Sabbateanism

ערב רב: פנים וחוץ בוויכוח הפרנקיסטי הוא ספר מרתק וחדשני החושף את סיפורה הייחודי של התנועה הפרנקיסטית, תנועה יהודית אפיקורסית שצמחה בפולין והתפשטה במרכז אירופה במחצית השנייה של המאה ה-18.

בעיני רוב היהודים פרנק היה 'משיח שקר' ידוע לשמצה. בעיני נוצרים נאורים ומיסיונרים מילנריסטים היה יהודי-נוצרי ואדם חופשי בדעותיו, שלו קשרים מסתוריים והוא משתמש במגיה ובמאגרי עושר סודיים. עבור מאמיניו היה למבשר שחרור מן המסגרות המקובלות המדכאות של מגדר, הלכה, מעמד, משטר ודת.

התנועה הפרנקיסטית עוררה הדים והיתה סלע מחלוקת גם בקרב גורמים דתיים ופוליטיים לא יהודיים: יוזף השני, קתרינה הגדולה, גתה, קזנובה ואחרים. תורותיו של יעקב פרנק, מנהיג התנועה, הציבו אתגר בפני היהדות הנורמטיבית, אך גם בפני האסלאם וזרמים בנצרות. הספר מברר מחלוקות פנימיות ביהדות המודרנית אך דן גם ביחסים בין יהודים לסביבתם במאות ה-18–ה-19.

ערב רב מבוסס על מקורות פנימיים שחיברו פרנק ומאמיניו, על מקורות יהודיים פולמוסיים אנטי פרנקיסטיים, ועל מקורות שכתבו גורמים לא יהודיים בני הזמן. דרכו המוקצנת של יעקב פרנק עוררה עניין רב בו ובתנועתו, ולקורא מוגש ניתוח מעמיק של פרשה היסטורית ייחודית זו.
המחבר, ד"ר פאבל מצ'ייקו מן האוניברסיטה העברית בירושלים, חוקר את תולדות היהודים בפולין-ליטא בעת החדשה. נולד בוורשה וקיבל תואר דוקטור מאוניברסיטת אוקספורד. פרסומיו הרבים זיכו אותו בפרסים, במלגות ובמענקי מחקר רבים. שימש מרצה אורח באוניברסיטאות שונות, בארצות הברית, בצרפת, בגרמניה ובפולין.

The purpose of this research is to publish a manuscript of the treatise Sefer Habri’a (The Book of Creation), written in 1670 by Rabbi Avraham Binyamin Nathan ben Elisha Chaim Halevi Askhenazy, also known as Nathan Ghazzati or Rabbi Nathan of Gaza. It has been copied into several manuscripts, which ended up scattered around the world, until they were ultimately collected by professor Chaim Wirszubski Z.L. of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1930s and 1940s. Wirszubski set out on a project of conducting a scientific edition of the treatise, and even published a small part of it.  However, misfortune has prevented him from finishing his great work, and he was called upon to teach in the Great Yeshiva in heavens. Now, the reader is presented with a full edition, accompanied by a comprehensive and methodical research. The research is separated from the original text, to allow the reader to focus on the text itself, if they so wish. Those who would seek to also delve into the analysis, can easily do so.
It is not everyday that a person is awarded the great privilege of returning a lost book to the collective Jewish library. Even more so when it is a book written by one of the greatest rabbis in recent generations, least of all a halakhic figure of the magnitude of Rabbi Nathan. We are faced with an unparalleled text in Rabbinic messianic and Hebrew literature. It is the central text of the Sabbatean movement after Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam. Sefer Habri’a was written by the progenitor of the movement, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza. Rabbi Nathan was famously considered a prophet by the spiritual leaders of the Jewish world in his time, and was one of those who declared Sabbatai Zevi to be a messiah. He was the one who explained the profound meaning of Zevi’s conversion, and the one who tried to prevent the masses from converting along with him.
If we wish to be certain that we can indeed declare “thou art our brother” to Nathan, we must look at this renewed text from every possible perspective. The text’s uniqueness, it’s complexity, length and meaning introduce many challenges, both on the technical-philological level and on that of semantic analysis. We should also pay heed to how socially problematic the Sabbatean movement is, following the heated debates that arose several generations after Zevi’s conversion. On that subject, we can view Sefer Habri’a as a treatise which ascribes profound meaning to Zevi’s ‘foreign acts’, through the Ha’ari’s hyper-nomic system. That is, the Lurianic Kabbalah, which unequivocally accepts the Jewish Halakha as sacred, is the treatise’s main method of discourse. It seems that the survival and continuity of Jewish tradition after the crisis was Rabbi Nathan’s main motivation in writing this immense work. That is, the desire to give a profound kabbalic meaning to the commandments of halakha, in the face of a shifting historical reality is at the heart of the text.
Sabbateanism is a grave subject in Jewish history. Therefore, whenever a new Sabbatean document is published, we must ask ourselves how its publication will affect the existing knowledge we have. When people read new material that contradicts what they perceive to be true, they often develop a ‘resistance front’, assuming that every new claim must be proved out of the existing body of knowledge, as if the unknown can be explored from the confines of the known. The problem here is evident - new information cannot be added in this way, and true learning cannot be achieved. All that can happen is that we pour old knowledge into a slightly different mould, at best. That said, there are times when a newly published document is so important that it demands of us to re-examine all of our previous held knowledge. More often than not, those who are tasked with preserving knowledge are not enthusiastic by the appearance of a new research which undermines the well known system to which they adhere. Therefore, if we wish the new knowledge to be properly accepted by people in that position, upon publishing such a document we must present in detail what we retain, and what we reconsider. It is possible that Sefer Habri’a would lead us into rethinking the Sabbatean movement in its entirety. It is, after all, a fundamental text written by the movement’s progenitor, immediately after the conversion. We will soon see that Sefer Habri’a would lead any observant reader to a clear understanding that it is a Kabbalah book that follows directly the writings of the Ha’ari. It is a direct continuation, and some would even say the highlight, of the Lurianic corpus. In this manner we can also see that Torat Israel, the Jewish halakha and the well-being of the nation at a time of crisis were undoubtedly on the mind of the author, Rabbi Nathan of Gaza, and that he was a loyal grand sage of Israel.

