Holy Dissent: Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe 0814335179, 9780814335178

Table of contents :
Title Page
Copyright
Contents
Foreword
Introduction
I. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD
“You Will Find It in the Pharmacy”
Shvartze khasene
R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia”
Hasidism and Habitat
The Rise and Decline of a Hasidic Court
II. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS
Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah
The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith
From Poland to London
Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri?
Judaism and Jewish Influencesin Russian Spiritual Christianity
In Search of the Millennium
The Religious World of
Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Holy Dissent

Holy Dissent Jewish and Christian Mystics in Eastern Europe

Edited by Glenn Dynner Foreword by Moshe Rosman

Wayne State University Press Detroit

© 2011 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission. Manufactured in the United States of America. 15 14 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Holy dissent : Jewish and Christian mystics in Eastern Europe / edited by Glenn Dynner ; foreword by Moshe Rosman. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8143-3517-8 (cloth : alk. paper) ISBN 997-8-0814-33597-0 (e-book) 1. Mysticism—Judaism—History. 2. Mysticism—Catholic Church—History. 3. Mystics—Europe, Eastern—History. 4. Judaism—Relations—Christianity. 5. Christianity and other religions—Judaism. 6. Sabbathaians—History. 7. Cabala. 8. Hasidism—Europe, Eastern. I. Title: Jewish and Christian mystics in Eastern Europe. BM723.H66 2011 296.8'2—dc22 2011005437

Designed by Norman E. Tuttle Typeset by Alpha Design & Composition Composed in Goudy Old Style

Contents

Foreword

vii

Moshe Rosman

Introduction

1

Glenn Dynner

I. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD “You Will Find It in the Pharmacy”

13

Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Shvartze khasene

55

Black Weddings among Polish Jews

Hanna We$ grzynek

R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia”

69

Widening the Besht’s Cultural Panorama

Moshe Idel

Hasidism and Habitat

104

Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland

Glenn Dynner

The Rise and Decline of a Hasidic Court The Case of Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye

Paul Radensky

131

vi

Contents

II. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah

171

Some Sabbatean and Hasidic Affinities

Elliot R. Wolfson

The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith

223

The Quest for a Common Jewish-Christian Front against Frankism

Pawel Maciejko

From Poland to London

250

Sabbatean Influences on the Mystical Underworld of Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, and Blake

Marsha Keith Schuchard

Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri?

281

The Help of Jacob Frank and His Daughter, Ewa

Harris Lenowitz

Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity

309

The Practices of the Early Dukhobors and the Prophecies of Maksim Rudometkin

J. Eugene Clay

In Search of the Millennium

334

The Convergence of Jews and Ukrainian Evangelical Peasants in Late Imperial Russia

Sergei I. Zhuk

The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks)

359

Nicholas Breyfogle

Contributors

393

Index

397

Foreword Moshe Rosman

In the not-too-distant academic past, Jewish communities were typically portrayed as cells of a worldwide Jewish people who lived with iterations of an original, common, authentically Jewish culture. The Jews (living in self-contained communities, in semi-isolation from the “host” society) and their culture (functioning autonomously) were “in dialogue” with the “surrounding” culture. The result of such interaction was often non-Jewish cultural influence on authentic Jewish culture at salient points. This influence might be salutary (“acculturation”), as when the Hasmoneans refashioned the Hellenistic practice of establishing commemorative holidays to create H˘anukkah; or negative (“assimilation”), as when the so-called “salon Jewesses” of eighteenth-century Germany engaged with Christians in social and cultural settings that led to conversion and mixed marriage. However, as academic research intensified, it began to appear that virtually all aspects of Jewish culture were shaped by the encounter with larger, stronger surrounding cultures. It seemed that Jewish ideas, institutions, rituals, and the like were at base reactions to, reflections of, even derivatives from, the people with whom Jews were in close contact. Jews mostly adopted and adapted things from their environment: medieval Jewish philosophy, a late variety of Neoplatonism or Aristotelianism; piyyut (medieval Jewish religious poetry), a calque on Christian liturgical poetry; classical biblical commentary, modeled on Islamic Arabic templates; Jewish autonomy institutions, copies of standard medieval European local governing arrangements; and so on. It seemed that Jewish culture was not merely in contact with other cultures; it was embedded within and culturally indebted to them. The reigning metaphor shifted from cultural dialogue to cultural hybridity. Jewish

viii

Foreword

culture everywhere was hybrid with the hegemonic culture, meaning that it was a skewed duplication of the majority culture. Jews of Arab lands were “Arab Jews.” Iberian-descended Jews constituted their own quasi-Portuguese “nation.” Poland consisted of “Jews and other Poles.” It followed that there is no common Jewish history; only Jewish histories. These are held to be, as David Ruderman (who disagrees) phrased it, “radically singular, diverse, and heterogeneous; lacking common features that might link them together.”1 Holy Dissent challenges both the autonomous and the hybrid models of the relationship between Jewish and other cultures as inadequate. It examines types and cross-types of religio-cultural exchange. From the studies offered in this book, it is apparent that Jewish and nonJewish religio-cultural exchange occurred on multiple planes, permutated in numerous combinations, and flowed in different directions. For example, laws intending to immunize non-Jewish culture by restricting Jews and inhibiting their cultural efflorescence might also have had the unintended effect of shaping Jewish culture and nurturing new Jewish cultural trends and institutions. Thus residential laws favoring, but segregating, enlightened secularizing Jews from traditional ones gave Hasidim and other traditionalists the space they needed to cultivate their lifestyle and institutions relatively unchallenged. The Russian government’s decree that prevented Ukrainian Hasidic rebbes from traveling away from their homes to visit centers of their followers resulted in the creation of large and elaborate Hasidic courts where these rabbis lived in regal luxury, attracted huge numbers of Hasidic pilgrims and established formidable power bases. Non-Jewish social ecology and material culture also could potentiate Jewish culture. In Congress Poland, the many small towns with their significant Jewish communities (shtetls) presented Hasidic leaders with an arena where—as opposed to villages that had no Jewish communities and cosmopolitan cities that had large and variegated ones—they could easily come to dominate the Jewish community and carefully control the border between the Jewish and non-Jewish worlds. Part of this control entailed the adaptation of Polish and Ukrainian folktales, songs and dances as expedients for promoting Hasidic group solidarity. This has been termed “insularity through acculturation.” There was more straightforward acculturation as well. It may be that the putative founder of Hasidism, Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, was inspired by the mystical practices of hesychastic ascetics whom he perhaps observed in his childhood. In the other direction, various Christian spiritualist, mystical, and messianic groups took on and reshaped certain Jewish beliefs and practices.

Foreword

ix

At the margins of Christianity, Islam, Judaism, and paganism, distinctions could dissolve and syncretistic amalgams, fitting no conventional religious rubric, might emerge. Sometimes the conventional organized religions even overcame their mutual antagonism to ally against these upstart creative, religious conflations. On yet another level, the term “acculturation,” connoting as it does a hierarchical process of one group (the Jews) adopting and adapting from another (the gentiles), can be misleading. Unconsciously, these and other groups shared a “common band of culture,” which often pre-dated their particular cultural interactions and where neither side exerted influence over the other. This band’s existence is exemplified by such shared cultural constructions as differential gender roles, tacit economic and political theories, folk medical beliefs, Paracelsian-style medical practice, and the ubiquity and standardization of the early modern apteka or pharmacy. As the Jewish “black wedding” ceremony demonstrates, the concept of cultural hybridity is not limited to minority groups doubling the culture of the majority within which they are physically embedded. A group’s culture can also be hybrid with a common overarching culture (e.g., European culture), with its own historical culture or with other subcultures belonging to the same ethnic group (e.g., other Jewish communities). Finally, if the cultural border between groups was frequently traversed and occasionally even disappeared, the cultural border for individuals could also be porous and cultural identity a fragile thing. With determined effort, in the space of one generation, someone like Jacob Frank’s daughter, Ewa, the daughter of renegade Jews, could become a central European Christian lady of “quietened manners and talents.” Against the backdrop of the history of mystical religion in eastern Europe, Holy Dissent explores many of the intricate pathways of the interrelationship between Jewish and other cultures. The examples adduced above lend an idea of the range of concrete cases examined here, which together provide a firm foundation for mapping these pathways of interchange and formulating more general notions of how cultures interact. NOTE 1. David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 9.

Introduction Glenn Dynner

Gone now are those little towns where the wind joined Biblical airs with Polish song and Slavic sorrow. —Antoni Slonimski, “Elegy of Jewish Towns” (1947)

Dissent from eastern Europe’s state-sanctioned religions was often both mystical and Jewish. This held true not only for Jews themselves, but for a host of Judaizing Russian Christian sects, including Dukhobors, Molokans, Jumpers, Subbotniks, Stundists, and “flagellants” (khlysty).1 That dissent assumed a mystical form is not surprising: the mystical enterprise tends to be trans-institutional since, as Steven Ozment has noted, the impulse to achieve a more direct, intimate communion with God often demands “more than the normal institutional structures of the church can give.”2 But the pervasiveness of Judaizing tendencies in a region so often singled out for its anti-Jewish outrages is more puzzling. While most Russian Christian sectarians initially based themselves on a conception of Judaism in the abstract, that is, as portrayed in the Old Testament, many gradually made contact with living Jews and were profoundly shaped by the interaction.3 It would seem that Jews, by virtue of their exceptional, officially tolerated status and, paradoxically, their sporadic suffering at the hands of the state, had for many Russians come to epitomize dissent. The way that east European Jewish mystics related to the dominant Slavic Christian culture seems counterintuitive, as well. Jewish popular medicine, folk rituals, and messianic and mystical movements may have been

2

Introduction

rooted in Kabbalah, an internal Jewish development, but they absorbed a great deal from a non-Jewish environment that is usually construed as aloof or hostile. Jewish mystics thus resembled Christian dissenters in their selective appropriation and nativization of a foreign, rival religious culture. One should not push the comparison too far—many Christian dissenters remained, in varying degrees, close to the dominant Christian culture and were less vulnerable to lethal physical violence. But an increasingly shared sense of victimization at the hands of the state led to convergence and, in certain cases, outright integration. In other parts of Europe, this connectedness might come as less of a surprise.4 But the main strands of Jewish life in eastern Europe (a term used here as shorthand for eastern and east central Europe) seemed to form a knot of insularity. The region contained the largest concentration of Jews in the world by the eighteenth century, affording a sense of “safety in numbers.” The Jewish vernacular, Yiddish, a combination of German and Hebrew with some Slavic elements, divided the Jewish masses from their Christian neighbors socially, or was perhaps a symptom of social division. Rabbinic and mercantile elites cultivated an abstruse literature in medieval Hebrew. The increasingly distinctive modes of dress adopted by adherents of the emerging Hasidic movement only accentuated the exoticism of Jewish piety. Haskalah, a movement for Jewish enlightenment-based reform, made limited inroads outside of select urban centers.5 Residential restrictions in many Polish towns and cities, while never quite fitting the definition of “ghettoes,” ensured that the bulk of the Jewish population lived and worked in their own neighborhoods under the scrutiny of a traditionalist-oriented Jewish leadership. Russian Jewry was largely confined to the Pale of Settlement. Economically, Jews formed a kind of captive service sector, often as lessees of noble-owned enterprises. And in 1881, the first series of pogroms ripped through southern Russia and parts of the Congress Kingdom of Poland.6 Yet Judaizing tendencies among Christian dissenters and the heavy Slavic imprint on Jewish popular culture call into question the presumed binary nature of culture in eastern Europe. Evidently the shtetl—the Jewish small town settlement—was not so hermetically sealed after all. Evidently east European Jewish culture itself, so celebrated by early twentieth-century Jewish intellectuals for its authenticity, was not so impervious to influence. And perhaps the region’s infamous antisemitism was not quite so consistent and pervasive.7 The spread of Sabbateanism in the region only further destabilized the lines of demarcation. The sordid tales of Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–76) and his

Introduction

3

self-proclaimed Polish reincarnation, Jacob Frank (1726–91), have been retold many times. In brief, Sabbatai Tzevi, born in Izmir, was proclaimed Messiah by the renowned Kabbalist Nathan of Gaza in 1665. After a tour though major Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire, Sabbatai arrived back in Izmir where, despite (or perhaps because of ) his open flouting of Jewish law, scores of Jews fell to the ground in fits of prophetic vision, proclaiming him Messiah. The messianic fever spread throughout the Jewish world. But upon his arrival in Constantinople, Sabbatai was imprisoned by the sultan and, presented with a choice between conversion and death, converted to Islam. “Sabbateanism,” a movement whose radical adherents indulged in ritual violations of their own, nevertheless endured thanks to the continued efforts and apologia of Nathan of Gaza.8 The extent of the spread of Sabbateanism in eastern Europe is still debated by historians.9 But among the several Sabbatean messiahs who appeared after Sabbatai’s death in 1676, none proved as successful in amassing a following as the Polish adventurer Jacob Frank. After a stint in Thessaloniki as leader of the Doenmeh—Jews who had followed Sabbatai Tzevi into Islam—Frank returned to Poland in 1755 and presented himself as Sabbatai Tzevi’s reincarnation. Eastern and central Europe proved fertile ground for Frank’s radical form of Sabbateanism, which included ritual violations of a sexual nature. On the night of January 27, 1756, in Lanckoronie, Frank and his followers were discovered conducting orgiastic ceremonies. Frank fled to the Ottoman territories and converted to Islam while his followers, who admitted to ritualistic wifeswapping and harboring Sabbatean beliefs, were placed under ban (herem). But Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski extended his protection to the “Frankists,” who presented themselves as anti-Talmudists with Trinitarian beliefs. A disputation held in Kamieniec Podolski from June 20–28, 1757, resulted in a victory for the “Frankists.” Their rabbinic opponents were fined and flogged, and copies of the Talmud were burned. Bishop Dembowski’s death on November 9, 1757, deprived the Frankists of their protector. But as potential converts to Christianity, the Frankists were given another opportunity to engage in a disputation by King Augustus III himself. This time, they charged that Jews used Christian blood for ritual purposes. The dangerous disputation, held from July 17 to September 19, 1759, in Lwów, was prematurely halted by the Vatican, and Frank was baptized along with around 3,000 of his followers. Suspicions about the sincerity of Frank’s conversion resulted in his imprisonment in a Cze$stochowa monastery. Freed by the Russians in 1772, Frank moved to Brünn (Brno) in Moravia and resumed his activities until his death in 1791.

4

Introduction

TOWARD A NEW METHODOLOGY

It is therefore more useful to think in terms of a permeable border zone than a sharp borderline dividing eastern European Jews and Christians. This conceptual shift is indebted to several recent scholarly developments. First is the flourishing discourse on cultural hybridity, which underscores the crossfertilization that inevitably occurs among variant cultures as they come into contact with one another. Scholars now doubt whether it is ever advisable to use terms like “authentic” when describing cultures or religions.10 Second is the dawning recognition of the need to bridge the artificial divide between theology (i.e., text) and social history (i.e., context). Steven Ozment drew attention to this divide back in 1973: “That history which views men as only thinking minds and immortal souls without bodies and involvement in time must be protested. But that history which preys upon the past with grand ‘scientific’ models and typologies, summarizing whole centuries with a handful of statistics, must also be reminded of its overweening modern bias.”11 Historians have since come to realize that capturing the multivalence of religious culture requires a reintegration of theology and praxis into their original context, conceived broadly as “outside” ideas, customs, rituals, socioeconomic and political realities, and so on.12 A generation of scholars of eastern and east central European religion has meanwhile emerged with almost unfettered access to archival sources, thanks to the revolutionary events of 1989, as well as the linguistic tools necessary for undertaking this project. On May 18–19, 2008, Professor Matt Goldish and the Melton Center of Jewish Studies at Ohio State University hosted a Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium entitled “Jewish Mystical and Messianic Movements in Their Social and Religious Contexts: The Eastern European Case.” This symposium constituted an unprecedented gathering of historians of Judaism and Christianity in eastern Europe interested in the encounter between Jewish and Christian mystics in the region. Wary of the reductionism that so often bedevils comparative religious approaches, participants made an effort to focus on well-substantiated, if more modest, instances of inter-connectedness and remain sensitive to cultural specificities.13 Their papers—enhanced by fruitful exchanges that occurred during the symposium—form the basis of this volume. Chapters in the volume’s first part examine the impact of the eastern European context on Jewish mystics who remained within the Jewish fold. Chapters in the second part address more thoroughgoing border transgressions among Jewish and Christian mystics alike. The overall focus on religio-cultural exchange in this volume

Introduction

5

is intended to help overcome a stereotyped, diachronic conception of Jewish life in eastern Europe and uncover multiple levels of ambiguity. JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD

While mystics are often associated with insularity, even misanthropy, Jewish mystical praxis in eastern Europe reveals a high degree of external influence. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern illustrates the extraordinary intercultural exchange inherent in magic, folk medicine, and healing. Mystical practitioners known as ba‘alei shem, though well versed in Kabbalah, did not hesitate to consult Christian doctors or borrow remedies and incantations from other Christian sources; and their Christian counterparts borrowed from them. Jewish and Christian healers also drew upon a common, earlier source, the Renaissance physician-philosopher Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim, 1493–1541), and both depended on a single institution—the pharmacy— for filling their often bizarre prescriptions. A similarly complex interplay is described by Hanna We$grzynek in her study of Polish Jewish black weddings, cemetery ceremonies held in hopes of persuading the dead to intercede with the divine to halt epidemics. Slavic Christian, pan-European, and earlier Jewish ritual alike resonated in those ceremonies. The several chapters on Hasidism depart in significant ways from the extensive historiography of the popular mystical movement. Since the field’s inception, social historians have been preoccupied with Hasidism’s alleged class basis: Jews were attracted to Hasidism because they were poor and disenfranchised or because Hasidic gatherings offered the hope of business opportunities.14 Such explanations were probably driven less by romanticization, as is often assumed, than by a more intractable functionalist understanding of religion that rejects the significance and quality of religious belief and practice as such in favor of a totalizing view of economic pragmatism. But the social history of Hasidism need not be burdened with such skepticism. Revisionists have shown that Hasidism’s charismatic leaders enjoyed the sanction and support of elites, that they usually derived from the elite themselves, and that they appealed to Jews along the entire socioeconomic spectrum.15 Contributors to the present volume attempt to move the social history of Hasidism beyond socioeconomic characterizations, so prone to overgeneralization, by exploring the ways in which the movement’s crucial theology and institutional development was shaped by contextual realities like geography, space, and the surrounding non-Jewish population.

6

Introduction

Hasidism’s spiritual founder, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), is usually assumed to have been born and raised in Okopy, a small town in Podolia (present-day Ukraine). Moshe Idel exposes the frailty of this assumption, arguing that a more likely setting for the Besht’s early formative years is a region in the northern Moldavian portion of the Carpathian Mountains known as “Walachia” during that period. This region was then under the influence of hesychastic asceticism, a movement whose techniques for attaining calmness (Hesychia) and communion with God in a state of seclusion bear a striking resemblance to the Besht’s earliest phase of mystical praxis. As Hasidism blossomed into a full-fledged movement during the nineteenth century, its charismatic leaders, known as tzaddikim (or rebbes in Yiddish), established full-fledged courts. My own chapter introduces the case of an aspiring tzaddik named R. Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna) Unger (d. 1883). Unger’s choice of the town of Pia$tek as venue for his fledgling court is representative of a wider phenomenon: when establishing their courts, most tzaddikim tended to eschew cities and villages in favor of small urban settlements with a pronounced Jewish presence known popularly as shtetls, where it was much easier to both dominate the local Jewish community and regulate interactions with local Christians. Paul Radensky analyzes the rise and decline of the opulent court of the “Tolner Rebbe” (Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye). In accounting for the court’s extravagance, Radensky points not only to the tzaddik’s charisma but to external factors as well: placed under house arrest by the tsarist government as a result of his overzealous expansionist initiatives, R. Duvid made a virtue of necessity and transformed his court into a thriving pilgrimage center. At its peak, the Tolner court was a town unto itself. CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS

Some mystics ventured further into the border zone or traversed it altogether. Elliot Wolfson provides an arresting view of the kabbalistically inspired messianism of Immanuel Frommann, a Jewish convert to Christianity. Frommann’s spiritualized approach to commandments not only resembles that of Sabbateans, but also bears an uncanny resemblance to the messianic gnosis that would be developed by the first Hasidic leaders a generation later. Wolfson shows that, while early Hasidim resisted Frommann’s hypernomian extremes, they drew upon the same kabbalistic clusters of symbols to emphasize inward spirituality as the key to redemption.

Introduction

7

The most famous case of Christianizing Jews is the messianic movement that emerged around Jacob Frank, discussed earlier. But Pawel Maciejko finds that Frankists were not the only ones to seek a Jewish-Christian rapprochement. Their chief adversaries, led by Jacob Emden, urged Christian leaders to join ranks with them in combating the Frankist heresy, an effort that forced Emden to recognize certain positive aspects of Christianity. Marsha Keith Schuchard examines the Frankist phenomenon from the Christian perspective, taking us on a tour of the erotically-charged mystical underground in mid-eighteenth century Europe and uncovering a whole web of relations between Frankists or other Sabbateans and prominent Christian mystics like William Blake, Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf, and Baron Emanuel Swedenborg. Harris Lenowitz provides a first analysis of the aspirations of Frank’s daughter, enabler, and messianic successor, Ewa (pronounced “Eva”). The messianic pretender had much to gain from Ewa: her gender allowed him to project female religious identifications onto her; and her education and manners gained him entry into aristocratic court life. Lenowitz describes Ewa’s struggle to break free of her narcissistic father’s hold, if only in her dreams. As mentioned earlier, several Russian Christian dissenting sects embraced overt Judaizing. Eugene Clay portrays the career of the Spiritual Christian prophet Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin (d. 1877), who ordered his followers to observe Old Testament festivals, founded an apocalyptic movement based on Christian and Jewish sources, and consequently suffered lifelong imprisonment. Sergei Zhuk shows how members of the evangelical dissenting sect known as Stundists found common cause with Jewish revolutionaries like Iakov Gordin and Iosif Rabinovich, combining evangelical ideals of social justice with communist utopianism and in some cases converting Jewish revolutionaries to evangelical Christianity. The volume closes with Nicholas Breyfogle’s study of what was perhaps the most extreme Judaizing case, that of Subbotniks. Members of this sect adhered to the tenets of Judaism in varying degrees, actively sought out Jews to teach them, and in certain cases joined the Jewish community outright. Breyfogle uncovers a messianically inspired form of Zionism among Subbotniks, with some members claiming a preeminent place in the new messianic order on the logic that they—in contrast to Jews by birth—were voluntary converts to the “true path.” The publication of this volume owes a great deal to the efforts of Matt Goldish, who conceived and organized the initial conference at Ohio State

8

Introduction

University and offered his continual guidance and encouragement throughout the volume’s preparation. We are indebted to the crucial logistical support provided by the Melton Center of Ohio State University and the Thomas and Diann Mann Distinguished Symposium. Thanks are also due to Terrie Bramley and the Institute for Advanced Study, and to Sarah Lawrence College. Finally, mention must be made of the late Richard Popkin, whose copious scholarship provided a reference point for symposium participants and undergirds the studies collected in the present volume.

NOTES 1. The case of the Towianists in the Kingdom of Poland and their relationship to Jews and Judaism is not treated in this volume, but has been covered extensively by Abraham Duker. See, for example, his “Wladyslaw Dzwonkowski, an ‘Enlightened’ Towianist, on the Jewish Problem, 1862,” in Meyer Waxman Jubilee Volume ( Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, 1966), 57–75; Duker, “The Tarniks (Believers in the Coming of the Messiah in 1840),” in Joshua Starr Memorial Volume (New York, 1953), 191–201; and Duker, “The Polish Great Emigration and the Jews” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1956). 2. Steven Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent: Religious Ideology and Social Protest in the Sixteenth Century (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973), 8. 3. For a summary of early east European Judaizing trends and government reprisals, see John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews: The Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia, 1772–1825 (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 25–28. 4. See the studies on scientific interactions among Jews and Christians in western and central Europe in David Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1995). For an application of models of crosscultural exchange and “connected histories” to Jewish history, see Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), esp. 223–25. 5. The most convincing case for a Haskalah “movement” in eastern Europe is made by Mordecai Zalkin in Ba‘alot ha-Shah≥ar ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 2000). By focusing on institutions, patrons, subscribers, students, and entire families, as opposed to a narrow stratum of celebrity authors, and by mapping Haskalah-oriented schools in key geographical centers, Zalkin uncovers a few hundred foot soldiers in the movement. But Zalkin’s efforts still create the impression of a comparatively small movement. 6. For an overview of many of these themes, see Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in PolandLithuania: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004). On pogroms in particular, see John Klier and Sholomo Lambroza, eds., Pogroms and Anti-Jewish Violence in Modern Russian History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 7. See, for example, Abraham Joshua Heschel, “The Eastern European Era in Jewish History,” in Yivo Annual of Jewish Social Science, vol. 1 (New York: Yiddish Scientific InstituteYivo, 1946), 86–106. 8. The definitive biography is still Gershom Scholem’s Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, trans. R. J. Tzvi Werblowsky (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), and is

Introduction

9

retold with concision and slight revision by David Halperin in Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), introduction. See also crucial revisions with respect to Sabbatai Tzevi’s followers by Matt Goldish, in The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004); and Ada Rapoport-Albert, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666–1816 (Oxford; Portland: Littman Library, 2011). On Jacob Frank, see see Meir Balaban, Toward the History of the Frankist Movement (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:23 (Hebrew); Alexander Kraushar, Frank i frankis´ci polscy (Cracow, 1895), 1:70–73, trans. as Herbert Levy, ed., Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbatarian Heresy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001); Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 236–61; and Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford, 2001), 167–98. A more sanguine view of Frank and Frankism is found in Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 9. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 153–56; and Michal Galas, “Sabbatianism in the Seventeenth-Century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: A Review of the Sources,” in The Sabbatian Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism: Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 17, ed. Rachel Elior (Jerusalem, 2001), 51–63. Jacob Barnai argues that the Chmielnicki massacres in the Ukraine were an important impetus for Sabbateanism. See “The Outbreak of Sabbateanism—The Eastern European Factor,” Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 4 (1994): 171–83. 10. For the application of this approach to Jewish history, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History? (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), esp. chapter 5, and Adam Teller and Magda Teter’s introduction to Polin 22 (2010): “Borders and Boundaries in the Historiography of the Jews in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth,” 3–46. 11. Ozment, Mysticism and Dissent, xi. 12. Examples within the present scope include Matt Goldish and Richard Henry Popkin, eds., Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001); Richard Henry Popkin, James E. Force, and David S. Katz, eds., Everything Connects: In Conference with Richard H. Popkin: Essays in His Honor (Leiden: Brill, 1999); Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets; Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Jewish Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001); Arthur Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Its Historical Context,” AJS Review 26 (2002): 1–52; Harvey Hames, Like Angels on Jacob’s ladder: Abraham Abulafia, the Franciscans and Joachimism (New York: State University of New York Press, 2007); Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, esp. 176–79; and Adam Teller, “Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 1–29. For pioneering studies on medieval Jewish culture, see Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006); and Elisheva Baumgarten, Mothers and Children: Jewish Family Life in Medieval Europe (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2007). See also the observations about Judaizing sects by Bernard Weinryb in The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972); and Mark Steinberg and Heather Coleman, eds., Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), on the impact of the modernization process. 13. On the dangers of an overgeneralized comparative religious approach, see Steven T. Katz, “Language, Epistemology, and Mysticism,” in Mysticism and Philosophical Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), 22–73.

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14. Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-H≥asidut (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1975), 8–9 and 36; Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, vol. 1, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1916), 220–34; Benzion Dinur, “The Origins of Hasidism and Its Social and Messianic Foundations,” in Gershon Hundert, Essential Papers on Hasidism (New York: New York University Press, 1991), esp. 136–37; Joseph Weiss, “Some Notes on the Social Background of Early Hasidism,” Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press for the Littman Library, 1985), 3–26; Raphael Mahler on the “plebeian” origin of tzaddikim in Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, ed. Eugene Orenstein (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1985), 7–10. The first claim about Hasidic business connections was made by Klemens Junosza, in his Nasi Zy{ dzi w miasteczkach i na wsiach (Warsaw, 1889), 67. 15. See Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); and Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). Yeshayahu Shahar’s systematic analysis of Hasidic attitudes toward wealth actually finds less concern for social justice in Hasidic literature than in its non-Hasidic counterparts. See Bikoret ha-h≥evrah ve-hanhagat ha-tzibor be-sifrut ha-musar ve-ha-drush be-Polin ba-meah ha-shmonah asar ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Dinur, 1992). Mention should also be made of Ignacy Schiper’s recently discovered manuscript, published as Przyczynki do dziejów chasydyzmu w centralnej Polsce, ed. Zbigniew Targielski (Warsaw: PWN, 1992), esp. 62.

I JEWISH MYSTICS IN A CHRISTIAN WORLD

“You Will Find It in the Pharmacy” Practical Kabbalah and Natural Medicine in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1690–1750

Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern

Two basic tendencies seem to characterize scholarly analyses of Slavic-Jewish contacts in the field of popular magic. The first is an essentially binary framing of mutual influence: either Slavic culture is understood to reflect a Jewish impact, or Jewish culture to reflect a Slavic one. The second tendency is to scrutinize Jewish-Slavic contacts through the prism of linguistics, anthropology, sociology, or philology, while eliding specific historical contexts. Typical in both of these respects is Olga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin’s Jewish Myth in Slavic Culture, the latest and perhaps most exhaustive study of the Slavic-Jewish interface. The authors correctly depict popular magic as a field “particularly open to cultural contacts,” emphasizing that Jews and Slavs “cooperated intensively in the sphere of demonology,” and amass manifold examples from data collected by ethnographers over the span of three centuries. But they construe this cooperation exclusively as “Slavic borrowings from Jews” or “Jewish reflections of Slavic influences”; and they present it as a uniform longue durée without historical specificities and local dynamics.1 Useful as their compilation may be, we are thus left with some vexing questions. Was the Judeo-Slavic encounter a strictly back-and-forth dynamic? Did the intensity of those contacts perhaps vary according to

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geographic region or proximity to prominent Jewish communities? And in a broader context, to what extent did the attested Slavic-Jewish interaction in the sphere of magic differ from Christian-Jewish analogous encounters in other countries of Europe? This paper assumes that it is misleading to conceive of a three-hundredyear period of Slavic-Jewish contact in a homogeneous, bilateral manner. Rather than Slavic influences on Jews or vice versa, I argue that a common source—early modern pharmacology—was responsible for the fascinating proximity of magical beliefs and natural medical remedies. What follows is a foray into shared realities and values by Jews and Slavs within a precise historical context, namely, eastern Poland during the last decade of the seventeenth century through the first half of the eighteenth century, a period marked by the belated discovery of Paracelsus and the nexus he posited between medicine, human health, and chemistry. Our discussion thus begins at a time when Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Jewish paramedics created a shared culture based on the medicine and alchemy of Paracelsus, and ends with an assault on that shared culture by proponents of Enlightenment.2 A special effort is made to reconstruct non-Jewish eastern European natural medicine, the often neglected context of Jewish magic and practical Kabbalah.3 It is my hope that the paradigm of shared culture presented here will help free the historiography from the dominant binary of cultural separateness/mutual influence. BA‘AL SHEM AS SHAMAN, HEALER, AND PARAMEDIC

Relations between Jews and Slavs (Catholics and Russian Orthodox) in eastern Poland at the end of the seventeenth and into the early eighteenth centuries, although strained in certain instances, were usually characterized by a fertile symbiosis in a variety of spheres within the borders of shtetls— private magnate-owned towns and, to a lesser degree, royal towns, where Jewish presence was more limited. There were intensive contacts between Jewish lease holders and the szlachta (Polish gentry), between Jewish artisans and Polish city dwellers, between peasants and Jewish grain traders, and between Jewish households and the Christian servants they employed as cooks and wet nurses. Of course, this was still the case as late as the late nineteenth century, yet the period in question is marked by a number of distinctive features: the rise of the subculture of ba‘alei shem (practical Kabbalists); the spread of natural medical knowledge; the development of an early hasidism—ascetic pietism among scattered elitist groups of mystics

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from whose midst emerged the spiritual founder of a new Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer (Ba‘al Shem Tov, ca. 1700–60); and the establishment of pharmacies and pharmacists in shtetls. Both Italy and Germany witnessed the phenomenon of itinerant herbal healers and alchemists during this period, yet Tobias Cohen (1652–1729), a medical doctor with firsthand knowledge of eastern Europe, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire, observed that amulets, practical Kabbalah, and magic were nowhere as popular as in his contemporary Poland.4 Sebastian Sleszkowski, court doctor and secretary of King Zygmunt III Waza, concurred, to judge by the idiosyncratic, derogatory manner in which he referred to the abundance of Jews acting as itinerant healers in eastern Poland.5 Moshe Rosman has explained that in the eastern European Jewish community, ba‘alei shem performed a shamanic function: to restore social order or provide personal security, they mediated between empiric reality and divine realms, this world and the netherworld, spirits and living beings. They employed magical remedies and mystical devices, Lurianic and popular Kabbalah, local folk herbal remedies and traditional Hebrew acronyms, encrypted biblical verses (gematriah) and amulets (kameya‘).6 In order to restore communal order, prevent natural disasters (floods, fires, epidemics), or provide a patient with personal security, ba‘alei shem manipulated holy names (shemot ha-kedushah), including divine and angelic names, and also the names of evil spirits and Satan (shemot ha-tumah). The ba‘al shem acted as a magician and hypnotist, but also as a therapist, pediatrician, urologist, obstetrician, psychiatrist, homeopath, parapsychologist, and family doctor. Jews and gentiles from all walks of life (the wealthiest Polish magnates included) turned to ba‘alei shem to cure infertility, sexual disorders, and seminal emissions, to ensure safe childbirth, control epidemics, protect a person or personal habitat from a disaster like murder, fire, robbery, or the evil eye, predict fate, reveal suppressed desires or “read” dreams, banish Lilith or other demons (mazikim), treat depression, and exorcise evil spirits (dybbuks).7 Contemporary witnesses such as Pinh≥as Katznellenbogen (1691–ca. 1760) attest to the enormous popularity of the ba‘alei shem and magic among the various strata of eastern European Jewish society. While pietists such as Isaiah Horowitz rearticulated everyday Jewish practices (halakhah) along the lines of Lurianic Kabbalah, ba‘alei shem cast the entire Jewish worldview and Jewish self-perception in a kabbalistic mold. Those who acted as ba‘alei shem included prominent communal leaders (Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz from the Triple Community, Rabbi Seckel Wormser from Michelstadt, Rabbi Elijah from Chelm, and Rabbi Hirsch Frankel from Ansbach), reputed preachers

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( Jacob Pesakh ben Yitzh≥ak, maggid meisharim from Z{ółkiew), communitysponsored mystics and healers (Israel ben Eliezer from Mie$dzyboz[, the Besht), self-employed non-itinerant healers ( Joel Heilperin from Zamos´c´), and itinerant Kabbalists (Binyamin Beinish ha-Cohen from Krotoszyn). Nonitinerant ba‘alei shem, such as Ephraim Reisher, dayan (judge) from Rzeszów, or Joel ben Uri Heilperin from Zamos´c´, called themselves indiscriminately ba‘al shem or ba‘al shem tov, but itinerant ba‘alei shem apparently did not add tov (“good”) to their name. Revisionist historians thus maintain that a number of ba‘alei shem possessed status and attended to various strata of the eastern European population, including members of the Polish gentry and other Polish Catholics, entire Jewish communities and communal leaders, and Russian Orthodox peasants.8 According to one scholar of Polish medicine, Christians in Poland considered shepherds, smiths, millers, gypsies, cabmen, and Jews to be healers (znachory).9 Although ba‘alei shem shared many common features and practices with the shamanic figures of various cultures and cults, ba‘alei shem differed in their use of practical Kabbalah devices, which originated from magical manipulations of mystically conceived Jewish rites.10 Unlike most of their Christian colleagues, who relied on the magical power of religious texts, images, and relics, ba‘alei shem drew their inspiration from the letters of the Hebrew alphabet.11 The widespread belief in the power of textual amulets among gentiles stemmed from the popular belief in the holiness of Christian texts;12 but the power of Jewish amulets stemmed from the popular belief in Hebrew letters as primordial forms that shaped the world and nurtured its creative energy.13 According to the plain meaning of the Mishnah, Hebrew letters were created before the sunset of the first Sabbath (Avot 5:8); however, kabbalistic tradition situates the creation of the letters before the creation (Sefer Yetzirah 1:2–3, 2:4). The letters were claimed to have functioned as the very instruments of creation: they stood in immediate proximity to the source of creative energy, and by virtue of their origin possessed supernatural qualities. The use of Hebrew letters on an amulet (segulah) therefore ensured its effectiveness. Since the Kabbalists perceived Torah as a universal set of codes and keys that helped release the hidden energy of Hebrew letters and channel it toward a certain end, ba‘alei shem utilized Torah verses in their healing remedies. In addition, they drew heavily upon the local popular oral traditions and additional aspects of the written corpus (both published and unpublished) of practical Kabbalah. At the same time, contemporary medicine, which scholars have hitherto overlooked as a source of knowledge for ba‘alei shem, provided them with a

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key reservoir of meanings, ideas, values, and remedies. Written and printed sources on early eighteenth-century practical Kabbalah widely quote the remedies and methods of “the famous (mefursam) Doctor Simh≥ah.”14 Simkhah Menah≥em ben Yoh≥anan Barukh de Yona (also known as Emanuel de Jona, d. 1702), was a court doctor to the Polish king Jan III Sobieski (1629–96). Between 1664 and 1668, Simkhah studied medicine at the University of Padua and later worked as a medical doctor in Z{ółkiew and Lwów, next to a newly emerging center of kabbalistic printing and in close proximity to Zamos´c´, the hometown of Joel Ba‘al Shem ( Joel ben Uri Heilperin), author of a number of popular books on practical Kabbalah.15 Another medical authority who was cited frequently in kabbalistic treatises was doctor Yakov Zahalon, rabbi and therapist, graduate of the department of medicine of the University of Rome, who lived and worked in Rome and earned fame for his popular medical tractate Otzar ha-hayim (Venice, 1683).16 Moshe de Campos, a Jewish doctor from Portugal, arrived at the prominent Zamojski court with a letter of recommendation in Latin written in Amsterdam by Doctor Joseph Bonus; it is plausible that he also had contacts with Polish Jewish healers.17 Hillel Ba‘al Shem, to believe the autobiographical digressions in his kabbalistic manuscript Sefer ha-H˘eshek (1739/40), studied medicine privately with Avraham Isaac Fortish (or Fortis, also known as Avraham Hazak), a medical doctor from a Polish-Italian Jewish family and most likely a graduate of the University of Mantua and a disciple of Moshe Zacuto (1620–97). Fortish was active in Lwów and Rzeszów, where he served as court doctor for the Lubomirski and the Potocki families of magnates.18 Hillel Ba‘al Shem repeatedly refers to Fortish’s authority, particularly on issues of hygiene, epidemiology, diseases, balsams, and herbs.19 According to Hillel: Above all we need to be careful and make sure that all the houses and rooms will be cleaned, particularly the latrines, from any rubbish and reeking and from any garbage, dirt or refuse. This was the statement made by the doctor from Rome [Zahalon], and the expert who told me about it was the famous doctor, our Rabbi, renowned in all the Polish lands, a great man full of perfection, of blessed memory, whose name was Yitzh≥ak Ayzik Fortis(h) in the Latin language.20

Joel Ba‘al Shem from Zamos´c´ also quotes Fortish, although infrequently. Even if ba‘alei shem did not have such direct contacts with medical doctors, they still had access to their recipes, prescriptions, and books. Otherwise

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it is inexplicable why their language should have duplicated that of Polish paramedics and professional doctors so precisely. MEDICAL SLANG OF THE BA‘ALEI SHEM

Zeev Gries has referred to books as the “agents of culture,” a metaphor that deftly captures the meaning of the kabbalistic subculture created during the proliferation of printed and handwritten books on practical Kabbalah in the eighteenth century.21 But it is also important to stress that kabbalistic books, written in Hebrew in central and eastern Poland, had a mediating function, introducing the Jewish reader to elements of Slavic popular beliefs, Slavic popular medicine, and Slavic healing practices. Although western and central European Jewish printing presses did publish books on practical Kabbalah (for example, Sefer Raziel ha-Malakh, Amsterdam, 1701; Amtah≥at binyamin, Wilhelmsdorf, 1717), the Z{ółkiew printing press published more than all the other European printing presses combined. Established in early 1690 by a former Amsterdam printer, Uri Phoebus (Faivush) ha-Levy (d. ca. 1704), the Z{ółkiew printing press produced more than those in Lublin and Cracow (even the Council of Four Lands could not save these two from bankruptcy), and attained an absolute monopoly on eastern European Jewish printing by the early 1700s.22 In the first half of the eighteenth century, Aaron and David, the grandsons of the founder of the printing press, published such popular works on practical Kabbalah as Sefer karnayim (1709), Zevah≥ pesah≥ (1722), Shem Ya‘akov (1711), Toldot adam (1720), Mifa‘alot ’elokim (1710; 1724; 1725), Divrei h≥akhamim (1725; 1730); Lashon h≥akhamim ve-lashon paz (1747), Shem tov katan (1750), and a number of more traditional Kabbalah books like Keren ohr (1721), Kitzur shnei lukhot ha-berit (1725; 1740), and Tikuney ha-Zohar (1740).23 Many practical Kabbalah books appeared as pocket-size (octavo), easyto-handle, user-friendly, inexpensive, and short (about 100–150 pages, but sometimes only 30 page) works, containing an index of most common diseases and healing remedies. Like many other books on practical Kabbalah, Z{ółkiew books offered their readers a variety of magical amulets, recipes, and natural medical remedies, employing sophisticated kabbalistic acronyms (rashey and sofey tevot, for example). However, in contrast to many other books of this genre, especially of Italian, Dutch, and German origin, the Z{ółkiew publications drew heavily from eastern European popular medicine and folk beliefs. To introduce medical remedies, kabbalistic and rabbinic books on practical Kabbalah would filter Latin, German, Polish, Ukrainian, and Belarusian

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notions through the Yiddish vernacular. Hillel Ba‘al Shem, who traveled in the 1730s through eastern Galicia, Podolia, Volhynia, and Belarus, resorted to both general Polish pharmacological terminology in his kabbalistic discourse— plaster, kwarta, litr, wanna, syrop, funt, belladona, walerjana (plaster, quart, liter, bath, syrup, pound, belladonna [plant], valerian [root])—and to the popular Slavic terminology designating various healing remedies, local professions, and artifacts—majewij barszcz, krapiwa, gorczyca, woronii koren, piawki, kowal’, stal’ (May Borscht [plant], nettles, mustard, Raven Root, leeches, smith, steel).24 Joel Ba‘al Shem, active as a practical Kabbalist at the end of the 1690s and early 1700s in Zamos´c´, used in his recipes tzibulia (onion), the seeds of the plant ognennaia kost (fire bone), ruta (rue), malwa (mallow), smetana (sour cream), petrushka (parsley), and a wide array of “Slavic herbs” (all words of Ukrainian or Polish origin). He also used medical vocabulary extensively, most likely borrowed from the pharmacological lexicon, such as myrrh, elixirs, balsams, plasters, camphor, and Artemisia.25 Consider one of the characteristic prescriptions by Hillel Ba‘al Shem: “You should not give your patient any laxatives even if he does not defecate for ten days; there is no reason to worry. And afterwards you should give him an enema with milk, sugar, and butter.”26 Similarly, a collection of seventeenth-century medical recipes composed, most likely, by and for Christians prescribed enemas with natural substances, such as a handful of dry rose petals diluted in cream and honey.27 Kabbalists quite often resorted to non-Jewish vocabulary to convey more accurately the meaning of this or that disease, which, they maintained, had arisen due to laxity in fulfilling commandments. Thus, for example, a person who engaged in excessive gossiping, drunkenness, and sexual promiscuity was more likely to develop podagra (gout).28 Jewish healers routinely prescribed natural medical remedies, as attested in extant eighteenth-century Polish Hebrew manuscripts. For example, an anonymous and untitled manuscript on practical Kabbalah—a collection of segulot and refu’ot in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw—suggested the following measures to improve one’s memory and retain what one has learned: take some grass called “the tongue of the bull” (lashon shor) and eat it every morning or drink the liquid from the moss. To secure procreation and prevent impotence, the same manuscript prescribed taking the spleen of a newborn colt, frying it in a frying pan, and eating it with eggs over three consecutive days—or hanging the head of a female mouse around one’s neck.29 Along similar lines, a popular late seventeenth-century Polish primer on natural remedies advised: to heal a wound, take a dead dog’s head, dry it, burn it to ashes, and apply it to the wound; to cure fevers and aches, use

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Hillel Ba‘al Shem, Sefer ha-h≥eshek, 1739–1740, ff. 17b–18. Chiromantic diagrams displaying the role of kabbalistic abbreviations in fortunetelling. Source: Pavel Fishel, Jewish Calendar, 5766 (2006–07) (Kiev: Dukh i Litera, 2006).

birds’ nests as bandages, and to reduce fever, take a piece of horse manure, put it in a kerchief, squeeze the juice out of it, mix it with wine or beer and feed it to the sick person.30 Both Jews and Poles reckoned that the best way to prevent epidemics was to shut the windows and burn (“smoke”) incense, manure, bones, and dirt in a house with the doors firmly closed, believing that Satan, associated with the plague, would be unable to tolerate the smell. Despite obvious religious differences, Jews and Slavs thus partook of a single popular culture. In both Jewish and Christian sources one finds a prohibition against urinating before the New Moon (to avoid inadvertently causing the death of a newborn child) or looking intensely at a rainbow (to avoid blindness), the advice to drink one’s urine before an arrest (to avoid a guilty verdict) or hang a dog’s tooth around one’s neck (to avoid talking in one’s sleep). Jakub Haur (more on his books below) advised eating dried and crumbled otter or hedgehog to cure koltun, a hair disease (Plica Polonica). Polish historians mention that in eastern Europe some placed wormwood in houses to scare away demons. Pharmacists sold dead or mummified doves and frogs for medical treatment, and even the most illustrious doctors prescribed rue, camphor, and children’s urine to battle epidemics.31 A Ukrainian

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scholar of witchcraft describes the use of knots, nails, dead man’s bones and teeth, excrement, sand and rubbish, and especially pieces of hangman or churchbell ropes for magical purposes.32 But if those measures proved ineffective, Polish healers—Jews, Lutherans, Russian Orthodox, Uniates, and Catholics alike—resorted to the magic of words, seeking to cure their patient with incantations. As we shall see momentarily, Jewish shamans resorted to Slavic incantations and Slavs turned to Hebrew ones—emphasizing the practical and magical aspects of incantations and avoiding, as much as they could, but not always very successfully, their theological aspects. HEALING IN A SLAVIC KEY

In 1921, the Jewish Historical Commission at the Narkompross (People’s Commissariat of Education) received for temporary use a three-hundredpage, early eighteenth-century manuscript in octavo from the town of Smilovichi in Belarus. It was a Hebrew composition on practical Kabbalah containing not only Hebrew-language explanations of kabbalistic prayers and descriptions of mystical practices, but also Belarusian-language names of trees, roots, and flowers used for healing purposes, healing remedies, and incantations against various diseases. Most likely the manuscript was lost in the 1920s; yet a number of fragments of its Slavic incantations, recorded in Hebrew transliteration, were preserved in the sole scholarly article to discuss its contents. Consider the following incantation aimed at banishing a disease with the help of God’s name: “Pryshla shuda da tago Ploni tsi ad khvaroby ad palakhni tsi ad paddyman tsi ad charavan’ne zakazue ia tabe Boskim imiam shto nebo i zemlia iztvaryl . . . pashla gidze tebe pan Bog tvaryl da pupa ne da glavy ne da sertsu ne da boku . . . ne dykhu i vystupai z tykh mestsa gedze tabe ne naleze Bozhim imiam omeyn navek.”33 The seven-hundred-page Sefer ha-H˘eshek, started most likely in Podolia or Volhynia, and finished somewhere around Słuck, contains similar incantations recorded in a mixture of Polish and Ukrainian in Hebrew transliteration by Hillel Ba‘al Shem: “Verby verbitze voz’mi ot tego Ploni ben Ploni propashitzi iak ty sotriasai nad vodoiu, tak tebe sotriasla propashnitzi ot Ploni ben Ploni, ot iago bialogo tila, ot ego chervona krev.”34 Such incantations represent a curious amalgam of Jewish and Christian beliefs, an amalgam whose meaning cannot be reduced to the sum of its parts. Judaic tradition understands the Almighty as the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, as the God of the Chosen People and as the God associated with the exodus from Egypt and redemption of His nation from Egyptian bondage (Deut. 5:6). According to the medieval Spanish Jewish poet Yehuda

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Halevy, if for Christians God is the Creator of Heaven and Earth, for Jews God is the God of their national history (Kuzari 1:25). Unlike the traditional Jewish conception of the divine, amalgamated incantations manifest Christian, Catholic, or Russian Orthodox yet markedly Old Testament-esque connotations. Both kabbalistic incantations address God as He “who created heaven and earth,” not He who “took us out of the Land of Egypt.” These syncretistic incantations also reflect pagan elements (for example, they address in the name of God the healing tree verba—willow, asking it to cure the body of a sick person), Christian ceremonies, and popular Slavic (Ukrainian and/or Polish) rhymes and rhythms, all elements typical of rural folklore. Hillel Ba‘al Shem employed an incantation that brings together some obvious Christian allusions (chernetz and chernytzia—a monk and a nun) as well as kabbalistic-rabbinic allusions like the idea of the 248 parts of the human body: Podi sebe z tego Ploni ben Ploni od vshystkikh dveso (200) shterdesti (40) i osm (8) chlonkikh imenem Boshkim ktury istvoryl nebo i zemliu bendze mi na dopomotze iak uv den taki v notse i vazyvaiu i vyklykaiu zaklinaiu imenem Boskim ktury iztvoril nebo i zemiu bendze mi dopomotzi tego Ploni ben Ploni riatuvatz. Zheby Bozhe zhyvy, v tebe shyre sertze, sluzhil. . . . Ia, Ploni ben Ploni, imenem Boskim ot(s)ylaiu, za chernym morem na trestenitzy, tam i znaidesh cherno i chernitze, tam rashchengaeshsia i tam krev vypyvaie, a tomu Ploni ben Ploni pokidai naveki.35

Compare this Hebrew transcription of a Slavic incantation with a late seventeenth–early eighteenth-century incantation recorded by a Polish scholar: “Boz[a$ moca$, Panny Mariej pomoca$, Wszystkich s´wie$tych pomoca$, by mu nie stanowiło, jako pirwy było, skóra z skóra$, kos´c´ z kos´cia$, w Imie$ Ojca i Syna i Ducha [s´]wia$tego.”36 Consider also evidence from a Polishowned manuscript that recommends a Hebrew conjuration (taken from the fifth chapter of the famous magical treatise Solomon’s Key) presenting a remarkable concoction of Jewish prayers, including penitential ones, and containing the enunciation aloud (forbidden in Judaism) of the four-letter name of God transcribed in Latin letters: Da Pys[. . .]ne, mi, atu, ai met; melech mauche hamlochem, hakudaus. Boruh, hu, Iechowa, iut, hai, wof, hai [ four times]—Aba, beryia, ama, yecyra, zo esai mukwe, iut, ha, wof, ha—wenialdaja hakol, tenfilin, laja freno, biwris, anlauheho, pajhotau, Kaiwonat, damen, hoio, hoiwe, wenhieie, kawonas, daiamen, dankadis,

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iehodunki, ithenau, ono, baykauh, gedolas, ieminho, tatir, cenruro, kabelrunas, anho. Sakweynu, tahareuny, nauro, no; gibaur, daurszei, ienhudiho, kenwowas, [P]zaumrem, birhem, taharem, rahmem, sitkafka, tanmit gaumlem, koszen. Kodaus, banraf, tahel, anhel, andoytchowhet gorio, laiamho, penay, zauther, kandusoscho, szauwieszynu, iaudeja, talumas baruh szem, kewault, malhusa, wuet, ono, godal, lucy, anderninihal, Jehowa, El, rahum, wayhanon, eireh apaim, wanraf heiset, veiemes, nocer cheyset, lalofim, nausauwun, wupesa, wanhatuo, wannakar, wenesefiweaies, wenio ipa, ei wii pacwem, lanro . . .37

