The Sabbath World (22 page)

But King John, the only Unitarian king in history, died early, by age thirty-one, and his Roman Catholic successor tamped down the country’s religious freedom by adding a provision forbidding all religious innovation. David, meanwhile, had moved on from anti-Trinitarianism to non-adorantism, the refusal to address prayers to Jesus. He said that invoking Christ in prayers was no better than the popish practice of worshipping the Virgin Mary or dead saints. In 1578, so ill that he had to be carried into court, David was tried for the crime of innovation, condemned to life imprisonment, and died a few months later in a dungeon in a castle on a high hill.

Innovation was the charge, but the offense was Judaizing. Of that he may have been guilty, but less guilty than charged. In one of the stranger wrinkles in the plot, David was the victim of intellectual fraud. George Blandrata, an Italian Unitarian doctor who had fled
persecution in Italy and become King John’s physician as well as David’s close friend and ally—he had, in fact, introduced David to Unitarian thought—decided David had gone too far and was endangering Unitarianism itself. Blandrata circulated a document in which David seemed to espouse the credos of a much more radical Christian Hebraist and anti-Trinitarian with messianic tendencies, Matthias Vehe-Glirius (his nickname was “the Jewish doctor”). This document claimed that Jesus spoke for God only insofar as his teachings conformed to the laws of Moses and the teachings of the Prophets. Though Jesus had preached a new covenant, it had not been accepted, and he had not freed his followers from the Law. Therefore the Old Testament should take precedence over the New until the Second Coming and Jesus’ reign on earth.

Though this forgery led to David’s death, it spread ideas among his followers that quickly blossomed into Sabbatarianism. Transylvania’s first open Sabbatarian was a longtime friend and follower of David: Andreas Eossi, a nobleman who owned three villages and more estates and had lost three sons and a wife to illness. Old and sick, he comforted himself by reading the Bible, as well as the writings of Vehe-Glirius. “This man,” wrote one seventeenth-century chronicler, “read the Bible so long that he extracted the Sabbatarian religion, with which he fooled a great many people.” Eossi didn’t just read; he wrote books, hymns, essays, and didactic poems. In them, he denied that Jesus freed his followers from the Law. One of the Church’s many mistakes had been to abandon the Jewish calendar, and he founded a church that celebrated biblical festivals, especially Passover and the Sabbath. He called the Sabbath a “spiritual marriage” and welcomed it in wedding clothes. Eossi’s ideas spread from village to village and ultimately reached the cities, becoming surprisingly popular among Transylvanian noblemen and noblewomen. By 1638, there were said to be between fifteen and twenty thousand Sabbatarians in Transylvania.

In 1583, a traveling Jesuit reported that a shocking number of Transylvanians “abstain[ed] from blood and pork,” kept the Sabbath, ate unleavened bread, and practiced circumcision. In the 1590s, Transylvania
came under the influence of a fiercely anti-Protestant emperor, Rudolf II, and in 1595 the Diet outlawed Sabbatarianism. Some prominent Sabbatarians responded by sending a letter to the military commander of the Turkish empire, pledging their loyalty to the Turkish sultan. After that, their books were burned, their property confiscated, their men flogged and jailed. In 1618, twenty-two Sabbatarian church buildings were seized and the Unitarians were forced to expel the Sabbatarians from their church. Several Sabbatarians went over to the Reformed Church.

They continued to keep the Sabbath in secret, though, led by Simon Pechi, a diplomat whose life story sounds like something dreamed up by John le Carré. He started out as Eossi’s sons’ tutor. When Eossi’s sons died, Eossi made Pechi his heir. Before that, however, he sent Pechi all over the world—Constantinople, North Africa, Rome, Naples, Spain, Portugal. When Pechi returned, years later, he spoke several languages and knew a surprising amount about rabbinic Judaism. He married the daughter of a prominent Transylvanian family; became Transylvania’s chancellor; negotiated a major peace accord in the Thirty Years War between the Turks and the Hapsburgs; then fell from favor. The prince of Transylvania imprisoned him, took away most of his property, and ended his career. This appears to have reflected a change in the diplomatic climate, not anti-Sabbatarianism, but his religious views couldn’t have helped his cause.

