The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
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to the first major opponent of Sabbatai Tsevi, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas. He became the most important figure in the rabbinic campaign against the Frankists. Before analyzing his understanding of Sabbatianism, I shall discuss the practical side of his involvement in the Frankist affair.
The Contacts between the Council of Four Lands and Rabbi Jacob Emden
Shortly after the Lanckoronie affair, Rabbi Jacob Emden was contacted by one of the most prominent members of the Jewish establishment in eighteenth-century Poland, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć, a district rabbi in Brzeńć and a rabbinic judge in Tarle. The extant sources first mention him in 1751; despite his relative youth, he already belonged to the inner circle of trustees (ne’emanim) of the Council of Four Lands and signed the council’s approbation for the Amsterdam edition of the Talmud.38 A year later, he became embroiled in the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy and denounced “the writer of the amulets,”39 stating, nevertheless, that it could not be conclusively determined who this writer was.40 In October 1753, when the council condemned the printing and distribution of pamphlets related to the controversy and ordered the existing writings to be burned (which, in practice, meant burning mainly of the writings of Emden), he signed the writ of condemnation together with other Polish rabbis.41 Nevertheless, Abraham of Zamońć was apparently not actually convinced of Eibeschütz’s innocence. Two months later, he wrote a letter calling for the public condemnation of Sabbatians and qualified some writings attributed to Eibeschütz as clearly heretical.42
In 1755, the victory of the Eibeschütz supporters seemed to be complete: Rabbi Jonathan collected letters of prominent scholars in his favor and published them in Altona under the title Luhot edut. Within a few months, Emden responded with his refutation, Shevirat luhot ha-even. The Council of Four Lands’ 1753 ban on publications pertaining to the Eibeschütz controversy was still in force; however, in contrast to earlier polemical works by Emden, which all came from his private printing press in Altona, Shevirat luhot was first printed in Żółkiew. The edition featured an approbation from Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć:43 the open violation of the council’s ban and his endorsement of the publication of the book in Poland constituted an unequivocal signal of support for Emden. Abraham became a leader of the anti-Eibeschütz faction among the rabbinic establishment in Poland.
The July–September 1756 sessions of the Council of Four Lands had two main items on the agenda. The first one was the wave of blood libels—in particular, the Jampol ritual murder trial, which had commenced in April of the same year.44 The second was the rise of Sabbatianism, culminating in its repeated overt challenges to the authority of the rabbinate and in the involvement of the Catholic consistory of Kamieniec in the Lanckoronie affair. The blood accusations will be discussed in detail in Chapter 4; for now, suffice it to say that the council obviously spoke in one voice on this issue: in order to counter the accusations, the delegates decided to send an emissary to Rome, Elyakim ben Asher Zelig, and to seek an official papal condemnation of the libel.
The matter of Sabbatianism was more complicated. As noted, during the first part of the eighteenth century, the council avoided direct involvement in the campaigns initiated by anti-Sabbatian activists. Throughout the early 1750s, the parnas (president) of the council, Abraham ben Hayyim of Lublin, was a staunch Eibeschütz supporter and the major force behind the attempts to quash the accusations against Rabbi Jonathan, which led to the burning of Emden’s pamphlets in 1753. However, during the 1756 sessions, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć, Baruch me-Erets Yavan, and Isaac ben Meir of Biała45 managed to convince the parnas that Emden’s writings did contain some true information (it is not clear if this referred to Eibeschütz himself or only to the cases of less prominent Sabbatians in Poland).46 The former president of the council and a staunch rival of Abraham of Lublin, Abraham Yoski of Lissa, also threw his weight in favor of unequivocal and forceful action against the Sabbatians in Podolia: he agreed to disseminate anti-Sabbatian pamphlets among the rabbis and requested to be sent ten copies of each of Emden’s polemical works, “for we cannot prevail if we do not have a weapon” against the heretics.47
In the summer of 1756, the competing factions of the Jewish establishment in Poland, which had so far been at odds over the matter of crypto-Sabbatianism and Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, agreed upon a common policy against the open Sabbatians in Podolia. In late September, the Council of Four Lands confirmed the herem previously imposed in Brody and extended its validity to other communities.48 Bans of excommunications were pronounced in the major Jewish centers of the region, including Lwów, Łuck, and Dubno.49 While the wording of the bans repeated the more or less standardized texts of earlier excommunications, this time there seems to have been a concerted effort to put them into practice and to publicize the general condemnation of the Sabbatians. Toward the end of September, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć informed Emden that the president of the Council of Four Lands had ordered the bans to be printed and disseminated among all the Jewish communities of Poland.50
Concurrent with the July–September sessions of the Council of Four Lands, the investigation at the bishop of Kamieniec’s consistory was gaining momentum. At the end of July, since the rabbis ignored the calls to appear at the gatherings of the tribunal, the body dispatched priests who were supposed to interview the Jews and gather evidence locally.51 On 2 August, the Sabbatians submitted a Latin manifesto to the consistory detailing their position and attacking the Talmud and the “Talmudists.” This manifesto contained an early version of the motions that were later put forward during the public disputation, which I shall discuss in the following chapter. The legal battle at the episcopal court raised the public profile of the Sabbatian controversy and embroiled the Jewish authorities in an unwanted—and potentially damaging—conflict with the bishop. Yet the involvement of the Catholic authorities was seen by some rabbis as the opportunity to eradicate Sabbatianism once and for all. On 28 September, the shtadlan Baruch me-Erets Yavan wrote to Emden: “The lords, bishops, and leaders of the righteous among the Gentiles already heard of the matter: the issue became of great significance and already reached the highest lord of their faith, the pope in the city of Rome. And also we will go ready armed before them52 and will stand before the lords bishops here [in Poland] and will bring them to be burned [at the stake].”53
The idea that Christians should be asked to burn Sabbatians at the stake for inventing a new faith had previously appeared in a letter that Emden wrote to the Council of Four Lands in 1751:54 Yavan was quoting Emden’s own ideas to their author. Yavan’s proposed solution was to pursue Christian involvement to the hilt and obtain a condemnation of the Sabbatians for heresy. The remark that the pope had been already informed seems to be an allusion to the hopes concerning Elyakim’s trip to Rome. On 26 December 1756, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć wrote to Emden:
And they wrote a manifesto against the Talmud. . . . There is certainly no way they can be brought back into the fold. Especially now, when they offered to the bishop to uproot [the faith of] Mount Sinai, the Temple, and God of Jacob . . . and we already gave money to the bishop and we pronounced upon them a herem . . . so the rest of Israel will not do as they do and will keep apart from them. And now we seek your advice, for we have no refuge except to obtain from the pope the writ of excommunication against this evil faith [ha-emunah ha-ra-ah]. So we here [Poland] and you there [Germany] should write to the [Jewish] leaders in Italy to make efforts toward this end.55
Since the priests of Kamieniec were already involved in the investigation concerning Sabbatianism, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć suggested that the rabbis should go straight to the highest authorities of the Catholic Church over the head of the local bishop. The fact that the Council of Four Lands was sending an emissary to Rome greatly helped to facilitate the matter in any case; indeed, in another section of the letter to Emden, Abraham explicitly confirmed that he had contacted Elyakim ben Asher Zelig on the issue of the Frankists.56 Elyakim’s primary mission was to acquire a writ against blood libels from the Holy See; his secondary objective was to obtain a papal condemnation of Sabbatianism.
Abraham ha-Kohen was an official of the Council of Four Lands, and Emden interpreted the remark “now we seek your advice” as a formal request on behalf of the council. In his autobiography,