Slavic incantations transliterated into Hebrew, Hebrew incantations transliterated into Latin and inserted into a Polish manuscript, and Polish incantations in Polish share the same rhythm, syntactical rhymes that sometimes defy all rules of semantics and grammar, magical usage of divine names, and a firm conviction that a healer can pronounce these incantations effectively against the disease. Given these proximities, one cannot but agree with Belova and Petrukhin, who point to “a literal similarity” of the elements of popular beliefs among Jews and Slavs.38 But ba‘alei shem and their Polish counterparts built upon a common foundation. EASTERN EUROPEAN NATURAL MEDICINE

Natural medicine is based on a belief in the healing functions of botanical species, and this belief was shared by practically everybody in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth. This syncretistic medicine drew from the purported healing qualities of plants, roots, herbs, stones, extracts, and tinctures prepared on their bases, and on chemical substances immediately available for an eastern European village, town, or shtetl-dweller. A late seventeenthcentury Polish manuscript, “Notes, Prescriptions, and Home Medical Recipes,” by a certain Adam Smielowski, a pious person with strong interests in theology, ancient history, law, and the Old Testament, contains among other things a detailed Latin and Polish list of popular herbs and a medical discourse on healing herbs like lavender, Melissa, and cloves. An eighteenthcentury Polish manuscript entitled “Secret Adorning and Curing of the Head and Its Parts” suggests a variety of wines, balsams, and essences to cure diseases, prevent hair loss, treat noises and winds in one’s head, and help one achieve an erection.39 Another Polish manuscript, “An Expert Doctor,” combines astrology and natural medicine, explaining when to gather roots and herbs, when a natural remedy does or does not help, on what days to purify the stomach, how to diagnose a disease based on the color of the

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blood, and how to treat urinating dysfunction and impotence.40 Consider also a late seventeenth–early eighteenth-century manuscript containing lists of remedies and entitled “Domestic and Tested Medicine.” This manuscript prescribes powders and vodkas for heart tremors, baths for epidemics, bandages, discusses types of humor and blood, and, most important, includes small pieces of paper with various medical recipes. The owner meticulously collected and attached them to the manuscript, which was apparently a guide to creating a home pharmacy.41 The Polish manuscript “Literary and Medical Varieties” contains, among interesting predictions of famine and other calamities for 1724–29, rules of fortunetelling, basic elements of astrology, and various natural remedies for aural disabilities, stomach purification, tuberculosis, eye diseases, dysentery, hemorrhage, and so on. A medical manuscript entitled “Medicine. Domestic Healing Recipes” recommends using wormwood for stomach indigestion; onion, lard, and herbs for worms, diarrhea, and headaches; wine with cinnamon and ginger for heartache; and a mix of bull’s manure with warmed beer for colic. The eighteenth-century manuscript “Descriptions of Various Herbs” prescribes wild angelica, plums, parsnip, cloves, mint, rosemary, pumpkin, marjoram, wormwood, and absinth—as well as the essences, syrups, and tinctures made thereof—for treating stomach ailments, worms, diarrhea, and other dysfunctions. These and similar manuscripts illustrate the extent to which natural remedies formed part of the reading and writing experiences of the intellectual elite of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Poland.42 While manuscripts had limited circulation, natural medicine made its way to the popular consumer through newly published Polish books. Throughout the seventeenth century, most Polish medical doctors and students of medicine published their treatises in Latin. Their publications were voluminous compendia in duo or in quarto, targeting teachers and students of medicine and pharmacology. At the very end of the seventeenth century, Polish language books on applied medicine translated from German began to appear. Their authors gave a detailed explanation of the influence of the seasons on human health, of causes of headaches, eye inflammation and ear infections, and of remedies for fevers, toothaches, dry coughs, kidney pains, diarrhea, and melancholy. They offered a variety of rubbing remedies, balsams, and herbal vodkas, able, according to the highest medical authorities, to cure both stomachache and hypochondria.43 Simultaneously, and perhaps under the direct impact of the translated German volumes, Polish medical doctors began to publish heavily indexed

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200- to 400-page books in the Polish language. Most of them were published in handy in octavo editions. These books provide large-type descriptions of diseases and medical remedies, organized in concise and practical chapter titles and subchapters, and with a meticulous index—undoubtedly targeting a mass readership of Polish urban dwellers, clerics, and gentry.44 Of particular interest among these books are Compendium medicum (1704, 1719–3rd edition),45 Promptuarium medicum (1716),46 and Vademecum medicum (1721).47 Like Hebrew books on popular medicine (which appeared slightly later), Polish tractates introduced the reader to various homemade healing remedies, medical herbs, and alchemic recipes, all of which drew heavily upon natural medicine. Later there emerged even more accessible books like A Pharmacy for Those Who Do Not Have a Doctor, which recommended a healthy lifestyle, dairy and vegetarian diets, vodka washings, and drinking herbal liquors, all required for the preservation of good health without an expensive doctor.48 A comparison of these books with the Hebrew kabbalistic works Mifa‘alot ’elokim, Toldot adam, Zevah≥ pesah≥, and Keter shem tov—also targeting a broader audience and relying on popular medicine—demonstrates that similar prescriptions for magical remedies (refu’ot and segulot) made their way into Jewish books. The title pages of these books leave little doubt that tractates on Jewish practical Kabbalah were closely related to Polish books on popular medicine. According to the Compendium medicum’s introduction, the book provides a “brief description of diseases, internal and external, male, female, and childhood diseases, their differences, their causes, ways to treat them easily at home, particularly for those who for various reasons cannot afford a doctor. Also, various methods of preparing vodkas, liquors, simple and complex healing remedies and syrups. Contains a home pharmacy in addendum. For the general reader, so that everybody can have this book at home and will be able to help his brethren.” On the first page of his preface to Mifa‘alot ’elokim, Joel Ba‘al Shem evinced a similar goal, addressing his book “in particular to the dwellers of small towns who do not have doctors. And although there are doctors in big towns, this book will suit the needs of the poor who cannot afford a doctor.” Slavs and Jews shared all sorts of healing practices. An anonymous copyist of Compendium medicum added to his Polish copy a description of Jewish remedies: “I heard this from a Jewess”; someone had used the remedy to cure “a Jewish girl who developed gangrene of the leg.”49 Joel Ba‘al Shem did not hesitate to mention in his kabbalistic book that he obtained a prescription from a non-Jewish doctor, Morits Ungrin (most likely from

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Hungary).50 Hillel Ba‘al Shem followed suit: “In the localities where there are pharmacies you should regularly purchase the following remedies: if a patient has hemorrhage and if he normally vomits but he cannot vomit, you should take a juice called siropus emutica (syrup) one kvint and melt it on a fire, [add] four liters rosenwasser (rose water), warm it up properly, and give to the patient to drink and he will vomit.”51 Kabbalistic references in Polish medical manuscripts suggest that natural medicine in Jewish books was a shared cultural experience rather than the result of Polish influence. A German-born and Polish-based medical doctor—or a pharmacist, most likely from Nies´wiez[—copied by hand into his manuscript, “Tractates on Magic and Kabbalah,” several lengthy excerpts from two Latin esoteric books of occult wisdom, Solomon’s Keys and Pneumatic Philosophy and Solomon’s Semaphoras.52 He meticulously reproduced the Hebrew names of the planets as well as alchemical and astrological symbols, which demonstrated an interest in Kabbalah among Polish readers.53 Another Polish-Latin manuscript entitled “Solomon’s Collected Acts,” which also quotes from Claviculae Salomonis, defines Kabbalah as “a science or knowledge received from the forefathers.” It outlines aspects of exorcisms, providing all sorts of Latin and Polish incantations against demons and evil spirits, and promotes the magical use of the tetragrammaton. The Polish manuscript applies Hebrew names, words, and notions for healing purposes. This manuscript also contains various diagrams and drawings of alchemical and kabbalistic substances, symbols, and signs. It spells out Solomon’s secret methods of melting various metals, and explains the mutual impact and connections between planets, spirits, and herbs. It describes, as do many other Judaic and Slavic books and manuscripts of the late seventeenth– early eighteenth-centuries, amulets and remedies to cure diseases, prevent accidents, reveal evil, protect one from sudden death, and cause one to be loved by all—exactly as one finds in Sefer ha-H˘eshek and printed books on practical Kabbalah.54 Natural medicine shaped the practice of Polish doctors in the same way it permeated the language of the ba‘alei shem. Many healers in Poland resorted to natural medicine based on violets, aloe, verbena, kalian, chestnut, herbs, and wormwood. Doctor Israel Conrad advised a member of the illustrious Zamojski family to keep a good diet, eat moderately, abstain from coffee and smoking, take regular outdoor walks, and use enemas and natural medical remedies like the essences of antisurbutica and stomachica. He emphasized, very much in the spirit of the epoch, that the great God blessed the practice of medicine.55 In another case, Doctor Simon Dobrochowski implored the

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members of Anna Zamojska’s household in the 1690s not to drink wine three times a day, which, he claimed, caused dysfunction of the bile. Rather, they were advised to use balsams, essences, liquors, and elixirs, observe a specially prescribed diet, and receive bloodletting.56 Among other sources, they relied on popular Polish editions of manuals on herbal medicine such as the early seventeenth-century Zielnik by Szymon Syreniusz that targeted, among others, “doctors, pharmacists, and barbers.”57 This existence of a common pool of popular medical concepts sometimes manifested itself in unexpected ways. For example, Polish and Jewish printers shared book vignettes, and the same vignettes appeared both in Polish books on astrology and Hebrew books on Kabbalah.58 Some of the cryptic symbols used by Jewish Kabbalists bear a striking, almost exact resemblance to the pharmaceutical and alchemical symbols in early modern Polish manuscripts (especially for mercury, antimony, saltpeter, and sulfur).59 Polish medical, alchemical, and pharmacological manuscripts usually appeared in quarto, bound in wood with leather corners—exactly the form of Sefer ha-H˘eshek by Hillel Ba‘al Shem, who seems to have not only shared the vocabulary and modus operandi of the surrounding pharmacists but also the physical look of alchemical manuscripts.60 AN UNUSUAL WITNESS

Books and manuscripts reflect elite cultural pursuits. In addition to these agents of high culture, there is an unusual grassroots witness to the high popularity of natural medicine among the multi-ethnic and socially mixed inhabitants of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the calendar. Between 1697 and 1763, about 800 editions of calendars were published. Nearly all were prepared by professionals—mathematicians, alchemists, and medical doctors—and appeared in octavo, between eighteen and thirty-six pages, on cheap yellowish paper. As known from nineteenth-century records (if one can trust this data), their circulation was more than seven times that of popular books. On several calendars it was stated directly that they were meant to reach “doctors and barbers,” explaining elements of astrology and alchemy to them and suggesting propitious and non-propitious days for the treatment of patients.61 Other calendars revealed their intended addressees— paramedics and their clientele—by providing lists of days when it is better to give or take certain pills and remedies and on the proper dates for bloodletting.62 At least one calendar, published in 1732, included a poem dedicated to pharmacists.63 Calendars reached other strata of the Polish population as

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well. A traveling merchant could find useful information on the distances between eastern European towns, while a clerk could check the dates of the month when mail arrived to and from Dubno and Warsaw.64 Polish calendars were used by Catholics, Russian Orthodox, Uniates, and Jews.65 Calendars popularized contemporary knowledge. Thus, a Lublin “Historical-Political Calendar” for 1742 contained daily verses from the Holy Writ, the names of European cardinals, information on the internal composition of the Earth, data on astronomy and planets, and various geographical riddles.66 Some calendars fueled popular prejudice, for example the belief that the Polish plait (kołtun), a horrible disease caused by poor personal hygiene, was the result of Jewish contamination. The 1721 Cracow calendar claimed in no uncertain terms that those nasty Jews (osobliwie smrodliwy narod y nieprzyiazny Katolikom Z{ydowski) contaminate Catholic Poles, since “in the small towns and villages where Jews lease breweries, one always finds people with the Polish plait.”67 But above all, calendars popularized natural medicine, astrology, shamanic treatments, stone therapy, herbal healing, and alchemy.68 A historian of Polish medicine observed that calendars were one of the most effective ways to popularize natural remedies, astrology, and herbs.69 Primary sources eloquently support this assertion. A 1681 calendar points to the healing qualities of roses, lilies, violets, and basilica. The 1682 edition of the same calendar includes extensive explanations on the uses of sage (salvia), rosemary, lavender, mint, marjoram, and wormwood. The 1683 edition lists the dysfunctions of various garden and orchard plants and trees and suggests ways to convert plant disease into medicine. The 1685 edition outlines the medical and healing qualities of fruit trees in a section on the weather forecast. In 1687, the calendar explains the healing secrets of oranges, lemons, figs, and olives.70 A calendar for the year 1700 contains recipes for “heart water,” “violet water,” and “rose water,” a variety of vodkas for heartache, paralysis, and so on, as well as syrups with honey and sugar, tartar root, and wormwood.71 Calendars published in Gdan´sk in the late 1720s outline the uses of wormwood vodka for stomach diseases, and prescribe sage with sugar and honey for coughs, rose vodka for eye disease, yellow violet-based vodka for headaches, aloe for ear inflammation, and essence of bile with alcohol to restore hearing. They also include folk remedies such as the following for tuberculosis: take intestinal worms, cut them, add as many olives as there are worms, mix them, fry, and eat.72 Indeed, this enormously widespread application of natural medicine could not stem from eastern European folklore alone. Its overwhelming acceptance by medical doctors, itinerant

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healers, and paramedics suggests another, quite unexpected authoritative source: Paracelsus. THE FATHER OF EASTERN EUROPEAN NATURAL MEDICINE

Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) was an eccentric, eclectic, groundbreaking thinker who prefigured what is today known as alternative medicine, homeopathy, biochemistry, shock medicine, and what in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries came to be known as natural medicine. Paracelsus’s medico-philosophical concoction combined alchemy, neoPlatonic thought, a hermetic tradition going back to Hermes Trismegistus, Judeo-Greek numerology, and the medical principles of Galen, very much outdated by Renaissance standards. Iatrochemistry, one of Paracelsus’s main inventions, combined medicine (ivatrov" signifies a physician) and alchemy. Paracelsus divinized nature, underscored the link between science and experiment, and claimed that only a magician can penetrate the secret virtues of nature, which he called arcana. Chemical elements—and Paracelsus considered sulfur, mercury, and salt as the key ones—shaped nature; to correct natural dysfunctions, such as diseases, a physician should use chemistry and be a chemist, a master of the key elements. Although he experimented with mercury, Paracelsus taught that the goal of chemistry was not to find a philosopher’s stone, but rather to discover and invent new medicine (such as essences and elixirs). He understood disease as a metabolic disorder, always local and specific. His medicine was based on the extraction or isolation of a special secret virtue (arcanum) of natural or chemical remedies able to treat a given disease. One should instruct human nature to take care of itself, preached Paracelsus; therefore a physician should prescribe soft measures to mobilize the inner forces of human organs, which then will take care of a dysfunction by themselves. He preferred external measures to internal, natural medicine to surgery, and advised consulting the celestial planets before using terrestrial herbs. He prescribed syrups, wine essences, and elixirs; in preparing medicine he resorted to antimony, mercury, sulfur, tartar, vitriol, and arsenic. Paracelsus was a central European Renaissance scientist, thinker, and practitioner par excellence, but he lived through a chapter in his life that makes him an object of special fascination for us here. At a certain point in his itinerant career, Paracelsus moved to Russia and was captured between Smolensk and Moscow. He spent some time in captivity in what is now

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Ukraine, where it is claimed that he learned shamanic medicine from Tatars. In addition to this hitherto unnoticed geographical proximity to the territory of our present focus, Paracelsus admitted that he learned from Jews and observed—like Pico della Mirandola, who studied with Yoh≥anan Allemano— what he considered their negligence toward theory and excessive reliance on the empiric. Be that as it may, his ideas provoke scholars of history to ponder some fascinating parallels. For example, the ethical principles of Paracelsus based on modesty and righteousness jibed with those of Jewish practical Kabbalists, who demanded that practitioners lead a life of piety and modesty. Paracelsus developed a principle of analogy of microcosm and macrocosm, man and cosmos, which is reminiscent of one of the cornerstones of Kabbalah—the mutual dependence of the realm of the divine (sefirot) and the human being. Both Paracelsus and the early modern Kabbalists (as well as many others of the period) imagined human beings to be surrounded by invisible diseasecausing demons. Like a student of the Talmud with his favorite analytical device of separating a statement into parts in order to reconstruct the logic behind a legal decision, Paracelsus, who might never have seen a page of the Talmud, considered the Genesis story of separation (va-yavdel, Ber. 1:4, 7; lehavdil, Ber. 1:14, 18) as a conceptual tool with which to reveal the essence of matter—and which should be imitated in chemical processes, experiments, and medicine. It is particularly compelling that what Paracelsus called truphat (his own neologism for separation) most likely was a derivative of trufah, Hebrew for medicine.73 The iatrochemistry of Paracelsus was much better received in Poland than elsewhere in Europe, with the exception of Denmark and Holland. The leading Polish chemists of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were alchemists and pharmacists (called aptekarz-alchemik) of the Paracelsus school, who studied and publicized his iatrochemistry.74 One devoted follower of Paracelsus, Michał Se$dziwój (1566–1636), known as Helicarnathus Borenthius, achieved renown as a supervisor of the first Silesian lead mines, author of books on natural medicine and alchemy that were translated into all European languages and reprinted eighty times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and a scholar whose theory prefigured the discovery of oxygen.75 Among other followers of Paracelsus were the brothers Lewi, Samuel and Emanuel, who held the privileged position of crown alchemists in Lwów in the 1670s.76 Under the impact of the ideas of Paracelsus, Polish scholars turned to ethnobotany and phytotherapy, promoting such plants as mustard, licorice, rue, and wormwood as panaceas for various diseases.77

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The ideas of Paracelsus shaped most popular Polish books on natural medicine.78 Stanisław Pron´, the preeminent twentieth-century historian of Polish medicine, claimed that all of Polish pharmacology began with Paracelsus, who saw life as a chemical process. He also brought ample proof that most pharmacists in Poland were followers and admirers of Paracelsus’s iatrochemistry. He discussed the tremendous impact of alchemy on the development of pharmacies and emphasized that between 1708 and 1718 the word alchemy was used to designate chemical and pharmaceutical ingredients.79 One of the most popular Polish books of the times, entitled Treasury of Secrets of Lords’ Economy by Jakub Kazimierz Haur (1632–1709), reprinted at least five times during the last quarter of the seventeenth century alone, presented various medical remedies to cure diseases, epidemics, physical sicknesses, and psychological dysfunctions that drew heavily on natural medicine and intellectual principles stemming from Paracelsus. It outlined the astrological influence of planets and stars upon crops, explained the basics of physiognomy, warned against alcohol abuse (the cause of many diseases), suggested painting and color-making as mentally stabilizing, included watermelon and melon seeds in various pharmaceutical remedies, and prescribed rose petals for strengthening the heart and alleviating coughing, rosemary for curing throat inflammation, in addition to lavender, citric fruits, wormwood, melissa, sage, various fruits and fruit trees, wine essences, and so on. Haur recommended stocking pharmacies with additional things, but warned that knowledge of the medical functions of natural remedies was worth the entire pharmacy.80 Haur advised burning sulfur in the house and permeating all beers, vodkas, and other drinks with the smoke, and also advised treating a nasty disease with a similarly nasty measure, the favored similant similae curantur method of Paracelsus.81 In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, most important Polish medical doctors and chemists considered themselves disciples of Paracelsus, while all Polish pharmacists of the era were alchemists of the Paracelsus school. As early as the 1560s, Polish chemists Dawid Mayer and Wojciech Bełza translated two books by Paracelsus and published them in Cracow. Polish medical doctors who studied in Amsterdam, Halle, and Copenhagen brought back not only the knowledge of pharmacists but also iatrochemistry, particularly popular in those scientific centers.82 Private collections of seventeenth-century Cracow pharmacists included Hippocrates, Galen, Avicenna, and Dioscorides, yet out of 115 books they were claimed to have had, 51 were on Polish herbs, pharmacology, drinks, essences, and other matters informed by the ideas of Paracelsus. Among other Polish admirers

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of Paracelsus, the crown doctor of August III argued that a good doctor should be able to make medicine on his own—that is to say, be a practicing pharmacist. Interestingly, he used the “popular word” arkany (from Latin, arcana, secrets), a favorite word of Paracelsus, instead of medicine. A Leszno pharmacist’s privilege uses the word arkany as a synonym for medicine.83 Early modern Polish medical manuscripts leave little doubt that Paracelsus had a luminary status in the region. The eighteenth-century manuscript “Paracelsus’s Practical Manual” contained various excerpts from published books by Paracelsus or his disciples and was dedicated to Occulta Philosophia—the secrets of uses of various minerals, mercury, sulfur, and tartar essence to correct physical dysfunctions.84 The Polish mid-eighteenth-century manuscript “Domestic Medical Recipes” demonstrates the heavy dependence of its author on natural medicine, pharmacology, and Paracelsus’s medicine.85 A late seventeenth-century manuscript from Prince Radziwiłł’s library, “Secrets of Sympathy and Antipathy,” made good use of the major terms of Paracelsus (sympathia and arcana), referenced Paracelsus as an expert in mummies and the essences made thereof, included excerpts from books by the epigones of Paracelsus, and sought to explain how to achieve physical immortality. This manuscript is yet another example of the interest in Paracelsus among early modern Polish readers—and, perhaps, practitioners, of medicine.86 Among early modern medical manuscripts in five depositories in Wrocław, Cracow, and Warsaw, one of the most representative is entitled “The Old Practices of Antiquities” (ca. 1660s). It combines alchemy and natural medicine, merging them into iatrochemistry and presenting the concoction as the last word in medical science. Among popular measures it recommended were the drinking of women’s breast milk for fever, applying a piece of bread soaked in rosewater to burns, drinking natural syrups for indigestion, consuming white poppyseed mixed with pig’s milk as a compress for insomnia, and also making an inhalation of warmed beer, root beer, and cloves to stop oncoming madness. Like Sefer ha-H˘eshek, this Polish manuscript claimed to rely on recipes taken from magnates, rulers, and famous doctors (King Zygmunt, Count of Saxony, Count of Brunswick, Doctor Fox, Pani Kosmerzowska, Jan Balwirz and a certain Szymon). It also offered medicine for pigs, bulls, horses, sheep, and cattle.87 Thus, Paracelsus emerges as a common source of both Polish and Jewish healers: ba‘alei shem, barbers, paramedics, and medical doctors. Catholic, Russian Orthodox, and Jews drew heavily from handwritten, printed, and oral sources stemming from iatrochemistry.

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Remarkably, there existed in eastern Europe an institution accessible to many and known to all: the pharmacy, which served as a sui generis headquarters of iatrochemistry. For early eighteenth-century eastern Europeans, who did not have access to healing remedies in any language or simply could not read, pharmacies served as the main reservoir of common practices and beliefs. Jewish Kabbalists also referred to pharmacies when mentioning various ingredients for a magic or healing remedy. They wrote: “You will find it in a pharmacy,” “You can purchase it from a peddler,” or “Get it from a pharmacist” (timtza be-apotek, tikne etzel ha-rokhlim, tikne etzel rokeah≥).88 By the same token, Polish books and manuscripts consistently instructed readers to take this or that ingredient—such as pure wax and turpentine or any other chemical ingredient—“from the pharmacy.”89 PHARMACIES AND PHARMACISTS IN EASTERN EUROPE

In the seventeenth century, about seventy-five Polish towns had pharmacies. Most towns—Bar, Kalisz, Krotoszyn, Lublin, Łuck, Olkusz, Radom, Sokal, and others—had one pharmacy each, whereas larger towns such as Cracow, Lwów, Rzeszów, and Sandomierz had two or three or more. Since Jews were banned from the pharmacist profession due to Catholic anti-Judaic bias, almost all pharmacies were Christian-run, albeit with minor exceptions, especially in eastern Poland. In the early eighteenth century, pharmacies functioned in Płock, Warsaw (at least five plus one in Praga), Cracow, Włodzimierz (Wołyns´ki), Sandomierz, Kalisz, Piotrków, Radom, Łomz[a, Poznan´, Lwów, Kamieniec-Podolski, Siedłiec, Łowicz, Sieciechów, Kutno, Wilno, Wschowa, Lublin, Torun´, Łuck, Pin´czów, Cze$stochowa, Gdan´sk, and Rawa. By the end of the eighteenth century this number nearly doubled, and closer to the 1790s licensed Jewish pharmacists appeared. Pharmacies were established before the partitions of Poland, mostly in the second half of the eighteenth century, in Brody, Kamieniec-Podolski, Kielce, Leszno, Zamos´c´, and Z{ytomierz, and in big cities such as Warsaw and Cracow their number grew to dozens. In contrast, very few new pharmacies had appeared between the 1690s and the 1750s.90 Pharmacies sold not only medicine, but also plants, roots, perfume, incense, pepper, cinnamon, almonds, chestnuts, bay leaves, and sugar cane, as well as opium, camphor, Peruvian bark, wax candles, tea, liquors, sugar, and guaiac. These and other artifacts were used for medical purposes, although a modern scholar who lists some of these items claims they had nothing to do with medicine.91

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The early modern pharmacies—from which ba‘alei shem and other Polish healers and paramedics drew their secrets, recipes, prescriptions, pills, and jargon—tended to occupy big stone houses, firmly protected with copper or iron-coated doors with several massive locks. Inside, they consisted of at least three rooms. The first had a pharmacist’s table with a scale, a box with weights (not standardized in Poland until the late eighteenth century), candles, small pieces of paper for calculations, and prescriptions or recipes. The wall was lined with wooden shelves, which were left open in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and predominantly closed by glass doors in the nineteenth. The upper shelves were stocked with colored glass, wood, porcelain, alabaster, and clay jars (Polish, puszki) containing powders and dry substances. Each jar had an abbreviated Latin inscription and sometimes an alchemical sign. The middle shelves held opaque glass milk bottles containing liquors, various herbal tinctures, essences, fruit and vegetable syrups, and herbal vodkas. Packages of tea and sugar occupied the lower shelves. On top of the shelves or sometimes attached to the ceiling hung various curiosities: a rhinoceros’s or unicorn’s horn, a small cage with an ostrich egg, a stuffed crocodile, a bat. An obligatory and obligatorily framed endorsement of the pharmacy issued by the Cracow Medical Academy or a privilege from a local Polish magnate, the town owner, was placed on the wall. The room was lined by long wooden benches, where various imported colonial goods were placed, such as Moravian, Greek, Rhineland, Hungarian, and Spanish wines. Under the benches, the pharmacists hid huge jars and bottles containing oils, wine spirits, and distilled water; each was covered by willow wicker and had a wooden plaque with a name attached to the top of the jar. The only large window opened onto the street: it had a wide window sill serving as a counter on which objects were packed and money was counted. The door to the adjacent storage room was plated with copper and had a huge lock opened by a foot-long key. This room contained saffron, incense, cinnamon, and other costly spices as well as money and expensive medical ingredients. The back door led to a lab, the pharmacy’s Holy of Holies, where alchemical tests were conducted and medicine was prepared. This room had a chimney, bellows for maintaining high temperatures, candles in a special copper candelabra hanging from the ceiling, glass retorts for distilling and alcohol production, crucibles, goblets, and flasks of various sizes, alabaster laboratory containers, clay, porcelain, and wooden mortars for transforming pieces of human or animal artifacts into dry powder, copper caldrons attached by a chain to the stove or the wall, wooden hammers for transforming spices into powders, a variety of iron instruments, knives,

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tweezers, tongs, large iron frying pans, copper pots, different size bottles and flasks of green or blue glass, wooden presses for tinctures and vegetable juices, and marble-covered tables on which the remedies were sorted, mixed, and bottled. More often than not, the walls were covered with alchemical formulas, magical squares, zodiac signs, and kabbalistic symbols.92 Eighteenth-century pharmacies were also called kram (store), since wines, herbs, wax candles, vodka, sugar, and tea in addition to medicine were available there. A pharmacist was called an aptekarz, alchemic, or chemic,93 but also an aromatariusz, i.e., a perfumer, as he also dealt in marinades, cinnamon, coriander, anise, mushrooms, opium, cantharides, and Euphorbia (cactus essence). Pharmacists had books and manuscripts in their possession, including classical medical tractates, pharmaceutical and perfumer manuals, and books of Polish and European alchemists, including Paracelsus and his disciples. Pharmacies became the laboratories of the disciples of Paracelsus. Pharmacists prepared, prescribed, and sold products such as essences, balsams, liquors, medical powders, vitriol, plasters, and pills. Some of them included essences made of woman’s breast milk, tinctures of the human brain, as well as such rarities as dried human heart, ashes of human hair, pieces of human skin, drops of human sweat, not to mention potions of excrements and urine.94 As with many other occupations in early modern Poland, pharmacists had to obtain a privilege legitimizing their presence and activities in a given locale. Big towns boasting more than one pharmacy (Cracow, Poznan´, Leszno, and later, Warsaw) usually had confraternities that controlled the market and staved off interlopers. To avoid competition, August I forbade barbers to sell pills and remedies. Some pharmacists, to circumvent existing confraternities, obtained their privileges secretly, as happened for example in 1712 in Poznan´ under August II. To be able to write “timtza be-apotek”—you will find it in the pharmacy— ba‘alei shem had to have visited one or at least known what was available there. This is particularly fascinating, as there were very few Jewish pharmacists. As for the very small number of Jews among them, consider a certain Kaliora Matatia, active in the second half of the seventeenth century and referred to in his 1663 privilege the apotekario Iudaeo blasphematore (a blasphemous Jewish pharmacist); or the brothers Samuel and Emanuel Lewi, who in 1671 obtained a privilege to work as alchemists (read: pharmacists) in Lwów.95 The available pharmacy privileges from Poznan´ indicate that because of religious prejudice but even more because of the fear of competition, Jews were not allowed to serve as pharmacists in this town. The full Latin privilege of the pharmacists of Poznan´, issued in 1688, confirmed in 1718, and

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supplemented in 1799, mentioned Jews as excluded from the profession in its first paragraph. In Poznan´, Jews appeared among pharmacy owners only in the nineteenth century.96 The late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century pharmacy was the common denominator for Polish doctors, eastern European paramedics, and ba‘alei shem. It served as a meeting place for their professional interests and communication.97 In 1741, a certain German-speaking Salomon (of unknown origin) either leased a pharmacy from the Radziwiłłs or owned a pharmacy situated in the Radziwiłłs’ town. His pharmacy traded in healing herbs, the antidote alexipharm, the antioxidant carminatio, the anti-asthmatic herb asthmatica, the aloe pain relief extract anodin, castor oil, healing absinthe (anise vodka), rhubarb, senna herb used to cure digestive tract dysfunction, myrrh used to treat urological, nervous system, and circulation dysfunctions, and several types of popular healing elixirs.98 In 1712–13, the owner of Kamien´ included in his regular account various pharmacological expenses, prescriptions of natural medicine, various oils, and tobacco.99 In the period between 1733 and 1741, Jan Preuss, owner or lease holder of another pharmacy situated in one of the towns belonging to the Radziwiłłs, sold or prescribed various healing remedies for a total of between 250 to 750 Polish złoty: violet syrup to stabilize one’s temperature, granulated tobacco, ginger, barbaris, camphor, special essence to treat chest pains, and colonial tea considered to have various healing qualities.100 Jan Lotz and Friedrich Ernst, lease holders of the Nes´wiez[ pharmacy, purchased medical supplies and healing remedies in Germany in 1739–40—indeed, not the cheapest way to obtain the necessary products.101 Jan Chrystyan Hintzke, a much more successful pharmacist who replaced them from 1750–60, provided services to the ruling elite, including the palatine of Wilno, the steward of Minsk, the owner of the town of Nies´wiez[, as well as Polish gentry and Christian doctors. Sales of medicine alone brought him about 18,000 złoty annually.102 In 1751, the owner of a pharmacy in the town of Trojanów had in his possession a huge stock of medical herbs, healing vodkas and wines, sugar, tea, and coffee, kept in half a dozen closets in tightly corked and quite expensive porcelain and glass vessels.103 In 1763, Tomasz Rosanski received a degree in surgery and in 1766 in medicine, both in Germany. He worked in Brody as a doctor, and later in Mogilev, where he received a privilege from Count Potocki to settle down and open a pharmacy.104 In Muscovy and Petrine Russia, local doctors were also sympathetic to natural medicine and pharmacology. Medical doctors of the Aptekarskii Prikaz (literally, Pharmacist Department; hereafter, Prikaz)—the future Ministry

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of Health—regularly prescribed medicine for the tsarina, archimandrite, and fusilier guards (strel’tsy)—the same medicines the Polish doctors prescribed for the szlachta and the Jewish ba‘alei shem prescribed for their motley clientele. The healing remedies and medicine that Count Iurii Romodanovskii ordered through the Prikaz, the medicine ordered for Muskovy through the future Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the healing remedies that court doctors prescribed to the gentry and courtiers were the same remedies as those included by Polish doctors in what they called a home pharmacy and which they recommended for everybody’s use. They were also the same as those which ba‘alei shem recommended in their books and manuscripts of segulot and refu’ot. Russian court doctors applied natural herbal extracts against coughs, “wine spirits,” nardan, romanea, cinnamon, cardamom, juniper, ginger, rosemary, almond oils, anise vodkas, various syrups, balsams, and bandages.105 While western Europe engaged in the wholesale purchase of colonial spices and used them, among other things, for healing purposes, eastern European healers, both Catholic and Russian Orthodox, had fewer opportunities to purchase spices wholesale and had to rely on the local and easily available medical herbs.106 The common healing practices and remedies help contextualize the ba‘alei shem and make sense of their language and practices. However, their place in the broader context of fellow paramedics requires additional consideration. BA‘ALEI SHEM AND OTHER PARAMEDICS

While historians of early modern Poland locate ba‘alei shem on the lower levels of the Jewish elite, somewhere between the common Jew and the Kabbalist of the kloyz, it seems plausible to also situate them in a subgroup of eastern European paramedics—pharmacists, barbers, and herb healers. A comparison between Jewish practical Kabbalists and their contemporary Slavic colleagues reveals several commonalities. It turns out that Russian, Polish, and Jewish paramedics alike were interested in natural medical and alchemical remedies, including the magical and healing qualities of new colonial goods like sugar, tea, anise, and coffee.107 Members of the gentry in both Poland and Russia were keen on obtaining and reading all sorts of books on healing, particularly the so-called travniks (herbariums), similar to those from which ba‘alei shem drew their knowledge on popular medical herbs and folk remedies.108 Jewish Kabbalists in Poland, Polish paramedics, and their colleagues at the Russian court were all engaged in the gathering

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A 1741 inventory of Dr. Salomon, an eastern European pharmacist, containing natural medical artifacts, tinctures, and herbs. Courtesy of Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), Warsaw.

of medical herbs.109 Barbers, healers, and medical doctors in Muskovy and Poland believed in the magical features of certain tree roots and spread their use among the population.110 A pharmacy in Russian Polotsk (Płock) had on its shelves medical products analogous or similar to those one could find in the pharmacies of such towns as Polish Nies´wiez[ and in no way different from the remedies applied by the ba‘alei shem.111 In Muskovy, the Aptekarskii Prikaz responsible for organizing medical care and providing treatment to the members of the court employed both pharmacists and alchemists

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An eighteenth-century pharmacy museum in Lviv (Lemberg). Courtesy of Ibrahim Kaya Sahin.

without differentiating between them, according to the scientific standards of iatrochemistry.112 Similarly, the handwritten and printed sources of the eastern European ba‘alei shem prove in various ways that the latter shared the language and medical/chemical principles of Paracelsus common to contemporary alchemists, professional medical doctors, barber-surgeons, and pharmacists. But there were also differences. Whatever ba‘alei shem or Polish paramedics engaged in, they were on their own and well aware of the growing competition in their informal guild. In contrast, Muskovy paramedics and doctors had a centralized state-sponsored and state-controlled system at their disposal. The heads of the voevodstvo (province) received orders to gather medical herbs and send them to the Prikaz. The fusilier guards were also obligated to engage in the gathering of herbs during their time off from military obligations. The Prikaz allowed its purveyors to gather herbs, healing flowers, and roots on monastery lands. The First and Second Court Pharmacies, reporting to the Prikaz, regularly dispatched doctors, paramedics, and barbers (responsible for minor operations, first aid, and bloodletting) to

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the army regiments. The Prikaz purchased wines, vodkas, and glass retorts in Malorossia (today’s Ukraine), imported medicine from France, England, and India, and invited doctors and paramedics to Muscovy from Germany.113 Indeed, the Prikaz purchased and provided natural medicine predominantly for the court, those who served at the court, and the fusilier guards and clerics. Ba‘alei shem and other Polish paramedics were much more informal and democratically oriented, providing services to Catholic szlachta, the Jewish community, and the Russian Orthodox peasantry alike.114 By sending their clients to a pharmacy, ba‘alei shem functioned as agents of the new trend in the history of medicine. From this perspective, one should place against the backdrop of early modern eastern European medicine not only the activities of the ba‘alei shem but also the numerous practical Kabbalah publications during the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Consider the following. Aaron and Gershon, publishers of every single book without exception on practical Kabbalah in eastern Europe, lived in the town of Z{ółkiew in the Rynek (Market Square). They rented a house in front of Jan Sobieski’s palace, which they shared with Abel the tavern keeper and the rabbi of Buczacz, whose name remains unknown. The house was owned by a certain Daniel Aptekarz, literally Daniel the Pharmacist. The list of town dwellers explicitly mentions Aaron and Gershon, drukarze wolni (free printers), and Daniel, the owner of the stone house.115 Perhaps Gershon and Aaron were so keen to publish palm-sized and cheap books on practical Kabbalah because the recurrent references by ba‘alei shem to pharmacies would attract new clientele to Daniel, the pharmacy owner who rented them part of his house and allowed them to establish a printing press on his premises. ENLIGHTENMENT VERSUS NATURAL MEDICINE

The invasion of Enlightenment-based ideas diminished the popularity of the ba‘alei shem and other paramedics. Ludwik Perzyna—as popular at the end of the eighteenth century as Haur with his Treasury had been a century before—sought to banish what he called the “falsification of medicine by pharmacists.” He grumbled that all the balsams, essences, and tinctures used in Poland should have long ago been forbidden. While he did recommend some natural and herbal medicine such as saltpeter, wax, henna, ginger, or rhubarb, he by and large admonished readers not to rely too much on these medical remedies. Quite typically, his attack on popular and natural medicine was coupled with an attack on Jews, whom he blacklisted along

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with midwives, barbers, itinerant healers, charlatans, peasants, and traders in fragrances and oils.116 At the same time, he made reference to quite rational healing measures such as personal hygiene, which Poles, he argued, should learn from Russians and, yes, Jews. Referring to the horrible Polish plait, Perzyna cautioned that “it is not enough to eat borsht and jellied meat: one should also wash, rinse, and comb one’s hair often, or like Moscovites do, go to the baths every week; even Jews, this dirtiest of tribes, wherever they have baths, each Friday go and wash there, hence we do not find the Polish plait among them.”117 Enlightened medical thought cast doubt on the perception of paramedics as omniscient and omnipotent healers. Perzyna’s 200-page eighteenthcentury study of the art of the barber, based on vast personal field experience, outlined the origin and treatments of diseases spread in the military and served as an excellent manual for the beginning paramedic. Each and every explanation was based on a clear-cut medical and anatomic causality, reflecting a professionalization of medicine. It championed experiments, hygienic medical instruments, thorough knowledge of anatomy, and experiential proof.118 Soon, paramedics, ba‘alei shem, and the entire realm of producers and consumers of natural medicine were relegated to the darkest corners of society, where the light of the new rational medicine had not yet penetrated. Indeed, among itinerant Kabbalists were not only dexterous healers and effective shamans but also charlatans, of whom Hillel Ba‘al Shem complained in his unpublished work. Charlatans of all sorts, both Christian and Jewish, eventually undermined popular trust in medical professionals of various stripes to such an extent that by 1710, charlatan-healers and impostors had become the subject of doctoral dissertations.119 By the end of the eighteenth century, ba‘alei shem increasingly found themselves objects of mockery and derision and indiscriminately deemed charlatans. Encroaching enlightened ideas dissuaded many from relying on non-professional paramedics. Skepticism was on the rise. In 1760, a highly educated young maskil, Solomon Maimon, played at being a ventriloquist ba‘al shem in order to scare his oppressive mother-in-law.120 In 1790, maskil Moses Markuze from Słonim (Belarus) published a (self-proclaimed) popular Yiddish book with a misleading kabbalistic title in which he attempted to differentiate between rational medical knowledge and superstitious kabbalistic beliefs.121 In 1841, maskil H˘ayim Aronson’s friend suggested to him that they put on disguises and pretend to be itinerant practical Kabbalists in order to exploit the gullible Jewish population. Both considered ba‘alei shem to be charlatans who preyed on superstitious Jews.122

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The waning glory of natural medicine was also apparent in calendars. By the middle of the eighteenth century, the amount of information on natural medicine and astrology radically diminished in calendars, which themselves became much smaller and more formal. They provided less and less information on diseases, limiting themselves now to the astrological connection between days and planets and such “rational” issues as the sunset and sunrise or the location of fairs.123 Hugo Kołła$taj, among the most famous Polish enlightened thinkers, barely disguised his contempt for popular healers—by now, he thought, a thing of the past: “Poland was an escape and a haven for all sorts of charlatans, empiricists, and adventurers. Whoever wanted, or whoever could secure protection, could become a doctor. He could settle in a city or town, treat people, establish a pharmacy, and concoct medicine, without the least knowledge thereof.”124 The rise and spread of Hasidism further undercut the medical-mystical fusion of the ba‘alei shem. While Moses H˘ayyim Efraim from Sudilkov, the grandson of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, did depict various magical practices that bore a resemblance to those of the early eighteenth-century ba‘alei shem, he avoided any medical references.125 The Ba‘al Shem Tov, for his part, departed from the modus vivendi described earlier and treated doctors with open scorn, at least according to the redactors of his Hebrew and Yiddish hagiography published in 1814/15.126 AFTERWORD AND CONCLUSION

Early modern medicine entailed for Jews and Slavs a shared pool of values, ideas, and tools. Although the human body and threats to the human body were imaginary categories shaped quite differently by Judaism and Christianity, the consequences of the threats (diseases, epidemics, sicknesses, dysfunctions) more often than not were similar for Catholics, Russian Orthodox, and Jews alike. Mors velociter (rapid death), a result of devastating epidemics, forced people of different faiths, classes, and cultures together. The urgent need to deal with high mortality rates, physical dysfunctions, and psychological disorders neutralized much mutual religious prejudice and animosity. In Jewish everyday life, popular medicine and practical Kabbalah continued to coexist, yet attitudes changed dramatically. In 1836, Russian police conducted a search in Shepetovka in the house of local wine brewer and tavern keeper Moshko Telezhinskii. They were looking for poison that the brewer had supposedly added to his vodkas, but found nothing suspicious

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except a bunch of strange herbs and, significantly, what one Russian policeman identified as a kabbalistic note. Soon fully exonerated, Moshko explained that he had obtained the herb from a local Ukrainian female herb healer to cure his wife’s heavy cough, and professed a genuine belief in its effectiveness. As for the kabbalistic note, it was an amulet: he had inherited it from his relative. But he referred to its alleged healing properties with irony.127 The glory attained by the ba‘alei shem between 1700 and 1740 had waned by the end of the eighteenth century, yet it must be reiterated that it was through the practical Kabbalists that Jews of eastern Europe learned of the wider world of contemporary medicine and its new discoveries in botany, homeopathy, and chemistry. Paradoxically, this discovery eventually marginalized the ba‘alei shem, causing many to disappear from eastern European Jewish life altogether as professionals in these fields came to the fore. The spread of enlightened medical knowledge marginalized Slavic and Judaic shamanism and popular healing in general. By the mid-eighteenth century, eastern Europe also saw the rise of the institution of military paramedics (feldshers), established by Peter the Great, which produced hundreds of army barbers and healers who came into competition with vagabond healers and ba‘alei shem, particularly after the partitions of Poland. At the same time, by the mid-eighteenth century professional medical doctors in Poland had organized into a guild—the Polish Medical Academy. Now doctors and pharmacists were no longer unusual and rare. As they became more widespread and affordable, they pushed aside popular and non-professional practitioners. The rise of military medicine in Poland also contributed to the professionalization of the métier.128 Thus, the professionalization of both medicine (doctors and paramedics) and of Jewish spiritual leadership (Hasidic institutions) effected a transformation in the field of popular magic and healing. To conclude, late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century practical Kabbalists and eastern European paramedics shared a professional language, remedies, sources, and healing techniques. Mutual influences and borrowings attested by ethnographers at the end of the eighteenth and early nineteenth century and even as recently as the past few years should be understood as rudiments of a shared popular culture during the golden age of ba‘alei shem that centered around the pharmacy. Unexpectedly, the history of early modern science illuminates one of the murkiest chapters in the development of magic and reveals early modern magic as a case of cultural transparency. Since enlightened thinkers treated popular magic with disdain, abhorred mysticism, and marginalized Paracelsus, they sidelined a shared

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culture created by Jewish and Slavic pharmacists, doctors, paramedics, and herbal healers because it appeared to them obscure, irrational, and unbecoming of an enlightened individual. Historians perpetuated these attitudes in distinguishing what they celebrated as high professional knowledge from what they disdained as low popular medicine. Finally, the Enlightenment tendency to categorize national Slavic or German as central and Jewish as marginal added ethnic division to class differentiation. It is a historical irony that the Enlightenment, which strove to integrate Jews socially, failed to grasp the inherent hybrid tendencies of popular culture and marginalized Jews intellectually. NOTES This essay utilizes the following abbreviations for manuscript, old prints, and archival collections: BN—Biblioteka Narodowa, Warsaw, Poland; BNZR—Biblioteka Narodowa, Zbiór Re$kopisów, Warsaw, Poland; AGAD—Archiwum Glówne Akt Dawnych, Warsaw, Poland; GBLZS—Glówna Biblioteka Lekarska, Zbiór starodruków, Warsaw, Poland; ZIH—Z{ydowski Instytut Historyczny, Warsaw, Poland; BO—Biblioteka Ossolin´skich (Ossolineum), Wrocław, Poland; BJZS—Biblioteka Jagiełłon´ska, Zbiór starodruków, Cracow, Poland; BAC—Biblioteka i Archiwum Czartoryskich, Cracow, Poland; RGADA—Rossiiskii arkhiv drevnikh aktov, Moscow, Russia; NBU—Natsional’na biblioteka Ukrainy im. V. I. Vernads’koho, Kyiv, Ukraine; TsDIAU—Tsentral’nyi drezhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrainy, Kyiv, Ukraine. This essay is the result of three years of research supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Northwestern University faculty grant. It is a considerably expanded version of my book chapter “Magiya ve-refua amamit,” in Toldot am yisrael be-rusya, 3 vols., ed. Israel Bartal et al. ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, forthcoming). 1. Olga Belova and Vladimir Petrukhin, Evreiskii mif v slavianskoi kulture (Moscow and Jerusalem: Mosty kultury/Gesharim, 2008), 449–57. 2. For the spread of natural medicine, “deified” matter and elements, the revision of the relations between chemistry and mathematics in medicine, the creation of new early modern medical knowledge and the role of Paracelsus (real name Phillippus Teophrastus Aureolus Bombastus von Hohenheim, 1493–1541) in that process, see Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (London: William Heinemann, 2006); The Chemical Philosophy: Paracelsian Science and Medicine in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, 2 vols. (New York: Science History Publications, 1977); Allen G. Debus, The French Paracelsians: The Chemical Challenge to Medical and Scientific Tradition in Early Modern France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Owen Hannaway, The Chemists and the Word: The Didactic Origins of Chemistry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975); Bruce T. Moran, The Alchemical World of the German Court: Occult Philosophy and Chemical Medicine in the Circle of Moritz of Hessen (1572–1632) (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 1991); and Anna Marie Eleanor Roos, The Salt of the Earth: Natural Philosophy, Medicine, and Chemistry in England, 1650–1750 (Leiden: Brill, 2007).

