Toward a Lockean Theory of Halakha

In the previous post, I argued that Haredi Judaism, to the extent that it accepted charismatic authority in the form of Gedolim, must be seen as an anti-halakhic movement. Charismatic authority is implicitly antinomian in that the only way for someone to demonstrate their absolute loyalty to the charismatic authority figure, as opposed to some textual authority, is to violate the law as interpreted through text. For example, Sabbateans were known to secretly eat a cherry on the fast of Tisha B'Av to demonstrate that they did not really need to fast on account of the coming of Sabbatai Sevi. On the contrary, the way to now truly fulfill the commandment of fasting was to eat. The real purpose of fasting was to signify faith in the coming of Sabbatai, the Messiah. So by showing such faith in Sabbatai, as to do what might look like a sin, you are the one who is really fasting, as opposed to the fasting non-believers, who are really the ones eating. Similarly, if you believe that it is impossible to know the law through one's own intellectual efforts, but require the aid of Gedolim, then the logical way to demonstrate this faith is to commit a sin like taking a bite out of that traif sandwich at the command of the Gadol.

In a post-Enlightenment world, there are good reasons to be tempted by charismatic authority. It very neatly solves the challenge to authority both from potentially heterodox methods of interpreting the world (such as science) and, most importantly, from non-believing clergymen, working to bring down the faith from within. Charismatic authority, if we accept it, clearly trumps science and offers an a priori religious authority that makes liberal clergymen irrelevant. We see this logic at work within American Protestantism as well, where the Evangelical use of charismatic authority has beaten the text-based authority of the mainline denominations.

Let me suggest an approach to religious authority that might redeem text-based authority in the modern world, making use of John Locke style social contract theory in which everyone is free to follow their own understanding of Judaism and free to reject other opinions as demonstrating that the person is not serious about their Judaism, all the while being subject to everyone else having that same power. Here is another thought experiment. As a scholar of Jewish history, I have just made an important discovery in my university library, a set of Gemarah and Shulhan Arukh. Our parents and grandparents were all committed socialists, who raised us on kibbutzim. So despite the fact that we all strongly identify as Jews, none of us know anything about halakha. Even after we started believing in God again, we felt that there was something missing in our relationship to him. Observing the laws in these books look like the perfect solution we have been praying for.

We are going to start a club called the LOJS (Local Orthodox Jewish Synagogue). We will gather together on Saturdays to engage in Jewish worship, as set forth in the books I found, and to listen to lectures on how to observe the many strange laws found in these books. (Can you believe it, but we are going to have to baptize our dishes.) Sessions will be presided over by a Jewish studies professor, whom we will call a rabbi. There is nothing special about him and people should feel free to ignore him. It just makes sense to have someone in charge to be officially not obeyed.

Word of the LOJS club is spreading and soon we will have chapters in many different cities. Now, in trying to recreate some form of traditionally observant Judaism, we will face a number of challenges related to authority. We are trying to create a religion based on what we read in a set of books. These books say a lot of things, much of which is blatantly contradictory (do we listen to Bait Hillel or Beit Shammai) or simply difficult to understand, leaving a lot of room for interpretation and reasonable disagreement. So even if everyone was totally committed, we would have people wanting to practice different versions of Judaism. Since we are all baalai teshuva trying to figure things out, none of us carry any real authority that others should listen. To make matters worse, all sorts of people are applying to join our club with different levels of observance. Most people are more in the market for a few rituals to give some spirituality to their lives, but not to refashion themselves with a complete set of laws that must be accepted in totum. Furthermore, everyone is coming to Judaism with previous social and ideological commitments, which they are not about to give up now that they are joining their LOJS. For example, we have the nice gay couple who want to be married in the club, the feminist studying to be a rabbi, the libertarian-anarchist who has no intention of praying for the restoration of any Davidic monarchy and the Christian who believes that Jesus is his Jewish Lord and Savior. Different LOJS clubs are going to make their own decisions about where to draw the lines and who can be members, but no one is in a position to force their views on anyone else.

The sensible solution to these problems of authority would be for every individual person and LOJS club to proceed with creating their own standards all while showing the spirit of charity for all those other clubs setting their standards. God did not speak to me and I am not the heir of any special tradition. I am just a scholar trying to read and apply a manual like anybody else. Furthermore, we have to accept that everyone is coming to Judaism with some kind of previous ideological baggage, which sets boundaries on how they will interpret laws. For example, classical liberal Jews might refuse to kill homosexuals and Amalekite children. We have to accept this for the simple reason that we have no greater divine authority than they do. Just as we need our opponents to accept us even when they disagree with our interpretations and look askance at our ideological commitments so too must we be consistent and accept them despite our disagreements.

There is one limitation I would place in order to keep everyone honest; we are free to reject anyone, who does not appear to us to be acting in good faith and seems to be using Judaism as cover for some other ideological agenda. A greater level of personal observance should be a cause to give the benefit of the doubt over those who are less observant. That being said, overzealousness in rejecting other LOJS clubs should serve as prima facia evidence of using Judaism as cover for another agenda, much as a lack of ritual observance would. For example, even as I, much like Chabad, welcome people who drive on the Sabbath, are intermarried or even gay, I would reject the membership applications of members of Jews for Jesus and Jewish Voices for Peace, finding that they perform little in the way of Jewish practice and their Judaism consists mostly of using their Judaism to castigate other Jews for failing to believe in Jesus or make suicidal concessions to the Palestinians. Clearly, their agenda is simply to call themselves Jews in order to convert us to their actual religion. Similarly, I might reject applications from Satmar on the grounds that despite their meticulous observance, their eagerness to denounce other Jews and place themselves on some kind of moral platform indicates that they are less interested in Judaism as a way of practice and to relate to God than they are in setting up an anti-modernist cult. In making these decisions, I recognize that I make myself vulnerable. Not only should I not expect any tolerance from those who I have rejected, but reasonable people might also come to question my motivations in the particular lines I draw and decide that they cannot accept me.

Clearly, there would be nothing to stop a Jews for Pork group beyond our ability to reject their application as a Jewish organization. (I would make a point in distinguishing Jews who incidentally did not practice kosher in their homes and ideological traif eaters.) That being said, we should be able to avoid the problem with antinomianism. There are no hard hierarchies let alone charismatic authorities so there is no reason why there should be any antinomians in our midsts, particularly if we do our job in rooting out those trying to use Judaism as cover for other agendas.

Social contract theory is often criticized for being ahistorical. There was never a moment when non-civilized men came together and agreed on any kind of social contract, whether the Hobbesian, Lockean, or Rousseauean versions. This criticism misses the point that the social contract was never something that happened in history, but is happening every day. The United States government stands because every day the vast majority of Americans, not me, get up and agree that the government has moral authority over themselves and their neighbors even to the point of killing them. The moment that even a small percentage of the population begins to question this then you get the Bastille and the Berlin Wall.

Similarly, many people might question the applicability of my scenario as it lacks any FFBs (frum from birth). What you have are some Jewish Studies majors deciding that they are really interested in halakha and getting other people to listen to them. (Granted that no one would ever take us seriously.) For me, this is precisely the point. Living post-enlightenment and emancipation, there are no people truly born religious. Being observant Jews is something that we decide every day. Furthermore, there is no power of tradition to give anyone any inherent authority over anyone else. My father might be an Orthodox rabbi, but I grew up in Columbus, OH as a product of American culture. Just as a genetic test would demonstrate my utter lack of racial purity, even a casual reading of this blog should be enough to demonstrate that my ideas are hardly pure of gentile influence. I do not claim to be anything more an American with classical liberal values and conservatives politics, who grabbed onto the Judaism he found around him, trying to give himself a community and some meaning to his life. I challenge anyone to demonstrate that their Judaism is any purer.

