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The Outbreak of Sabbateanism - the Eastern European Factor

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The Outbreak of Sabbateanism - the Eastern European Factor TheJournal ofJewish Thought and Philosophy, Vol. 4, pp. 171-183 © 1994 Reprints available directly from the publisher Photocopying permitted by licence only The Outbreak of Sabbateanism - The Eastern European Factor Ja~ob Barnai Haifa University,Haifa) Israel In this paper I discuss and elaborate a thesis based on the assumption that every historical event, especially if it is a great event, has multiple causes. There may be only a few such causes, or there may be many of them; some of them may be clear, while others are hidden. These factors may take a number of forms: ideological, political, cultural, social or economic. The historian's first task, in my view, is to attempt to discover the proba- ble causes and circumstances leading to the occurrence of a particular event. The next task is to assess, on the basis of documentation and inter- pretation the probable weight of each of the elements that contributed to the occurrence of this event. It is well-known that messianic movements have no religious or geo- graphic boundaries; they have existed in almost every human society since the dawn of history. One of the most prominent of them was the Sabbatean movement, which broke out among the Jews in the 1660s. The great extent of this movement has led many scholars to focus their atten- tion on its background and the possible causes of its occurrence and spread. These scholars suggested many different possibilities - some personal and some ideological, some social or political or economic. A few decades ago the work of Gershom Scholem overshadowed that of all the scholars who had preceded him. He established categorically that there were definite connections between the expulsion of the Jews from Spain in 1492, the development and spread of Lurianic Kabbala, and the outbreak and spread of Sabbateanism.1 Yet in his paper "The Sabbatean movement in Poland," which was first published in 1953, Scholem claimed that the outbreak of Sabbateanism "involved many different factors, both material and spiritual, both social and religious, and at the present time there is no possibility of distinguishing and evaluating the degree of influence of each 'I I thank my friend Prof. Moshe Ide! for his assistance in the formulation of this paper. 1 Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York 1941), pp. 284-288. 171 172 jacob Barnai factor separately." Later in the paper he mentioned the possibility that the extended wars and the pogroms visited on the Jews of Eastern Europe in the wake of these wars were among the causes of the outbreak of Sabbateanism. He brought several pieces of evidence to support this claim: (1) "Sabbatai Zevi considered the 1648-49 pogroms as the beginning of the redemption." (2) "Thus the Polish Jews themselves could surely find compensation for their suffering in the new gospel." Scholem bases this view on a ser- mon of R. Jacob ben Solomon of Lubzencz, in which he said, "The verse 'A deer [zevtJ will grow in its place' may be interpreted as meaning that Sabbatai Zevi will spring from the 1648-49 pogroms." (3) A quote from a letter written by Nathan of Gaza to Raphael Yosef in Egypt: "The saying 'There should not be any killing in the world' refers to the Ashkenazic [European] countries."2 When he later wrote his famous book about Sabbatai Zevi, however, Scholem changed his mind about this. In that book he rejected all possible causes of the outbreak of the Sabbatean movement in 1665 except for the spread of Lurian Kabbala.3 It seems that Scholem progressively closed himself off over the years from any thesis but his own and was no longer prepared to consider other possibilities. Scholem first published his com- prehensive work on Sabbatai Zevi in Hebrew in 1957, and in editions pub- lished in other languages he did not change his mind about this issue. But it seems to me that now, several decades later, the progress of research, which has led to new readings of sources and new methods of investiga- tion, gives us the opportunity for a re-examination of the issue. In recent years scholars have begun to question how widespread Lurian Kabbala actually was in the generation preceding Sabbatai Zevi.4 In conse- quence, there is place for a systematic critical re-examination of the various historical factors, and not only the ideological ones, that might have led to 2 Idem, "The Sabbatean movement in Poland," in: Israel Halpern (ed.), The House of Israe/ in Po/and, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem 1953) (in Hebrew), p. 36-76; reprinted in Scholem, Studies and Texts on the History ofSabbateanism and Its Metamorphoses (Jerusalem 1974) (in Hebrew), pp. 68-140. J Idem, Sabbatai .levi (princeton 1973), pp. 1-8. This was part of his general conception of the links between the expulsion from Spain, the spread of Lurianic Kabbala and the outbreak of Sabbateanism. This conception is supported by Isaiah Tishbi in his book, Studies in Kabba/a and Its Branches, Vol. 2 (Jerusalem 1993), pp. 592-96, 613-19 (in Hebrew). For a totally different view see Moshe Idel, Kabba/a; A New Perspective (New Haven 1988), pp. 257-60. 4 Moshe Ide!, "One from a town, two from a clan - The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism: A Re-Examination" jeJ}JishHistory, 7 (1993), pp. 79-104..
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