The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
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council meant that the herem was to shape the official policy of Jewish authorities in Poland. For the first time, the restrictions were imposed on the entire Jewish population of the country and not only on the suspected or actual Sabbatians. In order to attack Sabbatianism, the rabbinate attempted to formulate a general rule about the study of kabbalah by all Jews.80
The position taken by the rabbis was ultraconservative: virtually none of the great kabbalists of the past had refrained from studying kabbalah before attaining the age of forty (the most famous of all kabbalists, Isaac Luria, died at the age of thirty-eight). The strict adherence to the letter of the Brody herem would excommunicate most (or perhaps all) of the kabbalists active in Poland at that time, including quite a few signatories to the ban, many of whom belonged to one of the most important centers of kabbalistic study in the Commonwealth, the kloyz (house of study) of Brody. Hence, the Brody ban was probably not intended to be taken literally. Rather, it should be seen as an attempt to formalize the limits of the permissible in dealing with kabbalah and ensuring the rabbinate’s full supervision over esoteric pursuits.
More important than the exact age requirement demanded from would-be kabbalists was the fact that the rabbis offcially restricted kabbalistic studies to the recognized institutional framework: after the ban, members of the established institutions such as the kloyz of Brody would undoubtedly pursue their kabbalistic interests (almost certainly even before the age of forty), while those learning outside the pale of rabbinic supervision would be automatically excommunicated. The prerequisite of gaining full mastery of the Talmud before engaging in the study of kabbalah was meant to limit the latter to members of the rabbinic elite and to eliminate kabbalistic autodidacts and independent students who lacked the establishment’s formal seal of approval.
The polemics against Sabbatianism demanded the formalization of earlier unofficial restrictions on kabbalah study and the setting of clear limits to legitimate kabbalistic activity. While the rabbis stopped short of condemning kabbalah outright, they called for banning it from the sphere of public activity, confining its study to hermetically closed circles of authorized individuals. Not only did they downgrade the general importance of the Zohar; they denied its halakhic significance entirely81 and demanded a sharp separation of halakhah and kabbalah. Kabbalah was to be relegated to the private field of pure speculation and was not to have any influence on religious praxis and legal decisions governing the daily life of the Jews. Its study was to be confined to the members of establishment.
The Brody and Konstantynów pronouncements raised the process of framing the battle against Sabbatianism as the condemnation of illicit kabbalah to its highest point. A hundred years of polemics had caused the radical polarization of both parties’ positions vis-à-vis the nature and mutual relationship between exoteric and esoteric spheres of Jewish tradition. In the most extreme cases, the sides portrayed all of Judaism in terms of a battle between kabbalah and halakhah, between the Zohar and the Talmud. While this extreme dichotomization of opinion greatly facilitated the polemics by providing a clear target, it also oversimplified the respective positions of the sides almost ad absurdum.
The normative Judaism of even the most orthodox rabbis was never a Judaism of just the Talmud, and, in the opposing court, Sabbatianism also had sources other than kabbalah. Some of the known Sabbatians were acknowledged masters of Jewish law, while numerous anti-Sabbatians (including Emden) had a deep interest in kabbalah. Yet, as the Sabbatians were pigeonholed as “Contra-Talmudists” and “kabbalists,” their opponents unavoidably became “Talmudists” and “anti-kabbalists.” Both sides paid a high price for this mutual branding, yet the price paid by the anti-Sabbatians was higher by far: they placed themselves in constant danger of going one step too far and surrendering the entire esoteric stratum of Jewish religion to heretics.
This need to maintain the legitimacy of kabbalah within the framework of mainstream Judaism found its expression in the very language used in defining the Sabbatians by their opponents. According to Emden, the Frankists called themselves zoharishten (the “Zoharists”).82 His main supporter in Poland, Baruch Yavan, stated: “Ve-korim et atsman Kabbalisshten, she-omrim she-osim et ha-kol al-pi kabbalah min Sefer ha-Zohar (And they call themselves kabbalisshten, for they say they do everything according to a kabbalah of the book of the Zohar).”83 Neither description used the Hebrew word for kabbalists (mekkubbalim). Instead, they both employed somewhat distorted transliterations of the vernacular terms, therefore suggesting that the Frankists were not “real” kabbalists but impostors lacking legitimate connection to the Jewish kabbalistic tradition.
The terms zoharishten or kabbalisshten are neologisms that have no precedent in earlier rabbinic writings, and their origins need to be examined. Neither term appeared in internal Frankists sources and—in contrast to what Emden and Yavan would have us believe—we have no evidence that the Frankists ever called themselves that. Frank’s view on kabbalah is a perfect example of the inadequacy of the categorization of all Sabbatians as “kabbalists.” To be sure, some of his followers saw Frank as a master of esoteric lore, and Frankist manuscripts contain numerous paraphrases of classical Zoharic stories and direct references to the Zohar. However, quantitatively (and, in my opinion, not only quantitatively), these references are overshadowed by references to the Pentateuch, the midrashim, Polish and Ukrainian folktales, and even—strangely for the alleged outright “Contra-Talmudist”—talmudic aggadot. More important, Frank himself repudiated the label of kabbalist. The following dictum from The Words of the Lord is the best illustration of Frank’s attitude toward kabbalah: “When Rabbi Mordechai was telling me about the ten sefirot, drawing them on paper, I asked him what they were. He said: ‘They are houses.’ So I asked: ‘But where is a privy?’ Because when they build a house in Bucharest, they first dig a deep hole in the ground, then pour into it quicklime that burns the earth, then on top of it they construct a privy, and only finally they erect a house.”84
The dictum recalls the exchange between Frank and his patron, teacher, and initiator into the Sabbatian mysteries, Rabbi Mordechai of Prague. Like many believers of the older generation, Mordechai presented Sabbatian theosophy as kabbalistic lore, mystical interpretation of the Zohar in the spirit of Nathan of Gaza, Cardoso, and Hayon. His disciple, however, held different views. According to The Words of the Lord, Frank explicitly repudiated the Zohar: “The whole Zohar is not satisfying for me, and we have no need for the books of kabbalah.”85 In contrast to some earlier Sabbatian texts, Frank’s dicta did away with the traditional kabbalistic terminology. Very few of the kabbalistic concepts that still appear in the Frankist manuscripts have been subjected to a radically demythologizing reading as in the fragment quoted above: if the sefirot are “houses,” they should also contain a privy!
Speaking of kabbalistic works, Frank always called them your books, therefore emphasizing his own break with Jewish literary canon: “But I tell you the truth that is not yet found in your books.”86 He demanded that his followers “give away their old books for nothing” for “all books and laws will be broken like a potsherd.”87 This demand was absolute: it referred not only to the Talmud and halakhic literature of the anti-Sabbatian rabbis but also to the Zohar and kabbalistic works of Frank’s own Sabbatian teachers.
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