Japanese Journal of Policy and Culture Vol.

24 (March 2016) 1

Sabbatianism:
The Ruin of Purity

Mark N. ZION

Synopsis
Sabbatianism is a movement named after Sabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676), a Jew of the Ottoman Empire. This
movement, for all exposed to it, turned the world upside down. Scholars have called it a transvaluation within
Jewish culture (Scholem 1973:685), meaning it spun accepted norms on their heads in ways that ultimately led to
extreme expressions: A place where the violation of the sacred became a sacred duty. Sabbatianism repels as much
as it attracts because it speaks to something deep within the human psyche: that fine line in consciousness
between the sacred and profane, the moral and immoral, religious devotion and antinomianism, truth and imagina-
tion, meaning and nihilism. Sabbatianism developed independently of other messianic movements in Western
monotheism, all of which tend to follow remarkably similar patters: Populace movements that forge revolutionary
ideas destructive of the religious status quo. For Sabbatians vitality became sacred (Alter 1987:25), so the move-
ment is only different in kind from certain social, artistic, and aesthetic movements, even without Messiahs, that
teach the world to see through new eyes, however much the world may squirm over this. All messianic movements
attempt to bridge the gap between humanity and the Divine (Davies 1987:80) and while Sabbatianism has also
attempted this, it still presents riddles that have yet to be deciphered. I will touch here on a few of its revolutionary
features.

Key Words
Tikkun Olam; Lurianic Kabbalah; the Shemittot; Neo-Pla-
tonism; Gnosticism; the Messiah; Nathan of Gaza; Sabbatai
Tzvi; Maimodines; Sefer Zerubbabel; a theurgy; the Sefirot.

Contents
1. Introduction
2. Sabbatai Tzvi
3. Isaac Luria s groundwork
4. Nathan of Gaza
  a. Origins of evil
  b. Struggling with leviathan
  c. Cosmic cycles
5. Sabbatianism forms
  a. The sacred wounded
6. Sabbatianism s legacy

Recommender: Professor KURODA Emiko, Faculty of Policy Studies, Chuo University

 2

  a. The Dönmeh
  b. The Frankists
7. Conclusion

1. Introduction

In the seventeenth-century an astonishing mystical heresy arose̶Sabbatianism̶that centered on a messi-

anic figure. Based in part on Lurianic Kabbalah, this movement whipped up the flames of expectation, only to
burn itself out in the most ignoble way. Yet, the fervor could not completely burn out, but smoldered for
centuries. Sabbatianism scandalized Judaism, and ambivalence toward it continues even today (Alter
1987:22).
 I begin, as articles related to Kabbalah do, with the research of Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), who
pioneered the academic study of such weighty kabbalistic works as the Sefer ha-Bahir, the Sefer ha-Zohar,
and Lurianic Kabbalah. Yet the most intriguing (and controversial) part of Scholem s research has been to
uncover the history of Sabbatianism. Much of what I write here is grounded in Scholem s magnum opus,
Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (1973). Scholem found that much of this history had been deliberately
repressed (Scholem 1941:300). Belief in Sabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676) had been so much more pervasive than
standard histories of the movement had depicted. Sabbatianism had all the earmarks for creating a radically
new religion, but it stopped just short of it, for reasons I will consider below.
 Movements that create new religions trample on the sacred they inherit. Paul of Tarsus (c. 5-67 CE)
toppled what it meant to be a Jew: A person is not a Jew who is one only outwardly, nor is circumcision
merely outward and physical. No, a person is a Jew who is one inwardly; and circumcision is circumcision of
the heart, by the Spirit, not by the written code (Romans 2:28-29). Only a devout Jew, as Paul was, could
make such across-the-board declarations and have them stick. In founding a new movement, Paul began by
clearing away the brush that blocked its march for universal triumph in world religious consciousness:
Jewish ethnicity and practices.
 Similarly, only an Arab of the prominent Quraysh tribe, the Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632 CE), could
take the sacred traditions of Abraham and the Ka aba̶beliefs that had been part of Arabic culture from
antiquity̶and re-center them on a new imperative: A return to the pristine religion of Abraham and the One
1)
God he worshipped and followed. Muhammad declared that the Al-Qur’an was Allah s final revelation
(Al-Qur’an 33:40), making all previous revelations (Judaism and Christianity) incomplete or at least
2)
corrupted versions of the pure faith of Islam (Al-Qur’an 4:47).
 And only devout Jews could stretch the orthodox teachings they had inherited until they snapped. In 1665
Nathan of Gaza (1643-1680), using networks around the Jewish world, declared in treatises, letters, circulars,
and even in personal visits, that the Messiah had appeared in Israel (Dan 1987:289). Astonishingly, within just
a few months of Nathan s announcement, Jews everywhere from every social class were suddenly caught up
in a messianic fervor. Lurianic Kabbalah that by then animated Jewish life and strengthened traditional
Judaism held only vague notions of any messianic dimensions and it certainly had nothing to do with an indi-
vidual Messiah (Rabow 2002:94). Sabbatianism took a huge leap in the opposite direction: A Messiah was
necessary to crush the heel of evil (Scholem 1973:300).
 ZION: Sabbatianism 3

 Since in Judaism redemption meant this present world (not in the heavens), as Maimodines (c. 1135-
3)
1204) had written (Kraemer 2008:356), with a King in the spirit of King David̶a prophet like Moses in real
space and time̶many began to sell their land and possessions to move to the Holy Land to be among the
first returnees (Scholem 1973:528-32). Now, to make salvation certain, Nathan encouraged everyone to
repent and to support the Messiah with their prayer and devotion as he descended into the realms of dark-
ness to free the remaining captive sparks of the Divine, trapped from the beginning of creation in the realm
of the qelippoth or degrees of death (Scholem 1973:43). From May 1665 to September 1666 the enthusiasm
had risen to a fevered pitch:

An emotional upheaval of immense force took place among the mass of people, and for an entire year,
men lived a new life which for many years remained their first glimpse of a deeper spiritual reality
(Scholem 1941:288).

The euphoria among the large Jewish population alarmed the Ottoman authorities̶especially because Jews
were neglecting their businesses (Scholem 1973:449)̶and the Ottomans placed Sabbatai Tzvi under arrest.
On September 16, 1666, after meeting with the Sultan s Privy Council, Sabbatai accepted the Islamic turban,
thus showing he was a convert to Islam.
 What was the meaning of this? Since ancient times Jews had believed that to die for their faith̶rather
than to betray it̶was the highest honor (Maciejko 2011:133-134). After the Messiah s apostasy, the Jewish
world was left with a deep trauma and dilemma: A person hailed as the Messiah through a legitimate
prophecy (affirmed by rabbis in Jerusalem) had committed the most sacrilegious act possible. The Messiah s
apostasy was followed by outraged condemnations and excommunications (herem) by rabbinic councils in
the larger cities everywhere (Scholem 1973:712). For most caught up in the mass movement the apostasy
was too much and they quietly began to disassociate from it and to even deny they had ever believed in it.
 Yet, in spite of Sabbatai s conversion, Nathan of Gaza, who never wavered in his belief in Sabbatai s messi-
anic vocation, continued to expound on the reasons why the Messiah had to convert to Islam (Scholem
4)
1941:314). The Messiah must assume the cloak of evil in order to destroy all evil from within (Scholem
1973:802). Sabbatai s most loyal followers remained with him until his death in 1676 as an exile in Monte-
negro.
 Even after Sabbatai s death, his paradoxes continued to haunt many in the Jewish world. Some later
formed into small, secretive communities to flesh out the more mystical meanings of Sabbatai s legacy.
Scholars identify at least ten different groups that developed more or less independently, some in Christian
lands and some in Muslim lands (Dan 2007:92). These groups would continue in some form to our own day,
with general perspectives from Sabbatianism either contaminating or enlightening (depending on one s
perspective) the entire Jewish world and even influencing the great secular liberalizing movements of
Europe (Scholem 1941:320).
 Sabbatianism s context is important: It arose after the Reformation (1517-1648) and before the Enlighten-
ment (1650-1800). In other words, it grew out of a theocratic age (Vico 1730:39-74). The seventeenth-
century was still an age of magic̶though more empirical ways of looking at life were emerging̶with
almost everyone at the time believing in the possibility of miracles. Sabbatai Tzvi appeared after Michel de
 4

Montaigne (1533-1592), William Shakespeare (1564-1616), Thomas Hobbes (1588-1676), and René
Descartes (1596 1650), all secular visionaries of human potential, but as a pious Jew he would not have been
exposed to their writings; his contemporaries were John Locke (1632 1704) and Baruch Spinoza (1632
1677), yet oddly Sabbatai s legacy, though more indirect, pushed the world a little more toward rational objec-
tivity.
 Further, the Sabbatian movement was born of a religious culture remarkable for its homogeneity, given its
dispersion far and wide geographically, from the Yemen to Great Britain, from Portugal to Western Russia. It
was the first sustained assault from within on rabbinical authority to determine Jewish life and this planted
the idea to open the Ghetto for fuller participation in European cultural life (Dan 1987:287-288). As the
Reformation (1517) marked the start of the modern era for Western civilization (Russell 1945:481-483),
Sabbatianism launched the modern era for the Jewish people (Dan 2007:92), though not everyone agrees
with this (Alter 1987:28). I will consider a little of how this led to unforeseen consequences̶both positive
and negative̶and how the dynamism of Sabbatianism, the movement that Sabbatai Tzvi and Nathan of Gaza
orchestrated, unleashed powerful forces that have become part of secular life:

He (Sabbatai Tzvi) serves as a catalyst, negatively, for radical criticism of the existing order; positively,
of dreams at long last come true, of barriers long-standing being broken down, of a new creation̶all
this accompanied by an impulse to propagate good news (Davies 1987:85).

2. Sabbatai Tzvi

Sabbatai Tzvi, a native of Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey) and a Sephardic rabbi, is an unlikely Messiah. A drifter
among the synagogues of the Eastern Mediterranean since early adulthood, Sabbatai left no memorable
5)
sayings of wisdom and no scholarly achievements.
 Though a devoted kabbalist, ascetic, and Talmudist, Sabbatai was at times erratic, hyper, even profane
toward the sacred of Judaism, while at other times he was so withdrawn that he locked himself in his room
for weeks and weeks. Synagogues sometimes tolerated him, but at other times they expelled him. The Jeru-
salem rabbis, considered the de facto central authorities of Judaism of the day, once had him whipped. Sabba-
tai s strange actions (ma’asim zarim) had an aura of a sacramental violation: he pronounced aloud the
6)
Tetragrammaton̶the Divine name considered too sacred to say (Scholem 1978:247), celebrated a
marriage between himself and the Torah (ibid.), ate lard (a sacrilege of dietary Kashrut) on certain holy days
(Dan 1987:303), and even changed the days in which festivals, feasts, and fasts were held, once celebrating
Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot̶events celebrated over nine months̶in one week (Scholem 1978:248).
Sabbatai had also proclaimed himself a Messiah from time to time, but only a few took him seriously (Rabow
2002:94-95).
 Scholem has shown that Sabbatai Tzvi was manic-depressive, suffering from severe mood swings every
three months or so, from euphoria (his illuminated state) to deep depression (Scholem 1941:290). Nathan of
Gaza gave these swings metaphysical and redemptive meanings: When in a depressed state Sabbatai
descended deep into the qelippoth to release sparks from captivity or to redeem lost souls there (Sabbatai
only committed strange actions in his hyper state). When in a euphoric state, Sabbatai was ecstatically
 ZION: Sabbatianism 5

returning the sparks or souls to the Divine (Scholem 1973:302-308).

 From about 1648, at around the age of twenty-two, as Sabbatai s manic-depressive condition began to
appear, he suffered paralyses of such intensity that he could not read or write. He had looked for cures all his
adult life. In 1665, while in Egypt as an emissary of the Jerusalem community (which earlier had punished
him), and now nearly forty years old, Sabbatai had heard of Nathan of Gaza, the gifted young healer, and in
7)
April went to Gaza to be treated by him (Scholem 1941:291). To Sabbatai s astonishment, Nathan
announced that he (Sabbatai) was the redeemer of Israel. At first Sabbatai laughed this off, but over time
Nathan convinced him this was true (Scholem 1978:435).
 On May 31, 1665, Sabbatianism formally began, with Sabbatai proclaiming himself the Messiah in Gaza
and Hebron, before going to Jerusalem with forty men (twelve from a rabbinical school he chose to repre-
8)
sent the twelve tribes of Israel). They wore green (the color a previous Messiah of twelfth-century Bagdad);
Sabbatai had gained special permission from the Ottoman government to ride a horse around Jerusalem
seven times (Jews were forbidden to ride horses in Jerusalem). After, he went to the ancient Temple Mount
where the mosque, Haram esh-Sharif (Dome of the Rock), stood̶also a place where Jews were forbidden to
go. Sabbatai intended to perform a sacrifice showing that the Temple would be rebuilt. Later, Sabbatai ate
heleb (forbidden fat̶heleb can also mean a dog ) the fat around a kosher animal s kidneys, chanting a
profane blessing: Blessed art thou, O Lord, who permitted that which is forbidden (Scholem 1973:242).
 After hearing of the sacrilege with heleb, the Jerusalem rabbis excommunicated Sabbatai and forbade him
from ever entering Jerusalem again (Scholem 1973:246). Sabbatai s message of eating heleb was clear: In the
Torah, heleb is the only one of the thirty-two prohibitions that dealt with food (Leviticus 7:25; 18:1-26); all the
others were prohibitions against fornication, adultery, and incest (Scholem 1973: 242). The messianic age,
then, would overturn all sexual taboos. Sabbatai s intention was in part to elevate the status of women̶
Sabbatai also wanted women to read the Torah during Sabbath services (Scholem 1973:403).
 The Jerusalem rabbis excommunicated Sabbatai not because he had claimed to be a Messiah but for his
open violation of Jewish practices and for encouraging others to violate them (Scholem 1973:250); they later
urged everyone to separate yourselves from the tents of these madmen, lest both we and you be found
sinning against the king [that is, the Sultan], but neither Sabbatai nor Nathan would listen to the voice of the
rabbis of Jerusalem (Scholem 1973:251). Though with the authority to expel Sabbatai from Jerusalem s
Jewish Quarter, the rabbis could not stop the outpouring of enthusiasm Sabbatai had ignited far and wide.
 On September 19, 1665, Sabbatai began a messianic procession from Jerusalem to Safed, then to Aleppo,
Syria and Smyrna, with Constantinople (Istanbul) the final destination (Scholem 1978:248). One Jewish
witness in northern Europe chronicled the enthusiasm:

First of all, there were many people everywhere who fasted the whole week and immersed themselves
(in rivers, lakes, and oceans) every day . . . They devoted the whole day to good works, and recited the
daily devotions as arranged at the time . . . .

