Chapter 36. Mystics, Messiahs and Moderns: Kabbalah, Sabbateanism, Hasidism, Reform and Orthodoxy

Between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, rabbinic Judaism, the Talmudic order described in the previous chapter, broke into the forms it has today. Kabbalah, a mystical system, produced a messianic explosion in 1666 that ended in apostasy. Out of the wreckage came a popular revival, Hasidism, and the rabbinic establishment that opposed it. Emancipation then offered Jews citizenship in the new nation-states, and that offer produced the Haskalah, Reform Judaism and, in reaction, self-conscious Orthodoxy and the Haredim, some of whom would reject the Zionist state outright. This chapter follows that sequence, gives the political context through Arendt and Solzhenitsyn, and records the readings of Sabbateanism that other authors in the library connect to later secret-society theories, as those authors themselves state them.

Kabbalah after Safed

Kabbalah is treated in full in Part 6. Here only its role as the trigger matters. Karen Armstrong describes the Lurianic myth formed in sixteenth-century Safed after the expulsion from Spain: in Isaac Luria’s creation story “Sparks of divine light fell into the abyss of all that was not God,” and the exile of the Shekhinah and the Jews’ own lives “as displaced people were not two separate realities but one and the same.” Zimzum (God’s self-contraction) “showed that exile was inscribed in the very ground of being” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. Isidor Epstein traces how the doctrine spread: “De la Safed, doctrina Cabalei s-a extins şi la alte centre evreieşti din Palestina: Tiberiada, Hebron şi Ierusalim, ca şi la marile centre din diaspora: Italia, Germania şi Olanda” (from Safed the doctrine of the Kabbalah spread to other Jewish centres in Palestine, Tiberias, Hebron and Jerusalem, and to the great diaspora centres, Italy, Germany and Holland). It reached Poland, where Isaiah Halevi Horowitz (c. 1570–1630), author of the “most admired and read work” Shnei Luhot ha-Berit (The Two Tablets of the Covenant), did much to popularise it [Epstein, Iudaismul – origini şi istorie, #15429]. Epstein also links the earlier “practical” Kabbalah of German Jewry to their oppressed status: persecuted and fearing for their lives, they turned to its “talismanic and ecstatic effects” [ibid.].

Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank

Arthur Goldwag gives the outline: “a significant number of history’s greatest Kabbalists have believed themselves to be the Messiah. Shabbetai Zevi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791) were self-styled Messiahs who came out of the cauldron of Kabbalah only to end in heresy and out-and-out apostasy — Zevi as a convert to Islam; Frank to Catholicism. Both of them were antinomians.” He adds that Zevi “almost certainly suffered from a bipolar disorder” [Goldwag, Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, #73961, “Kabbalah”/”Shabbetai Zevi”]. Zevi proclaimed himself in Smyrna in 1666 and, under Ottoman pressure, converted to Islam. Frank later led a Polish sect that was received into the Catholic Church.

Peter Levenda follows the line into revolutionary Europe. “The Sabbataean movement was the subject of a massive volume by the respected Kabbalah scholar Gershom Scholem.” Frank’s relative and close associate “Moses Dobruschka (1753–94), had been considered as Frank’s successor, but Dobruschka demurred and found his way into Western Europe.” There, “With another Frankist — Ephraim Joseph Hirschfeld — he formed the Lodge of Asiatic Brethren as a Masonic organization that would admit Jews.” He then “changed his name yet again. This time he was Junius Frey, he was in France, and a Jacobin,” arriving in 1792. In Levenda’s summary he was among the Frankists “who became a Jacobin during the French Revolution and who died — along with Danton — under the guillotine”; Levenda writes that he was “executed at the guillotine on the same day in 1794 as Georges Danton” [Levenda, The Secret Temple, #64792]. In Levenda’s account, Dobruschka’s career joins a messianic Jewish heresy, a Masonic lodge and the Revolution in one documented biography, the link on which the later theories below also draw.

The conspiracist readings. Henry Makow, in a section titled “Satanists Champion the Cabala,” argues that “The main reason for mainstreaming Cabala was to underpin belief in the arrival of the Messiah and with it, Jewish world dominion,” and that “the infamous Cabalist Sabbatai Zevi … announced in Smyrna in 1666 that he was the Messiah,” preaching “the satanic doctrine, Praised be He who permits the forbidden.” For Makow, “The Cabala is the unacknowledged religion of the West … the belief system of Freemasonry and organized Jewry, the two forces that govern the world” [Makow, Illuminati 3, #70762, “Satanists Champion the Cabala”]. Susan Bradford writes: “Historians have identified the Rothschilds as members of the Sabbatean cult, which traces to a crazy 17th century character by the name of Sabbatai Levy who believed himself to be the Messiah,” and that “By the 18th century, as Rothschild-inspired revolutions were getting underway, Sabbatean Frankism emerged as a religious movement” [Bradford, Royal Blood Lies, #66643, “The Sabbatean Frankists”]. The Rothschild link is Bradford’s claim; neither her thesis nor Makow’s appears in the scholarly sources cited in this chapter (Goldwag, Levenda, Epstein, Armstrong).