תיקון שבתי צבי / יונתן מאיר. ההרצאה מבקשת להציג תמונה מורכבת ביחס לשבתי צבי, מכתיבתו הקבלית של נתן העזתי על המשיח הנפוּל, דרך ניסיונות תיקון נשמתו בידי הבעש"ט, ועד לשילובו בנרטיב הלאומי בידי זלמן שז"ר וחוקרים שבאו אחריו. יהא זה ניסיון למשוך קו במחשבה ובהיסטוריוגרפיה היהודית העומד מנגד לתפיסת הצרה בדבר "משיח שקר"

The world, and first and foremost the West, is in crisis. A crisis that is at once financial, monetary, economic, social, geostrategic, political, scientific, energy, and at the same time sees an erosion of morals and morals as well as an ecological crisis.

This great crisis is of a particular character that we call, like others long before us, the crisis of the spirit.

We must necessarily understand the deep origin of this one in order to overcome it. A spiritual crisis can only be fully resolved by starting with the restoration of the spiritual, that is, metaphysical, plane. Guénon, then Evola, have already explained the main supporters in a masterful way. We are part of this continuity.

We choose to approach the spiritual crisis in the West, studying it here from a point of view limited to the traces in history of certain extremely particular religious movements that appeared from the 17th century onwards, whose existence and influence are still largely unknown.

Our general approach is first and foremost a bibliographical compilation of works by world-class specialists, published in French, English and German and whose authors have followed an academic historiographical approach based on works written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Polish, Latin, Turkish, French and German, which are the primary historical references.

A very large part is deliberately left to quotations from excerpts from these works.

This approach to the history of religions is necessarily complemented in conclusion by some reflections on the philosophy of human history, and by elements of metaphysics.

Jacob Frank (1726-1791) was once the most notorious Jew in Europe, widely reviled as a sinister degenerate who engaged in orgies, coerced his followers into slavish obedience, and led the largest apostasy in Jewish history in 1759.  His reputation has scarcely improved over the last 250 years: among scholars, Frank’s outrageous behavior has been understood either as a derivative of the Sabbatean project of enacting “redemption through sin”  or as sheer, opportunistic nihilism.

In fact, none of this is correct.  We now know that the Frankist apostasy was forced on the sect by rabbinic leaders who could no longer suppress Sabbatean sects from within.  Frankist sexual ritual was not an orgy, but tightly controlled, limited in scope, and apparently quite rare  – the most famous instance of it may not have even occurred.  And most importantly, Frankist antinomianism is neither Sabbatean nor nihilistic in nature.