There are many Jews out there, who lack my Jewish education. I am not smarter or more virtuous than them and claim no intrinsic authority over them. I am sure, if they wish, they could study the same texts that I studied and surpass me. There are certainly many Jews who are more learned than me. I am sure that, if I applied myself, I could remedy that. Such people may be compared to my in-laws, brother-in-law, sister-in-law and younger brother, who all, unlike me, have medical degrees. It may be prudent that I take their medical advice seriously, but none of them can claim any kind of authority over me; I remain free to shop around for medical advice. Most importantly, I deny that any of them are intrinsically smarter or virtuous than me (besides for my mother-in-law). If I wanted to, I could go to medical school and become a doctor as well.

Let us do away with charismatic authority and even the hierarchy of tradition. Let us be the People of the Book.

My Dissertation's Journey (Part II)

I spent most of the next two years adrift with my dissertation. It did not help matters that I spent the 2009-10 school year away from any real academic oversight while teaching high school over in Maryland. The Hebrew Academy experience itself was a positive one for me, but most of that time randomly reading. It also did not help matters that I was fairly depressed over being in my late 20s and still single. Perhaps someone with better guidance, more emotional stability and less stubbornness would have recognized the need to reign in one's thinking instead of allowing it to range over a wide variety of topics related to messianism, much of it with no particular connection to Judaism, producing little in the way of actually useful writing.

It was only in 2011, after spending months wadding through the issue of Sabbatianism, that I really found my big idea. This idea was that messianism, with its conflicts between its spiritual and political variants, was rooted in the conflict between, what I came to refer to as, military model, missionary and esoteric model religions. The military model, based around community and ritual, seeks the support of a politically successful state. The missionary and esoteric models, based around believing individuals, oppose the community and eschews worldly success such as that provided by a state. This manifests itself in messianism, which combines the military model dreams of political success with the anti-community hopes of spiritual redemption. In a sense, messianism requires the belief that a political state is so unimportant that God would destroy it, merely for the sake of creating a more faithful nation, and so important that God would organize history around the return of his people to one.

I was still trapped by the idea that this dissertation needed to be comparative and discuss Christianity and Islam. This cost me several more months until I finally forced myself to set aside what had already ballooned to over 100 pages of material and set it aside for a future book. This still left me attempting to conceive of a grand narrative of Jewish messianism placed within the context of an elaborate theory of religion. Last fall, after I crossed the 500-page mark, my advisor told me to cut my early modern material. This included the Sabbatian chapter that I had spent so much time on. A few months ago, he told me to cut the medieval material and only hand in the beginning part, which was then well over 200 pages. One problem with this was that it meant abandoning all the material that I had originally set out to write. A more serious problem was that I was now writing a dissertation on ancient history, an area that neither I nor my advisor possessed any official expertise on. Nevertheless, I continued away at this part of the dissertation, clarifying ideas and adding in more examples to serve as evidence, until it passed the 300-page mark. I knew that what I was writing was not the sort of thing that one should normally do for a dissertation, but I assumed that as long as I was coherent and my advisor supported me I was safe.

Disaster struck a few weeks ago when a professor my advisor wanted to serve on my committee objected to the fact that I was writing a work of general theory. Other professors were soon called in and they raised the same objection. None of them bothered to argue against anything I had written. They did not need to. I had, without realizing it and with my adviser's cooperation, broken an unwritten code and that was enough. This morning I received what appears to be the final verdict. My advisor has acknowledged that my project had been a mistake from the beginning. He now apologizes for his mistake and offers his aid in writing a new dissertation. After nearly five years and more than 800 pages, I seem to be back at square one.         

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.

Speaking at a Chabad House (About Messianism No Less)

In South Pasadena, where Miriam and I are living, there is not much in the way of Orthodox life. We have a Chabad house 3.5 miles away where we pray. It is a small, but very diverse group of people. They have been very good to Miriam in the past and are now very accepting of me. I am happy to be part of this family. While most of the people there became religious through Chabad, as with most Chabad places, beyond the two Chabad rabbis and their families it is not a Chabad community.

A few weeks ago someone put forth the idea to me that, as a Jewish historian, I should give a class on Jewish history possibly on what I am writing about. I am an academic historian, writing about messianism; how many sentences do you think it is going to take before the rabbi pulls the plug on me? Somehow this person managed to convince me to go for it and, even more surprisingly, convinced the rabbi to give me a platform. So this past Sabbath, I gave an "Introduction to Jewish Messianism." I guess the biggest shocker was that over twenty people stuck around in the afternoon to listen to me. It was the sort of lecture that I like giving. It went on for about an hour before tapering off into an informal question and answer session. I took a number of questions while I was speaking, which sent me off on lots of side tangents. The problem with this is that it sometimes makes me difficult to follow. I try to balance this with a sense of humor. If people have no idea what I am talking about they should at least think it is funny, whatever it is I am actually talking about. Well apparently everybody liked my presentation so it looks like we may do this again, perhaps make it a monthly event.

Believe it or not, I do have a plan as to how to keep myself from being too offensive. Keep everything theoretical. I am simply reporting on what is going on in my field. Phrase things in questions. I am simply explaining some of the major debates going on and offering points for consideration. Above all else, I should avoid talking about Chabad messianism. As a historian, I should have no problem keeping things in the eighteenth century or beforehand.

Ok, so I did talk about Chabad messianism. I raised the question of calamity based messianism; do messianic movements come about in response to major physical disasters? Isaac Abarbanel writing three books on messianism several years after the expulsion of 1492 and as the Jews of Portugal were being forcibly baptized sounds like calamity messianism. Jews in Poland responding to the Cossack attacks of 1648 by embracing Sabbatai Sevi in 1666 might be calamity messianism. (Of course, that would still not explain why Jews everywhere else did too.) Why did Chabad in the 1980s and 90s turn messianic? What great physical threat did Lubavitchers living in the United States at the end of the twentieth-century face? If you are going to say that this was in response to the Holocaust then why did the Lubavitcher Rebbe not come out in the 1950s with his "bring Moshiach" campaign? (The previous Rebbe, in the 1940s, started a messianic campaign, but it faded away for several decades.)

So no trouble yet. One of the attendees has asked me if, for my next lecture, I could talk about traditional Jewish claims that there will be no Messiah or that all messianic prophecies were already fulfilled with King Hezekiah and the Second Temple. What could possibly go wrong with this?         

History 111: How to Start Your Own Religion (Part I)

So I have decided to put my dissertation research to some practical use and will be starting my own messianic cult. I figure that, considering my knowledge of the history of religion I should be able to learn from the mistakes of other would-be Messiahs and prophets. (Note to readers; being a Messiah is a difficult and dangerous task to be left to those with years of professional graduate school experience.)

Now in making claims of supernatural revelation, there are three levels, forming a very wide pyramid. At the bottom of the pyramid are the hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions of people, throughout history who claimed supernatural revelation. Such people stood around on street corners and were, for the most part, ignored. The more successful of them might have been mocked by those passing by or even arrested by the Inquisition on charges of heresy. We tend to call such people cranks and lunatics. Obviously, as a would-be Messiah of my talent, I think I can do significantly better than this.

The next level up were those who managed to form small groups of followers around themselves; in other words, they are cult leaders. Such people are relatively rare, perhaps a few thousand in all of history, as this actually requires, as we shall see, a very specific set of skills. Examples of such people would be David Koresh, Rev. Moon of the Unification Church, Hong Xiuquan from nineteenth-century China, who claimed to be the brother of Jesus and started the Taiping rebellion which caused the deaths of some twenty million people, and my beloved Sabbatai Sevi. Such a path, while offering minor celebrity status, carries with it a serious risk of sudden violent death due to government officials not appreciating your message of peace, love, and killing the unbeliever. Of course, Sabbatai did leverage his messianic career into a nice honorary position in the Ottoman civil service.

