My Dissertation's Journey (Part I)

As readers know, I am still in the process of writing my doctoral dissertation in history. It has taken me a few years and I am not yet done. As it stands now, while I possess a flesh and blood dissertation and more, that only needs to be edited, there is a strong possibility that I will have to make major changes, which can set me back months or even longer. Thus, I thought to take the opportunity to fill readers in on the situation and how I got there.

When I started my doctoral work at Ohio State, back in the fall of 2006, I wanted to write a dissertation on Isaac Abarbanel, focusing on either his messianic thought or his relationship to Maimonides. My advisor Dr. Goldish turned this idea down. He did not feel qualified to supervise something on Abarbanel. More importantly, he felt that my job prospects would fare better if I did not simply write something narrowly on Jewish thought, but instead addressed a larger narrative issue that would be of interest to people outside of Jewish Studies.

My next major idea was to write on the theme of vengeance against Christians in Jewish messianic thought. This was inspired by comments by Abarbanel, expressing his very un-politically correct hopes for the destruction of Christendom in the wake of the expulsion of 1492. I figured that writing about Jews thinking in ways that Christians often accused them of doing would be fun and controversial. This line of thinking led me to write an essay on the sixteenth-century adventurer David Reubeni, who claimed to come from the Ten Lost Tribes, and his interest in guns.

The next turn was influenced by a Koran class I took with the remarkable scholar Dr. Georges Tamer. On wrote a paper on Islamic Mahdism focusing particularly on the case of the Shi'i Fatimid dynasty, which seized power in North Africa in the early tenth century. What caught my attention was the fact that we are dealing with an apocalyptic movement that managed to evolve into a political one, once it seized power. I wondered if Maimonides', who took the apocalyptic element out of his messianism, was influenced by this line of thinking. Combined with my reading of Norman Cohn's Pursuit of the Millennium, which discusses medieval Christian apocalyptic movements in political terms, I became interested in messianism as a form of Jewish politics. This was to be in contrast to Gershom Scholem's categorizing of messianism as a retreat from politics.

I started to seriously work on the dissertation at the beginning of 2009 after completing my general exams. Using the essays on Reubeni and the Fatimids as well as a more extensive piece placing Abarbanel's messianism within the context of the Christian apocalyptic tradition as exemplified by Joachim of Fiore, I was planning on making my case that Jewish messianism was political largely by placing it within the context of various non-Jewish movements. The chapters would go as follows: Abu Isa's and David Alroy's use of armed force under charismatic leadership as influenced by early Shi'ism, Maimonides' rejection of apocalypticism as influenced by the Fatimids, Abarbanel's use of contemporary history as influenced by Joachim of Fiore, David Reubeni's use of guns as a symbol of state power, Sabbatai Sevi's use of early modern communication networks and Jacob Frank's use of brute force. This idea was grand, bold and completely impractical.

Are Messianic Movements Doomed to Failure?

The apocalyptic understanding of the Messiah would seem to guarantee that all messianic movements would, by definition, fail. If the point of a Messiah is to overturn the natural order of things and bring about the kingdom of God, any Messiah who comes and leaves the natural order of things intact is, by definition, a failed Messiah, if not a false Messiah. This argument is articulated by Harris Lenowitz in his book, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights. Lenowitz argues that messianic movements are by definition doomed because they cannot fulfill the supernatural claims upon which they are built:

Despite the variety of details in the messiah's lives and circumstances, one concludes, after reading all the accounts of them in succession, that they possess at least one feature in common: the messiah's failure to achieve his stated promises; from the beginning of every account, disaster is present and only awaiting its turn to appear. … No messiah succeeds in leading his followers and the world to a harmonious existence – not on the political level, where independence and autonomy inside or outside Israel is not regained by the Jews; and certainly not on the cosmic plain, where disease, violence, and death endure as principal features of the human universe. No messiah is able to soften these perdurable actualities. The messiahs, during their lives, and the followers, after their leader's death, must push the successful fulfillment of their programs forward into the future in order to maintain themselves as microsocieties in the present, but their efforts merely inflect the unavoidable death of the messiah and the eventual collapse of his movement, leaving rationalizations on the ruins of the unattainable hopes they have raised.

This view of Messianism has come under heavy fire. For example, Marc Saperstein, in his review of Jewish Messiahs, commented that:

Using the tools of the anthropologist, he [Lenowitz] presents the messianic movement as a Sisyphean ritual, in which all the protagonists know from the outset how the drama will end. … History, for the participants if not always for the historians, is very different from Greek tragedy. The analysis of behavior, knowledge, and motivation from the perspective of what occurs at a later date is (to use Michael Bernstein's felicitous term) illegitimate "backshadowing." It is hard to imagine that the protagonists of a messianic movement genuinely believe that they are following a script with a tragic ending. For them there is an alternative script in which the ending is luminous. 

I propose here that this is another example where political messianism becomes useful. As long as messianism is tied to the supernatural then, yes, the success or failure of the movement can be judged solely on the basis of whether the natural order in both politics and the physical order have been overthrown. This, of course, means that every messianic movement in history, whether Jewish, Christian or Muslim, has failed. Thus messianism becomes a study in failure. The study of Islamic Mahdism, in this sense, is useful in that it gives us a model of successful messianic movements that were apocalyptic. These movements simply shed their apocalyptic elements as they gained political power. If this process could work within Islam then in theory at least it could have worked for Judaism. Ultimately while messianic movements may be born out of Apocalypticism, they are not bound by them. They can transcend their apocalyptic origins and enter the political realm.

This allows us to look back at Jewish messianism as something other than a set up for failure. We may know the end of the story, that things will end in failure, but as long as there could have been a rationally plausible for any messianic movement to succeed then, as historians, we are required to put our knowledge of the end to one side and see the movement as those living in the moment would have seen it, with the possibility of success. Could Abu Isa and David Alroy have successfully led revolts and gained at least semi-autonomous Jewish States in northern Persia? Could David Reubeni, with the help of Shlomo Molcho, have continued the pretense of negotiating on behalf of a Jewish kingdom in the East long enough for Reubeni to have established himself as ruler of the Jews, making himself a force that no European power, not even Charles V, could simply ignore? Might the Ottoman Sultan have chosen to appoint Sabbatai Sevi as king of the Jews in a subject kingdom of Palestine, setting off a mass emigration of Western European Jews, bringing their technical skills to the new Sabbatian State? Would Jacob Frank have been able to carve at his niche in the political chaos of Poland and the religious chaos of the Jewish community to form his own power base? In many respects, barring more than a decade in prison, Frank actually did this and must, therefore, be viewed as a success.