As reflected in the primary collection of Frank’s oral teachings, recorded in 1784  and transcribed in a work known in Polish as Zbior Słow Panskich (“The Collection of the Words of the Lord”), in Hebrew as Divrei HaAdon, and in English as Words of the Lord,  Jacob Frank’s critique of religion is a surprisingly modern one, albeit one framed within a pre-modern mythic framework.  In this text, Frank espouses a skeptical materialism, grounded in the belief that the supernatural claims of religion are false, and that only the material is real.  Religion is at best ineffectual, at worst, actively evil, insofar as it holds people back from living a full life.  Even as Frank replaces Judaism and Christianity with his own elaborate, esoteric religion of Das (da’at, gnosis), that esotericism is a materialistic quest with the goal of attaining this-worldly immortality and power.  Frankist antinomianism is not Sabbatean; it is anti-Sabbatean.

My purpose in this article is twofold: firstly, I am interested in developing a typology of antinomianism that can help us understand cases such as Jacob Frank, and secondly, I am interested in the case of Jacob Frank precisely because it causes us to reconsider antinomianism as a religious phenomenon.  Here, I begin by briefly tracing the history of the concept of antinomianism, then propose a four-part taxonomy for understanding it, and then, in Part III, apply this taxonomy to the case of Jacob Frank, in whose work three of the four types are found.

This paper deals with the representation of David as a "feminized Messiah" appearing in the image of the Shekhinah in Kabbalistic literature, and with the connections between femininity and heresy in Jewish messianic movements. In the course of this analysis, I focus on the development of the concept of David as "fourth leg of the Divine Chariot,” from the origins of Kabbalah (the Bahir, R. Asher Ben David, R. Jacob Bar-Sheshet) to Castille and beyond, in the Zohar and the Theosophical-Theurgical Kabbalah in 13th–14th Century (in texts written on the Iberian Peninsula), up to the portrayal of David as the Shekhinah in Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbateanism. I claim that in the cases of David and Shabbatai Zevi, heresy indeed accompanies femininity. If the present order and its law are typically gendered as masculine, the threatening, disruptive forces that attempt to bring forth redemption are identified as feminine.

Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition. Even if historically some Jewish women may have experienced mystical revelations and led richly productive spiritual lives, the tradition does not preserve any record of their experiences or insights. Only the chance survival of scant evidence suggests that, at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears that they were generally censured, and efforts were made to suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the mystical messianic movement centred on the personality of Sabbatai Zevi (1626-76) stands out as a unique and remarkable exception. Sabbatai Zevi addressed to women a highly original liberationist message, proclaiming that he had come to make them 'happy as men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the subjugation to their husbands that were ordained for women as a consequence of the primordial sin. This unprecedented redemptive vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology, which the messianists believed to be unfolding and experienced in the present. Their New Law, superseding the Old with the dawning of the messianic era, overturned the traditional halakhic norms that distinguished and regulated relations between the sexes. This was expressed not only in the outlandish ritual transgression of sexual prohibitions, in which the Sabbatian women were notoriously implicated, but also in the apparent adoption of the idea-totally alien to rabbinic Judaism-that virginity, celibacy, or sexual abstinence were conducive to women's s spiritual empowerment. Ada Rapoport-Albert traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of Sabbatianism and its offshoots. These include the early promotion of women to centre-stage as messianic prophetesses; their independent affiliation with the movement in their own right; their initiation in the esoteric teachings of the kabbalah; and their full incorporation, on a par with men, into the ritual and devotional life of the messianic community. Their investment with authority was such as to elevate the messiah's s wife (a figure mostly absent from traditional messianic speculations) to the rank of full messianic consort, sharing in her husband's s redemptive mission as well as his divine dimension. By the late eighteenth century, a syncretistic cult had developed that recognized in Eva-the unmarried daughter of Jacob Frank, one of Sabbatai Zevi's s apostate messianic successors-an incarnate female aspect of the kabbalistic godhead, worshipped as 'Holy Virgin's and female messiah by her father's devotees. This was the culmination of the Sabbatian endeavour to transcend the traditional gender paradigm that had excluded women from the public arena of Jewish spiritual life. This work is a translation by Deborah Greniman.