At the top of the pyramid were those very rare individuals who, with a mixture of talent and the right historical circumstances, managed to become the heads of major religions, with millions, even billions, of followers willing to start wars in their name, billions of dollars, and massive houses of worship to gladden the heart of even the most humble Messiah. The all-time most successful person in this elite group was Jesus, with some two billion Christians. With over a billion Muslims, Mohammad comes in second. Even I, in my great humility, do not believe I can play in the same league as Jesus or Mohammad, but perhaps I can match the founder of Mormonism, Joseph Smith, and create a religion with a few million followers and a Broadway show.

Entering this field is about as easy as becoming a struggling artist as it does not require any actual talent or job experience. All you need to do is claim a supernatural revelation, a visit from say God, the angel Gabriel, Elijah the Prophet, Jesus or the Virgin Mary, and a message, something about peace, God's love, his kingdom is coming and everyone is going to die unless they repent very soon. While it may require no talent, it is necessary for even the most talented Messiah to start at the bottom so the position is not to be mocked. Being a divine messenger has the advantage over being an artist in that, by virtue of just the job title, you can automatically catapult yourself over all those theologians with years of theoretical experience in the field; artists have to walk in the shadow of those more established in their field. Of course, being an artist has the advantage of allowing you to sit around coffee shops, safe from the elements and the mob, instead of street corners. Note to self; make sure to do research into the feasibility of becoming the first Starbucks Messiah.     

(To be continued ...)

In Support of Public Schools Teaching Intelligent Design and Other Nonsense III

Baruch Pelta, in his second post, gets nasty, accusing me of putting up a "destabilizing lie meant to pull emotional strings." Yes, I have the nerve to compare his mode of dealing with opponents to that of Haredim in that, while intellectually he may understand that people disagree with him, at a psychological level he fails to internalize this. This gets him stuck on the fact that he is "objectively" correct. (Note that I did not accuse him of being a Nazi, which is what I would have done if I were trying to simply score polemical points.) One should not think ill of Baruch; this is a problem that afflicts most people. Being a true liberal, one who respects all beliefs and refuses to use any physically coercive measures, even against those he disagrees with, to force people to go against those beliefs, requires years of disciplined critical thinking. It is something I still strive to work on in myself.

 A useful exercise is to think in terms of x and y instead of actual ideas. X and y are both ideas held by people living in society. In order to get x and y supporters to not force their beliefs on the other, they need to be promised that the other side, in turn, will not try to force their beliefs on them. Now x might be evolution and y creationism, but that is irrelevant in face of the more abstract x and y social contract model we agree to serve. Thinking in abstract terms allows you to get around the psychological hang-ups we all have about the beliefs that seem to us to be obviously true.

Working as an intellectual historian also helps. For example, I have been spending much of my time these few months trying to understand Sabbatianism. It is not my place to judge those who believed that Sabbatai Sevi was the Messiah. If it seems absurd to me then I have to work all the harder as seeing Sabbatai as they might have and put myself in a frame of mind in which accepting Sabbatai as the Messiah can become reasonable. This is done by immersing oneself in the words of Sabbatians themselves and their worldview.

In terms of actual arguments, Baruch challenges my larger definition of religion, pointing out that the Constitution specifically refers to religion and not to ideas in general. Fair enough, but I would point out that, in the eighteenth century, the only examples of large-scale organized ideological groups, the kind that might have the power to overthrow the government in hopes of being able to force their beliefs on others, were religions. Keep in mind that the main "religious" concern of the Founding Fathers was to not have Catholics and Protestants repeating Europe's religion wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on American soil. I assume that they would have adjusted their terms if they were writing only several decades later and saw the Communist Party. At the end of the day, it does not make sense to have one set of rules for the Catholic Church and another for the Communist Party. Baruch, are you suggesting that the beliefs of Communists are outside of the first amendment? Richard Dawkins, of all people, has essentially made my argument that religion should not be treated any differently from any other belief. I agree with Dawkins that being a Quaker should not offer you special conscientious objector status not available to people who are pacifists on simple intellectual grounds.
 

The Military Mission of the Ottoman Empire

I previously discussed the difference between the military and missionary models of conversion as they relate to the Islamic and Christian traditions. The military model sees the conversion of the targeted population as a logical consequence of political rule, while the missionary model eschews politics, even to the point of accepting martyrdom, in the hope of converting the dominant society through argument and claims of miracles. I would like to point readers to an example of the military model as practiced under the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century.

Marc David Baer, in Honored by the Glory of Islam: Conversion and Conquest in Ottoman Europe, analyzes Ottoman conversionary tactics during the reign of Mehmed IV (1648-87). Mehmed IV is best known to Jewish history for being sultan during the outbreak of Sabbatai Sevi's messianic movement in 1665-66, to European history for presiding over the failed attempt to capture Vienna in 1683 and to Turkish history for being a pleasure seeking hunting enthusiast who allowed his empire to decline around him. Baer puts all three of these things together to knit an apology for Mehmed IV. Baer sees Mehmed IV's policies as being part of a consistent and remarkably successful plan of converting Christians, Jews and wayward Muslims. In this Mehmed IV was largely influenced by the conservative Kadizadeli movement, particularly the preacher Vani Mehmed Efendi. Instead of killing Sabbatai, the Ottomans hoped to use Sabbatai as a conversionary tool. Baer conclusively demonstrates how Sabbatai's conversion fit into a common pattern of ritualized conversions where Jews, Christians and heterodox Muslims would come before the court of the sultan to receive instruction in the faith, be dressed in new garments, and to be rewarded with a purse full of coins and a symbolic position at court. The failed siege of Vienna and the setbacks suffered at the end of Mehmed IV's reign, leading to his overthrow, should not detract from several decades of Ottoman military expansion, enlarging the sphere of Islamic power. This involved not just conquering territory, but the "Islamification" of the physical space under their control. This was also accomplished, in cases like the major fire in Istanbul, by not allowing Jews and Christians to rebuild and expelling them from specific neighborhoods thus turning former Jewish and Christian neighborhoods to Islamic spaces. Even Mehmed IV's love of hunting is seen as a means of projecting an image of the conquering Muslim warrior. Hunting served as a form of mock warfare where the sultan could demonstrate his personal bravery and command over other men. Furthermore the hunt served to allow Mehmed IV to travel around the empire and bring him in contact with his non-Muslim subjects and bring them to the faith.

What interests me about the conversion tactics described by Baer are that, while they bear a surface resemblance to the missionary model, they are still rooted primarily within the political and as such remains part of the military model. In our Ottoman scenario people might come to Islam out of their own free will. Even the accounts of Sabbatai's conversion, the major example in Baer's discussion of a forced conversion, carry the sense more of a gentlemen's agreement than brute force. The gist seems to be: "you Sabbatai are guilty of treason and should be put to death, but the sultan has nothing personal against you and is willing to call the whole thing off. He would just like you to do him a small favor, convert to Islam." Despite the absence of formal violence, though, the primary vehicle of conversion (for Sabbatai or anyone else) was the State and the realization that one could most effectively deal with this State by simply converting.

Such conversions lack drama and it was probably the point for it not to be dramatic. Jews and Christians are people of the book; they just need to accept the true conclusion of their faith and accept Islam, which should not be a big deal for them or require any sort of "rebirth." As such there is no need to use physical coercion. There is also no need for a sophisticated attempt to understand Judaism and Christianity and argue with their adherents on their own ground. There is something positive about this, in that Jews and Christians are not demonized; there is no need for them to be shown the "error" of their ways because they already know the truth and should be expected to readily convert. On the flip side, such a view does not take the opposition seriously even to the extent of acknowledging that the other side has opinions to be refuted. Christianity at least took Judaism seriously enough to polemicize against it. One is hard pressed to find an Islamic tradition of even achieving that baseline of respect.

