The Talmud (21 page)

Boys (only boys, the modern world was still dawning) would attend
yeshiva
from the age of thirteen. Well-off families paid for their sons’ education, those who could not afford it were supported from communal funds. Learning was meritorious, students were looked upon kindly in the divine realm and it was a long-established tradition that those whose work prevented them from studying could reap the same reward by providing financial support to poor students. Lodgings would be found in local homes for the pupils, the better-off
households would invite students from the
yeshiva
to dine at their Sabbath table, and sometimes during the week. For the rest of the time the young men were likely to go hungry. In a mainly agricultural world where most trades were forbidden to Jews, every parent’s ambition for their son was that he would become, if not the Messiah himself, then at least a renowned Talmud scholar.

Life was hard but in many ways the
yeshiva
world was no different from any other cloistered, religious environment. It looked inwards and paid little attention to events beyond its borders. Until the day in 1648 when the Cossack warlord Bohdan Chmielnicki led an uprising against state and Church subjection of his people. His call to arms was to rid the land of its Jews. The horrific violence that his hoards perpetrated resulted in the slaughter at a conservative estimate of seventy five thousand and possibly up to three hundred thousand souls across a swathe of the Ukraine and Poland. It left behind nothing but a climate of despair and confusion, a populace bereft of hope. The Chmielnicki massacres helped create the conditions for the brief success of one of the strangest characters to enter the pages of Talmudic history.

A messianic debacle

The Ottoman Empire was the dominant power in the Islamic world. Its borders took in the Balkan states, Greece, Turkey, the whole of North Africa and Arabia. But despite the vast territory it covered, economically and culturally it had long been in decline. The Golden Age of Islamic philosophy, mathematics and science was but a distant memory. The Talmudic communities in the Ottoman Empire were submerged in the same state of intellectual paralysis as everyone else. The ancient centres, where the academies had once flourished, now rarely produced Talmudists of distinction. Nor were the Ottoman lands touched by the currents of enlightenment and secularism which were beginning to flow through Europe.

Although the Talmud and the
hadith
had developed side by side, scholarly contact between the two communities had all but ceased long ago. Notwithstanding the trade links which formed part of everyday life, Jews and Muslims each lived in their own cultural silos. There was little engagement of any sort between the Talmud and its host communities.
24
The only time they
came into any sort of prolonged contact was when one local ruler or another decreed an expulsion or persecution of the Jews in his land.

Nobody foresaw the maelstrom that was about to rip through the becalmed intellectual climate. Even now, with the benefit of hindsight, it appears quite unthinkable. Individuals, families and whole communities across the Ottoman Empire and Europe were caught up in one of the most phenomenal eruptions of collective delusion the world has ever witnessed. It was not the result of any external threat and yet it threatened the Talmud more than any burning, or censor’s pen had ever done.

A Jewish tradition holds that the Messiah will be born on the anniversary of the Temple’s destruction, the ninth day of the Hebrew month of Av. Shabbetai Tzvi, around whom this episode in the Talmud’s story revolves, was born on that very anniversary, in the Turkish city of Smyrna on the Aegean coast, in 1626. His name, deriving from the Hebrew word for Sabbath suggests that he arrived in the world on a Saturday. We don’t know whether the child’s parents thought that the date and day of his arrival was a portent but as a young student of Talmud and
kabbalah
he gained a reputation as an ‘inspired man’ and attracted a circle of enthusiastic followers around him.
25

Tzvi suffered from an extreme form of bipolar disorder. He was prone to profound fits of melancholy, and states of great elation. In 1648, when news of the Chmielnicki slaughters in Poland reached Smyrna, Tzvi heard a voice proclaiming him the saviour of Israel.
26

Over the next few years his behaviour became increasingly erratic. He married three times, each time he refused, or was unable, to consummate the marriage and divorced his wife within a few months. He repeatedly proclaimed himself as Messiah, engaged in bizarre, pseudo-
kabbalistic
rituals and publicly pronounced the forbidden, mystical name of God, the mention of which had always been treated with the greatest gravity.
27
It had only ever been enunciated once a year, in a state of great awe and solemnity, by the High Priest in the Jerusalem Temple. Since the Temple’s destruction, a millennium and a half earlier, no one had dared utter it.