Talk, Facebook-Live (Hebrew)

מורדי מילר, סוד הנחש של הרב אליעזר ברלנד, 7 ביולי 2022

ראשי הפרקים להרצאה:
- הערות מתודולוגיות: מחקר עכשווי (למה לחקור את הרב ברלנד ואיך עושים את זה?)
- מה אנחנו יודעים על ברלנד
- כרונולוגיה של התנגדות
- האם הסיפור של ברלנד ייחודי? (לדעתי כן)
- שני סוגים של תמיכה (הסוג השני מעניין אותנו)
- פרשיית ברלנד והקשרה התיאולוגי
- סיכום ומחשבות להמשך


חלוקה לפרקים:
דקה 2 עד דקה 17: דברי הקדמה מתודולוגיים [למה לחקור את ברלנד ואיך לחקור אותו]
דקה 17 עד דקה  32: מה ידוע לנו על הרב ברלנד?
דקה 32 עד דקה 54: כרונולוגיה של התנגדות [כולל היחס לשבתאות מצד תומכיו ומתנגדיו, וגם: מיהם תומכיו כיום]
דקה 54 עד שעה ושתי דקות : מה מייחד את הסיפור של הרב ברלנד? [כולל תפיסת הצדיק החדשה, ו׳פרקים נבחרים׳ של הרב ברלנד לעומת ׳תיקון הכללי׳ של רבי נחמן]
שעה ו-2 דקות עד שעה ו-25 דקות: הסברים תיאולוגיים למעשיו של הרב ברלנד
שעה ו-25 דקות עד הסוף: קריאת ליקוטי מוהר״ן בעיניים של חסיד הרב ברלנד + מחשבות לסיום

קישור לסרטון ההרצאה:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_hcuRvHgIEk&t=3694s

https://www.facebook.com/mordi.miller/videos/5537111546350024

Full Article: https://www.academia.edu/39244534/Sefer_%E1%B8%A4alomei_Qets_Pela_ot_Meoraot_Tzvi_1814_and_the_Image_of_Sabbatianism_in_the_18th_and_19th_Centuries_Jewish_Thought_Journal_of_the_Goldstein-Goren_International_Center_for_Jewish_Thought_1_2019_pp._125-167_Hebrew_


ההרצאה היא פתח לפרוייקט רחב במסגרת האקדמיה הלאומית למדעים
ISF
שעניינו - מהדורה מוערת ומבוארת של ספר מאורעות צבי
וניצוח של עיצוב השבתאות במאה התשע עשרה


הקונגרס העולמי למדעי היהדות
מושב
250

Sabbatianism, Science and the Bounds of Religion
Tuesday, 08 August, 2017 09:00-11:00, Room: 2717

Maoz Kahana (he)
Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz’s Conception of the Sceintific Revolution and the Rediscovery of the Lost Manuscript of `Sefer Meirav’

Pawel Maciejko (en)
The Coat of Arms of Wolf Eibeschütz

Jonatan Meir (he)
Sefer Me’ora’ot Tzvi and the Image of Sabbatianism

The purpose of this article is to examine the life of Hayatizade Mustafa Efendi (c.1630-1692, formerly known as Moshe b. Raphael Abravanel) and his contributions to the Ottoman society (through transmitting his Marrano legacy to the Sabbateans), and to the Ottoman science (through incorporation of Jewish and European medical knowledge to the existing traditional medical corpus).

גרשם שלום -- תולדות התנועה השבתאית // 
History of the Sabbatian Movement was the first attempt by one of the giants of scholarship on Jewish mysticism, Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), to present a comprehensive picture of Sabbatianism as a single narrative. The book is based on the series of lectures given at the Hebrew University during 1939-1940, which are of special importance in that they laid the foundation for all of Scholem’s research in the years to come, including his extensive monograph Sabbatai Sevi: the mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, first published in 1957. What follows is a sketch of the massive History of the Sabbatian Movement, over which Gershom Scholem toiled his whole life but never completed. The lectures are presented here for the first time based on the original manuscripts, alongside the text of an additional series of lectures that Scholem gave as part of the “Month of Study” organized by Berl Katznelson in 1941. These long-hidden texts reveal new facets of the Sabbatian movement and its history, as well as of Gershom Scholem as a historian, and serve as prologue to any further study of this most stormy and complicated episode in Jewish history. The new edition includes a comprehensive introduction by the editors on all of Gershom Scholem’s studies on Sabbatianism. //---//

Table of Contents:
“The Open Book” - Jonatan Meir and Shinichi Yamamoto /
Introduction /
Chapter One: The Faces of the Generation /
Chapter Two: The Messianic Movement from its Beginnings to its Height /
Chapter Three: The Twists and Turns of the Sabbatian Movement /
Chapter Four: The Historical Development of Sabbatianism /
Appendix A: Messianism from the Spanish Expulsion to the Eve of Emancipation (Month of Study, 1941) /
Appendix B: The Sabbatian Movement: Its Roots, Its Development, and its Aftermath (Introduction, 1942-45 /
Appendix C: Bibliography of Works by Gershom Scholem on Sabbatianism /
Index /
Notes on the Cover Image (from the collection of Paweł Maciejko)