Rabbi Yigal Sklarin’s Defense of Gershom Scholem

Prof. Gershom Scholem famously devoted a large portion of his nearly thousand-page biography of Sabbatai Sevi to arguing that Lurianic Kabbalah in the sixteenth century led to Sabbatianism in the seventeenth. In Scholem's narrative, Isaac Luria revolutionized Jewish thought by fashioning a kabbalistic narrative focused on a process of metaphysical exile and redemption. The very act of creation caused the breaking of the divine vessels, causing the power of the divine light to fall into the hands of the forces of darkness, the klipot (shells). The practice of Jewish ritual, armed with the specific Kabbalistic interpretations of Luria and specific penitential practices would lead to the redemption of the divine light and heal the cosmos. Scholem assumed that by the mid-seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had spread to all Jewish communities in Europe and the Near East. Hence by the time that Nathan of Gaza declared Sabbatai to be the Messiah in the spring of 1665, Jews everywhere were prepared to accept this radical Sabbatian messianism with its explicit antinomianism. When Sabbatai converted to Islam, Nathan was ready to explain away the action as the Messiah descending into the forces of darkness to achieve the redemption of the divine light.

Prof. Moshe Idel, in his essay "'One from a Town, Two from a Clan': The Diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism," challenges this narrative. His main objection is this assumption of Lurianic Kabbalah becoming the dominant force within Judaism by the mid-seventeenth century. Idel argues that few people, even rabbis were in a position to understand Kabbalah and the Kabbalah that came through Europe was by and large not Lurianic, but that of Rabbi Moshe Codovero. Idel goes so far as to suggest that Scholem had his cause and effect backward. Lurianism did not spread Sabbatianism; Sabbatians spread Luria. Finally, Idel argues that Scholem overplayed the messianic elements within Lurianism. Those reading Luria in the seventeenth century would not have been jumping to some new radical form of messianism.

In a recent essay in the Bernard Revel journal, "In Defense of Scholem: A Re-evaluation of Idel's Historical Critiques," Rabbi Yigal Sklarin attempts to defend Scholem. Sklarin offers the case of R. Abraham Gombiner's Magan Avraham as an example of a popular work written before the outbreak of Sabbatianism that included distinctively Lurianic practices and concepts. Of particular interest to me is the fact that Sklarin attempts to use Gershon Cohen's theory of messianism to explain the popular spread of Sabbatianism. In "Messianic Postures of Ashkenazim and Sephardim (Prior to Sabbathai Zevi)," Cohen argued that Jews in Sephardic countries, unlike their Ashkenazi counterparts, were far more likely to start messianic movements due to the influence of philosophy. If the philosophical ideas current in rabbinic circles could gain popular currency and create a mass movement then why could not Luria have gone from rabbinic circles down to the masses to create Sabbatianism?


I am certainly intrigued by the prospect of rehabilitating the Luria-Sabbatianism connection. That being said, I find Sklarin's arguments against Idel to be very problematic. Yes, Cohen argued that Spanish culture was more open to messianism and less open to martyrdom due to the influence of philosophy. If I understand Cohen correctly, this was not simply something within the rabbinic elites, but on a mass cultural level. Regular people (or at least the literate ones) had some awareness of philosophy, particularly of astrology, and were willing to therefore willing to engage in messianic calculations. With Lurianic Kabbalah, we agree that this was something reserved for the rabbinic elites, not something that the masses would have been directly aware of. I fail to, therefore, to see how the analogy holds up. Furthermore, Sklarin seems to accept the premise that the Lurianic Kabbalah that reached our rabbinic elite was not the messianic Luria so how are the masses getting Lurianic messianism from the rabbis if even the rabbis are not getting that message? This leaves us with having to find some other solution besides for Lurianic Kabbalah to explain how Sabbatianism became a mass movement in the summer of 1665.

Columbus OH and Sabbatianism

I came across the following comment about the Rabbi Jekuthiel Greenwald ztl, who was the rabbi of Beth Jacob in Columbus OH, in the early twentieth century:

Rabbi Jekuthiel Judah (Leopold) Greenwald, a prolific and eclectic scholar, best known for his halakhic work on the laws of mourning, Kol Bo 'al Avelut, after emigrating from his native Sighet, Hungary [This is the same city that Elie Wiesel is from. Now it is part of Romania.] to the United States, served as orthodox rabbi of Columbus, Ohio. One of his many interests over the years was Sabbatianism. He published in Weitzen in 1912 a full-fledged work, Le-korot ha-Shabta'im be-Ungaria (Annals of the Sabbatians in Hungary). In his Sefer ha-Zikhronot (Book of Memoirs), published in Budapest in 1922, Greenwald recalls how as a soldier stationed in the Balkans during World War I, he stumbled on to the grave of Shabbetai Zevi in Albania.

Rabbi Greenwald's son, a Denver advocate, informs me his father's literary estate contained no unpublished papers on the subject of Sabbatianism. Yet perhaps now that the Iron Curtain has been lowered in Eastern Europe, it will once again be possible for an enterprising researcher to have a look at the Sighet city archives. (Bezalel Naor, Post-Sabbatian Sabbatianism: Study of an Underground Movement pg. 107-08.)

Sabbatianism as a Political Movement

Gershom Scholem, while he focused on the Kabbalistic elements of Sabbatianism, still took Sabbatianism seriously as a political movement. Yehudah Liebes, though, argues that Sabbatianism lacked any serious political component and did not concern itself with the physical redemption of Israel.

Sabbetai Zevi's utmost concern was not the fate of the people but rather a spiritual realm the people count not reach, and he was profoundly alienated from the masses of his followers. Even Nathan of Gaza failed to understand him and was at times forced to take insult and abuse or to work strenuously to restore to the Messiah his faith in himself (it is indeed possible that Sabbetai Zevi's estrangement from public concerns and his immersion in the spiritual realm added to his messianic charm in the people's eyes). Sabbetai Zevi's messianism was directed upward, to his God, which was why he was always careful to refer to himself precisely as the Messiah of the God of Jacob, a title he did not approach as a metaphor. (Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Messianism pg. 100.)

Nathan of Gaza also is seen as abandoning politics for a mystical war between good and evil. As a former converso, Abraham Cardozo's messianism focused on the redemption of the Jews from the sin of idolatry. The Messiah is a human being who seeks out and is enlightened as to the true nature of the divinity.

Needless to say the masses of Jews, who followed Sabbatai, did have an interest in a political redemption. They were expecting Sabbatai to literally overthrow the Ottoman Empire and for Sabbatai to rule in Israel and over the entire world as an earthly Messiah. The Jews, like Glukel of Hameln's father-in-law, who sold their possessions and waited by the docks for a boat to come to take them to Israel, were literally expecting to move to Israel. Liebes dismisses these people as being on the periphery of the movement. From Liebes' perspective, there were the real Sabbatians, consisting of a small elite, privy to Sabbatianism's esoteric antinomian theology. Such people did not abandon belief in the Messiah after his conversion, but accepted it as part of the divine plan for redemption. The mass of Sabbatian believers were not privy to this true understanding of the Messiah and quickly abandoned faith in him. Such people are, Liebes' perspective, irrelevant to understanding true Sabbatianism.

I find myself uncomfortable with the notion of a center and periphery in Sabbatianism as if the later is unimportant. I am certainly not on the side of Scholem, who depicted a seventeenth century Judaism overtaken by Lurianic Kabbalah and waiting for their Lurianic mystical Messiah. Very few Jews were in a position to understand Lurianic Kabbalah let alone the radical variant of it espoused by Nathan of Gaza. Nor am I willing to accept Scholem's premise that Sabbatianism broke the back of rabbinic authority, that the Jews had now experienced the reality of a redeemed world, would not accept going back to the old order and therefore turned to other forms of redemption such as the Enlightenment to bring forth their already redeemed world. The majority of Jews who turned to Sabbatianism in the summer and fall of 1665 were traditional Jews looking for a traditional Jewish Messiah. When Sabbatai converted to Islam in September of 1666, they remained traditional Jews. Does this mean that they were not real Sabbatians? In a sense they should be at the center of the story. Sabbatianism became a worldwide phenomenon not because it possessed a revolutionary theology, but because thousands of simple Jews accepted Sabbatai as a traditional Jewish Messiah, in complete ignorance of "true" Sabbatianism. Thus an understanding of Sabbatianism requires one to confront this "peripheral" Sabbatianism, which was certainly political.

