Content area
Full Text
For that Sabbatai Zevi- -cursed be his name- led astray a number of the greatest men of the generation and outstanding scholars . . . they left the fold and spoke evil regarding the Oral Law . . . but when a Tsadik sweetens their words, he transforms their sayings back into Torah.
Rabbi Nahman of Bratzlav1
Seventy-five years after the death of Sabbatai Zevi in 1676 in remote Albania, Sabbateanism remained an issue of major public concern for Jewish society. By the eighteenth century, Sabbateanism had become a catch-all for a broad family of beliefs ascribed to both groups and individuals throughout the Jewish dispersion. But no less disturbing was the percolation of Sabbatean ideas into mainstream writings. In 1752, Rabbi Jacob Emden (Ya'avets) published a blacklist of suspected works: "The following books have absorbed the venom of this snake in certain concealed parts . . . for now it suffices to demonstrate the extent to which this impurity has spread throughout Israel, hidden away in secret places."2 Emden's index was intended to identify and draw attention to any covert heretical ideas, those subversive hints and literary influences that might escape the perusing eye. Thus the main purpose of this detective work was not to uncover actual Sabbateans but to battle the widespread impact of the literature generated by a diverse movement, some of whose teachings had been coopted by seemingly normative prayer books and homiletic works accepted by the mainstream public.
A great uproar arose in Poland in 1756 when the scandalous deeds of Jacob Frank and his followers (who were drawn in part from dormant Sabbatean cells) were exposed. The conversion to Christianity of a significant portion of the members of the sect in 1759 seemed initially to solve the predicament posed by Sabbateanism by removing its adherents from the community. Some Frankist and non- Frankist Sabbateans remained within the Jewish fold, but more important for my discussion was the problematic parallel nature of the literary remains, which cannot so easily convert out. Through these literary remains, Emden saw, "poison" remained in the Jewish bloodstream. He himself admitted, during his heated attack on the Sabbatean heretical manuscript "And I Came This Day to the Fountain" (Va-avo' ha-yom el ha-'ayin), that "even...