History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume 1 of 3. From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)
Side by side with the scholastic literature of Rabbinism flourished popular ethical literature (musar181). Its originators were the preachers (darshanim), some of whom occupied permanent posts attached to synagogues, while others wandered about from town to town. The synagogue sermons of that period, which have come down to us in various collections,182 consist of a long string of Haggadic and Cabalistic quotations, by means of which the Biblical texts are given an entirely perverted meaning. The preachers were evidently less anxious to instruct their audience than to exhibit their enormous erudition in theological literature. Some of these preachers endeavored in particular to foist upon the people the notions of the "Practical Cabala."183 The "secret" writings of Ari184 and his school were circulated in Poland in manuscript copies, which went from hand to hand. The ideas embodied in the Cabalistic doctrine of Ari were popularized in the shape of "gruesome stories" concerning life after death, the tortures of the sinners in hell, the transmigration of souls, and the exploits of demons.
The books which endeavored to inculcate piety among the masses by means of these stories became rapidly popular. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, the Cabalist Joseph Dubno wrote a work in this spirit under the title Yesod Yoseph, "Foundation of Joseph." Prior to its publication, Dubno's work was utilized by Hirsch Kaidanover, a son of the above-mentioned rabbi of Cracow, Aaron Samuel Kaidanover,185 and issued by him in an improved and amplified version in Frankfort-on-the-Main, in 1705, under the name Kab ha-Yashar, "The Just Measure." A few years later the book was published also in the Yiddish vernacular, and became a great favorite among the lower classes as well as among women.
The Kab ha-Yashar breathes a spirit of gloomy asceticism, and is expressive of a funereal frame of mind. "O man," – the author exclaims – "wert thou to know how many demons thirst for thy blood, thou wouldst abandon thyself entirely, with heart and soul, to Almighty God!" The air, according to the doctrine preached in this book, is filled with the invisible spirits of the dead who can find no rest in the other world, and teems with the wandering shadows of sinners and demons, who frequently slip into living beings and force them to rage like madmen. Scores of "reliable" stories are quoted, telling of the conflicts between men and demons and of the exploits of miracle-workers who have exorcised the evil spirits by means of incantations.
Prominent among these stories is an account of the expulsion of devils from a house in Posen, which produced a great sensation at the time. Evil spirits had been constantly haunting the inhabitants of the house. At first they sought advice of the local Jesuit priests. When the remedy employed by the latter proved of no avail, the inhabitants invited the famous magician and miracle-worker Joel Baal-Shem186 from Zamoshch.187 The miracle-worker subjected the demons to a regular cross-examination, demanding an explanation why they refused to abandon the ill-fated house. At the cross-examination the demons argued that the house was theirs by inheritance, inasmuch as they were the legitimate children of the former owner of the house, a Jewish artisan who had had relations with a female devil. As a result, a conference of the rabbis of Posen was held in the presence of the above-mentioned miracle-worker, and their verdict was that the demons had no claim to immovable property in places populated by human beings, but were limited in their right of residence to forests and deserts.
Such was the spiritual pabulum on which the Jewish masses were fed by their leaders. A writer of the beginning of the eighteenth century makes the observation, that "there is no country where the Jews are so much given to mystical fancies, devil hunting, talismans, and exorcism of evil spirits, as they are in Poland." The demand brought forth a supply, and even the celebrated rabbis frequently devoted themselves to Cabalistic exercises. One of these was the Rabbi of Ostrog and Posen, Naphtali Cohen (1640-1719), of whom the following curious incident is related. After settling in Frankfort-on-the-Main, he made the people believe that he had discovered a magic formula against fire. As luck would have it, a fire broke out in his own house, and destroyed a considerable part of the Jewish quarter. The ill-fated Cabalist was sent to jail on the charge of careless handling of fire during his pyrotechnic experiments (1711). After his release from prison Naphtali Cohen led the life of a wanderer, entering into suspicious relations with Hayyun, the notorious emissary of the Sabbatian sect, though afterwards, when Hayyun's heresy had been unmasked in Amsterdam, he renounced all connection with the heretic. During the contest which for many years was waged by Emden against Eibeshütz and his mysterious talismans,188 the majority of Polish rabbis sided with Eibeshütz. Evidently they found nothing objectionable in the attempt to cure diseases by means of cabalistically inscribed talismans.