The Sabbatian Tipping Point

Malcolm Gladwell, in Tipping Point, makes the argument that major movements and changes in society come into being through small groups of individuals. Gladwell looks to three types of individuals necessary to create such changes, which he refers to as "Mavens," "Connectors" and "Salesmen." Mavens are recognized experts, often even lay experts. People are likely to pay close attention to them because they are in the "know." Connectors are people who know lots of people. They can spread a message to lot of people and even more importantly to lot of different types of people, crossing social and geographic lines. Salesmen are people enlisted to directly sell the message to others. On the one hand, because this group is most closely tied to spreading the message, they are most obviously in the front line in spreading the message. On the other hand this also makes them the most biased and therefore the least trusted type and thus the least effective.

The historical figure that Gladwell uses as his prototype Maven and Connector is Paul Revere. In April of 1775, when word got around that the British were planning to march on Concorde, numerous people set out to sound the alarm. Revere was the most successful, not because he was smarter, could shout louder or had a faster horse. Revere was a known respected figure in Boston society and in the opposition to Britain, someone that people would listen to. Also Revere simply knew lots of people along the way to Concorde. He knew which specific people he needed to talk to and was in a position to be able to talk to them. So on that night in April, Revere was not just some man on a horse shouting "the British are coming." He was the crucial piece of a large, if informal opposition to Britain that was quickly put into motion.

I find this discussion of tipping points, Mavens and Connectors to be a fruitful method to confront one of the great mysteries of Jewish Messianism, the Sabbatian movement. Here are the basic facts of the story. In May of 1665, Nathan of Gaza declared Sabbatai Sevi to be the Messiah. By September this message had spread from Palestine to every major Jewish community and had picked up followers. Jews in Amsterdam took to the streets in support of Sabbatai. As Scholem famously observed what is unique about the Sabbatian movement was that it is the one Jewish messianic movement (at least up until modern day Lubavitch Messianism) that managed to be a worldwide movement instead of simply a local affair.

In looking at the Early Modern version of Mavens and Connectors there is one common factor that is critical, mobility. The Early Modern period was an era of incredible mobility for a select few. Thus more than increased mobility, the Early Modern period saw an ever-widening gap between those who did not travel and those who did. Being part of the mobile elite offered two critical advantages. It meant that you knew more people. More importantly, it means you knew many different people, who do not necessarily know each other. You are connected to many different groups and are likely one of the few connections between these groups, hence the perfect Connector. Being a member of the mobile elite offered one access to privileged knowledge. If you have been to far off places then you have firsthand experience and knowledge about something that most people do not know about and that people valued. If you are known to have this knowledge then people are likely to place you as the expert to be consulted on all such matters. This can range over many fields of knowledge. Having travel experience may give you knowledge of foreign places, peoples and politics. It might also give at least the impression of having special knowledge of foreign esoteric doctrines such as the various schools of Safed Kabbalah.

Mobility helps us explain, the importance of the land of Israel and why it was critical as a launching point of a mass messianic movement such as Sabbatianism. Despite the fact that Israel was in many respects a backwater Jewish community, it was a remarkably cosmopolitan with residents from other places and who would go on to other places. Students of Jewish history are already familiar with this phenomenon in terms of the failure of pre-modern "Zionist" movements. Getting Jews to move to Israel was one thing keeping them there was another. Ironically, this inability to hold onto Jews made Israel an ideal forge for churning out members of the mobile elite. The Jewish community in Israel was full of people from other places and communities across the Near East and Europe had people who were from Israel. The fact that they were from the Holy Land only served to enhance their status as Mavens to be put in positions of trust.

In our Sabbatian scenario of the summer and winter of 1665, there are many rumors spreading through far off Jewish communities about events unfolding in the Near East about a man named Sabbatai Sevi who may or may not be the Messiah. Ordinary individuals are not in a position to verify information on their own. As such they turn to the people viewed as having the necessary information, members of the mobile elite. And it is in this regard that the Sabbatians held the advantage over the Rabbinic establishment. The Sabbatian movement was a movement precisely of these mobile elites.  

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.  

A Truly Scrumptious Messiah

Musing to myself about the recent passing away of Dr. Yosef H. Yerushalmi, I found myself flipping through his classic work From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto - Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics and ran into something I thought was worth sharing.


During the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi in the seventeenth century Abraham Cardoso, a Sabbatian who grew up as a converso in Portugal and Spain, attacks his brother, Isaac Cardoso, and Isaac Orobio de Castro, another former converso, for their failure to accept Sabbatai as their messiah and savior. Abraham mocks them for their unwillingness to accept the notion of a suffering messiah:

Let us return to the aforementioned messiah of Doctor Cardoso and his capricious companions; he is neither Christian nor Jew, but imaginary; he must come casting rays of light … and then, all at once, in a twinkling, he has to ingather the tribes, and the wheat from the chaff; he must come on a cloud of sugar candy, his body of butter paste, his garment of soft bread. And for support they drag in the great Rabbi Moses of Egypt [Maimonides], whom they see but do not understand even in the light … (Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto
pg. 339)


So what have here are three Jewish former renegade Catholics, who never exactly got over the Catholic part. Once again we see how important Maimonides is saving Judaism from false messiahs. Also, now I understand what is wrong with Christianity; their messiah is cheap wine and crackers. We need a messiah who would be truly scrumptious to eat.

Howard Sachar – Current Israeli Myths and Realities: the Way to Peace

I was privileged to attend the closing of the DCJCC's Jewish literary festival to hear Dr. Howard Sachar speak. Here are my notes of the event and my comments. As usual, all mistakes are mine.

