The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko

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СКАЧАТЬ independent of or even hostile to the rabbinic establishment.⁵ Thus, according to Goldish, Sabbatianism was for Sasportas “simply another chapter in the continuing onslaught against the Talmudic tradition and rabbinic authority,” and the rabbi largely lost interest in the movement after Sabbatai’s conversion: as the aspiring messiah was no longer Jewish, his purported claims had no significance for Jews and Judaism.⁶

      Sasportas was certainly taken aback by Sabbatai’s antinomianism and worried about the subversion of the position of the rabbis brought on by popular prophets. Yet it seems to me that his true fears lay elsewhere. In the opening pages of Tsitsat novel Tsevi, Sasportas favorably quoted the young Sabbatai Tsevi’s teacher, Rabbi Joseph Eskapa, who stated, some twenty years before his pupil’s conversion to Islam, that “whoever forestalls him first deserves well, for he will lead many into sin and make a new religion.”⁷ In a letter to one of the believers, Rabbi Isaac Nahar (also written before Sabbatai’s apostasy), Sasportas remarked that whoever accepts Sabbatai’s messianic claim takes “a new Torah” upon himself and abandons his old faith.⁸ In July 1666, Sasportas described his dread that because of the upheaval surrounding Sabbatai, “before long, our religion will become two religions.”⁹ Around the same time, he wrote to the rabbi of Vienna: “our faith might become like two faiths and our people like two peoples. . . . So began the faith of Jesus and his followers.”¹⁰ In September 1666, upon hearing the news that Sabbatai Tsevi had instituted new festivals and abolished traditional fasts, Sasportas again expressed his fear that the “faith of the Lord would collapse and would be entirely uprooted and replaced by a new faith, unlike our Torah, for they accepted [as the messiah] a strange man . . . who will give a new Torah, like Jesus the Nazarene.”¹¹ Following the apostasy, he claimed that Nathan’s latest pronouncements finally made it clear to the sages that “from the outset, his intention was to deceive Israel and to create a new Torah” for them.¹² Sasportas’s understanding of Sabbatianism has been recapitulated as follows: “It seems to me that this is the beginning of irreligion [apikorsut] among the Jews and that it constitutes the foundation of a new faith and a different religion, as happened in the days of that man [Jesus]. And it is incumbent upon all the sages in every city to come together and gird themselves and hound those who follow this irreligion.”¹³

      It is significant that Sasportas called Sabbatianism “irreligion” (apikorsut) and not “heresy” (minut). While rabbinic literature often used both terms imprecisely or even interchangeably, their strict technical senses were different. The term apikorsut— etymologically deriving from Epicureanism—denoted not so much a deviation from specific theological principles of Judaism as it did the absolute rejection of revealed religion combined with disrespect for religious authority: the Talmud defines the apikoros as “one who despises the word of the Lord” and “one who insults a scholar.”¹⁴ I believe that the author of Tsitsat novel Tsevi used the term in its precise meaning; he considered Sabbatianism a rebellion against the very fundaments of religiosity rather than a particular transgression against an existing religion.

      Matt Goldish has noted that what first “tripped the sensors” of Sasportas was Nathan of Gaza’s claim that the messiah had the right and power to judge all men and to make “a new Torah.” Goldish has interpreted this assertion as a rebellion against the official institutions of the rabbinate and an attempt at a radical overturn of the authority of rabbinic tradition.¹⁵ This might have been the way that the Sabbatians themselves saw it: for all its rhetorical flourish, the Sabbatian talk about the “new Torah” and the new prophecies being “like the Torah of Moses”¹⁶ were meant simply to emphasize Nathan’s higher status as one possessing direct revelation unmediated by the rabbis. His followers saw in Sabbatai the fulfillment of the traditional redemptive promises; they regarded themselves not as founders of a completely new religion but as faithful Jews seeking to renew Judaism from within.