//--// Order The BOOK
http://www.schocken-jts.org.il/english/bookstore/prodView.asp?idproduct=408

"This is the first comprehensive social, intellectual and religious history of the wide-spread Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that they owed their survival to the internalization of the Kabbalistic "burden of silence"

Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced and consumed these artifacts, including nascent Hasidism. The deceptively simple question at the heart of this article is this: What would it mean to diagram Sabbateanism? Or to put it another way, what would constitute a Sabbatean ilan? How might distinctive Sabbatean ideas have found diagrammatic expression in this genre? Once identified as such, what do Sabbatean ilanot tell us about the meanings of Sabbateanism in the contexts within which they were produced?

This essay should be considered as part of a larger question: how were Continental millenarian, mystic and hermetic texts received and adapted in contexts for which they had not been intended?  Its purpose is twofold – specifically to assess the extent of Jacob Boehme’s and Emanuel Swedenborg’s influence by comparing the responses of English-speaking readers to their works.  More generally, by focussing on continuities between early modern religious ideas and the Romantic imagination it explores some of the routes through which certain beliefs traversed the Enlightenment.  It will suggest that while the evidence for Swedenborg’s detailed knowledge of Boehme and his interpreters is largely inconclusive, these writings nonetheless form an important context for appreciating the initial reception of Swedenborg’s teachings.  Mapping this readership also enables us to go beyond the boundaries of traditional Swedenborgian studies which have tended to emphasize denominational developments at the expense of wider contexts.

Critically Edited and Introduced by Paweł Maciejko, With Additional Studies by Noam Lefler, Jonatan Benarroch and Shai Alleson Gerberg, 2014 (Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 42), 360 pp., in Hebrew, ISBN 1-933379-45-6

“The Lost Book of Merav and the Vision of a Scientific Religion: An unknown chapter in the world of Rabbi Eibeshitz”, Zion 84,2 (2019), pp. 229-277

Abstract:


R. Yehonatan Eybeschütz (1694-1764), one of the prominent rabbis of Central Europe in the eighteenth century, was writing during the 1720s, as I wish to describe in this article, an extraordinary book: “Sefer Meirav”. This Hebrew book, designed in a theatrical format of a theater play, dealt with various branches of contemporary science (as was known at the beginning of the eighteenth century), and in the close relations that the author sought to draw between these scientific fields and the Jewish wisdom of the Torah and th Holy Spirit concealed within it. This wisdom compensates for the scientific inferiority of the Jewish people whose history was devoid of any scientific research institutions. The manuscript of “Sefer Merav” was never printed, and was considered lost. But recently I have found parts of the book included in the copying of another manuscript. Using this material, I would like to describe in this article the purpose and character of the book, to place it in the context of R. Yehonatan's wider, well known extensive writings, and to understand the meaning of some of the hidden hints contained in the parts of the book which were discovered. Through the study of those remains of Sefer Merav I will try to show the way in which Rabbi Eybeschütz clothed into the theatrical structure of the book his unique conception of relations between religion and science, as well as his personal understanding of the complex challenges and tense dialogues that he personally was encountering in the stormy cultural landscape of Hapsburgian Prague at these years: a landscape where religious and scientific disputes with Jesuit priests and  Bohemian novels, and with religious groups with different religious and scientific tendencies and contradictions took place. I will describe and locate the universal vision of the author, Rabbi Eybeschütz, within a particular stream of thought that was prevalent in the eighteenth century, a stream that aspired to the creation of a universal scientific religion in which the best achievements of the new science would be combined and evaluated with metaphysical patterns of thought: Kabbalistic and hermetic magic. At the heart of this enormous project, as described in the Sefer Meirav, was the utopian literary figure of an all-known pansophic Jewish sage, a figure whom I would like to identify with the author himself, Rabbi Yehonatan Eibeshitz