People tried to sell goods and belongings at any price they could get, and kept themselves in readiness
for the moment when the messiah and the prophet Elijah would appear and announce the end, so as to
be able to proceed [to the holy land] without delay . . . . And let no one say that I have exaggerated in my
 6

description, for you should know that what I have written is not even a half of what has been reported,
by not one but by hundreds of trustworthy witnesses who have told most wondrous things of the repen-
tance that was wrought in our parts [that is, German, Holland, etc.] (Leyb b. Ozer as quoted by Scholem
9)
1973:473-75).

Sexuality and purity (civilization/religion) are often at war and these can roughly follow Sigmund Freud s
(1856-1939) paradigm of the id (sexual impulses) and the super-ego (ethics). In Civilization and Its Discon-
tents, Freud theorized that humanity is essentially hostile toward civilization because it forces a repression of
sexual impulses for civilization to continue (1930:4-5). Indeed, one could argue, as Freud did (Freud
1930:73), that the antinomian spirit that promotes social equality is partly sexual, since conservative hierar-
chies based on race or social class forbid the elites from marrying members of minorities or inferiors. Sexual
10)
liberation by definition is part of messianic movements, and this was certainly true of Sabbatianism.
Sabbatai had married a former prostitute, Sarah, following the prophet Hosea (c. eight-century BCE), also
11)
symbolic of the New Age (Silverman 1998:202), part of abolishing the present age s divisions between
sacred and profane.
 Many accounts of Sabbatai Tzvi s conversion to Islam are extant: We have Christian accounts (British,
Dutch, and French) both from members of the clergy and diplomats to the Ottoman Empire and Jewish
accounts from supporters of the movement and its enemies. The Turkish records seem to have been
destroyed by fire (Scholem 1978:385). All accounts agree that Sabbatai was arrested on February 6 while on
a ship in the Sea of Marmara bound for Constantinople. Shortly after, the Sultan s Grand Vizier, Ahmed
Köprülü (1635-1676), a remarkably capable administrator, interviewed him. The meeting was extraordinary
for its leniency. Frequent sedition in the Ottoman Empire was always brutally put down by immediate execu-
tion. Nathan had earlier predicted that the Sultan would willingly give Sabbatai his crown (Scholem
1971:145), which would have been enough to make the charge of sedition stick. The Vizier instead sent
Sabbatai to Gallipoli for confinement.
 While in custody for seven months, Sabbatai, perhaps from the bribes of his followers, had comfortable
accommodations and was allowed visitors, who flocked from far and wide to see him. Sabbatai may have
created some of the ritualized violations there (including those sexual in nature) that characterized later
Sabbatianism (Scholem 1978:262-264).
 On September 15, 1666 the Ottoman authorities brought Sabbatai to Adrianople where he appeared before
the Privy Council the following day in a large room with a balcony where the Sultan could watch from behind
a latticed screen (kafes). High government and court officials attended, including the Sultan s chief preacher,
Mehemed Vani Effendi (d. 1689). The chief preacher s presence perhaps shows the underlying motives for
the proceedings (Scholem 1973:675). The Sultan Mehmed IV (1642-1693), a devout Muslim, and perhaps
encouraged by his chief preacher, hoped for the conversion of Ottoman Jews to Islam. They must have felt
Sabbatai could deliver the Jewish world to the Islamic fold.
 The Privy Council gave Sabbatai three choices: 1) to perform a miracle (by surviving the arrows of the
Sultan s archers) to prove he was the Messiah; 2) to endure a slow death by spears on a stake at the Gate of
Seraglio (the place for public execution), to become a martyr for his faith; or 3) to become a Muslim.
Sabbatai may have expected to convert (this may have been the prearranged understanding). As a circum-
 ZION: Sabbatianism 7

cised Jew, converting for Sabbatai would involve only a change of clothing, from Jewish to Muslim attire
(Dan 1987:295). Sabbatai accepted the Muslim garments.
 The Sultan, all reports agree, overjoyed with Sabbatai s conversion, gave him a Muslim name (Mehemed
Effendi or Aziz Mehemed Effendi) and a special office Kapici Bashi Keeper of the Palace. In addition to the
honorarium from this office, the Sultan added a pension of one hundred fi fty silver coins a day (Scholem
1973:681). Sabbatai, destined for a life of luxury as the result of his apostasy, wrote a letter around 1668-69,
some two years later, to tell his followers that his conversion was sincere (he must descend into the abyss to
launch a new age). Also, since he was manic-depressive, Sabbatai dealt with the issue of his firmness of
conviction despite his mental instability:

Know ye my brethren, my children, and my friends that I recognized with great clarity that the True
[God] whom I alone know for many generations and for whom I have done so much, has willed that I
should enter with my heart into the Islamic religion [din islam], the religion of Ishmael, to permit what
it permits, and to forbid what it forbids, and to nullify the Torah of Moses until the time of the End. . . .
The Torah of Moses is nullified, as is also esoterically implied in the Talmudic saying [where God is
reported to have said to Moses]: May thy strength increase because you broke the tablets of the Cove-
nant. . . . And so do not believe, my brethren, that I did this [becoming a Muslim] on the strength of an
illumination so that you become terrified and say: today or tomorrow the illumination will depart from
him and he will regret what he had said and will be very sorry for it. This is not so, but I did this on my
own, through the great power and strength of the Truth and Faith which no wind in the world and no
sages and prophets can cause me to leave my place (Sabbatai Tzvi as quoted by Scholem 1973:840-841).

Finally, in 1672, the Ottomans exiled Sabbatai to a fortress called Dulcigo (Ulcinj, Montenegro). For six years
Sabbatai had lived the life of an esteemed Ottoman courtier, holding his own court, receiving visitors and
dignitaries from around the Jewish world, but Sabbatai s strange acts, with the suspicion that his conver-
sion was insincere, sealed his fate. Yet it is amazing that he continued for as long as he did, given that execu-
tion was the punishment for Muslims who did not practice Islam. In 1672 reports surfaced that Sabbatai had
led a procession and celebrated the Sabbath in a synagogue where he wore Jewish phylacteries (tefillin) and
Jewish garb, with wine and women (Scholem 1973:874)̶the implication being it was a ritualized sexual
ceremony. The Grand Vizier, who had earlier been Sabbatai s protector, now wanted his execution. It seems
the Sultan s mother intervened on Sabbatai s behalf for exile instead. Shortly before he died, and still
convinced he was the Messiah, Sabbatai wrote:

But if thou shall indeed obey his voice and do all that I speak to you (Exodus 23:22), then I shall indeed
go up and fill your treasures (Proverbs 8:21). Thus saith the man who is raised to the heights of the
Father, the Celestial Lion and Celestial Stag, the Anointed of the God of Israel and Judah, Sabbatai
Mehemed Tzvi (Sabbatai Tzvi as quoted by Scholem 1973:916).

Sabbatai s apostasy had caused more turmoil than any internal event in the annals of Jewish history. The
pogroms, the persecutions, and all the external traumas had tended to reinforce group identity and cohesion,
 8

but Sabbatai s apostasy wounded and divided Jewish interior life. Nothing in Judaism s sacred writings
prepared anyone for an apostate Messiah (Scholem 1973:793). The inner renewal many felt was genuine and
despite all objective evidence to the contrary some continued to nurture this inner awakening:

The efforts of the believers to discover a positive and constructive meaning in what was an essentially
negative and destructive act, constitutes their peculiar contribution to the history of religion in general
and to the subsequent history of Judaism in particular. Their faith required of them a measure of tension
and a struggle with paradox that went beyond anything demanded of the Christian believer (Scholem
1973:799).

3. Isaac Luria s groundwork

Lurianic Kabbalah, the crown jewel of mystical teachings from the community in Safed, Israel, aided by the
newly invented printing press, had spread quickly throughout the Jewish world from 1630 to 1640 (Scholem
1978:245). As these ideas were internalized they would paradoxically form the foundation Sabbatianism built
on:

The spread of Lurianic Kabbalism with its doctrine of Tikkun, of the restitution of cosmic harmony
through the earthly medium of a mystically elevated Judaism, this doctrine could not but lead to an
explosive manifestation of all those forces to which it owed its rise and its success (Scholem 1941:287).

Original visionaries are extremely rare: Dante Alighieri (c. 1265-1321) and John Milton (1608-1674) are two
from among a handful who through symbolic language transformed fundamental perceptions. Isaac Luria
(1534-1575) is in their league, the most original kabbalist ever. Before Luria, Kabbalah was a mishmash of
Neo-Platonism and Gnosticism (Scholem 1978:45) grafted into traditional Jewish practices, with the Sefer
ha-Zohar as materia poetica. Plotinus (c. 204/5-270), Neo-Platonism s originator (Enneads 270), developed
the idea of emanations from the Divine One that resulted in three levels of reality: 1) the highest is intelli-
gence and Divine mind (nous); 2) next comes the world of nature (world soul); and 3) lowest is the physical
body and spirit (soul).
 Classical Kabbalah begins with a Neo-Platonic vision of divinity: The Sefirot, with the Ein-Sof hidden and
unknowable (Bloom 1987:2-8), emanated in ten forms (characteristics of the Divine) at creation; this concept
12)
was also developed in more detail from an ancient esoteric writing, the Sefer Yetzirah. Neo-Platonism also
accorded Kabbalah s tripartite division of human consciousness: the nefesh, the ru’ah, and the neshamah,
from the lower to the higher consciousness (Bloom 1987:17).
 Gnosticism may have its origins in ancient Judaism, according to Scholem (Dan 2007:24-26) and Hans
Jonas (1958:33-34): the Merkavah (Chariots) traditions (c. sixth-century BCE) that Ezekiel wrote of (Ezekiel
1:28), though scholars in our time have yet to find evidence to support this thesis (Dan 2007:24-26). While
Neo-Platonism brought Greek divisions into Jewish thought, Gnosticism brought experiential enlightenment
(Scholem 1941:42). Luria took this brew of contrasting ideas and turned it into an individual and universal
ethic for redemption.
 ZION: Sabbatianism 9