3. The Sabbatian Movement
The mystical and sectarian tendencies which were in vogue among the masses of Polish Jewry were the outcome of the Messianic movement, which, originated by Sabbatai Zevi in 1648, spread like wildfire throughout the whole Jewish world. The movement made a particularly deep impression in Poland, where the mystical frame of mind of the Polish-Jewish masses offered a favorable soil for it. It was more than a mere coincidence that one and the same year, 1648, was marked by the wholesale murder of the Jews of the Ukraina and the first public appearance of Sabbatai Zevi in Smyrna. The thousands of Jewish captives, who in the summer of that terrible year had been carried to Turkey by the Tatar allies of Khmelnitzki and ransomed there by their coreligionists, conveyed to the minds of the Oriental Jews an appalling impression of the destruction of the great Jewish center in Poland. There can be no doubt that the descriptions of this catastrophe deeply affected the impressionable mind of Sabbatai, and prepared the soil for the success of the propaganda he carried on during his wanderings in Turkey, Palestine, and Egypt.
When, in the year 1666, the whole Jewish world resounded with the fame of Sabbatai Zevi as the Messianic liberator of the Jewish people, the Jews of Poland responded with particularly keen, almost morbid sensitiveness.
The Jews – says the contemporary Ukrainian writer Galatovski – triumphed. Some abandoned their houses and property, refusing to do any work and claiming that the Messiah would soon arrive and carry them on a cloud to Jerusalem. Others fasted for days, denying food even to their little ones, and during that severe winter bathed in ice-holes, at the same time reciting a recently-composed prayer. Faint-hearted and destitute Christians, hearing the stories of the miracles performed by the false Messiah and beholding the boundless arrogance of the Jews, began to doubt Christ.
From the South, the Sabbatian agitation penetrated to the North, to distant White Russia. We are informed by a contemporary monastic chronicler, that on the walls of the churches in Moghilev on the Dnieper mysterious inscriptions appeared proclaiming the Jewish Messiah "Sapsai."
In the course of the eventful year in which the whole Jewish world raved about the coming of the Messiah and deputations arrived from all over the Jewish world at the "Castle of Splendor," Sabbatai's residence in Abydos, near Constantinople, a delegation was also dispatched by the Jews of Poland. In this delegation were included Isaiah, the son of David Halevi, the famous rabbi of Lemberg, author of the Taz,189 and the grandson of another celebrity, Joel Sirkis.190 The Polish delegates were sent, as it were, on a scouting expedition, being instructed to investigate on the spot the correctness of the rumors concerning the Messianic claims of Sabbatai.
When, in the summer of 1666, they were presented to Sabbatai at Abydos, they were deeply impressed by the sight of the thousands of enthusiastic admirers who had come from all possible countries to render homage to him. Sabbatai handed the Polish delegates an enigmatic letter, addressed to the Rabbi of Lemberg:
On the sixth day after the resuscitation of my spirit and light, on the twenty-second of Tammuz… I herewith send a gift to the man of faith, the venerable old man, Rabbi David of the house of Levi, the author of Ture Zahab– may he flourish in his old age in strength and freshness! Soon will I avenge you and comfort you, even as a mother comforteth her son, and recompense you a hundredfold [for the sufferings endured by you]. The day of revenge is in my heart, and the year of redemption hath arrived. Thus speaketh David, the son of Jesse, the head of all the kings of the earth… the Messiah of the God of Jacob, the Lion of the mountain recesses, Sabbatai Zevi.
The gift referred to in the letter consisted of a shirt which Sabbatai handed over to Rabbi David's son, with the instruction to put it on his aged and feeble father and recite at the same time the words, "May thy youth be renewed like that of the eagle!"
Having learned from the delegates that a Cabalistic propagandist, by the name of Nehemiah Cohen, who predicted the coming of the Messiah, had appeared in Poland, Sabbatai added a postscript to his letter in which he asked that this "prophet," being the forerunner of the Messiah, be sent to him speedily. The omniscient Messiah failed to foresee that this invitation spelled ruin for him. It is generally conceded that the interview between Nehemiah, the Cabalistic fanatic, and Sabbatai was one of the causes that accelerated the downfall of the Messiah. After a Cabalistic argument with Sabbatai, which lasted three days, Nehemiah refused to acknowledge him as the expected Messiah. While in Adrianople he revealed Sabbatai's plans to the Turkish authorities, and this led to the arrest of the pseudo-Messiah and his feigned conversion to Islam.