Shabbetai Tzvi’s behaviour publicly challenged the authority of the Talmud. As he ritually desecrated religious law he would utter what was to become his trademark blessing, to God ‘who permits the forbidden’.
28

By all accounts Shabbetai Tzvi, who at times was charming, charismatic and blessed with a beautiful singing voice, could be wild and frightening. As his dark moods became more frequent people stopped seeing him as a benign fool and began to regard him as dangerous. Eventually he was forced to leave Smyrna. He began a period of wandering, during which he seemed to return to a calmer frame of mind. He ended up in Jerusalem where he heard about Nathan of Gaza, a young man, who it was said, could reveal the secret root of a soul, and provide a kabbalistic formula for its cure. Shabbetai, still convinced he was the Messiah, travelled to Gaza to meet him.

When they met Nathan was quickly won over to the belief that Shabbetai Tzvi was indeed the Messiah. Shabbetai, for his part, was overwhelmed by Nathan’s gift of prophecy. Within just a few months Shabbetai’s personal delusions, brought to public attention by Nathan’s remarkable PR skills, were to spread throughout the Jewish world. Communities in Poland and Lithuania, so recently traumatized by the slaughters perpetrated by Chmielnicki now rejoiced, the Messiah had arrived, salvation was at hand. Elsewhere in Europe, North Africa, Arabia and the Near East, where the reports of the massacres had been an ominous omen from a foreign land, people counted themselves lucky not just to have lived far from the slaughter, but to have been born in the generation when the long-awaited Messiah had arrived. They were in no doubt. Fifteen hundred years of exile and suffering were drawing to a close.

Shabbetai Tzvi’s Messianic claims, the enthusiasm of his supporters and the fierce opposition he engendered, had a devastating impact. The faith of those who believed the promise of a new, utopian world would have been touching were it not so misplaced. The dismay of their friends and relatives, who saw their beloved ones succumbing to the madness, often casting aside their livelihoods and possessions to chase mere dreams and promises, turned to rage as the delusion spread. Families and communities were torn apart. Those who believed in Tzvi regarded those who did not as infidels. The Talmud was abandoned in favour of mystical practices, its laws repudiated, or reinterpreted, to meet the demands that Tzvi placed upon his followers. In many
small communities and villages the Sabbatean movement swept up the entire population. In Amsterdam, one of Tzvi’s most committed opponents, Jacob Sasportas, believed that the ‘infidels’ were in the minority, overwhelmed by those who followed Shabbetai. In the Yemen, the isolated and mistreated Jewish community gave up their trades, donated all their possessions to charity and prepared to travel to Jerusalem, for the long-awaited ‘ingathering of the exiles’. Similar stories were reported from Germany, Poland, Morocco and the Papal States. Even in staid London, which was recovering from the Great Plague of 1665, the news was met with joy.
29

Not everybody lost their heads. They didn’t all believe in Shabbetai Tzvi and Nathan his prophet. This was a man who publicly profaned the law to prove his Messianism. That wasn’t how it was supposed to be. Granted, the Talmud had said that the Messiah would be proclaimed by a prophet, but that prophet should have been Elijah. Even if one could stretch a point on his identity, who was to say that Nathan was a prophet? It was well known that the age of prophecy had ended long ago.

In Amsterdam, Jacob Sasportas pointed to the passages in the book of Deuteronomy which warned against false prophets.
30
A true prophet could only be known, according to biblical and Talmudic tradition, if he performed a miracle, or if he made predictions that came true. In either case a court of law had to verify the facts. Private testimonies were not enough.
31
Since no court had ever verified Nathan’s prophetic ability, he didn’t make the grade, and if he was no prophet then there was no evidence for Tzvi as Messiah. Indeed, Nathan had effectively admitted as much. In stark contrast to the Talmudic view, he had insisted that neither he nor the Messiah would prove themselves by performing miracles. They demanded nothing less than pure faith.
32

Shabbetai Tzvi had first met Nathan in early 1665. At the end of that year he prepared to travel to Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire. Reports had already reached Istanbul that a new king of the Jews had arisen and that his followers were preparing themselves for the advent of the messianic era. The excitement had spread beyond the Jewish population, the entire city was
gripped by a carnival atmosphere. The imperial authorities, who were well used to putting down insurrection and revolt, opened their armouries.