תקציר
ר׳ יהונתן אייבשיץ,  מן הידועים והרבנים שברבני מרכז אירופה במאה השמונה עשרה, עסק בשנות העשרים של המאה השמונה עשרה, כפי שאבקש לתאר במאמר הנוכחי, בכתיבתו של ספר יוצא דופן: ׳ספר מירב׳. הספר העברי, שעוצב בתבנית תיאטרלית של מחזה, עסק בענפים שונים של מדע עכשווי (כפי שהיה ידוע בראשית המאה השמונה-עשרה), וביחסים ההדוקים אותם ביקש המחבר לשרטט בין תחומי הידע הללו ובין חכמת התורה ורוח הקודש השורה, לדבריו, בלב חכמי היהודים. חכמה זו מפצה לדבריו על הנחיתות המדעית של העם היהודי שבהיסטוריה שלו היה נטול מוסדות מחקר מדעיים. כתב היד של ספר ׳מירב׳ מעולם לא נדפס, ונחשב לאבוד. אך לאחרונה מצאתי חלקים מהספר שנכללו בהעתקה של כתב יד אחר. מתוכם אבקש להעלות במאמר הנוכחי את מטרתו ואת אופיו של הספר, לשבצו בקונטקסט של תפיסותיו העקרוניות של ר׳ יהונתן בכתיבתו הרחבה, ולעמוד על פשר כמה מן הרמיזות הסמויות הכלולות בחלקים שהגיעו לידנו. דרך העיון בשרידי ספר מירב אנסה להראות את הצורה בה הפנים ר׳ יהונתן לתוך התבנית התיאטרלית של הספר את התפיסה הייחודית שלו אודות יחסי דת ומדע, כמו גם את עמדתו נוכח האתגרים המורכבים, והדיאלוגים המתוחים, שזימן בפניו הנוף התרבותי הסוער בו שהה בפראג ההבסבורגית באותם עשורי השנים: נוף שחברו בו וויכוחי דת ומדע עם ׳כמרים׳ ועם ׳שרים׳, ועם קבוצות דתיות בעלות נטיות דתיות ומדעיות שונות ומנוגדות. את חזונו האוניברסלי של המחבר אבקש לתאר בתוך זרם מחשבה מסויים שרווח במאה השמונה עשרה, זרם ששאף ליצירתה של דת מדעית אוניברסלית בה ישולבו מיטב גילויי המדע העכשווי עם תבניות מחשבה מטאפיזיות: מאגיות קבליות והרמטיות. בלב הפרויקט העצום הזה, כפי שתואר בספר ׳מירב׳, עמדה דמותו הספרותית האוטופית של חכם יהודי יודע כל, דמות שאותה אבקש לזהות עם המחבר עצמו, ר׳ יהונתן אייבשיץ.

השקה לספר 'ספרי יעקב' מאת אולגה טוקרצ'וק. עם צאתו בתרגום לעברית בהוצאת כרמל נארח בבית אריאלה מפגש לדיון בספר, פרי עטה של הסופרת הפולניה זוכת פרס הנובל.

ביום שישי, 1.5.20 בשעה 11:00 הוצאת כרמל, האוניברסיטה הפתוחה, המכון הפולני ובית אריאלה גאים להציג

פרופ' אבריאל בר לבב, עורך הספר, ראש המכון לחקר יחסי יהודים, נוצרים, מוסלמים, האוניברסיטה הפתוחה / מרים בורנשטיין, מתרגמת הספר לעברית /פאנל: בין פנטזיה למציאות - על יעקב פרנק, משיחיות ומיסטיקה יהודית /משתתפים: ד"ר גדי שגיב, ראש תחום מדעי היהדות, האוניברסיטה הפתוחה / פרופ' יונתן מאיר, המחלקה למחשבת ישראל, אוניברסיטת בן גוריון בנגב / ד"ר רות קרא, החוג לתולדות ישראל, אוניברסיטת חיפה / מנחה:  ירון לונדון

על הספר: ספרי יעקב' הוא רומן היסטורי יוצא דופן על אחת הפרשיות שהסעירו את יהדות מזרח אירופה במאה השמונה־עשרה – פועלו של יעקב פרנק, דמות שנויה במחלוקת, ספק משיח, ספק חוטא, ספק רמאי, אדם שֶׁשְּׂטן ההרס רקד בליבו, שביקש לעקור את הכול, ועבר בין דתות שונות כדי לבטל את כולן. ועם זאת, פרנק היה אדם בעל כריזמה יוצאת דופן, בעל כוח פיוטי וקול דתי מהפכני, רב ניהיליסט

האירוע נדחה בשל המגפה

המאמר מציע שינוי פרדיגמה בחקר השבתאות ובהבנת דמותו של מייסדה - שבתי צבי. במקום תיאור קליני - מאני-דפרסיבי של שבתי צבי, ובמקום התיאור המקובל אודות ׳מעשים זרים׳ שתכליתם אנטינומית, מוצע במאמר פענוח מהודק של מחוותיו כיצירתיות אישית שפועלת בתוך שפת החוק היהודית ודרכה נפתח שער חדש להבנת עולמו הפנימי, לשיח שלו עם קהלו ולהצעת יומרותיו המשיחיות והפוליטית, בתוך ההקשרים הספרותיים והריאליים של האימפריה העות׳מאנית ושל המאה השבע-עשרה בה פעל וחי.
המאמר זכה בפרס למאמר פורץ דרך בחקר ההיסטוריה לשנת 2016 של החברה ההיסטורית והעמותה  על שם שלמה ובלה ברטל