 Luria restored the dynamic aspects of early Judaism with a mythology to live by (Bloom 1987:1-19),
extrapolating in fresh ways the origins of the cosmos, the redemptive power of ethics and practices, and the
destiny of humanity in a redeemed world (Scholem 1973:27). Its sheer scope in the way it answered ques-
tions is rare among world religions. Though it is complex, it is also remarkably nimble as an inward ethic and
surprisingly accessible to a general audience.
 Luria s teachings became the people s poetry (Davies 1987:86), giving meaning to the abused and the
oppressed: Jewry (the true sparks) is trapped among the nations (the true qelippoth), its vitality siphoned for
their own evil purposes in opposition to the Divine (Silberman 1998:179-180). By Nathan of Gaza s time Jews
everywhere had internalized Luria s new spins on the reasons for practices: Tzimtzum (Contraction),
Shevirat ha-Kelim (Breaking of the Vessels) Tikkun Olam (Restoration of the World), and Nitzotzot Hade-
13)
doshim (Lifting Holy Sparks) (Bloom 1996:212).
 Luria s sweeping vision nonetheless reinforced the Exile (Galuth), as it pulled the curtain back on a
universal emptiness of catastrophic proportions (Scholem 1971:104)̶a nightmare vision where even the
Divine suffers: The Shekhinah exiled from the nine other Sefirot wanders in mourning as Jews wander in
Exile (Scholem 1941:230-235).
 Lurianic Kabbalah was absolute in its stress on collective responsibility: Jews can through Mitzvot (Good
Works) bring Tikkun Olam (Healing of the World) (Scholem 1965:115-17). For some this message empow-
ered, but the passive, lazy, and unenlightened, if unable to live up to the high standards of holiness and righ-
teousness, could postpone Tikkun Olam indefinitely (Dan 1987:277), a very frightening prospect indeed.
Luria s Kabbalah created many Jewish saints, but with its high imperatives Jews relinquished some measure
of autonomy (from a humanistic perspective), for Luria taught that every thought, every intention, had
eternal consequences for prolonging Exile or for restoring the world.
 Made up of a rather small group of mystics, the kabbalistic community of Safed saw itself with a special
role as enlightened ones, but this role did not extend to ordinary people (Dan 1987:259; 277). Luria himself
wrote little that we know of, except for three poems still in liturgical use today. Hayyim Vital (1542-1620) and
Joseph Ibn T bul (b. 1545), two of Luria s closest disciples, recorded his teachings and their records are at
14)
times are contradictory. Vital was the most prolific but he refused to publish Luria s teachings for fear they
15)
may fall into unworthy hands (Scholem 1973:24). His manuscripts, obtained by stealth,16) were published
17)
only toward the end of his life and against his wishes (Levine 2003:92).
 Lurianic Kabbalah had also left all traditional Jewish practices in place, as behooves a community centered
on Kabbalah (Kabbalah in Hebrew meaning Tradition or That Which Is Received ) even as it offered a
revolutionary new scope of ideas (Scholem 1973:570). Yet, life in Exile, what traditional practices were based
on, could be a dark vision of religion, as Franz Kafka (1883-1924), whom Scholem esteemed as a secular
kabbalist (Mendes-Flohr 1994:16-17), expressed in numerous stories where characters are suspended
18)
somewhere between life and death and whose redemption remains equivocal. This sense of eternal
suspension was followed hard by the burden of transforming this mega-catastrophe. Did this burden turn
people in quest of a Messiah?
 Do people need a Messiah, a savior, or a heroic person to express something deeper in the psyche, an alter
ego or an idealized vision of one s deepest self? Freud in The Uncanny wrote: The uncanny is that class of
the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar (Freud 1919:123). This sense of
 10

the uncanny is projected onto a hero, what Freud called the worship of a Superman, to allay fears. We find
hero worship in nearly all cultures, heroes that descend into the underworld to redeem life in this world
19)
(Eliade 1951:367-374).
 The time was ripe for Messianism and when Nathan of Gaza opened its door it exploded with a fury
unmatched in Jewish history. And once opened it was not possible to close the door again completely̶
though many did try̶and powerful new perspectives breached the hearts and minds of nearly everyone
exposed to it. It asked the heretical question: Could traditional Jewish practices keep the sparks in captivity?
Generally, Messianism propels social transformation: Messianism can function as a powerful progressive
and revolutionary force, especially when its dynamism has yielded before the petrified patterns of ancient
popular myth (Scholem 1973:464).
 Though Luria allowed for messianic figures̶gifted souls who may further redemption on earth more
than others̶no one person had a special mission to single-handedly complete Tikkun Olam. Messiahs were
in the background quietly performing Tikkun and may even be unaware of their great accomplishment for
redemption (Levine 2003:97-98). Only at the end of time would they receive their rewards.

This final redemption, however, cannot be achieved by one single messianic act, but will be affected
through a long chain of activities that prepare the way. . . which is the essential task of the Jewish
people̶and the final result, the state of redemption announced by the appearance of the Messiah, who
marks the last stage (Scholem 1978:245).

4. Nathan of Gaza

Nathan of Gaza (Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi), also known as Ghazzati, whom admirers
also called the Holy Lamp (Buzina Kaddisha), remains a baffling figure in Jewish history. No one has
doubted his singular sincerity and devotion to his mission. Nathan s father, a respected scholar of rabbinical
and kabbalistic Judaism, had migrated from Germany or Poland earlier in the seventeenth-century to Jeru-
salem where Nathan was born. Nathan was an ardent student and studied under one of the world s most
respected scholars of the Talmud, Jacob Hagiz (1620-1674). With his formidable intellect and fertile and
creative imagination, Nathan took up the study of Lurianic Kabbalah in 1664, adopting the ascetic lifestyle of
kabbalistic devotees, and began to have visions of angels and the spirits of past sages (Scholem 1978:435):

I studied the Torah in purity until I was twenty years of age, and I carried out the great Tikkun which
Isaac Luria prescribes for everyone who has committed great faults. Although, praise be to God, I have
not advertently committed any sins, nevertheless I carried it out in case my soul be sullied from an
earlier stage of transmigration. When I had attained the age of twenty I began to study the book Zohar
and some of the Lurianic writings. But he who comes to purify himself receives the aid of Heaven, and
thus He sent me some of His holy angels and blessed spirits and revealed to me many of the mysteries
of the Torah (Nathan of Gaza as quoted by Scholem 1941:294).

Nathan of Gaza̶to draw a parallel with Christianity̶was both John the Baptist and the Apostle Paul in one
 ZION: Sabbatianism 11

person (Scholem 1941:295). Not only did he announce the coming of the Messiah, Nathan also prolifically
expounded on the reasons the Messiah had to come and created an overpowering literature supporting his
declaration. Scholem has shown that Sabbatianism in fact came from Nathan of Gaza rather than from
Sabbatai Tzvi, who tended to be passive and at times not at all confident in himself as the Messiah (Scholem
1978:250). If not for Nathan of Gaza, Sabbatai Tzvi would no doubt have remained unknown to history
(Scholem 1941:289).
 Nathan seemed to intuit the spiritual needs of the Jewish people en masse as he mixed Zoharic teachings
and Lurianic Kabbalah with earlier ideas of an unfulfilled messianic prophecy from Sefer Zerubbabel (c.
20)
seventh-century CE). Though a trained Talmudist, Nathan avoided using the Talmud for his messianic
pronouncements (Maciejko 2011:76). Nathan s most striking deviation from Luria, however, was that Jews by
their good works alone were unable to complete redemption (from a Lurianic point of view redemption came
by raising the sparks through Mitzvot).
 During the feast of Purim (late February or early March 1665), Nathan had a vision that lasted twenty-four
hours (Scholem 1973:211; 269n). It centered on the Ma’aseh Bere’shith (the Mystery of the Creation) and the
Ma’aseh Merkavah (Mystery of the Chariots)̶visions of the creation in its various stages and of the chariots
from the book of Ezekiel. Nathan saw emblazed on one of the chariots SABBATAI TZVI next to the name of
the patriarch Jacob (Nathan must have first met or seen Sabbatai Tzvi in Jerusalem s Jewish Quarter where
Sabbatai lived in 1663 and it made a deep impression on him). This chariot also carried the shinning counte-
nance of AMIRAH (the new name for Sabbatai Tzvi), an acronym in Hebrew for Our Lord and King, His
Majesty to be Exalted (Adoneinu Malkeinu Yarum Hodo) (Scholem 1973:263). Nathan also heard a voice:
Thus saith the Lord, behold your savior cometh, Sabbatai Tzvi is his name. He will cry, yea, roar, he shall
prevail against his enemies. Nathan further elaborated:

In that same year (1665), . . . I was undergoing a long fast in the week after the feast of Purim. Having
now locked myself in holiness and purity in a separate room and completed the morning prayer under
many tears, the spirit came over me, my hair stood on end and my knees shook and I saw the Merkavah,
and I saw visions of God all day long and all night, and I was vouchsafed true prophecy like any other
prophet, as the voice spoke to me and began with the words: Thus speaks the Lord. And with the
utmost clarity my heart perceived towards whom my prophecy was directed [i.e. towards Sabbatai Tzvi],
and until this day I have never yet had so great a vision, but it remained hidden in my heart until the
Redeemer revealed himself in Gaza and proclaimed himself the Messiah; only then did the angel permit
me to proclaim what I had seen (Nathan of Gaza as quoted by Scholem 1941:294-295).

Nathan added: Moreover I was told that Israel ought to believe [in the Messiah]. And whoever does not
believe, it is evident that his soul contains an admixture of evil from the generations that rebelled against the
Kingdom of Heaven and against the Kingdom of David (Nathan of Gaza as quoted by Scholem 1973:211).
Even from this dazzling beginning Nathan s prophetic vision had an edge (evident in other messianic move-
ments): Those who did not accept the Messiah were associated with evil. This was Nathan s one vision,
which he was not to reveal until the summer of 1665, and all his later writings were expositions on its
meaning, though he claimed to hear the voices of Maggadim (voices of angels or sages) continuously after
 12

the vision. Nathan was precise about the dates: The Messiah will announce himself in 1665 in Israel and in
1667 the age of the Messiah would begin (Scholem 1973:287), with the rebuilding of the Temple set to start
in 1672.
 How could the people of that time have been so gullible, with estimates of over fi fty-percent of the Jewish
population believing that Sabbatai was the Messiah (Rabow 2002:101)? Many have offered good reasons for
what happened: The then recent pogroms in Poland (1647) created a deeper longing for deliverance from
21)
cruel political subjugation. But the fact that Jews everywhere embraced Sabbatianism, from every social
class, even those of Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece), Amsterdam, and Leghorn (Livorno, Italy) where Jewish
communities were prosperous and where Jews enjoyed a measure of tolerance, is often overlooked (Dan
1987:292-294). And where persecution was greater, in Eastern Europe and Western Russia for example,
Jewry was not so enthralled with Sabbatianism in its initial declarations. Others have said that less educated
Jews had ignorantly fueled this fervor, yet the rabbis, the educated, and the leaders of Jewish communities
everywhere shared a mutual responsibility in leading the movement (Scholem 1973:478). Indeed, Nathan
had tapped into the Jewish collective unconscious with his prophecy, reaching in and touching deep spiritual
needs across all social classes and cultures.
 The most important reason for what happened, however, was the place prophecy held in the Jewish
imagination of the time. While most larger communities around the world had messianic pretenders from
time to time, prophecy was much more rare. The Mishnah states that prophecy can only come from Israel
(Scholem 1973:464). The Zohar was accepted as a sacred text because its assumed author, Rabbi Shimon bar
Yohai (c. 100-160 CE), a Tannic sage, had written it while he was in hiding from the Romans in Galilee (the
22)
Zohar, with the Tanakh and the Talmud, are the three sacred books in Judaism today). The Mishnah, a
collection of rabbinical pronouncements also known as the Oral Law, was compiled over several generations
(about 130 years) in Israel (c. 220 CE), with R. Yehudah ha-Nasi (d. 217) editing the final document. The
Talmud, the foundational text of rabbinical Judaism today, though composed outside of Israel in today s
23)
Iraq, focused on interpreting the Mishnah, called the Gemara (Aramaic for Study ), making it acceptable
as a sacred text.
 In the Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), only Ezekiel (c. 622-570 BCE) had prophesied outside of Israel as an exile
in Babylon, yet the Talmud declares that Ezekiel received his prophecies in Israel before he was taken into
24)
Exile.

There was nothing unusual in a person pretending to be a Messiah, but the claim to prophecy, coming
from the Holy Land, was a new experience for Jews. Because the Talmud states that there is no
prophecy but in the land of Israel, they tended to listen and believe. Nathan s message was expressed in
Lurianic, orthodox terms (Dan 2007:87).

In 1666, some Jerusalem rabbis signed a letter to Jewish communities in the Diaspora vouching for Nathan of
Gaza s prophetic dignity (Scholem 1973:244); (Dan 1987:289), and this of course gave him an aura of credi-
25)
bility. Nothing in Nathan s prophecies and teachings up until the apostasy had contradicted accepted
kabbalistic teachings from the Zohar or Lurianic Kabbalah, neither could any of Nathan s writings be consid-
ered heretical (Scholem 1973:298). I will sketch a few of Nathan s original ideas below.
 ZION: Sabbatianism 13

a. Origins of evil
 Lurianic Kabbalah, as it developed in the century before Nathan of Gaza, had grown into distinct schools,
each with a different vision of how evil originated (Scholem 1973:35). Hayyim Vital, the primary recorder of
Luria s teachings, showed some bias in resisting Luria s most radical teaching of evil as part of the Divine
(Scholem 1973:299-300). Israel Sarug (fl. 1590-1610), a pseudo follower but who was at times an accurate
portrayer of Luria s teachings based on manuscripts stolen from Vital, with Joseph Ibn T bul, gave a fuller
version of the otherness (sitra ahra) that appeared as Divine self-awareness emerged. While in the Zohar
evil is a servant to good, since all is of God, with the division between good and evil an illusion (Dan
1987:215), in Lurianic Kabbalah evil is a metaphysical reality̶the very reason the universe exists. Luria s
vision also differed fundamentally from earlier kabbalists: Humanity was not the reason for creation but
another realm where the combat between good and evil takes place; indeed humanity is merely another
mending agent (Dan 1987:266). From Luria Israel s task. . . was not to be a light to the nations, but, on the
contrary, to extract from them [the nations] the very last sparks of holiness and life (Scholem 1973:46):

The focus of the Kabbalistic theurgy is God, not man; the latter is given unimaginable powers, to be
used in order to repair the Divine glory or the Divine image; only his initiative can improve divinity. . . .
The theurgical Kabbalah articulates a basic feature of Jewish religion in general: because he concen-
trates more upon action than upon thought, the Jew is responsible for everything, including God, since
his activity is crucial for the welfare of the cosmos in general (Moshe Idel as quoted by Bloom 1992:105).