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3. This paper continues using “horizontal” methodology in the study of Jewish mysticism, based on the reconstruction of immediate historical circumstances and outlined in an essay on two trends in modern Jewish Hasidic historiography; see Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “H˘asidei de‘ar’a and H˘asidei dekokhvaya: Two Trends in Modern Hasidic Historiography,” AJS Review 32, no. 1 (2008): 141–67. 4. See Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 56. 5. “Wyja$wszy włócze$g i Z{ydy, który nie umeja$c y definiciey, mediciny włócza$ sie$ po Rusi, po Podolu, udaja$c sie$ za Medyki.” Quoted in Ludwik Ga$siorowski, Zbiór wiadomos´ci do historii sztuki lekarskiej w Polsce od czasów najdawniejszych, az[ do najnowszych, 4 vols. (Poznan´: Jan Konstanty Z{upanski, 1839–55), 1:174. 6. Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 13–19. 7. See Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern, “Ba‘ale Shem” and “Demons,” YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 1:99–100, 401–2. 8. Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 217–18; Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader (Hanover, N.H.: Brandeis University Press), 7–45; Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 142–53; on Shmuel Falk, the Polish ba‘al shem who became famous in London, see Michal Oron, Mi-“ba‘al shed” le-“va‘al shem”: Shemuel Falk, ha-Ba‘al Shem miLondon ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2002). Cf. Belova and Petrukhin, Evreiskii mif v slavianskoi kulture, 509. 9. Piotrowski Wiktor, Medycyna polska epoki kontr-reformacji (1600–1764) ( Jawor: Towarzyswo Miłos´ników Jawora, 1996), 162–63. Itinerant Polish paramedics appeared at fairs during market days to reach out to the masses. In 1707, a person calling himself a doctor from Silesia arrived at the Z{ywiec fair, where, to the amazement of those present, he advertised the magnificent qualities of his medicine and offered his pills and herbs for sale, displaying portraits of the sick people he had successfully treated. Another “doctor” at a fair pitched his unique treatment—with the silver coin with which the Jews had sold Jesus, which he did not use until the customers bought natural medicine from him. See Zbignew Kuchowicz, Obyczaje staropolskie XVII–XVIII wieku (Łódz´: Wyd. Łodz´kie, 1975), 125–26. 10. For Slavic herbal healers, whose praxis resembles the modus operandi of ba‘alei shem, see Aleksandr Lavrov, Koldovstvo i religia v Rossii, 1700–1740 (Moscow: Drevnekhranilishche, 2000), 75ff., 92–93, 127. 11. David Gentilcore, From Bishop to Witch: The System of Sacred in Early Modern Terra D’Otranto (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1992), 165–71. 12. Don C. Skemer, Binding Worlds: Textual Amulets in the Middle Ages (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006), 75–124. 13. Moshe Hallamish, An Introduction to the Kabbalah (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1999), 129–54; Moshe Idel, “Mystical Techniques,” in Essential Papers on Kabbalah, ed. Lawrence Fine (New York: New York University Press, 1995), esp. 462–69; Elliot Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetics of Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 197–225. 14. See, for example, Toldot adam, 7a, 21b, 26a, 27b, 28a; Mifa‘alot ’elokim, simanim 9, 51, 52, 169, 297, 337, 346, 410, 416; Sefer ha-H˘eshek, 23a. 15. For D-r Simh≥ah, see Solomon Buber, Kiryah nisgavah (Cracow, 1903), 76; Ignacy Schiper, ed., Z{ydzi w Polsce odrodzonej (Warsaw, 1932–33), 298–99; Natan Mikhael Gelber,

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“Toldot yehudey zolkiv,” in Sefer Zolkiv [Z{ółkiew]: Kiryah nisgavah ( Jerusalem: entziklopediyah shel galuyot, 1969), 43–45. 16. See him mentioned in Zevah≥ pesah≥, 3b; Sefer ha-H≥eshek, 23b. On Zahalon, see David Ruderman, Science, Medicine, and Jewish Culture in Early Modern Europe (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University, 1987), 9, 15; Ruderman, “Medicine and Scientific Thought: The World of Tobias Cohen,” in The Jews of Early Modern Venice, ed. Robert C. Davis and Benjamin Ravid (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001), 194–98. 17. AGAD, Archiwum Zamoyskich, sygn. 719 (Korrespondencja Tomasza Zamoyskiego) l. 65. 18. On Fortish, see Moshe Rosman, The Lords’ Jews: Magnate-Jewish Relations in the PolishLithuanian Commonwealth during the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990), 148, and the bibliography there; Schiper, Z{ydzi w Polsce Odrodzonej, 299–300; also I[srael] Ha[lpern]’s article in Encyclopedia Judaica ( Jerusalem, 1971–72), 6:1443. 19. Sefer ha-H˘eshek, f. 12b, 13b, 25a, 46a, 183b. 20. For mentions of Fortish, see Mifa‘alot ’elokim, siman 379; Toldot ’adam, siman 101; Sefer ha-H˘eshek, 12b. Fortis is Latin for Strong; his Hebrew last name was H≥azak (strong). 21. Zeev Gries, The Book in the Jewish World, 1700–1900 (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007), 69–90. 22. For more detail, see Stefan Ga$siorowski, Chrzes´ciajanie i Z{ydzi w Z{ółkwi w XVII i XVIII wieku (Cracow: Polska Akademia Umieje$tnos´ci, 2001), 121–25. 23. Since Mifa‘alot ’elokim was a sequel and a version of Toldot adam, we can claim six editions of this book on practical Kabbalah. Numbers of editions, however, might not reflect the circulation of the books, which due to their small size were published beyond the annual quantity of 700 in-folio kuntersin (notebooks; here, copies of books) established by the Council of Four Lands for the three Polish contemporary printing presses, Z{ółkiew, Cracow, and Lublin. See Shlomo Buber, Kiryah nisgavah (Cracow: Bi-defuso shel Y. Fisher, 1903), 104–5. For a brief history of the Z{ółkiew printing press, see Meir Balaban, “Batei defus yehudiim be-zolkiv,” in Sefer Zolkiv, ed. N. M. Gelber and Y. Ben-Shem ( Jerusalem: Entzyklopedya shel galuyot, 1969), 215–24; Haim Dov Friedberg, Toldot ha-defus bepolanyah (Tel Aviv: Barukh Fridberg, 1950), 62–68; Israel Halpern, Yehudim ve-yahadut be-mizrah eropa: Mehkarim be-toldotehem ( Jerusalem: Magnes, 1968), 83–84. 24. Sefer ha-H˘eshek, ll. 7a, 9a, 11a, 22b, 147a–b, 182a, 181b, 204a. This reliance of eastern European kabbalistic books on popular medicine and Slavic folklore is neglected or misunderstood in modern studies on ba‘alei shem. See, for example, Nimrod Zinger, “‘Who Knows What the Cause Is?’ ‘Natural’ and ‘Unnatural’ Causes for Illness in the Writings of Ba’alei Shem, Doctors and Patients among German Jews in the Eighteenth Century,” in The Jewish Body: Corporeality, Society, and Identity in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period, ed. Giuseppe Veltri and Maria Diemling (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 127–58. 25. Mifa‘alot ’elokim, simanim 22, 28, 42, 131. 26. Sefer ha-H˘eshek, 23a. 27. BO 5908/1 (Mf 11819), “Zbiór prepisów lekarskich z XVII w.” 254 ll., in octavo, ll. 49–51. For a similar manuscript containing recipes, see BNZR, Akc. 2147, “Recepte,” in German and French, in quarto, about 205 folios, end eighteenth century (here the application of rhubarb, anise, vitriol etc.); on ll. 94–95 there are recipes attached to the text. See also BNZR, RPS. sygn. 5619–20, “Przepisy lecznicze” in German and Latin, octavo, 216 pages

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(here the explanation concerning herbs, syrups, tinctures, balsams, spirits, elixirs, plasters, and an alphabetical index to the entire manuscript). 28. Like many other words, this one of Greek origin was borrowed from German or Latin through Yiddish. See Divrey h≥akhamim, l:15b. For a fascinating anthology of the early eighteenth-century thought that brought astronomy, astrology, chiromancy, alchemy, and natural medicine together, and could serve as a Polish parallel to Divrey h≥akhamim, see BNZR, Akc. 4382, “Miscellanea naukowe (Prace z zakresu medycyny),” in German and Latin, early eighteenth century, ca. 500 ll. This also contains diagrams of various forms of the solar system according to Copernicus, Ptolemy, and Tycho Brahe. 29. This manuscript also prescribed similar folk remedies in order to chop trees without an ax, keep grapes fresh in winter, brighten decayed ink, cure eye sicknesses, achieve night vision, whiten pearls, make an inextinguishable candle, catch a snake barehanded, extract a splinter, dye hair blonde, make boys withstand fear, but, most important, buttress procreation by restoring menstruation to women, secure impregnation, cure urinating dysfunction, and increase the amount of milk of a nursing woman. See ZIH, Rkp. 629, anon., no title page, in octavo, 14 folios, ll. 6b–13b. Pencil lined paper with margins. Eighteenth-century Ashkenazi semi-cursive throughout. On f. 1b there is an excerpt from Sefer Segulot Mal’akhim (Neuwied, 1750; cf. Vinograd, Otzar ha-Sefer ha-Ivri, 2:479). 30. BNZS, Jakub Kaimierz Haur, Sklad albo Skarbiec Znakomitych Sekretow Oekonomiey Zemianskiey (Cracow: Mikolaia Alexandra Schedel, 1693), 395, 408, 411. 31. Stanisław Szpilczyn´ski, Do dziejów przesa$du i zabobonu w lecznictwie (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1956), 20; Ludwik Ga$siorowski, Zbiór wiadomos´ci do historii sztuki lekarskiej w Polsce od czasów najdawniejszych, az[ do najnowszych, 4 vols. (Poznan´: Jan Konstanty Z{upan´ski, 1839–55), 2:61–62; Fr. Giedroyc´, Mór w Polsce w wiekach ubiegłych: Zarys historyczny (Warsaw: Szkaradzin´ski, 1899), 129. 32. Kateryna Dysa, Istoriia z vid’mamy: sudy pro chary v ukrains’kykh voevodstvakh Rechy Pospolytoi XVII–XVIII stolittia (Kyiv: Krytyka, 2008), 49, 57, 162–63, 185–228. 33. Translation: “[I] have come here to this Ploni [“John Doe”] because he was sick or burnt or choked or bewitched, I order you by the name of God, who created heaven and earth, to return to your place, where the Lord God created you, do not go to the navel, to the head, to the heart, to the side, to the lungs (breathing), get out from the places where you are not supposed to stay, by the name of God, amen, forever.” For more detail, see Z[mitrok] Byadulia (pseudonym; real name Shmuel Plavnik), “Rukapis chernaknizhnika XVIII veku (Bahatyia matar’yaly pa belaruskai etnagrafii),” Vol’nyi stsiag 5, no. 7 (1921): 33–35. 34. Translation: “Willow, my little willow, take this disease (flu?) from Ploni ben Ploni—as you shake waters, shake this disease off of Ploni ben Ploni, from his white body, from his red blood.” See NBU, Orientalia Department, OR 178, Sefer ha-H˘eshek, ll. 366b–367a. 35. Translation: “Get out from this Ploni ben Ploni, out of all his two hundred forty-eight members [248 = remakh eyvorim = number of parts of the human body according to rabbinic anatomy and the number of positive commandments], by the name of God, who created heaven and earth, which will help me during the day and also at night—I conjure, and invoke, and summon, by the name of God, who created heaven and earth, help me to redeem this Ploni. You are a Living God, you have a merciful heart, be of help! I, Ploni ben Ploni, by the name of God, am sending out [the disease] away, beyond the black sea on the marshes, you

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will find there a monk and a nun, there you will feel at ease, there you will drink blood, but leave forever this Ploni ben Ploni.” See Sefer ha-H≥eshek, ll. 362a–362b. 36. Translation: “By God’s might, by Virgin Mary’s help, by the help of all the saints, may it not happen to him as has been before, skin with skin, bone with bone, in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.” See Wiktor Piotrowski, Medycyna polska epoki kontrreformacji (1600–1764) ( Jawor: Towarzyswo Miłos´ników Jawora, 1996), 164. This incantation seems to be a Christianized version of the medieval Old High German Second Merseburg Charm (Merseburger Zaubersprüche), which famously traveled widely across international boundaries. See, e.g., John Lindow, Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 86, 128, 132. 37. BNZR, Rps BN II 6698, “Salomonowe dzieła zebrane,” Polish, Latin, eighteenth century, in quarto, 261 ll. ll. 2b–5, 6–10, 18–20, 17–28, 33, 45, 57, 100–103, 115, 162–70, 179, 187, 229–61. 38. Belova and Petrukhin, Evreiskii mif v slavianskoi culture, 499–533. Cf. Wanda Wyporska, “Jewish, Noble, German or Peasant?—The Devil in Early Modern Poland,” in Christian Demonology and Popular Mythology, ed. Gábor Klaniszay and Éva Pócs (Budapest and New York: CEU Press, 2006), 139–51. 39. BO 2583/1 (Mf 11819), “Tajemnice ozdobienia i leczenia głowy i członków jej,” VIII w., 207 ll., ll.42–62, 85, 112–14. 40. BN, Mf 4340, [Ex manuscriptus Antonij Uminski], “Medyk dos´wiadczony to jest Róz´ne narózn´e choroby, lekarstwa naybardziej z prostych y domowych rzeczej złoz[one,” 1768, 210 ll., here ll. 10–50, 97–98. 41. BNZR, BN 1493/II “Lekarstwa domowe i dos[w]iadczone,” seventeenth and eighteenth century, ll. 67–68, 79–85b, 87, 102–3. 42. BNZR, Rps BN I. 3300, Adrian Smielowski, “Notatki, aforyzmy, domowe przepisy lecznicze,” Polish, Latin, seventeenth century, in octavo, 198 ll.; BNZR, Rps. BN III 6689, “Miscellanea Literackie i Medyczne,” in Polish, most likely a copy of the late seventeenthcentury manuscript, made probably in 1769, in duo, 119 ll.; BNZR, Rps. BN I.3299, “Medicina. Manuscript. Domowe przepisy lecznicze,” In octavo, eighteenth century (has wrong date, XVI–XVII), 21 ll., here ll. 2–4; BO 2775/1 (MF 822), “Opis róz[nych ziół,” in octavo, Polish, ll. 40, 85, 147, 167, 337, 510. 43. GBLZS, Eliasz Beynons, Miłosierny Samarytan, albo przyiazno-braterska Rada na wszelakie choroby, łamania w ludzskim ciele, tak wne$trzne, iako y poierzchowne podłemi y małemi sposobami do uleczenia bez wielkiego kosztu swez[o wynaleziona. Z Niemieckiego ie$zyka na Polski przetłumaczona, 2nd ed. (Warszawa: u X. X. Piarow, 1695), 10–11, 19–20, 42–43, 203. 44. GBLZS, Johannes Conradus Barchusen, Synopsis pharmaciae, Methodum pleraque medicamenta, sive a Veteribus sive ab Recentioribus excogitate, componendi juxta et conficiendi tradens (Batavorum: Theodorum Haak Bibliopol., 1712); see a detailed description of medical remedies and diseases, ll. 159–259. 45. BJZS, Compendium medicum, to jest krotkie zebranie y opisanie Chorob, ich roz[nos´c´i, przyczyn, Znakow, sposobow do leczenia. Takz[e roz[nych sposobow robienia Wodek, Olekow, Iulepow, Syropow, Konfitur, Mas´c´i, Plastrow y roz[nych osobliwych rzeczy. Na siedm tractatow rozdzielone. Z przydatkiem osobliwych Chorob, tak Me$skich, iako y Białogłowskich y Dz´ecinnych. Dlia wie$kszey wygody ludskiey (Druk Jasney-Gory Czestachowskiey, 1719).

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46. BJZS, Promptuarium medicum empiricum, to jest krotkie opisanie wszystkich prawie tak wne$trznych iako y powierzchownych, me$skich, białogłowskich, y dz´ecinnych chorob i sproby leczenia ich proste y domowe; dlia tych osobliwie, Ktorzy albo dlia odległos´c´i, albo dlia nagłego paroxysmu, albo dlia defektu kosztu, lub iakiey inney przyczyny, Doctorów przy sobie y lekarstw miec nie moga$. Z przydatkiem apteki domowey. To jest sposobow robienia roz[nych Wodek, lekarstw prostych y zwyczaynych. Przesz pewnego Authora napisana, y w druk dlia pospolitnego poz[ytku podana (Cracow: Drukarnia Franciszka Cezarego, 1716). 47. BJZS, Vademecum medicum, to jest krotkie y dóswiadczone sposoby leczenia chorob rozmaitych, Me$skich, Białogłowskich y dz´ecinnych, o Pulsach, Urynach, o krwi puszczeniu a c. o Powietrzu z przydatkiem apteki domowey, a c.ktore maia$c przy sobie kaz[dy nie tylko sam sobie, ale w bliz´niemu łatwo porzadz´ic´ moz[esz (Podanie do druku przecz pewnego Authora, Druk JasneyGory Czestachowskiey, 1721). 48. GBLZS, J. Z. R. K., Apteka Dlia tych cpiey, ani lekarza nie maia albo sposob konserwowania zdrowia, mianowicie dlia tych spisana co lekarstwa ne maia, Apteki nie znaia, to est Szkola Salernitanska, Z Lacinskiego wierszu metrem Oyczystym przelozona w podrozy (Warszawa: Collegium Coc. Jesu, 1750). 49. Cf. “to słyszał za pewne od iednij z[ydowki,” “ułeczeł dziewczynó z[ydowska$, wrzeszowie iusz zdesperowana$ z[ycja, ktora$ ignis perfidus był opanował noge$.”Cm BAC, sygn. 2236 (IV), ll. 300, 312. 50. Mifa‘alot ’elokim, siman 10. 51. Sefer ha-H≥eshek, 22a. 52. Claviculae Salomonis et Theosophia Pneumatica, Semiphoras and Schemhamforas Salomonis Regis, both volumes published in Frankfurt by Andreas Luppius in 1686. 53. BNZR, Rps. BN II 6785, “Traktaty z zakresu kabaly i magi,” German, late seventeenth century (after 1687), 67 ll. Latin books containing elements of Kabbalah and occultism such as Claviculae Salomonis were quite popular among eastern European medical doctors. In addition to three manuscripts referring to or copying from this book, see also a Kabbalah manuscript from Italy in Polish collection: BNZR, akc. 4856, “Secreta secretorum Salomonis Hebreorum Regis,” in Latin, from the collection of Frederick August of Bologna and Saxony, which contains kabbalistic diagrams and Hebrew inscriptions throughout. 54. BNZR, Rps BN II 6698, “Salomonowe dzieła zebrane,” Polish, Latin, eighteenth century, in quarto, 261 ll. ll. 2b–5, 6–10, 18–20, 17–28, 33, 45, 57, 100–103, 115, 162–70, 179, 187, 229–61. 55. AGAD, Archiwum Zamoyskich, sygn. 2789, ll. 9–11. 56. AGAD, Archiwum Zamoyskich, sygn. 507, ll. 88–90, 116–22. 57. Giedroyc´, Mór w Polsce, 21–26, 59–67, 125–40; Tadeusz Brzezin´ski et al., Wybór tekstów z´ródłowych do dziejów medycyny polskiej (Warszawa: Polska Academia Nauk, Instytut Historii Nauky, 1983), 154–59. 58. For example, the vignettes in Z{ółkiew practical Kabbalah books such as Zevah≥ pesah≥ and Mifa‘alot ’elokim and those in Stanislaw BNZS, Dun´czewski, Ciekawos´c´ o komiece roku panskiego MDCCXLIV z dalsza swiatła obrotu (Zamos´c´: Academia Zamoyska, 1744). 59. Stanisław Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, seu artis pharmaceuticae experimentalis spectrum. Rzecz o muzealnictwie historycznym aptekarstwa w Polsce (Warszawa: Pan´stwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1967), 97–104. 60. See comments on the physical outlook of the medical books and manuscripts and compare plates in Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 126–27.

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61. BO, no. 295 (1702–43), sygn. XVII-6912-III, “Kalendarz Rzymski i Ruski, 1709–1714,” prepared by M. Franciszek Niewieski, professor, doctor of philosophy, astronomer. Published in Cracow, Lwów and Zamos´c´. 62. BO, no. 140 (1725–44), sygn. XVIII-12651-III, “Kalendarz Polski i Ruski,” prepared by Stanisław Dun´czewski, professor of mathematics in Zamoyski Academy, Lwów. 63. “Malo iulepki, Aptekarskie sloie/ Pomoga na mozg: takie zdanie moie. /Nie masz recepty na glowy bolesci /Iak ia smarowac ieleiem madrosci.” See BO, no. 154 (1725–39) Sygn XVIII-12532-III, “Kalendarz, 1732.” 64. BO, no. 121 (1797) Sygn. XVIII-12335-I, “Kalendarz, 1797,” ll. 28–29 (same Jewish holidays indicated in 1796). 65. A 1716 Cracow calendar (for Catholics and Uniates) indicated the dates for the Jewish Passover celebration. A calendar for 1718 also listed the Jewish Passover among the holidays of the year, connected the impact of the planet Saturn to the Jews and elderly Poles, and mentioned that Jews were banished from Vienna in 1670 and not allowed back. Other calendars had a special line for the chronology “according to Jewish rabbis.” A Polish 1738 Poznan´ calendar included a handwritten list of debtors’ papers with Yiddish inscriptions. A 1740 calendar from Cracow contained a handwritten list of the Złoczów kahal and Jewish lease holders’ debts. The 1742 calendar from Galicia included handwritten notes on debts of two Jews, Judka and Levko. See BO, no. 170 (1707–39), sygn. XVIII-12530-III, prepared by Ignacy Pawel Michalowski; BO, no. 154 (1725–39), sygn. XVIII-12532-III, “Kalendarz, 1738,” prepared by Joseph Choynacki, philosopher and professor of mathematics; BO (1707–21), sygn. XVIII-12528-III, “Kalendarz, 1718”; BO, no. 140 (1725–44), sygn. XVIII-12651-III, “Calendarz Polski i Ruski,” prepared by Stanisław Dun´czewski, professor of mathematics in the Zamoyski Academy, Lwów; BO, no. 295 (1702–43), sygn. XVII-6912-III, “Kalendarz Rzymski i Ruski, 1711,” prepared by M. Franciszek Niewieski, professor, philosopher, astronomer. Published in Cracow and Lwów. 66. BO, no. 91 (1739–41), sygn. XVIII-12544-III, “Kalendarz History tko-Polityczny, 1742.” 67. BO, no. 170 (1707–39), sygn. XVIII-12530-III, “Kalendarz, 1721,” prepared by Ignacy Pawel Michalowski from Cracow. 68. Wiktor Piotrowski, Medycyna polska epoki kontrreformacji (1600–1764) ( Jawor: Towarzyswo Miłos´ników Jawora, 1996), 174–75; Zbignew Kuchowicz, Obyczaje staropolskie XVII– XVIII wieku (Łódz´: Wyd. Łodz´kie, 1975), 120–24. 69. Stanisław Szpilczyn´ski, Do dziejów przesa$du i zabobonu w lecznictwie (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1956), 38–48. 70. BO, no. 216 (1679–87), sygn. XVII-7315-III, “Kalendarz, 1685.” 71. BO, no. 302 (1697–1714), sygn, XVII-7324-III, “Kalendarz, 1700.” 72. BO, no. 54 (1714–24), sygn. XVIII-9136-III, “Kalendarz, 1715, “Kalendarz, 1717” prepared by Paulus Pater from Gdan´sk. 73. In these two passages I drew heavily on Philip Ball, The Devil’s Doctor: Paracelsus and the World of Renaissance Magic and Science (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006), 7, 9, 13, 96, 140–41, 201, 203, 254–55, 266, 274, 305–6, 361; Walter Pagel, Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the Renaissance (New York and Basel: S. Karger, 1958), 15, 36, 48–49, 56, 63, 82–86, 91–92, 140–44, 146–47, 152–53, 157, 215–17; Robert Rembielinski, Historia farmacii, 3rd ed. (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1987), 82–87. 74. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 226–28.

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75. Roman Meissner and Jan Hasik, Polski wkład w medycyne$ s´wiatowa$ (Poznan´: Krajowa Agencja Wydawnicza, 1989), 142–44; Wiktor Piotrowski, Medycyna polska epoki kontrreformacji (1600–1764) ( Jawor: Towarzyswo Miłos´ników Jawora, 1996), 118–20. 76. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 226; Fr. Giedroyc´, Materyały Dziejów Farmacyi w Dawnej Polsce. Spis aptekarzy (w. XIV–XVIII) (Warzsawa: Druk Lepperta, 1905), 32. 77. Barbara Kuz[niecka, ed., Historia Leków naturalnych, 5 vols. (Warsaw: Instytut Historii Nauki, Polska Academia Nauk, 1999), vol. 5 (Materia pharmaceutica), 38–42. 78. See, for example, an early eighteenth-century medical manuscript, most likely from the Radziwiłł collection, written apparently by a certified pharmacist who used natural medicine and alchemy and showed the deep impact of iatrochemistry. See BNZR, Rps. BN II 6784, “‘Dispensatorium Wolaviense.’ Zbiór recept lekarskich,” Lat., German, XVIII manuscript (not XVII, as indicated—see 251: usus A[nno] 1700), in duo, 309 ll. 10–22, 244b, 287b. 79. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 516–17. 80. BNZR 3112 A III.6.4. Jakub Kaz´imierz Haur, Oekonomiki zemian´skiey punkta particularne (Cracow: Dr. Akademicka, 1679), 46–47, 71, 73, 75–77, 81–90, 114–17, 175–77, 178cx– 178cxl; Haur, Skład albo Skarbiec znakomitych sekretów oekonomiey zemian´skiey (Cracow: Mikolaia Alexandra Schedel, 1693), 83, 100–111, 158–62, 178–81, 300–302. 81. Jan Kracik, Pokonac´ czarna$ s´mierc´: Staropolskie postawy wobec zarazy (Cracow: “M,” 1991), 25–29; BNZR, Jakub Haur, Sklad albo skarbiec znakomitych sekretow oekonomiey zemianskey (Cracow: Mikolaia Alexandra Schedel, 1693), 463. On this favorite principle of Paracelsus, see Ball, The Devil’s Doctor, 180–81. 82. Wolfram Kaiser, Henryk Pankiewicz und Andrej Skrobacki, Polonica medica des 18. un des fruhen 19. Jahrhunderts in den bestanded des halleschen Universitatsarchivs (Halle: Wissenschafrliche beitraege der Martin-Luther Universitaet Halle-Wittenberg, 1979), 10–13. 83. Robert Rembielinski, Historia farmacii. 3rd ed. (Warsaw: Pan´stwowy Zakład Wydawnictw Lekarskich, 1987), 82–83, 92–93, 160–61, 163–68; Leonard Kostren´ski, Materiały do historii aptek wielkopolskich, 2 vols. (Warsaw: Herod, 1929, 1936), 1:19, 2:100. 84. BNZR, Akc. 2237, “Manuale Paracelsi in Praxe,” Latin and German, eighteenth century. In octavo, 24 folios. 85. BNZR, Akc. 5637, “Domowe przepisy lecznicze,” Latin and Polish, mid-eighteenth century. In octavo, ca. 70 folios. 86. BNZR, Rps. BN II 6787, “Arcana sympathiae et anthipatiae. De mumiis microcosmi,” contains a stamp “Biblioteca Radivilliana Ducali Nesvisiensi.” German language, in quarto, 24 ll. This manuscript seems to contain German translations of excerpts from a book by Iulii Caesaris Baricelli (doctoris medici, et philosophi, Hortulus genialis), Rerum iucundarum, medicarum, & memorabilium compendium in quo naturae arcana, multae rerum sympathiae & antirpathiae [sic], & auctoris obseruationes reserantur: cum indice locupletissimo: huic accessit liber De esculentorum potulentorumque facultatibus (Genevae: Philippum Albert, 1620). 87. BNZR, Akc. 15039, “Dawna staroz[ytnos´c´i practyka,” Latin and Polish, 1660–early eighteenth century, 590 pages (581 with text plus app. 15 pages at the end of the nineteenthcentury index to the manuscript, which shows it was in use for at least 150 years), ll. 6, 9, 12, 22, 26, 28, 29, 43, 57, 60, 65, 68, 80, 98, 139, 167, 173–77, 179–82, 264–68, 324, 340, 350, 407, 472, 503. For even more manuscripts from Poland containing references to iatrochemistry, see also BNZR, sygn. II 9039, “Sekreta [sic] meravigliosi,” in Italian and Polish, in octavo, 66 ll. This contains a detailed explanation of the philosopher’s stone, distilling cube, and

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various natural medical herbs used as pain relievers and laxatives (rue, marjoram, anise, sulfur, coriander, ll. 19–20a, 58–65); BNZR, akc. 5273, “Przepisy przyrza$dzania trunków i napojów,” in German, French, and Latin, in duo, containing a description of various drinks, tinctures, and mixtures, essences, and vodkas used as natural elixirs. See also the sixteenthcentury manuscript from a Polish collection containing astrology, alchemy, fortunetelling, an imitation of a Raymund Lull-esque device to predict the future, and a pharmacological essay, De apotecario nato. 88. Examples are plentiful. Divrey h≥akhamim, one of the popular books on practical Kabbalah, chiromancy, and astrology, published, as well as many similar pocket books, in octavo, gave the following instructions: If for any specific purposes you need saltpeter or any other ingredient, you will find it from a peddler (etzel rokhlim or etzel rokhel eh≥ad). See Divrey h≥akhamim, 17b, 18a, 24b. For references to pharmacists and pharmacies, see Hillel Ba‘al Shem’s Sefer ha-H˘eshek, 10a, 22a, 23b, and Joel Ba‘al Shem’s Mifa‘alot ’elokim, simanim 28, 33, 37, 51; also see Toldot adam, 24b, 25a, 26b, 27a, 28a, 29b. 89. F.e., see BNZR, Akc. 15039, “Dawna Staroz[ytnos´c´i practyka,” l. 22; GBLZS, J. Z. R. K., Apteka Dlia tych cpiey, ani lekarza nie maia, 58. 90. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 542–54; Fr. Giedroyc´, Materyały Dziejów Farmacyi w Dawnej Polsce. Spis aptekarzy (w. XIV–XVIII) (Warzsawa: Druk Lepperta, 1905), 3–35. 91. Sophie Hodorowicz Knab, Polish Herbs, Flowers, and Folk Medicine (New York: Hippocrene Books, 1993), 41–44; GBL, Ludwik Ga$siorowski, Zbiór wiadomos´ci do historii sztuki lekarskiej w Polsce od czasów najdawniejszych, az[ do najnowszych, 4 vols. (Poznan´: Jan Konstanty Z{upanski, 1839–55), 2:116. 92. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 487–96; Rembielinski, Historia farmacji, 160–68. 93. Giedroyc´, Materyały Dziejów Farmacyi w Dawnej Polsce, 19, 29, 31–33. 94. Pron´, Musaeum Poloniae Pharmaceuticum, 230–31. 95. Giedroyc´, Materyały Dziejów Farmacyi, 26, 32. 96. Leonard Kostrzenski, Materiały do Historii Aptek Wielkopolskich, 2 vols. (Warsaw: FR. Herod, 1929 and 1936), 1:14–17, 19, 45, 86–90, 101, 106; 2:24, 26, 31, 91, 93, 149. The Statutes of the City of Poznan´ declared that to “secure human life and health requires a lot of efforts”; therefore, “we forbid all Poznan´ Jews from selling any strong medicine and poisons [such as] mercurialia varia, arsenicalia, cobaltum aurum pigmentum, or other similar medicine under penalty of confiscation and imprisonment on bread and water.” See Giedroyc´, Materyały Dziejów Farmacyi w Dawnej Polsce, 40–41. 97. J. Z. R. K., Apteka Dlia tych cp iey [sic], ani lekarza nie maia albo sposob konserwowania zdrowia, mianowicie dlia tych spisana co lekarstwa ne maia, Apteki nie znaia (Warszawa: Collegium Coc [Soc]. Jesu, 1750), l. 58. 98. AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów, AR21/II, sygn. S 16. 99. BNZR, Akc. 387, “Róz[ne dokumenty Dóbr Kamienia,” 16–18 w., ll. 67–68. 100. AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów, AR21/II, sygn. P 149, ll. 1–2. 101. AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów, AR21/II, sygn. P 192, ll. 1–32. 102. AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów, AR21/I, sygn. H 47, ll. 1–2, 4, 6, 14, 17. 103. AGAD, Zbiór Czołowskiego, 449 M 39056, ll. 7–11. 104. BNZR, Akc. 11651, “Dokumenty Tomasza Rosan´skiego, doktora medycyny (1760s–1770s).”

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105. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 699 (“Rospis lekarstv,” 1663), ll. 1–2; d. 1088 (“Ukaznaia pamiat iz Aptekarskogo prikaza,” 1674), d. 1409 (“Retsepty i zapisi po otpuske lekarstv,” 1690), ll. 5, 7, 44, 53, 214. 106. For more detail about this difference, see Aleksandr Petrov, Zapad-Vostok: Iz istorii idei i veshchei (Moscow: RAN, 1996). 107. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 734 (“Pis’mo ili rasssuzhdenie doktora Kollinza,” 1664). 108. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 1029 (“O knigakh-travnikakh, otoslannykh iz Aptekarskogo Prikaza,” 1673). 109. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 33 (“Pamiat’ v Koniushennyi Prikaz,” 1647), l. 1. 110. See the request sent to the Aptekarskii prikaz about a discovered root, allegedly with magical properties: RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 279 (“Ukaz iz Zemskogo Prikaza,” 1657). 111. See the description of the Polotsk (Połock) pharmacy: RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 116 (“Rospis’ aptekarskikh predmetov,” 1654). 112. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 588 (“Chelobitnaia Aptekarskogo prikaza doktora Engelgardta,” 1662), l. 1–1b.; d. 979 (“Spisok Aptekarskogo Prikaza chinovnym liudiam,” 1672), l. 1; d. 950 (“Delo po chelobitnoi alkhimista,” 1671). 113. RGADA, f. 143, op. 2, d. 33 (“Pamiat’ v Koniushennyi Prikaz,” 1647), d. 1611 (“O vypiske nekotorykh inostrannykh lekarei v Rossiiskuiu sluzhbu,” 1696), l. 7. 114. See Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 143–47. 115. AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów. Dz. 25, sygn. 4693 (M17268). Inventarz Z{ółkwy 1733, l. 1. Twenty years later the situation somewhat changed: the town registry mentioned a house of a certain Jiel ( Joel) cyrulik, a Jewish barber, a paramedic who most likely inherited the house of Daniel Aptekarz, while David, the son of Aaron the printer, had his printing press in a stone house next door, where he lived with the—again, unnamed—rabbi of Buczacz. See AGAD, Archiwum Radziwiłłów, Dz. 25, sygn. 4696 (M 17271), l. 30. Cf. Sebastyan Janeczek, known in Poznan´ as Sebastyan Aptekarz, see Leonard Kostrzen´ski, Materiały do historii aptek Wielkopolskich, 2 vols. (Warsaw: F. Herod, 1929 and 1936), 1:47. 116. “. . . za Doktorowie gdy sie$ maszac´ tak długo w Akademiach Lekarskiey umie$tnos´ci uczyc´, musi wie$c ta umie$ietnos´c byc ciezka, wie$c iey ani Z{yd, ani Babba, ani Cyrulik, ani Szerletan, ani Chlop, ani Kat, ani Oleykarz, umiec´ nie moze bo sie iey nie uczył.” See BNZR, Ludwik Perzyna, Lekarz dlia włos´cian, czyli rada dlia pospólstwa, w chorobach i dolegliwos´ciach naszemu Krajowi albo wlas´ciwych, albo po wie$kszey cze$s´ci przyswoionych, kaz[demu naszego Kraiu Mieszkan´cowy do wiadomos´ci potrzebna (Kalisz: Typ. Przymasa Gniez[nien´skiego, 1793), preface, no pagination, [p. 1], 324, 351, 361–91; see also 23 ( Jews using non-kosher animals to heal their brethren and then selling the meat to non-Jews), 37 ( Jews as midwives), 213–14 ( Jews enriching themselves at the expense of unnecessary bloodlettings), 229–31 (against Jewish laxative pills), and 258–62 ( Jews controlling the keys of the Churches). 117. BNZR, Ludwik Perzyna, Lekarz dlia włos´cian, 1. 118. BNZR, Ludwik Perzyna, Nauka cyrulicka krótko zebrana, to iest: Nauki dlia chca$cych sie$ uczyc´ Cyrulickiey umieie$tnos´ci dokładnie napisaney, 3 vols. (Kalisz: Typ. Przymasa Gniez[nien´skiego, 1792), 182 ll. On the impact of enlightened thought on Perzyna and other late eighteenth-century medical books, see Stanisław Schwann, “O chorobach zawodowych w Polskim Pis´miennictwie Medycznym w XVIII i na pocza$tku XIX wieku,” Kwartalnik Historii Nauki i Techniki 1–2 (1965): 69–90.

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119. GBLZS, Friderico Hoffmann, Dissertatio solennis medica Perversa judicia de medicis et medicina exhibens (Magd.: Typog. Georgi Jacobi Lehmanii, 1712), see 8–9 on a growing mistrust of the doctors caused by the spread of charlatans and impostors; GBLZS, Johannes Fridericus Bauer, Dissertatio de Hodiernorum Empiricorum Fraudibus (Lipsiae: Litteris Schedianis, 1720) is devoted to charlatans and bogus paramedics. 120. Solomon Maimon: An Autobiography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 76–77. 121. Moses Markuse, Seyfer refuos ha-nikra Oyzer Yisroel (Poritsk, 1790). See in detail Mordecai Zalkin, “Scientific Literature and Cultural Transformation in Nineteenth-Century East European Jewish Society,” Aleph: Historical Studies in Science and Judaism 5 (2005): 249–71; Nancy Sinkoff, Out of the Shtetl: Making Jews Modern in Polish Borderlands (Providence: Brown University Press, 2004), 80–81. 122. On ba‘alei shem and Hasidic masters in early nineteenth-century Poland, see Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 140–47. 123. See, e.g., several calendars BO, no. 148 (1749–63), sygn. XVIII-12552-III, prepared by Adam Szczepan Jagielski. 124. Hugo Kołła$taj, Stan os´wiecenia w Polsce w ostatnich latach panowania Augusta III (Warsaw: Gebethner i Wolff, 1905), 70. 125. See in this respect Alan Brill, “The Spiritual World of the Master of Awe: Divine, Vitality, Theosis, and Healing in Degel Mahaneh Ephraim,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 8 (2001): 27–65. 126. Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, simanim 26, 187; In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov: The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome Mintz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 40–41, 253–54. 127. Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istorychnyi arkhiv Ukrainy, f. 442, op. 1, d. 2246 (“Ob issledovanii kachestva vodki i trav, naidennykh u soderzhatelia korchmy v Shepetovke,” 1836), ark. 7–13. 128. Andrzej Abramski, Lekarze, cyrulicy, szarlatani: stan medycyny w Polsce stanisławowskiej (1764–1775) (Katowice: D-r A. Abramski, 1992), 20. The manuscript of a Polish doctor written in the late 1760s and early 1770s demonstrates the strong impact of the Enlightenment: it is a streamlined professional medical manuscript with copies from dozens of medical books such as Malebranche, Michaelis, and Mirabeau. See BNZR, Akc. 4810 “Prolegomena [in medicinam],” in quarto, 107 ll., in German and Latin, some Italian.

Shvartze khasene Black Weddings among Polish Jews

Hanna We$ grzynek

On September 1, 1892, Gazeta Lubelska described two weddings that had taken place a day earlier in Lublin’s Jewish cemetery. The ceremonies sparked interest not only because of their morbid location, but also because they included a mysterious ritual: four young women were harnessed to a plough and made to plough around the town limits on the Biskupice side.1 These activities were intended to halt the typhus epidemic that was raging in the vicinity.2 Additional strange rituals were undertaken by local Lublin Jews. The water from the local pond was secretly (and illegally) released, and the chains of the ponds’ barrier were buried at the cemetery.3 That same year, a similar wedding was held in a cemetery in Opatów.4 In addition to the ceremony itself, the feast and celebration, including the dancing, took place in the town’s cemetery. According to local lore, the epidemic subsided a few days later. Similar cemetery weddings from that period are mentioned in the Memorial Book (Yizkor Bukh) of the Ryki Community.5 Over twenty years later, in early March 1916, Dziennik Narodowy (Piotrków Trybunalski) reported on another cemetery wedding: Yesterday something occurred in our town that clearly attests to the truly shocking ignorance prevailing within the local Jewish population. Among the Jewish masses in provincial towns of the Kingdom of Poland, the superstitious belief has survived that any kind of epidemic may be combatted by holding a wedding at a cemetery. This superstition is held also

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by Jews here in our town, and since the typhus epidemic is spreading almost exclusively in the Jewish neighborhood, the decision was made to make use of some salutary means. And whom to marry off ? A young couple was found. They did not know each other before. Both are poor. Several hundred rubles were collected from the local Jews and a wedding was organized. From this amount, 200 rubles were set aside as a dowry, and the rest went to cover the cost of the wedding. A crowd of several thousand people set off for the cemetery-wedding celebration. A canopy was erected and the cemetery fence was measured off with a white cloth, which was then handed to the “bride.” Bed linens and underclothes for the newlyweds were to be sewn from this material. When the measurements were finished, the wedding ceremony was conducted, after which the crowd returned to the town, secure in their belief that they had taken “the only [possible] step” toward staving off the epidemic.”6

The ceremony probably occurred in Lublin.7 The report was reprinted in two additional newspapers, Czas (Cracow)8 and Dziennik Poznan´ski (Poznan´).9 All three papers had a Polish nationalist orientation; thus, their main intent was to expose the backwardness and superstition prevailing among the Jewish population. Yet the original account contains valuable information. The 1916 ceremony differed in some respects from the 1892 ceremony: the marriage was concluded more quickly, both bride and bridegroom were poor and had not known each other previously, and the cemetery was “measured” with white cloth, to be used for the newlyweds’ bed linens and underclothes. Memorial Books from Biłgoraj, Kamieniec Podolski, as well as an individual account by Eli Zborowski regarding Z[ arki, mention similar weddings during or after the First World War.10 A cemetery wedding involving local elites was performed in Lwów in April 1920.11 We do not know many details; however, a typhus epidemic had resulted in many deaths in Lwów and there was a fear that the epidemic would continue to spread.12 In this case, special invitations were printed in order to ensure that leading rabbis and other important local personages would take part, an indication that such weddings were not restricted to the common folk. In fact, it was a hallowed custom: it was to take place “according to an age-old tradition to appease God’s anger when pestilences are raging.”13 These journalistic accounts and the extant wedding invitation may represent the earliest first-hand sources confirming the existence of a tradition

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known as shvartze khasene, or Black Wedding, a ceremony performed in a cemetery to curry favor with the dead and, through their intercession, induce the Creator to halt an epidemic. It was believed that epidemics—in these cases, cholera or typhus—were the result of curses put on communities as divine punishment for their collective sins. The betrothed were sought out from among the poor and infirm, individuals who did not otherwise have a decent chance of contracting a marriage. The ceremony was organized and financed by the wealthy members of the community. Thus it was not only a kind of sacrifice for the dead, but also a mitzvah (act of kindness) that assisted society’s weaker members. The term Black Wedding had an additional usage: it could denote a ceremony for a bride who had died suddenly. The dead maiden, it was believed, had a right to the ceremony, which would bring joy to her soul. Since a black h≥uppah (canopy) was erected during her funeral, this ritual was called a “black h≥uppah” in addition to a “black wedding.”14 But the most common function of the Black Wedding was to ward off or control epidemics. In all surviving accounts, the location (the cemetery), social background of the betrothed (impoverished), and the ceremony’s objective (to halt an epidemic) were identical. In several instances, the ceremonies were accompanied by a demarcation of borders of the cemetery, which symbolically closed off the affected area. Sometimes a feast was organized at the cemetery, and sometimes dancing took place. It is occasionally claimed that the above accounts contain elements of fiction, rumors, or legend. Yet Black Weddings unquestionably flourished among the Jews of east central Europe, particularly in the area which until the late eighteenth century was part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, and which today comprises Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine. Our aim here is to explore the cultural roots of this macabre drama, both external (i.e., Slavic Christian) and internal (i.e., Jewish), in order to test the contours of Jewish insularity in the region. LITERARY, MEMOIR, AND ETHNOGRAPHIC DEPICTIONS OF THE BLACK WEDDING

It is difficult to say with certainty when the custom of holding weddings in cemeteries developed, and where precisely it became popular. According to one tradition, it originated in the mid-seventeenth century in the wake of the Chmielnicki uprising and attendant massacres of 1648.15 This is also the explanation offered by S. An-ski in The Dybbuk, a play based on his

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ethnographic expedition throughout the Ukrainian Jewish communities on the eve of the First World War. The play’s action takes place in Brynica, where a tombstone located next to the main synagogue was erected in memory of a young couple murdered by Chmielnicki’s detachments just before their wedding. The couple, contrary to religious rules, was buried together where both had died. According to the play, “in order to bring comfort and cheer to the buried bride and groom, it has long been a custom in our town to dance around the grave after every wedding.”16 In one of the scenes, a female protagonist, Lea, invites the murdered couple to her wedding: “Beloved bride and groom, I invite you to my wedding! Come and stand beside me under the canopy!”17 Later, she goes to the cemetery to invite her dead mother. Lea’s grandmother warns her that such invitations should be extended only to close family members, for if she singles out someone from outside the family the other dead could take offense. In all likelihood, the custom of Black Weddings crystallized over the course of several decades. Ethnographic accounts from the early twentieth century claim that the first Black Wedding took place as late as 1771, in Berdichev (Berdyczów).18 One can only say that all extant accounts— whether ethnographic, literary, journalistic, or iconographic—originate from the second half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, even if they refer to earlier centuries. It is also difficult to determine the frequency with which the ceremony was conducted; but its relative frequency is suggested in manifold references in various types of literature. The Black Wedding appears in numerous fictional accounts by authors from varied circles representing different literary styles, an indication that the tradition was either popular or controversial. Much literature suggests the latter. A lengthy story by Jacob Rambro, published in the magazine Voskhod in 1884, constitutes a vivid example.19 Rambro depicts the tradition as a brutal farce and pokes fun at the whole ceremony, regarding it as symbolic of a cruel world that takes advantage of the impoverished and infirm betrothed couple, who do not even realize what is happening. The story is moralistic, discrediting the old, backward customs that lack virtue and allow injustice to be perpetrated on the weaker members of society. Ilya Erenburg’s account of a Black Wedding, included in his satirical novel The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz, possesses a similar mocking tone. Lasik himself happened to be the son of a couple whose wedding had taken place in a cemetery.20 Bruno Jasien´ski treats Black Weddings in a similarly disparaging manner:

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Rebbe Eleazar prayed for a long time, bent over his pulpit. When he closed the sefer [book] and turned to face his congregation, his face was calm and luminous. He ordered that the next day a wedding be celebrated at the cemetery, as is the custom during times of pestilence. A bride and bridegroom were found. A textile merchant, Shyia, and cap maker, Sender, undertook to equip the bride and bridegroom. The wedding took place the next day at the Bagneux cemetery, in the presence of Jews from the entire Hótel de Ville. After the wedding, the newlyweds were seen home. That same night, the bride died, showing symptoms of the plague [probably cholera or typhus]. The shames [sexton], to whom the frightened Jews ran to tell the news, for a long time did not dare to tell the rebbe.21

The Black Wedding is also explored by Isaac Bashevis Singer in Gimpel the Fool and Satan in Goray, and by Israel Joshua Singer in Yoshe Kalb. Also worth mentioning in this context is the Soviet film Granitsa (The Border, 1934).22 THE CULTURAL SOURCES OF THE BLACK WEDDING

Discerning the cultural roots of the Jewish Black Wedding is a delicate task. In the sparse literature that exists to date, the tradition is mainly attributed to the absorption of Slavic customs.23 This is supported by the ritual’s geographic distribution and by the potent ancestor cult that existed among the Slavs, manifested in feasts and festivities organized in cemeteries several times a year.24 Several identifiably pagan customs survive within mainstream Christian ceremonies, such as the Christmas Eve supper and the blessing of baskets of food on the Saturday before Easter.25 Pagan customs specifically involving cemetery rituals surface particularly in economically underdeveloped areas, for example the placing of eggs on graves during Easter, a tradition practiced even today in Polish towns such as those in the Kashubia region.26 But the most widespread cemetery ritual is the observance of All Souls’ Day, an occasion celebrated by the Church together with All Saints’ Day, which involves grave visitations.27 Rituals related to All Souls’ Day were much more elaborate during the early nineteenth century, and memory of these traditions in Poland might not have survived were it not for the play Dziady (All Forefathers’ Eve) by the great Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz.28 The ritual of “forefathers” of the title, also known as the “goat feast,” was actually

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banned by the Church.29 On the night of All Souls, the residents of a town or village would meet at the cemetery, chapel, or some secluded area. They would bring food and would summon the souls of the dead with lit candles to join the feast.30 This particular forefathers’ ritual, especially popular in the Lithuanian-Belarusian borderlands, died out in the early nineteenth century. “Forefathers” came instead to refer to beggars asking for alms at cemeteries on All Souls’ and All Saints’ Days.31 In areas like the Lublin and Podlasie Districts, pierogis, groats, or, in some regions, bread were brought to cemeteries for the beggars, now referred to as “forefathers.”32 These newer forefather celebrations remain a part of folk belief and practice today.33 Rituals related to Slavic ancestor cults were more elaborate among Orthodox Christians than Roman Catholics.34 The Orthodox Church, whose position in Poland was much weaker than the Roman Catholic Church, was not as determined in its struggle against such old Slavic relics. Cemetery feasts held during the week after Easter occurred in the District of Sokal (in present-day Ukraine).35 Only married women took part. First the women would visit the priest, offering him bread and eggs, and then they would eat a meal together at the cemetery. Orthodox Christians from the Podlasie District organized feasts for the dead four times a year. They would bring hot food, believing that the steam rising from them was pleasant for the souls.36 Sometimes they would dance a dance called kulisha, also called the dance of dead.37 It was also customary to drink vodka.38 Cemetery feasts were frequently organized in the Polesie District (contemporary Belarus) as well. Participants would leave pots with food and even spoons on the graves.39 Sometimes the cemetery feast formed a part of funeral celebrations.40 These Slavic folk rituals, in particular feasting and dancing in cemeteries, seem to have contributed to the development of Jewish Black Weddings. The wedding procession itself, so unusual in Jewish cemeteries, was a more common sight in Catholic or Orthodox cemeteries, since most of the cemeteries in small towns and villages were located in the churchyards.41 Synagogues, in contrast, were rarely located near cemeteries (an exception being a Synagogue in the town of Klimontów). Yet several factors militate against a straightforward linkage between Jewish and Slavic or Christian rituals. Many of the Slavic rituals which closely resemble Black Weddings are known solely from early medieval sources, and seem to have been completely eradicated after the Middle Ages owing to the Church’s Christianizing initiatives.42 It is doubtful that Polish Jews would have been influenced by customs that had all but died out by the end of the medieval period, since Jews only began arriving there en masse

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during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Moreover, feasts for the dead are not unique to Slavic culture; many peoples, including even the ancient Hebrews, have such a tradition.43 Even those Polish practices which seemed to resurface in Jewish ones might not have actually originated in Poland. For example, the Baroque-era “dance of death” or “dance macabre” was popular all over Europe, reflected in both literature and iconography. Its aim was to cast off the fear of death while at the same time bringing some cheer to the subject.44 In Poland, there is a related tradition of caroling in which one of the carolers is always dressed as Death, which survives today.45 This may have influenced Jewish customs.46 The practice of ploughing fields, seen in the Lublin case of the four young women, serves as another warning against a hasty Slavic attribution. This method does share certain features with a Polish Christian procedure in which an affected area was closed off and ditches were dug around an entire town or village, a method still in use as late as the eighteenth century.47 The meaning of the four young women pulling the plough is ambiguous, but it could relate to Christian iconography: the plague was often portrayed as a large woman wearing a white, black, or red dress, sometimes known as the “plague maiden.”48 In the materials collected by the famous Polish ethnographer Oskar Kolberg in the middle of the nineteenth century, there is a striking account of a lady—the owner of a village—who ploughed around her property in the nude during an epidemic.49 However, similar practices were to be found throughout Europe, especially in the eastern part of the continent among tribes along the Volga river such as the Chuvashes.50 The same rituals were deployed in early modern Germany, according to an account from 1632 concerning Regensburg. Here, the explanation for the ritual differed: girls who failed to find fiancés during carnival were harnessed to a plough on Ash Wednesday as punishment.51 Polish Christian attempts to ward off epidemics were, in addition, often markedly different from Jewish ones. Polish Christians used various techniques to ward off the plague. In most cases, they organized processions, including processions of flagellants, or took Holy Communion. These were considered acts of contrition for sins and ways of appeasing God. It was also common practice to burn various herbs in all the rooms of one’s house like incense, including juniper, aloe, myrrh, incense, scarf, cinnamon, carnation, wormwood [absinth], resin, and tobacco, as well as turpentine, sulfur, and amber. Some burned horse excrement and animal bones or horns. Horses were believed to provide special protection; thus it was recommended that one move to a stable or hang a horse’s skull over one’s door. Various

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complicated medicines were prepared to prevent disease, often containing some surprising ingredients. The most popular was theriac, also called Venice treacle, which was a mixture of powdered plants, resins, minerals, vipers with addition of turpentine, vine, honey and opium. Another popular preventative medicine was “vinegar of four thieves,” made from wormwood [absinth], rosemary, sage, mint, rue, lavender flowers, garlic, angelica, cinnamon, carnation, nutmeg, vinegar, and camphor dissolved in vodka. It was also recommended that one drink one’s own urine.52 A list of anti-plague medications from a Torun´ pharmacy, compiled in 1708, contains 140 various specifics.53 Jews often employed the same methods as Christians.54 But they also developed their own remedies. In addition to holding Black Weddings, Jews employed techniques like placing a sign over their gates stating “Typhus has already reigned here” or “Nobody is inside” to fool death. It was also recommended that one hang a locked padlock on the door or outline the walls of one’s house with charcoal.55 Black Weddings cannot, however, be fully understood in reference to Slavic or other Christian traditions alone. It must be recalled that the Jews of east central Europe had their own rich tradition of magic-related practices and demonic beliefs, sometimes brought over with them from German-speaking lands and sometimes derived from kabbalistic literature. Certain Jewish magical practices that were present even in the ancient period were later found in medieval Europe.56 Such practices could also be found among Jews in early modern Poland.57 Hasidism, which emerged during the latter half of the eighteenth century out of Podolia (contemporary Ukraine), was predicated on the belief that specially endowed individuals could move between earthly and supernal realms. Hasidism perpetuated popular beliefs in demons and spirits that could harm the living and even take control of their bodies.58 A particularly fascinating case was that of Hannah Rachel, the maid of Ludmir (Włodzimierz), whose unusual intellectual abilities were explained with the theory that the spirit of a man had entered her body.59 It was probably no coincidence that the ritual of the Black Wedding was observed in Podolia, Volhynia, eastern Galicia, and northern Małopolska, areas where Hasidism was very influential. In contrast, there are no accounts of Black Weddings in northern Lithuania, where Hasidism was weaker. In ethnographic materials collected in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Jewish communities of eastern Galicia and northern

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Małopolska, one can find Jewish wedding customs that seem connected to the Black Wedding and may have contributed to its emergence. For example, Black Weddings may have been influenced by the Jewish bride’s customary visit to her deceased parents’ graves to invite them to her wedding celebration. It was believed that the deceased parents could intercede on behalf of the bride.60 Jews also widely believed that the betrothed were susceptible to interference by spirits, which is why they were never to be left alone during the eight days before the wedding.61 The bride in particular was at risk for demonic possession (the theme of An-ski’s The Dybbuk), and it was recommended that she not leave the house. It is also possible that elements of the Black Wedding derived from internal Jewish healing practices like the measuring of a sick person with a cotton thread, which was then used to make a wick for candles. The candles were then taken to the synagogue or buried in the cemetery, wrapped in a shroud. A similar healing effect was attained by measuring the length and width of a cemetery with white linen, which was later distributed to the poor.62 If a young girl was seriously ill, covering her with a wedding gown was considered an effective cure. It was also believed that objects left in the cemetery for some time—such as a kerchief left on a grave—had the power to heal.63 Finally, the influences on Jewish magical practices are not always easily reducible to exclusively Slavic Christian or Jewish. Elements of a common magical tradition may be observed in conventional wedding rituals, such as the tossing of wheat and other grains at newlyweds, the breaking of the glass, and the symbolism of the bride’s white veil or scarf.64 The same was true of death rituals. In both Slavic and Jewish funeral ceremonies, death candles were burnt near the head of the deceased, coins or broken pieces of pottery were placed on his eyelids, mirrors were covered, and the deceased’s legs were pointed in the direction of the door. The custom of burying suicide victims by the cemetery wall was common to both cultures.65 Of course, there were minor differences, such as the clothing in which the dead were buried. Among Polish Christians, dark colors prevailed—black and dark blue—while only married women were dressed in white aprons.66 In Jewish funerals, the color white predominated. The situation changed if the deceased was a young girl or woman. In Christian society, she was often buried in a white dress, or even in a wedding gown. The bonnet of the young deceased Jewish woman would have a black rather than white ribbon on it.67 A black h≥uppah would be erected for her if she was betrothed. But overall, Jewish and Slavic wedding and funeral rituals bore an uncanny resemblance.

