabbalah (ch26) from the Zohar and Safed to its most dramatic consequences, and grows from Rabbinic Judaism (ch19). Its messianism belongs with The End of Days (ch50) and with the Christian millenarian hopes of the Reformation era (ch31), when 1666 excited Christians too. The Dönme lived between Judaism and Islam and Sufism (ch21, ch27), whose orders they resembled. Frank's baptized followers entered Polish Catholicism. Hasidism's joyful mysticism, its holy leaders and its songs bear comparison with Sufism (ch27) and Bhakti (ch30), and the rebbe with the saints and gurus of other traditions. Its modern outreach and messianic hopes belong with the New Religious Movements of ch35. In the Vault, the Zohar (V79) and the Sefer Yetzirah (V80) are the books behind it.

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From The Divine Archives · https://getconexto.com/chapters/ch73.html · a comparative library of the sacred.