Otherness, from Luria s view, aroused the Divine to self-awareness. Why the presence of this otherness
and why it was troubling is a matter for conjecture. Prompted to action, the Creator began to plan and take
the necessary steps to deal with it. From a human perspective, the Divine chose to be responsible for who He
is and what He would become. Creation in the various stages that Luria articulated (constriction, catas-
trophe, and restoration) was the Divine s attempt to address this otherness, with purging before reincor-
poration the two primal goals. Since with the Divine thought immediately becomes reality̶a separate
reality with the potential of a separate personhood̶God has created evil and once created, evil does not go
gently into that goodnight.
 Freud also identified otherness as a normal psychic pattern: There are cases in which parts of a
person s. . . mental life̶his thought and feelings̶appear alien to him and as not belonging to his ego
(Freud 1930:13), with love having the power to purge the separateness (here Freud meant the erotic drive).
Can one assume that the Creator had this urge? Sexuality in Kabbalah is between Te’feret (male) and Shekh-
inah (female) and so one can assume love, in all its manifold meanings, is part of creation and the drive for
wholeness.
 Why had Hayyim Vital avoided this essential concept from the great master (Dan 1987:215)? One can
guess it was too radical a departure from normative sensibilities, for it not only implied a duality within the
Godhead but also a Creator that did not have complete control. Further, this otherness, having the poten-
tial to take full control, could result in a duality of rival but equal Divine personages, one Good and the other
Evil.
 For Luria the Ein-Sof first Contracted (Tzimtzum) to create an empty space, what the Zohar termed
 14

tehiru ( emptiness in Aramaic), a Divine workshop for self-healing and restoration. Here Freud remains the
great analyst even of the Divine when he said that a person falls in love so his or her spirit will not collapse
in on itself, a time when a person is never more defenseless (Freud 1930:13). As love is necessary for whole-
ness on a human level, the Divine, from Luria s expositions, also needs to create for wholeness (Bloom
1987:16).
 Without the tehiru (desolation), creation and human freewill could not exist, since it allowed for a place
outside the Divine, who is also known as Ha-Makom (The Place):

Creation out of nothing, from the void, could be nothing other than creation of the void, that is, of the
possibility of thinking of anything that was not God. Without such an act of self-limitation, after all, there
would be only God̶and obviously nothing else. A being that is not God could only become possible and
originate by virtue of such a contraction, such a paradoxical retreat of God into Himself. By positing a
negative factor in Himself, God liberates Creation (Gershom Scholem as quoted by Bloom 1987:214).

We see in Lurianic Kabbalah a divided Divine Personage, parts of whom after breaking apart had formed
separate entities and powers of their own̶indeed together these entities collectively challenged divinity s
intentions and personhood. Exile, the great theme of Kabbalah, reaches even into the higher realms. Luria
also called this Divine otherness the reshimu ( residue in Hebrew), itself sources of holy powers. All Luri-
anic schools agree with this fundamental concept. The debate is how the reshimu developed into the qelip-
poth (husks of evil) (Scholem 1973:33-35), a tougher resistance to the Divine will. I will touch briefly on the
more widely accepted concept.
 After the Tzimtzum, the Ein-Sof (Nothingness/Unknowable) projected the otherness into the tehiru,
(from the fi fth Sefirah Din or Gevurah). Was creation successful from a Divine perspective? Yes and No.
God succeeded in the first stage of creation: the Tzimtzum and the isolation of the reshimu. Now ready to
purge and to re-incorporate it in what the Divine had intended as a new partnership for wholeness, the Divine
completely misunderstood the reshimu s intentions, its refusal to participate. The heart of the Divine, then, is
not of violence toward the otherness, but healing for wholeness.
 Still, the Divine went ahead with creation without the reshimu. In order to channel light, as the Sefirot
unfolded in Space/Time (please see Appendix), the Divine created vessels or shells to both direct and to
26)
contain the Divine manifestation in the tehiru (Scholem 1973:33). Kabbalists are somewhat divided on
whether the vessels are also Divine̶most feel that these are created of somewhat courser light that gives
them shape, similar to Aristotle s formulations of form and matter (Dan 2007:75).
 The shattering of these vessels̶the primal catastrophe and the beginning of the creation̶occurred
both from the overwhelming force of Divine light and the resistance of the reshimu to taking part in creation
(Dan 1987:265). Luria called this the Shevirat ha-Helim (Breaking of the Vessels). The reshimu, which the
Divine naively intended to join in for healing and restoration, instead stole the show and took the sparks or
27)
particles of Divine light captive (Scholem 1991:77).
 I mentioned above that Kabbalah is essentially a myth of Exile. It could also be called a myth of the
Kidnapped. Other kabbalistic works̶the Zohar is one example̶offer a pristine beginning of primal
harmony. Not so with Lurianic Kabbalah: The primal beginnings only had disorder and confusion:
 ZION: Sabbatianism 15

Existence does not begin with a perfect Creator bringing into being an imperfect universe; rather, the
existence of the universe is the result of an inherent flaw or crisis within the infinite Godhead, and the
purpose of creation is to correct it (Dan 2007:75).

Nathan, in articulating the need for Sabbatai s appearance, concentrated on the moment of creation when the
Ein-Sof sent Divine light into the tehiru and taught that the Divine divided the light into two realms: The
thought-some light and the thought-less light. Nathan also gave the tehiru a new context (it was already a
hot bed of rebellion according to Luria): forces of otherness became violent toward the Divine s purpose of
creation, with the reshimu forming husks, qelippoth (the Zohar calls these bark ), a more insidious concen-
tration of resistance. Unfortunately thought-less light also crystalized with the qelippoth to become a more
menacing counter-force (Scholem 1973:300). Nothing went right for the Divine, who with every action or
innovation worsened the catastrophe.
 The thought-some light had a focused mission: to create life (and humanity) in the tehiru (Scholem
1973:301). After the contraction, and while the reshimu and qelippoth were forming, the thought-some light
first shot in a straight line into the void (Scholem 1973:300). The thought-less light, which Nathan called
golem, or unformed or undifferentiated light (Scholem 1973:301), was fundamentally disgruntled. The
creation in Lurianic Kabbalah is also a catastrophe, but Nathan shows creation as a great gamble, too, with
no certainty of a positive outcome. The streak of light entering the tehiru, then, brought both positive and
negative consequences, as it stirred up the primal soup as it were, creating life but also reinforcing resistance
to the Divine.

b. Struggling with leviathan

 The thought-some light accomplished its purposes only in the upper three Sefirot: Keter, Hokhmah, and
Binah (the Sefirot expressing Divine intentions and the implementation of creation)̶Luria had also said that
the Shevira (Breaking) occurred only in the lower seven Sefirot (Dan 1987:262)̶with creation springing
forth from Binah (Bloom 1987:9). But this light could not enter the lower seven Sefirot, which for Nathan
was an abyss, a vision of hell and so much darker than even Lurianic Kabbalah, which had been the darkest.
Here the Divine was withering away, with the qelippoth potentially infecting even the upper Sefirot. Where
will restoration come from? From humanity, which itself is in the tehiru?
 Nathan s metaphysics for the Messiah stressed that Lurianic Kabbalah s imperatives for Jews to follow
Mitzvot for Tikkun Olam applied only to the upper three Sefirot. Jews had no redemptive power among the
lower seven Sefirot: a nightmare vision that haunts the imagination (there is nothing like it in any other reli-
gious tradition). Nathan s vision of a self-consuming divinity showed that the Messiah, and only the Messiah,
could bring healing by destroying the qelippoth, reconfiguring the matrix that would dissolve the dark forces
and free the captive sparks. These freed sparks would automatically rejuvenate the Sefirot and heal the
universe (Dan 1987:292).
 For Nathan, Job (Job 41:1-34) symbolized the Messiah at war with Leviathan (sea monsters, symbols for
qelippoth), also mentioned in Isaiah 27:1: In that day the Lord with his sore and great and strong sword shall
punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that
is in the sea. Leviathan, an archaic force of darkness in the archaic beginning, opposed creation (Bloom
 16

1990:28-31) and must be destroyed before creation can take place: God breaks the heads of Leviathan in
pieces (Psalm 74:14). The Messiah, then, has to struggle against the Leviathan to free both the trapped
souls (from the fall of Adam) and the Divine sparks.
 In Zoharic Kabbalah the other side is also a parallel force, centered on the left side of the Sefirot (near
28)
the fi fth Sefirah Din or Gevurah), yet separate from the Ein-Sof (Dan 2007:51-54). In Nathan s Treatise on
Dragons (1665), however, the other side makes up fully one half of the Ein-Sof (Scholem 1973:300-303), a
radical departure from all other kabbalistic expositions, except classic Lurianism, since in principle the sitra
ahra is an equal Divine power. The thought-some light entering the primal abyss also severed the two
spheres: One good, the other Satanic.
 Kabbalah, from the Sefer ha-Bahir and Sefer ha-Zohar through Luria, presents a gnostic-oriented
mythology, though any direct influence from other gnostic myths has yet to be discovered (Scholem
1941:175-177; 260). Nathan certainly built on gnostic mythology (Scholem 1941:322f ). When evil is creative,
the balance is tipped toward a gnostic vision. In classic Gnosticism an evil, rival power created the universe,
so the true God was not only uninvolved but is now removed from creation, yet remains in the world only
deep in the human spirit (Jonas 1958:123-124).
 Gnostic tendencies also occur when subjective inner realities trump objective realities, when people hold
their inner truth as an absolute. With the Messiah s apostasy, Sabbatianism became subjectively and mysti-
cally gnostic: The new Torah (Atziluth) and the new kingdom (appearing only in the heart) had taken prece-
dence over all objective reality. Many early Sabbatians refused to deny this inner reality (Scholem 1941:306-
29)
307).

c. Cosmic cycles
 Nathan of Gaza, then, to capitalize on this inner awakening, needed to expound on why the inner reality
must remain inner and why the objective messianic kingdom had not materialized. Nathan had earlier said
that Sabbatai s sacrilegious actions (ma’asim zarim), his sacramental trampling of sacred, showed the new
age had come. What is the basis of this new age?
 Kabbalistic texts had earlier spoken of different ages spanning civilization and with each new age a
30)
different expression of the Torah was necessary. The Sefer ha-Temunah (Book of the Figure), attributed to
the Tannaim (compliers of the Mishnah) Rabbi Nehunya ben ha-Kanah and Rabbi Ishmael, is one such
example (Scholars believe a Spanish kabbalist wrote it around the time the Zohar was first published, c.
1280). Its focus is on Shemittot (cosmic cycles), where each of the seven lower (or emotional) Sefirot̶
Gevurah, Te’feret, Hesed, Hod, Yesod, Netzach, and Malkhut/Shekhinah are represented in seven ages, each
age consisting of seven thousand years. At the end of the complete cycle, the fi fty-thousandth year, the
Great Jubilee or Age of the Messiah will begin. Each Sefirah will then return to Binah (Wisdom), the
Cosmic Mother, from which the present creation came, when the task of both creation and universal restora-
tion is consummated (Scholem 1973:811-812).
 The letters and words of the Torah do not change with each Shemittah̶since these are the eternal words
the Creator created the world with̶but their combinations (sounds/numerical values) change with a
different focus in each age. Gevurah (Stern Judgment), according to the Temunah, is already the second age
(Hesed was the first age) and so the Gevurah s Torah focuses on commandments and prohibitions (Scholem
 ZION: Sabbatianism 17

1941:178-179).31) The Temunah states that a new age appears only after a cataclysm, now seen in the transi-
tion from the age of Gevurah to the age of Te’feret (Scholem 1973:814).
 Nathan, an astute student of kabbalistic writings, applied these cycles in his Treatise on the Menorah
(published by Scholem in 1944) to show that Sabbatai Tzvi had inaugurated a new age. Conversely, Nathan
believed the present Shemittah was Hesed (Mercy) not Gevurah (Judgment), with the Messiah (rather than a
catastrophe) inaugurating the new age of Gevurah; this fit Nathan s sense of Sabbatai s mission: Sabbatai
would redeem the qelippoth aligned with Gevurah. The staff of Moses is symbolic of the correctness and
rectitude of the then present age (Hesed), while the age of Gevurah, symbolized by the Holy Serpent, is
crooked and fluid. Moses staff at YHWH s command became a snake after he threw it down, which so fright-
ened Moses that he ran away (Exodus 4:3). For Nathan this passage revealed the transition from Hesed to
Gevurah. Sabbatai Tzvi, when signing letters and documents, sometimes drew a crooked snake symbol next
to his name (Scholem 1973:236).
 In conjunction with the Sefirotic ages are four levels of awareness: Atziluth (emanation), Beriah (creation),
32)
Yetzirah (formation), and Asiyah (action). Though these two teachings of the Shemittah and the four levels
of awareness are mutually exclusive systems, Nathan awkwardly combined them. Now that the age of Atzi-
luth is here, the previous Torah of Beriah no longer applied (Dan 2007:91); the Messiah now determines the
Torah (Scholem 1973:390). Sabbatians would internalize the new age of Atziluth as a central ethic in
succeeding generations.
 Nathan died in Skopje (Üsküb), Macedonia in 1680, three years before the Great Apostasy that created the
Dönmeh, which I will discuss below.