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CONCLUSION

In east central Europe, with its colorful pattern of religions and cultures, it is difficult to disentangle the origins of specific customs. Many resulted from the coexistence of manifold traditions and experiences, which testifies to the degree to which these cultures permeated each other and formed a common heritage. Jewish culture in east central Europe may be said to resemble a fabric in which horizontal (i.e., non-Jewish) threads intersected with vertical (i.e., Jewish) ones. The Black Wedding constitutes a vivid example of the imbricated nature of Christian and Jewish remedial magic. Black wedding ceremonies were still being practiced as late as the Second World War. Attempts were made during the Holocaust to hold Black Weddings in ghettos to combat typhus epidemics. One such ceremony was held in Z{elechów, and is poignantly confirmed by a surviving description and photograph.68 Attempts were also made to organize a Black Wedding in Warsaw, as recorded in a diary entry by Adam Czerniaków, head of the Warsaw Judenrat: “Yesterday I was inoculated against typhus a second time. My blood test showed a negative reaction, which meant that I could fall ill

A Black Wedding in Ze{ lechów during the Holocaust. From Yizkhor bukh fun der Zhelekhover yidisher kehileh (Chicago, 1953).

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with typhus. A few months ago, the rabbis proposed to me that a wedding should be celebrated at the cemetery. In their opinion, this would help combat the epidemic. The scientists who test the blood say that neither a positive nor a negative test is authoritative, and that they are able to help as much as the rabbis mentioned above.”69 Less harrowing recollections of this custom endure in Polish literature, such as the dramatic works of Tadeusz Kantor, staged with great success in his experimental theater during the 1970s and 1980s.70 The Black Wedding tradition lives on in Jewish folktales circulating in contemporary Ukraine.71 NOTES 1. Gazeta Lubelska 183 (1892): 1. 2. Ibid., 182 (1892): 1; 184 (1892): 1; 185 (1892): 1. 3. Ibid., 184 (1892): 1. 4. An account was published in the second half of the twentieth century. See They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland before the Holocaust, ed. Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett (Berkeley: University of California Press, Judah L. Magnes Museum, 2007), 14. 5. Sefer Riki. Ryki A Memorial to the Community of Ryki (Poland) [in Hebrew and Yiddish] (Tel Aviv: Irgun Yatz’e Ryki, 1973), 44. 6. Dziennik Narodowy 55 (March 1916): 3. 7. That the town was Lublin may be adduced from the fact that the previous correspondence originated there, and the town was struck by an epidemic at that time. See Kurier Lubelski 12 (1916): 6. However, the report could also refer to Piotrków Trybunalski, where Dziennik Narodowy was published. 8. Czas 125 (1916): 2. 9. Dziennik Poznan´ski 60 (1916): 5. 10. Khurban Bilgoraj, ed. A. Kronenberg (Tel Aviv, 1956), 125; Kamenetz-Podolsk; A Memorial to a City Annihilated by the Nazis, ed. Leon S. Blatman (New York: Sponsors of the KamenetzPodolsk Memorial Book, 1966), 86. Eli Zborowski confirms the existence of such habits in his native town Z{ arki during the interwar period. 11. Maksymilian Goldstein and Karol Dresdner, Kultura i sztuka ludu z[ydowskiego na ziemiach polskich (Lwów: M. Goldstein, 1935), 3. 12. Kurier Lwowski 97 (1920): 4; 98 (1920): 2–3. 13. Goldstein and Dresdner, Kultura i sztuka ludu z[ydowskiego, 3. 14. Viktoriya Mochalova, “Istselenie, spasenie, izbavlenie v evreyskoy traditsii i magicheskaya praktika (evreyskiy obryad kladbishcheskoy svad’by i ego slavyanskie paralleli),” Folk Medicine and Magic in Slavic and Jewish Cultural Tradition (Moskva: Sefer, 2007), 93; O. V. Belova, V. Ya. Petrukhin, Evreyskiy mif v slavyanskoy kul’tyre, Ierusalim 5768–Moskva 2008, 374. 15. Mochalova, Istselenie, spasenie, izbavlenie v evreyskoy traditsii, 95. 16. S. An-ski, The Dybbuk and Other Writings, ed. David G. Roskies (New York: Schocken Books, 1992), 21. 17. Ibid., 25.

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18. Mochalova, Istselenie, spasenie, izbavlenie v evreyskyj traditsii, 96. 19. Ya. Rambro, “Kholernaya svad’ba,” Voskhod 6 (1884): 10–45. 20. Il’ia Erenburg, The Stormy Life of Lasik Roitschwantz (New York: Polyglot Library, 1960), 17. 21. Bruno Jasien´ski, Pale$ Paryz[ (1928; reprint, Warszawa: Biblioteka Analiz-Jirafa Roja, 2005), 131. Bruno Jasien´ski, the pen name of Wiktor Zysman (1901–38), was born in Klimontów, near Sandomierz. He was a leading Polish Futurist. In the 1920s, he was involved in the communist movement. He was shot while imprisoned in Moscow. 22. The title had a dual meaning—the story took place on the border between Poland and Soviet Belarus, but the word “border” also had the propagandistic meaning of a line dividing the progressive communist world of the Soviet Union from the backward bourgeois world represented by Poland. In this case, the Black Wedding was used to put a halt to Bolshevik expansion and progress. See Miron Chernenko, Krasnaya zvezda, zheltaya zvezda; kinomatograficheskaya istoriya evreystva v Rosii (Moskva, 2006), 103. 23. Mochalova, Istselenie, spasenie, izbavlenie v evreyskyj traditsii, 89–109. 24. Aleksander Brückner, Mitologia słowian´ska i polska (Warszawa: PWN 1985), 53; Stanisław Bylina, Człowiek i zas´wiaty (Warszawa: Instytut Historii PAN, 1992), 7; Adam Fischer, S:wie$to umarłych (Lwów: Muzeum im. Dzieduszyckich, 1923), 13; Aleksander Gieysztor, Mitologia Słowian (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego, 1982), 259; Oskar Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´–Polesie (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1968), 101, 137; Barbara Ogrodowska, S:wie$ta polskie. Tradycja i obyczaj (Warszawa: Centrum Animacji Kultury, 2000), 308; Jan Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci. Zwyczaje, obrze$dy oraz wierzenia pogrzebowe i zaduszkowe na Kaszubach (Lublin: Towarzystwo Naukowe Katolickiego Uniwersytetu Lubelskiego, 1999), 251. 25. Fischer, S´wie$to umarłych, 31, 46; Zdzisław Kupisin´ski, S´mierc´ jako wydarzenie eschatologiczne. Zwyczaje, obrze$dy i wierzenia pogrzebowe i zaduszne mieszkan´ców regionu opoczyn´skiego i radomskiego (Lublin: Wydawnictwo KUL, 2007), 243; Ogrodowska, S:wie$ta polski, 42. 26. Ogrodowska, S´wie$ta polskie, 191; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci, 284. 27. Alfons Labudda, “Liturgia Dnia Zadusznego w Polsce do wydania Rytuału Piotrkowskiego 1631,” Studia z dziejów liturgii w Polsce 1 (Lublin, 1973), 302; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci, 287. 28. Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady: Forefathers; trans. into English verse by Count Potocki of Montalk; foreword by Wiktor Weintraub (London: Polish Cultural Foundation, 1968), part 2. 29. Józef Kallenbach, Tło obrze$dowe “Dziadów” (Lwów, 1898), 12; Ogrodowska, S:wie$ta polskie, 309. 30. Brückner, Mitologia słowian´ska i polska, 54; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´– Polesie, 137; Ogrodowska, S´wie$ta polskie, 309. 31. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 17:2, Lubelskie (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1962), 83; Fischer, S:wie$to umarłych, 29. 32. Fischer, S´ wie$to umarłych, 20; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 17:2, Lubelskie, 85; Ogrodowska, S´ wie$ta polskie, 311. 33. Fischer, S´ wie$to umarłych, 36, 53; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 53, Litwa (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1966), 161; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 56:1, Rus´ Czerwona (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie

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Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1976), 244; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci, 293. 34. Fischer, S´ ywie$to umarłych, 45; Ogrodowska, S:wie$ta polskie, 311. 35. Fischer, S´ wie$to umarłych, 32. 36. Ibid., 35. 37. Ibid., 32. 38. Ibid., 37, 40. 39. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´–Polesie, 101, 309. 40. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 84, Wołyn´: Suplement do tomu 36 (Poznan´: IOK, 2002), 90. 41. Jan Stanisław Bystron´, Dzieje obyczajów w dawnej Polsce: Wiek XVI–XVIII, vol. 2 (Warszawa: PIW, 1994), 114. The oldest known cemetery in Warsaw was located in the churchyard at St. Barbara’s, which is today located in downtown Warsaw next to the Marriott Hotel. 42. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´–Polesie, 123. 43. Regina Lilientalowa, S´wie$ta z´ydowskie w przeszłos´ci i teraz´niejszos´ci, vol. 2 (Kraków: Akademia Umieje$tnos´ci, 1908), 97. 44. In Poland, there is a related tradition of caroling, which survives today, in which one of the carolers is always dressed as Death. Ogrodowska, S´wie$ta polskie, 67; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci, 264. See also Gabriella Safran, “Dancing with Death and Salvaging Jewish Culture in Austeria and The Dybbuk,” Slavic Review 59, no. 4 (2000): 761–81. 45. Ogrodowska, S´wie$ta polskie, 67; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierci, 264. 46. Safran, “Dancing with Death.” 47. Andrzej Karpin´ski, W walce z niewidzialnym wrogiem (Warszawa: Wydawnictwo Neriton and Instytut Historii PAN, 2000), 109; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 42:7, Mazowsze (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1970), 339. 48. Karpin´ski, W walce z niewidzialnym wrogiem, 35; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 42:7, Mazowsze, 342; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´–Polesie, 438; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 53, Litwa, 365; Jan Kracik, Pokonac´ czarna$ s´mierc´: staropolskie postawy wobec zarazy (Kraków: Wydaw. M. [Maszachaba], 1991), 119; Andrzej Podberski, “Demonologia ludu ukrain´skiego w powiecie Czehryn´skim,” w: Zbiór Wiadomos´ci do Antropologii Krajowej, 4 (1880): 80. 49. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 42:7, Mazowsze, 343. 50. Al. P., “Oranie wody (kradziez´ ziemi, wody, oborywanie podczas zarazy),” Wisła, 4:2 (1890): 332. 51. Norbert Scindler, Ludzie pros´ci, ludzie niepokorni . . . Kultura ludowa w pocza$tkach dziejów nowoz[r tnych (Warsaw: Wiedza Powszechna, 2001), 291. 52. Sebastian Petrycy, Instructia abo nauka, iak sie$ sprawowac´ czasu moru, Kraków 1613; Sebastian S´leszkowski, O ustrzez[eniu i leczeniu morowego powietrza, Kalisz 1623. See also Stanisław Chodyn´ski, Zbiór wiadomos´ci dziejów medycyny dotycza$cych. Z akt kapituły włocławskiej (Włocławek, 1912), 68; Franciszek Giedroyc´, Mór w Polsce w wiekach ubiegłych (Warszawa, 1899), 121; Franciszek Giedroyc´, Ochrona od zarazy morowej w Polsce, Krytyka Lekarska, 3 (1899): 41, 79, 115, 153; Karpin´ski, W walce z niewidzialnym wrogiem, 169, 177; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 17:2, Lubelskie, s. 112; Jan Kracik, Pokonac´ czarna s´mierc´, 132, Jan Kracik, “Praktyki religijno–magiczne na Górze Witosławskiej w czasie epidemii 1708 r.,” Roczniki Teologiczno– Kanoniczne, 22:4 (1975): 152.

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53. Stanisław Salmanowicz, Torun´ wobec zarazy w XVII i XVIII wieku, Rocznik Torun´ski, 16 (1983): 246. 54. See the chapter by Yohanan Petrovsky–Stern in this volume. 55. Segel, Wierzenia i lecznictwo ludowe Z{ydów, 53. 56. Gideon Bohak, Ancient Jewish Magic: A History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Joshua Trachtenberg, Jewish Magic and Superstition (New York, 1939). 57. Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland–Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 131–59. 58. Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 143, 241. 59. For a recent study on this fascinating figure, see Nathaniel Deutch, The Maiden of Ludmir: A Jewish Holy Woman and Her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003). 60. Regina Lilientalowa, “Wierzenia, przesa$ dy i praktyki ludu z[ydowskiego,” Wisła 18 (1904): 264. 61. Regina Lilientalowa, “Zare$czyny w wesele z[ydowskie,” Wisła 14 (1900): 318. 62. Lilientalowa, Wierzenia, przesa$dy i praktyki, 106. 63. Benjamin Wolf Segel, “Wierzenia i lecznictwo ludowe Z{ydów,” Lud 3 (1897): 53. 64. Lilientalowa, Zare$czyny w wesele z[ydowskie, 65. 65. Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 17:2, Lubelskie, 88; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 20:1, Radomskie (Wrocław and Kraków: Polskie Towarzystwo Muzyczne; Warszawa: Ludowa Spółdzielnia Wydawnicza, 1964), 133; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 52, Białorus´–Polesie, 308; Kolberg, Dzieła wszystkie, vol. 56:1, Rus´ Czerwona, 438; Lilientalowa, Wierzenia, przesa$dy i praktyki, 105; Teofil Mleczko, “S:wiat zmarłych,” Lud 8 (1902): 52; Perszon, Na brzegu z[ycia i s´mierc´, 193, 225. 66. Mleczko, S´wiat zmarłych, 52. 67. Lilientalowa, Wierzenia, przesa$dy i praktyk, 108. 68. Izkhor bukh fun der Zhelekhover yidisher kehileh (Chicago, 1953), 225. 69. Adama Czerniakowa dziennik getta warszawskiego [Adam Czerniaków’s Warsaw ghetto diary], ed. Marian Fuks (Warszawa: PWN, 1983), 251, entry dated February 12, 1942. In English, see The Warsaw Diary of Adam Czerniaków: Prelude to Doom, ed. Raul Hilberg, Stanisław Staron, and Josef Kermisz (New York: Stein and Day, 1979), 324. 70. Tadeusz Kantor, Pisma, vol. 2, Teatr s´mierci. Teksty z lat 1975–1984 (Kraków: Ossolineum and Cricoteka, 2004), 199–258. 71. Shtetel XXI vek. Polevye issledovaniya, Sankt-Peterburg 2008, 259.

R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov “In the State of Walachia” Widening the Besht’s Cultural Panorama

Moshe Idel

A UNANIMOUS SCHOLARLY AGREEMENT OR A HISTORIAN’S MYTH?

It is currently a matter of scholarly consensus that the founder of the eighteenth-century revivalist movement known as Hasidism,1 R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), was born in the Podolian town of Okopy. Though not corroborated by any reliable source, this historical detail has been repeatedly invoked to locate the social and cultural background against which the founder of Hasidism emerged. However, if the birthplace of the Besht changes, as we shall suggest below, so too does his entire early context. Such a change forces us to contemplate some profound but rarely considered religious influences on the emergence of Hasidism. Simon M. Dubnow, the first accomplished historian to dedicate a fullfledged study to the history of Hasidism from its inception, initially expressed some hesitation over the connection between Okopy and the Besht in articles printed in Russian beginning in 1888 that culminated in a book in 1931. But he ultimately accepted Okopy as the Besht’s birthplace.2 Given his status as the leading historian of eastern European Jewry, Dubnow’s view has

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reverberated powerfully and was reiterated in important academic studies on the topic3 and leading Jewish encyclopedias.4 A rather stable “tradition” has thus been manufactured and disseminated by Jewish historians themselves, a tradition that to my knowledge has never been subjected to scrutiny. Yet there is no reliable evidence that the Besht was born in Okopy insofar as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century documents, including even legendary ones, are concerned. Dubnow’s decision in this direction was influenced solely by hagiographical material, but even that material does not explicitly offer such an opinion. One, moreover, finds hints about an Okopy birthplace in the notorious Kherson “Genizah,” a collection of letters that, although accepted as authentic by two twentieth-century leaders of the Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, contains material fabricated during the early twentieth century and has been widely repudiated by the scholarly community. That an outright forgery might have contributed to the Okopy assertion’s acceptance is hardly reassuring.5 What is the exact source of this recurring claim? In reality there is no such source, since the one invoked by Dubnow and subsequent scholars does not actually say what they assume it says. It is found in two different versions of the best-known collection of Hasidic hagiography on the life and deeds of the Besht, Shivh≥ei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov).6 Before delving into these versions, it should be mentioned that Okopy, which means in Polish “trenches” or “ramparts,” or according to its full name, Okop Góry Swie$ ty Trojcy (“the Ramparts of the Holy Trinity”), was a small town next to a small fortress established in 1692 on the border between the Kingdom of Poland and the Ottoman Empire during the short Turkish occupation of part of Podolia between 1672 and 1699. I shall introduce the possibility that the Besht was born somewhere else entirely, perhaps in a town in the northern part of Romania that he probably continued to visit during his more mature years. Although we know little about the forms of Jewish religious activity in the latter area, it was less densely populated and less advanced from the perspective of traditional Jewish knowledge than the small Jewish towns in Podolia, where circles cultivating older forms of ascetic piety or pneumatic personalities were found, and was moreover home to a very different variety of non-Jewish religious currents. The Romanian communities had, in addition, a markedly different history from that of the Podolian localities, especially concerning the infamous 1648–49 pogroms and the rhythms of population replenishment. Of course, it was Podolian Jews whom the Besht approached and whose hearts he conquered, attracting talented younger figures and making them

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his disciples. But the present analysis concerns the site of the Besht’s initial emergence, most likely a region in northern Romania called Walachia (sometimes spelled also Wallachia), and considers the possible religious and cultural bearing of this Romanian context on Hasidism’s spiritual founder. WAS THE BESHT’S BIRTHPLACE IN “WALACHIA”?

Let me start with the Yiddish version of In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov, which claims that the Besht’s father, Rabbi Eliezer, “was dwelling in the states of Walachia.”7 Here the place is mentioned in an unequivocal manner, without any mention of a border. The plural form, “states,” presents the possibility of the Besht’s parents having resided in Walachia in a place far removed from the border with Podolia, a point to which we shall return below. However, in the Hebrew version of the hagiography, the passage is more elaborate: “Rabbi Eliezer, our teacher, the father of the Besht, was dwelling in the state of Walachia, near the border. He and his wife8 were old.”9 This version has the Besht’s father residing in the state (singular) of Wallachia, near an unspecified border. Significantly, there is no mention of the town of Okopy in either version. Which version came first and thus may be considered more authentic? In the last generation scholars have disputed the original language of the hagiography and arrived at quite different solutions.10 Here is not the appropriate place to return to the complex arguments in favor of one position or another, and the small discrepancy under discussion does not decisively solve the quandary. But one may assume that at least in this case, the Hebrew form “hayah dar” (had lived)—though in existence since the Hebrew Bible—is a translation of the Yiddish “hat gevoynt” and not vice versa. One may also assume that the Hebrew version’s additional information on the border was added to either the Yiddish version or to a hypothetical common source, since it is unlikely that a redactor would simply edit out such vital information. “Border” is a translation of the Hebrew sefar. The common usage of this term, however, is not “borderline” (a precise demarcation that separates two different countries or territories is gevul in Hebrew). “Sefar” rather denotes a small area located on the periphery of a much larger area, in the sense of “frontier.” Given the fact that the larger region is described as Walachia, this could mean that Eliezer and his wife lived in a region on the periphery of Walachia and, as Avraham Rubinstein, editor of the Hebrew version of In Praise of the Besht, mentioned, we may in fact be dealing with Moldavia,11 or more precisely, in light of later descriptions, the province of Bukovina.

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On the other hand, this more common meaning of sefar is qualified by the term samukh (“near”), and the phrase samukh la-sefar is therefore just as the English translators rendered it, “near the border.” The exact expression samukh la-sefar is found in numerous earlier Hebrew sources, so this usage is neither new nor problematic. But the identity of the country on the other side of the border of Walachia remains unclear. The Besht’s father was taken to another remote country by bandits (sholelim) according to the Hebrew version of the legend, or by Tatars according to the Yiddish one, and kept there for several years; reminiscent of the biblical Joseph he became a viceroy, and he did not touch the woman he was given as a wife. Then, the Hebrew version of the legend reports, he returned to the original town and then to the town in which his wife was now living. Though both were very old—according to the hagiography nearly one hundred years—they nevertheless gave birth to the Besht, now reminiscent of the biblical Abraham and Sarah story.12 This means that the Besht’s parents were inhabitants of a town—the term is ‘yir, which has no parallel in the Yiddish version—in a border region described as part of Walachia, which his mother left for another town after the alleged kidnapping of the Besht’s father. They are not reported to have left this new town, where the future parents reunited after the husband’s return; and in the absence of such a specification, Walachia becomes or remains a possible location for the Besht’s birth. This is all we know about the parents and birth of the founder of Hasidism, and parsimonious and problematic as this single source is, it remained for many decades the only literary reference invoked by historians to address the issue. Later on in the text of In Praise of the Besht, the Besht is described as an inhabitant (but not a native!) of “the town of Okopy”13—referred to in the Yiddish and Hebrew sources as Akup.14 This piece of information, which seems to be the sole source for the scholarly attribution of the Besht’s birthplace to Okopy—is reported in the name of a certain legendary Rabbi Adam,15 who revealed to his son in a dream that he should deliver mysterious kabbalistic or magical writings to “Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer of the town of Okopy.”16 In this context, the Besht is described as fourteen years old. A rabbinical attribution to the Besht at this age, despite his rather sparse education, would be a real achievement even for the Besht. But in dreams, especially those of magicians, anything is possible. Moreover, although the study of kabbalistic books at this early age is not impossible in eastern Europe during the eighteenth century, as we know from the reports of the Besht’s much younger contemporaries Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, and Solomon Maimon,

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I doubt if this was so in the Besht’s case. All descriptions of the Besht’s background, legendary as they may be, agree that he emerged from a very humble environment. In any case, the crucial point here is that the birth of the Besht in Okopy is never mentioned, and that the single reference to the town in the entire book has to do with an imagined event that, even if historical, would have occurred only fourteen years after the Besht’s birth. Let me make it clear that it is not my intent to deny the possibility that the Besht was in some manner connected with Okopy during his youth. But reliance on Okopy as his birthplace is quite risky: why historians should ever have attributed such authority to such an event (if, indeed, it even took place ) in relation to an event occurring fourteen years earlier, i.e., the Besht’s birth, is itself a quandary. The shaky validity of the series of legends about R. Adam and his son, and their relations to the Besht, should moreover give further pause to anyone interested in a critical approach to the Besht’s biography. The extremely scant material actually points in a different direction. To sum up, it only allows us to conclude that the founder of Hasidism was born to a very poor family in an unknown place on the Romanian side of the border with, presumably, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, in a province that was in some way under its influence, and that the Besht was active in the Polish portion. Since there are no sources on the family’s permanent move from one place to another, the Besht would have been born on the Romanian side of the border or somewhere in Moldavia, would have crossed the border early in life alone or with his family, and then would have established himself in the recently created town of Okopy, which, to my knowledge, was never part of northern Romania but rather part of Bukovina when it belonged to the Austro-Hungarian empire after the 1770s. To reiterate, there is simply no evidence from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the Besht was born in Okopy, not even legendary. Even if we were to accept the reliability of the hagiographical source describing him as “of the town of Okopy,” it certainly does not follow that he was actually born there. Moreover, according to information transmitted by a descendant of R. Shneur Zalman of Liady, the late eighteenth-century founder of Lubavitch Hasidism, in a sermon from 1904, Akup is not even a name of a town. It is rather a Polish word for a trench or some form of fortification, found at the outskirts of the town of Tluste, where the Besht’s poor parents were living. Accordingly, R. Shneur Zalman is reported to have said, on the basis of an oral tradition, that when the Besht signed “Israel of Akup,” he meant that he was from the trenches of Tluste.17 In the case of

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so dubious a tradition we had best not identify those trenches as the Besht’s birthplace, but rather as the place where he was known to be active. It seems more likely that the Besht’s stay in Tluste reflects the period when the parents, presumably, had moved to Podolia, if we are to trust this problematic type of evidence at all. The same R. Joseph Isaac of Lubavitch claimed, in a sermon delivered years later in 1941, that the Besht was born “in Akup on the border in a very small settlement between Turkey and Walachia.”18 To the best of my knowledge, this mid-twentieth-century testimony is the very first traditional source to explicitly mention the town of Okopy as the birthplace of the Besht. And even this statement is not uncomplicated. On the one hand, as seen above, it contradicts an earlier tradition in this author’s name from some years earlier. On the other hand, Okopy was, historically speaking, indeed at the border situated between Turkey, Poland, and Walachia in 1698, a piece of information that would not likely have been known to a forger of Hasidic documents (i.e., the Kherson Geniza) living in early twentiethcentury Russia. Moreover, given the fact that R. Joseph Isaac mentions no source, we may dismiss this as little more than a reverberation from the Kherson fabrications, which present a more mature Besht as active in Okopy. Provided that the place where the Besht’s elderly parents lived was at the border region but, in accordance with the Hebrew text of In Praise of the Besht, still within Walachia (the meaning of which will be discussed below), it seems to me more plausible to assume, on the strength of the extant material, that the Besht was not born in Okopy or even in Tluste, even if according to R. Joseph Isaac he signed his name as such. Let me be clear: I am merely considering what seems more plausible in light of extant evidence transmitted through hagiography, the sole source to address the issue of the parents of the Besht and his birth, in addition to potentially independent testimony by the Polish maskil Abraham Stern, to be discussed shortly. This is, therefore, a tentative picture that could always change if more reliable material were to surface. Where was the “border” mentioned in the Hebrew version? Although the stories that constitute In Praise of the Besht were mainly collected in 1794 and printed in late 1814, I doubt if the border claim reflects such a late period. I assume rather that it refers to the period immediately preceding the birth of the Besht in 1698, according to the scant sources in our possession.19 My preference for attributing the meaning of the opening statement of In Praise of the Besht to the political situation in 1698, rather than earlier (according to Elchanan Reiner’s thesis)20 or later, is the fact that the whole region of

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Podolia reverted to Polish rule around 1698, and the fortress of Okopy would have thus lost its border status and strategic importance while at the same time opening up to Jewish settlement. Therefore, the Besht’s later development and the earliest phase of what would become the Hasidic movement took place in Podolia, a region that remained part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth for over seventy-five years until the first partition, when it was incorporated into the Habsburg Empire.21 Let me add that I wonder whether a Jew writing in the second half of the eighteenth century would really describe Podolia, a Polish or Ukrainian region occupied by the Turks for twenty-seven years, as “Walachia.” The Walachia designation, applied to the Besht’s parents in In Praise of the Besht, cannot mean Podolia. The Besht’s parents must, instead, have been inhabitants of the northern Romanian territories, governed indirectly and intermittently by the Turks in one way or another for several centuries. There is an additional piece of evidence that may independently corroborate this view, to which Marcin Wodzinski has kindly drawn my attention: an unidentified report on Hasidism from the maskilic camp (Polish Jewish proponents of Enlightenment-based reform) that describes the Besht as a person who came from Walachia to Podolia. The author of the report is Abraham Stern (1762–1842), a contemporary of the printers of In Praise of the Besht. According to Stern, “No more than a few score years ago, an Israelite from Walachia called Israel came to Podolia to the town of Miedzyboz. He adopted the name Ba‘al Shem.”22 This is a rather unequivocal statement. If we accept it as a reliable source, independent of the hagiography, we have corroboration for the thesis of the present study. Though Stern may have had access to the printed forms of In Praise of the Besht or to the views of Perl, his statement does not reflect any precise statement found in those sources. From the manner in which Stern’s statement is formulated, it seems that the Besht was not a mere child when arriving to Podolia, although this could be an over-reading. At any rate, for the time being Stern’s report is the most explicit statement about the Walachian origin of the Besht, and it could well be independent of a hagiographic or even Hasidic source. It should be mentioned that his attribution of “Walachian” origins to the Besht might reflect contempt toward both Hasidism and Walachia on the part of a Polish maskil, who wished to present the despised religious phenomenon as foreign. This was attempted in other “Enlightened” works, including Joseph Perl’s critique and R. Nahman Krochmal’s 1816 epistle about Hasidism, all flowering in the same generation. Nevertheless, I would refrain from pre-

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supposing that Stern outright invented such a “Walachian” tradition in the absence of evidence to that effect. A border was, to be sure, in most cases no more than a theoretical and quite flexible line in Jewish eyes. Indeed, both fortresses there, Okopy on the Polish side and Kamienice-Podolski on the Turkish side, were only a distance of some few miles from each other, and both constituted centers of concentrated military activity and building construction. I would say that even the recently established small town of Okopy next to the fortress hosted a vibrant Jewish culture. From the Jewish point of view, culturally and otherwise, shifts in borders between empires were relatively meaningless: we may well assume that on each side of the theoretical borderline, Jews resorted to the same vernacular, Yiddish, for communicating among themselves; to Hebrew for more advanced forms of Jewish learning, and to the vernacular languages for communicating with the gentiles. The fundamental Jewish culture hardly differed among Jews who found themselves separated by a political or military borderline such as that established by the Katowice agreement in 1699 or any other such political arrangement. This point notwithstanding, from a broader cultural perspective being born and raised in a frontier region may have been deeply consequential for the Besht and the slowly nascent circles of Hasidic figures active in the area. I do not refer only to the psychological state of emergency that characterized life in such a belligerent region, which are by now quite imponderable, but also to the richer cultural possibilities that this geographical detail entailed. Most important, early Hasidic masters might have been exposed to more than one cultural and religious context, and rather than restricting the possible interactions or relationship to various Christian ambiances related to Russian schismatic phenomena,23 we should take certain Muslim cultural elements into consideration, as well as consider the possibility of contacts with the rather mysterious tribe of Csángós, a population of Hungarian extraction, which displayed Shamanic features and had been active in several villages in the Subcarpathian settlements of North Moldavia since the mid-thirteenth century.24 Given the relatively short period of the Ottoman occupation of the eastern part of Podolia, between 1672 and 1699, neither Turkish culture nor Islam in general would have extensively infiltrated the popular culture of the northern Moldavian or southern Ukrainian regions. But the presence of some more modest elements of Turkish or Muslim folklore, such as the widespread stories related to Nassr a-Din Hodja, cannot be denied. The preponderance of such stories is indeed interesting, since one of the

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major contributions of Hasidism from its very inception was the resort to storytelling as a crucial medium for transmitting religious messages.25 In general, there was in early Hasidism a greater openness toward appropriations from non-Jewish sources. Indeed, the Besht himself has been described by his grandson, R. Moshe H˘ayyim Efrayyim of Sudilkov, as having resorted to “alien” stories, namely of a non-Jewish extraction. The grandfather is reported as telling “stories and external matters,26 by means of which he worshipped God through the pure and subtle wisdom that he possessed,” an important dimension rarely expressed explicitly elsewhere in the extant Hasidic material.27 Nor was it only the resort to stories as a vehicle of religious messages that was relatively new to Jewish mysticism. There was also the negation of the importance of the “I”—namely the ego—found in a similar storiola related to R. Aharon of Karlin, a student of R. Dov Baer, the Great Maggid of Mezeritch (Mie$ dzyrzecz), which seems to reflect the impact of a Sufi storiola, as pointed out by Martin Buber28 and more recently in my own studies.29 In any case, In Praise of the Besht records meetings between Jews and people of varied backgrounds—including Muslim merchants—on market days in the town of Balta, another town on the Podolia-Moldavia border during the early eighteenth century.30 THE MORE MATURE BESHT AND “WALACHIA”

There are three additional occasions in the hagiography where we may adduce the presence of the Besht in the northern Romanian territories, in one case described yet again as Walachia, and they seem to concern separate events. The more important and explicit one is found in the following passage in the Hebrew version of In Praise of the Besht: Once the Besht was in the state of Walachia,31 where they have grape wine so strong that even when you mix two or three drops in a glass of wine it is too strong to drink. The householder offered the Besht a glass of this wine. When he tasted it the Besht said: “Your wine is delicious. Why is your glass so small?” The householder answered: “Because it is dangerous to drink a large portion.” The Besht said: “I am not afraid of that.” They gave him a large glass and he drank it all. All of them stared at him in fright as his face became red and his hair stood up as though it were on fire. But the Besht passed his hand over his face and at once he

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returned to normal.32 All of them were very surprised but he said that our Rabbis, blessed be their memory, said: “Wine is strong but fear works it off.” When he looked at the greatness of the Blessed One, he was struck by fear and trembling, and it completely undid the effects of the wine.33

This is a rather innocent passage, in the sense that there are neither extraordinary miracles nor profound teachings. It is worthy of a more sustained and detailed analysis than can be accomplished here; nevertheless, it can be said for the moment to reflect a relatively mature Besht, namely someone who already knew how to exit the state of drunkenness. Moreover, consuming wine does not fit the ascetic profile of the Besht’s early phase, an issue to which we shall return below. Nor is there any compelling reason to question the authenticity of this passage, including its independent assertion of a connection between the Besht and Walachia. It seems the Besht was able to communicate with the people mentioned there, probably non-Jews, meaning that he could speak in a Romanian vernacular without a translator. It should be pointed out that although the specific dialect of the Romanian language in Moldavia is indeed closer to Russian than the dialects spoken in other parts of Romania of today, it would still be incomprehensible for someone who knows only Russian or Ukrainian. The passage also suggests that he was to a certain extent an outsider who was unacquainted with a specific type of wine in the region, all the more interesting considering that the Besht may have run a tavern for a certain period, as we shall see momentarily. In any case, drinking wine with non-Jews suggests a degree of openness and sociability with non-Jews, affirming the more “wild,” uncouth, nonconformist nature of early Hasidism that was attenuated in the later reports but survived in early criticisms of Hasidism. For example, the Besht would refer to R. Nah≥man of Kosov as “crazy,” and the latter returned the favor. This “wildness” has less to do with theologically or mystically extreme concepts than with the idiosyncratic behavior of the first masters of Hasidism, including the Besht. Perhaps this feral stage was characteristic of the Besht’s pre-Miedzyboz period, and was domesticated as the Great Maggid of Mezeritch and his disciples disseminated Hasidism in larger Jewish centers. According to another text in In Praise of the Besht, the Besht lived for some years in mountains located beyond the “river of Prut,” allegedly crossing the river weekly: “He lived in a small village and made his living by keeping a tavern. After he brought brandy to his wife he would cross the river Prut and retire into seclusion34 in a house-like crevice that was cut into the mountain.

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He used to take one loaf of bread for one meal and eat once a week. He endured this way of life for several years.35 On the eve of the Holy Sabbath he used to return home.”36 This testimony, if we accept its accuracy, means that the Besht spent some years of his early mature life both in a small village and, for even longer, in solitude in the mountains on the other side of the river Prut, which may refer to the northern part of the Romanian territories. Unfortunately, the identity of this small, probably Podolian, village is unknown. Were we to know it, it could help us identify what specific part of the river the Besht crossed it. The river Prut is quite long, stemming in the North from the Podolian part of the Carpathian Mountains and flowing for most of its trajectory in the Moldavian territories along their border with Podolia. If we assume that the Besht was not living in the vicinity of the northwestern part of the river but in the vicinity of the place where he married, namely somewhere around Kuty or Kolomaya, we may plausibly assume that he crossed the river at a point that would bring him into the northern Moldavian parts of the Carpathians, which just so happen to be near the places attributed to the Besht and his synagogue, or the “synagogue of the Jew,” in legends that circulated for generations.37 Was this presumed retreat to the Romanian mountains necessarily a return to the place of his childhood? For the time being it is difficult to ascertain. But at the very least, by introducing the possibility of a Moldavian or Bukovinian background we inject some uncertainty over the setting of the Besht’s birth and early life. Uncertainty is surely preferable to an Okopy myth created and embraced by twentieth-century historians of Hasidism and lacking any reliable textual support. The combination of mountain seclusion and an ascetic exercise that involves consuming only bread is also known from hesychastic asceticism. A mystical practice that consists in techniques for reaching experiences of calmness (Hesychia) and communion with God when performed in a state of seclusion, hesychastic asceticism crystallized in the mid-fourteenth century in Mt. Athos (although it drew upon much earlier sources) and slowly spread into the Balkans and the northern part of Romania, especially the Carpathian Mountains. In the Besht’s case, seclusion and asceticism did not necessarily coincide, but in this passage they are described as such. Interestingly enough, these ascetic exercises did not attract the interest of the Besht’s followers and did not reverberate in Hasidism, to my knowledge. Of course, the formulaic descriptions of the Besht’s periods of seclusion are hardly reliable from a historical point of view. If we adopt a more critical approach, we may

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say that it makes perfect sense in a post-factum hagiographical description of a personality who became, meanwhile, a religious leader, to have him undergo a spiritual development in preparation for a peak moment when he would disclose his real and extraordinary nature. But, in my opinion, this latter reading is no more than an anachronistic or a teleological one by his disciples, although we may accept the possibility of a historical kernel without accepting the precise details of the seclusion or the precise rhythm mentioned in this context. Most important, we have here an example of a relatively ascetic way of life in a mountain cave that is reminiscent of numerous parallel forms of small retreats by individual monks in the Moldavian Carpathian Mountains from that period and beyond, when hundreds of monks lived alone in such small caves (and still do). It appears that sometime early in his life the Besht really did adopt, with certain necessary changes, a pattern of ascetic life in mountain caves found already for some centuries in the monachal life of orthodox Christians in parts of the Carpathians. By the same logic, he may have adopted the traditional Ruthenian and Romanian magical practices and knowledge that were abundant there, another point to which we return below. How would late eighteenth-century followers of the Besht in a relatively urban part of northern Podolia or Wolhyn know details about the ascetic lifestyle of monks who populated the Moldavian Carpathians, which they then posthumously attributed to the Besht? In my opinion, when the redactors of In Praise of the Besht introduced formulaic expressions about the Besht’s structured rhythm of seclusion in the mountains and return home in town, they exploited some historical data about the Besht’s early seclusion period that they were acquainted with, but framed the data in patterns more familiar to their readers. How they should have become acquainted with such a claim in the first place, including its relation to the acquisition of extraordinary occult powers known from Shamanism, is still not clear. But a clue to its historicity may be found in the radical shift undergone in the Besht’s theological development. In the Besht’s initial stage of spiritual development, according to these accounts, he was closer to an ascetic vision. His subsequent negation of asceticism represented a significant shift.38 Let me point out that the pattern of weekday solitude and returning to one’s wife for the Sabbath is not totally new in Rabbinic Judaism; however, a retreat into the mountains for such a long period, several years according to the traditions we have, is apparently unknown in connection to any Jewish figure. Even the biblical Elijah did

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not live so long in remote mountains. For this reason, I doubt that what we have here is merely derived from an earlier classical Jewish mystic. In several cases, of course, themes found in hagiography about the sixteenth-century mystic R. Isaac Luria Ashkenazi, Shivh≥ei ha-’Ari, have been projected onto the Besht. But it is highly improbable that the practice of living in solitude in a cave found in a mountain, which has no antecedent in the long Jewish tradition of hitbodedut (spiritual solitude), would be artificially attributed to the Besht. Instead, the Besht seems to have engaged in a practice that was widespread among the ascetic Orthodox monks in the Carpathians for some few centuries, before changing over to a non-ascetic religiosity during a later stage. As such asceticism was eventually rejected in Hasidism, storytellers and editors would be loath to falsely attribute an ascetic approach to the founder of what was now an expressly non-ascetic movement. The third instance in the Besht’s life suggesting his presence in the Romanian territories is related to his failed attempt to go to the land of Israel. On this journey he is reported to have stayed for a while, perhaps a year, in Istanbul.39 One of the ways to get to Istanbul would be via the seaport of Odessa and then by the sea, as his famous great-grandson R. Nah≥man of Bratzlav was later to do. The other way, however, would be to travel by foot through Moldavia and Muntenia to one of the southern seaports of the western part of the Black Sea, such as the Danubian port city of Galati, which in 1777 would serve as the place of departure to the land of Israel for Hasidic groups. Though neither Walachia nor the manner in which he arrived to Istanbul are ever mentioned in the few extant reports of the Besht’s journey to the land of Israel, this route is a reasonable probability. This journey would have taken place at the end of the thirties or early forties, namely many years after the period of his presumed sojourn in the Carpathians, when he was already an inhabitant of Miedzyboz. In any case, the testimonies regarding the Besht’s retreat in the Carpathian Mountains and his parents’ origins in the northern Romanian territories do not conflict with the data we have from other sources. Not only should we eschew anachronistic views of statal entities like “Poland,” “Ukraine,” or “Romania,” which were at that time non-homogenous entities from both an ethnic and religious point of view with shifting political borders, but even more to the point, we should regard the specific cultural landscape of the mountains and the ambiance and popular cultures of their villages as absolutely formative for the Besht, who would later operate in more urban sites within another type of Jewish culture. This convergence of diverse geographical and cultural elements, both rural and urban ones and perhaps

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also pre-axial and axial mentalities, may help answer the mystery of the success of the Besht’s teachings among so many different strata of Jewish population.40 The background of the young Besht’s experiences seems to have been a rich amalgam of ethnic identities and religious convictions. Raising awareness of this complexity, in addition to introducing much needed skepticism toward the Okopy idea, is our principal purpose here. A further examination of eighteenth-century maps and books written in that period as well as a new altertness to anachronistic geographical identifications and clichés should contribute, however modestly, to a reassessment of an issue that was assumed for so long to be self-evident. WHERE “WALACHIA” REALLY WAS IN THE BESHT’S LIFETIME: A GEOGRAPHICAL QUANDARY

The phrase used in the two passages analyzed above is “the state[s] of Walachia,” which we have interpreted as meaning northern Moldavia. However, the question arises: Why was the term Walachia used for Moldavia? In modern times Walachia uniformly denotes the southern part of Romania in the southern Carpathians, called also Muntenia, far away from the area in question. Not even in the many maps of the eighteenth century I have seen is Moldavia designated by the name Walachia. In fact, the coupling of the names Moldavia and Walachia, which recurs frequently in various historical and literary sources and contexts and denotes two distinct geographical and governmental entities, has created the widespread misconception that they were separate, a misconception that reverberates in the modern usages of the terms. This confusion is also reflected in the manner in which the Hasidic material has been handled by scholars; i.e., an anachronistic understanding of Walachia as referring exclusively to a southern province of Romania far away from the Podolian border and completely distinct from Moldavia. This confusion was probably introduced by Simon Dubnow.41 If we were to adopt this anachronistic understanding of Walachia, the question would arise whether the Besht was born or stayed for a substantial period in a southern province of Romania, as did his much younger contemporary Jacob Leibovitch, better known as Jacob Frank, the Podolian Jew who founded the eighteenth-century European version of Sabbatean messianism known as Frankism. There is, however, no evidence for this. Rather than sending the Besht south, the quandary can be solved by better understanding what Walachia actually meant during the period in question.

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On the basis of two independent and quite reliable sources, we may determine that Walachia and Moldavia were one and the same area during the eighteenth century for Christians and Jews alike. None other than the Romanian prince Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723), indubitably one of the most erudite scholars of the first part of that century in all of Europe, who was also the Voievod (governor) of Moldavia for roughly two years (1710–11), testifies to this usage. In the years 1714–17, Cantemir wrote two books about Moldavia in Latin: one dealing with its various designations and the other with its history. In both, he claims repeatedly that Moldavia is called, among many other things, “Great Walachia,” in contrast to the aforementioned southern Romanian province known as Muntenia, which he refers to as “Little Walachia.”42 This authoritative source, written by an expert who addressed the subject in great detail, is compelling evidence that Jewish sources mentioning Walachia actually meant “Great Walachia” (i.e., Moldavia). The term “Walachia” was invoked more than once, by Hasidic writers and printers who were contemporaries of the editors of In Praise of the Besht, to denote Moldavia, but never, to the best of my knowledge, Muntenia. In an account of the journey of R. H˘ayyim ben Solomon (known also as H˘ayyim Tirer of Chernovitz), former rabbi of the northern Moldavian town of Botosani, to the tomb of the Besht in Miedzyboz, the protagonist is described as “R. H˘ayyim Chernovitzer, from Walichia [sic], from the community of Botoshiani [sic].”43 It is evident that in this case Walachia refers to the region of the well-known town of Chernovitz, with its sizable traditional Jewish population, namely the northern part of Moldavia. Let me turn now to a special form of Walachia mentioned in a text authored by the Besht himself. In certain versions of the famous Holy Epistle or the Epistle of the Ascent of the Soul by the Besht that was sent to his brotherin-law R. Abraham Gershon of Kutov, at that time residing in the land of Israel, we read that the first formulation of the epistle did not reach its destination and that he now sends another epistle because “the deterioration of the states that occurred, due to our sins, has spread throughout all the states around us and has arrived in the community of Mahilov,44 the states of Walachia, and the states of Qedar.”45 The specific spelling of Walachia in two out of three versions of the epistle, and in all the other variants of the epistle possessing this passage, is rather unusual: yajylaww, which in transliteration becomes the incomprehensible form Walih≥ai or Walichai. Such a spelling does not correspond to any of the forms of the term Walachia I could find in Cantemir’s two above-mentioned books, and it is hardly plausible in the

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Romanian sources. On the contrary, the form Vlachia is found there. This is not an error: in addition to the above passage related to R. H˘ayyim Tirer, this precise form occurs in an eighteenth-century epistle sent from Iasi, a major town in Moldavia, by the Hasidic figure R. Abraham of Polotzk to Vitebsk in 1778. It may be assumed that the closest approximations to Vlachia were the German or the Yiddish forms Wallachei and Wallachai.46 Even more compelling is the fact that the Besht invoked the plural form medinot—states—when referring to Walachia. Therefore, he assumes in a manner reminiscent of the Yiddish version of the hagiography that there is more than one state called Walachia. This epistle was written in all its variants, including the lost and extant variants, several years after the Besht’s attempt to reach the land of Israel, and thus he could speak from first-hand experience about the lands of the Muslims and perhaps also his journey in the Walachian territories. In any case, such small but significant details bolster those authors who are more inclined to attribute historical value to elements of hagiography. As Dimitrie Cantemir mentions in his two books on Moldavia, the term Walachia indeed refers to two main Romanian provinces, Moldavia and Muntenia, designated respectively as Great and Little Walachia. Thus, it seems that the Besht was acquainted with an interesting detail that even scholars in contemporary Romania rarely know: as late as the eighteenth century the single term Walachia referred simultaneously to two distinct geographical areas differentiated only by the adjectives small and great. This was certainly also known to some of his followers, who were among the redactors of the hagiography. I hope that I have resolved some of the confusion over the particular usage of the term Walachia in relation to the Besht. This does not necessarily prove that he was in seclusion in Moldavia for a lengthy period, as traditions from In Praise of the Besht explicitly claim, or that he was even there at all. It is quite possible that the hagiography merely fabricates a lengthy period of seclusion in order to fill in missing information on the whereabouts of the founder of Hasidism during the years in question. But the existence of these seclusion-traditions certainly adds to the probability of his stay in the northern part of the Carpathian Mountains of present-day Romania, and it may help establish his Moldavian extraction. The shifting of borders, complexity of the Carpathian populations, and diversity of religious outlooks substantially complicate the historian’s work and belie any attempt to establish even basic facts about where the Besht was born, not to mention where and how he spent the first half of his life. These complications

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merely emerge from a more careful analysis of the scanty information in our possession. If historians are inclined to resist the many fantastic details found in hagiography, they should certainly avoid inventing details that are not even explicitly found there. SOME POSSIBLE ROMANIAN RELIGIOUS INFLUENCES ON THE BESHT

The above examination of extant Hasidic material, which is very scant indeed and only occasionally reliable, only calls into question the Podolian influences on the Besht’s earliest stage of development. Even if he was born and perhaps spent some of his early childhood somewhere in one of the provinces known as Moldavia or Bukovina, he was mostly active as a young adult and more mature person in the Podolian part of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, where his ideas nourished Hasidism’s nascent growth and expansion into new regions over the next two generations. At the same time, he does appear to have returned intermittently to Moldavia or Bukovina.47 It seems plausible that, just as the hagiography reports, the Besht made his way from time to time to the northern Romanian province for periods of seclusion or while traveling to and from the Ottoman Empire. It is also plausible that if he passed through the southern part of Romania named Muntenia on his way to or back from Istanbul (or, according to other versions and other trips—real or imaginary—Constantinople), he would have learned that Muntenia, too, was designated as Walachia. In this context, we should mention a parallel though, geographically speaking, inverse episode in the life of the monk and then famous starets Paisie Velicikovsky (1722–94), a major figure in the Christian Orthodox mystical movement known as Paisianism or neo-Hesychasm. Though born in the Ukrainian city of Poltava, he was active for some years of his youth (after a stay in Mount Athos) in three major centers of orthodox spirituality during important parts of his mature career: first, in the Bukovinan monastery of Dragomirna; then, after the Habsburg conquest of the region, southward in two Moldavian monasteries: Secu and, for a longer duration, Neamtz. This is the very vicinity of the oral traditions about the Besht mentioned above. The latter monastery became the center of the hesychastic renascence in eastern Europe after the late eighteenth century. Let me point out that these monasteries were substantial institutions, sometimes consisting of many hundreds of monks; around them were, at least in the northern and southern Carpathians, smaller communities named in Romanian sihastrie

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(from the term hesychasm); and around the latter were many seclusion caves for individual anchorites, sihastri, i.e., hesychasts, or neighboring caves for two or three monks. Paisie, known earlier as Petru or Platon, was of distant Jewish origin, as he explicitly mentions in his autobiography (his maternal grandfather was a wealthy Jew who converted in Poltava, along with his family, to Christianity).48 To Moldavian monasteries and, by means of his many followers, to the Ukraine and Russia, he introduced a much more intense interest in patristic mystical literature than had ever been seen in those regions. During his prior, fruitful stay at Mount Athos for some years, he studied this literature in the original Greek, in particular some of its spiritual and hagiographical aspects appearing in the famous voluminous collection of material from late antiquity known as the Philokalia.49 Because Paisie’s religious activities took place after the death of the Besht, no impact of his views on the founder of Hasidism is possible, though this could certainly have been the case with his predecessors. It should be mentioned that hesychastic practices were known and practiced in northern Moldavian monasteries and small retreats around them long before the religious reform of Velicikovsky in the last third of the eighteenth century, albeit in a more sporadic manner and on a more limited scale. There is ample and reliable evidence of the uninterrupted existence of small hesychastic retreats in the northern Moldavian region since the fifteenth century.50 This Romanian propensity for the mystical lifestyle attracted Paisie, and many years before him another major hesychastic figure also of Russian, probably Ukrainian, origins: one of Paisie’s spiritual mentors known as Vasile (1700–1766), from the monastery of Poiana Marului. This monastery was located in the southeastern part of the Carpathians, and the starets Vasile was active there during the Besht’s lifetime. Vasile was a relatively original mystic who contributed to a simplification of the complex hesychastic practice of prayer adopted by many Romanian and Russian ascetics, as has been pointed out in Dario Raccanello’s study on the prayer of Jesus.51 This simplification of the complex hesychastic prayer-technique is strikingly reminiscent of the Beshtian simplification of the complexities of the Lurianic system, i.e., intentions or directions of human thought to the supernal powers inherent in a technique known as kavvanot. The attractions of the Romanian monasteries—together with the problems that Russian authorities created for these monks—is one of the major reasons that both Vasile and Paisie (and his good friend Alexie, who was Vasile’s successor as starets of the Poiana Marului monastery) left Russia for Moldavia and then entered the southern part of Romania by the