      Sasportas, however, took the ideas about the “new Torah” in a deliberately literal fashion. Sabbatianism was for him not a narrow halakhic problem, which could be settled by legalistic decision, or a theological deviation, which could be countered by speculative argument. It was not a heresy challenging particular tenets of Jewish belief but a schism threatening the unity of Judaism as a whole; it might have led to the split of the Jewish people and the establishment of a completely new faith. In this context, Sasportas’s scattered remarks about Jesus and Christianity assume a special significance. The rabbi was not worried about Christian “influences” on Judaism introduced by Sabbatian theosophy or about messianic “enthusiasm” that might play into the hands of the Catholic priests.¹⁷ He displayed little or no interest in contemporary Christendom: in fact, all mentions of Christianity in Tsitsat novel Tsevi refer not to the seventeenth-century Church and her clergy but to the ancient Jewish sect that led some Jews astray.¹⁸ Before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas foresaw the danger that Sabbatianism would become a new religion, separate from Judaism, like early Christianity. He expressed hope that the Jewish sages would manage to do what they had failed to do in the case of Jesus: nip the new faith in the bud.¹⁹

      It is in this context that Sasportas invoked the symbolism of the mixed multitude. As discussed in the Introduction, Nathan of Gaza’s idea that those denying Sabbatai’s messiahship were descendants of the mixed multitude was gaining currency among his followers. Sasportas knew Nathan’s statements about disbelievers coming from the erev rav and “laughed at them.”²⁰ Inspired by the writings of Nathan, Hosea Nantava, a Sabbatian serving as a rabbi of Alexandria, claimed that rejecting Sabbatai Tsevi was like rejecting the Law of Moses as well as the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. He, too, linked the rejection of the messiah with the symbol of the mixed multitude.²¹ Sasportas responded to the rabbi as follows:

      And you destroyed your place in the land of the living [i.e., the afterlife] by saying: “Anyone who does not believe in [Sabbatai’s messianic mandate] is like one who rejects the Torah of Moses our teacher and the resurrection of the dead, and he is from the mixed multitude.” This was expressed in the letter of your prophet. May boiling liquid and molten lead be poured down the throat of the one who says such things! . . . How can he who denies your messiah . . . be like the one who denies the entire Torah?! . . . But you said that those who deny your messiah are not the [true] leaders and sages of the generation, but they are from the mixed multitude, the seed of Lilith, and the “caul upon the liver.”²² You opened your mouth to do evil and spoke about things you do not comprehend. He who does believe in him . . . is one of the mixed multitude! The truth is not what his prophet wrote but what was written by the holy Rabbi Simeon bar Yohai [purported author of the Zohar]: “The evil handmaid [Lilith] is a grave, and in it she imprisons her mistress, the Shekhinah, and she is cold and dry [as] Saturn [Sabbatai]. . . . “Her mistress” is a garden; “the handmaid” is a dunghill, and she is soiled from the side of the mixed multitude, a dunghill mingled with a garden in order to grow seeds from the side of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, and from the side of idolatry she is called Saturn [Sabbatai], Lilith, soiled dunghill. It consists of all kinds of filth and vermin and dead dogs and donkeys are thrown upon it.”²³ And so you see that he who comes from the side of Saturn [Sabbatai] really comes from the mixed multitude and the seed of Lilith.²⁴

      “Sabbatai” is the Hebrew name of the planet Saturn, and the Jewish tradition often linked “the reign of Sabbatai” (the astrologically elevated position of the planet Saturn) with the advent of the messiah. In a fascinating paper, Moshe Idel has argued that the outburst of messianism in the seventeenth century owed much of its potency to such speculations. Young Sabbatai Tsevi’s messianic convictions were shaped by the deep awareness of the astrological meaning of his name, and the nexus between Saturn and the coming of the messiah was of prime importance to Tsevi himself, his followers, and to many contemporary observers.²⁵

      Sasportas was clearly well acquainted with astrological interpretations of the advent of Sabbatianism: in a letter to Rabbi Raphael Supino, he noted that СКАЧАТЬ