5. Sabbatianism forms

Mystical heresies have succeeded in all ages and have led to surprisingly similar ends: the overthrow of
dominant religious dogmas. Christianity is Judaism s mystical heresy, as Protestantism is Roman Catholi-
cism s. The Mormons, the Seventh Day Adventists, and the Jehovah Witnesses are mystical Protestant here-
sies. The Anabaptists and Quakers at their origins, though remaining uneasily in the Protestant fold, are
other venerable interpretations that wreaked havoc on normative religious sensibilities (Scholem 1941:301).
Shi ism is Islam s great mystical heresy. Sabbatianism by contrast had no universal evangel. Sabbatai s Eigh-
33)
teen Commandments forbade even the conversion of fellow Jews (Mazower 2004:73), the reason Sabba-
tianism has been passed down among families (Scholem 1978:305). Because Sabbatians wanted a new
Judaism, based on Jewish hereditary, they did not create a new religion.
 When Nathan of Gaza finessed the reasons why the Messiah s apostasy was necessary and why the new
age must be accepted by faith alone, he gave birth to Sabbatianism, as we know it today. First, Nathan
showed that the believers were in an intermediary stage (much as Christians and later Socialists). Ellen G.
White (1827-1915) similarly crafted the foundational teaching for what became the Seventh Day Adventist
Church after a failed prophecy. William Miller (1782-1849), using the book of Daniel s seventy weeks of
years, predicted that Jesus would return in 1843. When this did not happen, Miller recalculated the date and
34)
it fell on October 22, 1844 (Armstrong 2000:90-1). After October 23rd dawned Mrs. White wrote that Jesus
had entered the Holy of Holies in the Heavenly Temple (of which the earthly First and Second Temples in
Jerusalem were representations) to finish the atonement, suspending believers forever in this eternal
 18

moment just before redemption.

 Since redemption in Kabbalah takes place when the Shekhinah, the tenth Sefirah, rises in union with the
other nine Sefirot, Nathan taught that the Shekhinah, though lifted from the dust, remains in Exile. As in
other failed prophecies, its fulfillment hovered close, just out of reach, as the rainbow over the horizon, in a
35)
limbo between the times; in essence this was no different from the Exile.
 Second, the completion of Tikkun Olam rests with the work of the Messiah and those with faith in him.
Since the Messiah s soul originated from the qelippoth (Scholem 1973:302), only he experiences hell in its
fullest sense to redeem the world. While Christianity s Nicene Creed (325 CE) proclaims Jesus Christ as the
same substance as the Divine, as true God from true God (Rubenstein 1999:82), Sabbatai had the more
arduous task of transforming himself from the lowest, basest substance to the highest substance of light: the
divinity of the Ein-Sof (Scholem 1973:307).
 Third, and again building on Lurianic Kabbalah, where the holy sparks once lifted no longer give life to
evil, Nathan wrote in Treatise on Dragons before the apostasy that the good works of Jewry for redemption
were blocked by the heel of evil, which the Messiah must vaporize by descending into it. Nathan continued
to elaborate on this theme: Though the Messiah s apostasy appears to increase evil, goodness, by
becoming evil, implodes evil. Like termites infesting a tree, the tree (the nations, Islam, and Christianity)
only appears healthy (Scholem 1973:741-743).
 Finally, Sabbatians, thanks to Nathan and others, drew from Israel s sacred narrative to affirm that the
Messiah s apostasy was a biblical hypocrisy (Scholem 1973:804). Faced with a dilemma in Egypt when the
Pharaoh asked who the beautiful woman with him was, Abraham said that Sarah (his wife) was really his
sister (technically she was his half-sister), yet Abraham s duplicity furthered the Divine s purposes (Genesis
20:2). Moses had grown up in Pharaoh s court as an Egyptian prince (Exodus 2:1-10), hiding his true identity
until he killed an Egyptian beating a Hebrew (Exodus 2:11-12), later to lead the exodus from slavery. Like-
wise, Queen Esther (Hadassah in Hebrew) hid her Jewish identity until her uncle, Mordecai, urged her to
reveal herself to King Ahasuerus (her husband) to save her people. Esther agreed, asserting: If I perish, I
perish (Esther 4:16). And as Christians before him, Nathan appropriated Isaiah 53:4, the poem of the
suffering servant, to refer to Sabbatai: Yet it was our sickness that he was bearing, our suffering that he
endured. We accounted him plagued, smitten and afflicted by God.
 Redemption in prison or in Exile (among the qelippoth) was another Sabbatian theme: For thirteen years
Joseph suffered, first as Potiphar s slave and later in Pharaoh s dungeon from a false accusation (Genesis 40,
41), to save the fledgling nation of Israel. Samson, living in the Philistine s Temple as a slave after he was
blinded, pulled the Temple down on himself and everyone (Judges 16:28-30) to destroy evil from within. King
David, fleeing for his life from King Saul, went to Gath (Philistine) to seek asylum from King Achish (1
Samuel 21:1-22:4). Afraid King Achish would kill him, David feigned mental illness by making marks on the
doors of the gates and letting saliva run down his beard. Altogether, David may have spent fi fteen years as a
fugitive. Was David any less a Jew for seeking asylum and feigning insanity? Did not King David further
Divine purposes by this hypocrisy? An angel protected Daniel (Daniel 6) after King Darius jealous adminis-
trators had him thrown into a lion s den. Daniel remained pure though immersed in evil. Each of these
heroes redeemed sparks by descending into the realms of qelippoth.
 ZION: Sabbatianism 19

a. The sacred wounded

 Some did follow Sabbatai Tzvi in converting to the religion of mainstream culture, to Islam and Christi-
anity, forming the Dönmeh and the Frankists respectively (I will discuss both in more detail below) to
enter the paradox of destroying evil from within, as Jacob Frank articulated:

But there were more radical possibilities to be explored [than just taking the cloak of evil]: only the
complete transformation of good into evil would exhaust the full potential of the latter and thereby
explode it, as it were, from within. This dialectical liquidation of evil requires not only the disguise of
good in the form of evil but total identification with it (Jacob Frank as quoted by Scholem 1973:801).

The Marranos (forced converts to Christianity on the Iberian Peninsula) gave Sabbatianism its ethical and
spiritual force. Also called Christianos Nuevos (New Christians) and crypto-Jews, in 1391 alone about two
hundred thousand saved themselves by converting to Roman Catholicism. On March 31, 1492 the Catholic
monarchs Isabella I of Castile (1451-1504) and Ferdinand II of Aragon (1452-1516) announced the Alhambra
Decree (the Edict of Expulsions) for all of Jewish descent̶even many who had converted to Christianity
st
(Mazover 2004:67)̶to leave the Iberian Peninsula and all their territories by July 31 of the same year.
Scholars disagree on how many were expelled: from one hundred thirty thousand to seven hundred thou-
sand (Silberman 1997:109-110).
 The exiled Marranos scattered among the communities of Amsterdam, Leghorn, and the Ottoman Empire
suffered the stigma of betrayal. Some synagogues worked out procedures to return them to the Jewish fold
(Silberman 1998:147). Abraham Miguel Cardozo (c. 1626-1706), a Marrano who converted back to Judaism,
became the second great theologian of Sabbatianism after Nathan of Gaza. Since Sabbatianism had
proclaimed conversion a sacred act to destroy evil from within, many who became radicals were of Marrano
descent.
 Though enigmatic for us today, this ethic was transformative for vast numbers of Jews (and not only the
Marranos) who lived separate existences from the mainstream cultures in isolated communities. It answered
a deep yearning for ways to be authentic and aligned with their traditions in the dual roles many were forced
into. Having the appearance of evil, while remaining Jewish within, spoke to Jews who at times were forced
to hide their true identity for self-preservation. The Sabbatian messianic secret, then, is that the Messiah by
suffering the outward humiliation and scorn for his apostasy performed the ultimate Tikkun Olam. Taking
the appearance of evil became a central ethic of radical Sabbatianism.
 Sabbatianism rattled Judaism to its foundations, for it began the questioning of the structure and nature of
Judaism itself. What had been absolute in Jewish life, for lack of any alternative, suddenly became open to
scrutiny (Scholem 1941:320). On a more positive note, Sabbatianism showed new possibilities: One can
descend in order to ascend and the ascension can take many forms. Normative Judaism responded by
branding Sabbatians as amoral renegades and traitors. The term Sabbatian from the eighteenth-century
was synonymous with libertine, anarchist, revolutionary, and nihilist (Scholem 1941:301).
 Groups against the grain, which struggle against coercion to preserve spiritual autonomy, wreak havoc on
mainstream values. The dominant religion s inclination has been to destroy them, as the Roman Catholic
Church did to the Cathars (or Albigensians) of Southern France when it slaughtered tens of thousands of
 20

them from 1209 to 1229 (Rubenstein 2003:156).36) Surprisingly, dissident groups tend to nurture a climate for
the secularization of religious values (Scholem 1941:299; 301; 304). Why this is so is open to debate, but by
challenging the dominant view s absoluteness, dissident groups can lay the groundwork for alternative ways
of looking at life.
 The German Reformation under Martin Luther (1517), and later piety movements that grew from it, even-
tually evolved into the nineteenth-century s secular and aesthetic Romantic Movement (Berlin 1999:145-
146). The Calvinist Reformation kindled the Enlightenment (Fukuyama 1992:194-195)̶if only because the
masses had grown weary of conflict over unseen metaphysics̶the greatest liberalizing movement of
37)
Western civilization. Later Sabbatians, nurtured by a fierce antinomianism, would become leaders of move-
ments for secular emancipation (Scholem 1941:299-304).

6. Sabbatianism s legacy

Sabbatianism began a change that continued for centuries within the religious life of Judaism. While scholars
have identified at least a score of different Sabbatian groups, Sabbatianism is generally divided between
moderates who did not believe in Sabbatai Tzvi s divinity (Scholem 1973:835) and radicals who did (Scholem
1971:124). The moderates tended to stay within the Jewish fold while the radicals tended to separate, with
some apostatizing. All Sabbatians shared a few fundamental beliefs (Scholem 1971:126):

1) The Messiah s apostasy began the work to break apart the qelippoth and to raise the Shekhinah.
2)  Believers must shield their true identity to outsiders: falsehood, hypocrisy, and two-facedness
were sacred duties.
3) The Torah of Beriah must be violated in order to realize the Torah of Atziluth̶this Torah has yet to
unfold (both moderates and radicals created ceremonies to ritually violate the Torah, with some
violations as simple as eating a piece of fruit on Tu B Av, the day of fasting and mourning the
38)
destruction of the First and Second Temples).
4) The Godhead, for radical Sabbatians, will be realized in three separate incarnations.
5) The First Cause (the philosopher s God) and the God of Israel (the God of Religion) are different
deities (below I will mention how Jacob Frank applied this to himself).
6) Traditional Judaism, led by rabbis, unwittingly maintains the age of Beriah.

Sabbatianism indeed offers profound insight into group psychology: it demythologizes a homogeneous past
while it more accurately reflects the collective trauma and aspirations of Jewish experience. As Freud wrote
in Mass Psychology (1922), groups in ideological or metaphysical opposition to mainstream sensibilities
allowed people to act on antinomian impulses that gave them a feeling of power and security, since the
group̶not the individual̶is ultimately responsible. Freud quoted Gustave Le Bon s (1841-1931) The
Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895):

The first is that the individual forming part of a group acquires, solely from numerical considerations, a
sentiment of invincible power which allows him to yield to instincts which, had he been alone, he would
perforce have kept under restraint. He will be the less disposed to check himself from the consideration
 ZION: Sabbatianism 21

that, a group being anonymous, and in consequence irresponsible, the sentiment of responsibility which
always controls individuals disappears entirely (Gustave Le Bon as quoted by Freud 1921:22).