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1730s. Moreover, it should be pointed out that quite interesting figures in the province preceded their arrival. For example, the seventeenth-century figure Dosoftei (1624–93), the erudite Mitropolite of Moldavia, contributed a great deal to the province’s spiritual effervescence. As a speculative approach to mysticism, eighteenth-century Hasidism was a much more synthetic, if less systematic, way of thinking compared with hesychasm; and Hasidism was a more popular revivalist movement to boot. Hesychasm in eastern Europe was smaller and more learned, based on a return to patristic texts from late antiquity that were reprinted in their original Greek and translated into the Neamtz, Russian, and Romanian vernaculars. Its mysticism gravitated around a very specific type of mystical technique practiced in solitude, which was inherited from monks in Mount Athos and then simplified. But could this hesychastic transition from the Ukraine (or Russia) to Moldavia—a transition that bypassed cultural borders, as well—have been instrumental in the emergence of two parallel mystical revivalist movements that coincided geographically (i.e., the northern parts of the Carpathians) and to a certain extent temporally?52 The answer is not a simple one. A geographical move from the Ukraine/Russia to Moldavia is evident in the cases of Vasile and Paisie, the two most important hesychastic figures. And in all three of these cases, the two hesychastic figures and the Besht himself, we find mobile religious figures who changed the places where they spent years of their lives and transformed the spiritual lives of many others. Such mobility and influence is also documented in the case of the above-mentioned Jacob Frank, who spent some time in Walachia, in the region of Bucharest, and then in Turkey, before returning to Podolia to commence his more public messianic activities and then departing and spending the last part of his life in Offenbach. In other words, extreme mobility seems to be a shared factor among the most creative figures in the history of religion in the northern Moldavian province and Podolia. As for religious practice, there are three potential affinities between the Besht’s and hesychasm: (1) the importance of seclusion, practiced by the Besht but not adopted by most of his followers; (2) a new emphasis on the centrality of prayer,53 which would remain a pillar of Hasidism for generations; and (3) a profound emphasis on the need to deal in one way or another with intrusive, “alien” thoughts that obstructed one’s worship of God—in Hebrew, mah≥ashavot zarot, and in Greek, logismoi.54 In both cases, the struggle against those thoughts was conceived as critical for mystical attainment. It should be clear that in Jewish mystical literature all three practices appear

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earlier; but the new emphasis they received in the Besht’s teachings bears a striking resemblance to hesychasm. Lastly, both models of the righteous man, the tzaddik and the hesychastic starets, represent new forms of religious leadership, a novel gravitation around living personalities who were central to the social economy of the two mystical movements. Again, although most of the elements concerning the holy man were present before the eighteenth century in both Jewish mysticism and hesychasm, the structural similarity of their place in each respective movement is striking.55 Also worthy of future investigation is the greater role played by the simple man, sometimes described as prostak, presented as a paradoxically superior religious paradigm in both early Hasidism and the patristic literature that informed medieval and pre-modern hesychasm. Let me emphasize that the possible contacts between nascent Hasidism and eighteenth-century hesychasm do not have to end with the Besht’s presumed stay in Moldavia, but could continue in principle also into Podolia during his mature life or even after his death by means of his followers, but this issue need not detain us here. One final and important point about the possible relevance of northern Moldavia’s cultural landscape for the Besht: the assumption that he was born or was at least present for a time in a region south of Podolia opens up the possibility of cultural contacts beyond those commonly assumed. As I pointed out some years ago, there may be a historical affinity between the Besht’s Shamanic practice, especially his cataleptic ecstatic experiences, and a similar practice displayed by the Csángós (or Ceangai in Romanian), a tribe of presumably Hungarian origins that for centuries resided only in a few small villages in the northern Moldavian slopes of the Carpathians.56 This affinity, of course, becomes more explicable if the Besht spent a significant amount of time in the northern Moldavian Carpathians rather than the region close to the Slovakian area designated as Carpathorus or the western areas of the Podolian Carpathians. To be sure, this suggested affinity between Shamanic elements and aspects of the Besht’s practice is based on descriptions found exclusively in a Jewish hagiographical account and a Christian ecclesiastic report dating from a whole century before the Besht was active, a tenuous basis indeed. But if it is accepted, as it seems to have been by scholars like Rosman and Pedaya, it may account for some of the Besht’s practices and experiences. In any case, the “Walachian” region where the Besht was likely born and where he seems to have occasionally visited later in life was quite rich and

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variegated from a religious point of view, a place where manifold mystical and magical religious mentalities and a vivid folkloristic tradition flourished during his lifetime.57 In a legend about the first of the Besht’s miraculous deeds—his victory over a werewolf who endangered children in his care— which, according to the legend occurred before he reached the age of fourteen, the affinity between regional magic and demonology and the details of the story is astonishing. The question remains whether it was the Besht himself who told the story to his later followers, which would render it part of a relatively early self-image shaped in his birthplace; or, alternatively, whether it was a pure invention by later editors, who conflated some traditional Jewish elements found in the book of Job with the Balkan werewolf motif and the manner of combating it, by means of a wooden-stick.58 CONCLUSION

While the Besht was sometimes aware of more elite forms of kabbalistic literature, a rather axial type of culture in which forms of Greek and Hellenistic philosophies reverberate, he was also acquainted with what may be conceived of as pre-axial elements derived from his rural childhood background. No wonder that it is in Hasidic literature that figures of more simple folk, including shepherds, make their first extensive appearance in the history of Jewish mystical literature. The Besht might have had some access to Sufi, Shamanic, Hutzulian, or hesychastic practices and themes, especially through his oral contacts. Nevertheless, I certainly do not propose to reduce his teachings as a whole, even less so his religious behavior, to any of these external religious phenomena, nor even to depict it as a synthesis with them, just as it would be unwise to restrict his most formative views on Hasidism to just one kabbalistic school or another or to one ethical book or another.59 Neither would a description of him as a typical Walachian, or Moldavian or Podolian Jew—if there were such typical Jews—tell us too much about his development without more specific knowledge of the multiple religious contexts that formed a backdrop to his activities. He was, indubitably, a sui generis religious personality who drew on a variety of sources and was capable of speedily reading books and interpreting their content in an original manner and, when necessary, changing direction and adopting new views. Scholarship in the field of Hasidism would do better to treat these nonJewish religious ingredients as merely illuminating his activities and aspects

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of early Hasidism as a whole.60 Perhaps the Besht was one of the few (or even the only) thinkers to be acquainted with both the specific religious modalities and popular magic of these geographical areas and printed books on Jewish magic like Sefer Raziel ha-Mal’akh.61 The possible contacts with Csángós, Hutzuls, Hesychasts, and perhaps groups of wandering Gypsies, to name only a few of the salient religious groups in the region, in addition to the majority Orthodox and Catholic religious forms, should all be taken in consideration. Of course, the probability of multiple contacts is predicated on the assumption that the Besht indeed visited sites in the Carpathians close to the Neamtz monastery and remained there for a while, as the oral traditions claim. To increase our problems, the minority forms of religion mentioned above as they evolved in the Carpathians have not attracted much attention by scholars in comparison to the region’s folklore. These problems aside, a panoramic approach to the Besht’s sources that does justice to the matrix of factors behind his emergence as a religious figure is not only a matter of considering the plethora of Jewish texts available to him—still a desideratum in scholarship on the topic—but also of traditions stemming from a variety of non-Jewish circles. Only then will we have a better understanding of his religious thought. Let me reemphasize that cultural context cannot become the sole constitutive approach for understanding the Besht’s thought. At the same time, we cannot continue to conceive the Besht’s knowledge in terms of erudition and a profound acquaintance with the details of lengthy and complex texts. A panoramic approach is especially necessary because the Besht’s knowledge was much more fragmentary and associative than has been acknowledged. In conclusion, socioeconomic conditions in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth during the Besht’s lifetime were much less fundamental to his earliest stages of religious development and to the attraction that his personality exercised on learned figures (and some of his disciples were quite learned) than has been assumed. The most recent critical studies about the Besht’s background revolve exclusively around events in the Podolian and Wolhynian provinces, with their historical, cultural, religious, and economic particularities, a context that was decisive only for the eventual reception and proliferation of the Besht’s magical deeds and teachings, and the eventual organization of Hasidism into a movement. The restriction of the Besht’s wider geographical and cultural horizons has had the effect of channeling most scholarly discussions toward places that were only relevant to a later phase, places that had only a secondary

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impact on the emergence, formulation, and initial understanding of the Besht’s teachings. The geographical and cultural areas discussed above were likely more formative.62 To be sure, the emergence of the first Hasidic groups out of earlier, ascetically inclined pneumatic Jewish circles connected with the Besht or his direct disciples should not be confused even in their earliest phases with the details of the founder’s biography. Though their histories overlap to a certain limited extent, they are far from identical. While the younger Besht probably spent, according to the scenario I have proposed here, some of his younger years in seclusion in the northern Moldavian Carpathians as an ascetic, Hasidism as a movement hardly displays an ascetic type of religiosity.63 It seems that it was the mature Besht, who displayed an anti-ascetic attitude and explicitly opposed the fasting of his disciple R. Jacob Joseph of Polonoye, who brought about Hasidism’s change in this direction. However, the newly formed Hasidic movement did not penetrate during the eighteenth century into the specific mountain areas where the Besht probably continued to visit. The founder of Hasidism and the religious movement that derived from his teachings and activities had their own separate courses, problems, and idiosyncrasies, which may not and probably do not neatly coincide.64 As in many other cases of religious leadership, the founder and the founded are far from identical.65 Though paradigmatic for his followers, the life of a founder is at the same time exceptional. The Besht, as described in hagiography, was anxious to emphasize his superiority over his contemporaries in many domains, and his immediate followers conceived him as an unusual figure in the history of Judaism. He retains his uniqueness in the history of Hasidism to this day. I hope that I have made a sufficiently strong case for the plausibility of the Besht’s early residence in “Walachia.” The length of this period is an important factor in determining the degree to which these years left an imprint on his religious outlook, and the paucity of evidence makes a continued scholarly debate more likely than any conclusive resolution. The cultural, linguistic, and religious discrepancies between northern Moldavia or Bukovina, where I feel the Besht originated and spent periods of seclusion, and a Polish province like Podolia, where he acted as a religious leader, should be kept distinct to avoid anachronistically imposing the wrong complex of religious traditions on people and events. Yet both of these regions will ultimately have to be considered if we are to grasp the life of the early Hasidic movement and its extraordinary leader.

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NOTES This is a much longer version of a short article printed as “In the State of Walachia Near the Border—Or Was the Besht Born in Okopy?” Eurolimes 5 (2008): 14–20. More material has been adduced here, some issues have been changed, and the scope of the discussion has been widened considerably beyond the question of the Besht’s birthplace. Thanks are due to Prof. Glenn Dynner for important suggestions. 1. R. Israel ben Eliezer, Ba‘al Shem Tov (c. 1698–1760), the master of the Good Name, often designated by the acronym the Besht. 2. See Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1960), 43n2 (Hebrew) and the English translation of this discussion as “The Beginnings: The Ba‘al Shem Tov (Besht), and the Center in Podolia,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to Present, ed. Gershon D. Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 27, 51n4, as well as again in Toldot ha-H˘asidut, 441, where he adduces both the text from the Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, to be discussed immediately below, and the 1816 letter of the maskilic thinker Nah≥man Krochmal, which deals, in a rather contemptuous manner, with the emergence of Hasidism in Walachia. See also below the testimony of Abraham Stern to the same effect, esp. note 22. See also Dubnow’s earlier, popular, and comprehensive Divrei Yimei ‘Am ‘Olam, trans. S. L. Kirshenbaum (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1962), 2:483, where he presents Okopy as the Besht’s birthplace without any hesitation. In his still earlier History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Dubnow does not mention Okopy when he refers to his birth, but instead speaks about the “border line of Podolia and Walachia,” thus making one step toward Podolia, which is not mentioned in the hagiography, and minimizes the weight of the statement concerning Walachia. See the English translation of Israel Friedlander (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1946), 1:222. To what extent the earlier book of Kahana (see following note) contributed to Dubnow’s later decision to assess Okopy as the birthplace of the Besht is hard to know. His association of the Besht with Okopy may be related also to his emphasizing the importance of the impact of the pogroms of 1648/49, which took place in Podolia, as the crucial background for Hasidism. Though the frequency of this “lachrymose” vision to the background of Hasidism has declined in the last generation, it did not affect the Okopy nexus to the Besht’s birth. 3. I compile below an incomplete list of some other leading scholars in the field, who subscribed in one way or another, to the assumption that the Besht was born in Okopy: Abraham Kahana, Sefer ha-H˘asidut, 2nd ed. (Warsaw, 1922), 19 (Hebrew); Sh. A. Horodetzki, Hasidism and Hasidim (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1953), 1:1 (Hebrew); Meir Balaban, Toward the History of the Frankist Movement (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:23 (Hebrew); Torsten Ysander, Studien zum B‘estshten Hasidismus (Lundeqistka Bokhandeln, Upsala, 1933), 76n1; Scholem, The Latest Phase: Essays on Hasidism by Gershom Scholem, ed. D. Assaf and E. Liebes ( Jerusalem: ‘Am ‘Oved, Magnes Press, 2008), 112 (Hebrew); Isaac Raphael, Sefer ha-H˘asidut ( Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1956), 1 (Hebrew); and Bernard D. Weinryb, The Jews of Poland: A Social and Economic History (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 282, as well as the authors of the last three serious monographs dedicated to the Besht in the last two decades: Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 63–64, 174; Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center, 2000), 59 (Hebrew); and Netanel Lederberg, Sod ha-Da‘at, R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, His Spiritual Character and Social Leadership ( Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 2007), 21

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(Hebrew). The only substantial doubts having to do with the identification of Okopy with a village, or alternatively with a street in the Ukrainian city of Colomei, were expressed by Abraham Rubinstein, ed., Shivh≥ei ha-Besht ( Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 1991), 44n36 (Hebrew), but he too adopts the option of Okopy as the Besht’s birthplace. The mentioning of Colomei occurs also in Weinryb, Jews of Poland. See also Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson’s discussion of the emergence of Hasidism, in H. H. Ben-Sasson, ed., A History of Jewish People (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976), 768, where he claims that the Besht was born in Podolia. See also the view of an earlier scholar of Hasidism, Aharon Marcus, Ha-H˘asidut, trans. Moshe Shenfeld (1901; reprint, Bnei Brak: Netzah, 1980), 13 (Hebrew), who claims that the Besht was born in 1690 in Kytov (sic), but his translator in Hebrew “corrects” him, writing that “the correct place is Okopy.” See also more recently Rachel Elior, “The Baal Shem Tov and the Beginning of the Hasidic Movement,” unpublished paper, 9 (Hebrew); Rachel Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, trans. Sh. Carmy (Oxford: Littman Library, 2008), 175; and Jean Baumgarten, La naissance du Hassidisme: Mystique, rituel, société (XVIIIe-XIXe siècle) (Paris: Albin Michel, 2005), 213. See also below, notes 4–5. Even in a work on the history of Hasidism in Romania by an author who specialized in historical aspects of the Hasidic movement, the place of birth was still considered to be Okopy. See Isaac Alfasi, Hasidism in Romania (Tel Aviv, 1973), 9 (Hebrew). In this context, see also the controversial article of Yaffa Eliach, “The Russian Dissenting Sects and Their Influence on Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, Founder of Hassidism,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 36 (1963): 62, who indeed added a question mark to Okopy, but later on in the same article (66), described the Besht as being a Russian Jew. Let me point out that in the following discussions, for the sake of covering all the available sources, I shall refer to but not rely on the information found in the twentieth-century material “discovered” in the Kherson Genizah concerning the Besht, since it is not authentic. 4. See, e.g., Abraham Rubinstein’s item in Entziklopediyah Ivrit (1961), vol. 20, col. 489 (Hebrew); Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson’s items on the Besht in Encyclopedia Judaica (1972), vol. 9, col. 1049; and the item in The New Encyclopedia of Judaism (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 99, and more recently Moshe Rosman’s item in the YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 100. A great number of other, minor, encyclopedias and blogs reiterated this information, and there is no reason to compile a list of all of them. 5. On this spurious twentieth-century Genizah see, e.g., Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut, 425–33; Scholem, The Latest Phase, 45, 108, 123, 377–78; Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 123–25. See the detailed analysis of the reverberations of the forgery and the bibliography about it in Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Hagiography with Footnotes: Edifying Tales and the Writing of History in Hasidism,” Studies in Jewish Historiography in Memory of Arnaldo Momigliano, Supplement of History and Theory (1988): 119–59. As we shall see below, the last two masters of the H˘abad movement capitalized too on the information found in the Genizah. As to the questioning of the place of birth of the Besht as Okopy, see my interview of May 2000 for the Romanian journal Apostrof. See also Andrei Oisteanu, Inventing the Jew: Antisemitic Stereotypes in Romanian and Other Central-East European Cultures, trans. Mirela Adascalitei (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), 300n158, originally printed in Romanian in 2001. 6. In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov [Shivh≥ei ha-Besht], trans. and ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (New York: Schocken Books, 1984), to be quoted below as In Praise of the Besht. For a recent survey of the perception of the material collected in this book that will

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preoccupy us below, see Karl E. Groezinger, ed., Die Gechichten vom Ba‘al Shem Tov (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1997), 2 vols., where the Hebrew and Yiddish versions have been printed and translated in German; Zeev Gries, “Between Literature and History: Prolegomena for a Discussion and Inquiry in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht,” Tura 3 (1994): 153–81 (Hebrew); Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 99–113, 119–26; Nah≥um Karlinsky, Historia She-ke-neged ( Jerusalem: Yad Yitzh≥ak Ben-Tzvi, 1998); Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader, 217–63; and now an updated discussion in Rosman’s Stories That Changed History: The Unique Career of Shivh≥ei Ha-Besht, B. G. Rudolph Lectures in Judaic Studies, n.s. 5 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007); Joseph Dan, Ha-Sippur ha-H˘asidi ( Jerusalem: Keter, 1975), 64–131 (Hebrew); Karl Erich Groezinger, “The Source Value of the Basic Recensions of Shivhei ha-Besht,” in Hasidism Reappraised, ed. Ada Rapoport-Albert (Oxford: Littman Library, 1996), 354–63; and Isaac Raphael, ‘Al H˘asidut ve-H˘asidim ( Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1991), 22–49 (Hebrew). See also Zvi Mark’s article mentioned below in note 60. For the earliest rendering of some parts of this text in any European language, see the famous collection of Hasidic tales by Martin Buber, compiled a century ago. For the studies of I. Bartal, J. Barnai, and A. Teller as to the historical dimensions of some of the details found in stories in the hagiography, see Etkes’s survey. 7. Sefer Shivh≥ei Ba‘al Shem Tov (Koretz, 1816), fol. 2a, first printed in Ostrog in 1815: ∑yyajlaww twnydm @ya fnawwyg fah ’r¿ùy[: The only scholar I am acquainted with who argued that Walachia was the region where the Besht started his activity, without, however, addressing the issue of his birthplace, was Dan, Ha-Sippur ha-H˘asidi, 81. However, it is not clear to what activity of the Besht Dan refers, nor where the place named Walachia is situated in his opinion. On the quandaries related to the geographical significance of the term Walachia, see below. As to the place where the Besht actually started his activity, not his years of seclusion, it is the Podolian small towns. Interestingly enough, no other scholar who dealt subsequently with the first steps of the Besht has related in any way to Dan’s observation. See note 3 above and note 9 below. On the significance of the plural form of “states,” see also below. 8. The name of the Besht’s mother was Sarah. See the passage discussed in M. Idel, Hasidism: Between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 86, and below note 6. 9. In Praise of the Besht, 7 (emphasis mine). In the original ùb @mys ,fùù`[bh yjb`.

tnydmb rd hyh ,bwf -!`-l[bh l` wyba ,rz[yla wnrwm brh ‘36 ùm[ ,@yyf`nybwr ùa trwdhmb ∑!ynqz wt`aw awh ùyhw ,rpsl ^wms yyajlaw The spelling of the state as Walachai reflects the German or Yiddish pronunciation. See below note 45. The Hebrew version was printed for the first time by R. Israel Yoffe in 1814 in Kapust (Kopys). It should be mentioned that Rubinstein, in his edition of the hagiography, 36n1, claimed that Walachia is the general term for all Romanian territories, and thus it refers here to Moldavia. For more on this issue see below. However, he too adopts the view that the Besht was born in Okopy. For a detailed analysis of this passage, see Moshe Rosman, “The History of a Historical Sources: On the Editing of Shivh≥ei ha-Besht,” Zion 58 (1993): 201–2 (Hebrew). See above note 3. 10. Chone Shmeruk, after analyzing the legends related to the secret writings of Rabbi Adam and the Besht, argued for the existence of a separate, earlier version that served as a common source for the Hebrew and Yiddish versions. Abraham Ya‘ari insisted that studying the Yiddish version yields a more profound understanding of the collection. Finally, Yehoshua Mondshine—and following him Immanuel Etkes and Moshe Rosman—conceived the Hebrew printed version as the source of the Yiddish one. See Abraham Ya‘ari, “Two Basic Versions of Shivh≥ei ha-Besht,” Kiryat Sefer 39 (1964): 249–72, 394–407, 552–62 (Hebrew); Chone Shmeruk,

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Yiddish Literature in Poland, Historical Studies and Perspectives ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1981), 119–45 (Hebrew); Yehoshua Mondshine, Shivh≥ei ha-Ba‘al Shem Tov ( Jerusalem 1972), 22–47, and Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader, 240–42. See also Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut, 411–16; Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 147–49, 153; and “The History of a Historical Sources,” 180–83, 188. On the relation between the Besht and R. Adam, see also Yaakov Elbaum, “The Baal Shem Tov and the Son of R. Adam: A Study of the Story of Shivh≥ei ha-Besht,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Folklore 2 (1982): 66–79 (Hebrew). 11. See Rubinstein, Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, 36n1. 12. In Praise of the Besht, 10. See note 3 above as to the name of the Besht’s mother, Sarah, like the biblical figure who gave birth to Isaac at the age of ninety. 13. In Praise of the Besht, 15. 14. See Avraham Rubinstein, ed., Shivh≥ei ha-Besht ( Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 1991), 44: me-‘yir ’Akup. In the Yiddish version Okop is described as Stadt. The description of Okopy as a city seems to reflect, if at all, a much later situation, when the fortress established in 1692 grew considerably. At best, this is an anachronistic description. See also the maskilic critique of Hasidism by Yehudah Leib Miesis in his book Kine’at ’Emmet (Vienna, 1828), 22, where the founder of Hasidism is reported to have been born to poor parents, in a village found in ∑ñtwlkshw ^`wjh !wqmÑ @ylhap tnydm. See the passage quoted in Immanuel Etkes, “Magic and Magicians in Haskalah Literature,” in Studies in Hasidism, ed. D. Assaf, J. Dan, and I. Etkes ( Jerusalem, 1999), 42 (Hebrew). It is not clear to what village or state the maskilic author is referring. Probably he refers to the state of Wolhyn, but in this case this is a blatant mistake. 15. This part of In Praise of the Besht is especially problematic, as it represents an adaptation of an earlier legend known since the sixteenth century. See the important study of the topic in Shmeruk, Yiddish Literature in Poland: Historical Studies and Perspectives, 119–46, and the bibliography adduced in In Praise of the Besht, 310n1, as well as Elbaum, “The Baal Shem Tov and the Son of R. Adam.” 16. In Praise of the Besht, 15. 17. See R. Menah≥em Mendel Schneersohn of Lubavitch, Torat Menah≥em (Brooklyn, 1960), part 2, p. 12. The Hasidic master reported this interpretation in the name of his father-in-law, R. Joseph Isaac, in a sermon delivered in 1936. See the text reproduced in Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem (Brooklyn, 2004), 422. This piece of information has been kindly brought to my attention by Dr. Zvi Mark. This tradition and the next one depend upon the pseudepigraphic letters printed in the review Ha-Tamim, from the Kherson Genizah. See note 5, and esp. RapoportAlbert’s discussion of R. Joseph Isaac’s historiography in “Hagiography with Footnotes.” 18. See Likkutei Dibburim, parts 3–4, sermon from 18 Elul 1941 (Brooklyn), 385, the probable birthday of the Besht, printed in Sefer ha-Sih≥ot and reproduced in Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 419n6: $yn[rg ![nyylq rag r[d @ya @[raww[g @[rab[g zya bwf !` l[bh wnrwm. ∑[yyjalaw @wa yyqr[f @[`ywx ,pwqa bw`y Thanks are due Dr. Pesah Schindler from Jerusalem, who kindly drew my attention to this passage. This view has been reiterated in some other Lubavitch later sources, which also do not mention any reliable source. 19. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 63–64. 20. See his Shivh≥ei ha-Besht: Mesirah, ’Arikhah, Hadpasah, Proceedings of the 11th World Congress of Jewish Studies ( Jerusalem, 1994), vol. C2:145–52 (Hebrew), who claims that some of the stories found in In Praise of the Besht emerged much earlier in the 1760s. 21. For the social processes related to the development of the initial Hasidic group into a much larger social movement, see Ada Rapoport-Albert, “The Hasidic Movement after 1772,

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Structural Continuity and Change,” Zion 55 (1990): 183–245 (Hebrew); Ada Rapoport-Albert, ed., Hasidism Reappraised (Oxford: Littman Library, 1996), 76–139; and Immanuel Etkes, “Hasidism as a Movement—The First Stage,” in Hasidism: Continuity or Innovation, ed. Bezalel Safran (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 1–26. These studies convincingly refute the existence of an organized social movement before the death of R. Dov Baer, known as the Great Maggid of Mezeritch, in 1772. See also more recently Moshe Rosman, “Hasidism as a Modern Phenomenon,” in Jahrbuch des Simon-Dubnov-Instituts 6 (2007): 219. 22. According to the English translation from the Polish original in Marcin Wodzinski, Haskalah and Hasidism in the Kingdom of Poland, History of Conflict (Oxford: Littman Library, 2005), 261; as to his sources in general, see 59–60. For an analysis of the historical context of Stern’s statement, see Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 109–13 and 157–60. See also a similar claim found in Joseph Perl, Uiber das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim, ed. A. Rubinstein ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, 1977), 123. However, though Perl mentions the origin and spread of Hasidism on the border provinces, including Walachia and the Carpathians, he does not depict the Besht as deriving from there. To the best of my knowledge, none of the scholars I am acquainted with have used these traditions in order to question the accepted vision of the Besht’s birthplace. See above, notes 2–5. 23. See Eliach, “The Russian Dissenting Sects and Their Influence on Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov,” 57–83. Ysander, Studien zum B‘estshten Hasidismus, points in this direction without, however, being conclusive. Subsequent studies on Hasidism did not endorse this proposal. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 58–60, and also below, note 50. 24. See Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Paths (Budapest and New York: CEU, 2005), 143–50. See more on this issue at the end of this study. 25. See Idel, Hasidism, 185–88. See also now Glenn Dynner, “The Hasidic Tale as a Historical Source: Historiography and Methodology,” Religious Compass 3 (2009): 1–4. 26. Namely by means of material that stems from non-Jewish sources. Therefore, what I call the individual panorama of the Besht’s sources should include, at least in principle, also non-Jewish topics. See also Dan, Ha-Sippur ha-H˘asidi, 47. 27. Degel Mahaneh ’Efrayyim (Jerusalem, 1995), 50. As to the Besht’s relations with gentiles, there are many stories in In Praise of the Besht. See Rosman’s discussion in Founder of Hasidism, 58–59. See also R. Menah≥em Nah≥um of Chernobyl, Sefer Me’or ‘Einayyim ( Jerusalem, 1975), 169 (Hebrew). On the event during which the Besht drank wine with gentiles in “Walachia,” see the next section. See also the discussion in Dynner, Men of Silk, 220–21. 28. See, especially, Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, ed. and trans. Maurice Friedman (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1988), 221–23. 29. See my “Prayer, Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious Worldview,” in Let the Old Make Way for the New: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry, Presented to Immanuel Etkes, Volume I: Hasidism and the Musar Movement, ed. David Assaf and Ada Rapoport-Albert ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2009), 75n61 (Hebrew), and the parallel between the parable discussed there, 67–72, and a similar Sufi storiola, discussed by Sara Sviri, in a study mentioned there, 62n12. Let me point out that in addition to possible influences of contemporary Muslim material on the nascent Hasidism, there are also earlier Sufi and other types of material stemming from Muslim sources that nourished the Jewish sources of early Hasidism. See also my Hasidism for other influences of Muslim culture on Hasidic literature.

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30. In Praise of the Besht, 59. 31. The expression “state of Walachia” is identical to that found in the case of the birth of the Besht mentioned above. For its geographical meaning in this context, see the next section. Prof. Dynner drew my attention to the possibility that the young Besht, as he was described in In Praise of the Besht, 21, donned a “short coat and a broad belt,” reminiscent of Romanian peasant garb. We may also add to this remark that the Besht’s “language” mentioned in this context was presumably different from that of R. Gershon’s, who was “astonished and frightened” when seeing and hearing him. 32. I hope to elaborate elsewhere on the significance of this gesture that appears also in several other traditions about the Besht. 33. In Praise of the Besht, 250 no. 242: ,@yyf`nybwr tdwrhmb wr @mys ,fùù`[bh yjb`

,!ybn[h @m #fwn` `wrq @yy !lxa hyh !`w ayjlaww tnydmb fùù`[bh hyh tja ![p .305-304 ùm[ ta tybh l[b dbykw ∑wqzj ynpm twt`l r`pa ya !ynfq @ypyf `wl` wa !yt` swkb @ybr[m`kw yk tybh l[b by`h ∑@fq ^swk hml ,bwf ^nyy alh ‘fùù`[bh rma wm[f`kw ∑@yym @fq swkb fùù`[bh ta ht`w lwdg swk wl wntnw ∑hzm aryytm yna @ya ‘fùù`[bh rmayw ∑lwdg swk twt`l awh hnks lba ∑!lwk wlhbtnw ,`mm `a wmk wdm[ wytwr[` lkw ,!ymwda wynp w`[n` wb !lwk wlktshw ∑wlwk ,wgypm djp h`q @yy` [wdy yk rmaw ∑hz l[ dwam whmtw ∑[grk wnyy gyphw wynp l[ wydy ryb[h fùù`[bh ∑lkw lkm @yyh ta gyphw 'ty wtlwdgm hd[rw djp wyl[ lpn ,^rbty wtlwdgb @nwbth r`akw The phrase “I am not afraid of that” is reminiscent of what the Besht’s father was reported to have told him before his death: “Do not fear anything [beside God].” See In Praise of the Besht, 11, and Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, ed. Rubinstein, 39, and for another case of mentioning this warning in note 57 below. To the best of my knowledge, this incident in the Besht’s life related to Walachia did not attract the attention of any scholar dealing with the founder of Hasidism. On trembling, there are several other reports related to the Besht’s experiences, and it is reminiscent of the description found in the report by M. Bandinus on the Csangos, mentioned below in note 56. 34. The Hebrew term is hitbodedut, a term which has more than one meaning in Jewish medieval thought when it first appears. On its meaning as solitude and its development in Jewish mysticism and philosophy, see M. Idel, “Hitbodedut: On Solitude in Jewish Mysticism,” in Einseimkeit: Archaeologie der literarischen Kommunikation VI, ed. Aleida Assmann and Jan Assmann (Munich: Fink, 2000), 189–212, where earlier studies on the developments related to the term hitbodedut have been mentioned. 35. According to another Kherson tradition, the Besht was in seclusion for seven years, quite a formulaic number in Jewish literature. Cf. the views of Australian tribes in which a magician acquires magical powers by retreating into the mountains for periods of time related to the figure seven, and the life of privation there. Cf. H. Hubert-Marcel Mauss, “L'Origine des pouvoirs magiques,” in Mélanges d’histoire des religions (Paris, 1909), 131–87. In the period of the seclusion, the Besht was reported by the hagiography as having been taught by a supernal mentor, Ahiyah the Shilonite, just as the Australian shamans were initiated by supernal beings. Cf. to the material stemming from the Kherson Genizah, where the “Besht” is reported as describing his hitbodedut, now in a field, during the day of his sixteenth birthday, found in a Yiddish letter; see R. Joseph Isaac, Sefer ha-Sih≥ot (1943), 167, reproduced in Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 418n6. The claim there, cited in the name of the Besht, who is reported as speaking in the first person, is that he is following a custom of the unspecified ancient authorities, Kadmonim, by secluding himself on his birthday and reciting chapters of the Psalms. I am not acquainted with such a tradition anywhere in Judaism, and

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it seems that once again this is an example of the impact of the Kherson pseudepigraphy. See also the next note. Interestingly enough, the period of the Besht’s possible seclusion in the mountains, which if proven by other types of evidence than the hagiography will be confirmed as a formative phase in the Besht’s spiritual life, did not attract the due attention of scholars of Hasidism. See, however, the short but important article of a scholar of Jewish folklore, Dov Noy, “The Besht in the Carpathean Mountains,” Mahanayyim 46 (1960): 66–73 (Hebrew), who contributed the interesting proposal to consider the Hutzul population in the Carpathians—a Slavic population living, inter alia, in the southern Ukrainian Carpathians and in the northern Romanian ones, and which adopted some Romanian customs—a possible context for themes that appear in the Besht’s hagiography. It should be pointed out that R. Isaac Luria has been described in a hagiography related to his life to have been living in isolation on an island on the Nile in Egypt, for two, six, or seven years—according to the different versions of the story—discussed in Meir Benayahu, The Toldot ha-Ari, and Luria’s “Manner of Life” (Hanhagot) ( Jerusalem: Ben Tzvi, 1967), 82–83, 154 (Hebrew); on his study of the Zohar for six nights of the week, see 319–20. However, this isolation was not related to fasting. See below, note 36. For the plausibility of the impact of the hagiography concerning Luria or that concerning the Besht, see Joseph Dan, above, note 6. 36. In Praise of the Besht, 34; awh yk ‘64 ùm[ ,@yyf`nybwr trwdhmb ,ùj @mys ,fùù`[bh yjb`‘

twddwbthl ^lh #r`-@yyh wt`al aybh`k wkrd hyhw ,ñjzrm tybÑ ù qn[`ùùh l[ @fq rpkb b`y dja !jl wl jqwl hyhw ,rhb bxjn @fq tyb wmk [ls rhb wl hyh !`w ,ùùfwrpùù arqnh rhnh rb[mb ab hyh `dwq tb` br[w ∑!yn` hmk hn[th ^k ∑[wb`b tja ![p lkwa hyhw ,tja hdw[s l[ ∑wtybl It should be mentioned that a similar pattern of a retreat during the days of the week in a house of seclusion in a wood for prayer and study and then a return to his wife for the Sabbath is found elsewhere In Praise of the Besht, 27, just before his “revelation,” as a special personality that will act publicly as a magician and spiritual guide. For building a house for seclusion in order to study there, see also another instance found in In Praise of the Besht, 17–18, concerning the activity of the Besht immediately after his first marriage. It should be pointed out that there are several themes that recur in the hagiography, in a manner that evince the hand of a strong redaction. See also above, note 33, and below, note 56, insofar as another theme is concerned. For the ascetic custom to rely only on bread and water, see the recommendation of the contemporary of the Besht, the important staretz Vasile, active in the southern Romanian Carpathians, who is discussed below. Cf. Dario Raccanello, Rugaciunea lui Iisus in scrierile Staretului Vasile de la Poiana Mare, trans. M-C Oros–Ioan I, Ica (Sibiu: Deisis, 1996), 175, 234. If this correspondence is significant, we have here some form of asceticism, similar to the hesychastic monks in the Carpathians in the Besht’s lifetime. For another explanation of the Besht’s seclusion as part of an initiation process, see H˘aviva Pedaya’s review of Moshe Rosman’s book in Zion 69 (2004): 517–19 (Hebrew). There she cautiously proposes a hesitation over the hagiographic tradition related to the seclusion of the Besht in the Carpathians. However, see the probably earlier tradition adduced in the name of R. Elimelekh of Lysansk, who died in 1786: “When the Besht was young . . . he used to take six loaves of bread and a pitcher of water at the close of the Sabbath, when he went into seclusion for the entire week. On a Friday, when he was ready to go home, and about to lift his sack from the ground, he noticed that it was too heavy, opened it, and found all the loaves still in it.” Cf. M. Buber, Tales of the Hasidim, Early Masters, trans. Olga Marx (New York: Schocken Books, 1964), 45. This quite significant parallel to the hagiography is quite important and has been ignored by scholars. For a later similar testimony, see the passage

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that Prof. Glenn Dynner kindly drew my attention to and translated in Klemens Junosza, Nasi Z´ydzi w miasteczkach i na wsiach (Warsaw, 1889), 56: “[The Besht] spent his younger years in the forests and caves of the Carpathian Mountains, and peasants from the source of the river Prut were his first teachers.” 37. See especially several legends on the Besht collected in the last four decades of the twentieth century from Jews who were still living in the westerns slopes of the easternnorthern Romanian parts of the Carpathian mountains told mainly in Yiddish dialects and printed in Germany and in Romania by Claus Stephani. See his Basme Evreiesti, Culese pe meleagurile Carpatilor, trans. H. Ruxandra Georgeta (Bucuresti: HaSefer, 2004), 34, 36, 172–73, 176–79, 208–15. For other traditions, see Pinkas ha-Kehillot, Romania, Encyclopedia of Jewish Communities in Romania ( Jerusalem: Yad va-Shem, 1969), 1:209 (Hebrew). Regarding the town of Piatra Neamtz, found in the vicinity of the two Moldavian monasteries to be mentioned below, it is written: “According to tales told by Jewish and Christian farmers, the Baal Shem Tov lived in the nearby Carpathian Mountains. There are also those who say he was born in one of the nearby villages.” According to other legends, the small village is Bicaz, a small town in the northern Carpathians. In Piatra Neamtz there still exists an old wooden synagogue, believed to be where the Besht prayed, which became a tourist attraction. 38. On the need to discern in traditions reported in the name of the Besht different approaches to the same issue, both as part of his religious development and as reflecting multiple meanings held at the same time, see M. Idel, “’Adonai Sefatai Tiftah: Models of Understanding Prayer in Early Hasidism,” Kabbalah 18 (2008): 7–111, and Idel, “Prayer, Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious Worldview,” esp. 119n251, where I adduced the scholarly bibliography dealing with the different Hasidic and the academic attitudes to asceticism. See also below, note 62. 39. See In Praise of the Besht, 237, and for the Yiddish version in Rubinstein, Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, 381–82; Yaari, “Two Basic Versions of Shivh≥ei ha-Besht,” 559–61; Gedaliah Nigal, Ha-Sipporet ha-H˘asidit, Toledoteiah ve-Nose’iah ( Jerusalem, 1981), 280–92 (Hebrew); and Mark Verman, “Aliyah and Yeridah: The Journeys of the Besht and R. Nahman to Israel,” Approaches to Judaism in Medieval Times 3 (1988): 159–71. For the probable date of this enterprise as 1740, see the material assembled more recently by Mor Altschuler, “Messianic Strains in Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov’s Holy Epistle,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 (1999): 66. 40. For Hasidism in general, see also Idel, Hasidism, 225. 41. See above, note 5. See also Dubnow, “The Beginnings: The Baal Shem Tov (Besht), and the Center in Podolia,” in Hundert, ed., Essential Papers on Hasidism, 51n4, who also speaks explicitly about a confusion between the two different provinces in Romania. See also above, note 7, as well as his Toldot ha-H˘asidut, 441, where the term “confusion” occurs again. Dubnow’s own confusion emerged from combining, unconsciously to be sure, the short sentence in In Praise of the Besht about the parents in Walachia and childhood in Okopy with the Kherson theme of the Besht signing as if he had been from Okopy. 42. See Dimitrie Cantemir, De Antiquis et Hodiernis Moldaviae Nominibus, Historia MoldoVlachica, printed and translated into Romanian in Dimitrie Cantemir, Opere Complete, vol. 9, part 1, ed. Virgil Candea (Bucuresti: Editura Academiei R.S. Romania, 1983), e.g., 36/37, 123/124, 420/421, 424/425. Another interesting expression that links Walachia to Moldavia, found both in the title of Cantemir’s second book and in, e.g., the same work, 82/83, 420/421, and is found in the important eighteenth-century figure that will preoccupy us later, is Moldovalachia. See Paisie Velicikovsky, Cuviosul Paisie de la Neamtz, Velicikovski, Autobiografia

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unui staretz, ed. Ioan I. Ica (Sibiu: Editura Deisis, 1996), 185. It should be mentioned that Cantemir’s evidence, decisive as it indubitably is, is corroborated by a report of the friar Marcus Bandinus to the pope in 1646, about the Moldavian territories, where he tells the legend of the first ruler of Moldavia, an Italian figure named “Vol[o]cha.” See Codex Bandinus, ed. V. Urechia, “Memoriu asupra scrierii lui Bandinus de la 1646, urmat de text, însotçit de acte sçi documente,” Analele Academiei Române, Memoriile Sectiunii Istorice vol. 16, 1893–94 (Bucuresçti: Lito-tipografia Carol Göbl, 1895), 128–31. For references to Moldavia as Walachia in some Jewish texts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, see Lucian-Zeev Herscovici, “Un aspect al relatiilor dintre evrei caraiti din Basarabia si Eretz Israel in prima jumatate a secolului al XVIII-lea,” Hazionut 23 (Martie 1993): 10–11; 24 (Mai 1993): 9–10. Thanks are due Dr. Herscovici for drawing my attention to his article. 43. Printed in R. Barukh of Miedzybozh, Botzina’ di-Nehora’ ( Jerusalem, 1961), 139 (Hebrew). See also the verso of the front page of an edition of an anonymous sixteenthcentury kabbalistic book, Sefer Galia’ Razza’, printed by the same R. H˘ayyim in Mohilev, in 1812, and in some other cases elsewhere. For this spelling, Walichia, see notes 45–46. 44. Namely Mohilov, Mohyliv, or Mogilev in Russian and Ukrainian, and Moghilev in Romanian. This deteriorization may have had something to do also with the uprising of the Haidamaks and of others in the Ukraine in this period. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 54–55. 45. Namely the Muslim states. See the two versions of the epistle printed in Mondshine, Shivh≥ei ha-Ba‘al Shem Tov, 233, and Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader, 293: tmjm bwlyham qùùqb rbdh [ydh wnytwbybsl bwrq !g yk twnydmh lkb rbdh f`ptn hùùw[b twnydmh lwqlq .rdq twnydmbw ùyajylaww twnydmbw. On the problems related to the versions of this epistle, see Mondshine, Shivh≥ei ha-Ba‘al Shem Tov, 229–32; Etkes, The Besht, 302–9; H˘aviva Pedaya, “The Holy Letter of the Besht: Versions of the Text and the Worldview: Messianism, Revelation, Ecstasy and Sabbateanism,” Zion 70, no. 3 (2005): 312–43 (Hebrew); Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 97–113; and Rosman, “The Besht’s Letters: Toward a New Assessment,” Studies in Hasidism, ed. D. Assaf, H. Dan, and I. Etkes ( Jerusalem, 1999), 3–8 (Hebrew). See also note 39 above. It should be pointed out that in the Yiddish version of Shivh≥ei ha-Besht the plural form of states, medinot, is used in connection to Walachia. See fols. 2a (quoted above) and 26a. The plural form is found also in one case in the Hebrew version of the hagiography; see Rubinstein, Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, 294, translated in English in the singular. See In Praise of the Besht, 250. 46. See Ya‘acov Barnai, ed., Hasidic Letters from Eretz Israel ( Jerusalem: Yad Izhak ben Zvi, 1980), 76 (Hebrew). See, e.g., the different spellings found in the German text by Perl, Über das Wesen der Sekte Chassidim, 61, 123, 155. See above, notes 9, 43. 47. See above, notes 2–4. For the time being I have not found any serious hesitations related to the opinion shared by so many scholars that the Besht has been born in Okopy or in Podolia, which means that I did not see any conclusion drawn from such hesitations. See, however, the interesting attempt by Solomon Schechter to claim that the Besht was born in Bukovina, because Okopy was considered since the late eighteenth century to be part of this province. Cf. his Studies in Judaism, Essays on Persons, Concepts, and Movements of Thought in Jewish Tradition (New York: Atheneum, 1970), 154–55. A similar geographical mixture claiming that the Besht was born in Okopy and in Walachia at the same time is found in another twentieth-century author, R. Abraham Stern, in Sefer Melitzei ’Esh (Varnov, 1933), 33. Indeed, since the last quarter of the eighteenth century, Okopy was part of the Habsburg province of Bukovina. However, in a map drawn in 1790 it is regarded as still part of Moldavia, as it was before the 1770s, when it was occupied by the Austrians. See the map reproduced twice

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on the front and back pages of Ioan Horga–Sorin Sipos, De la “Petite” à la “Grand Europe,” Temoignages francais de la fin du XVIIIe et debut du XIXe siècle sur la frontière orientale de l'Europe (Oradea: Editurea Universitati din Oradea, 2006). 48. Cuviosul Paisie de la Neamtz (Velicikovski), Autobiografia unui staretz, 85. 49. Cf. his autobiography translated from Russian into Romanian as Cuviosul Paisie de la Neamtz (Velicikovski), Autobiografia unui staretz, ed. Ioan I. Ica (Sibiu: Editura Deisis, 1996). See also the introduction by P. Elia Citterio to the Italian translation of the autobiography, Paisij Velickovskij, Autobiografia di uno starets, 13–53. 50. On the history of hesychasm in the Carpathian monasteries prior to Velicikovsky’s arrival there, see, e.g., the survey of the renowned scholar and expert of hesychasm Dumitru Staniloaie, Din Istoria Isihasmului in Ortodoxia Romana (Bucuresti: Scripta, 1992). Though the book deals with the penetration of hesychasm in the Romanian provinces in general, many of the discussions deal with figures related to the Moldavian monasteries mentioned above; see, e.g., 9–12, 14–16, 18–19. On the life and thought of Vasile from Poiana Marului, a contemporary of the Besht, see the important monograph of Raccanello, Rugaciunea lui Iisus. 51. See note 36, above. 52. See the succinct suggestion of Scholem, in an important essay first printed in 1960 and reprinted now in The Latest Phase: Essays on Hasidism, 112; the much more elaborate study of Igor Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity of the Eastern Territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Possible Contacts and Mutual Influences,” Kabbalah 10 (2004): 73–105; and Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 58. Though in the title of Tourov’s study only the Slavic territories are mentioned, in the article itself the neo-hesychastic movement in Moldavia is duly mentioned. However, he did not focus his analyses on the assumption that the Besht was present in Moldavia in his youth and might have access to earlier hesychastic traditions, which presumably preceded Vasile’s arrival but definitely coincided with Velicikovsky’s second and much longer stay in the Romanian territories, which is my hypothesis here. See also Moshe Idel, “On European Cultural Renaissances and Jewish Mysticism,” Kabbalah 13 (2005): 76–78. 53. See my “’Adonai Sefatai Tiftah≥,” and “Prayer, Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious Worldview.” 54. See “Prayer, Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious Worldview.” 55. Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity,” 89–97. For an instance of a possible affinity between an important detail found in a seminal parable of the Besht and Christianity, see M. Idel, Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (London: Continuum, 2007), 543–57. 56. See Idel, Kabbalah: New Perspectives (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 321n137, and Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism, 148–50. See also Rosman’s resort to the term Shamanesque for describing the Besht, in Founder of Hasidism, 13–14, 106–7, 110–11, 130–33, 181. On the Shamanic background in the Moldavian Carpathians, see the account found in Mircea Eliade, Zalmoxis: The Vanishing God, trans. W. R. Trask (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972), 191–94, and Carlo Ginzburg, Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, trans. Raymond Rosenthal (New York: Pantheon, 1991), 188, 189, 194, 199. The original Latin text that describes those Shamanic practices, a unique document written in 1648 by the Minorite friar Marcus Bandinus as a report for the pope dealing with heresies found in Moldavia, and its Romanian translation, have been published by V. A. Urechia, Codex Bandinus, Memoriu asupra scrierei lui Bandinus dela 1646 (Analele Academiei Romane, Bucuresti 1895), 154, CLVII–CLVIII. I hope to offer a more detailed analysis of the content of this description in the context of the Besht’s cataleptic experiences in my forthcoming monograph about the founder of

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Hasidism. For general descriptions of this population, see more recently the two different approaches of Ferenc Pozsony, Ceangaii din Moldova (Cluj: Kriza Janos, 2002), and Dumitru Martinas, Originea ceangaiilor din Moldova (Bucuresti: Editura sciintifica si enciclopedica, 1985). 57. A fuller description of the various religious trends found in the northern Moldavian Carpathians is a desideratum for understanding a certain type of background for the emergence of Hasidism, in addition to the more important ones, the Podolian and the Wolhynian cultural landscapes. See Noy’s “The Besht in the Carpathian Mountains.” The main problem is that some of the populations found there, like the Hutzuls, the Gypsies, or the Csangos, did not record their traditions. 58. Cf., e.g., the belief in the transformation of the witch into a werewolf—in both Hebrew and Yiddish the form of Wakilak—which is connected to the first miraculous deed of the Besht in his youth, when he killed the monster with a wooden stick—cf. In Praise of the Besht, 12–13, and 298—to the belief in the same type of transformation in Romanian folklore, where it is designated as varcolac. Cf. Lazar Saineanu, Basmele romane (Bucuresti: Minerva, 1978), 568, and Antoaneta Olteanu, Scoala de solomonie: Divinatie si vrajitorie in context comparat (Bucuresti: Paideia, 1999), 260–61. This is a common Balkan belief, and the other variants of this name are Varcolaco, Vâracolaci, Svâracolaci, though it is quite widespread also in Romanian folklore. Basically it stems from the Bulgarian varkolak and vulkodlak, and originally from Greek vrykolakas. For more on this topic, see Harry Senn, “Romanian Werewolves: Seasons, Ritual, Cycles,” Folklore 93, no. 2 (1982): 206–15, and his Were-Wolf and Vampire in Romania (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982). I am not acquainted with the precise linguistic parallel to the form Wakilak used in the hagiography on the Besht, but it probably represents a reverberation of the Serbian form Wukolak. In Russian the form is wolkodlak or wolkuliaki (see Kahana, Sefer ha-H˘asidut, 28), and it is less pertinent for a comparison with the form Wakilak. I hope to address this issue in more detail in a separate study. For a lengthy discussion of the relationship between wolves and Dacians—the forerunners of the Romanians—including a rich bibliography on the topic without, however, referring to vircolac, see Eliade, Zalmoxis, 1–20. Mention should also be made of the warning of his father not to be afraid of anything. See also above, note 33. The possible affinities between this reiteration of the fear of God in the hagiography and views found in the Besht’s teachings and in those of R. Pinh≥as of Koretz deserve a separate investigation. See also Noy, “The Besht in the Carpathian Mountains,” 72, who attributes the recommendation not to be afraid of anything to a Hutzul influence. If Noy’s proposal is correct, then the recommendation not to fear anything emanates from the early Besht, while he was still in the mountains, and is not an invention of the Podolian followers of the Besht; see also Noy, 68, on the Wakilak. 59. On speculative and mystical aspects of Hasidism as constituted by a conglomerate of different models stemming from the kabbalistic literature, a view that is also applicable, at least in principle, to the Besht himself, see Idel, Hasidism; “’Adonai Sefatai Tiftah≥,” 99n250; Idel, “On Prophecy and Early Hasidism,” in Studies in Modern Religions, Religious Movements and the Babi-Baha'i Faiths, ed. Moshe Sharon (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 41–75; and my studies mentioned in the next note. 60. Important efforts in this direction, though, as may be expected, generating different pictures of this figure, have been made by several scholars. See esp. Scholem, The Latest Phase, 106–38; Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, esp. 174; Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader; H˘aviva Pedaya, “The Besht, R. Jacob Joseph of Polonoy, and the Maggid of Mezeritch: Basic Lines for a Religious-Typological Approach,” Da‘at 45 (2000): 25–73 (Hebrew); Pedaya “Two

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Types of Ecstatic Experience in Hasidism,” Da‘at 55 (2005): 73–108 (Hebrew); Zvi Mark, “Dybbuk and Devekut in the Shivhe ha-Besht: Toward a Phenomenology of Madness in Early Hasidism,” in Spirit and Spirit Possession in Judaism, ed. Matt Goldish (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), 257–301; my “The Besht as Prophet and as Talismanic Magician,” in Studies in Jewish Narrative: Ma‘aseh Sippur, Presented to Yoav Elstein, ed. Avidov Lipsker and Rella Kushelevsky (Ramat Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2006), 121–45 (Hebrew); and my “The Land of a Divine Vitality: Eretz Israel in Hasidic Thought,” The Land of Israel in Modern Jewish Thought, ed. Aviezer Ravitzky ( Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Tzvi, 1998), 256–75 (Hebrew), as well as my studies referred to above in notes 29 and 38, and below in note 63. My basic approach differs from those of the other scholars dealing with the thought and personality of the Besht as more consistent and coherent, and rests on the assumption that conceptually speaking the Besht was a much richer personality than assumed, that a resort to a panoramic approach to Hasidism and to the Besht is quintessential, and, last but not least, that a developmental approach to the Besht is helpful in that it assumes that he embraced more than one view on a certain topic at the very same time. 61. Printed for the first time in Amsterdam in 1701. It seems that this edition has been in the Besht’s hands. On the importance of this widespread book of Jewish magic, which did not attract the due attention of scholars of Hasidism, for some aspects of the Besht’s thought, and in the context of early Hasidism in a different way, I hope to elaborate elsewhere in some detail. For other Hebrew books of magic that have been printed in the period of the Besht, see Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic and Leader, 33–49; Etkes, “Magic and Magicians in Haskalah Literature,” and in more general terms in Gedalyah Nigal, Magic, Mysticism, and Hasidism (Tel Aviv: Yaron Golan, 1992) (Hebrew), and Idel, Hasidism, 290, 315, 326, 334–35. 62. See the interesting formulation of the twentieth-century scholar S. Y. Horowitz, adduced by Etkes, “Magic and Magicians in Haskalah Literature,” 50, who speaks about the “Haydamak-Walachic background” that had an impact on the Besht. Once again the Walachic background is emphasized by an author related to the Haskalah. See also the views of A. Stern, J. Perl, and N. Krochmal. I assume that the present study is a first sustained effort to inspect the possible affinities between the Besht and the “Walachian” cultural contexts. 63. See the similar interesting shift in the attitude toward the beauty of women reported in the case of the important disciple of the Besht, the Great Maggid of Mezeritch, as it was described by his own disciple, R. Zeev Wolf of Zhitomir, discussed in M. Idel, “Female Beauty: A Chapter in the History of Jewish Mysticism,” in Within Hasidic Circles: Studies in Hasidism in Memory of Mordecai Wilensky, ed. I. Etkes, D. Assaf, I. Bartal, and E. Reiner ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1999), 319–24 (Hebrew). See also above, note 38. 64. For the need to separate sometimes between the changing views of the Besht in general and those views of his that have been adopted in early Hasidism, see my methodological approach in “Prayer, Ecstasy, and Alien Thoughts in the Besht’s Religious Worldview.” See also my “‘Your Word Stands Firm in Heaven’: An Inquiry into the Early Traditions of R. Israel Baal Shem Tov and Their Reverberations in Hasidism,” Kabbalah 20 (2009): 219–86 (Hebrew); and the salient remarks of Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 27, 34–36, 38–39, 173–74. 65. Cf. with the structural and conceptual discrepancies between Jesus’ life, or that of Sabbatai Tzevi’s, on the one hand, and the structure of early Christianity, including Jesus’ closest group, and of Sabbateanism, on the other hand.

