The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
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stated that since the papal Inquisition did not operate in Poland, local consistories had the right and obligation to conduct proceedings in its place. Upon the request of the Jewish authorities, the consistory court of the Kamieniec diocese claimed general jurisdiction in cases concerning heresy (nobis quoque, . . . potestats inquisitionis contra haereticam pravitatem . . . de iure competat)32 and undertook to investigate specific allegations of heresy against the Sabbatians.
To the best of my knowledge, the Kamieniec investigation was the first case in early modern Poland in which a Christian ecclesiastical court looked into allegations of a Jewish heresy. It is not clear whether the bet din of Satanów knew what they were doing when they denounced the arrested Sabbatians to Dembowski and approached the bishop’s court. The explicit formulation of the nature of the crime as “deviation from the true teachings of Mosaic Law” would suggest that the accusers knew that the Church had prima facie jurisdiction in such cases, and it seems to be no coincidence that they approached precisely this court.
Very quickly, however, the rabbis realized that the voluntary renunciation of the Jewish judicial autonomy was not a good idea. A week after the commencement of the investigation in Kamieniec, they tried to backtrack; the consistory protocol noted that “on 9 February, the accusers withdrew their case and refused to continue the proceedings.”33 But it was too late: the Catholic clergy had already gained the opportunity to meddle in what until then had been an internal Jewish affair. The consistory “decided to continue the proceedings for its own information,” demanded that the arrested parties be transferred from Lanckoronie to Kamieniec, and ordered that the inspection of books and manuscripts confiscated by the bet din be carried out by qualified priests.34
The Kamieniec consistory also demanded more information. Detentions and interrogations of suspected Sabbatian heretics by local Polish authorities occurred in other locations in Podolia: on 1 March, four suspects were apprehended in Jezierzany, and three weeks later, a large group was arrested in Wielchowiec. The detainees were brought to Kamieniec for questioning and faced Bishop Dembowski.35 Further incidents attesting to the antinomian behavior of the Sabbatians took place. One Shabbat, the Sabbatian Samuel of Busk “out of spite” rode a horse and smoked tobacco in front of the house of the chief rabbi of Lwów and the Land rabbi of Ruthenia, Hayyim Cohen Rapaport. He also publicly reviled the rabbi.36 Rapaport’s response was similar to that of the elders of Satanów and Lanckoronie: he brought Samuel to the court of the archbishop of Lwów, Mikołaj Wyżycki.
The protocols of the Lwów consistory for 1756 are no longer extant, so we do not know the legal basis of the case; all that is left is an index to the protocols that attests that the bishop’s court indeed heard the case against Samuel in causa intuitu certarum cathegoriarum.37 The Lwów trial was apparently similar to the one from Kamieniec and invoked the Church’s jurisdiction in cases of heresy against the Mosaic Law and natural law. Some information can be culled from a Latin letter sent in 1757 to the papal nuncio in Warsaw by the shtadlan of the Council of Four Lands, Baruch me-Erets Yavan. When describing the case to the nuncio, Yavan stated that Samuel “professed and disseminated new religious tenets contrary to the Ten Commandments, the Old [Testament] Law as well as the natural law.”38
The shtadlan also mentioned that the delinquent was deemed a heretic by Bishop Wyżycki’s court and was delivered to the secular authorities for punishment (pro quibus criminibus fuit haereticus adinventus, et pro paenis ad forum saeculare remissus).39 According to Emden’s anonymous informant, Samuel was condemned to death and hanged. Neither the Jews nor the Christians wanted to bury him, so the body lay under the gallows for days.40 Emden’s informant seemed to have exaggerated: execution for heresy was extremely rare in Poland, and when it did occur (as in the 1689 case of the nobleman Kazimierz Łyszczyński, author of the tractate De non existentia Dei),41 it was widely publicized and discussed. The complete absence of any mention of Samuel’s case in Polish sources suggests that it did not end in any spectacular way. Ber Birkenthal (who mentioned a trial in Bishop Wyżycki’s court without giving Samuel’s name) reported that the defendant was accused of “inventing a new faith and new religion” (al hamtsa’ah emunah ve-dat hadashah) and that he was pronounced guilty but that bribery had saved him from any punishment.42