Before I was a historian I was prevailed upon not to be an academician, but to go to law school like a good Jewish boy. This lasted for about six weeks. I took several exams, but ended up the subject of a parody by a professor as to how not to take an exam.
Real Zionism is not just about funding lectures but in a willingness to allow one's children to go live there. Part of the challenge of living in Israel is the willingness to accept is that it is not perfect. The Orthodox are a heavy millstone around the neck of Israel. That being said, it should be noted that the first people to return to Israel were not the Zionists but Ultra-Orthodox messianists. We have the example of the followers of Rabbi Yehudah Ha-Hasid. (It should be noted that he was a Sabbatian so not exactly what you or I would consider Orthodox. Far better examples would be that of the Hasidim and followers of the Vilna Gaon who traveled to Palestine in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.) They traveled by mules and wagons to a desert land. They were not productive. They suffered and lost hundreds of people every year to cholera. They were the "sleeping settlement." My grandmother was one of three out of eleven children in a family to grow up to adulthood. That was the culture in which she grew up in.
Haskalah, Jewish humanism, under the influence of European nationalism, would lead to further migration to Palestine, for better or for worse. These points were made at a center of a recent conference to argue for the legitimacy of Jews living in Palestine. This is not the whole truth. By World War I there were only 80,000 Jews in Palestine and over fifty thousand of them were these Orthodox messianists. As late as 1917, the majority of Jews in Russia were members of the Bund. Why did they not come to Palestine? Most Jews who left Russia went to America. More Jews went to racist South Africa than Palestine. What changed was something eccentric and tragic. The eccentric was the Balfour Declaration of November 2, 1917, which proved to provide a compelling increase. This was brought about by British self interest. That year was the worst for the Allies. The French army mutinied. The Italians nearly collapsed. Russia was tottering. It was important that America be brought in. Lloyd George believed that Jewish opinion could be rallied in the United States and Russia. No need to go into the tragic part. The new countries, fashioned in the wake of World War I, saw their Jewish minority as a threat to their new found freedom. This prefigured the anti-Semitism of Nazi Germany. Those Jews who survived the Holocaust were left homeless. No western country wanted to take them in so an alternative had to be given. Russia and France wanted to expel Britain from the Middle East. Truman did not want too many Jews in New York. This took the Zionists by surprise. They were content asking for 100,000 DPs.
Israel once again has to face how it will protect itself. They are in the dilemma of being a small state. Seven years ago Colin Powel said it was no interested in forcing a peace. More recently Secretary Clinton said she wished to encourage both sides to reach an agreement. If this is the case than we are at an impasse. No small state has managed to negotiate boundaries by itself without the interference of a great power. This goes for the Treaty of Westphalia and the Treaty of Paris. Do great powers have the celestial right to enforce their vision on to others? At the Paris conference many of the new countries protested and the borders they were being given. Lloyd George commented that had it not been for the battlefield casualties suffered by the major allied powers this whole issue would be mute. He also noted that their hatred threatened to suck Europe into another war.
I have given testimony on the matter before the Senate and have seen Israel activists, many in black kippot, and I knew that they would not be happy with what I am saying. It was the victorious allies that set forth the Arab mandates and created the State of Israel. Each Arab Israeli war threatens to expand into a larger conflict. Now there is the threat of weapons of mass destruction. There is a need for great powers today to not just serve as mediators but to actively enforce a solution, one that is supported by the silent majority of both sides. This conclusion was reached by Sharon when he pulled out. Ben-Gurion also understood this. After the sixty-seven war he said celebrate, take a few things needed for security, but from everything else we must pull out. We cannot put ourselves as an occupation. He was not listened to and we have seen the results. Fortunately Israel has pushed through and survived even with their bloated defense and settlement budgets. What is now needed is for the great powers to tell the Israelis and the Palestinians what is going to be the final decision about boundaries. This would allow the leaders on both sides to stand up to their own fanatics. Everyone will see that their hands are tied and that the leaders have no choice but to give in.


Despite the Orthodox bashing, I actually liked the speech and think that Dr. Sachar made some valuable points. I found it interesting that Dr. Sachar did not go into detail as to how a "great power," assumingly the United States, would force through some sort of decision. During the question and answer section I asked him how he would avoid turning his own argument into an apology for imperialism and how he would put such a policy into action without putting soldiers on the ground. He proceeded to give the examples of Northern Ireland, how they needed the threat of Great Britain to make peace, and the Czech Republic, how they allowed Slovakia to secede. While both of these things strengthen his original argument, he still completely ignored my question. I am willing to accept his argument, but the obvious implications are unsettling even for someone like me. Do we have no choice but to throw ourselves into another, Iraq, Afghanistan or a Lebanon? I suspect that the implications may be so unsettling for people of a more liberal disposition that they would simply block out the whole issue.

A Sabbatian Credo

In a recent post I discussed the issue of principles of faith within Judaism. I offered my own formulation of them. Since then Bray of the Fundie has kindly offered his own list of principles. I just came across a list principles of faith for the Sabbatian sect of the Donmeh. The Donmeh were Jews who converted to Islam in the seventeenth century, following in the footsteps of the apostate messiah Sabbatai Sevi. As with many Sabbatian groups, the Donmeh practiced a radical form of antinomianism, the ritual violation of religious taboos. For example they believed in ritualized wife swapping. (And people think that religion is prudish and boring.)

I believe with perfect faith in the faith of the God of truth, the God of Israel who dwells in [the sefirah] tiferet, the “glory of Israel,” the three knots of faith which are one.

(This is a common theme within Gnostic thought. There is the lower creator God and the true God revealed to the initiates of the group.)

I believe with perfect faith that Sabbatai Zevi is the true King Messiah.

I believe with perfect faith that the Torah, which was given through our teacher Moses placed before Israel, as ordered by God through Moses. It is a Tree of Life to them that hold fast to it and its supporters will be happy … [here follow several biblical verses extolling the Torah].

I believe with perfect faith that this Torah cannot be exchanged and that there will be no other Torah; only the commandments have been abolished, but the Torah remains binding forever and to all eternities.

I believe with perfect faith that Sabbatai Zevi, may his majesty be exalted, is the true Messiah and that he will gather together the dispersed of Israel from the four corners of the earth.

I believe with perfect faith in the resurrection of the dead, that the dead shall live and shall arise from the dust of the earth.

I believe with perfect faith that the God of truth, the God of Israel, will send the rebuilt sanctuary from above down to us [on earth] beneath, as it is said: Unless God buld the house, those that build it labor in vain. May our eyes see and our heart rejoice and our soul sing for joy, speedily in our days. Amen.

I believe with perfect faith that the God of truth, the God of Israel will reveal Himself in this [earthly] world [called] tevel, as it is said: And the glory of God will be revealed and all flesh shall see it, for the mouth of the Lord has promised it.

May it be pleasing before Thee, God of truth, God of Israel who dwells in the “glory of Israel,” in the three knots of faith which are one, to send us the just Messiah, our Redeemer Sabbatai Zevi, speedily and in our days. Amen. (Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism pg. 157)

For all you people in the market for a Jewish savior without the messiness of getting nailed to a piece of wood, may I suggest a nice Jewish boy from Turkey. You can acknowledge before him that you are a sinner and pray:

Sabetay Zevi, Sabetay Zevi,
No ai a utro como a ti
Sabetay Zevi, Sabetay Zevi
Esperamos a ti

(Sabbatai Sevi, Sabbatai Sevi
There is no other like you
Sabbatai Sevi, Sabbatai Sevi
We hope to you)

History Quiz

I gave a quiz today to my Modern Jewish history class at Hebrew Academy with two questions and a bonus.

1. How is the historical method different from the scientific method? Does this mean that historical claims are just random guesses or leaps of faith? (I cannot prove that Napoleon ever existed, but I believe in my heart that he did. Believing in the existence of Napoleon gives meaning to my life and makes me a better person. I therefore believe in him just like I believe in fairies, floating invisible teacups in outer space and flying spaghetti monsters.)

2. Name five prominent Jewish historians.

One bonus point for each historian that you can match with their choice for the starting point for modern Jewish historian.

For more detailed discussions of the historical method than I wanted from my students see the posts on Philosopher Football, Dragonseed, and evolution as history. As for the historians, the ones that I discussed in detail in class along with their views on modern Jewish history were Gershom Scholem (Sabbatai Sevi), Heinrich Graetz (Moses Mendelssohn), Shimon Dubnow (French Revolution), Isaac Jost (Frederick the Great), and Benzion Dinur (Yehudah Ha-Hasid). Other historians mentioned either in class or in my student’s readings were Josephus, Jacques Basnage (not Jewish but certainly a historian of Jews), Haim Hillel Ben-Sasson, Shmuel Ettinger, Michael Meyer, Salo Baron and Yosef Yerushalmi.

AJS Conference Day Two Session Four (Insults Through the Ages)

Hartley Lachter (Muhlenberg College)
"The Little Foxes that Ruin the Vineyards: Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov on the Pernicious Influence of Jewish Philosophy"

Shem Tov ibn Shem Tov, in Sefer Emunot, refers to philosophers as foxes that ruin the vineyard of Jewish tradition. For Shem Tov it is Kabbalah that represents the true Jewish tradition. Sefer Emunot serves to educate the reader as to the true nature of Kabbalah. Shem Tov even attacks Maimonides for going after the Greek Aristotle and human reason. Shem Tov sees Maimonides as being an elitist. For Maimonides, knowledge comes to the worthy few. Shem Tov does acknowledge some philosophy as being useful; just as long as it is kept in its place by revealed tradition. The fox in Shem Tov's analogy is not just clever it also is a violator of boundaries. Their actions lead to apostasy. As such philosophers destroy the one vehicle for divine truth to reach the world. Thus it is a threat not just to Judaism but to the world as well.