Tzvi journeyed from Gaza through Syria, remaining for a few months in his home town of Smyrna before setting off for Istanbul. On his arrival in the capital, Shabbetai Tzvi was arrested and cast into the most foetid dungeon the city could offer. It could have been worse, many expected him to be sentenced to death.

Bribes were paid and eventually Tzvi was transferred to a more spacious prison where, on the eve of Passover, he sacrificed a lamb; a ritual which, as it could only be performed in the Jerusalem Temple, had long been abrogated. He made his customary blessing to ‘He who permits the forbidden’.

On 16 September 1666 Shabbetai Tzvi was hauled out of jail and brought before the Sultan. He was given a choice, of death or conversion to Islam. Everyone assumed that Shabbetai would opt for martyrdom, that’s what self-proclaimed messiahs were expected to do. Instead he chose to convert. The Sultan was delighted, this was a prize catch. He gave Tzvi a royal pension. His followers were thrown into utter disarray.

Reaction to Shabbetai Tzvi’s apostasy was mixed. Many refused to believe what had happened, or if they believed it, saw the events as part of some great messianic plan. In Turkey and Hamburg it was believed that he had ascended to heaven and it was merely his likeness which remained behind.
33
A handful of his closest followers followed his lead and became Muslims. Their descendants make up the Donmeh sect in Turkey today.

With the benefit of hindsight we can see that the Sabbatean outbreak, hysterical as it may have been, was no more than the product of its times. Messianic expectations were rife in Europe and across the Mediterranean. In Britain, millenarian beliefs, which John Gray places at the heart of the Reformation, had by the seventeenth century spawned radical messianic groups like the Ranters and the Fifth Monarchy Men who, taking their name from the prophecies of the Book of Daniel, were preparing for the Second Coming.
34
Matt Goldish has demonstrated close parallels between the belief in Shabbetai Tzvi and the growth of utopian movements including the Quakers and the French Prophets.
35

In time the majority of those who had been taken in by the Shabbetai delusion returned to their former lives and the Talmud resumed its place at the centre of religious life. But it wasn’t the end of the story. Shabbetai Tzvi may have converted to Islam, abandoned his messianic pretensions and lost most of his supporters, but the movement he inspired didn’t disappear overnight. It simply went underground, with its tentacles still protruding. Many Sabbateans disguised their affiliation, living outwardly as normal members of the community and practising their sectarian rites in secret.

Notes

1
Avot d'Rabbi Natan 31b.

2
See, for example, Pesachim 94a–b, Eruvin 56a, Rosh Hashanah 20b–21a and 24b–25a.

3
The best-known include Abraham ibn Ezra, Levi ben Gershom (Gersonides) and Solomon ibn Gabirol in his work
Keter Malchut
.

4
The
Almagest
by the second century, Alexandrian astrologer Ptolemy dominated astronomical thinking throughout the medieval period. It was translated into Hebrew by Jacob Anatoli and many Hebrew commentaries written on it.

5
Mishnah Rosh Hashanah 2.8. Gamaliel had no fear of Greek Wisdom. In Sotah 49b, his son Shimon records that his students would study Greek Wisdom in his father’s house.

6
Fishman, 1997.

7
Ruderman, 1995.

8
Fishman, 1997.

9
David Gans,
Naim v’nehmad
, Jesnitz, 1743, p. 84b.

10
Pesahim 94b.

11
Neher, 1986.

12
David Gans,
Naim v’nehmad
, Jesnitz, 1743, p. 15b,

13
The
golem
was a mythical humanoid made of clay into which its creator instilled life. The best-known
golem
is the one said to have been made by the Maharal of Prague, Yehuda Loew, a giant Frankenstein-like monster, created to protect his community from anti-Semitic attacks. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is possibly modelled on
golem
legends. See the chapter, The Golem, the Invention of a Tradition, in
Languages of Community: The Jewish Experience in the Czech Lands
, Hillel J. Kieval (University of California Press, Berkeley, 2000).