Group psychologies, perhaps unsurprisingly, are often psychosexual, as I discussed briefly above when
Sabbatai Tzvi, after announcing his Messiahship, ate heleb as he recited the profane blessing: Blessed art
thou, O Lord, who permitted that which is forbidden. Scholem understood, however, that Sabbatianism,
though a release from sexual divisions and repression, sprang from deeper recesses:

Feelings such as these formed the psychological background for the great nihilistic conflagration that
was to break out in the radical wing of the Sabbatian Movement. The fires were fed by powerful reli-
gious emotion, but in the crucial moment these were to join forces with passions of an entirely different
sort, namely, with the instinct of anarchy and lawlessness that lie deeply buried in every human soul.
Traditionally Judaism had always sought to suppress such impulses, but now that they were allowed to
emerge in the revolutionary exhilaration brought on by the experience of redemption and its freedom,
they burst forth more violently than ever (Scholem 1971:109).

a. The Dönmeh
 In 1683, some seven years after Sabbatai Tzvi s death, up to three hundred Sabbatian families converted to
Islam (Scholem 1971:147). They considered apostasy a sacred calling and saw themselves as a new elite
force to deliver the death knell to the qelippoth. Sabbatai Tzvi had sporadically encouraged some of his
followers to convert, since it pleased the Sultan to have Jewish converts to Islam (Scholem 1973:847), and
even a few Goyim (People of the Nations) may have joined the Sabbatian movement (Scholem 1973:832). But
conversion to Islam had never been en mass. Soon Salonika became its center.
 They called themselves the Ma’aminim (the Faithful or Believers), but the Turkish authorities named the
group the Dönmeh, meaning to turn or to convert, to distinguish them from the Dhimmi, People of
the Book̶Jews and Christians̶who though protected paid special taxes (jizya) under Islamic Law. The
authorities at first were pleased with the mass conversion and hoped the entire Jewish population would
follow and gave special grants of land, with at least one Sabbatian synagogue/mosque in Thessaloniki
remaining today (Mazower 2004:76). Yet, as the authorities soon realized, these converts had no intention of
mingling with Muslims or of practicing Islam (though they publicly presented themselves as Muslims): They
married only among themselves, kept in close contact with other Jewish communities, and secretly practiced
their version of Sabbatian Judaism, though some Dönmeh groups did forge links with Islamic Sufi groups
(Mazower 2004:74).
 In about 1700 the Dönmeh split into three groups after Baruchya Russo (Osman Baba), who declared
himself a reincarnation of Sabbatai Tzvi, attempted to assume leadership; these became the most radical of
the Dönmeh (Maciejko 2011:14). The Jakubi who broke with Baruchya (d. 1721) claimed loyalty to Jacob
Querido (c. 1650-1690), a leader of the mass apostasy of 1683 and also a claimant of Sabbatai s reincarnated
soul (Maciejko 2011:13). A third group, which identified themselves as the Papulars (Old Ones), also
39)
known as the Karakash, among other names, considered themselves followers of Sabbatai Tzvi alone.
The Papulars were made up mostly of craftsmen while the Jakubi were professionals and officials (the Jakubi
 22

have left the greatest number of documents). All three Dönmeh groups would eventually contribute to the
modernization of Turkey (Scholem 1971:159), among the ranks of what historians term The Young Turks
(1906-1908)̶officially known as Committee of Union and Progress̶to create a constitutional monarchy in
a secular Turkish state, realized when Mustafa Kemal Atatürk (1881-1938) became the first president of
Turkey (1923-1938). Nazim Bey (1870-1926), Mehmet Cavit Bey (1875-1926), and Munis Tekinalp (1883-
1961) are a few of the more famous Dönmeh. Astonishingly, remnants of the Dönmeh continue today
(Scholem 1971:166).
 All Sabbatians from their origins had been accused of ritualized sexual license, of sacred fornication and
holy wife swapping, with the Dönmeh as special targets of these accusations. Similar accusations have often
been unjustifiably leveled against almost all sectarian religious groups throughout history. But there is ample
evidence to show that Sabbatians practiced theurgical sexual rituals (Scholem 1971:162), practices that
deeply offended normative Jews, the reason for the collective effort over generations to isolate the Dönmeh
and other Sabbatian radicals, to destroy their literature whenever possible, and to minimize how widespread
40)
the movement had been.
 Sexual theurgies ( theurgy meaning human efforts to direct Divine purposes) within a group s religious
dynamic repel even as they attract, since they tap into some kind of collective unconscious: Ancient tribal life
was universally sexually theurgical, as sexual forces spilled forth to create religious meaning. The young
men of the tribe, Freud theorized of past tribal life, murdered the aging ancestor because he kept all the
young women to himself; they then cannibalized him and deified him to assuage guilt, the primal forces for
religious meaning and ceremonial rites (Freud 1918:121-123). Further, in many religious traditions, sexuality
on the edge is sanctified through mythological orientations, as Eliade Mircea (1907-1986) has shown in
Hinduism, when it served Divine purposes (Eliade 1957:170-172).
 Sexual prohibitions in the Torah, radicals believed, had become positive commandments̶one must violate
the prohibitions to establish the age of Atziluth̶and they found biblical support in obscure passages. The
Prophet Elisha (c. ninth-century BCE), in his visit to the childless woman of Shunem (2 Kings 4:8-17), had
sanctified intercourse with her (though the narrative leaves this unspoken) in order for her to have a child,
since her husband was too old to perform the service. Samson (c. 1118-1078 BCE), also a Sabbatian hero,
had opened the door to transgressive sexuality as part of extraordinary religious achievements, a path that
would become central in Sabbatianism (Idel 2005:145). The law of the Red Heifer (Numbers 19) teaches that
one becomes unclean when in contact with the dead and so must offer a red heifer for slaughter and
burning. The priest who sprinkles water dipped in cedar wood, hyssop, and wool dyed scarlet also becomes
unclean (interpreted both as Sabbatai s apostasy and sexual violations by Sabbatians) as he makes the
worshiper clean. Likewise Sabbatai and Sabbatians, the clean, became unclean (in apostasy and viola-
tions) in order to make everyone clean.
 Abraham Cardozo showed how David s ancestors transgressed sexual restrictions to create the Davidic
line, in a theurgical trampling of sacred taboos for Divine purposes: Lot s incest with his daughters (Genesis
19:30-38) produced Moab and Ammon, Israel s perpetual enemies that served Divine purposes; Judah s
sexual relations with his daughter-in-law Tamar (from Tamar s seduction) whom he thought was a prostitute
(Genesis 38:1-30) (Tamar, after her two husbands died, was entitled by law to Judah s younger son, whom
Judah had refused to grant); Tamar entered the Blessing to become an ancestor of King David; Ruth the
 ZION: Sabbatianism 23

Moabite who uncovered Boaz feet (Ruth 3:7), a euphemism for sexual intercourse, is King David s great-
grandmother; King David s lust for the Hittite Bathsheba resulted in a union that produced King Solomon (2
Samuel 11:1-4). Cardozo expounded on a new vision of the sacred, where all prohibitions̶including the
eating of pork̶would be abolished (Scholem 1973:818). Indeed, he said that to unveil the age of the
Messiah (Atziluth), every Jew must become a Marrano (Bielik-Robson 2014:33).

b. The Frankists
 Finally, Jacob ben Judah Leib (1726-1791), who later changed his surname to Frank, brought renewal
within Sabbatianism that destroyed it from within. Infamous today as Judaism s most nihilistic vitalist ever,
even more extreme than the writer of Qoheleth (the book of Ecclesiastes), Frank followed the Dönmeh s
Baruchya Russo branch and declared himself a third reincarnation of Sabbatai Tzvi (after Baruchya), the
incarnation to finish the work that Sabbatai had begun. Affirming classic Sabbatianism that to violate the
Torah is to honor it, Frank expanded Sabbatian sexual rituals to include his twelve concubines who repre-
sented the twelve tribes of Israel. Today Frankists are known for their orgies but in reality these were
customs of hospitality that Sabbatians had practiced in some form for almost a hundred years before the
Frankist sect arose in which the husband, host, or father offers his wife or adult daughters to guests
(Maciejko 2011:38), based on ancient biblical precedents (Genesis 19:7-8; Judges 19:22-30).
 Scholem called Frank a the most hideous and uncanny figure in the whole history of Jewish
Messianism. . . [whose] words exercise a considerable though sinister fascination (Scholem 1941:308).
Does this fascination redeem something of the hideous and uncanny figure? Frankists were involved in a
41)
blood libel against Polish Jewry (Maciejko 2011:107-109), the reason Frank has never been forgiven
(Frankists were forced to seek Christian protection). Yet, to be fair, Frank had only led a reform movement
within Sabbatianism and merely built on radical beliefs and practices that had been in place for over two
generations. History more easily blames one person to avoid the uncomfortable complexity inherent in
collective responsibility.
 Strangely, Frank s brand of Sabbatianism linked sexual libertinism with asceticism (Frankists often flogged
themselves in repentance). Frank, who had earlier converted to Islam (Maciejko 2011:88), also converted to
42)
Polish Roman Catholic Christianity with his more than three thousand followers (Maciejko 2011:129-131).
But as the Dönmeh had done before him, Frank forbade his followers from intermarrying with those not of
Jewish descent or even from associating with them, and successfully advocated for the group to retain its
43)
Jewish identity (Scholem 1971:130-131).
 A Frankist prayer from Podolia, Poland from the mid-seventeenth century, recorded by Jacob Emden
(1697-1776), Sabbatianism s great antagonist, shows the Frankist connection with Baruchya in its use of
Senor Santo (from Judeo-Spanish) for Sabbatai Tzvi:

May it be Thy will that we prosper in Thy Torah and cling to Thy commandments, and mayst Thou
purify my thoughts to worship Thee in truth. . . and may all our deeds in the Torah of atziluth [meaning:
transgressions!] be only for the sake of Thy great name, O Senor Santo, that we may recognize Thy
greatness, for Thou art the true God and King of the universe, our living Messiah who wast in this
earthly world and didst nullify the Torah of beriah and didst reascend to Thy place to conduct all the
 24

worlds (Sefer Shimmush, 7a by Jacob Emden as quoted by Scholem 1971:124).

Frank s theology, though not as rich as Nathan of Gaza or Abraham Cardozo s, still retains a pungent authen-
ticity. His original work, The Words of the Lord (c. 1790), consisting mostly of autobiographical musings,
perhaps originally published in Polish (Lenowitz 2004:xi), is singularly vivid and razor sharp. Based on the
Hebrew Bible with his own earthy spins, the work was composed by a person living on a mythological
44)
level. Though Frank was a renegade, since his context is well-known, he was also a gifted storyteller and
an imaginative and original myth-maker; his writing if taken on its own (if one expunges the gnostic and
heretical declarations) is similar to the Hasidic stories and midrashim (interpretations) of one hundred
years later.
 Frank, in contrast to his Sabbatian predecessors, turned away from Kabbalah and its terminology
(Maciejko 2011:81-82) and constructed a purely gnostic myth (Scholem 1971:129): The Good or Living God
did not create this world, but is hidden from all humanity, with only the believers truly knowing Him
(Frank 1790:177). The universe, created by an Evil Power, which Frank identified as feminine (as did the
Sefer ha-Bahir) (Dan 1987:139), is visible in the Rules of the World (Frank also called them the Rulers of
this World). These must be violated in order to annihilate them. In fact, all laws, both civil and religious,
serve the Rulers; these include the Laws of Moses:

Wherever Adam trod, a city was built, but wherever I set foot, all will be destroyed, for I came into this
world to destroy and to annihilate. But what I build will last forever. . . . This much I tell you: Christ, as
you know, said that he had come to redeem the world from the hands of the devil. . . but I have come to
redeem it from all the laws and customs that ever existed. It is my task to annihilate all this so the Good
God can reveal himself (Frank 1790:337).

The Polish Catholic Church, growing suspicious of Frank after followers in apostasy confessed they believed
Frank (not Jesus Christ) was the Divine incarnation (Maciejko 2011:164-65), arrested him on February 6,
1760 and after lengthy interrogations exiled him to a castle fortress in Cz㶝stochowa, Poland where he lived
for thirteen years (Lenowitz 2004:iv). But the movement continued to grow, with Frankists later engaging in
religious rites of a typical sexual orgiastic nature inside the fortress (Scholem 1978:302). After his release
Frank moved to Brünn, Moravia (1773-1789), and then to Offenbach where, supported by wealthy patrons,
he continued to hold court in regal splendor until his death in 1791. One of Frank s more acrid statements
sums up his brand of Sabbatianism, an articulation that inverts all reference points in its lunge for the
destruction of the corrupt present age:

I did not come into this world to lift you but rather to cast you down to the bottom of the abyss. Further
than this it is impossible to descend, nor can one ascend again by virtue of one s own strength, for only
the Lord can raise one up from the depths by the power of his hand (Jacob Frank as quoted by Scholem
1971:130).

Sexual theurgies broaden sanctified sexuality and these are not always male dominated. Frank, who said his
 ZION: Sabbatianism 25

purpose was to make in the flesh everything that has been in spirit (Maciejko 2011:179), predicted the
arrival of a female Messiah, an incarnation of the Shekhinah, the tenth Sefirah, whom he called the Virgin.
Frank probably referred to his daughter, Eve (Rachel) Frank (1754-1817). A Cult of Eve evolved after
Frank s death, which involved an erotic liturgy with her at its center (Maciejko 2011:178-179; Levine
2003:124). The Virgin will give birth to the next Messiah and with Frank (the God of Israel) and Sabbatai
45)
Tzvi (the First Cause) will form a new Holy Trinity. We find a consistent internal logic in all Sabbatianism,
of audacious violations (strange acts) that lead to personal and universal redemption:

The annihilation of every religion and positive religion and positive system of belief̶this was the true
way the believers were expected to follow. . . . The descent into the abyss requires not only the rejec-
tion of all religions and conventions, but also the commission of strange acts, and this in turn demands
the voluntary abasement of one s own sense of self, so that libertinism and the achievement of that state
of utter shamelessness which leads to a tikkun of the soul are one and the same thing (Gershom
Scholem as quoted by Bloom 1987:211).

The Frankists, and indeed all other radical Sabbatians, modified their extremism by the nineteenth-century.
The sexual rites, with the hope of the age of Atziluth s appearance, began to whither away. For the loyal
Frankists faith rather than strange acts became the prime ethic. Frankists in particular and Sabbatians in
general became people of high moral caliber and sincere faith (Scholem 1978:308). Made up to a surprising
degree of lawyers and writers, Frankists became leaders of secularism, reform movements, and assimilation,
elevating the yearning for reform within Judaism to create a less hierarchical, more democratic, religious
structure. This led not only to Reform Judaism (Judaism s most liberal branch) but also to the secular liberal
Jew, the consummate modern person (Scholem 1971:140).
 Historians even today have trouble tracing Sabbatian ancestry: Sabbatians hid their identities even as
normative Judaism destroyed their history and literature. Yet Sabbatians have been discovered as leaders of
the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) in Hungary and Moravia (Scholem 1941:301), with Aaron Chorin
(1766-1744) and Leopold Loew (1811-1875) as early pioneers of religious reform (Scholem 1941:301-304).
46)
Shockingly, Jonathan Eybeschutz (1690-1764), a chief rabbi of Prague, was a secret Sabbatian. Other
notable Sabbatian descendants: Moses Dobruschka (1753-1794), an activist in the French Revolution,
Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld (1758-1820), co-founder with Dobruschka of the Society of Freemasons, the
piano virtuoso Marianna Agata Wołowska (1789-1831), U.S Supreme Court Justices Louis Brandeis (1856-
1941) and Felix Frankfurter (1882-1965), and the former French President Nicolas Sarkozy (2007-2012).
 The Dönmeh, beginning with the modernization of Turkish society from the early twentieth-century,
began to spiral into oblivion (Mazower 2004:74-76). Already in the nineteenth-century the Dönmeh began to
lose their Hebrew language abilities and switched the language of worship and songs to Judeo-Spanish
(which they spoke at home) and finally in the twentieth-century to Turkish written in a Hebrew script
(Scholem 1971:161-162). Yet the Dönmeh have not died out completely.