The news of the hideous desertion of Judaism by the redeemer of the Jewish people was slow in reaching the Jews of Poland, and when it did reach them, only a part of his adherents felt it their duty to abandon him. The more credulous rank and file remained steadfast in their loyalty, hoping for further miracles, to be performed by the mysterious savior of Judaism, who had "put on the turban" temporarily in order to gain the confidence of the Sultan and afterwards to dethrone him. When Sabbatai died, Poland witnessed the same transformation of political into mystical Messianism which was taking place at the time in Western Europe.
The proximity to Turkey and to the city of Saloniki, the headquarters of the Sabbatian sect, lent particular intensity to the sectarian movement in Poland, fomenting a spiritual agitation in the Jewish masses from the end of the seventeenth down to the end of the eighteenth century. The main center of the movement came to be in Podolia, part of which had been annexed by Turkey, after the Polish-Turkish War of 1672, and was returned to Poland only in 1699 by the Peace Treaty of Carlowitz.
The agitators and originators of these sects were recruited partly from among the obscure masses, partly from among the Cabalists whose minds were befogged. At the end of the seventeenth century, a Lithuanian Jew by the name of Zadok, a plain, ignorant man, who had been an innkeeper, began to prophesy that the Messiah would appear in 1695. About the same time a more serious propagandist of the Messianic idea appeared in the person of the Cabalist Hayyim Malakh. Having resided in Turkey, where he had been in contact with the Sabbatian circle in Saloniki, Malakh returned to Poland and began to muddle the heads of the Jews. He secretly preached that Sabbatai Zevi was the Messiah, and that, like Moses, who had kept the Israelites in the desert for forty years before bringing them to the borders of the Promised Land, he would rise from the dead and redeem the Jewish people in 1706, forty years after his conversion.
Malakh's propaganda proved successful, particularly among the ignorant masses of Podolia and Galicia. Malakh was soon joined by another agitator, Judah Hasid, from Shidlovitz or Shedletz.191 Having studied Practical Cabala in Italy, Judah Hasid returned to his native land and began to initiate the studious Polish youths into this hidden wisdom. The circle of his pupils and adherents grew larger and larger, and became consolidated in a special sect, which called itself "the Pious," or Hasidim. The members of this sect engaged in ascetic exercises; in anticipation of the Messiah, they made public confession of their sins and inserted mystical prayers in their liturgy. Hayyim Malakh joined the circle of Judah Hasid, and brought over to it his Sabbatian followers. The number of "the Pious" grew so large that the Orthodox rabbis became alarmed and began to persecute them. Under the effect of these persecutions the leaders of the sect started a propaganda for a mass-emigration to Palestine, there to welcome in triumph the approaching Messiah.
Many Jews were carried away by this propaganda. In the beginning of 1700, a troop of one hundred and twenty pilgrims started on their way, under the joint leadership of Judah Hasid and Hayyim Malakh. The emigrants traveled in groups, by way of Germany, Austria, and Italy, stopping in various cities, where their leaders, dressed, after the manner of penitent sinners, in white shrouds, delivered fiery exhortations, in which they announced the speedy arrival of the Messiah. The lower classes and the women were particularly impressed by the speeches of the rigorously ascetic Judah Hasid. On the road the Polish wanderers were joined by other groups of Jews desirous of visiting the Holy Land, so that the number of the travelers reached 1300 souls. One party of emigrants, led by Hayyim Malakh, was dispatched, with the help of charitable Jews of Vienna, from that city to Constantinople. Another party, headed by Judah Hasid, traveled to Palestine by way of Venice.