Includes the text of both editions of the earliest known Hebrew description of the Frankist movement printed by R. Jacob Emden.
This article appeared in the Shalom Rosenberg festschrift, 'BeDarkhei Shalom', in 2007. Due to several requests, I gladly make it available for reading here.

Introduction to: . Jonathan Eibeschütz, And I Came this Day unto the Fountain, ואבוא היום אל העין, Critically Edited and Introduced by Paweł Maciejko, With Additional Studies by Noam Lefler, Jonatan Benarroch and Shai Alleson Gerberg, 2014 (Sources and Studies in the Literature of Jewish Mysticism 42), 360 pp., ISBN 1-933379-45-6.

The book Be-ikvot Mashiah (Gershom Scholem, In the Footsteps of the Messiah, 1944), still hunted by academics and collectors to this day, signifies the first attempt to redeem the texts of the fallen Messiah’s followers. This was a beginning that shaped the study of Jewish mysticism in the twentieth century, even if complete editions of key Sabbatian texts continue to await their redeemer. The current reissuing of this book, in 390 copies, is nothing less than a call to action to scholars and a cry for a textual redemption that has been delayed. |

Professor Jonatan Meir serves as a faculty member in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is the author of numerous studies on various forms of Jewish Literature and Jewish Mysticism.

orders: https://blimabooks.com

First Edition, 2021
Paperback Edition, 2023



בעקבות משיח: אוסף מקורות מראשית התפתחות האמונה השבתאית מלוקטים מתוך כתביו של ר' אברהם בנימין נתן בן אלישע חיים אשכנזי המכונה נתן העזתי יוצאים לאור מתוך כתבי-היד על ידי גרשם שלום, ועתה הובא לדפוס מחדש עם תיקונים והשלמות  על ידי יונתן מאיר, ספרי בלימה | עלו לשלום, ירושלים וברלין תשפ"ב - מהדורת פקסמיליה עם תוספות מרובות, עדכונים והשלמות- הפקה: יוסי שוייג | עיצוב: עדה ורדי - נדפס בש"ץ עותקים |

This book is a prelude to a larger task that lies ahead: the authoring of a comprehensive monograph on Gershom Scholem’s scholarly oeuvre as informed by the vast material preserved in his archive. Or, in other words, presenting the “Major Trends in the Study of Jewish Mysticism” as established by Scholem. This book is concerned with one—albeit central—component of this story that awaits to be told, that of Scholem’s study of the Sabbatian movement. By presenting for the first time the narrative arc of what is arguably Scholem’s greatest scholarly achievement as informed by his own archive, Gershom Scholem and the Research of Sabbatianism subverts many of the questionable theories put forward about Scholem’s hidden motives in studying this messianic movement while offering a clear picture of the development of the scholarship of this critical chapter in the history of Jewish mysticism.

Professor Jonatan Meir serves as a faculty member in the Goldstein-Goren Department of Jewish Thought at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. He is a member of the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities and is the author of numerous studies on various forms of Jewish Literature and Jewish Mysticism. Dr. Shinichi Yamamoto is a scholar of Kabbalah and Sabbatianism at the University of Tokyo; he has recently published Kabbalah: Historical and Conceptual Perspectives (Tokyo 2015). The authors are the editors of Gershom Scholem, History of the Sabbatian Movement (Jerusalem and Tel Aviv: Schocken Institute for Jewish Research and Schocken Books, 2018)

orders: https://blimabooks.com

This paper investigates the eighteenth century phenomenon of the wide spread and use of Sabbaetean literature by “main stream” Jewish rabbis. For what reason did  participants in the Jewish rabbinic elite posses and use copies of heretical manuscripts, while integrating them in their literally projects as well as their personal daily practice ? Moreover, how did the tempestuous controversy over Jacob Frank and his believers at the middle of the eighteen century affect this status of Sabbatean texts in the rabbinic library?
In this essay I will examine a particular aspect of this literary opacity from the viewpoint of two Torah scholars. By dating and revisiting lost manuscripts and short fragments, along with well-known polemics, this paper will attempt to uncover the basic attitudes of R. Ezekiel Landau of Prague and R. Pin@has Katzenellenbogen of Boskowitz toward  Kabbalistic and Sabbatean literature. Several personal writings dating from 1752 to 1761 will be closely examined with the aim of tracing two opposing, yet prototypical responses to the place occupied by Sabbatean literature on the Kabbalistic-Lurianic shelf of the contemporary rabbinic library.