7. Conclusion

The desire to destroy, declared Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876), is also a creative desire. Today we view
 26

Sabbatianism from the prism of twentieth-century hedonistic movements, of amoral self-gratification, where
all excess for its own sake is the goal̶decadence for decadence s sake. Sabbatians were not like that. While
I have identified Jacob Frank as a nihilistic vitalist, Sabbatian nihilism was only toward this present world:
to break apart the illusions that religious and civil authorities maintained. Weary of all mystical teachings that
suspended people in a vacuum, whether in Exile or with a hovering Shekhinah that falls short of redemp-
tion, Sabbatianism s sacred violations were for peeling away the age that was already passed. The new age of
Atziluth is already here and would automatically gush forth in all its glory and fullness through strange
acts. Purity, a concept created in the age of Beriah, also had to be ruined.
 Franz Kafka, the great artist of Kabbalah in a secular age, showed that social inertia and myopic personal
expectations blur the realization that Paradise (the age of Atziluth) is the present world̶Atziluth had never
left but is only dimmed by the human mind, reflecting Friedrich Nietzsche s (1844-1900) aphorism that
47)
people can really only see themselves:

The expulsion from Paradise is in its main significance eternal: Consequently the expulsion from Para-
dise is final, and life in this world irrevocable, but the eternal occurrence (or, temporally expressed, the
eternal recapitulation of the occurrence) makes it nevertheless possible that not only could we live
continuously in Paradise, but that we are continuously there in actual fact, no matter whether we know it
here or not (Kafka 1954:31)

If the present world is Paradise, was Nathan of Gaza right about Sabbatai s Messiahship but wrong about
how the messianic age would emerge? Gershom Scholem splendidly taught that the Jewishness in the religi-
osity of any particular period is not measured by dogmatic criteria. . . but solely by what sincere Jews do, in
fact, believe (Gershom Scholem quoted by Bloom 1987:210). Sincerity, as a measure of spiritual or reli-
gious impulses, can include a great deal. The Jews who became Sabbatians could not choose to be born
among a persecuted minority, but they did choose to suffer a double-sigma of being considered heretics by
their own community̶since for them this was the way to universal salvation.
 Unlike twentieth-century revolutions̶the Russian, the Chinese, the Cuban, among so many others̶that
had goals to rid the world of social pollution only to sputter out, Sabbatianism s first goal was the redemption
of the Divine in pushing ahead the time-line for universal redemption, to enter the pollution to break it apart.
When universal redemption tarried, the bitter disappointment could not help but close up the heavens for
most of them. Yet, as all other revolutions, one wonders: Was it possible for the people of this time to usher in
a new age of universal harmony?
 Haim Hazaz (1898-1973) play In The End of Days sums up the Sabbatian vision: We will bury ourselves, a
burial of the dead, in license, in promiscuity and raw instinct, in order to arise from the void and chaos of this
world like the sleepers of the dust who are destined to be resurrected, pure and clean and seven times more
alive.

Notes
1) Muhammad s universal vision also elevated the status of women, as religious reform movements tend to do̶this
includes Sabbatianism̶with the Medina Constitution giving women some basic rights (Armstrong 1993:157-158).
 ZION: Sabbatianism 27

2)  Muhammad is not the father of any of your men, but (he is) the Messenger of Allah, and the Seal of the Prophets:
and Allah has full knowledge of all things.
3) Maimonides (Moshe ben Maimon̶c. 1135-1204) in his Commentary on the Mishnah (1173/4), Sanhedrin 10:1:
The Messianic age is when the Jews will regain their independence and all return to the land of Israel. The Messiah
will be a very great king, he will achieve great fame, and his reputation among the gentile nations will be even greater
than that of King Solomon. Nothing will change in the Messianic age, however, except that Jews will regain their inde-
pendence. Rich and poor, strong and weak, will still exist. However it will be very easy for people to make a living, and
with very little effort they will be able to accomplish very much. . . . it will be a time when the number of wise men will
increase. . . . war shall not exist, and nation shall no longer lift up sword against nation. . . . The Messiah, a righteous
and honest king, outstanding in wisdom, and close to God, will rule it. . . . All nations will return to the true religion
and will no longer steal or oppress. . . . Our sages and prophets did not long for the Messianic age in order that they
might rule the world and dominate the gentiles, the only thing they wanted was to be free for Jews to involve them-
selves with the Torah and its wisdom.
4) Cf, Zion vol. III p. 228, (Nathan of Gaza, 1667) quoted in Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, p.
314: For if he were not the Redeemer, these deviations would not occur to him; when God lets His light shine over
him, he commits many acts which are strange and wonderful in the eyes of the world, and that is proof of his truth.
5) Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism (1993:107), offers some evidence that Sabbatai Tzvi
wrote the treatise Raza de-Meheimanuta (Mystery of the True Faith), though it is more likely that the work was
written by Miguel Abraham Cardozo (1626-1706), an earlier follower of Sabbatai Tzvi and the movement s principal
theologian after Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatai may have written another work, Mystery of the Godhead, or he may have
communicated it to someone who wrote it. This work contains what may have been Sabbatai Tzvi s central insight that
Te’feret should be the focus of religious devotion.
6) The High Priest during the First and Second Temple periods spoke the Tetragrammaton only once a year when he
went into the Holy of Holies on the Day of Atonement. Today, the consonants are written as YHWH.
7) Nathan was reputed to be able to identify a person s soul root, as Isaac Luria had done, and to prescribe a special
practice or chant for the Tikkun (Healing) the soul required (Scholem 1978:249).
8) Sabbatai Tzvi had been fascinated with Jesus of Nazareth (c. 4 BCE-30 CE), Simon Bar Kochba (d. 135 CE), and
David Alroy (fl. 1160), the latter he imitated, wearing green as did Alroy, whose name may mean the inspired one as
he led his followers in Bagdad (Scholem 1973:241). Though the Talmud tells of the terrible punishment that Jesus of
Nazareth was bound to receive for leading people astray (Be’Iquoth Mashiach, p. 43), Nathan of Gaza expounded that
the Messiah (Sabbatai) can save anyone, even Jesus of Nazareth, whom Jews considered the messianic qelippoth
(Scholem 1973:284-285). Jews of the time saw Christianity, from the generations of persecution, as the great evil in
the world. The Talmud mentions the grim punishment that Jesus faced because he sought to entice Israel and lead it
astray. But Sabbatai saw Jesus root as coming from absolute evil and out of this evil, good would grow, as Nathan of
Gaza wrote: And finally he [that is, the messiah] will restore [to holiness] his qelippah which is Jesus Christ
(Gershom 1973:285).
9) Leyb b. Ozer collected his descriptions, as quoted by Gershom Scholem, from travelers. Another interesting
witness in the Ottoman Empire was French Catholic diplomat Chevalier De la Croix, who lived in Constantinople at
the time. He also took a keen interest in the events and recorded them as they unfolded in his Mémoire (1684), where
he summarized the extraordinary enthusiasm of a letter from a believer (1684:290-292). Scholem borrowed heavily
from Chevalier De la Croix to reconstruct Sabbatianism s early history.
10) Saint Paul s preaching of freedom from the Law led to such sexual exuberance that Paul finally had to deal with it
(I Corinthians 5:1). A later school of Paul also declared: To the pure, all things are pure (Titus 1:15). In 1164 an
Ismaili messianic group in Persia arose (Scholem 1971:164): Shiite Islam, it claimed, was but a shell covering the
kernel of truth that emerged only by breaking its prohibitions through sacramental violation. Hassan II (reigning
 28

from 1164-68) proclaimed that the age of the Qiyamah (Resurrection) had arrived and commanded continual feasting
and rejoicing (implying sexual liberation), with no fasting, since the Hidden Imam had now become visible and all the
law of the Shari’ah was void (Peters 2003:143-145).
11) It is doubtful that Sabbatai engaged in sexual rituals to prove his point before his apostasy, although there is some
evidence that he began ritual sexual transgressions while in confinement on Gallipoli. The Turkish authorities,
however, seem to have built a case against Sabbatai for this after his apostasy. Certainly Nathan of Gaza, as a devout
Jew, would not have been open to sexual experimentation, if even to destroy the age of Beriah, yet Nathan promoted
the idea that all prohibitions had been cancelled out, which included all sexual prohibitions.
12) The Sefer Yetzirah (Book of Formation) is one of the most ancient mystical texts (apart from the Bible). Scholars
have called this work gnostic-leaning because of its focus on inner enlightenment. Parts of it, according to some
analyses, are in the same style as the Mishnah, and so some date it to the second-century CE. It is also the first known
work to mention the Sefirot: Ten Sefirot of nothingness, ten and not nine, ten and not eleven.
13) Harold Bloom, Omens of Millennium (1996) p. 212: Everything in Luria s thought moves in great triple rhythm.
God contracts or withdraws himself; this absence brings about the cosmological catastrophe that Luria called the
breaking of the vessels ; human prayer, study, and ecstatic contemplation bring about a mending that yet may restore
a shattered world.
14) Israel Sarug (fl. 1590-1610), posing as a student of Luria (which he had not been), also disseminated Luria s teach-
ings among the Jewish world from Vital s stolen manuscripts, with his own interpretations (Scholem 1973:25-26). Yet
Sarug was a gifted interpreter of Lurianic Kabbalah.
15) Laurence Fine (2003), Physician of the Soul, Healer of the Cosmos: Isaac Luria and His Kabbalistic Fellowship, pp.
80-81: Vital provides us with the names of thirty-eight individuals who according to him made up Luria s discipleship.
. . . The fellowship was divided into four hierarchically ordered groups. The first, and most important, was composed
of eleven men, listed in this order: Hayyim Vital, Jonathan Sagis, Joseph Arzin, Isaac Kohen, Gedaliah ha-Levi, Samuel
Uceda, Judah Mishan, Abraham Gavriel, Shabbatai Menashe, Joseph ibn Tabul, and Elijah Falko (or Falkon). It is
largely accepted that within a year Hayyim Vital emerged as the leading student, so that when the Arizal (Luria) died
in 1572, at the age of 38, Vital succeeded him. Since the Arizal had left almost none of his teachings in writing, Vital
began to write down everything he had learned from his master.
16) The evidence is circumstantial that Isaac Sarug ended up with the manuscript copies and later became a kind of an
Apostle of Lurianic Kabbalah to Italy, Salonika, and Poland (Silverman 1998:195-196).
17) Morris M. Faierstein, in Traces of Lurianic Kabbalah: Texts and their Histories, The Jewish Quarterly Review, Vol.
103, no. 1 (Winter 2013) 101-106, wrote that Hayyim Vital kept all his manuscripts locked in a chest, allowing only a
few scholars to read them every now and then. Theses scholars tried to memorize as much of the texts as they could
before returning home to copy them down. Once, when Vital fell sick, Joshua ben Nun, a wealthy person in the area,
bribed Vital s brother to get the manuscripts, about six hundred pages. Ben Nun hired scholars to copy the manu-
scripts and returned them days later. It would take two hundred years, though, for the complete ideas of Luria to be
gathered and published.
18) Gershom Scholem identified deeply with the writing of Franz Kafka and felt his work was the truest representation
of Judaism, as a secular kabbalist. Scholem wrote: Many exciting thoughts had led me [in the years 1916-1918]. . . to
an intuitive affirmation of mystical propositions [Thesen] which walked the fine line between religion and nihilism. I
later [found in Kafka] the most perfect and unsurpassed expression of this fine line, an expression which, as a secular
statement of the kabbalistic world-feeling in a modern spirit, seemed to me to wrap Kafka s writings in the halo of the
canonical (Cited in D. Biale, Kabbalah and Counter-History, p. 75, as quoted by Paul Mendes-Flohr in Gershom
Scholem: The Man and His Work, p. 16).
19) Christian sects that originated in the United States̶the Mormons, the Seventh Day Adventists, and the Jehovah
Witnesses (among many others)̶have tended to overthrow denominational, institutional faith with their new visions.
 ZION: Sabbatianism 29