Hasidism and Habitat Managing the Jewish-Christian Encounter in the Kingdom of Poland

Glenn Dynner

Kotzk, home to a legendary Hasidic court during the mid-nineteenth century, is a medieval town hedged in by rivers, lakes, and wetlands about an hour’s drive from Warsaw. The very first site that greets the visitor is a corner building topped with a small tower at the intersection of Wojska Polskiego and Polna Streets, the former dwelling of the fiery Kotzker rebbe (Hebrew, tzaddik), Menah≥em Mendel Morgenstern (1787–1859). It is subdivided into apartments for five Polish families, each with its own beautiful flower garden, and there is a single communal water pump out front. The attic where the rebbe secluded himself during the latter part of his life hovers over the complex, vacant and condemned. From the building it is but a short walk to the market square, now a park bordered by an eighteenth-century classicalstyle church and blaring commercial storefronts that every so often permit the hoary wooden remains of prior centuries to gleam through. Walking to the outskirts of town, one approaches the palatial former residence of Jan Meissner, the German banker who owned the town during the Kotzker rebbe’s reign. The palace, now a convalescent home, is flanked by an old church that still holds services. Approaching the palace, I felt my mind was playing tricks on me—mournful strains of a Hasidic melody (niggun) seemed to drift along the breeze. But on closer inspection, the sounds were real. They were coming from the Catholic mass.

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Recent advances in cultural hybridity theory have given new impetus to the search for parallels, influences, and counter-influences among Jews and Christians.1 In the case of Hasidism, which has become associated with insularity in our own day, the appropriation and nativization of the surrounding Slavic religious culture by its leaders and adherents presents a particularly intriguing avenue of inquiry.2 But discussion about cultural boundaries can become better grounded through a consideration of space and place: What was the literal terrain of Hasidic and local Christian interactions, and how might those interactions have varied along the urban spectrum? A topographical focus can help us make sense of the movement’s spatial and intercultural strategies and set a comparative religious analysis on firmer footing.3 The present chapter considers the significance of Hasidic topography in the Kingdom of Poland where, at the very moment when Jews were beginning to migrate to urban centers in significant numbers, aspiring Polish tzaddikim and their inner circles relocated to the shtetl—a small-town setting with a pronounced Jewish presence.4

Zygmunt Vogel, Kotzk: Parish Church and Town Hall, 1796.

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WHERE NOT TO LIVE: HASIDISM AND THE VILLAGE

R. Ze’ev Wolf of Stryków, disciple of R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk, poet, and eventual tzaddik, penned the following lament about village life: I prefer the clamor of town living5 And reject the stillness of village lodgings. There, young and old delight in each other Here, sheep surround me and bulls encircle me. A gentile girl afflicted with leprosy and running wild Covered with sores, abscesses, and white spots6 Should be quarantined Yet she wears a gold crown.7

A Jew would surely avoid contact with the village’s contagious foreign culture (“a gentile girl afflicted with leprosy”), but he could not apparently resist the village’s lucrative business opportunities (i.e., her “gold crown”). Why was the gentile supposedly more contagious in the village? Assimilation and acculturation are typically associated with the city, where modern ideas and fashions made their first appearance. The memoirist Solomon Maimon’s adventure as a village tutor sheds some light on the much overlooked phenomenon of rural Jewish assimilation. His Jewish hosts were not only ignorant of Hebrew, but could not speak a word of Yiddish—their only language was “Russian, the common patois of the peasantry.” The family consumed cabbage and red beets, the principal food of Lithuanian Christians.8 The fact that a village economy could usually support only one Jewish family, often lessees of the local tavern, all but guaranteed interethnic fraternization. In the Congress Kingdom of Poland, according to census data from 1844, there were 74,749 such village Jews, constituting about fifteen percent of the Jewish population.9 A modest corpus of Hasidic hagiography grew around the figure of the village Jew. Some tales functioned like jokes, in which the village Jew’s presumed ignorance concealed unexpected piety or wisdom.10 A village Jew came to Przysucha to drink, but found all the taverns closed. Upon learning the reason—there was a public fast because the tzaddik Jacob Isaac, the “Holy Jew,” had fallen ill—the village Jew prayed fervently that the tzaddik would

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recover quickly so that the taverns would open again. The tzaddik attributed his recovery to the sincerity of this village Jew’s prayer.11 The tzaddik Ber of Radoszyce met an elderly Jew from Ulishija village, a childhood friend, and asked him how he was. Naively addressing the tzaddik by his first name, the elderly villager replied, “Beryl, Beryl, what can I tell you? As soon as a man no longer works [i.e., retires], he has nothing.” The tzaddik thrilled at the simple wisdom of this remark, interpreting “work” (avodah) as “divine service.”12 The ironic impact depended on the audience’s preconceived notions about the village Jew’s cultural level.13 The piety of village Jews was so suspect that Hasidim refused to trust meat slaughtered and prepared by them. Among the first miracles of future tzaddik Simh≥ah Bunem of Przysucha was his ability to eat meat “in places where Hasidim do not eat, such as villages and the like,” apparently because he possessed the supernatural ability to divine that it was kosher.14 This attitude is corroborated in responsa literature: when R. Isaac Meir Alter of Ger (Góra Kalwaria) (henceforth the Gerer rebbe) was asked to determine the kosher status of an unknown species of fowl, probably turkey, he dismissed as irrelevant the consideration that village Jews habitually consumed it, since “we know that there is a great deal of ritual laxity in villages.”15 In hagiographic literature, the village Jew is more vulnerable to apostasy. A Jewish lessee from the village Samot, who was accustomed to give generously to tzaddikim, eventually succumbed to his surroundings and apostatized. He was buried in the Christian cemetery; but the Gerer rebbe made the earth eject his corpse so that it could be buried in a Jewish cemetery.16 The Polish tzaddik Solomon of Radomsko met a village lessee whose daughter had apostatized and married a Christian. R. Solomon’s blessing caused the daughter’s husband to not only miraculously convert to Judaism but to become a Hasid who sported a shtreimel and long side-locks.17 Whether these traditions reflect fantasy or history, they undoubtedly signaled to audiences that the risk of contracting the gentile girl’s “disease” outweighed any benefits to be derived from her “gold crown.” Historians have sometimes missed this Hasidic aversion to village life.18 The most dangerous “gold crown” appears to have been the rural tavern lease. Most taverns continued to function on the Sabbath and festivals by means of legal fictions in contracts that, drawn up reluctantly by rabbis, allowed for the “sale” or “lease” of taverns to gentiles on these days.19 Hasidic leaders inherited a mistrust of Jewish tavern keeping, deeming it a business “of ill repute and thus impervious to all blessings.”20 The Galician tzaddik

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Menah≥em Mendel of Rymanów (1745–1815) attempted to “expel” Jewish tavern keepers from the Galician countryside.21 In the Kingdom of Poland, Jewish tavern keepers had to contend with an ever-tightening noose of concession fees designed specifically to drive them out of the trade, and some converted to Christianity to escape the prohibitive fees.22 The tzaddik Moses of Kozienice complained bitterly about such conversions that, in his view, had occurred under duress. In Be’er Moshe we read: “That your people Israel not be dependent on each other, nor on another people” (BT Yoma 53b, High Priest’s prayer on Yom Kippur). According to the teaching’s simple meaning, this [prayer] is recited because of our many sins and the decrees of gentiles, who issued economic decrees against Israel and increased her tax burden. And in particular, they taxed the village dwellers who leased arendas until they could no longer bear it. And because of our many sins, several (kama ve-kama) of the villagers were forced to apostatize because of their need to make a living. And because of this, we pray: “May your people Israel not be dependent on each other” to make a living; “nor on another people” so that they will not have to apostatize, heaven forefend. . . .” The nations heap sorrows upon us and confuse our minds with their evil thoughts, for they constantly think up onerous decrees to impose on every Israelite’s means of making a living, until there remains in this bitter exile no means of making a living and supporting one’s wife and children. And we cannot prepare our minds to properly direct our prayers because of the heaviness of the yoke of exile, which weighs upon us so much that we can barely carry it. And therefore the Lord shall clothe himself in the clothing of envy and revenge and wreak vengeance upon those who hate us and repulse all of our enemies from us. And bring down casualties upon casualties before us until there remains not a single faction that will decree a single [harsh] decree upon Israel. But to the contrary, they will decree good, salvific, comforting decrees upon us which greatly increase our happiness so that we will be ever happy and lighthearted in order to become a fitting and pure vessel for the holy presence of God (shekhinah ha-kedushah).23

But however acute the economic pressures, such rural tavern keepers had violated Jewish society’s most solemn taboo, further tarnishing the image of the village Jew. The passage was censored out of subsequent editions.

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HASIDISM AND THE CITY

The tzaddik Simh≥ah Bunem of the small town of Przysucha once sent his Hasidim to Warsaw to find out the latest news. During their walk around the city they did not hear any news, but they did overhear two peddlers discussing the biblical verse about Abraham and the non-Jewish Avimelekh: “And they made a covenant, the two of them” (Gen. 21:27). One peddler noticed that the phrase “the two of them” seems superfluous, since Abraham and Avimelekh were the only people there. The peddler then resolved the apparent superfluidity by explaining that Abraham foresaw that “we, Israel, will be scattered in exile among the idol worshippers and will do business with them and need other things from them.” For this reason, Abraham made a covenant with Avimelekh to be, emphatically, “two of them,” meaning that “there will never be a union between them nor any friendship which will cause them to emulate their ways, God forbid.” When the Hasidim repeated this teaching to R. Simh≥ah Bunem, he claimed that this was precisely why he had sent them to Warsaw, so they would realize that “even if one must be around uncouth folk who lack refinement, because of business needs and the like, one must interact with non-Jews as ‘two,’ not in union.”24 Even the simplest urban Jew, we learn, understood the dangers of inter-religious fraternization. One might expect Warsaw Jews to have followed a course similar to that of Jews in Odessa and St. Petersburg, where a direct line may be drawn between the acquisition of wealth, acculturation, and cosmopolitanism.25 But the cities of the Kingdom of Poland suggest a different model: urban centers with equally entrenched religious and secular-oriented groups, and where economic prosperity did not favor one group over another. Warsaw, Lodz, and other Polish cities hosted thriving communities of Hasidim, mitnaggdim (non-Hasidic traditionalists), maskilim (Enlightenment-based reformers), and more radical integrationists. In the latter half of the nineteenth century, they would be joined by “Litvaks” (Russified Jews from historical Lithuania) and representatives of the New Jewish Politics (Zionists, Bundists, and others).26 Hasidism was entrenched in Warsaw well before Jewish settlement was legalized in 1802, although it is difficult to quantify.27 Jacob Shatzky’s claim that two-thirds of the city’s 300 prayer houses were Hasidic by 1880, invoked as evidence repeatedly in contemporary scholarship, turns out to be a castle built on air.28 Eleonora Bergman’s data yields a total of only 167 Warsaw prayer houses in 1869, and the number had dwindled to 117 by 1910.29

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Warsaw’s hospitality to variant religious subcultures was to an extent a product of the kingdom’s residential segregation policy. From its inception in 1809, the policy had a built-in exemption feature for wealthy and acculturated Jews that was to prove deeply consequential. In Warsaw, Jews who possessed 60,000 złoties, eliminated their beards and other distinguishing sartorial marks, enrolled their children in public schools, and fit a desired professional profile were eligible for permission to live and work on restricted streets.30 This exemption policy had the effect of sifting prominent acculturated Jews out of the Jewish quarter, leaving behind a more traditionally oriented and traditionalist-led mass. In this manner, official segregation policies inadvertently consolidated what would come to be known as “Ultra-Orthodoxy.” The comfort level of Hasidim in Warsaw was such that many walked the streets wrapped in their tallit and tefillin, and belted out their prayers in public during the sanctification of the Moon.31 Ezekiel Kotik, an aspiring maskil who arrived in Warsaw in 1868, was so disappointed by the Jewish community’s traditionalist bent that he considered retiring to some village and leasing a tavern, since “it was better to be a little man in a village than a nothing in Warsaw . . . a hypocrite, a fanatic among fanatics.”32 Franciscan Street in those years was a potent mix of Hasidic and non-Hasidic study houses. In the “Shas Association,” Kotik amused his anti-Hasidic friends with caricatures of tzaddikim he had encountered back home; but both camps united to form a “Sabbath Guard” that saw to it that female street vendors ceased all business before the Sabbath, pouring out their baskets into the gutter whenever they tried to squeeze in a final sale.33 And when it came to issues affecting the entire Jewish community, prominent Hasidim and mitnaggdim cooperated with even the most acculturated Jews in combating the government’s perceived assaults on the traditional Jewish way of life.34 In cities, the watchword was accommodation. At most, urban enclaves could come to be dominated by Hasidim. If Franciscan Street appeared to Kotik as a mix of traditionalist subcultures in the 1860s, it had gained an overwhelmingly Hasidic tenor by the 1880s. Ya‘akov Milkh describes Franciscan Street during this later period as a Hasidic street, where “every Hasidic shtibl in Warsaw” coexisted, including Kotzk, Ger, Grodzisk, Biala, Warka, Radzymin, Neushtadt, and “even Trisk.” A passerby could hear any Hasidic melody or see any Hasidic dance.35 One could usually avoid acculturated Jews. During a walk with his cousin, Kotik was relieved to finally meet an acquaintance of his, who was dressed in the

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“German-style.” But when he looked around, he realized that his cousin had fled. Later, Kotik’s cousin threatened to never go out in the street with him again if he ever stopped to talk to another acculturated Jew.36 Contact with Christians was usually confined to the economic realm. On Franciscan Street there were, besides prayer houses, shops where Jews “deal in everything on which profit is to be gained,” according to one traveler. When Russian soldiers obtained a few hours’ leave, they went straight to Franciscan Street. “As soon as a Jew spies a soldier, he seems to read in his countenance what he was looking for, whether thread, pipe-clay, blacking, or soap.” There were few indications of intimacy or even familiarity in those encounters.37 Contact with Christians in the city also occurred during times of emergency. A responsum by the Gerer rebbe concerning a grass widow (agunah) case provides some rare insight. One witness was strolling by the Vistula River on the Sabbath behind Elijah Jonah’s house when he came upon Lifsha, the wife of a local Jew named Kopel Leder, in the company of several Christians. According to the witness, “She asked me to go with the gentiles to the village Zoran, because they said they found a drowned man there.” So the witness traveled there with the gentiles and three other Jews and found the corpse in the river among the rushes early the next morning, identifying him as Kopel Leder.38 The scenario suggests a blend of trust and mistrust. The non-Jews were kind enough to seek out a Jewish woman in Warsaw who might be missing her husband. The Jewish witness agreed to go with them to identify the body (Shifra could not go with them because of her gender). However, for safety’s sake he took along three additional Jews, more than the required number of witnesses. If the Hasidic rank-and-file thrived in Warsaw’s Jewish neighborhoods, Hasidic courts gained surprisingly little traction. The Gerer rebbe resided in Warsaw for much of his pre-tzaddik career but felt compelled to leave shortly after his ascension as tzaddik. A police report from 1859 describes throngs of unkempt Hasidim pouring in from the provinces upon the death of R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk hoping to gain audience with the new tzaddik in his residence at 1015 Krochmalna Street. Certain Jewish residents complained to the authorities.39 The Gerer rebbe first attempted to move his court to Eisengas Street, which was more sparsely populated, but less than a year into his reign as tzaddik he decided to move his court to the small town of Góra Kalwaria.40 The nature of the Gerer rebbe’s Warsaw career may hold a key to his decision to relocate to the shtetl. It was a career distinguished by collaboration,

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negotiation, and compromise with anti-Hasidic traditionalist and acculturated Jewish leaders alike in an effort to mitigate perceived threats to the Hasidic way of life like army conscription, primary educational reform, and language ordinances.41 Hagiography admits that such collaborations forced the Gerer rebbe to witness acculturated Jews eating non-kosher food and smoking on the Sabbath.42 Even driving down Jerusalem Street in his droshky could be hazardous, forcing the tzaddik to shake hands with acculturated Jews eager to meet a celebrity.43 Warsaw was significantly larger and more non-Jewish (41,062 Jews and 115,500 Christians) at mid-century than the two other cities in which Hasidic courts were briefly established during the nineteenth century: Lublin (8,588 Jews and 6,901 Christians) and Płock (5,251 Jews and 7,152 Christians). Lublin represented the most successful case. Yet there was a forty-year lag between the demise of the flourishing court of the Seer of Lublin upon his death in 1815 and the next full-fledged court, established in 1854 by Judah Leib Eiger, grandson of the legendary Akiba Eiger. Lublin Hasidim found it difficult to dominate the Synagogue Council as well.44 For much of the century, only rank-and-file Hasidim, confined to the area in front of the Castle, were able to thrive in Lublin.45 AN IDEAL SETTING FOR A HASIDIC COURT

Most aspiring tzaddikim relocated to a shtetl. To understand this choice of habitat, it will help to examine the case of an aspiring tzaddik who moved from Warsaw to the shtetl Pia$ tek, a bishop-owned town. Although formally off-limits to Jewish settlement, Pia$ tek contained a designated Jewish quarter. The town was split evenly between non-Jews and Jews throughout the 1850s—807 Christians and 805 Jews, the latter being further split between Hasidim and non-Hasidim.46 As in many Jewish communities, Hasidim and non-Hasidim in Pia$ tek had achieved an uneasy modus vivendi: for the past twenty-five years the town rabbi, Szmul Izrael, had been Hasidic, but the Synagogue Council was dominated by non-Hasidic lay leaders. In 1860, the balance of power was suddenly upset with the arrival of the rabbi’s flamboyant brother-in-law, Chuna Unger, from Warsaw. Unger not only possessed a passport permitting him to settle in the town (notwithstanding an old Christian privilege restricting Jewish settlement to native-born Jews) but a patent for spiritual leadership, as well.47 According to the anti-Hasidic Synagogue Council member Baruch Gajzler, the Hasidic

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party immediately made Unger their leader and began collecting funds for him. Unger issued a decree forbidding the consumption of local meat and refused to attend synagogue services, even on religious holidays.48 Instead, he began assembling local Hasidim under the pretext of prayer, “addicting them to drunkenness and demoralization,” in the words of his opponents.49 Unger may be identified with Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna) Unger (d. 1883), son of the tzaddik Mordecai David Unger (1770–1846) of Dombrov (Da$ browa Tarnowska) and son-in-law of the tzaddik H˘ayyim Meir Yeh≥iel of Mogielnice. Unger initially achieved renown as the publisher of the Hasidic classic Avodat Yisrael ( Josefów, 1842), which contains the teachings of R. Israel, the Maggid of Kozienice. He was wealthy, pedigreed, and charismatic, although little is known about his scholarly ability.50 Unger’s supporters elaborated an interesting counter-charge. Rabbi Szmul Izrael had fallen ill and needed to go to Warsaw for a cure, but Unger’s influential non-Hasidic opponents—Gajzler and his colleague Mordka Goldberg—had refused to grant him a leave of absence. Rabbi Szmul Izrael was forced to depart without the Synagogue Council’s formal permission. Upon his return, he found himself banished from the synagogue, a state of affairs that lasted several months. The anti-Hasidic Goldberg, for his part, had a quarrelsome reputation: he had inflicted punishments—including floggings—on town residents, had accused members of the Burial Society of wrongdoing, and had convinced the mayor to dissolve the body. And now, Unger’s supporters claimed, he had insulted a rabbi renowned for his learning and spotless reputation. In the spring of 1862, the communal balance of power was put to test in a Synagogue Council election. The declared winners were two Hasidim, Michał Ciosnowski and Szyja Szternfeld, and the anti-Hasidic Mosiek Zylberberg. The Hasidim had achieved a majority on the council. In addition, 75 of 140 taxpayers signed a petition in Unger’s defense (although one petitioner signed his name twice), reflecting support for the Hasidim among just over half of the community’s taxpayers. The election results were disputed with the support of local Polish officials. According to County Commissioner Le$ czycki, Unger had “inflicted harm on the kosher meat lease,” held by Goldberg, and had engaged in “questionable methods of tax collection during an election year.” Unger had issued a ban against anyone buying meat in order to hurt Goldberg and had induced the rabbi to quit the town on the High Holidays without

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obtaining a leave of absence so that no one could ensure the kosher status of meat. Unger was “a social menace who does not fulfill his spiritual functions, but rather engages in trade in corn and lumber.” According to the director of the State Council, Unger and the rabbi had conspired to remove Goldberg and Gajzler from the Synagogue Council in 1860, going so far as to accuse Goldberg of a capital crime. Unger had thereby hoped to install council members who “obeyed his will” so that he could take over the finances and governance of the community. And thus he did. During the new elections in 1862, he had extracted the votes of the poor “through terror and corruption” and had managed to ram through the election of his relatives, Ciosnowski and Szternfeld. Since their election, Unger, the rabbi, Ciosnowski, and Szternfeld had “immediately employed a variety of abuses.” They had established fees for the slaughter of cattle and poultry, seized control of the burial society, prevented relatives of the dead and wealthy members of the community from attending burial rites, and attempted to conceal expenditures exceeding 1,500 silver rubles resulting from suits against Ciosnowski for his physical assaults against community members. In spite of the best efforts of the anti-Hasidic leaders and their powerful Christian allies, however, the Hasidic victory was upheld. In 1863, Gajzler and Mosiek Zylberberg, the sole non-Hasidic Council member and new meat tax lessee, brought suit against the leaders of the local Hasidim. They now claimed that the rabbi had improperly extracted unspecified payments, refused to eat “official” meat, issued bans against slaughtering to the detriment of Zylberberg, collected fees for his own slaughtering, quit the community and appointed the unqualified Unger in his place, and had moreover never taken the exam now required of rabbis. The suit also asserted that Unger had held Hasidic gatherings involving lawlessness, drunkenness, and other harmful acts. But Unger apparently had connections of his own in the central government in Warsaw. The State Council acquitted the rabbi and Unger of all charges and reaffirmed the legality of praying in separate prayer houses. Since the complaints were “unsubstantiated,” Gajzler and Zylberberg had to pay the costs of the investigation. The Interior Ministry in Warsaw confirmed the Hasidic candidates and formally annulled the 1860 election of Gajzler and Goldberg. The latter now stood accused of delivering false testimony and other criminal offenses. Although the Le$czycy Police Court acquitted Goldberg of all charges the following year, the Hasidim had carried the day.51

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Table 1. Pia$tek Jewish Communal Election Results Votes Received Name Josek Towunczyk Michał Ciosnowski* Szyja Szternfeld* Szyja Adamowicz Lewek Lewin Mordka Goldberg (*) Mosiek Zylberberg* Josek Dominkiewicz Lejbel Orzechowski Baruch Gajzler Chune Unger

(March/February)

Tax Bracket

3/0 63/62 63/62 63/62 0/0 63/61 64/60 60/60 2/2 n/a n/a

2nd 1st 5th 5th 4th 2nd 2nd 2nd 4th 1st 1st

Affiliation Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Non-Hasidic Hasidic

*declared winners

The 1862 election results disclose the tax status of Gajzler, Unger, and the nine candidates, giving us a sense of the economic level of the Hasidim and their adversaries. Table 1 reveals how delicate the balance of power truly was. With the arrival of Unger, the Hasidim now had two members in the top tax bracket compared to only one non-Hasid, Gajzler. At the same time, Hasidic candidates occupied both the highest and lowest tax brackets. One of the poorest members of the community, Szyja Szternfeld, won a seat—perhaps Unger had appointed him as a “stand-in” (Gajzler apparently tried something similar with Lejbel Orzechowski). The non-Hasidic candidates, on the other hand, were clustered mainly in the second tax bracket, appearing to comprise a “secondary elite.”52 This socioeconomic balance differs from that of other known cases, further confirming Hasidism’s lack of any distinctive class make-up.53 But the data reveal something else, as well: in a small town like Pia$ tek, it only took the arrival of a single individual—albeit a wealthy, pedigreed, and influential one—to dramatically shift local power relations. Before Unger, the Hasidic community had been moribund. His arrival was a jolt to local Hasidim, who now formed their own prayer quorum, began celebrating Sabbaths and festivals in rapturous Hasidic style, showered their new tzaddik with money, opted out of the community’s kosher slaughtering, and soon took over the Synagogue Council. Pia$ tek was suddenly home

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to a Hasidic court, notwithstanding the best efforts of wealthy Synagogue Council members in coalition with local Polish officials. The case, dramatic as it may have been, was indicative of a wider trend. The vast majority of aspiring Polish tzaddikim from the middle decades of the nineteenth century chose to set up their courts in towns like Pia$ tek. The presence of courts in those towns caused local Jewish populations to swell to enormous proportions around the Sabbath and festivals. British missionaries described Warka, home to Isaac Kalisz (1779–1848), as “the Capital of Hasidism” in 1846. The missionaries asked two Jews where all the Hasidim were and were told “that nearly everyone is Hasidic, and that last month on the holiday of Rosh Hashanah, 4,000 Jews from various locales came to this rabbi.”54 Anything even approaching these numbers would have dwarfed the town’s permanent Jewish population of around 1500.55 Demographic shifts occasioned by the establishment of Hasidic courts were sometimes manifested less in a court town’s permanent Jewish population, which was more subject to restriction and regulation by Polish authorities, than in surges in temporary Jewish migration around Sabbaths and festivals.56 Village and city Jews alike journeyed to provincial towns to meet tzaddikim and revel in the vibrant Hasidic court life. Of course, the pilgrimage experience itself varied according to one’s own habitat. For the villager, it meant rare company with fellow Jews. For the urban Hasid, it was more of a retreat, an escape from the hustle and bustle of daily affairs. But for all Hasidim, the small town that hosted a court was nothing less than a manifestation of ancient Jerusalem.57 Pilgrimages became increasingly convenient with improvements in transportation: after the death of the tzaddik Yeh≥iel Meir Lifschitz (1816–88), who had established a court in the small town of Gostynin, logbooks of the steamship that continually stopped there reported a loss of 22,324 passengers.58 Not only did such towns offer little in terms of economic opportunity, they often had legally sanctioned restrictions on Jewish settlement. In the early nineteenth century, Jewish quarters called rewiry were established or reinstated based on earlier privileges in a total of thirty-one towns and cities, including Warsaw.59 In towns like Pia$ tek that were formally off limits to Jewish settlement (de non tolerandis Judaeis), another type of Jewish quarter called an obre$b, or “compass,” was delineated. In all, fifty-five Jewish quarters existed by the 1830s.60 Yet moribund local economies and residential restrictions were no deterrents to aspiring tzaddikim. If the local economy and residence rights were not decisive, then what was? The principal consideration seems to have been manageability. First,

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Table 2. Towns with Hasidic Courts Court

Founded

Christians (1852)

Jews (1852)

Góra Kalwaria Warka

1859 ca. 1830

524 1,181

1,298 1,527

Radomsko Alexandrów

1843 1868

1,794 2,524

1,162 971

Biała Podlaska

1873

1,333

2561

Gostynin Radoszyce Bychawa

1875 1831 1828

2,445 1,116 340

634 745 638

Pia$tek

1860

807

805

Ciechanów

1820

1,097

2,241

Piotrków

ca. 1820

5,720

4,151

Grodzisko Izbica Kock (Kotzk) Kozienice Lelów Mogielnica Parysów Przedborz Przysucha

1848 ca. 1840 1829 1765 Pre-1814 1828 Pre-1862 1788 1790s

185 1,149 1,270 924 328 1,003 679 1,067 587

786 970c 1,612d 1,961 428 1,202 456 3,181 2,020

1765 1844

1,098 549

2,117 1,062

Z{elechów Z{ychlin

Residential Restrictions De non tolerandis Judaeis De non tolerandis Judaeis ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced) De non tolerandis Judaeis De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass) No more than 30 houses ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced) Jewish Quarter (rewir) De non tolerandis Judais De non tolerandis Judaeis, revoked De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass), no non-native Jewish settlement ( Jewish Quarter planned but unenforced)a De non tolerandis Judaeis, Jewish Quarter (compass)b Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted Unrestricted; yet a separate market square (rynek) for Jews. Unrestricted Unrestricted

Sources: AGAD, KRSW 188, fol. 223–254; Maria Łodynska-Kosinska, ed., Katalog rysunków architektonicznych z Akt Komisji Rza$dowej Spraw Wewne$trznych w Archiwum Głównym Akt Dawnych w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1974). aSee

also Aleksander Kociszewski, Mazowsze w epoce napoleonskiej (Ciechanów: RSW, 1985), 317–18.

bPiotroków’s

compass was originally established as a separate “Jewish town” by the Starosta. AGAD, KRSW 188, fol.

224 and 331. cAccording to Wasiutynski, the population of Izbica dropped to 681 five years later, in 1857, perhaps a result of the death of R. Mordecai Joseph Leiner in 1854. dIt is difficult to explain Wasiutynski’s much lower figure of 1,480 five years later, in 1857 (the Kotzker Rebbe did not die until 1859).

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there was the Jewish community itself. As the Pia$ tek case demonstrates, a town with a small but viable Jewish population was relatively easy to dominate politically. Second, there was less likely to be a viable acculturated Jewish leadership to contend with. And third, although Jews would tend to be on more familiar terms with their Christian neighbors in a smaller town than in an anonymous city, the boundaries were well marked. Local Christian reactions to the court of R. Jacob Tzvi Rabinowicz in Parysów (which, ethnographer Stefanija Ulanowska notes indignantly, possessed an unpainted wooden parish church with a shingled roof yet a grand stone synagogue with an iron roof ), elicited a powerful sense of border maintenance.61 Parysów Christians were continually amazed by the hordes of Jewish petitioners streaming into their town from every locale, including even Warsaw, to obtain advice, help, and healing from the local epileptic rabbi whom Jews regarded as a saint. True, the rabbi was charitable: he provided meals for around sixty poor Jews every single day, paid for by his wealthy followers. But he had never even shown himself on the street, preferring to remain somewhere behind the red-curtained windows of his house, and had never bothered to learn Polish. On the holidays the town “swarmed” with Jews, reaching numbers unseen at church fairs. At a certain point, visitors would gather before the rabbi’s window and throw money at him from every side. In return, the rabbi would write prayers on slips of paper, which were then collected and cast through a tiny window in the tomb of his late father.62 Some Christians in Parysów began to worry that the Jews were planning to slaughter them, and that the rabbi was merely biding his time until the numbers of Jews grew even larger.63 In fact, the proportion of permanent Jewish residents to Christians in Parysów had grown from 28.8 percent in 1827 to 43.3 percent in 1857.64 But these worries did not give way to open hostility against Hasidim. In 1865, Christian townspeople complained to the municipality about Jewish-owned houses that lay too close to the church, a perceived encroachment on Christian space, but never about the Hasidic court in their midst.65 Christians occasionally availed themselves of a local Jewish saint’s services. The tzaddik Abraham of Ciechanów (1795–1875) was especially known to grant non-Jewish requests, dispense advice and charity to non-Jews, and arbitrate their disputes. Once, a non-Jewish woman from Neszalsk who “knew how to speak the Jewish language because she had grown up in the midst of Jews” (probably as a servant or wet nurse) disguised herself and presented her petition under a Jewish name. The tzaddik

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perceived that the petition was from a non-Jew and forbade her admission to his room, but still gave her a blessing.66 In another instance, R. Abraham did permit non-Jewish petitioners to enter his inner chamber: A non-Jewish woman came with her husband, an ill farmer, to the rebbe of blessed memory, and the attendant asked if he would let them enter, and the rebbe gave his permission. And they entered the inner chamber, and the rebbe ordered the attendant to ask her—since she was the spokesperson— what was her request. And she replied that her husband was ill. And he ordered him to ask her from what he was ill, and if she had already sought out doctors. And she said yes. And he asked which doctors, and if they were from the vicinity, and other such questions. And she answered everything. And afterward he commanded him to ask her what she wished from him and why she had come to him, and she replied that she came to request that he pray to God for his recovery. (And all the manifold questions were to derive the reason for their coming to him, to make sure that it wasn’t to worship him like an idol, Heaven forfend. And they either realized this intent or a Jew had advised them to answer in this manner.) And he blessed him, as is his manner, with: “May the Holy One Blessed Be He give him a complete and speedy recovery.”67

The tradition has the trappings of any number of Hasidic power-inversion fantasies.68 But certain features argue for its historicity. The Christian petitioners in this case were quite humble; and the original redactor, S., the Rabbi of Kłodawa, preserves a sense of awkwardness during the encounter.69 The attendant had to first ask the tzaddik’s permission to bring non-Jews into the inner chamber. The tzaddik had to filter his words through his attendant/ interpreter, since it was unseemly for him to address a non-Jewish woman directly.70 Nevertheless, as the peasants were in his domain, he controlled the encounter. The redactor’s prejudicial remarks (in parentheses) are less convincing. It is difficult to imagine a peasant actually regarding the tzaddik as a god, and there is no reason to believe that R. Abraham, who interacted frequently with Christians in and around Ciechanów, would have entertained such notions. In addition, there is no reason to assume with the redactor that the woman was coached by Jews. If we disregard the editorializing, we are left with a rather straightforward exchange and a sense of the conditions under which a tzaddik would agree to interact with non-Jews. Outside the tzaddik’s court, Hasidic contact with Christians in the shtetl was perhaps more frequent than in a city, but it was still confined to the

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economic sphere. Hasidic hagiography exudes fear and mistrust of gentiles, even construing them in demonic terms, but acknowledges that one still has to do business with them.71 A male petitioner whose store was frequented by gentiles was accustomed to read from a copy of the Lubavitcher classic, the Tanya, to avoid spiritual contamination. R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk praised this practice, but advised him to also recite the Shema prayer at those times.72 R. Menah≥em Mendel, for his part, was proud of his young wife’s success in attracting “many customers, Jewish and non-Jewish,” to her store.73 Although contempt for members of the dominant culture could result in a double standard in the marketplace, Hasidim were admonished against cheating their non-Jewish customers. R. Abraham of Ciechanów explained to a Jewish store owner that he was unable to make a profit because he had been cheating non-Jewish factory workers by means of weights and measures.74 R. Isaac of Warka rebuked a lessee for stealing from a landowner: it was only permissible to steal “a little time to study Torah” from the nobleman, nothing more.75 Likutei Shoshanim, a tract attributed to both the non-Hasidic chief rabbi of Warsaw, R. Shlomo Zalman Lifschitz, and to R. Isaac of Warka, establishes the following guidelines: Robbing and stealing are forbidden, especially between an Israelite and a gentile. And all swindling in the whole world is forbidden in business transactions, even involving a gentile. For example, if there is a flaw in one’s goods, he must announce it to the customer even if he is a gentile, for not announcing it is ‘stealing his mind’ and causing him to err. If it is but a tiny thing which people are not so strict about, such as taking a splinter to use it as a toothpick, it is permissible. But a Hasid will avoid doing even this.76

To judge by the phrase “even involving a gentile,” it appears that a double standard did prevail among some Jews. Many Christians suspected all Jews of adhering to a double standard. Mazowian townspeople informed ethnographers that Jews supported themselves by swindling drunken peasants, sober burghers, and noblemen alike.77 Polish author E.T. Massalski had his Jewish character explain that “no pagan has a soul, and that is why we are free to cheat and beat them; and if we can’t wipe out these demons and enemies of true belief, then it is our obligation to cheat them and harm them as enemies of God, and at every opportunity increase their losses.”78 But such logic, to the extent it really operated, did not receive religious sanction.

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Juifs Polonais (Polish Jews), by August Jacob Theodor Von Heyden, c. 1862–67.

A vivid picture of economic engagement and conflict in the shtetl emerges from the horde of quasi-Hasidic petitions to Elijah Guttmacher, the non-Hasidic “tzaddik of Gratz (Grodzisk Wielkopolski),” from the early 1870s. Petitioners requested such things as “success collecting debts and success in a court case with the gentile, for he does not want to pay.”79 A gentile owed one petitioner over 1,000 zlotys, the petitioner’s entire fortune; but when he went to collect, the gentile had physically threatened him.80 Another petitioner complained that a gentile hated him for no reason and harmed him in every possible way, destroying his business. The petitioner asked R. Guttmacher to help him find favor with the local government minister “so that they will permit me a little business.”81 Petitions concerning members of the nobility usually possess an alarming quality, since the sums involved were often substantial: “and now the noblewoman has fallen ill, and I fear she will demand her money, and I, too, am ill”; or “now it is impossible to get anything from him” because the nobleman had squandered the money the petitioner had lent him.82 But economic conflicts were not only

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ethnic-based: when a Jewish tavern keeper’s lease was usurped by two fellow Jews, he blamed them, not the nobleman who accepted their higher bid.83 Relations between Hasidim and gentiles in the shtetl only occasionally transcended the economic realm. Disclosures of such relations in hagiography carry grave warnings: “The nations of the world befriend the Israelites and by this means estrange them from the Israelite religion, God forbid,” according to R. Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk. Indeed, “one sees this nowadays, because of our many sins, that friendships with the nations of the world have caused this to happen.”84 Audiences were horrified by tales of apostasy, but reassured in the end that the apostate eventually repented or, in some cases, was killed.85 Social drinking, the society’s main pastime, was to occur only between Jews: “As wine enters, the secret (sod) emerges” (BT Eruvin 65): And Israel’s “secret” is “love your neighbor as yourself ” (Lev. 19), love and neighborliness. And the gentiles’ “secret” is murder: “And by your sword you shall live” (Gen. 27). Therefore, when the Children of Israel sit together to drink, as the wine enters the secret of love emerges: love of God and love of friends. And when the gentiles begin to drink, we see quarrels and murder among them.86

According to one tale, a Jew fell victim to a gentile’s murderous inclinations in a tavern.87 Yet hagiography occasionally admits that social drinking did occur between déclassé Jews and Christians.88 INSULARITY THROUGH ACCULTURATION

In his study of contemporary Hasidic life, Samuel Heilman appears amazed by the degree to which Hasidim have integrated themselves into American life: In New York even the bearded Satmar Hasid who sought to live undisturbed in his Jewish ghetto had become a part of New York and its social life and politics like all other ethnics in the city. And at his electronics business in midtown Manhattan, he could sound like any other American businessman, saluting customers and closing transactions with the vapid but quintessentially American “Have a nice day.”89

Heilman interprets such salutations as a desire on the part of Hasidim to “be part of the contemporary world around them.”90

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But in the mode of acculturation adopted by Hasidim, only those attractions or benefits of the secular world that, paradoxically, helped preserve the society’s core insularity were appropriated. Space and place were crucial to this defensive appropriation: the “quintessentially American” gestures witnessed by Heilman occurred, significantly, in the Hasid’s own store rather than on any neutral turf. To prevent an over-reading of such gestures, it may help to remember that Hasidic homiletic literature, despite the occasional ecumenical feint, essentially conceives non-Jews as rooted in lifelessness or, worse, demonic husks (kelipot), existing only as divine instruments to punish Jews sins through persecution or to vindicate Jews through their own downfall.91 A tzaddik’s engagement with the surrounding Slavic popular culture was a miraculous extraction of the pure from the impure: the tzaddik discerns “holy matters” in all the folktales of the world;92 and “is able to elevate the common sayings and stories of peoples of his time,”93 since non-Jewish folktales contain “many hidden and extremely exalted things.”94 The same is said to be true of non-Jewish music: “In all the lieder that the nations of the world sing, there is an aspect of fear and love (of God), extending from above down to all the lower levels.”95 Hasidim danced Polish and Ukrainian folk dances in a state of intoxication, moving one contemporaneous critic to compare them to peasants; but the goal was ostensibly devekut, not amusement.96 Hasidic exorcism ceremonies may have exhibited Slavic influences; Hasidic pilgrimages may have resembled Christian pilgrimages to Cze$ stochowa, Kobylan´ska, and Kalwaria.97 But as Polish as these practices may have been, they ultimately functioned to shore up the Hasidic community by stealing thunder from the alluring sounding culture. The notion that under the aegis of tzaddikim one could sanctify profane practices by engaging them with a holy intent justified the most unabashed appropriations of Polish culture. In the Hasidic imagination, the Polish folktale, song, dance, and any other cultural artifact entered the Hasidic court much in the same way as the Christian farmers approached R. Abraham of Ciechanów: as supplicants in need of repair. The shtetl proved an optimal environment for Hasidic courts because both the local Jewish community and their interactions with the Christian population and its potent culture could be better regulated there. Polish cities also allowed for a high degree of border maintenance, thanks to their legislated Jewish enclaves. However, cities proved much more difficult to dominate politically owing to their multitude of entrenched

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subcultures, each with its own influential leaders, and a tzaddik could only insulate himself with great difficulty. Villages failed on every score: in the absence of a viable Jewish community in the countryside, borders between Jews and Christians could not be policed at all. As a result, Hasidic court life gravitated toward the shtetl, where the tzaddik’s negotiation with the Jewish and non-Jewish community alike could occur from a position of strength. NOTES 1. On the application of “cultural hybridity” to Jewish studies, see Moshe Rosman, How Jewish Is Jewish History (Oxford: Littman Library, 2007), esp. chap. 3. I would like to thank Olga Litvak for reading an earlier draft of this chapter and offering several helpful suggestions. 2. Attempts to locate Christian influences on Hasidism include Yaffa Eliach, “The Russian Dissenting Sects and Their Influence on Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, Founder of Hassidism,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research 36 (1963); Torsten Ysander, Studien zum B‘estshten Hasidismus (Upsala: Lundeqistka Bokhandeln, 1933); Igor Tourov, “Hasidism and Christianity of the Eastern Territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: Possible Contacts and Mutual Influences,” Kabbalah 10 (2004): 73–105; Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 176–79; Adam Teller, “Hasidism and the Challenge of Geography: The Polish Background to the Spread of the Hasidic Movement,” AJS Review 30 (2006): 1–29; and Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), chap. 6. 3. On topography in Jewish studies, see Anna Lipphardt, Julia Brauch, and Alexandra Nocke, “Exploring Jewish Space: An Approach,” in Jewish Topographies: Visions of Space, Traditions of Place, ed. Lipphardt, Brauch, and Nocke (Burlington, Vt.: Ashgate, 2008), 1–26; and Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, “Review Essay: The New Spatial Turn in Jewish Studies,” AJS Review 33, no. 1 (2009): 155–64. 4. There is some scholarly disagreement over use of the term shtetl. Some consider it a reified term that serves only a nostalgic purpose and is thus better left out of historical studies. However, I regard shtetl as an evocative term whose closest equivalent, “small town,” fails to capture the relatively autonomous Jewish presence in many of the region’s smaller urban settings. For a summary of the debate, see Adam Teller, “The Shtetl as an Arena for Polish-Jewish Integration in the Eighteenth Century,” Polin 17 (2004): 35–49. 5. From Sifre to Devarim 43, in reference to Rome. 6. Compare BT Shabbat 62b: “in the place where they perfumed themselves shall be decaying sores . . . the place where they girdled themselves shall become full of bruises.” 7. Yoatz Kayam Kadish, Siah≥ sarfei kodesh (Piotroków Trybunalski, 1923), 2:71. 8. Solomon Maimon, An Autobiography (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2001), 145–46. 9. Archiwum Główne Akt Dawnych (AGAD), Komisya Rza$ dowa Spraw Wewne$trznych (KRSW) 202, 166.

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10. On the overlap between Yiddish jokes, tales, and eventually modern Jewish literature, see Jordan Finkin, “Jewish Jokes, Yiddish Storytelling, and Sholem Aleichem: A Discursive Approach,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 1 (2009): 85–110. 11. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:80–81. 12. Ibid., 2:112. 13. Authors of ethical treatises from the period used village Jews to shame their audiences, e.g., “even a villager, if he sees a Jew standing in prayer, will not sit next to him and distract him.” See Elazar Tahlgrin, Tokhah≥at musar: Hu sefer Tehilim (Warsaw, 1854), 21. 14. Samuel of Sieniawa, Ramata’im Tzofim (Warsaw, 1880), 170. 15. She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rim ( Józefów, 1867), “Yoreh De’ah,” no. 8. 16. Ibid., 4:118. 17. Yitzh≥ak Mordekhai Hakohen Rabinowicz, Atarat Shlomo (Piotroków, 1926), 38–39. 18. See, for example, Gershon Bacon, “Warsaw-Vilna-Budapest: On Joseph Ben-David’s Model of the Modernization of Jewry,” Jewish History 11, no. 1 (Spring 1997): 103. 19. Israel Halpern, Pinkas Va‘ad arba aratzot: Likute takanot, ketavim u-reshumot ( Jerusalem: Bialik, 1989), 483–86; Betzalel ben Solomon Darshan, Korban Shabbat (Warsaw, 1873), 121; cited in Jacob Katz, The “Shabbes Goy”: A Study in Halakhic Flexibility, trans. Yoel Lerner (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1989), 94–105; Hayyim Hillel Ben-Sasson, “The Sabbath Violation Regulations of Poland and Their Social and Economic Significance,” Zion 21 (1956): 183–206 (Hebrew); Solomon Drimer of Skole, Bet Shlomo (Lemberg, 1855), 36 (24a), and “Orah≥ H˘ayyim,” no. 50; Solomon Lipschitz, Hemdat Shlomo-Drushim (Warsaw, 1889), no. 3, p. 13. See my article “Legal Fictions: The Survival of Rural Jewish Tavern Keeping in the Kingdom of Poland,” Jewish Social Studies 16, no. 2 (2010): 28–66. 20. “Ha-kitrug aleyha, eyn ha-berakha shorah bah.” See R. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk’s letter in Barnai, Igerot H˘asidim me’eretz yisra’el ( Jerusalem: Yad Yitzh≥ak Ben-Tzvi, 1980), 118–20. A full (and alternate) translation appears in Gershon Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania, 48–49. For additional condemnations of tavern keeping and other rural business endeavors, see especially Pinh≥as of Koretz (Korzec), Imrei Pinh≥as ha-shelem, p. 188, no. 32 (“settlers in villages do not succeed [economically] in the end because they are mixed up with the goyim”); p. 210, no. 129 (“even if they would give [R. Pinh≥as] great wealth—apparently he said ten ducats—he would not settle in a village”); and 210–11, no. 130 (“[R. Pinh≥as] told one man not to reside in a village. And the reason was that this man did not have a father who was a scholar . . . and so he needed to guard himself against residing among the goyim”). 21. One tradition is quite explicit: “[R. Menah≥em Mendel] saw that our brothers the Children of Israel who lived in villages—lessees of taverns and lessees of other estate holdings— were descending, thread by thread, ten steps down in their divine service because they could never pray in a quorum or purify themselves in the good waters of a ritual bath (mikveh) even on Sabbaths. And from there they hit rock-bottom and mingled with gentiles. The children in particular, since they had never seen anyone but the gentiles, were slipping into materiality.” Avraham H˘ayyim Simh≥ah Bunem Mikhalzohn, Ohel Naftali (Lemberg, 1911; reprint, Jerusalem, 2004), 185–88; no. 373. 22. Initiated by the Napoleonic regime in the Duchy of Warsaw on October 30, 1812, concessions for Jews running taverns rose from an average of 50 zlotys (1815) to 400 zlotys (1824) to 650 zlotys (1828).The concession amounts depended on the number of households in a given locale. See Jan Rukowski, Historia gospodarcza Polski II (Poznan, 1950), 213; Halina Roz[enowa, Produkcja wódki i sprawa pijan´stwa w Królestwie Polskim 1815–1863 (Warsaw:

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PWN, 1961), 60. According to Mahler’s calculations, the liquor concession was eight times the initial fee by 1824, and twelve times the initial fee by 1830. See Mahler, Hasidism and the Jewish Enlightenment, 178. 23. Moses Eliyakim Beriyah of Kozienice, Be’er Moshe, “Yom Kippur” ( Jozefow, 1858), 1st ed. only. 24. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:46–47. 25. On Odessa Jewry, see Steven Zipperstein, The Jews of Odessa: A Cultural History, 1794–1881 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985); on St. Petersburg Jewry, see Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). 26. For the diversity of Jewish culture in Lodz, see Jacek Walicki, Synagogi i domy modlitwy w Lodzi (Lodz: Druk, 2000). 27. The presence of the tzaddik R. Levi Isaac of Berdyczów in Warsaw during the 1780s is attested in various sources. Warsaw’s assistant rabbi, R. Isaac Benjamin Wolf (d. 1802), was an ardent Hasid. There are indications of a Hasidic presence in Warsaw as early as 1768 (in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht), in 1785 (minute book of the Praga Burial Society), and in 1789 (in an unpublished manuscript). See Rubinstein, “H˘asidut ve-H˘asidim be-Varshe,” 61–84. Yizkor (Memorial) accounts of Hasidism in Warsaw include Avraham Bik, “Etapen fun Hasidism in Varshe,” in Pinkes Varshe 1 (Buenos Aires, 1955), 179–86; Meir Shvartzmann, “Vi Khasides Hat Bazigt des Lomdishe Varshe,” in Das Amalike Yidishe Varshe (Montreal, 1966), 750–55; and Sefer Praga: A Memorial to the Jewish Community of Praga (Hebrew/Yiddish), ed. Gabriel Waisman (Tel Aviv: Orli, 1974), 21–41 and 62–66. 28. Jacob Shatzky, in Geschichte fun yidn in Varshe (New York: YIVO, 1947), 3:364, cites Ya‘akov Milkh, Oytobiagrafishe skitzen (New York, 1946), who makes no such claim. Examples of reliance on this false data include Bacon, “Prolonged Erosion, Organization and Reinforcement: Reflections on Orthodox Jewry in The Kingdom of Poland (up to 1914),” in Major Changes within the Jewish People in the Wake of the Holocaust: Proceedings of the 9th Yad Vashem International Historical Conference, ed. Yisrael Gutman and Avital Saf ( Jerusalem, 1993), 75; Bacon, “La société juive dans le royaume de la Pologne du Congrès (1860–1914),” in Société Juive à Travers L’histoire I, ed. Shmuel Trigano (Fayard, 1992), 653; and Bacon, “Warsaw-VilnaBudapest,” 103–4. The figure could have been (incorrectly) derived from Hilary Nussbaum’s estimate that Hasidim constituted two-thirds of Warsaw Jewry in 1880. See Szkice historyczne z z[ycia Z{ydów w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1881), 131. 29. Eleonora Bergman, “Nie masz bóznicy powszechnej”: synagogi i domy modlitwy w Warszawie od konca XVII do pocza$tku XXI wieku (Warsaw: DiG, 2007), 136–57 and 91. Bergman reasons that each of the forty tzaddikim buried in Warsaw’s Jewish cemetery would have had at least one prayer house in Warsaw (meaning about one-quarter of all the prayer houses), but concedes that there is little concrete data on the issue. 30. There were 22 such families in 1815 and 124 by 1836. Adam Wein, “Z{ydzi poza rewirem Z{ydowskim w Warszawie (1809–1862),” Biuletyn Z{IH 41 (1962): 45–70. 31. Tahlgrin, Tokhah≥at musar, 18b. 32. Yeh≥ezkel Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes (Warsaw, 1913), 78. On similar disappointments among maskilim in Warsaw, see Scott Ury, “The Generation of 1905 and the Politics of Despair: Alienation, Friendship, Community,” in The Revolution of 1905 and Russia’s Jews, ed. Stefani Hoffman and Ezra Mendelsohn (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), 96–110. 33. Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes, 71–73.