Matt Goldish (Ohio State University)
"Rabbinic Insults in the Early Modern Period

There is a thanks in order to the conference for lowering their standards thus allowing for Allan Nadler to take part.

Rabbis do not pay much attention to the laws against loshon hara. The early modern period is rich in rabbinic insults. This reflects a crisis in rabbinic authority. Rabbis saw the oral law and rabbinic tradition as being under attack and they felt the need to its defense. For example we have R. Jacob Sasportas attacking the Sabbateans. Referring to the four sons of the Passover Haggadah, he comments about Nathan of Gaza that first Jacob Hagiz thought he was a Tam, a simpleton, than he realized that he was the child who does not know how to ask. Sasportas calls Sabbatai Raphael a tub of urine. Leon Modena attacks Kabbalists and asks that boiling lead be poured down the throat of Shem Tov b. Shem Tov for insulting Maimonides. According to Modena, Kabbalists have not produced a single worthwhile Talmudist. Their work is the overcoat of idiots.

Alexander Joskowicz (University of Mississippi)
"Jewish Insults in the Modern Period: On Neo-Orthodox Popes and Jewish Jesuits"

Insults serve an important role as source material. In the late nineteenth century making fun of Catholics becomes an important part of inter communal Jewish polemics in Germany. In 1876 there was the famous debate over the law of separation. This measure was supported by the Orthodox party. It allowed them to form their own separate communities outside the control of the Reform establishment. Reformers attack the Orthodox as being Jesuits. Just like the Jesuits are first and foremost loyal to the Pope and not the state so to the Orthodox refuse to remove references to Zion from their prayers, demonstrating their disloyalty to the state. We also see the counter argument that Reform rabbis are like Catholic priests; they have no natural authority and seek to simply bully people into submission. This anti Catholic sentiments can be seen as a type of pathway to modernity. Jews were taking part in the Protestant culture around them and framing their arguments within a distinctively Protestant value system.

(Allan Nadler served as the respondent for the session and stole the show. First he returned the favor to Dr. Goldish by pointing out that it was now past shkeia, sunset, so Dr. Goldish could tuck his tzitzit in. Then he introduced us to some interesting background about the name Nadler. Apparently, during the early modern period, the name Nadler was a common insult. The source for this seems to have been a family of Nadlers who were bigamists. So calling someone a Nadler was the Jewish way of calling someone a bastard. Indeed even the famous R. Joel Sirkes got involved and ruled that it violated the laws of lashon hara to call someone a Nadler.)

AJS Conference Day Two Session Two (Early Modern Messianism(s): Context, Confluence, and Discourse

Rebekka Voss (Harvard University)
"Topsy-Turvy World's End: The Lost Tribes in Apocalyptic Scenarios from Sixteenth-Century Germany"

Jews saw the Ten Lost Tribes as redeemers who would save them from the Christians. This is in keeping with the theme of revenge which so permeates Ashkenazic thought. Christians saw the Ten Lost Tribes as serving the Anti Christ. (See Andrew Gow's the Red Jews) In the early modern period the Ten Lost Tribes were a major political and military force, to be reckoned with, in the minds of both Jews and Christians in Europe. In 1523 we have pamphlets in Germany talking about the tribes being on the march with 600,000 soldiers. It was at this moment in time that Reubeni appeared and offered Christians a solution to their problem. The Ten Lost Tribes would help them take the Holy Land. What is interesting to note is that, despite the differences between Jews and Christians, the Ten Lost Tribes plays a role in their common culture. Jews and Christians exchange information between each other relating to sightings of the tribes and are used as sources by the other. Jews took on the legend of the Red Jews, that there was this vast army of Jews from the Ten Lost Tribes ready to descend upon Europe, as a counter counter story. Each side claimed the Jacob side in the Jacob/Esau narrative. For Christians red refers to Edom (in reference to Esau selling his birthright for a bowl of lentiles) For Jews red referred to King David who had red hair. The Yiddish version of the legend talks about the Ten Lost Tribes as David taking on the Christian Goliath.


Anne Oravetz Albert (University of Pennsylvania)
"The Religio-Political Jew: Post-Sabbatian Political Thought in Daniel Levi de Barrios and Abraham Pereyra"

The Sabbatean movement meant a lot of different things to different people. We see an example of two Amsterdam Jews who engage in a shift towards a Jewish politics, to see Jews as political beings. Both of these Jews were ex conversos familiar with Catholic political thought. Abraham Pereyra talks about the need to govern with more piety. His Mirror of the World talks about the value of prudence in classical and Jewish sources. He attacks secularizers who follow Machiavelli and try to take religion out of politics. (For a discussion of the role of Machiavelli in early modern Catholic political thought see Robert Bireley's the Counter-Reformation Prince.) Daniel Levi Barrios, a converso poet, talks about how Jewish exile lead to better Jewish forms of government with the ultimate example being the Jewish community of Amsterdam. (Ruth Wisse's Jews and Power is an interesting example of a modern scholar who seems to follow a very similar line of thinking. Wisse talks about Jewish exilic political thought as being centered on creating and maintaining a community without recourse to physical force.) Barrios wavers back and forth on the merits of a monarchy versus that of a democracy. (A line of political discourse founded in Aristotle's Politics.) The mamad is the ideal type of government. Barrios uses various symbols to put the mamad within the context of creation.

(This presentation, as with the first, are closely related to the research I am doing now. I wrote a paper on Reubeni and his use of his status as an ambassador from the Ten Lost Tribes to create a mobile state around himself. This going to be part of my larger dissertation on the politics of Jewish Messianism, an issue this second paper so nicely confronted.)

Pawel Maciejko (The Hebrew University of Jerusalem)

(The original title of Maciejko's presenation was going to be "Messinaism and Exile in the Works of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschutz." Maciejko, though, decided to speak on Eibeschutz's Sabbatean son, Wolf Eibeschutz.)

On Christmas eve in 1758 Wolf Eibeschutz told the people in the synagogue that he was in that instead of following the traditional Jewish Christmas eve practice of playing cards. (There is a custom amongst certain Jews not to study Torah on Christmas eve because on this night the klipot, the dark powers, reign supreme and anything good done would just go to serve the forces of evil.) Instead Eibeschutz declared that he would destroy the power of the klipot by playing his harp. The people saw a flame in the sky, which Eibeschutz declared was the sechina descending. Like Eibeschutz, Jacob Frank, in Poland, was trying to unite the Sabbatean community behind him. The Frankists had just lost their protector. Frank was pushing for conversion to Christianity which he would do in 1759. Like Eibeschutz, Frank also used this "flame" in the sky, which was in fact Halley's comet.

The eighteenth century was a golden age of charlatanism, which Eibeschutz and Frank are examples of. The eighteenth century was a time in which there developed a major knowledge gap; those who were on the more knowledgeable side could easily use their knowledge to dupe those who were not. Both Eibeschutz and Frank knew about the expected appearance of Halley's comet from reading European newspapers.

The concept of a false messiah is a contradiction in terms. Frank should not be viewed as a messiah at all. He was simply part of a wide circle of charlatans active in Europe at the time and formed an actual community. There is little messianism in Frank. He does not offer redemption. Instead there is this world and eternal life.

(Even if you are involved in Jewish studies you have probably not yet heard of Pawel Maciejko. I first met him last May when he came to Ohio state for a conference. Just remember that you heard about him here first. This guy is brilliant and a talented speaker and he will be a dominant figure in the field in the decades to come.

One could challenge Maciejko over the eighteenth century being the age of charlatanism. The sixteenth century had David Reubeni and Natalie Zemon Davis' Martin Guerre case. Maciejko responded to this that the eighteenth century was different in that you have an actual community of charlatans who are in contact with each other.