The prince must have been fond of Pechi, though, because shortly after jailing him, he allowed a group of Turkish Sephardic Jews—descendants of the Jews expelled from Spain in 1492—to move to Transylvania and granted them freedom of worship and dress, rights denied them in most of Europe. After the prince died, Pechi moved back to his one remaining estate and grew close to the Jews, who had settled nearby. He set up a synagogue in his house, translated portions of the Hebrew Bible and rabbinic literature into Hungarian, wrote and compiled Sabbatarian hymns, and opened a Sabbatarian school. Under Pechi, the Sabbatarians did not go so far as to consider themselves Jews, but they did claim to be a foreign branch grafted onto the Tree of Israel. They kept kosher and lit candles on
Friday nights. In 1639, during what has been called the Reformed Inquisition—an attempt to rid the country of radical Unitarianism—Pechi was condemned to death. He saved himself by converting to Calvinism.

Over the next few centuries, Transylvanian Sabbatarianism dwindled but did not disappear. It took root in a small village named Bozod-Ujfalu. Its adherents became an eccentric remnant of a forgotten schism, rather like the Amish in America. In 1855, one observer wrote:

In 1869, two years after Hungary passed a law allowing Christians to convert to Judaism, its last handful of Christian Sabbatarians became Jews. During World War II, Hungary’s pro-Nazi collaborators rounded up the Sabbatarians along with the rest of Transylvania’s Jews and took them to a brick factory in a town near Bozod-Ujfalu. A local priest tried to rescue them by showing an SS officer forged baptismal certificates, but not all of them were willing to deny that they were Jews. Those who did not died in Auschwitz. It is said that after living in the brick factory for several days, the Sabbatarians and the other Jews of the region came to despise each other. The other Jews—few of whom still practiced their religion—refused to acknowledge the Sabbatarians as Jews, and the Sabbatarians replied that they were more Jewish than their accusers, because they kept the laws.

The Communists finally destroyed what the Christians and Nazis could not. In the 1980s, Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Communist dictator of Romania, decided to destroy more than seven thousand villages in Transylvania, which had reverted to Romanian rule after the war but whose inhabitants refused to consider themselves Romanians. In 1989, months before Ceauşescu and his wife were executed by firing squad, the Romanian army completed a dam and flooded Bozod-Ujfalu. After four hundred years, the Sabbatarian heresy was finally wiped out.

The
Szombatosok
, as it happens, was only one of many Anabaptist Sabbatarian groups, and not even the only one to survive into the twentieth century. Anabaptists kept the Sabbath on Saturday in Norway, Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands, France, Spain, and Russia, and were almost all persecuted for it. When a small sect of anti-Trinitarian Saturday Sabbatarians (Subbotniki) appeared in Russia in the early nineteenth century, probably under the influence of some Moravian Anabaptist refugees, the Russian government ordered that their leaders be drafted into the military for a lifetime of service or sent to Siberia and the rest be classified as a “Jewish sect.” There are still Subbotniki in Russia today, most of them converted to Judaism, some of them seeking to make aliyah to Israel. In yet another of the dark historical
ironies that have always seemed to characterize Sabbatarian history, rabbinic authorities in Israel empowered to determine who is a Jew have recently begun to challenge the validity of the Subbotniki’s conversions and to refuse to grant them Israeli citizenship.

O
NE MORNING
in synagogue, instead of listening to a sermon, we studied a passage in the Talmud about Hannah, the mother of the great judge Samuel. Before she gave birth to him, she had been another of the many biblical women driven to desperation by infertility. Where in the Bible, the Talmud asks, do we see true reverence—the biblical word means heaviness of head—in prayer? In Hannah, a rabbi named Elazar answers, when she begged God for a child. For “she was bitter of spirit,” he says, quoting the Torah.