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34. See Israel Bartal and David Assaf, “Shtadlanut ve-Ortodoksiyah: Tzaddikei Polin bemifgash im ha-zmanim ha-h≥adashim,” Tzaddikim ve-anshe ma‘aseh: mehkarim be-h≥asidut Polin, ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), 65–90. 35. Ya‘akov Milkh, Oytobiagrafishe skitzen (New York, 1946), 81–82. 36. Kotik, Meine Zikhroynes, 78. 37. Harro Harring, Poland under the Dominion of Russia (Boston, 1834), 124–25. 38. She’elot u-teshuvot ha-Rim, “Even ha-Ezer,” no. 2. Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern finds Jewish-Christian cooperation during a fire in the city of Balta, as well. See “The Marketplace in Balta: Aspects of Economic and Cultural Life,” East European Jewish Affairs 37, no. 3 (2007): 277–95. 39. AGAD Centralne Władze Wyznaniowe (CWW) 1871, 306–7, 39. 40. Ostensibly, he moved his court to shield young followers from the commercial and cosmopolitan influences of the big city. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 5:33; Yitzh≥ak Alfasi, Gur (Tel Aviv: Sinai, 1978), 68; Jacob Shatzky, Geschichte fun yidn in Varshe, 3:357; and Arthur Green, Language of Truth (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1998), xxv. Eleonora Bergman is dismissive of the traditional view; see her “Gora Kalvariya,” in Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh: Mehkarim be-H˘asidut Polin, ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), 111, no. 2. 41. On this attempted cooperation, see Israel Bartal and David Assaf, “Shtadlanut veortodoksiah-tzaddikei Polin be-mifgash im ha-zmanim ha-hadashim,” in Elior et al., Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh, esp. 86–90. 42. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 3:74. For a similar episode, see 2:112, and also 4:102. 43. Ibid., 4:120. Some tales are more vicious. A wealthy assimilated Jew “of the new generation” who made jokes during the Passover meal was struck with paralysis and died. Ibid., 5:35. Another assimilated Jew claimed to have repented on his deathbed, but the rebbe refused to believe him. Ibid., 3:74. 44. Eiger was also rare in his ability, as a Hasidic leader, to operate as an officially recognized rabbi in Lublin and receive an annual pension of sixty rubles from the Synagogue Council. Robert Kuwałek, “Urze$dowi rabini lubelskiego Okre$gu Boz[niczego, 1821–1939,” in Z{ydzi w Lublinie: Materiały do dziejów społecznos´ci z[ydowskiej Lublina, ed. Tadeusz Radzik (Lublin: Marii Curie-Skłodoski, 1995), 39. 45. AGAD, KRSW 188, fol. 239. Płock’s Jews were confined to a Jewish quarter composed of several streets since 1811. 46. AGAD KRSW 188, fol. 229 (for 1852); Bohdan Wasiutynski, Ludnos´c´ Z{ydowska w Polsce w wiekach XIX i XX (Warsaw, 1930), 50 (for 1857). 47. AGAD, Komisja Wojewodztwa Kaliskiego (KWK) 3224. 48. On this Hasidic tactic, see Chone Shmeruk, “Hasidism and the Kehilla,” in The Jews in Old Poland, ed. Antony Polonsky, Jakub Basista, and Andrzej Link-Lenczowski (London: I. B. Tauris, 1993), 186–95; Isaiah Kuperstein, “Inquiry at Polaniec: A Case Study of a Hassidic Controversy in Eighteenth-Century Galicia,” Bar Ilan Annual 24–25, ed. Gershon Bacon and Moshe Rosman (Ramat Gan, 1989), 25–40. Shaul Stampfer discusses the legalistic (halakhic) facet of Hasidic slaughtering, in “The Dispute over Polished Knives and Hasidic Sheh≥ita,” in Mehkarei H˘asidut, ed. I. Etkes, D. Assaf, and Y. Dan ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1999), 197–210 (Hebrew). 49. AGAD, KWK 3224. The following discussion is based on this file, which is unpaginated.

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50. His mastery of rabbinic parlance is made evident in a lengthy, fascinating explanation of his strenuous efforts to publish Avodat Yisrael in the introduction to the first printing (1842). Several of the approbations to the book mention Unger’s personal financial investment. 51. KWK 3224, documents dated 1863–64. 52. In contrast, B. Z. Dinur attempted to argue that Hasidim comprised a “secondary elite.” See Dinur, “The Origins of Hasidism,” 86–208. 53. Compare Marcin Wodzinski, “State Policy and Hasidic Expansion: The Case of Włocławek,” trans. Sean Martin, Jewish Studies 5 (2005–07), esp. 174. 54. AGAD, CWW 1457, p. 575. In Przedborz, the Hasidim were “very numerous here and have a famous Rabbi [Immanuel Weltfreid (1802–1865)].” See AGAD, CWW 1457, p. 507. 55. Ibid., 24. 56. I have stressed the even greater significance of large temporary holiday influxes elsewhere. See “How Many Hasidim Were There Really in Congress Poland? A Response to Marcin Wodzinski,” in Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry 20 (2005): 91–104. On specific cases, including Warka, Kozienice, Z{elechów, Opatów, and Lelów, see Dynner, Men of Silk, chaps. 1 and 3. 57. On this conception of Kotzk, see Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership and the Hasidic Zaddiq,” in Jewish Spirituality, vol. 2, ed. Green (New York: Crossroad, 1986–87). 58. Klemens Junosza, Nasi Z{ydzi, 77. 59. KRSW 188, fol. 96–97. The towns of Maków and Wschowa do not seem to have been able to reinstate their Jewish quarters after 1821. The following towns planned and mapped Jewish quarters during this period but did not enforce them: Augustów, Biała Podlaska, Bolimów, Chorzele, Ciechanów, Czyz´ew, Janowo, Kielce, Krasnystaw, Kuczbork, Lublin, Łosice, Maków Mazowiecki, Płon´sk, We$g rów, Wyszków, Wyszogród. See Maria ŁodynskaKosinska, ed., Katalog rysunków architektonicznych z Akt Komisji Rza$dowej Spraw Wewne$trznych w Archiwum Głównym Akt Dawnych w Warszawie (Warsaw, 1974). 60. KRSW 188, fol. 223–26. See also fol. 98; and KRSW 6632, p. 68. These statistics, signed “Zarza$ dzaja$ cy Wydziałem Administracyjnym Radca Stanu Biernacki,” confirm the low end of Bergman’s estimate that Jewish quarters existed in between 12–15 percent of towns in the kingdom. “The Rewir or Jewish District and the Eyruv,” Studia Judaica 5 (2002): 85–97. 61. Stefanija Ulanowska was doing field research in the nearby village of Łuków, published in a chapter entitled “Niektóre materjalny etnograficzne w wsi Łukówcu (Mazowieckim),” in Zbiór wiadomos´ci do antropologii krajowej, Polska akademia umieje$tnos´ci komissyi antropologicznej, vol. 8 (Kraków, 1884), 247–50. Originally printed in the nationalistically oriented newspaper Czas. 62. On these slips of paper, known in Yiddish as kvitlekh, see David Assaf, The Regal Way (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002), 316–18, and the discussion below. On pilgrimages to the graves of tzaddikim, see Assaf, Regal Way, 321–24. 63. Oscar Kolberg, Mazowsze III: Obraz Etnograficzne (Kraków, 1887), 360–61. 64. Wasiutynski, Ludnos´c´ Z{ydowska w Polsce, 65. 65. Katalog rysunków, 240. On the impact of Hasidic courts on local economies, see Dubnow, Hasidut, 361–62; Assaf, The Regal Way, 374, no. 65; and Bergman, “Gora Kalvariya,” in Tzaddikim ve-Anshe Ma‘aseh: Mehkarim be-H˘asidut Polin ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1994), ed. Rachel Elior, Yisrael Bartal, and Chone Shmeruk, 111–18. 66. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 3:103. The tzaddik H˘ayyim David Bernhard tended to a sick gentile woman in his Piotroków court, albeit with his eyes closed. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:33.

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67. Ibid., 3:103–4. On this phenomenon in the modern period, see Alina Cala, The Image of the Jew in Polish Folk Culture ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1995). 68. Note, for instance, a tale in which R. Abraham blesses a colonel, who goes on to become a general; Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:104, and “Siftei Kodesh,” 31. The Seer of Lublin allegedly healed a noblewoman’s son after extracting a promise that she would not raise payments on her Jewish lessees. There are several tales about Prince Czartoryski seeking the Maggid of Kozienice’s counsel in state matters, as well. On the actual event upon which these tales were based—a visit to the Maggid’s court by Czartoryski—see Dynner, Men of Silk, 73–74. In that case, it is significant that even the magnate had to meet the tzaddik on his own turf. 69. This tradition was among the written accounts sent to Kadish by Tzvi Yeh≥ezkel Mikhalzohn, who received them from the redactor S. of Kłodawa, a Ciechanów Hasid “who heard them firsthand or received them [in writing] from trustworthy Hasidim and recorded them on the pages of a book so that they would not be forgotten.” 70. On the “greeting ceremony” at the elaborate Ruzhin court, see Assaf, Regal Way, 319–20. 71. On certain occasions, the tzaddik Menah≥em Mendel of Kotzk identified peasants as demons in disguise. Even a Cossack on horseback who rescued him from drowning in the river was suspected of not being human. See Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:60, 63 and 4:15.Yet gentiles were sometimes admired for their magical powers or soldierly devotion to their king. On the image of gentiles in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht, see Rosman, “A Minority View the Majority: Jewish Attitudes Towards the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth and Interaction with Poles,” in From Shtetl to Socialism, ed. Antony Polonsky (Oxford: Littman, 1993), 45; Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 57–58. 72. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 1:62. 73. Ibid., 3:77. Similarly, the wife of the tzaddik Solomon of Radomsko managed a store. See Yitzh≥ak Mordekhai Hakohen Rabinowitz, Atarat Shlomo (Piotroków Trybunalski, 1926), 40:27. 74. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 5:100. 75. Ibid., 4:87–88. 76. Shlomo Zalman Lifschitz, and Isaac of Warka, Likutei Shoshanim (Lublin, 1883), H˘ayyim Yeshayahu Hakohen, ed., Part 4, p. 26. 77. Kolberg, Mazowsze III, 358–59. 78. E. T. Massalski, Pan Podstolic albo czem jestes´my czym byc´ moz[emy. Romans administracijny (St. Petersburg, 1833), 100. 79. YIVO Archives, “Guttmacher Collection,” RG 27, Uniejów. We cannot know for sure to what extent petitioners considered themselves “Hasidic,” or to what extent Guttmacher considered himself a rebbe; technically, Guttmacher himself was not Hasidic. However, the immense size of the collection suggests a veritable institution of heavenly and earthly interventions on the part of the supposedly reluctant tzaddik for years. It was only during the last year of his life that Guttmacher begged Jews to stop sending him petitions. See his “Request” in Ha-Magid 12 (1874), supplement. 80. “Guttmacher Collection,” RG 27, Uniejów. 81. Ibid., Babinice. 82. Ibid., Ozorków and Osiaków. 83. Ibid., Bielany. 84. Siah sarfei kodesh, 1:130.

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85. Ibid., 2:114; “Siftei Kodesh,” 36. 86. Siah≥ sarfei kodesh, 2:112. 87. Ibid., 3:114. 88. See ibid., 2:13. 89. Samuel Heilman, Defenders of the Faith: Inside Ultra-Orthodox Jewry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 343. Heilman repeats the anecdote with an expression of shock and adds elements (e.g., the immodest dress of female customers) in the documentary film A Life Apart (1997), produced and directed by Menachem Daum and Oren Rudavsky. 90. Ibid. 91. See Levi Isaac of Berdyczów, Kedushat Levi ha-Shalem ( Jerusalem, 1993), 204, 232, and the crucial continuation, 398–400. However, compare Rosman, “A Minority Views the Majority.” See also Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica, Mei ha-Shiloah≥ (1860; reprint, New York, 1984), Parashat Ki Tavo and “Sefer Tehillim,” on Ps. 92; and Tzvi Elimelekh of Dinów, B’nei Yissakhar (Israel, 1909), Tishrei, sermon 1, “Mahut ha-H˘odesh”; R. Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zabaraz[, in Miles Krassen, Uniter of Heaven and Earth: Rabbi Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zabarazh and the Rise of Hasidism in Eastern Galicia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 180. On the zoharic roots of these teachings, see Jacob Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages, trans. Bernard Dov Cooperman (New York: Schocken, 1993), 24. 92. Moses H˘ayyim Ephraim of Sudzyłków, Degel Mah≥ane Ephraim, Parashat Lekh Lekha ( Jerusalem, 1995), 17. Emphasis added. 93. Keter Shem Tov, no. 8 (Brooklyn, 1972), 3. 94. Nah≥man of Bratzlav, Sippurei Ma‘asiyot, Nathan Shternharz’s introduction (reprint, Jerusalem, 1991), 4. On this and other forms of appropriation, see Dynner, Men of Silk, chaps. 4, and 5. 95. Degel Mah≥ane Ephraim, Parashat Ve-Yera, 17–18. 96. Gottlober, Zikhronot u-Masa’ot, 1:107; Ephraim Deinard, Zikhronot Bat Ami (New Orleans, 1920), 14. 97. David of Maków, Shever posh’im: zot torat ha-kena’ot, in Wilensky, H˘asidim u-Mitnaggdim ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1990), 2:107.

The Rise and Decline of a Hasidic Court The Case of Rabbi Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye

Paul Radensky

Among the more striking images called to mind by Hasidism for well over a century is that of the Hasidic tish. The tzaddik (or rebbe in Yiddish) sits at the head of a huge table on an elaborate chair or throne, often surrounded by his sons and sons-in-law. On either side of the table, hundreds of Hasidic men stand on bleachers gazing devoutly at their spiritual leader while chanting a powerful antiphonal Hasidic melody along with him. At some point, the tzaddik recites the prayer over wine that sanctifies the Sabbath, then the prayer over bread (h≥allah), and then takes a taste of many of the large dishes that are served to him. These dishes are then passed around to the Hasidim in attendance, each one eager to consume a morsel of food from which the tzaddik himself has eaten. In doing so they partake in the tzaddik’s meal, thus recreating the sacrificial service of the Temple in Jerusalem during which pilgrims would eat part of the animal sacrifice offered up by the priests. The grand Hasidic tish is only one, albeit prominent, example of what scholars have termed “royal” or “regal” Hasidism.1 During the late nineteenth century, the focal point of this type of Hasidism was a tzaddik who appeared all the more charismatic and imposing because he traveled about in an elegant carriage and was usually surrounded by an impressive entourage

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of assistants, intimates, and dedicated followers. Reports from the second half of the nineteenth century testify that at least some of the leading tzaddikim of the Chernobyl dynasty (R. Duvid Twersky of Tal’noye, R. Abraham of Turisk)2 and the Ruzhin dynasty (R. Abraham Yaakov of Sadegura,3 son of R. Israel of Ruzhin) maintained elaborate “courts” that included a palatial residence for the tzaddik, a kloyz (synagogue), and a hall (shalash) where the tzaddik received his followers, in addition to kitchens, outhouses, and stables. These courts served as pilgrimage centers. They were targets of criticism by maskilim ( Jewish proponents of Enlightenment-based reform), who regarded them as evidence of the avarice of the tzaddikim. Some scholars of the history of Hasidism, inferring from the large, elaborate compounds that they themselves had seen or heard about in the late nineteenth century, projected this grandeur backward upon early nineteenth-century Hasidism. Sh. A. Horodetsky, for example, asserted without evidence that R. Mordecai [Motele] of Chernobyl built “a splendid house and amassed much money.”4 Basing himself on Horodetsky, Simon Dubnow described R. Motele in much the same way.5 According to Hasidic tradition, some tzaddikim from the early part of the nineteenth century did conduct themselves in an ostentatious manner, traveling in elegant carriages or with large retinues,6 and some, including R. Motele, collected large amounts of money as pidyonot nefashot—“redemption money” for praying on petitioners’ behalf.7 There is, however, no evidence that the large, elaborate court emerged until later in the century.8 This paper explores the development in the late nineteenth century of the regal court of one of the leading tzaddikim of the era, Rabbi Duvid ben Mordekhai Twersky of Tal’noye (1808–76). Although, as a leading Ukrainian tzaddik, R. Duvid admittedly received disproportionate attention from the Russian authorities, his career nevertheless sheds a great deal of light on Hasidism in general. A combination of inner Hasidic sources and newly accessible materials from the Russian State Archives lets us trace the expansion and contraction of “Tolner Hasidism.” While R. Duvid’s aggressive growth was initially stymied by governmental travel bans, we will find that the tzaddik made a virtue of necessity by establishing an elaborate Hasidic court that fostered the continued growth and centralization of his leadership. Testimonies about the Tolner court suggest that mid-nineteenth-century Hasidism, rather than degenerating, flourished to an unprecedented degree. R. Duvid was the son of R. Mordkhe (Motele) Twersky of Chernobyl, one of the leading tzaddikim of his day and son of R. Menah≥em Nah≥um of Chernobyl, an associate of Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht) and

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a disciple of R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch (Mie$ dzyrzecz). During his lifetime, R. Nah≥um was appointed maggid (preacher) in Chernobyl, a position that was not particularly lucrative. Like his master, the Besht, R. Nah≥um did not apparently have many followers, but rather cultivated a small circle of disciples. After his father’s death in 1797 or 1798, R. Motele took over the position of maggid in Chernobyl and began to build a different kind of following. Although he was not a disciple of R. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, R. Motele was undoubtedly influenced by the unprecedented efforts of R. Dov Baer’s students to expand Hasidism to ever broader circles within eastern European Jewish society. The systematic outreach of one such student, R. Shneur Zalman of Liozna (and later of Liady), has been extensively described.9 R. Motele, according to hagiography, engaged in outreach of his own—following the precedent allegedly set by the Besht, he traveled from town to town supervising shoh≥tim (kosher slaughterers), righting injustices, and becoming a self-appointed religious authority. Over time, R. Motele’s authority was acknowledged by individuals and eventually whole communities, even though he resided elsewhere. Certain communities appointed R. Motele as maggid, but the term now took on a new meaning: rather than a mere “preacher,” he became the ranking spiritual authority of such communities. The communities under such a maggid’s supervision came to be known as his maggidut (preaching domain). It is possible that the institution of maggidut was patterned on the Roman Catholic practice of canonical visitation,10 although church officials were admonished to travel modestly.11 We know little about R. Duvid’s childhood. He was born in 1808 to Feygele, R. Motele’s second wife and the daughter of R. David Leahkes, a disciple of the Besht. R. Duvid was R. Motele’s sixth son and Feygele’s third. At thirteen, he was married to Feyge Yente, daughter of R. Zusya of Annapoli. When R. Motele died in 1837, R. Duvid followed the example of his older brothers and moved to a town that had been part of his father’s maggidut, Vasil’kov, thirty-six kilometers southwest of Kiev.12 R. Duvid was in Vasil’kov when he wrote his first and best-known work, Sefer Magen David, although his tenure in the town was not particularly successful from an economic point of view, according to hagiographic literature. Whether this was because the town was owned by the Russian Imperial Treasury13 and did not offer R. Duvid incentives to stay or because the Jewish population in Vasil’kov was comparatively small, R. Duvid seized the opportunity in 1852 to move to Tal’noye, a small town 175 kilometers south of Kiev that was one of the holdings of the celebrated Russian noble Shuvalov family.

Major Hasidic courts, 1815–1929. From The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon Hundert, available at www. yivoenecyclopedia.org (© YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, 2010), based on a map prepared for the exhibition “Time of the Hasidim,” by Elz˙bieta Długosz, The Historical Museum of Kraków—Old Synagogue. Used by permission.

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Like Vasil’kov, Tal’noye had been part of his father R. Motele’s maggidut.14 Once in the new community, R. Duvid continued to develop his own maggidut. By the 1860s there were communities of Tolner Hasidim (as R. Duvid’s followers were now called) in Kalnibalt, Odessa, Rzhishchev, Belaia Tserkov, Kishinev, and, most notably, the nearby commercial town of Uman,15 forty kilometers to the southwest. R. Duvid’s followers grew in confidence over the course of the 1850s, and took a leading role in persecuting the Breslover Hasidim during their annual Rosh Hashanah pilgrimage to R. Nahman’s grave in Uman during the early 1860s.16 R. Duvid’s own boldness was revealed in his visit to Odessa in late 1860, making him the first major tzaddik to visit the city in decades and drawing the less than favorable attention of the local Russian press and the Russian government. R. Duvid also attempted, unsuccessfully, to visit his followers in Kishinev in 1862.17 The high watermark of R. Duvid’s attempts to expand his maggidut took place in August 1864, when he and his entourage visited Rzhishchev, a small town on the Dniepr River sixty-five kilometers south of Kiev. R. Duvid and a growing mass of followers had just visited Belaia Tserkov, Boguslav, and Kagarlyk. In Boguslav, R. Duvid stayed eight days and raised 2,000 silver rubles. From there he went to Kagarlyk, where his followers demanded that the local Jewish community appoint R. Duvid as their maggid. When local lay leaders and the rabbi refused, the Tolner Hasidim rioted, destroying property, beating residents, and expelling the local rabbi. The remaining lay leadership agreed to appoint R. Duvid as maggid. Then, most likely to the shouts of Duvid melekh yisroel (David, King of Israel), the Tolner tzaddik consecrated the Kagarlyk cemetery, an act that conclusively demonstrated his authority over the local Jewish community.18 From Kagarlyk, R. Duvid and his followers made their way to Rzhishchev. It appears that R. Duvid had been invited by the local Tolner Hasidim to consecrate the Rzhishchev Jewish cemetery, thus demonstrating his authority there. Unlike the other towns that R. Duvid had visited, however, Rzhishchev had its own Hasidic tzaddik, R. Yaakov Yosef ben Moshe (Mandel) of Rzhishchev. When (apparently) on Friday night R. Duvid’s followers demanded that R. Yaakov Yosef be expelled and R. Duvid appointed as maggid, fighting broke out between followers of the two tzaddikim. The fighting continued on Saturday morning, and again property was damaged and people were beaten. Nevertheless, R. Yaakov Yosef and his Hasidim did not capitulate, and this time R. Duvid had to leave without consecrating the cemetery. But the conflict did not end there. Furious at the Rzhishchever tzaddik for refusing to acknowledge the authority of their tzaddik, Tolner Hasidim forged a

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letter in which the Rzhishchever tzaddik appeared interested in converting to the Orthodox Church.19 The Russian language press in Kiev picked up the story and Alexander Zederbaum, editor of the Hebrew periodical Hamelitz and the Yiddish Kol mevaser, was publicly indignant over the unscrupulous behavior of the Tolner Hasidim.20 For Zederbaum’s westernized readership, the Rzhishchev affair confirmed R. Duvid’s pernicious influence. A special governmental commission was established to investigate, recommending in July 1866 that R. Duvid be exiled by administrative order to Siberia and placed under strict surveillance. Most likely thanks to the intercession of Count Pyotr Pavlovich Shuvalov,21 who would fulfill his feudal role of landowner-protector on more than one occasion, R. Duvid was not exiled but placed under house arrest. Still, he was now prohibited from leaving Tal’noye without special permission from the governor-general, the ranking Russian official in Ukraine. The travel ban was also extended to other tzaddikim in the Ukraine, and came to be known in Hasidic literature as the gezeras tzaddikov. THE TEMPORARY DECLINE OF THE UKRAINIAN TZADDIKIM

The newly issued decree of the governor-general forbidding tzaddikim in the southwest region from traveling without the government’s express permission was strictly enforced. The seriousness of the situation is described in a Russian petition that R. Duvid sent on July 3, 1868, apparently to the governor-general of the southwestern region.22 R. Duvid maintains that he has led a life of service to his co-religionists and encourages them to conduct themselves uprightly. Despite his positive influence, ill-meaning “educated” Jews have brought false accusations against him, and as a result of such slander he and his brothers have been under house arrest for two years. R. Duvid reports that they are not even allowed to leave to obtain medical care. Nor are he and his brothers permitted to travel to the grave of their father on the commemoration of the latter’s death. Appealing to the official’s humanity and mercy, R. Duvid asks him to intercede on their behalf and obtain permission for them to travel outside their homes.23 We do not know whether this plea was ultimately successful, but it is clear that the travel prohibition had significant ramifications for Ukrainian Hasidism. Some of these ramifications are elaborated in a fascinating letter by “A Polish Hasid24 from the Odessa Shalashin25 Beis ha-Medrash” that appeared in Kol mevaser in 1868. The writer explains that now that the tzaddikim cannot

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leave their towns, their income has dropped drastically, and that some are in desperate financial straits. “True, the tzaddikim still have their agents traveling around collecting money, but it is not the same—it doesn't have any ta‘am (flavor). The economic situation is very bad, people who were wealthy no longer are wealthy, and those who collect the money keep a lot for themselves.” The 1860s proved an especially difficult adjustment period for Jews in the Pale of Settlement in general. With the emancipation of the peasants in 1861, noblemen could no longer rely on cheap labor to work their estates and now became more directly involved in their operations, threatening to render the Jewish lessee (arendar) obsolete. At the same time, the growth of the railroad industry, while enriching a small number of Jewish families, impoverished many others by obviating the need for inns, postal stations, and other services that traditionally catered to travelers.26 Moreover, during the late nineteenth century, the Jewish population expanded at a much faster rate than the creation of new economic opportunities. The masses of Russian Jewry consequently grew increasingly impoverished. With less money reaching the tzaddikim, their courts appeared to be at the brink of dissolution. The writer adds that some of the tzaddikim are now “mortgaged from their head to their feet and others are debtors and feel that things will come to a profanation of God’s name and that they will have to go bankrupt. . . . I ask you would it be nice to imprison a guter yid [tzaddik] not for kiddush ha-shem [to sanctify God’s name] but for monetary [reasons]?” The letter also laments that the prohibition against the freedom of movement of tzaddikim has an additional negative ramification: without the presence of a tzaddik to supervise Jewish matters, people are more willing to read secular books and send their children to secular schools. Of course, this was precisely why the maskilim ( Jewish westernizers) championed the idea of limiting the mobility of the tzaddikim.27 The author concludes by complaining that a H˘abad (Lubavitcher) tzaddik came to the area and, exploiting the void left by the absence of the Ukrainian tzaddikim, began attracting Hasidim. “He doesn’t reach the soles of our tzaddikim,” the author writes, “and when he says H˘abad torah it doesn't have any ta‘am.” Ultimately, the police heard about this H˘abadnik, and upon learning that the police had taken an interest in him he quickly made his way back to Lithuania.28 Although the author of this correspondence signed himself “a Polish Hasid,” the fact that it appeared in a maskilic publication (albeit a Yiddish one designed for the general public) and confirmed the maskilic point of view suggests that it could be maskilic propaganda. Nevertheless, the temporary decline of the Hasidic courts is corroborated by two other

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sources that originate with the tzaddikim themselves. The first is a letter that R. Duvid sent to Yaakov Yosef of Kashavat[ni], which seems to have been written in the second half of the 1860s. The Tolner tzaddik writes that the wedding of his daughter, H˘ayah,29 to the son of the Maggid of Trisk (Menah≥em Nah≥um)30 is approaching, “and since with the stress of these days it is not possible for me to travel myself and the needs of the wedding are great according to my honor, behold, I am sending these men [the bearers of the letter] to the elite of our followers, that they give to them a gift of their hand with the generosity of [the donor’s] pure heart. And their love will be inscribed on the tablet of my heart to always pray on their behalf for their good and their success.”31 Significantly, R. Duvid linked his difficulty raising money to his inability to travel. He had to request his followers’ help, promising that if they complied he would intercede spiritually on their behalf. The degree to which R. Duvid and the other Ukrainian tzaddikim chafed under the restrictions on their freedom of movement is also reflected in their petition to the government requesting their removal. Nevertheless, the recommendations that were sent to the Minister of Internal Affairs in August 1868 were decidedly against lifting the restrictions,32 and there is no evidence that they were relaxed. From the sources in our possession, it is clear that the courts of the Ukrainian tzaddikim, especially that of R. Duvid, initially suffered a serious blow. Until the 1870s there is hardly any mention of Duvid’s courts in Vasil'kov or in Tal’noye. It seems they were simply not worth writing about. Surprisingly, a great deal was written about the court several years after the gezeras tzaddikov was implemented. The travel prohibition against the Ukrainian tzaddikim had the unexpected consequence of forcing Hasidim to travel to their tzaddikim. As such, the Russian government inadvertently stimulated the creation of a much more elaborate Tolner court. We possess few details on the mechanics of the transformation of R. Duvid’s court into a pilgrimage site and capital of a veritable empire. Tzaddikim during this period dispatched representatives to collect ma‘amadot (taxes) that the Hasidim paid to their tzaddikim.33 Moreover, according to the anti-Hasidic Russian-Jewish writer Menashe Morgulis, tzaddikim began dispatching their daughters (presumably the gezeras tzaddikov applied to sons as potential tzaddikim) to their territories to collect money.34 The only other data from this period comes from a small number of haskamot (approbations) and extant letters.35 The absence of earlier written material suggests that as long as R. Duvid drove from place to place in his maggidut, he was not interested in writing haskamot or other kinds of letters on behalf of

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individual petitioners. Now that he was confined to Tal’noye, he was more accessible to those who sought out his approval, spiritual guidance, and healing powers. After a short span of time, the gezeras tzaddikov produced the quite unintended consequence of bringing even more people under R. Duvid’s spell—at least for a few years. As more people visited the Tolner court and contributed financially, R. Duvid was able to build a lavish palatial compound. THE COURT IN TAL’NOYE OF R. DUVID AT ITS HEIGHT

We do not possess any contemporaneous eyewitness descriptions of the Tolner court, but two sets of memoirs give us a vivid, if occasionally exaggerated, sense of R. Duvid’s court at its height. The first and most important of these memoirs was written by the famous scholar and cantor of the maskilic Brody Synagogue in Odessa, Pinh≥as Minkovsky (1859–1924).36 Minkovsky came from a well-respected family that had long been associated with Chernobyl Hasidism. His grandfather, Reb Gadi, was the head of the ritual butchers’ guild in Zhitomir and taught R. Aharon of Chernobyl how to inspect slaughterers’ knives—one of the early functions undertaken by tzaddikim.37 Minkovsky’s father, R. Motil, was the energetic h≥azzan (cantor) of the main synagogue in Belaia Tserkov. R. Duvid was quite familiar with his family.38 Minkovsky longed to become a h≥azzan, and at sixteen he decided to travel to Kishinev to study with Nisi Belzer, one of the leading h≥azzanim in nineteenth-century Russia. He explains that all of the h≥azzanim of his day were associated with tzaddikim, and that although Belzer himself was a H˘abad Hasid he was close to R. Duvid and traveled to Tal’noye annually to perform for him. During these excursions, Belzer would take his choir, composed at least in part of pupils such as Minkovsky. In 1875, thirteen days after arriving in Kishinev, Minkovsky set out with Belzer for his first trip to the Tolner Court. Belzer introduced the members of his choir to R. Duvid, who demonstrated an interest in none of the choristers but Minkovsky: However when he reached me and extended his hand to me, he fixed his eyes on me as if to ask, “You too are in their group?” He held my hand and asked me in detail from which city I was from, from which family and further such questions. And when I told him that I am Pini Motil Gadi’s from Sedeh Lavan,39 he turned to Nisi, while his hand was still in my palm and said, “Did you know who this young man is? Wasn't his

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great-grandfather R. Meir the shoh≥et a God-fearer and craftsman, and a member of the dynasty of shoh≥tim, about whom our father, of blessed memory, testified that God’s name hovers over their knives. . . . His father, Motil, is a wonderful ba‘al tefilah [prayer leader]. . . . He [Minkovsky] is the son of good people, and I am sure that this young man will walk in the steps of his fathers and will honor God with his throat.” From then on, my soul was connected with the soul of the tzaddik, R. Duvidl.40

This passage reveals not only the origin of Minkovsky’s interest in R. Duvid, but also the latter’s warmth and charisma, a subject to which we return below. In 1878, when Belzer accepted a position in Berditchev, Minkovsky took his place in Kishinev and continued to travel yearly to Tal’noye to sing for R. Duvid. After a while, Minkovsky was asked to become the h≥azzan of the maskilic Choir Synagogue in Kishinev. Minkovsky was hesitant since it entailed breaking with the Hasidic community, but as the pay was substantially better he accepted it a year later and thus established himself within the modernizing community.41 Minkovsky’s recollections provide a unique window onto the Tolner court of the mid-1870s, an extensive and loving description that is all the more remarkable considering that he had moved into the maskilic camp. He describes a large compound with separate houses (literally “palaces”) for R. Duvid, his wife, son, and son-in-law, houses for descendants of the Ba‘al Shem Tov who resided at the court, as well as a guesthouse, a synagogue (kloyz), kitchens, stables, and outhouses. Minkovsky explains that the Tolner court could accommodate as many as 2,000 people at a time and that it was a tremendous economic engine that not only provided for everybody within the court, from R. Duvid to the lowly cook, but also for tavern keepers and store owners whose livelihood depended on the Hasidim and others who came to visit R. Duvid.42 The palatial residences for R. Duvid and his family helped reinforce a sense of royalty. The very sight of these buildings must have inspired the feeling among followers arriving in Tal’noye that they were approaching the capital of an empire.43 This concept of Tal’noye as a capital—as one of the centers of Hasidism in Ukraine—was strengthened by the presence of descendants of the Besht. The glass cases that displayed the garments of R. Zusya of Annapol, R. David Leykes (famous ancestors of R. Duvid), and the Shpoler Zeyde,44 walking sticks of various tzaddikim, and finally pipes of deceased gute yidn would have enhanced the effect.45 R. Duvid’s busy, populous court demonstrated that, at least superficially, the Tolner rebbe had overcome the crippling restrictions of gezeras tzaddikov.

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Another central component of the Tolner court was the almost continual presence of music. While music was common in “royal” Hasidic courts in late nineteenth-century eastern Europe,46 R. Duvid was famous for his love of music and Tal’noye, according to later reports, was a center for Jewish music in the Ukraine. Minkovsky lists the traveling h≥azzanim with their choirs (including Nisi Belzer and later himself ), as well as klezmer bands such as Stempenyu from Berditchev and Pedhatsur from Zhitomir,47 that frequented the Tolner court. R. Duvid himself apparently owned a collection of musical clocks that played European classical music.48 The most important source of music in R. Duvid’s court, at least during his later years, was the h≥azzan R. Yosele Tolner, “dem rebins” (i.e., “the tzaddik’s”). R. Yosele was not only a prayer leader, but a prolific composer who created a new nigun (melody) for his tzaddik every Sabbath.49 Each melody was seen as embodying R. Duvid’s spirit, since each was composed under his influence. The “proof ” was that when R. Yosele moved to Rakhmistrivke after R. Duvid’s death, he allegedly lost his musical talent.50 Mendl Osherowitch, a Yiddish journalist who dedicated a chapter to Tal’noye in his book, Shtet un shtetlakh in ukraine (“Cities and Towns in Ukraine”), wrote that R. Yosele’s melodies were easily learned and rapidly disseminated throughout Ukraine by R. Duvid’s Hasidim. R. Yosele’s nigunim were so popular that even apikorsim (non-believers) would sing them. Osherowitch considers R. Yosele’s melodies the secret to the Tolner tzaddik’s popularity.51 The musical atmosphere and elegant buildings, together with facilities sufficient to accommodate several thousand people, helped the Tolner court become a pilgrimage center. As such, it was an economic power house that provided for dozens of people within and supported store owners and other service providers just outside its confines (including the noble Shuvalov family, who must have benefited from a sellers’ market in leases on taverns and other enterprises). Moreover, some people were likely supported by charity distributed at the court. The expenses of the court must have been very high regardless of R. Duvid’s substantial income. While it seemed to flourish into the middle of the 1870s, however, its high maintenance may have contributed to his flight from Tal’noye in 1878. R. DUVID’S PERSONALITY

The physical grandeur of the Tolner court, the excitement generated by the hundreds of Hasidim who would have been visiting at any given time, and the nearly ubiquitous presence of music undoubtedly enhanced the court’s

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popularity. The most important attraction, however, was the tzaddik himself. The Tolner tzaddik’s magnetic personality was already apparent in the early 1860s, before the Rzhishchev affair. The Yiddish writer Mordkhe Spektor writes that his father, Yankele, had to pay R. Duvid 3,000 rubles to attend the wedding of his daughter and subsequent celebrations. After eight days of dancing, eating, and drinking, when the tzaddik needed to leave and was already sitting in the carriage, surrounded with Hasidim and the town’s women, and all waited until the tzaddik would give the command to go, suddenly, he took a look at the group and asked, “Where is Yankele’s wife?” That is, he was asking after my mother and wanted to bid her farewell since the tzaddik spent the entire time with us in our house. When the tzaddik uttered these words, all the women shuddered and made a way for my mother, so she could go through the great crowd to the carriage where the Tolner tzaddik sat. My mother, shuddering and embarrassed, came with great fear closer to the tzaddik’s carriage. The . . . crowd waited with . . . trembling. . . . And when my mother was standing close by the carriage . . . [the tzaddik] took a look at her and, without words, bowed to her with his head, and the carriage moved—the tzaddik drove away. The large group of women was very jealous of my mother and said that not everyone merits such an honor.52

This incident displays R. Duvid’s sense of drama, timing, and economy of movement, not to mention the hold of his personality on his followers. When he was no longer able to travel freely, he adapted. We saw above how R. Duvid warmly greeted Minkovsky during the latter’s first visit to Tal’noye with Nisi Belzer. Minkovsky visited Tal’noye yearly after his first visit in 1875, and thus came to know R. Duvid fairly well. According to Minkovsky, R. Duvid strove above all to be cheerful: The tzaddik R. Duvidl was . . . unique in his category, full of the spirit of life, far from the distortions and the lazy Hasidic slovenliness that ruled then in all the courts of the tzaddikim. . . . R. Duvidl was the greatest optimist among the children of R. Motele and . . . he imparted his spirit also upon his Hasidim. Crying and sadness were hateful to his soul, and among the mentally ill that were brought to him to be healed, he chose

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to display his influence on the joyful insane and always despaired of the depressives. I recall that when we sang the first time before the tzaddik the U-netane tokef with the Ki ke-shimkha that was famous in the dispersion of Israel . . . there did not remain one eye without a tear—the tzaddik suddenly opened his eyes and hinted to Nisi to stop, saying to him, “Nisi, you want to make me cry? Enough!” and didn't allow him to finish the song, and spoke some words of humor.53

Great efforts were expended to maintain this “spirit of life” in the court, and it is not surprising that R. Duvid silenced Nisi Belzer. Humor, alongside music, was central to the creation of a joyful atmosphere. To this end, R. Duvid employed a “court jester,” Leybele Mikhoels, who during the period of time set aside daily by R. Duvid for general conversation would introduce a joke, sometimes even at the tzaddik’s expense.54 The greatest source of gaiety in the Tolner court was, however, R. Duvid himself. His jokes, many of which appear in Hasidic hagiography, run the gamut from self-deprecating to cruel. Once when R. Duvid was beginning his rabeystve (career as a tzaddik) and was relatively impoverished, he overheard his assistant telling all that he, the tzaddik, was a miracle worker. To this R. Duvid responded, “I don't know if I am a miracle worker (ba‘al mofet), but I am a debtor (ba‘al hov) without a doubt.”55 Referring in a self-deprecating manner to his practice of healing the mentally ill, R. Duvid noted that “more insane people come to me than sane people.”56 Sometimes R. Duvid’s humor had clear spiritual ends. Discussing the Aramaic translation of Numbers 16:1, “And Korah≥ split off,” R. Duvid remarked that “every Jew today has been swallowed by an aspect of Korah≥. . . . We Jews believe that half the world is caught up in heresy and apikorsut, but how do you understand half ? Do you divide the people? No, some people themselves are half [heretics].”57 R. Duvid argued that his humor was never for the sake of fun, but rather a defense against the evil inclination and even a praise of God.58 R. Duvid was also not averse to using his wit against his own petitioners. He reprimanded a butcher for his drunkenness, to which the latter replied, “But I drink like all Israel.” The Tolner tzaddik answered, “That’s the problem—you should drink like one of Israel.”59 There are many similar anecdotes.60 Finally, R. Duvid could use his wit to reduce a junior, competing tzaddik like R. Duvidl of Savran: During one of my trips to Tal’noye there occurred two incidents that I have not been able to forget, even until today. The first was in the dining hall by

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the “tish.” . . . My trip then was on the 15th of Shevat, which they celebrated in the court with great splendor as one of the four new years. . . . Many guests came for the holiday, including the tzaddik, R. Duvidl Savraner, who came to appease the Tolner tzaddik, since he [R. Duvidl Savraner] had interfered in a town on account of a shoh≥et, whom they removed, and this caused a great controversy and a desecration. The Tolner tzaddik and all his family and also the Savraner tzaddik were reclining at the table. . . . The [Tolner] tzaddik nodded to me to sing. I was confused and did not know what to sing on the Rosh Hashanah for trees . . . I decided to sing the first Psalm, which has in it a little on the topic of the day: “He is like a tree planted beside streams of water which yields its fruit in season, whose foliage never fades, and whatever he will do will prosper” (Psalms 1:3). How great was my joy when I saw that after I finished my song, the tzaddik closed his eyes, supported his head with his right hand, and opened with his gentle voice, “He is like a tree planted beside streams of water . . .” and he became animated and explained that the tzaddik is the tree that defends the generation, but there are tzaddikim who are compared to fruit trees that blossom and give fruit in their season, and there are tzaddikim, God forbid, who in this time are compared to barren trees, and they are “the evil inclination that delays the redemption.” And he repeated himself over and over again as was his way, each word, but emphasized the words “barren trees” with all his strength and concluded that even from barren trees one must be comforted and that they will bring fruit (This “torah” was published in “Birkat David” [sic]).61 The Hasidim were aware of the controversy that the Savraner had caused by his revolt against the Tolner’s will and everyone understood that he was the target of R. Duvid’s sharp barbs. This sermon made a deep impression in the “court.” The Hasidim took pleasure in the tzaddik’s wisdom and I also gained respect since I provided a verse at the right time for the Tolner tzaddik to pay the Savraner tzaddik his due.62

R. Duvid was at that point the leading tzaddik in the Ukraine; yet his ability to laugh at himself undoubtedly endeared him to those who might have been repelled by an arrogant figure. At the same time, R. Duvid did not hesitate to use his sharp tongue to his political advantage, as in his castigation of the Savraner tzaddik. The Tolner tzaddik’s sophisticated wit impressed his followers, and they were proud to be associated with their tzaddik. This element was undoubtedly crucial to the construction of a community of Tolner Hasidim. When R. Duvid’s Hasidim visited Tal’noye, they not only took pleasure in spending time with R. Duvid but were buoyed by the joy

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and liveliness of the court. When visitors returned home, they regaled their families and friends in the Tolner kloyzn throughout the Ukraine with tales of R. Duvid’s latest exploits.63 In this way, R. Duvid made Tolner Hasidism the largest, most influential type of Hasidism in the Ukraine during the 1870s. A WEEK IN TAL’NOYE

Minkovsky’s memoir describes R. Duvid’s daily routine. Upon rising he would immerse in a mikveh, then recite the morning prayers. Afterward he would isolate himself in meditation in his private room and then have breakfast. This was followed by an afternoon nap. Then R. Duvid would accept pidiyonot. Finally, for an hour around sunset, R. Duvid would invite the wealthy and those with important family lineages to join him for an hour of sih≥at h≥ulin—a discussion of secular, worldly matters. During these sessions, while R. Duvid reclined and others stood off at a distance, someone would read the news from various newspapers.64 This seating arrangement seems to have emphasized R. Duvid’s superiority over the guests, who were among the elite of the Hasidic world. Minkovsky did not mention whether the Tolner tzaddik allotted a special time of day to treat the mentally ill, although R. Duvid presumably saw such patients during the time allocated for petitions and donations. R. Duvid’s treatment of the mentally ill dates from the second half of the 1860s and the 1870s, in tandem with the court’s development. In addition to Minkovsky’s memoir,65 this aspect of R. Duvid’s rabeystve (career or practice as a tzaddik) is covered extensively in the hagiographic literature. While neither Magen David nor Birkat David mention anything about illness, hope for their recovery appears frequently in R. Duvid’s last work, Kohelet David,66 written during the last third of his career. As Dovid Mekler points out, the stories about R. Duvid’s healing abilities fall into two general categories: stories in which he heals through his wisdom, and those in which he heals by supernatural means. Mekler tells of a man who believed that his legs were made of glass and therefore could not easily sit or move around. All attempts to convince him that his legs were normal had failed, and finally, when people became convinced that a dybbuk (an evil spirit that inhabits another’s body) was the source of his erroneous belief, they decided to take him to Tal’noye to see the tzaddik. When the man came in to see R. Duvid, the latter told him to sit down. When he hesitated, R. Duvid cried out, “I command you to sit and do it now!” The man was shocked, but if the tzaddik commanded it, it had to be done. So the man sat down, and as

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he did he heard the sound of glass breaking. R. Duvid had stationed a gabbai in another room to break a glass vessel at the moment when the patient sat himself down. R. Duvid announced that he was now healed and could sit and move like anyone else. Hearing the glass break made the man believe the spell was broken.67 There are a number of stories, often employing common hagiographic themes, about how R. Duvid healed or helped petitioners by supernatural means. An old h≥azzan no longer pleased the Jews of his community and was removed from his post. The community hired a new h≥azzan but apparently made no arrangement to care for the old prayer leader. The latter pined away and died, but before Rosh Hashanah his spirit possessed the new h≥azzan. When the young man tried to sing, all heard the voice of the old h≥azzan. When nothing else worked, the young man went to R. Duvid, who chided the dybbuk (spirit) of the old h≥azzan that “the dead do not praise God” (Psalms 114:17). With that, it left the young h≥azzan’s body forever.68 According to another story, R. Duvid took advantage of a divine moment of grace (et ratzon) in order to enable an eighteen-year-old dwarf to grow, practically instantaneously, to normal height.69 Unfortunately, outside corroboration for even the more plausible accounts of R. Duvid’s healing exploits has not yet surfaced, and we therefore have a limited sense of R. Duvid’s remedies. There is, however, nonHasidic testimony confirming that R. Duvid treated a large number of patients. A report from 1876 in the Judeophobic Russian newspaper Kievlianin70 bewails the fact that Tal’noye seems overrun with the insane who have come to see R. Duvid: “A report from the Tal’noye locality. Local Jews of our region are attached to the miraculous medical strength of the tzaddik, Duvid Twersky, [who is] especially praised among them for wondrous medical treatment of the insane. Our town, with a comparatively small population (around 1,500 inhabitants), overflows with a great number of insane people brought in from various places to the tzaddik for healing; thus it is said that the number of such sick people in our town reaches as many as 120 persons.”71 There is no reason to suppose that the author exaggerated the number of the mentally ill in Tal’noye at any given time. The high number suggests that R. Duvid did not, as a rule, meet with patients only once (as in the stories cited above), but provided ongoing therapy. If this was the case, then much of R. Duvid’s time during the week must have been taken up with his mentally ill patients. It is hard to imagine R. Duvid having undertaken this while he was still traveling around visiting

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the various communities of his maggidut. Nor would it have predominated if there were sufficient numbers of wealthy donors. R. Duvid’s increasing reliance on the mentally ill was probably symptomatic of the decline of his court: such patients would not usually have the ability to earn a living, and could not pay well. If an increasing portion of R. Duvid’s week in Tal’noye was given over to the mentally ill, Sabbaths and festivals were days on which R. Duvid and his inner circle of Hasidim celebrated. As Minkovsky relates, the court began its preparations for the Sabbath on Friday. R. Duvid only accepted petitioners on that day in cases of emergency. During the winter, R. Duvid would bring in the Sabbath early and spend several hours in meditative isolation. Tolner Hasidim would rest until they heard that R. Duvid had finished his contemplation and was on his way to the shalash (dining hall). They would then hurry to the shalash, filling all the available places save the seats at the head of the table designated for R. Duvid, his family, and important guests. In his autobiography, Minkovsky describes R. Duvid’s tish: How glorious did R. Duvidl appear in the company of his family, gabbaim and servants and all the religious functionaries of the town, dressed in an expensive fur coat, draped in satin and wearing a cubit high round hat lined and trimmed with badger or mole tails. The tzaddik walked slowly, with precision, on a walkway covered with boards that was built for him, and since he was tall and walked alone on the high, short bridge between the two camps of his followers, who were adorning him on either side, he appeared head and shoulders above the rest of them. As he approached the dining hall, a shout was heard, “The tzaddik walks!” Those who had not yet had an opportunity to greet the tzaddik stretched out several hundred hands to him, and he would reply, with a gracious modesty, politely and with the eyes of a person deep in his thoughts, “Aleichem sholem.” And as he approached the dining hall, the entire large congregation stood . . . and turned towards the glory of his holiness and his family. The tzaddik sat down on his chair, [and] closed his eyes. . . . His son, Motele (and after his death, his grandson, Nah≥umche) brought the goblet of wine to the tzaddik, who said kiddush with the greatest awe and reverence and satisfied, with his pleasant voice, the delicate ears of his listeners. . . . His shining, bright face, and especially the green artery beating like a pendulum and flashing under the skin of his forehead [captivated] . . . those who saw him and all his admirers as if held by a magician’s

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spell. After he took a taste from the cup, shirayim72 of wine were distributed in drops in the hundreds of cups of the Hasidim. He ritually washed his hands in a cup of water that a waiter brought to him (that is to say, the gabbai who walks on the top of the table in his slippers),73 cut the portion of h≥allah and said ha-motzi, and immediately, the h≥allah was broken apart in chunks, pieces and crumbs, and of course, all depended on the luck of the recipient. The tzaddik opened his mouth and whispered the melody for “Atkina Seudata,”74 closed his eyes, supported his head on his right hand and sung in the most delicate of voices each verse in the melody of “devekut” . . . and the congregation repeated after him the verse in a very loud voice. After tasting the fish and the gravy, and the “snatching of the shirayim,” the zemirot [Sabbath hymns] begin. . . . After the zemirot, Yosl dem rebins would sing a new composition that he created. . . . Then the tzaddik would begin saying “torah.”75

Minkovsky’s beautiful description conveys the tense emotion felt by Tolner Hasidim. Everything seems to have been staged to create the optimum measure of wonder. With his tall frame and elegant clothes, R. Duvid’s deliberate walk to the shalash would have magnified the anticipatory thrill that his Hasidim felt. Furthermore, R. Duvid’s careful recitation of kiddush and other blessings, his tasting of the foods, and his distribution of the shirayim created an emotional bond with his followers. The spiritual warmth and closeness between Hasid and tzaddik also existed between fellow Hasidim. Participating in the tishn and other activities with R. Duvid helped forge a sense of community, and not only in Tal’noye. Wherever there were Tolner kloyzn, members were energized by stories from those who had just returned from a visit to the court.76 As moving an experience as the Friday night tish was, the high point was the tish for shalosh seudos (also called seudah shelishit), the third and last meal of the Sabbath, which took place in the late afternoon just as Sabbath was ending. Minkovsky writes: Amidst darkness and the crowd at sunset in the great ohel [dining hall], full of sounds of people on all sides . . . on the benches and on the window sills, the shining face of the tzaddik like the light of the moon . . . and amid a deathly silence of the entire community, a delicate sweet singing broke open and ascended, deep, boiling . . . ploughing and penetrating the hearts and exciting the minds to elevated spiritual ecstasy and bitul ha-yesh77