Elisheva Carlebach was chairing the session and challenged him over his refusal to use the terms false and failed messiahs. So they got into an interesting back and forth on this matter. I asked him point blank if in creating the narrative of Jewish Messianism, such as Harris Lenowitz's Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights, if he would take Frank out. He said yes. Since I am planning on including a chapter on Frank in my dissertation on political messianism, I am going to have to be responding to Maciejko; this should be interesting.)

General Exam III: Jewish History (Part I)

The general exam for my major, Jewish history, was longer than my two minors. I had forty eight hours and five thousand words as opposed to twenty four hours and twenty five hundred words. The exam was written by Dr. Matt Goldish and Dr. Daniel Frank. I was given four questions from which I had to choose two. I also was given two documents to analyze. I must say they were awfully nice to me. Here are the questions I did not do.

Explain Gershom Scholem’s thesis concerning messianism from the Spanish Expulsion through the Frankist movement. Who has criticized his thesis, and with what arguments?

[This question is essentially about one part of the major Gershom Scholem versus Moshe Idel debate on Jewish mysticism, which I have made occasional reference to in this blog. Part of Scholem’s narrative is that the expulsion of 1492 brought about a major shift in Jewish thought in that the magnitude of the tragedy forced the Jews who left to account for what happened on a theological plane. The result was the creation of a new form of Kabbalah which emphasized the themes of exile and redemption. The ultimate product of this school of Kabbalah was Isaac Luria. Lurianic Kabbalah was based on a cosmic narrative of a divine exile and redemption. The act of creating the world brought the “breaking of the vessels” which caused this great damage to the sephirot. Furthermore part of the divine light became ensnared by the dark powers, the klipot. It is up to man to bring about the cosmic redemption by bringing about the repair of the sephirot and the redemption of the divine light from the power of the klipot.

Lurianic Kabbalah brought about, what in Scholem’s opinion was the key turning point of early modern Jewish history, the messianic movement of Sabbatai Sevi. Sabbatai Sevi’s theology was a direct product of Lurianic Kabbalah and a logical consequence of it. The Sabbateans justified Sabbatai Sevi’s erratic behavior, violation of Jewish law and even his apostasy by arguing that Sabbatai was simply fulfilling his role as the messiah and redeeming the spiritual world by descending into the power of darkness. Scholem assumed that, by the mid seventeenth century, Lurianic Kabbalah had taken over the Jewish world. Scholem uses this to explain the success of the Sabbatian movement, which was unique amongst Jewish messianic movements in that it was able to gain followers not just in one area but amongst Jews across the world.

Scholem saw the Sabbatian movement as spawning many later movements that would affect Judaism and the world. Scholem pointed to the Frankist movement, a Sabbatian offshoot in Poland, as having a direct affect on the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and other liberation movements of the nineteenth century. Scholem saw Sabbatianism as laying the groundwork for the Reform movement, by undermining rabbinic authority and creating a non halachic Judaism. Finally, and probably most controversially, Scholem saw Hasidism as a Sabbatean movement.

Idel rejects this narrative. He argues that redemptive Kabbalah had its roots before 1492 and that the expulsion had no real affect on Jewish thought. Idel challenges Scholem to find people who were Kabbalists, exiles from Spain and were involved in Messianism. According to Idel the only person who fits into this category was R. Abraham b. Eliezer ha-Levi. Idel distances Luria from the expulsion. He was not Sephardic and he was born decades after the expulsion. Idel also minimizes the importance of Lurianic Kabbalah, arguing that it only became a major factor after Sabbatai. Finally Idel rejects the major prominence that Scholem gave to Sabbatianism and does not make it the progenitor of modern Judaism.]

Discuss the evolution of Karaite attitudes toward Rabbinic literature and thought during the medieval period. Please illustrate your answer with specific examples.

[This question clearly came from Dr. Frank. In essence he wanted me to throw back at him what we have been studying together in the private reading course I had with him this past quarter.]

(To be continued …)

Leon Festinger's UFO Group and the Spreading of Whedon's Gospel

Leon Festinger’s When Prophecy Fails is the classic study on cognitive dissonance and its role in religious and apocalyptic thinking. The book is built around the study of a UFO group. The leader of the group claimed to be receiving revelations from aliens. According to these aliens, the Earth would soon be struck with a series of cataclysmic disasters. The aliens promised, though, that, before these cataclysms occurred, they would send a ship to save the members of the group, the true believers. Festinger had his students infiltrate the group to study the people involved. In particular, he was interested in seeing how these people would react as the predictions made by the group’s leadership failed to come to pass; which people would maintain their faith? What Festinger found was that, while those who were only marginally attached to the group abandoned their beliefs as they were refuted by the reality on the ground, the inner circle, those who had actually made serious sacrifices because of their beliefs, not only maintained their faith but became even more convinced in their beliefs.

Another thing that Festinger observed was that, while initially, the group had no interest in spreading their message to the outside world, once the final date for the group to be taken up in the alien spaceship had come and gone the remaining believers suddenly became very interested in spreading their message. While before they would not talk to reporters, now they eagerly sought the media to tell people that, while it might seem that they had been proven wrong by events, in truth what had happened was that earth had been given a second chance due, in large part to the group’s intercession with the aliens.

Based on his study, Festinger drew up a list of conditions for a person to believe in something despite it being refuted by empirical reality. This would have to be a belief built around the prediction of a clear-cut event in time, such a date upon which the alien spacecraft would appear. The person needed to have made real-life changes and sacrifices based on this belief such as losing a job. When the big event fails to happen, the person needs to be surrounded by a group of like-minded believers. The larger the group of likeminded believers the easier it is to maintain belief. This would explain the need to gain proselytes after the fact. If lots of people become believers after the fact then it would demonstrate that the belief really was true.

Festinger connected the actions of his UFO group to two groups in history, the original followers of Jesus and the Sabbatian movement. In theory, Jesus getting crucified should have been the end of Christianity. On the contrary, though, Jesus’ crucifixion inspired his apostles to preach the message to the entire world and created the world’s largest religion. Similarly, the conversion of Sabbatai Sevi to Islam should have been the end of the Sabbatian movement. Chased underground by the Jewish establishment, the Sabbatians continued in their belief, convinced that their messiah’s apostasy was a necessary act in the unfolding drama of redemption. Elisheva Carlebach, in fact, uses Festinger in her course on Sabbatai Sevi to explain why the movement failed to die even when its messiah converted to Islam.

I would connect Festinger’s theory of proselytizing to Joss Whedon’s Firefly and the dedication of its followers, known as Browncoats. The television show Firefly lasted a grand total of eleven episodes (fourteen were actually made) before Fox canceled it. Rather than take this as a defeat, Browncoats made it their mission to spread Firefly to whomever they could. Aided by the internet and DVDs they managed to make Firefly a major cultural phenomenon. They even succeeded in getting a Firefly movie made, though, like the television show, it failed to be a financial success. Earlier this month, cooped up in a hotel in Chicago for several days with my cousins, I brought along my Firefly DVDs and did my best to recruit new followers. Why would I be so loyal to this show, particularly as it was a failure? It is precisely because it failed. It is galling to watch a show as good as Firefly as it builds up its fantastic storyline only for it to end suddenly. It is like reading a good book only to find out that half of the book is missing and the book is out of print so you can never get a hold of another copy. One cannot just stand by and do nothing, one must act. The only thing that one can do is to spread the message wherever one can. The point is not even to bring Firefly back, highly unlikely at this point, but simply to show that Joss Whedon did not make a mistake. In decades to come when Firefly is listed as one of the greatest shows of the early twenty-first century no one is going to doubt Whedon’s vision.

On a side note, Firefly is now available to watch, legally, on Hulu. So now there is no excuse for anyone who claims to be a fan of science-fiction or to having a sense of humor not to have seen this show.