This was crazy! I knew Hannah’s story very well, thank you, because Hannah was my Hebrew middle name, and once, as part of an assignment for a college fiction class, I had invented a character I named Hannah as a sort of alter ego. Then I had decided to read the story of the original Hannah. No one could be less of a paragon of rabbinic piety. Depressive and proud, prickly and dissatisfied, she tilted against everything in her life. Lacking children in a society in which a woman’s worth was measured in children, she fought constantly with her husband’s other wife, who had many sons and daughters and mocked Hannah for her barrenness. She wept and fasted and rejected her husband’s efforts to comfort her, even though he openly preferred her to his other wife and, displaying an unusual degree of romantic love, at least for the time, asked her, “Am not I more to you than ten sons?”

Finally, during the family’s yearly visit to a central shrine, she went to the sanctuary and prayed and wept with such soundless intensity that her lips moved but “her voice was not heard” and an elder priest had to rebuke her for praying while drunk. But then, rather than slink away ashamed, as one might expect a commoner to do after being
reprimanded by a temple official, she boldly defended herself. “No, my lord,” she said, “I am a woman of a sorrowful spirit: I have drunk neither wine nor strong drink, but have poured out my soul before the Lord. Count not thine handmaid for a daughter of Belial: for out of the abundance of my complaint and grief have I spoken hitherto.” (The rabbis also thought her response bordered on arrogance. Pointing out that she started her reply with an unnecessary “No,” they speculate that what she meant to say was—and I quote—“You do not know what you are talking about, and you must not be blessed with God’s spirit, if you suspect me of such a thing.”)

And here Hannah’s story takes a surprising turn. For the priest does not take offense. Instead, he accepts her implicit reproach, draws himself up, and says, “Go in peace: and the God of Israel grant thee thy petition that thou hast asked of him.” Shortly after that, she conceives Samuel, and once he is weaned she gives him to the priest to raise as a Nazirite, which is rather like giving him over to be raised by monks.

Hannah’s voiceless despair, her deeply female alienation, her barely contained outburst at a priest—
this
exemplified prayerfulness? It seemed implausible that the rabbis, whom I thought of as villains of patriarchy, could have meant to advance such a protofeminist notion. And yet, it seemed, they did, or something like it. Our rabbi told us that tradition deemed Hannah the first Jew to engage in private prayer, as opposed to public ceremony. He pointed out Rav Hamnuna’s wondering comment, “How many important laws” (Hamnuna meant about prayer) “can be learned from these verses relating to Hannah!” And our rabbi explained that there had been a reason to make her the exemplary figure of prayer. The silence that Eli mistook for inebriation gave the ancient rabbis the image of the sensibility they were trying to cultivate to replace the lost religion of priests and temple sacrifices. It was from Hannah that Jews were to learn
kavanah
, the rather Buddhist-sounding art of focusing one’s soul inside oneself and burrowing deep into one’s prayers.

This was, to me, a new idea. I had always thought of prayer as the repetition of ancient words praising a God I didn’t believe in and
making promises I never intended to keep. As Heschel wrote somewhere, “Prayer is an extremely embarrassing phenomenon.” If I concentrated hard enough, I thought, as I stared blankly at the prayer book Saturday after Saturday in synagogue, maybe one day the words would part like the Red Sea and their secret meanings would become as clear to me as the sand on the floor of the sea.

In fact, it occurred to me, I was having such a moment right now. A line from the Shemoneh Esrei popped into my mind, and I suddenly understood it. That was the prayer said silently, while standing, which required the steps and bows I had not known in camp and still didn’t totally grasp. The petitioner praises God for “upholding the fallen, healing the sick, freeing those in chains, and keeping faith with those who sleep in the dust.” And now I saw those lines through Hannah’s eyes: God, I thought, is that which keeps faith with our desire to believe that the bad—the intolerable—can improve,
must
improve, which is part of the desire to believe in the intrinsic goodness of the world. This is said to be the radical innovation of mono theism, for the many gods in the pagan pantheons could not be counted on to further the interests of the common person. God was Hannah’s conviction that she had the right to hope, despite having no reason to do so. And prayer was her way of committing herself to that quixotic view.