The Battle for God: Fundamentalism in Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Karen Armstrong
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of the population relied on charity. Deprived of sunlight and contact with nature, Jews deteriorated physically. They were also mentally confined and were out of touch with the arts and sciences of Europe. Their own schools were good, but after the fifteenth century, when the educational curriculum in Christendom was becoming more liberal, Jews continued to study only Torah and Talmud. Immersed as they were solely in their own texts and cultural traditions, there was a tendency for Jewish learning to degenerate into hair-splitting and a concentration on minutiae.42
The Jews of the Islamic world were not restricted in this way. Like Christians, they were accorded the status of dhimmi (“protected minority”), which gave them civil and military protection, as long as they respected the laws and supremacy of the Islamic state. The Jews of Islam were not persecuted, there was no tradition of anti-Semitism, and even though the dhimmis were second-class citizens, they were given full religious liberty, were able to run their own affairs according to their own laws, and were more able than the Jews of Europe to participate in mainstream culture and commerce.43 But events would show that even the Jews of the Islamic world were growing restless, and dreaming of greater emancipation. Since 1492 they had heard news of one disaster in Europe after another, and in 1648 they were horrified by reports of atrocities in Poland that would remain unequaled in Jewish history until the twentieth century.
Poland had recently annexed much of what is now Ukraine, where peasants formed cavalry squads to organize their own defense. These “cossacks” hated both Poles and Jews, who often administered the lands of the Polish nobility as middlemen. In 1648 the cossack leader Boris Chmielnicki led an uprising against the Poles which attacked Polish and Jewish communities alike. When the war finally came to an end in 1667, the chronicles tell us, 100,000 Jews had been killed and 300 Jewish communities destroyed. Even though these numbers were probably exaggerated, the letters and stories of the refugees filled Jews in other parts of the world with terror. They spoke of massacres in which Jews were cut to pieces, of mass graves in which Jewish women and children had been buried alive, of Jews being given rifles and commanded to shoot one another. Many believed that these events must be the long-awaited “birth pangs of the Messiah,” and turned in desperation to the rites and penitential disciplines of Lurianic Kabbalah in an attempt to hasten messianic redemption.44
When news of the Chmielnicki massacres reached Smyrna in what is now Turkey, a young Jew who was walking and meditating outside the city heard a heavenly voice telling him that he was “the Savior of Israel, the Messiah, the Son of David, the anointed of the God of Jacob.”45 Shabbetai Zevi was a scholarly young man and a Kabbalist (though not, at this point, versed in Lurianic Kabbalah), who would share his insights with a small band of followers. He had an appealing personality, but when he was about twenty he began to exhibit symptoms that we would today call manic-depressive. He used to hide away for days, sunk in misery in a dark little room, but these depressed phases would be succeeded by frenzied periods of “illumination,” when he was restless, unable to sleep, and felt that he was in touch with higher powers. Sometimes he would feel impelled to violate the commandments of the Torah, publicly uttering the forbidden Name of God, for example, or eating nonkosher food. He could not explain why he committed these “strange acts,” but felt that God had for some reason inspired him to do so.46 Later he became convinced that these antinomian acts were redemptive: God “would soon give him a new law and new commandments to repair all the worlds.”47 These transgressions were “holy sins”; they were what Lurianic Kabbalists would call acts of tikkun. It is likely that they represented an unconscious rebellion against the customary observances of Jewish life and expressed a confused desire for something entirely new.
Eventually Shabbetai’s behavior became too much for the Jews of Smyrna, and he had to leave the city in 1650. He then began a fifteen-year period, which he later called his “dark years,” during which he wandered through the provinces of the Ottoman empire, going from one city to another. He told nobody about his messianic vocation and may have abandoned the very idea of a special mission. By 1665 he was longing to free himself of his demons and become a rabbi.48 He had heard about a gifted young Kabbalist in Gaza who had set himself up as a healer, and set off to visit him. This Rabbi Nathan had already heard about Shabbetai, probably when both men, then unknown to each other, had lived in Jerusalem at the same time. Something about Shabbetai’s “strange acts” must have lodged in Nathan’s imagination, because, shortly before the arrival of his visitor, he had received a revelation about him. He had recently been initiated into Lurianic Kabbalah, and had made a retreat just before Purim, locking himself away, fasting, weeping, and reciting the Psalms. During this vigil, he had seen a vision of Shabbetai and heard his own voice crying aloud in prophecy: “Thus saith the Lord! Behold your Savior cometh. Shabbetai Zevi is his name. He shall cry, yea, roar, he shall prevail against my enemies.”49 When Shabbetai actually turned up on his own doorstep, Nathan could only see this as a miraculous confirmation of his prophetic vision.
How could Nathan, a brilliant thinker, have imagined that this sad, troubled man was his Redeemer? According to Lurianic Kabbalah, the soul of the Messiah had been trapped in the Godless realm created in the original act of Zimzum; from the very beginning, therefore, the Messiah had been forced to struggle with the evil powers of the “other side,” but now, Nathan believed, thanks to the penitential disciplines of the Kabbalists, these demonic forces were beginning to lose their hold on the Messiah. From time to time, his soul soared free and he revealed the New Law of the messianic age. But victory was still incomplete, and from time to time the Messiah fell prey once more to the darkness.50 All this seemed to fit perfectly with Shabbetai’s personality and experience. When he arrived, Nathan told him that the End was nigh. Soon his victory over the forces of evil would be complete and he would bring redemption to the Jewish people. The old law would be abrogated, and actions that had once been forbidden and sinful would become holy.
At first, Shabbetai wanted nothing to do with Nathan’s fantasy, but gradually he was won over by the power of the young rabbi’s eloquence, which, at least, gave him some explanation for his peculiarities. On May 28, 1665, Shabbetai declared himself to be the Messiah, and Nathan immediately dispatched letters to Egypt, Aleppo, and Smyrna announcing that the Redeemer would soon defeat the Ottoman sultan, end the exile of the Jews, and lead them back to the Holy Land. All the gentile nations would submit to his rule.51 The news spread like wildfire, and by 1666, the messianic ferment had taken root in almost every Jewish community in Europe, the Ottoman empire, and Iran. There were frenzied scenes. Jews started to sell their possessions in preparation for the voyage to Palestine, and business came to a standstill. Periodically, they would hear that the Messiah had abolished one of the traditional fast days, and there would be dancing and processions in the street. Nathan had given orders that Jews were to hasten the End by performing the penitential rituals of Safed, and in Europe, Egypt, Iran, the Balkans, Italy, Amsterdam, Poland, and France Jews fasted, kept vigil, immersed themselves in icy water, rolled in nettles, and gave alms to the poor. It was one of the first of many Great Awakenings of early modernity, when people instinctively sensed the coming of major change. Few people knew much about Shabbetai himself and fewer still were conversant with Nathan’s abstruse kabbalistic vision; it was enough that the Messiah had come and that at long last hope was at hand.52 During these ecstatic months, Jews experienced such hope and vitality that the harsh, constricted world of the ghetto seemed to melt away. They had a taste of something entirely different, and life for many of them would never be the same again. They glimpsed new possibilities, which seemed almost within their grasp. Because they felt free, many Jews were convinced that the old life was over for good.53
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