Hasidism: a conservative revival

Armstrong contrasts Hasidism with the modernising New Light Protestantism of the same century: “Hasidism was a typically conservative reform movement. Its spirituality was mythical, based on the Lurianic symbol of divine sparks that had been trapped in matter during the primal catastrophe, but the Besht transformed this tragic vision into a positive appreciation of the omnipresence of God” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. Epstein gives the theory: the Besht’s doctrines “se întemeiază pe gândirea cabalistică a lui Luria,” keeping the Lurianic tikkun (repair), the Shekhinah and cosmic universalism. But instead of inviting, as Luria did, the apocalyptic vision of a future messianic release, Hasidism concentrated on the present [Epstein, Iudaismul, #15429]. For all its antinomian tendencies, Epstein says, Hasidism “a rămas … ferm ancorat în Şulhan Aruh” (remained firmly anchored in the Shulhan Arukh). Though Ashkenazi, the Hasidim “au adoptat cartea de rugăciuni a lui Luria, care urmează în esenţă ritul sefard” (adopted Luria’s prayer book, which essentially follows the Sephardi rite). Opposite them stood the Gaon of Vilna, author of more than seventy books and “the first to practise the critical study of the Talmud” [ibid.]. The reference shelf records that the movement “arose in the 18th century as a spiritual revival movement in contemporary Western Ukraine before spreading rapidly throughout Eastern Europe,” and counts roughly 250,000 adherents in 2015 [Wikipedia: Hasidic Judaism].

Solzhenitsyn sets the revival inside the politics of the Kahal, the self-governing community board: “The whole of Jewish life was guided by the Kahal.” The rabbis “were the executive enforcement arm of the Kahal, and owed their position to appointment,” and in the conflict “The rabbis had Hasidic books publicly burned and the Hasidim emerged as defenders of the people against abuses of the Kehilot.” When Polish Jewry passed to Russia “this indigenous system remained, in which the hierarchy of the Kahal had a self-interest” [Solzhenitsyn, 200 Years Together, #70714, ch.1].

Emancipation, Haskalah and Reform

Hannah Arendt identifies the political problem: “The series of emancipation edicts which slowly and hesitantly followed the French edict of 1792 had been preceded and were accompanied by an equivocal attitude toward its Jewish inhabitants on the part of the nation-state. The breakdown of the feudal order had given rise to the new revolutionary concept of equality, according to which a ‘nation within the nation’ could no longer be tolerated.” Its enemies “coined the new nationalist phrases ‘state within the state,’ and ‘nation within the nation'” [Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, #63233, Part One, ch.2]. Armstrong cites Christian Wilhelm von Dohm’s argument that a modern nation “must mobilize the talents of as many people as possible, so it made sense to emancipate the Jews … even though they should not be granted citizenship,” on “The underlying assumption … that Jews were objectionable” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064].

The Jewish response was the Haskalah, which the reference shelf dates from the 1770s to about 1881. It “worked to diminish the authority of traditional community institutions such as rabbinic courts and boards of elders” and so “collided both with the traditionalist rabbinic elite … and with the radical assimilationists” [Wikipedia: Haskalah]. In Russia, Solzhenitsyn reports, following J. I. Gessen, “all the anger that enlightened Jews felt against the ossifying Talmudic tradition became stronger in the middle of the 19th century.” A Warsaw teacher’s memorandum, “without relying on the Talmud, but on the contrary, by opposing it, imputed to the Kahal and the rabbinate ‘the spiritual stagnation which had petrified the people'” [Solzhenitsyn, 200 Years Together, #70714, ch.1–2]. On Jacob Brafman’s Book of the Kahal he records both sides: Jewish critics conceded “the quality of his translation but blamed him for false interpretation,” while the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (1994) judged that “the documents published by Brafman are a valuable source for studying the history of Jews in Russia” [ibid., ch.4].

Reform went furthest. Armstrong: “This Reform Judaism began as an almost wholly pragmatic movement and, as such, was guided entirely according to the principles of logos. Its aim, indeed, was to abolish the mythos of Judaism. Israel Jacobson (1768-1828) believed that if Judaism appeared less outlandish to the German people, this would improve the chances of emancipation” [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. The political consequence came later. Epstein writes that “în tabăra reformată atitudinea faţă de sionism a fost o ostilitate dârză, căci reformaţii vedeau în Mişcare o sfidare … faţă de doctrina lor de bază: evreii nu sunt decât o comunitate religioasă” (in the Reform camp the attitude to Zionism was stubborn hostility, for the Reformers saw in the movement a public challenge to their basic doctrine that the Jews are only a religious community). Many Orthodox and Reform Jews alike “considered political Zionism contrary to political loyalty to the country where we have become citizens” [Epstein, Iudaismul, #15429].

