Chapter 2

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      The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith

      Prehistory of Eighteenth-Century Anti-Sabbatianism: Rabbi Jacob Sasportas

      From the very outset, the Frankist case deviated from the established pattern of the rabbinic struggle against Sabbatianism in the first part of the eighteenth century. Frankism was unique in its extraordinary public profile, in the level of involvement of Gentile authorities in an ostensibly internal Jewish affair, and in the brutality of the rabbinic campaign against it. In order to understand these developments, we must extend our inquiry beyond eighteenth-century anti-Sabbatianism and retrace the strategies of opposition to Sabbatai Tsevi during his lifetime. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610–98) was the principal opponent of the messianic movement that arose around the figure of Sabbatai in the 1660s. Sasportas was born in North Africa and served as rabbi in a number of Sephardic communities in Western Europe. During the outbreak of Sabbatian enthusiasm, he was living as a private individual in Hamburg. Tsitsat novel Tsevi, his collection of letters and accounts pertaining to the period directly preceding and following Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, remains the indispensable source for any analysis of the early stages of Sabbatianism.

      Rabbi Jacob Sasportas’s activities were first reconstructed in Gershom Scholem’s monumental monograph on Sabbatai Tsevi. Scholem had little sympathy for his subject: on just one page of his book, he managed to attribute to Sasportas harshness, irascibility, arrogance, fanaticism, hunger for the power and status of rabbinic offices, bitterness and frustration, arrogance and unsteadiness in human relations, egotism and excessive self-confidence. On the adjacent page, he called the rabbi “a Jewish Grand Inquisitor.”¹ If Scholem’s discussion of Rabbi Jacob’s character is, to put it mildly, somewhat biased,² his reconstruction of Sasportas’s polemical activities is masterful. What Scholem did not analyze, however, was the content of Sasportas’s ideas about Sabbatianism. Tsitsat novel Tsevi was presented by Scholem not as a text expounding a consistent theological position but as an expression of its author’s twisted character. Since Sasportas’s book described otherwise unknown events from the early phase of the Sabbatian movement, it had paramount significance for historical research, but it has not been subjected to a more in-depth conceptual analysis. In my opinion, Sasportas’s ideas should be treated with the utmost seriousness: in addition to his being the first prominent anti-Sabbatian strategist, the rabbi was the first to try to understand what the Sabbatian movement was all about.

      Scholars have emphasized that Sasportas attacked Sabbatai well before his apostasy, and the target of his ire was not the messianic enthusiasm per se: the rabbi explicitly stated that he would be prepared to accept Tsevi as the messiah if the latter fulfilled the traditional criteria of the messiahship.³ Isaiah Tishby and Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer have argued that Sabbatianism was for Sasportas first and foremost a halakhic issue: the polemic was motivated mainly by Sabbatai’s systematic violations of the principles of religious law.⁴ Matt Goldish posited that Sasportas took issue with the rise of the “unauthorized” prophecy as a source of religious legitimacy independent of or even hostile to the rabbinic establishment.⁵ Thus, according to Goldish, Sabbatianism was for Sasportas “simply another chapter in the continuing onslaught against the Talmudic tradition and rabbinic authority,” and the rabbi largely lost interest in the movement after Sabbatai’s conversion: as the aspiring messiah was no longer Jewish, his purported claims had no significance for Jews and Judaism.⁶

      Sasportas was certainly taken aback by Sabbatai’s antinomianism and worried about the subversion of the position of the rabbis brought on by popular prophets. Yet it seems to me that his true fears lay elsewhere. In the opening pages of Tsitsat novel Tsevi, Sasportas favorably quoted the young Sabbatai Tsevi’s teacher, Rabbi Joseph Eskapa, who stated, some twenty years before his pupil’s conversion to Islam, that “whoever forestalls him first deserves well, for he will lead many into sin and make a new religion.”⁷ In a letter to one of the believers, Rabbi Isaac Nahar (also written before Sabbatai’s apostasy), Sasportas remarked that whoever accepts Sabbatai’s messianic claim takes “a new Torah” upon himself and abandons his old faith.⁸ In July 1666, Sasportas described his dread that because of the upheaval surrounding Sabbatai, “before long, our religion will become two religions.”⁹ Around the same time, he wrote to the rabbi of Vienna: “our faith might become like two faiths and our people like two peoples. . . . So began the faith of Jesus and his followers.”¹⁰ In September 1666, upon hearing the news that Sabbatai Tsevi had instituted new festivals and abolished traditional fasts, Sasportas again expressed his fear that the “faith of the Lord would collapse and would be entirely uprooted and replaced by a new faith, unlike our Torah, for they accepted [as the messiah] a strange man . . . who will give a new Torah, like Jesus the Nazarene.”¹¹ Following the apostasy, he claimed that Nathan’s latest pronouncements finally made it clear to the sages that “from the outset, his intention was to deceive Israel and to create a new Torah” for them.¹² Sasportas’s understanding of Sabbatianism has been recapitulated as follows: “It seems to me that this is the beginning of irreligion [apikorsut] among the Jews and that it constitutes the foundation of a new faith and a different religion, as happened in the days of that man [Jesus]. And it is incumbent upon all the sages in every city to come together and gird themselves and hound those who follow this irreligion.”¹³

      It is significant that Sasportas called Sabbatianism “irreligion” (apikorsut) and not “heresy” (minut). While rabbinic literature often used both terms imprecisely or even interchangeably, their strict technical senses were different. The term apikorsut— etymologically deriving from Epicureanism—denoted not so much a deviation from specific theological principles of Judaism as it did the absolute rejection of revealed religion combined with disrespect for religious authority: the Talmud defines the apikoros as “one who despises the word of the Lord” and “one who insults a scholar.”¹⁴ I believe that the author of Tsitsat novel Tsevi used the term in its precise meaning; he considered Sabbatianism a rebellion against the very fundaments of religiosity rather than a particular transgression against an existing religion.

      Matt Goldish has noted that what first “tripped the sensors” of Sasportas was Nathan of Gaza’s claim that the messiah had the right and power to judge all men and to make “a new Torah.” Goldish has interpreted this assertion as a rebellion against the official institutions of the rabbinate and an attempt at a radical overturn of the authority of rabbinic tradition.¹⁵ This might have been the way that the Sabbatians themselves saw it: for all its rhetorical flourish, the Sabbatian talk about the “new Torah” and the new prophecies being “like the Torah of Moses”¹⁶ were meant simply to emphasize Nathan’s higher status as one possessing direct revelation unmediated by the rabbis. His followers saw in Sabbatai the fulfillment of the traditional redemptive promises; they regarded themselves not as founders of a completely new religion but as faithful Jews seeking to renew Judaism