After much suffering and many losses on the journey, during which several hundred died or remained behind, one thousand reached Jerusalem. On arriving at their destination the new-comers experienced severe disappointment. One of the leaders, Judah Hasid, died shortly after their arrival in the Holy City. His adherents were cooped up in some courtyard, and depended on the gifts of charitable Jews. The destitute inhabitants of Jerusalem, themselves living on the charity of their European brethren, were not in a position to support the pilgrims, who soon found themselves without means of subsistence. Disillusioned and discouraged, the sectarians rapidly dispersed in all directions. Some joined the ranks of the Turkish Sabbatians, who posed as Mohammedans. Others returned to Western Europe and Poland, mystifying credulous people with all kinds of wild tales. Still others in their despair let themselves be persuaded by German missionaries to embrace Christianity. Hayyim Malakh, the second leader of the pilgrims, remained in Jerusalem for some time with a handful of his adherents. In this circle symbolic services, patterned after the ritual of the Sabbatians, were secretly held, and, as rumor had it, the sectarians performed dances before a wooden image of Sabbatai Zevi. Having been forced to leave Jerusalem, the dangerous heretic traveled about in Turkey, where he maintained relations with sectarian circles. After being banished from Constantinople by the rabbis, Hayyim Malakh returned to his native country, and renewed his propaganda in Podolia and Galicia. He died about 1720.
The ill success of the "Hasidim" failed to check the spread of sectarianism in Poland. In Galicia and Podolia, the conventicles of "Secret Sabbatians," dubbed by the people "Shabsitzvinnikes" (from the name of Sabbatai Zevi), or, in abbreviated form, "Shebsen," continued as before. These Sabbatians neglected many ceremonies, among them the fast of the Ninth of Ab, which, because of its being the birthday of Sabbatai, had been transformed by them from a day of mourning into a festival. Their cult contained elements both of asceticism and libertinism. While some gave themselves over to repentance, self-torture, and mourning for Zion, others indulged in debaucheries and excesses of all kinds. Alarmed by this dangerous heresy, the rabbis at last resorted to energetic measures. In the summer of 1722, a number of rabbis, coming from various communities, assembled in Lemberg, and, with solemn ceremonies, proclaimed the herem (excommunication) against all Sabbatians who should fail to renounce their errors and return to the path of Orthodoxy within a given time.
The measure was partly successful. Many sectarians publicly confessed their sins, and submitted to severe penances. In most cases, however, the "Shebsen" clung stubbornly to their heresy, and in 1725 the rabbis were forced to launch a second herem against them. By the new act of excommunication every Orthodox Jew was called upon to report to the rabbinical authorities all the secret sectarians known to him. The act of excommunication was sent out to many communities, and publicly recited in the synagogues. But even these persecutions failed to wipe out the heresy. Secret Sabbatianism continued to linger in the nooks and corners of Podolia and Galicia, and finally degenerated into the dangerous movement known as Frankism.
4. The Frankist Sect
Jacob Frank was born about 1726 in a town of Podolia. His father Judah Leib belonged to the lower Jewish clergy, among whom all kinds of perverted mystical notions were particularly in vogue. Judah Leib fell under suspicion as an adherent of Sabbatianism, and was expelled from the community, which he had served as rabbi or preacher. He settled in Wallachia, where little Jacob grew up in an atmosphere filled with mystic and Messianic fancies and marked by superstition and moral laxity. From his early youth he showed repugnance to study, and remained, as he later called himself, an ignoramus. While living with his parents in Wallachia, he first served as clerk in a shop, and afterwards became a traveling salesman, peddling jewelry and notions through the towns and villages. Occasionally young Jacob traveled with his goods to adjoining Turkey, where he lived for some time in Saloniki and Smyrna, the centers of the Sabbatian sect. Here, it seems, Jacob received his nickname Frank, or Frenk, a designation applied in the East to all Europeans. Between 1752 and 1755 he lived alternately in Smyrna and Saloniki, and came in contact with the Sabbatians, participating in their symbolic, semi-Mohammedan cult. It was then and there that Jacob Frank was struck by the idea of returning to Poland and playing the rôle of prophet and leader among the local secret Sabbatians, who were oppressed and disorganized. It was selfish ambition and the spirit of adventure rather than mystical enthusiasm that pushed him in that direction.
In 1755 Frank made his appearance in Podolia and, joining hands with the leaders of the local "Shebsen," began to initiate them into the doctrines he had imported from Turkey. The sectarians arranged secret meetings, at which the religious mysteries centering around the Sabbatian "Trinity" (God, the Messiah, and a female hypostasis of God, the Shekhinah) were enunciated. Frank was evidently regarded as the second person of the Trinity and as a reincarnation of Sabbatai Zevi, being designated as S. S., i. e. Santo Senior,192 "the Holy Lord." One of these assemblies ended in a scandal, and turned the attention of the rabbis to this new agitation.