Orthodoxy, the Haredim and religious anti-Zionism

Against Reform, tradition organised itself as Orthodoxy. Epstein records that Orthodox rabbis and laymen, “strongly opposed to Zionism, because they saw in the Jewish nation a profane nation and not ‘the messianic people of God,'” met at Katowice under Jacob Rosenheim and founded Agudat Israel [Epstein, Iudaismul, #15429]. Armstrong traces a more radical rejectionism. Rabbi Hayyim Eleazar Shapira of Munkacs (1872–1937) campaigned from 1922 against Agudat itself as collaborating with the Zionists. In Jerusalem, Blau and Katzenellenbogen formed a group that told the Zionists, “You are not the city’s guardians but its destroyers. The scholars who study the Torah are the true guardians of the city,” and took the Aramaic name Neturei Karta (“Guardians of the City”). She sizes them: “These anti-Zionist Haredim constitute a small minority: there are only about ten thousand of them in Israel, and several tens of thousands in the United States. But their influence is considerable. Even though most of the ultra-Orthodox are a-Zionist rather than anti-Zionist, the Neturei Karta and other radicals, such as the Satmar Hasidim, confront them with the dangers of cooperating too closely” with the state [Armstrong, The Battle for God, #53064]. This is the rabbinic choice of Yavneh, statelessness over messianic politics, carried into the twentieth century (see Chapter 4.10).

Two outside readings: Heisman and Keshe

Mitchell Heisman reads the whole trajectory as secularisation. “Judaism, as the source of the original monotheist insight, had to combine contradictory values. As a first decisive alignment with an ultimate trajectory of postbiological evolution, Judaism took a step towards a pattern of ‘progress’ culminating in a transcendence of biology: God.” He speaks of a succession of revolutions, “From Judaism to Christianity to the neo-Judaism of liberal democracy to neo-Christianity of Marxism,” and states that his work, “As a logical fulfillment of the enlightenment founding of liberal democracy, … puts liberal democracy on trial” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II, part 64 and passim]. Heisman does not discuss Reform Judaism in the passages cited; applied to this chapter, his scheme would make Reform’s abolition of mythos one step in a longer conversion of Jewish ethics into modern egalitarian politics.

Mehran Keshe, speaking about a war with Iran, presents messianism as a live political force on both sides: “I think the Islamic religious leaders and Jewish religious understand exactly what I mean. This war with Iran is done by religious leaders, paving the path for coming of their Methi, according to their script. And you have been waiting for this, for the coming of the same Methi at the same time. But whose Methi is the real one?” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 636, #378348, “Prophecy of Religious War and the False Messiah”]. In KSW 633 he claims that flags in Tehran signal “the awakening for the coming of Messiah, is Methi (Al Mahdi),” that “Khamenei established the army for coming of Methi,” and that “Jews are doing the same. Vatican is spending huge amount of m[oney]” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 633, #378345, “Religious Denial and the Arrival of Methi”]. These are Keshe’s assertions. They put him alongside the authors who treat the Sabbatean expectation as a recurring political script rather than an episode closed in 1676.

Key points

• From Safed, Lurianic Kabbalah (divine sparks trapped in matter, exile built into creation) spread to Palestine, Italy, Germany, Holland and Poland, where Horowitz’s Shnei Luhot ha-Berit popularised it [#53064, #15429].
• Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676) proclaimed himself Messiah in 1666 and converted to Islam; Jacob Frank (1726–1791) converted to Catholicism; Goldwag calls both antinomians and suggests Zevi was bipolar [#73961].
• Levenda documents the Frankist Moses Dobruschka: co-founder of the Asiatic Brethren lodge, then the Jacobin “Junius Frey,” guillotined with Danton [#64792]. Makow and Bradford build Satanist and Rothschild theses on Sabbateanism; these are their claims [#70762, #66643].
• Armstrong calls Hasidism a conservative reform that turned Lurianic tragedy into joy in God’s omnipresence; Epstein says it stayed anchored in the Shulhan Arukh; Solzhenitsyn sets it in the struggle against the Kahal [#53064, #15429, #70714].
• Arendt: emancipation after the French edict of 1792 came with the nation-state’s refusal to tolerate a “nation within the nation” [#63233].
• Jacobson’s Reform sought to abolish Judaism’s mythos for emancipation and opposed Zionism because Jews were “only a religious community”; Orthodoxy and Agudat Israel opposed it too, and Neturei Karta and Satmar remain anti-Zionist [#53064, #15429].
• Heisman sees secularised Judaism continuing in liberal democracy and the idea of progress; Keshe claims Jewish and Islamic religious leaders are each “paving the path for coming of their Methi” through the war with Iran [#38252, #378348, #378345].