"

Nathan of Gaza, the (in)famous prophet of Sabbatai Zevi, was also a brilliant kabbalist who drew on a wide range of sources. This article calls for a reading of Nathan’s kabbalah as both a product of and as informative about the kabbalistic milieu of the 17th century, and not just as a vehicle for Sabbatian ideology. It also intervenes in methodological debates over the historiographical categories of “Sabbatian” and “crypto-Sabbatian,” and complicates the claim that Nathan’s “influence” on subsequent kabbalists implies that these latter followed in the footsteps of the failed messiah. Nathan’s kabbalah is juxtaposed with an 18th century kabbalist whom, as Isaiah Tishby argued, Nathan appears to have influenced: Ya’akov Koppel Lifshitz of Mezritch. Both Nathan and Koppel are also compared conceptually with earlier and contemporaneous kabbalists. Putting Nathan in a wider kabbalistic context reveals how he and other post-Lurianic kabbalists conceptualized their diverse libraries of kabbalistic texts. Finally, this article examines how early modern mentalities – particularly those related to cosmology and nature – may have influenced the reception of Nathan’s texts.

Scholars have only recently started to study ilanot (lit., “trees”), the cosmographic genre constituted by the wedding of kabbalistic diagrams—the trees of the metonymic name—and large parchment sheets. Differences of kabbalistic opinion naturally found expression in these “maps of God.” The Sabbatean messianic movement of the 1660s and its prolonged and impactful afterlife produced, among other things, a number of distinctive kabbalistic opinions. For the most part, these innovations were tightly integrated with the speculations associated with “Lurianic” Kabbalah based on the teachings of R. Isaac Luria (1534–1572). The great Lurianic ilanot were designed and circulated in the second third of the seventeenth century, not long before the emergence of Sabbateanism, but their golden age was “the long eighteenth century”—a British coinage for roughly 1660–1830—and thus coincided with the profound and pervasive absorption of Sabbatean elements in precisely those sectors that produced a...

This article presents a letter penned by Nathan of Gaza in 1665 in a time of great elation. This was not long after he had heard, in his words, “the herald of the heavenly academy declare saying that in a year and several months’ time the Messiah son of David will be revealed in the world” and that “the kingdom of the Messiah son of David will be revealed,” and shortly after he had prophesied “Thus sayeth the Lord: Your redeemer has come and Sabbatai Ṣevi is his name; lo he sallies forth as a warrior, as a man of war he stirs up fury. He raises the battle cry, even bellows, over His enemies He prevails.” These remarks were sent to Raphael Joseph in Egypt, along with with repentance ordinances, Derush ha-Taninim, and other works by Nathan. This text is of critical importance for understanding the early stages of Sabbateanism, when the movement was largely disconnected from the personal theology of Sabbatai Ṣevi. The letter was widely disseminated in manuscript and served at various points as a manifest of sorts for the “believers” of the Sabbatean movement. The text printed below—together with a historical introduction and explanatory notes—was prepared from the manuscript of the work Tsitsat Novel Tsevi and appears with important textual variations based on earlier manuscripts only recently discovered.

"on: Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement 1755-1816 (Jewish Culture and contexts), Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011, 376 pp.

The article includes a review of developments in research of late Sabbateanism, especially research concerning the ‘wondrous charlatan’, Jacob Frank. Histories of Frank, and those who joined his movement in various countries until his conversion have long been a subject of great interest for modern historiography and they provide a touchstone for discerning the religious and ethical boundaries of the historians themselves. The first to write critically about Frank came from the Haskalah and had a negative attitude toward him. They saw Frank as the last and necessary chain in the unfolding of Sabbatean heresies. A real change in perspective came about in studies from the beginning of the twentieth century, written with a romantic and nationalistic orientation by authors who found the sparks of nationalism in Sabbatean literature. The studies of Gershom Scholem, Aaron Zeev Eshkoli and others who continued this trend, but who were more nuanced and historically accurate, offered a fuller picture of the phenomenon. Against this background it is possible to better appreciate the
publication of the new book by Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude, which presents the history of late Sabbateanism in very different light and in various ways changes the accepted understanding of its history."