During the fair held in Lantzkorona,193 Frank and two score of his followers, consisting of men and women, had assembled in an inn to hold their mystical services. They sang their hymns, exciting themselves to the point of ecstasy by merrymaking and dancing. Inquisitive outsiders managed to catch a glimpse of the assembly, and afterwards related that the sectarians danced around a nude woman, who may possibly have represented the Shekhinah, or Matronitha,194 the third person of the Trinity. The Orthodox Jews on the market-place, who were not used to such orgies, were profoundly disgusted by the conduct of the sectarians. They informed the local Polish authorities that a Turkish subject was exciting the people and propagating a new religion. The gay company was arrested, Frank, being a foreigner, was banished to Turkey, and his followers were delivered into the hands of the rabbis and the Kahal authorities (1756).
A conference of rabbis was held in the town of Satanov,195 and scores of men and women, who had formerly belonged to the Sabbatian sect, presented themselves to confess their sins and to repent. The sectarians owned to having committed acts which were subversive not only of the Jewish religion but also of the fundamental principles of morality and chastity. The women admitted that they had violated their conjugal fidelity, and told of the sexual excesses in vogue among the sectarians, which were justified by mystical speculations. On the basis of all this evidence, the conference of rabbis in Brody, which met during the sessions of the Council of the Four Lands, proclaimed a strict herem against all heretics who had failed to repent, and forbade all contact with them. They also prohibited the study of the Zohar before the age of thirty and of the Cabalistic writings of Ari,196 which were circulated during that period in manuscript form, before the age of forty in order to avoid the snares of mystical heterodoxy.
It was then that the excommunicated and persecuted Podolian sectarians, prompted by their leaders, resorted to a counsel of despair. Their representatives appeared in the city of Kamenetz-Podolsk before the Catholic Bishop Dembovski, and declared that the Jewish sect of which they were members rejected the Talmud as a false and harmful work, that they only acknowledged the Zohar, the sacred book of the Cabala, and believed that God was one in three persons, of whom the Messianic Redeemer was one. This declaration aroused in Bishop Dembovski the hope of converting the sectarians to Christianity, notwithstanding the fact that by the "Messianic Redeemer" they understood Sabbatai Zevi, or his reincarnation, Jacob Frank. The Bishop ordered the publication of the ambiguous confession of faith of the "Contra-Talmudists" or "Zoharists" – as the sectarians designated themselves – and decided to arrange a religious disputation between the Frankists and the rabbis. The Podolian rabbis received strict orders from the Bishop to send delegates from their midst to participate in the proposed disputation. Their failure to appear was to be punished by fines and the burning of the Talmud.
After considerable preparations, the disputation between the leaders of the Contra-Talmudists and a number of rabbis took place in Kamenetz, in the summer of 1757, in the presence of Bishop Dembovski and representatives of the Catholic clergy. The contest lasted seven days. The discussions centered around certain peculiar utterances in the Talmudic Haggada, which the Frankists cited as evidence of the "blasphemous" character of the Talmud. The rabbis retorted feebly, hampered by their inadequate mastery of the Polish language; moreover, when the dispute turned on the fundamental dogmas of Judaism, they refused to discuss them in the presence of Catholic priests. The Bishop received the impression that the Talmudists had been defeated. In the autumn of 1757 he issued a rescript imposing a fine upon the Talmudists, to be paid out to their opponents, for having insulted them at the fair of Lantzkorona, and ordering that all Talmud copies found in the diocese of Podolia be taken away from their owners and delivered to the flames.
The revolting scenes of the time of Louis IX., of France, and Pope Paul IV. were re-enacted. Thousands of Talmud copies were taken away from the Jews and carried to Kamenetz, where they were publicly burned on the market-place. The sectarians witnessed their revenge on their persecutors and triumphed. It is difficult to say how this triumph would have ended, had not Bishop Dembovski suddenly died, in November, 1757. The sectarians were deprived of their mainstay, and became again the target of the Kahal authorities. In 1758 they finally succeeded in obtaining a safe-conduct from King Augustus III., but even this could not rescue them from the uncomfortable position peculiar to those who, having forfeited the sympathies of their own, have not yet been able to gain the confidence of strangers.