Regardless of what the true outcome of Samuel of Busk’s case was, it is clear that a new paradigm of the struggle between the Sabbatians and their opponents was being established in Podolia. Provocative public violations of normative Judaism and challenges to rabbinic authority became a daily matter. The standard response of the rabbinate became denunciation to Christian ecclesiastical authorities and the accusation of heresy. The involvement of episcopal courts and of such prominent and powerful clergymen as Dembowski and Wyżycki constituted a mortal danger for the Sabbatians (even if the testimony about Samuel’s hanging is probably untrue), but it also gave them a chance to argue their case before the state and the Church authorities. In mid-March, during the Fast of Esther, Frank gathered the Sabbatians in Kopczyńce and announced: “‘If we have the True God and you believe in him, why should we hide? Let us go in the open and do public damage. Whoever wants to give his body and cling to the love of the Faith, let him walk with me.’ And they went. . . . The Lord himself had jam and vodka in his hand and gave everyone in public in the streets something to eat.”43
Open violation of the Fast of Esther must have been part of Frank’s wider strategy of instigating public confrontation with the rabbis. The account fits nicely with the claim that he deliberately opened the windows in Lanckoronie; Frank apparently sought to provoke the Jewish authorities in hopes that he would be given access to the bishop and thus gain the support of the Christians. He succeeded: two days after the Kopczyńce incident, he was arrested, together with several other participants, and brought to face Dembowski. Those arrested were released after a week and granted salvus conductus for the duration of the consistory’s proceedings.44 The Sabbatians dispersed to their homes; Frank left the Commonwealth and headed for Salonika.45
While the cases were being tried before the consistories of Kamieniec and Lwów, Jewish authorities conducted their own investigation. The rabbinic council of the Land of Ruthenia gathered in Lwów on 10 May46 and obliged the rabbi of Satanów to collect testimony concerning Sabbatianism in the area of his jurisdiction. The Satanów bet din sat between 31 May and 13 June; the testimony that it collected (along with the testimony from the Lwów case of Samuel of Busk sent to the nuncio by Baruch me-Erets Yavan) is the fullest extant account of Sabbatian antinomianism.
The Satanów rabbinic court collected twenty-seven short depositions and one long confession from a repentant Sabbatian. The vast majority of the short depositions were given not by the Sabbatians themselves but by people who saw their misdeeds (on one occasion, spying through a keyhole)47 or even by those who had only heard about them. Most deponents took great pains to emphasize that they themselves did not participate in the crimes ascribed to others; some claimed that they had been given the opportunity to participate but had declined to do so or escaped at the last minute.48 The offenses attributed to the Sabbatians pertained to three main spheres of activity. First, they involved violations of Shabbat and dietary laws. Thus Joseph of Rohatyn, who did admit to having taken part in prohibited rites, described in detail how during Passover he had eaten a slice of bread with “the other thing” (pork) and butter and had drunk nonkosher wine; he also stated that it was customary among the Sabbatians to include a piece of pork and a piece of cheese in a Shabbat meal.49
Second, they touched upon theological issues. For instance, Samuel of Busk professed his belief that “there is One God in the Trinity, and the Fourth Person is the Holy Mother”;50 others mentioned the belief in the annulment of the Torah of Moses and its replacement by the new Torah of Sabbatai Tsevi51 and admitted possessing and copying heretical books and manuscripts.52 Third, they constituted sexual transgressions. Samuel of Busk stated that “it is permissible to have children and to have sexual intercourse with someone else’s wife or one’s own sister, or even—though only in secret—with one’s own mother. As I am old now, I no longer do it, but twenty years ago (and I have professed this faith for twenty-four years), I had carnal