In their own way, each mentioned above began with its own messianic figure or revelator: Joseph Smith (1805-1844),
Ellen G. White (1827-1915), and Charles Taze Russell (1852-1916) respectively. Messianism today tends to be more
prevalent in the United States, yet this is not always the case. The Solar Temple sect from Switzerland and Quebec
(1994-1997), founded by Joseph Di Mambro and Luc Jouret, rose to infamy with a mass suicide (of about fi fty
members) in 1994. Later, in 1995, another twenty or so joined them in death. And of course Shoko Asahara s Aum
Shin-rikyou in 1995 began mass-terror in Japan with its gassing of six thousand people in a Tokyo subway station. Two
hundred seventy-five were seriously injured, with eight people dying. Later it was discovered that Aum Shin-rikyou
had its own Buddhist-style kingdom with Asahara as its head.
20) The Sefer Zerubbabel (seventh-century CE) was a highly respected work in the Jewish world. Zerubbabel, whose
name means born in Babylon, the last heir of the Davidic line through Solomon and Jeconiah, foretold the coming of
a Messiah, whose name is Manahem ben Ammiel (the Messiah ben David). This Messiah would appear nine
hundred-ninety years after the destruction of the Second Temple disguised as a beggar. This would have been around
the year 1058.
21) The Cossacks, led by Bogdan Chmielnicki (c. 1595-1657), as they rebelled against Polish rule, tried to establish an
independent Ukraine and the Jewish population became their target. They killed between 100,000 to 300,000 Jews and
destroyed about three hundred Jewish communities. They saw the Jews as loyal to the Polish crown.
22) Gershom Scholem s numerous studies show that Moses de Leon wrote the Sefer ha-Zohar, parts of which were first
published in Spain around 1280 (de Leon lived near Castile) (Scholem 1941:159). Generally, Scholem based his
conclusions on the Zohar’s awkward and eccentric Aramaic grammatical constructions (largely invented by de Leon
for his purposes), his use of medieval Spanish and Portuguese words and phrases transliterated into Aramaic
throughout the work, with the author s complete lack of topographical understanding of Galilee, where most of the
scenes take place (Scholem 1972:222; 225-28). While de Leon took concepts from such works as the Sefer Yetzirah
and the Sefer ha-Bahir, his original spins have been transformative in ways that continue to alter world religious-
consciousness. The Zohar is so compelling and so original that it has to be considered one of the great aesthetic
triumphs in world literature.
23) The Jewish centers of learning during late antiquity in Iraq were Nehardea, Nisibis, Mahoza (near present day
Bagdad), Pumbeditha (near Anbar), and the Sura Academy near what today is Fallujah.
24) Most Jews believed that prophecy had not ended with the Bible (completed in its present form by about 200 BCE).
25) Nathan of Gaza was prolific. In addition to countless letters, some extant, Nathan wrote four essays before Sabba-
tai s apostasy: The Prophecy of Jonah s Ship, The Short Exegesis, The Long Exegesis, with The Treatise on
Dragons (Derush ha-Tanninim) becoming the foundational theological statement. Nathan also wrote several manuals
on repentance, compiled in The Penitential Devotions. After the apostasy Nathan wrote The Mystery of the
Messiah King, The Book of Zemir Arisim, The Book of Creation (Hadrat Kodesh), The Treatise of Principles
(Tiqqun Qeri’ah). Please see website: http://jec2.chez.com/abstheslqayam1.htm
26) In Lurianic Kabbalah the vessels (kelim) were created for channeling divinity (Sefirot) in the material world. But
since they could not contain the power and brilliance of the divine, they broke apart, with divine sparks exiled in the
Olam Tohu (The World of Chaos). When the vessels shattered from the intensity of divine light (Ohr), the entire
Sefirot became discordant, resulting in a divine paralysis. Kabbalists single out Gevurah (judgment) as the Sefirah
most responsible for the imbalance, with judgment, severity, and harshness increasing the shattering; the Sefirot then
became somewhat separate entities and lost something of their original wholeness, yet are mending in the process of
Tikkun Olam. Restoration revolves around and emerges from the sixth Sefirah, Te’feret (Beauty).
27) Scholem wrote: It is these sparks (Netzutzot) that now shine even in those spheres over which evil gains control.
Their activity is strangely ambivalent: on the one hand, these sparks animate evil, guaranteeing its existence and its
power of action; on the other, they are like captives, awaiting their own redemption from evil.
28) The Sefer ha-Zohar (Book of Splendor or Radiance) is one of the great triumphs of mystical literature. A literary and
 30

mystical genius, Moses de Leon wrote in a simple Aramaic (a language he was not completely fluent in and in fact
created for his purposes). Today the Zohar is, with the Talmud and Tanakh, a sacred writing of modern Judaism.
Kabbalists, however, attribute the Zohar to Rabbi Shimon bar Yohai (c. 135-170 CE), a second century sage who lived
in Galilee (his tomb in Safed, Israel remains a sacred pilgrimage site today). Moses de Leon may have felt this vener-
able sage was transmitting the Zohar directly to him.
29) Sabbatianism has obvious similarities with Christianity, but the Jews living in the Ottoman Empire who founded this
movement would have had little contact with Christianity, because it was either nonexistent or not visible, with some
exceptions in Jerusalem, Salonika, and elsewhere. It is doubtful that devout Jews, as the founders were, would have
had any extended or deep engagement with Christian doctrines. More likely the forces that were at work in Sabba-
tianism were from the internal dynamics of Judaism itself, a dynamic that created early Christianity.
30) Astonishingly the Sefer Temunah speaks of a missing letter to the Hebrew alphabet, a consonant that is yet to be
revealed and this shows why the creation cannot be complete or whole until the missing letter is in place.
31) The great Safed mystics Moses Cordovero (1522-1570) and Isaac Luria believed the Shemittot described spiritual
states rather than cosmic cycles.
32) Prior to the shattering and the unfolding of the Sefirot and the Four Worlds, Adam Kadmon’s abode was in the pris-
tine world with God as Divine awareness and the material creation unfolded:

A’K (Adam Kadmon)

Atziluth (World of Emanation)
Beriah (World of Creation)
Yetzirah (World of Formation)
Assiah (World of Action)

33) Yet, Sabbatai Tzvi himself, at certain points, did win Jewish converts to Islam (Scholem 1973:847), which may have
been part of an understanding with the Sultan and the Sultan s personal minister. At least this was the expectation they
had of Sabbatai̶for Sabbatai it seems converts were feathers in his cap, showing he was living up to expectations of
an agreement that resulted in the sparing of his life.
34) Daniel 9:24-27 speaks of the seventy weeks of years, from when Israel was conquered by Babylon (597 BCE) and
the leaders taken into exile, to the final redemption by the anointed prince s return, who makes an atonement and
anoints the Holy of Holies.
35) Others pondered about what kind of a Messiah Sabbatai Tzvi was. If of the House of David, then the age of
redemption was at hand. If of the House of Joseph, then he must suffer and Sabbatai is only a forerunner of the
House of David s Messiah (Scholem 1973:784).
36) Richard Rubenstein, Aristotle’s Children (2003:143): Cathar ethics followed inexorably from this major premise.
God sent Jesus to show us the way to triumph over the body and to escape the vicious chain of sexual reproduction.
Each person should therefore see, like Christ, to purify himself by loving his neighbor and overthrowing the tyranny
of the flesh. What was so threatening about this doctrine of attempting to free oneself from earthly desires and of
loving one s neighbor? It was dynamic and it effectively challenged Church authority.
37) Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), a fervent Protestant, who called Christianity (Calvinism?) the Abso-
lute Religion, also believed the stress on equality, lifestyle, and work fostered a personal dignity that ultimately gave
rise to demands for equal political recognition. The American and French revolutions were the fruits of this.
38) The First Temple (586 BCE) and the Second Temple (70 CE), according to tradition, were destroyed on this day,
the ninth of Av̶the Bar Kokhba Revolt (135 CE) was also put down on this day. Sabbatai Tzvi was born on the ninth
of Av, 1626, which fell on the Sabbath. Hence, he was named Sabbatai in honor of the Sabbath. Some traditions
pointed to the Messiah s birth on the ninth of Av.
 ZION: Sabbatianism 31

39) Some other names Papulars used: Izmirlis, Kapandshis, Smyrnians, Kavalieros, and Koniosos.
40) Sabbatian violations of the sacred centered on three areas: 1) violations of holy days and dietary laws, 2) violations
of theology of the divine, particularly the Ten Commandments that forbade idolatry. Here Sabbatians tended to have
four deities (all human beings), with one female, similar in some ways to the Christian Trinity, and 3) sexual violations
that included ritual adultery, sex with menstruating women, public masturbation, heterosexual incest (violating Levit-
icus 7:25; 18:1-26), and sexual hospitality̶with the male host or head of family offering his daughters or wife to
guests (Maciejko 2011:32-33). Perhaps the most famous is a ceremony in which Sabbatians danced around a naked
woman, who represented the Torah Atziluth (Maciejko 2011:200).
41) The blood libel was from Europe s history of anti-Semitism that stretched back hundreds of years by Frank s time;
it centered on the horrible accusation that the Talmud required Jews to use Christian blood in religious celebrations,
especially in Passover matzah (unleavened bread). Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1343-1400), in Canterbury Tales ( Prioress
Tale ), highlighting the accusation that Jews killed Christian children for this purpose, showed in the devout nun a
diseased psyche and underdeveloped spirituality. Frankists used obscure Talmudic passages (Maciejko 2011:103-6;
110-16) in support of the Bishop Kajetan Ignacy Sołtyk s (1715-1788) fresh attempt to revive these ancient accusa-
tions (13 Jews in Poland were sentenced to death because of him). The Roman Catholic Church, however, after the
case went to Rome, rebutted these charges after it found translators who after the reading the Aramaic passages in
the Talmud claimed these were misinterpreted.
42) There is still no definitive figure for the number of converts. Was it three thousand individuals that eventually
converted or three thousand families? If the latter the number is incredible, a great shock to the Jewish communities
everywhere that so many abandoned their ancestral faith. Pawel Maciejko (The Mixed Multitude) in his chapter How
Rabbis and Priests Created the Frankist Movement, shows that the Frankist movement would not have become sepa-
rate from Judaism had not extremists from both the Christian and Jewish sides been in such deep conflict over
doctrinal boundaries.
43) The Frankists negotiated with the Polish Roman Catholic Church to keep their Jewish identity (Scholem 1978:296):
1) to keep Kashrut (kosher) dietary laws; 2) to keep their Jewish names (they would also take baptismal names); 3) to
keep their beards and sidelocks; 4) to continue to wear Jewish clothing; 5) to continue to study the Zohar and other
kabbalistic books; 6) to celebrate the Sabbath (they would also participate in Sunday Church worship); 7) and to
marry only among themselves (Maciejko 2011:144). While the Church publicly balked at some of these (Maciejko
2011:154), the Frankist community indeed realized these goals, if only through attrition.
44) Please see Harris Lenowitz translation online: https://archive.org/stream/TheCollectionOfTheWordsOfTheLordJa
cobFrank#page/n0/mode/2up
45) The Church of the Latter Day Saints in Jesus Christ (commonly known as the Mormons) is also an heir to Sabbatian-
ism s sexual theurgy. Known today for their high moral standards, strong families, and close association with the
Republican Party of the United States, the Mormons in their first sixty years or so, from about 1840, practiced
polygamy (what they called Celestial Marriages ). Only Celestial Marriage could fulfill the non-Creator God s
purpose of having souls enter the physical realm. Further, polygamy propelled the Mormon people toward personal
divinity, toward becoming a God in one s own right. Mormons and kabbalists have many parallels. Both saw the
Divine as dependent on humanity to fulfill Divine purposes. As in Sabbatianism with the violation of sexual prohibi-
tions leading to the age of Atziluth, Mormon polygamy was a gateway to the Divine realm. Joseph Smith (1805-1844),
the Mormon Church s visionary founder, may have had eighty-four wives (Bloom 1992:96-111), though Smith s
Mormon biographer, Fawn Brody, lists only forty-nine official Celestial Marriages (Brody 1945:334-347). Smith s
successor, Brigham Young (1801-1877), may have had fi fty-five wives that produced fi fty-seven children. In the 1890s,
the United States government forced the Mormon Church to abandon polygamy in order for Utah to achieve state-
hood.
46) Gershom Scholem s discovery of Joseph Eybeschutz s secret Sabbatianism led to outraged condemnations from
 32

Israel s Orthodox community, which attacked Scholem personally (Dan 1987:307-309). The Orthodox community
could not accept that someone who had grown up studying the Talmud and other sacred writings of Judaism could fall
victim to Sabbatianism, since this violated the deep Jewish sense of the protective power of the Torah. But this,
indeed, was the case.
47) Nietzsche had asked: Why does man not see things? He is himself standing in the way: he conceals things
(Nietzsche Daybreak 1997).

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34

Appendiy

Ein Sof
(Beyond Infinity)

KETER
Crown
Ehyeh Asher
Ehyeh

BINAH CHOCHMA
Understanding Wisdom
(y-h-v-h) Yah
Elohim
DA’AT
Knowledge
(y-h y-h-v-h)
Yah, the Lord

GEVORAH
CHESED
Justice
Loving-Kindness
(e-l-h-m)
El
Elohim

TIFERET
Beauty
(y-h-v-h)
Adonai

HOD NETZACH
Splendor Victory
Elohim Tzevaot Adonai Tzevaot

YESOD
Foundation
Shaddai &
El Chai

MALKHUT
SHEKHINAH
Kingdom
Adonai

The Tree of Life The Sefirot (emanations) From Estatic Kabbalah, p. 16 by Rabbi David E. Cooper