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of all the matters of the world in exchange for one spiritual sound, that came out of his holy mouth, [R. Duvidl was] emphasizing every syllable not according to the rules of grammar that the maskilim and the apikorsim invented, but according to the rules of the punctuation of the heart which burns and is torn on the exile of Israel and on the exile of the Shekhinah, and upon all the types of exile of the soul. . . . In short, seudah shelishit was the crown of all the meals, in which was expressed the feelings . . . [the] longing for the Shekhinah of the “extra soul.” The soul was so bitter on leaving Sabbath.78

Minkovsky’s passionate depictions convey a sense of the way many Hasidim must have felt in the presence of their charismatic leader and the aweinspiring environment, crowded into the huge shalash in the dark, singing melancholy songs of longing for redemption. R. Duvid was by no means unique in conducting tishn—this was a widespread practice—but the manner in which he did so was singular. R. Duvid’s tishn reflected the great spiritual power of late nineteenth-century Hasidism, giving lie to Dubnow’s assertion that Hasidism of this era “did not have great men [gedolim]” and that “the creative force in Hasidism has gone and removed itself.”79 After shalosh seudos, the Hasidim escorted R. Duvid back to his home and then went their separate ways. Some recited the evening prayers in the dining hall, and in all the Hasidic homes people began drinking hot drinks and telling stories of the tzaddikim, especially of the Besht.80 R. Duvid recited the evening prayers and conducted the brief havdalah ceremony in his home. Later, important and well-connected Hasidim gathered with him for sih≥at h≥ulin during which he had an entirely new face, that “of a h≥akham more than that of a tzaddik.” Now he was open to listening to the news or a joke from the “court jester.”81 Afterward, R. Duvid would host a melaveh malkah (farewell party for the Sabbath). During these times, one of R. Duvid’s attendants (gabbaim) would bring food and drink and the Hasidim would sing and dance.82 Thus the Sabbath ended and the week began in Tal’noye. For Hasidim visiting R. Duvid’s court, the experience was profound. Nevertheless, the Tolner court ultimately proved fragile and difficult to sustain. In the late 1870s, a number of stresses imperiled its very survival. These included the death of R. Duvid’s only son, R. Motele, increasing government hostility, and probably increasing debt, factors that contributed to R. Duvid’s decision to move to Brody (Austrian Galicia) in 1878. Although

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R. Duvid returned to Tal’noye after less than a year, the move weakened the court. When R. Duvid died four years later in 1882, as the region became enveloped by the very first large-scale pogrom wave, Tolner Hasidism largely came to a halt. THE DEATH OF AN ONLY SON AND DEPARTURE FROM TAL’NOYE

We possess almost no contemporaneous information about R. Duvid’s son, R. Motele. However, hagiography provides basic details about his life and death. Mordekhai ben Duvid Twersky was born in either 5605 (1844/45)83 or 5608 (1847/48),84 apparently after his mother had given birth to a number of daughters. He was named after his grandfather, R. Motele (i.e., Mordekhai) of Chernobyl. R. Duvid placed many hopes in his son, to such a degree that after his birth R. Duvid refused to have any more children.85 These hopes were eventually disappointed: Motele refused to consider succeeding his father as rebbe.86 R. Motele married Yocheved, the daughter of R. Shlomo of Savran, and had with her a son, Menah≥em Nah≥um.87 In the mid-1870s, R. Motele became ill with a lung disease. According to R. Yoh≥anan Twersky of Jerusalem, R. Duvid approached his son and offered to intervene for his well-being if he would agree to succeed him as tzaddik. R. Motele refused and was left to die of his illness.88 Yitzh≥ak Even offers a more plausible account: R. Motele’s physician recommended that he move to Crimea to recover, but the Russian government categorically refused to contravene the travel ban. R. Motele’s condition continued to deteriorate, and his family decided to take him to Crimea without permission. By this time it was too late, and he died en route.89 Had R. Motele lived another two years, he probably would have been allowed to travel to wherever his physicians prescribed. By 1880, even R. Duvid was permitted to travel: a report in the Russian Jewish journal Razsvet describes how the Tolner tzaddik on his way to Vienna was received enthusiastically by a large number of his followers in Fastov, a city approximately sixty kilometers southwest of Kiev.90 Both explanations of the circumstances surrounding R. Motele’s death help clarify a fateful phase in R. Duvid’s life: his flight to Austrian Galicia and his temporary settlement in Brody. Although R. Israel of Ruzhin had fled Russia and settled in Austrian Bukovina in the early 1840s,91 such a move was considered unusual; and R. Duvid’s flight from Russia caused widespread bewilderment.92 That R. Duvid himself fostered an aura of mystery surrounding his move comes across in a letter to his followers after his departure: “I took

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counsel with my Maker, and the counsel of God will stand, . . . to wander in the land; and if this thing is wondrous in your eyes, is not the passage ‘And when the Ark would travel . . . ,’ separated with [inverted Hebrew] nuns93 for it is not possible to reveal . . . for all is from the hand of God.”94 R. Yoh≥anan Twersky’s tradition about R. Duvid offering to save his son’s life if he would agree to succeed him as the Tolner tzaddik was most likely received from his father, R. Dovid Mordkhe, who explains: “Immediately after the death of Grandfather’s [i.e., R. Duvid’s] only son, R. Motele, . . . Grandfather Duvid decided to take upon himself an obligatory exile. He decided to leave his court for a long time . . . and undertake a long and difficult journey among the Jewish communities in order to strengthen Hasidism and Judaism and arouse people to learn Torah, give charity, and perform mitzvot and good deeds.”95 In other words, R. Duvid left Tal’noye as a selfinflicted penance for his role in R. Motele’s death. This interpretation fits nicely with R. Duvid’s secrecy, since voluntary exile for the sake of spiritual growth was traditionally done incognito. Yitzh≥ak Even’s explanation is also connected with R. Motele’s death. As noted, Even claims that the Russian government refused to permit R. Motele to leave Tal’noye in order to recover, and that R. Motele’s death consequently brought R. Duvid to hate Russia and leave at the first opportunity. This chance came with the wedding of a grandson, R. Yitzh≥ak,96 which was to be held in the beginning of winter, 5639 (1878–79), in Behush (Buhusi), Romania, approximately 80 kilometers southwest of Iasi. Despite his old age and the possibility that he might not be allowed to return to Tal’noye, R. Duvid resolved to attend the wedding. Once over the border, warmly greeted by Galician Jews, and witness to the freedom that Galician Jews enjoyed relative to their Russian brethren, R. Duvid decided to live out his life in Galicia.97 But it may be that R. Duvid’s departure from the Russian empire actually had little to do with R. Motele’s death. Both Mekler and Even present a number of additional reasons for why R. Duvid abandoned Tal’noye, as does Vinberg.98 Among these is the argument that R. Duvid fled Russia to escape government persecution. Mekler and Even reject this possibility out of hand, since they assume that the government pursued R. Duvid only in connection with the silver throne purportedly given to him, a controversy that took place back in the 1860s. They are unaware of a new, separate situation in the late 1870s that made R. Duvid’s stay in Tal’noye untenable: an unspecified attack on R. Duvid by local authorities that is disclosed in a letter written by Pavel Petrovich Shuvalov,99 administrator of his mother’s estate of Tal’noye and son of R. Duvid’s defender, Count Pyotr Pavlovich

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Shuvalov. The letter, dated May 27, 1878, probably not long after R. Duvid left Tal’noye, asks Nikolai Pavlovich100 to permit R. Duvid to return to Tal’noye and shield him from further harassment at the local level: My personal respect for Twersky, as well as my sympathy for the many poor families of the Tal’noye Jewish community who depend on him, impel me to petition you to cease or at least soften the harsh measures to which Twersky is subjected to by the local administration. Recently, various types of oppression compel old Twersky to travel across the border. Now his only desire is to return to the homeland. . . . I ask you not to refuse him this request and to save him from further persecution by the local powers who, without your impartial intervention, will subject him to a different type of undeserved measure.101

Although Shuvalov’s letter provides crucial insight into the endurance of the lord-Jewish relationship in late-nineteenth century Ukraine, it unfortunately does not specify the “various types of oppression.” But at the close of his letter, Shuvalov writes, “The spirit of sedition observed in him is none other than the fabrication of Jews of liberal understanding. The accusers, not the accused, are suspect.”102 The accusation of sedition presumably refers to R. Duvid’s opposition to the modernization program of the maskilim. Shuvalov’s retort implies that some liberal Jews were sympathetic to the revolutionary cause. R. DUVID’S ESTABLISHMENT IN BRODY AND VISIT TO SADEGURA

The few extant sources provide a rough sketch of R. Duvid’s stay in Galicia. The first chronological mention is Count Pavel Petrovich Shuvalov’s above-mentioned petition, dated May 27, 1878, which notes that “recently” R. Duvid was compelled to flee the country.103 But if the Tolner tzaddik’s departure from Russia occurred under duress, he was surprised and delighted by the enthusiastic greeting of tens of thousands of Galician Jews.104 Prior to leaving Tal’noye, R. Duvid had made arrangements to settle in the Galician town of Podvolchisk,105 and this was the first place in which he stayed after he crossed the border.106 We have no information as to why R. Duvid rejected Podvolchisk as his home. Afterward, R. Duvid apparently went to Lemberg (Lwów, Lviv), the capital of Austrian Galicia, and spent seven weeks there. He was accompanied by hundreds of young Hasidim, all of

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whom were supported by their tzaddik, who in turn,was supported by the contributions of wealthy Russian Jews.107 R. Duvid spent the majority of his stay in Galicia in Brody, a prosperous commercial town near the Russian border, where he began taking steps to reestablish his court. With the exception of an (uncorroborated) attempt by local maskilim to frame him, R. Duvid was able to stay in Brody peacefully.108 The only contemporaneous source regarding R. Duvid’s sojourn in Brody is a letter written by the rabbi and scholar Elazar Ha-Levi Landau to his brother Israel, notes of which were published by the latter in a posthumous edition of his brother’s novella on the talmudic tractate Shekalim. The letter describes Elazar’s experience spending Rosh Hashanah with the Tolner tzaddik in Brody in 1878: If the people who came were few in number . . . the majority of all of them were great in their qualities . . . the blasts of the shofar were with great and awesome awareness and when he [the Tolner tzaddik?] . . . recited the verse, “You have heard my voice”109 there was extensive crying, and even a wise person might think that all were dying with this sobbing, and there hardly wasn't anyone who did not have thoughts of repentance at this moment. Afterward, the high table was loaded with great joy . . . and the joy increased for a complete hour until all the Hasidim were rejoicing in song and all of them clapped their hands without pause and hundreds of them danced on the table of the king (the king of the rabbis) before him and he took pleasure in this; and thus it drew out till nearly sunset, happy are the tzaddikim who provide for our Father in heaven with all the feelings and excitement of the soul, and happy are those who cleave to them and believe in them as it is written, “and they believe in God and in Moshe His servant “ [Exodus 14:31].110

Even though the extant version is only a summary of the original, Landau’s enthusiasm shines through. If the circle around R. Duvid in Brody was small by Hasidic standards—only a few hundred people—it was full of learned and passionate people. But the numbers and financial wherewithal of his followers were probably insufficient. Within less than a year, R. Duvid returned to Tal’noye; but before doing so, he made one final gesture by paying a visit to one of the other leading tzaddikim of his day, R. Abraham Jacob of Sadegura. Within the Hasidic world, this move was regarded as deeply significant. The Sadegurer tzaddik was the son of R. Israel of Ruzhin, who had been the main rival of

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R. Motele of Chernobyl and his sons, in particular of R. Duvid. While R. Israel’s influence had undoubtedly waned in the Ukraine once he left the Russian empire in the early 1840s, he still had fiercely loyal Hasidim who were Russian subjects. A hagiographic tradition illustrates the extent of the rivalry. When R. Duvid began his career as a tzaddik and was having financial difficulties, a Ruzhiner Hasid from Skvira contributed financially to R. Duvid and eventually became his close friend. Once, when times were difficult, R. Duvid came to Skvira to seek help from his Ruzhiner friend and to cultivate a following among the lower classes (higher-class Jews already being Ruzhiner Hasidim). When the Ruzhiner Hasidim found out that he was there, they surrounded his inn and made him promise not to conduct himself as a tzaddik while in Skvira and to leave town immediately after the Sabbath to travel to the Ruzhiner and make peace with him.111 The scandal over the abandonment of traditional Judaism by R. Ber of Leovo, a son of R. Israel of Ruzhyn, may have further strained relations. Like European nobility, members of the leading Hasidic dynasties commonly married one another in arranged marriages. A marriage had been arranged between R. Ber and Sheyndele, daughter of R. Motele of Chernobyl. R. Ber found his wife unattractive, which could help explain why they had no children.112 At any rate, when R. Ber also began expressing doubts about Hasidism and orthodoxy in the middle of the 1860s, his brothers, the other sons of R. Israel of Ruzhin, kidnapped him and held him captive in Sadegura. After he was freed with the help of the maskilim in Czernowitz, he briefly lived with the latter but then returned to Sadegura and possibly also to traditional Jewish practice.113 R. Ber and Sheyndele most likely continued to live apart and, according to the Tolner tradition, Sheyndele eventually returned to the Ukraine to live with R. Duvid.114 However, even if R. Ber and Sheyndele’s marital difficulties strained relations between the Tolner and Sadegurer, the problem must have been significantly alleviated with R. Ber’s death on November 29, 1876.115 Whatever the factors militating against the Tolner tzaddik’s visit to Sadegura, the reasons in favor were compelling. For R. Duvid, who had been away for nearly a year and was at the nadir of his popularity, the positive publicity justified a stay in Sadegura. It is likely that R. Duvid’s visit also benefited his host, R. Abraham Yaakov of Sadegura. After all, R. Abraham Yaakov and his brothers, R. Dovid Moshe of Czortkow and R. Mordekhai Shraga of Husiatyn, had been embroiled in controversy due to the scathing, if unjustified, attacks against them and their Hasidim by the Galician tzaddik and talmudic authority, Rabbi H˘ayyim Halberstam of Sanz.116 While the

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hostilities had apparently subsided with R. H˘ayyim’s death on the twentyfifth of Nisan 5636 (April 19, 1876),117 R. Abraham Ya‘akov still seized an opportunity to generate good will within the broader Hasidic world. Finally, it should be noted that now that R. Israel of Ruzhin’s sons had established themselves in Bukovina, Galicia, and Rumania, the competition between the Ruzhin and Chernobyl dynasties had diminished. Yitzh≥ak Even, who himself arrived in Sadegura around the time of R. Duvid’s visit and became a yoshev (resident) there,118 provides the most complete and accurate account of this meeting. R. Duvid was greeted in the Czernowitz railroad station by thousands of Hasidim, who escorted him to their tzaddik’s court in Sadegura. R. Abraham Ya‘akov greeted him and they spoke briefly. On the Sabbath he asked R. Duvid to lead the tishn but R. Duvid refused. Only at shalosh seudos, the meal held late Saturday afternoon, did the Tolner tzaddik agree to speak. The large and elegant court of the Sadegurer tzaddik must have reminded R. Duvid of what he had hoped his own court would be in Galicia, and deep sadness over the loss of his son resurfaced: And this is the matter from “and the sun rose and the sun set” [Eccles. 1:5]. The tzaddik must leave a successor. If not, God forbid, this is called “the setting of the sun but not in its season,” the opposite of the order of the world. This is the mystery of likui ha-me'orot [the defect of the heavenly lights] of which the Gemara says that it is a consequence of a “sage who was eulogized in a way which is not in accord with Jewish law,”119 that is, during the lifetime of his father. Therefore it is written about King David, “and the days of David approached to die” [I Kings 2:1], only his days died, but not he himself because he left his true successor. Therefore he could say with true joy, “Behold, I am going in the way of all the earth,” as the order of the world is, he went before his son did.120

R. Duvid’s choice of subject seems odd—one would imagine that R. Duvid would speak about something more positive or celebratory. That he chose to allude to the death of his son indicates his continuing depression. In addition to the other setbacks, R. Duvid’s court suffered the devastating loss of his famous optimism, which must have made it even harder to attract new Hasidim and retain old ones. Upon his departure, R. Abraham presented R. Duvid with a gold tobacco box he had received from his own father, R. Israel of Ruzhin. According to haskamot (book approbations) that R. Duvid wrote in the late 1870s, he returned to Tal’noye between February and June 1879,121

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where he stayed until his death three years later. No information has surfaced describing the political machinations that enabled R. Duvid to return, reestablish himself in Tal’noye, and mend relations with his Hasidism. Nevertheless, R. Duvid did not have to despair for the future of Tolner Hasidism. He used his last years to groom his grandson, R. Motele’s son Menah≥em Nah≥um, for succession, and to complete his third and final book. CONCLUSION

R. Duvid began his career as a rebbe in Vasil’kov, but it was only after his move to Tal’noye that he was successful in building a maggidut that was as loyal to him as that which his father, R. Motele, had possessed. The success of R. Duvid’s maggidut attracted the negative attention of those Jewish modernizers who advised the Russian authorities in the Ukraine. When R. Duvid’s attempts to expand his territory by force spun out of control, the authorities finally heeded the calls of the maskilim and limited R. Duvid’s mobility. Russian sources suggest that without the intervention of Count Shuvalov, whose family owned the town of Tal’noye, R. Duvid might have been exiled to Siberia. Instead, he was given the much lighter sentence of house arrest, a punishment that was also extended to his brothers and other Ukrainian rebbes. Although the Imperial Russian government in the popular imagination is viewed as wholly antisemitic, the relationship of the government to the Jewish population was more complicated. Those who wished to limit R. Duvid’s influence were only doing so at the urging of one part of the Jewish community, while Count Shuvalov, who defended R. Duvid, responded to the concerns of another part of the Jewish community. Gezeras tzaddikov weakened Tolner Hasidism for awhile, but it rebounded by embracing a new model: the Hasidic court as a pilgrimage center. It is a historical irony that the efforts of the maskilim to limit the influence of R. Duvid by forbidding him to travel compelled him to build a court that was far more impressive than his traveling rebeystve had ever been. The elaborate court of the now-sedentary tzaddik was a sign that Hasidism retained its creative energy. Despite the continuing economic decline of Russian Jewry, R. Duvid’s court appeared to hold its own until the death of R. Motele, in late 1876. The loss of his only son was not only personally devastating, but erased whatever hope he may have had of his son succeeding him. The second major blow to R. Duvid’s court was his departure for Austrian Galicia in 1878. R. Duvid returned less than a year later to Tal’noye and a much diminished court.

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APPENDIX A Petition of Rabbi Duvid Twersky to the Governor-General of the Southwest Region (of the Russian Empire)

3rd of July 1868 Your Honor! Charitable character is like the returning messenger of the Most High Creator of the World, for the continuation of the existence of all realms of creation in general, but the highest realm (of the animals) in particular, even nonthinking animals are provided with extraordinary strength and an irremovable desire defending oneself from opponents in the case of necessity; this strength is sufficiently known to scholarly people under the title of instinct; in a person gifted with a reasonable and thinking soul, this strength is developed of course, to the highest level, thus that distinct person searches for his salvation even in objects far from his whereabouts, in subjects sharply different from him and even to minds [?] not attainable; therefore Your Honor, although until this time I did not possess the happiness to acquire your personal acquaintance, however, I am convinced that Your bright soul was sent down from heaven to this carnal world properly for the salvation of innocent suffering souls, proof of which is this: that one name of yours serves through the entire circle of residence [Pale of Settlement?] as a symbol of truth and piety, but the “voice of the people,” says Uvarov, “is the voice of God.”122 This, my just conviction, together with my extreme need and necessity inspire in me the boldness to trouble your person with the following most humble petition: by your location in the near distance from my place of residence, Tal’noye, where I have resided for over sixteen years, as much as I have heard about You, You have probably heard as much about me, I hope, that you know my name not from an evil source (if not, then you can assure yourself ) I know that it is not unknown to You my former and current existence: Having conducted nearly all my life of service to my co-religionists instilling in them good qualities and installing in their souls morality to live in fear of God, with obedience to the authorities with respect toward the administration, with compassion to the nearest without distinction of estates and creeds; everywhere I had only traveled through was boiled in philanthropic life, breathed with good behavior everywhere, but especially in the cities near me, at the time of the bad harvest and extraordinary high prices, by my persuasive appeal [sidva] which was opened by subscription and bore significant sums of money, such voluntary and even sincere gifts for the benefit of the poor and fallen proprietors, everywhere I tried among litigating sides to

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[stop] arms, promote peace, [resolve] private disputes between my co-religionists and others of my nationality and family intrigues—to halt them in every way; yet here not long ago between Count Moshcheiski and the residents of his estate, in the town of Ladyzhenka, committed to the formal order already more than twenty years, by their request I restored eternal peace, based on the unshakable support of healthy reason and clean conscience, a peace with which both sides remained completely satisfied, after all my acts, unhappily by a false slander I have been arrested already two years with all my brothers under a so-called house arrest so that I am not permitted to leave this city, which consists of local merchants, even in case of medical assistance; it is prohibited to all us brothers to go to the grave of our deceased father to worship on the day of his death anniversary, as is our custom, and we have been deprived of our last sincere consolation. It is understood that we do not have reasons to accuse the high Administration, which judges only by reports of the lowest officials; and might the educated Administration consider praiseworthy acts as foul ones, a virtue as a vice? No! the chief culprits of our state of suffering are not Christians but some ill-thinking persons from the educated class of our Jews, who by nature are far from Christian virtue, are by their upbringing very alien to the religious bases of Judaism and feed their co-religionists a hatred that is much greater than that of people of other faiths; these ill-intentioned people brought against us false accusations that we, allegedly, are harmful to education and that we impede the attainment of the Administrative goals for the Jewish question in general, but we are extremely offended [by] this complete vanity. Be favorable Your Honor; turn favorable attention upon the sorrow of our circumstances, hear the voice wailing and show a characteristic sign of your mercy, defending us with your true persuasive word in all places where a comfortable occasion is presented to You; from the humaneness of Your most sincere empathy with our sufferings obtain [by petition] for us permission to travel outside of the home, at least [in cases where] places require our presence; and rather than the cessation of guiltless limitations of some of our rights alleviate our fate very much and raise in the hearts of our families an eternal memorial of truth and piety with respect to Your praised name, which will never be pronounced by us without blessing. In expectation of Your mercy, with true high respect, I have the honor to be TO YOUR HONOR always an obedient servant Duvid Tveverski, meaning Duvid Tverskii.123

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APPENDIX B Description of the Tolner Court from the Memoirs of Pinchas Minkovsky

On an ample space in the center of the town of Tal’noye . . . sprawled the large court surrounded by a fence on all sides like a small town of its own that contains to a surprising measure great and elaborate buildings, like small palaces: the palace of the tzaddik’s wife,124 the palace of their only son, R. Motele, the palace of their son-in-law, Meir'l (a son of one of the wealthy in Berditchev), a special palace for the chief of the court, R. Yankele Hana-Hayeles, and other special houses for Beshtian offspring and grandchildren who became familiar here all the days of their lives and lived in ease at the expense of the community and the tzaddik. Each one of these houses was perfect in taste and beauty . . . and there were special male and female servants. . . . One house was entirely empty, a kind of court inn which served to receive visiting tzaddikim . . . (or) in-laws or relatives of the tzaddik when they came to celebrate the wedding of one of the children of the tzaddik’s family. And of course, the tzaddik’s residence rose above the others in its beauty and splendor. In this court was the great kloyz of the tzaddik, which held as many as 2,000 people, not including the great hall and the corridor which stuck out on the south side of the kloyz with an open door for the tzaddik so that he could pray with the community while still in isolation [hitbodedut] in his room. In the center of the court stood a large, long wooden building which served as a dining facility for Sabbath and holiday meals for the tzaddik and his intimates. Not far from it [were] the sauna, [regular] baths, and a large mikveh. Each of the houses was covered with a nice sukkah that was covered the whole year with thin sawn wooden wings. In one corner there was a line of special cooking rooms separate for meat foods and for milk foods . . . and each cooking room had different maid servants, those who cooked meat and those who cooked milk, so that they should never change places. In another corner there was a row of houses for “cleanliness” [i.e., outhouses], stables for horses and carriages and pens for cows. In short, the court that was in Tal’noye was like a small state within a large state, and the large state imbibed its livelihood from the wells of salvation of this small state. . . . The walls of the court were surrounded by inns, taverns for liquor and wine, and a large number of stores of all kinds of goods, craftsmen’s workshops, and wagoners stations, and a large group of idlers, kley koydesh and h≥ayot ha-koydesh, gabbaim who wrote notes [for petitioners], temporary servants for visitors, emissaries for gathering the ma‘amadot

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money in support of the court, and just hangers-on spending the rest of their days here with their meals always provided by the court. All of this large community, from the [Beshtian] offspring and grandchildren and all the worthies who sat first at the table of the tzaddik, to the meat or dairy cook, all of them received the bounty of their livelihood from the channels of the court, that is to say, from the Hasidim of the tzaddik.125 NOTES 1. See Arthur Green, “Typologies of Leadership,” Jewish Spirituality (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 2:144; and David Assaf ’s monograph on R. Israel of Ruzhin, Derekh ha-malkhut: R’ Yisrael me’ruzhin u-mkomo be-toldot ha-H˘asidut ( Jerusalem: Merkaz Zalman Shazar, 1996/97), translated as The Regal Way (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2002). 2. Aharon David Twersky, Sefer ha-Yahas me-Chernobyl ve-Ruzhin (Lublin 1937/38), reprinted in Seforim Kedoshim mi-Talmidei Ba’al Shem Tov ha-Kodesh (New Square, N.Y., n.d.), 92:25, 51–52. 3. Yitzh≥ak Even, Fun rebins hoyf: Zikroynes un mayses gezen, gehert un nokhdertzeylt (New York, 1969/70), 80–85. 4. Shmuel Abba Horodetsky, Ha-H˘asidut ve-ha-H˘asidim (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1951), 3:85. Horodetsky was born in the fall of 1870, and at age ten came to Chernobyl to live with his grandfather, R. Barukh Horodetsky. R. Barukh’s mother, Hannah Hayele, was one of R. Motele of Chernobyl’s daughters and, together with other Chernobyl Hasidim, had a great influence on young Shmuel Abba (Horodetsky, Zikhronot [Tel Aviv: Devir, 1957], 21–23). Possessing such excellent informants and having lived in Chernobyl, one would think that Horodetsky would have had opportunity to see R. Motele’s “splendid house” or at least have heard more about it, had it, in fact, existed. 5. Simon Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut: Al yesod mekorot rishonim, nidpasim ve-kitvei-yad (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1944), 316. 6. On R. Moshe Zvi of Savran’s carriage, see David Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 151, note 114. For a story describing R. Motele and his entourage, see Dovid Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf: Fun Chernobyl biz Talne (New York, 1931), 1:116–17; Israel Klapholtz, Admorei Chernobyl (Israel, 1971), 178–79. 7. On the institution of pidiyon nefashot, see David Assaf, “‘Money for Household Expenses’: Economic Aspects of Hasidic Courts,” Studies in the History of the Jews in Old Poland in Honor of Jacob Goldberg, Scripta Hierosolymitana 38 ( Jerusalem, 1998), 31. The early anti-Hasidic polemicist R. David of Makov included R. Motele in a list of Hasidic leaders who “become wealthy from the pidiyon nefesh that they take from the unfortunate poor.” See Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut, 287–88. 8. Concerning the residences of R. Israel of Ruzhin and his descendants, David Assaf writes, “Indeed, concerning the realia of [R. Israel’s] court in Pogrebishche and in Ruzhin, we know nearly nothing, but concerning the court in Sadegura, and about its offspring . . . we know more.” Derekh ha-malkhut, 364. 9. Immanuel Etkes, “Darko shel R. Shneur Zalman mi-Liadi ke-manhig shel H˘asidim,” Zion 50 (1985): 321–54; Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), esp. 39–98.

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10. The following is recorded in the twenty-fourth session of the Council of Trent, November 8, 1563: “Patriarchs, primates, metropolitans, and bishops shall not fail to visit their respective dioceses . . . if they shall not be able on account of its extent, to make the visitation of the whole annually, they shall visit at least the greater part thereof, so that the whole shall be completed in two years. . . . But the principal object of all these visitations shall be to lead to sound and orthodox doctrine, by banishing heresies; to maintain good morals, and to correct such as are evil; to animate the people, by exhortations and admonitions, to religion, peacefulness, and innocence; and to establish such other things as to the prudence of the visitors shall seem for the profit of the faithful, according as time, place and opportunity shall allow. And to the end that all this may have a more easy and prosperous issue, all and each of the aforesaid, to whom the right of visitation belongs, are admonished to treat all persons with fatherly love and Christian zeal.” For sources on canonical visitations in eastern Europe, see Paulus Rabikauskas, SJ, Relationes Status Dioecesium in Magno Ducatu Lituaniae, vols. 1-2 in Fontes Historiae Lituaniae (Rome, 1978) (for Lithuania); Teofil Dlugosz, Relacje Arcybiskupow Lwowskich 1595–1794 (Lwów, 1937) (for Lwow); and Maria Trojanowska, Chelmski Konsystorz Greckokatolicki [1525] 1596–1875 [1905]: Inwentarz Analityczny Archiwum (Warsaw, 2003) (for a description of the visitation reports of the Greek Catholics of the Eparchy of Chelm). I am grateful to Fr. James Lenaghan of Ohio State University for bringing the practice of canonical visitation to my attention and providing me with these sources. 11. “And during it they shall be careful not to be troublesome or burthensome to any one by any useless expenses; and neither they, nor any of theirs, shall, by way of agency fee for the visitation, or, on account of wills made for pious uses—except that which is of right due to them out of pious bequests—or under any other name whatsoever, receive anything, be it money, or present, of whatsoever kind, or in whatsoever way offered; any custom, even though immemorial, to the contrary notwithstanding; with the exception, however, of food, which shall be furnished frugally and in moderation to them and theirs, only during the time necessary for the visitation, and no longer. It shall, however, be at the option of those who are visited, to pay, if they prefer it, in money, according to a fixed assessment, what they have been accustomed heretofore to disburse, or to furnish the food as aforesaid; saving also the right of ancient conventions entered into with monasteries, or other pious places, or churches not parochial, which right shall remain inviolate. But, in those places or provinces, where it is the custom that neither food, money, nor anything else be received by the visitors, but that all be done gratuitously, the same shall be retained there.” Concilium Tridentinum, sess. XXIV, c. iii, De ref. The Canons and Decrees of the Sacred and Oecumenical Council of Trent, ed. and trans. J. Waterworth (London: Dolman, 1848), 208–10. 12. Paul Ira Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform: A Biography of Rabbi Duvid ben Mordkhe Twersky of Tal’noye” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University and the Jewish Theological Seminary, 2001), 43–45, 50. 13. P. Semyonov, Geografichesko-staticheskii slovar’ rossiskoi imperii, vol. 1, 1863, 402. 14. “Iggeret maran admo"r hrh"k rebe mordekhai me-chernobyl: Odot takanah le-tovat ha-aniyim ne k"k talna,” Kovetz netzah≥ david, vol. 1, Kislev 5756, 90–91. 15. Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 80. 16. Mordkhe Spektor, Mayn lebn (Warsaw, n.d.), 1:134–40; Hamelitz #8 (February 20/ March 3, 1864, February 27/March 10, 1864). See also David Assaf, “Adayin lo nishkat ha-riv

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h≥inam: Ha-ma’aval neged h≥asidut breslov be-shenot ha-shishim shel ha me’ah ha-19,” Zion 59, no. 4 (5754) (1993/94): 466–67. Cited in Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 86–88. 17. Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 96–99, 116–20. 18. Before a new Jewish burial ground can be used, it must be consecrated or ritually designated as a cemetery. Traditionally, a Jewish cemetery is consecrated by a ceremony in which the rabbi and the community walk around the perimeter of the area to be used for burial. These circumambulations are called hakafot. For a contemporary description, see Hanna Geshelin, “Consecrated Ground,” Jewish Press, August 12, 2009 (www.jewishpress. com/pageroute.do/40389, accessed November 1, 2009). 19. Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 126–32. 20. “Beser a shand in ponem eyder a veytog in hartz!,” Kol mevaser #20 (May 27/June 8, 1865), 299–307. 21. See R. Duvid’s petition of July 20, 1866, to Count Pyotr Pavlovich Shuvalov, Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA), fond 1092, opis’ 1, delo 254, folios 1–3b. See also Illia Galant, “Do borot'by z tsadikizmom,” Zbirnik prats evreiskoi istorichno-arkheografichnoi komisii (Kiev, 1929), 2:343. 22. According to a note in a different hand on the bottom of the petition, the letter was sent to the “Kiev General Governor.” By this I assume that the writer of the note meant the governor-general of the Southwest Region, the highest-ranking Russian official in the area that roughly corresponds to Ukraine today. 23. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 337, 41–42ob. Translated in Appendix A at the end of this essay. 24. As late as the 1860s, Jews living in the Ukraine continued to refer to themselves as Polish Jews even though this area was no longer administratively considered part of Poland. Thus, for example, Yitzh≥ak Yoel Linetski’s book, Dos poylishe yingl, parodies the life of a young Hasid in the Ukraine. This work went through many editions. In English, see The Polish Lad, trans. Shalom Spiegel, introduction by Milton Hindus (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1975). 25. Perhaps from shalash, a large assembly hall common in Ukrainian Hasidic courts. 26. Iulii Gessen, Istoriia evreiskogo naroda v Rossii (reprint, Moscow and Jerusalem, 1993), 161–62. 27. See, for example, the 1864 recommendations of Jewish Affairs advisor G. M. Barats for limiting the influence of the tzaddikim submitted to Southwest Region Governor-General N. N. Annekov, in Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 123–25. 28. “A brokhe af ayer kop her redaktor erez,” Kol mevaser #12 (April 21/May 1, 1868), 89–90. In his history of the Lubavitch movement, H˘ayyim Meir Heilman describes the visit of one of the Lubaviticher tzaddik’s sons in Ukraine in 1866: “At the end of his days . . . our tzaddik [R. Menah≥em Mendel, the fourth Lubavitcher tzaddik, known as the Tzemah≥ Tzeddek after his volume of halakhic responsa], in his last winter, sent [his son, R. Yehudah Leyb], to visit the cities of Little Russia [i.e., Ukraine]. [Yehudah Leyb] ‘thundered the world’ with his journey and every place he came he would speak words of H˘asidut before great numbers and people brought him pidiyonot and requests.” In a note to the above-cited passage, the author points out that the Tzemah≥ Tzeddek dispatched Yehudah Leyb at the request of people of the towns in Little Russia. Sefer Beit Tzaddik, part 3 (Berditchev, 1902), 25 (arabic pagination). 29. Sefer ha-Yahas me-Chernobyl ve-Ruzhin (Lublin, 1937/38), 135. Reprinted in Sefarim Kedoshim me-Talmidei Ba‘al Shem Tov ha-Kodesh 82 (Brooklyn, 1989/90).

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30. Ibid. 31. “Igeret me-ha-rav ha-kadosh tzaddik Dovid me-Talne,” Kerem ha-H˘asidut: Measef le-inyanei H˘asidut, mishnatah, hilkhotehah, ve-toldotehah, part 2, Nisan 5745 (1985): 166. 32. Illia Galant, “Do borot'by z tsadikizmom,” Zbirnik prats evreiskoi istorichno-arkheografichnoi komisii (Kiev, 1929), 2:343. We unfortunately have neither the text of their petition, the name of the person who recommended against removal of the travel restrictions, nor the final decision on this question that was rendered by the Minister of Internal Affairs. 33. “A brokhe af ayer kop her redaktor erez,” Kol mevaser #12 (April 21/May 1, 1868), 89–90. 34. M. Morgulis, “Byt’ ili ne byt’ tsadikism v iugozapadnom krae,” Volynskie gubernskie vedomosti #67, 1867. Reprinted in M. Morgulis, Sobranie statej (Kremenchug, 1869), 39. One of the sources, if not the source, for Morgulis’s claim is an article by Y. M. Eisenberg, “Neskol'ko slov o Tsadikzme,” that appeared in Odesskii vestnik, no. 173 (presumably in 1866). I have been unable to obtain this article; however, Zederbaum, in “Sheltn unter di oygn,” takes Eisenberg to task for criticizing Hasidim in a Russian-language periodical. Eisenberg’s critique apparently focused on the visit of one of R. Duvid’s daughters to the baths in Odessa and the subsequent party that a Tolner Hasid there held in her honor. Zederbaum sees absolutely nothing inappropriate in the incident. Zederbaum, “Sheltn unter di oygn,” Kol Mevaser #32 (August 18/30, 1866), 494–95. 35. Haskamah to Leyb ha-Kohen, Sefer Or ha-ganuz, dated 19 Iyar 5625 (May 15, 1865); “Ha-rav ha-kadosh rebi Duvid me-Talne: Ishur takkanot hevrat sha"s me-kehilah kedoshah ternovka,” Kovetz siftei tzaddikim: Measef le-torat ha-H˘asidiut, le-pirsum genizah ve-h≥eker toldotehah 10 (Tevet 5758 [1998]): 32. Approval of the regulations of the Talmud Study Society of Ternovka, dated 1 Adar 5626 (1866); “Mikhtav kodesh me-harav ha-kadosh rebi Duvid me-Talna, zakhuto yagen alenu,” Kovetz nahalat tzvi: Bimah le-mishnat ha-H˘asidut ve-toldotehah, gilyon 2 (Bnei Brak: Makhon le-hafatzat torat ha-h≥asidut, 1990), 94–95. Letter of recommendation for the bearer, a granddaughter of “the tzaddik of Shepitovka,” who was soliciting money to help care for her ill daughter. R. Duvid’s letter is preceded (apparently on the same sheet of paper) by a note by a R. Yeh≥iel ben Yaakov Tzvi confirming that the woman indeed is whom she claims to be. This note seems to have been written in 1869 (judging from the gematria used for the date). R. Duvid’s letter presumably was written shortly afterward. 36. Hyman H. Harris, Hebrew Liturgical Music: A Survey of Traditional Hebrew Music: Biblical Cantillation and the Music of the Cantors (New York: Bitzaron, 1950), 438. 37. Pinh≥as Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” Reshumot, n.s., vol. 1 (Tel Aviv, 1924/25), section 1. For hagiographic descriptions of the tzaddik as the spiritual supervisor over ritual slaughters, see Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz, In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov [Shivh≥ei ha-besht]: The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism (New York: Schocken, 1984), 166–67, 192. For similar stories about R. Motele of Chernobyl, see Aryeh Leyb ben Yaakov Nisan of Radivke, Sefer Likutei Yekarim, 1924, 124–25; Klapholtz, Admorei Chernobyl, 206–8; Menah≥em Mendl Bodek, Sipurim H˘asidiyim, ed. Gedaliah Nigal (Tel Aviv, 1990/91), 85–87. 38. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 109. 39. “Sedeh Lavan” (White Field) was one of the Jewish euphemisms for Belaia Tserkov (White Church).

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40. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 109. “Duvidl” is a diminutive form of Duvid. 41. Ibid. Minkovsky’s career continued to flourish. He studied musical composition in Vienna and for a short time became a h≥azzan in Lemberg. In 1891, Minkovsky moved to Odessa to become h≥azzan of its venerable Brody Synagogue. For over thirty years, Minkovsky served in this capacity and, by arranging liturgical music for choral synagogues, greatly influenced the new generation of h≥azzanim. In 1922, Minkovsky left Odessa for America, where he died two years later. See Israel Shalita, Encyclopedia of Music: A Biographical Dictionary of Jewish and World Musicians, ed. Hanan Steinitz (Tel Aviv, 1959), 383–87. 42. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 113. This passage is also reproduced in Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 365–66. Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, also discusses other Ukrainian courts and especially the courts in Sadegura and Czortkow, 366–80. 43. I am grateful to Nehemia Polen for this insight. 44. On the relation of R. Duvid and Chernobyl Hasidism generally to the Shpoler Zeyde, see Radensky, Hasidism in the Age of Reform, 87–88. 45. Yoh≥anan Twersky, He-hatzer ha-pnimit: korot mishpahah (Tel Aviv, 1954), 28. Cited in Shlomo Zalman Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥: Toldot h≥ayav u-fa‘alo shel tiferet uzenu kadosh Israel ha-mefursam morenu ve-rabenu moh"r David me-Talne zy"a ( Jerusalem, 1993/94), 68. 46. Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 325–27, 378. 47. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 115. 48. Ibid., 120. 49. According to his daughter, Devorah Leah Rosenblatt, R. Yosele was born in Tal’noye in 5617 (1856/57). The son of a famous h≥azzan, R. Peysi (who himself was apparently a model for Sholem Aleichem’s novel, Motel Peysi dem khazns), R. Yosele went into h≥azzanut over his father’s objections. The chief objection was the poverty that a h≥azzan would have to endure, and R. Yosele, despite his fame, did indeed live a life of poverty. After R. Duvid’s death in 1882, R. Yosele moved to the court of Rakhmistrivke, where he became R. Yoh≥anan’s h≥azzan. Upon R. Yoh≥anan’s death in 1895, R. Yosele became the h≥azzan of R. Yoh≥anan’s son, R. Motele, who had his court in Zlatopolie, approximately seventy kilometers east of Tal’noye. R. Yosele died the death of a martyr. In 1919, while visiting his daughter in the neighboring town of Novomirgorod, R. Yosele, together with fifty other prominent Jews, was seized by a Ukrainian band led by Ataman Grigorev. The fifty were forced to dig their own graves and were buried alive. During this horrific event, R. Yosele comforted the ill-fated Jews and, with his last breath, uttered the prayer “Shema Yisroel.” Devorah Leah Rosenblatt, “Tokhter fun barimten Talner khazn shraybt tzum ‘forvertz’ vegn ir tatn,” Forvertz (April 23, 1942), 3–2. See also Eliohu Zaludkowski, Kultur treger fun der yidisher liturgie (n.p., 1930), 172–76. 50. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 115. 51. Mendl Osherowitch, Shtet un shtetlakh in ukraine un in andere teyln fun rusland (New York: Aroysgegebn fun M. Osherovitsh yubiley-komitet, 1948), 146–49. 52. Mordkhe Spektor, Mayn lebn, 1:28. 53. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 114. 54. Ibid. 55. Twersky, He-h≥atzer ha-pnimit, 29. Cited in Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 51. 56. Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 85. 57. Aharon Dovid Twersky, Sefer ha-yahas me-Chernobyl ve-Ruzhin (Lublin, 1937/38) (reprinted in Sefarim kedoshim me-talmidei Ba‘al shem tov ve-talmidav, vol. 82), 63.

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58. Ibid., 61, 63. 59. Israel Bekmaister, Sipurei niflaot me-gedolei Israel (Tel Aviv, 1968/69), 310–11. In introducing this anecdote, Bekmaister writes, “I heard this from the elderly R. Azriel Rozen, who related what he himself saw when he stood next to the holy rabbi, R. Duvid of Talne, may the memory of the righteous be for a blessing, when he was receiving the public.” 60. For example, see Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 129; Aharon Ha-Levi Pechenik, H˘amishim tzaddikim be-tokh ha-ir (Bet El, Israel, 1989), 280–82; for R. Duvid’s jibe against Nisi Belzer, see Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” pt. 3, 110. 61. This reference is in error. R. Duvid’s sermon for Tu bi-shvat (with some variations) appears in Sefer Kohelet David (Lublin, 1881; reprint, Jerusalem, 5734), 54. R. Duvid’s source for this sermon is Tzava‘at ha-rivash ve-hanhagot yesharot (Zolkiew, 1793), reprinted in Sefarim kedoshim mi-kol talmidei ha-besht ha-kodesh (Brooklyn: Bet Hillel, 1993), 20, a work that has been ascribed to the Maggid of Mezeritch. I am grateful to Glenn Dynner for bringing this to my attention. See also his Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 10–11. 62. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” part 5, 120–21. 63. Mordkhe Spektor, for example, describes how his brother-in-law was showered with questions by members of the Haysin kloyz after his return from seeing R. Duvid in Tolne. Spektor, Mayn Lebn, 1:203. 64. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 119–20. 65. Ibid., 114. 66. Sefer kohelet David (Lublin, 1881), 102–3, 104–5, 105–6, 108–9, 144–45, 145–48, 162. 67. D. L. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf (fun Chernobyl biz talne) (New York, 1931), 2:136–37. 68. Ibid., 137–41. 69. Ibid., 47–50. 70. On the development of Kievlianin’s Judeophobia, see John D. Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 185–98. 71. “Tsadikovskaia lechebnitsa,” Kievlianin, no. 109, 1876. 72. Small portions of wine or food are passed to the Hasidim at a tish so that they can participate in the tzaddik’s meal. 73. A version of this practice is attested to in Linetski’s Dos poylishe yingl: “As soon as everything appeared to be in order [for the Friday night tish], Mekhtzie [the Sirkover tzaddik’s chief attendant] sprang up, clambered on to the table in his stocking feet, and proceeded to reshuffle the seated guests.” The Polish Lad, 186. 74. One of the kabbalistic hymns attributed to R. Yitzh≥ak Luria and traditionally sung on Friday night. 75. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 116–18. 76. See above, note 51. 77. “Nullification of the physical.” According to this central Hasidic doctrine, one can reach the most exalted spiritual heights only by completely overcoming awareness of bodily needs and desires. 78. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 119. According to Jewish tradition, the Sabbath is so special that one is granted an extra soul for the duration of the day. 79. Dubnow, Toldot ha-H˘asidut (1967), 37. 80. For more on the custom of telling stories about the Ba‘al Shem Tov on Saturday night, see Aaron Wertheim, “Traditions and Customs in Hasidism,” in Essential Papers on

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Hasidism: Origins to the Present, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 372. 81. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 118–19. See also Pincus Puchkoff ’s descriptions of these gatherings, My Four Homes: Or Ktayim (Fragments III) (New York, 1948), 42–43. 82. Puchkoff, My Four Homes. 83. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 142. 84. Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 59–60. 85. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 142. 86. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 2:179–80; Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 174. 87. Twersky, Ha-yahas me-Chernobyl ve-Ruzhin, 134–35; Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 169. 88. Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 174. R. Yoh≥anan Twersky was a great- great-grandson of R. Duvid. 89. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 148–50. 90. “Vstrecha i provody tsaddika,” Razsvet #22 (May 29, 1880). 91. Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 196–201. 92. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 2:185–86. 93. In the Masoretic text, Numbers 10:35–36 is preceded and followed by inverted nuns. According to Rashi’s commentary on verse 35, these inverted letters indicate that this was not the original place for this passage. Rashi continues that it was placed here to separate two episodes of punishment (see Pentateuch with Targum Onkelos, Haphtaroth, ed. M. Rosenbaum and A. M. Silbermann [Jerusalem, 1972–73], 4:51–52a, 189). R. Duvid here is comparing himself to the Ark of the Covenant. As this was the focal point of Israelite life in the desert, R. Duvid sees himself as the focal point in the life of his followers. Moreover, as the rationale for this passage in Numbers seemed elusive but ultimately had meaning, so too is R. Duvid’s departure from Tal’noye for some sort of greater good. 94. “Mikhtav me-ha-rav ha-kodesh, morenu ve-rabenu ha-rav rebi Duvid me-Talne zatz"l,” Kovetz kerem shlomo (Menah≥em Av 5747 [1986–87]), kuntres 9, 14–15. 95. Ha-Rav Dovid Mordkhe Twersky, “Fun Talne biz Nyu York: Di geshikhte fun der Talner hoyf: kapitl akht: di nesie keyn brod,” Der morgn zhurnal (February 9, 1951), 6. 96. R. Yitzh≥ak was also a grandson of R. Israel of Ruzhin. See David Assaf, “R. Israel me-Ruzhin u-mkomo be-toldot ha-H˘asidut be-meh≥atzit ha-rishonah shel ha-me'ah ha-teshaesreh” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1992), 257. 97. Even, Fun rebins hoyf: Zikhroynes un mayses gezen, un nokhdertzeylt, 141–42. 98. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 2:185–86; Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 140; Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥,181–83. 99. Shuvalov (1847–1902) later achieved some notoriety as one of the leading members of the conservative, semi-clandestine Sviashchennaya druzhyna (“Holy Company”), which was established in March 1881 to defend the new tsar and to fight the revolutionaries through intrigue and propaganda. The liberal tendencies of some of its members alarmed Alexander III’s confidant Konstantin Pobedonostsev, who urged the tsar to dissolve the organization in November 1882. For more on Shuvalov’s role in the “Holy Company,” see S. Valk, “Shuvalov, Pavel Petrovich,” Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ russkogo bibliograficheskogo instituta Granat (Moscow, n.d.), 50:508–10. On the “Holy Company” generally, see Hans Rogger, Russia in the Age of Modernisation and Revolution 1881–1917 (London: Longman,

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1983), 10–11, and Philip Pomper, The Russian Revolutionary Intelligentsia (Arlington Heights, Ill.: H. Davidson, 1970), 145–46. 100. Since Russian salutations omit surnames, I have not been able to identify with certainty the recipient of Shuvalov’s letter. 101. RGIA, fond 1092, opis’ 1, delo 1358, 19–20. 102. Ibid. 103. Ibid. 104. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 141–42. 105. Meir Yeh≥iel Knoblakh, letter to the editorial board, Mishkenos ya‘akov (New Square, N.Y., 1993/94), 2:87. 106. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 2:191. 107. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 142. 108. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 2:225–31. Mekler further writes that the maskilim in Brody were aided by the local Jewish parliamentary deputy, Nathan Kalir. When the plot was uncovered, Hasidim set up tables and gathered petitions on R. Duvid’s behalf. Nevertheless, the Tolner tzaddik was summoned to Lemberg by the stathalter (governor), Potocki. Once the latter realized whom he was dealing with, he understood the plot to be a fabrication and released R. Duvid. I have not found attestation to this interesting event in any other source. 109. Lamentations 3:56, an introductory passage read before the blowing of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah. 110. Israel Segal Landau, ed., Zikhron Elazar: H˘iddushim al ha-mishnah ve-ha-yerushalmi me-masekhet shekalim (Brody, 1906), introduction, p. 6. 111. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 138–39. See also Horodetsky, H˘asidim ve-ha-H˘asidut, Book 3, 112; Vinberg, Netzah≥ she-be-netzah≥, 58–59. 112. Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 458. 113. Horodetsky, Ha-H˘asidut ve-ha-H˘asidim, 3:125–39; Yitzh≥ak Even, Mah≥loket Sanz veSadigorah: Kol korot ha-pulmus me-tehilato ve-ad sofo, al pi mekorim ne’emanim u-va-ruah≥ bikoret ne'emanah (New York, 1915/16), 25–33; Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 459; and Assaf, Ne’eh≥az ba-svakh ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar, 2005/6), 18–19. 114. Mekler, Fun rebins hoyf, 1:181–82. 115. Horodetsky, Ha-H˘asidut ve-ha-H˘asidim, 153. 116. Radensky, “Hasidism in the Age of Reform,” 139–40. 117. Ibid. 118. Zalmen Rayzen, Leksikon fun der yidisher literatur, prese un filologie (Vilna, 1928), 1:1. 119. The Talmud gives a list of misfortunes that diminish the sun, the first of which is the head of a beit din who died but “who was not eulogized according to halakhah.” BT Sukkah 29a. 120. Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 147–48. 121. The last haskamah that R. Duvid gave in Brody was to an edition of his book Sefer Magen David, published in 5640. The haskamah is dated Tuesday, 18 Shevat 5639 (February 11, 1879). His first haskamah in Tal’noye was for the book Sefer H˘esed le-Avraham, by Abraham Shapiro (Czernowitz, 1884). The approbation is signed 11 Sivan 5639 ( June 2, 1879). 122. A popular quotation here ascribed presumably to Sergei Semionovich Uvarov (1786–1855), Minister of Public Enlightenment under Tsar Nicholas I, 1833–49. See “Uvarov, Sergei Semionovich,” Wikipedia.com, accessed November 25, 2009.

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123. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 337, 41–42ob. 124. According to Yiddish journalist and former Sadegura Hasid Yitzh≥ak Even, Tolner Hasidim were proud of the fact that after his son, Motele, was born, the Tolner tzaddik divested himself of worldly interests to the extent that he did not have relations with his wife nor did he even continue to sleep in the same house with her. Yitzh≥ak Even, Fun rebins hoyf, 142. 125. Minkovsky, “Me-sefer h≥ayai,” 1:113. This passage is reproduced in Assaf, Derekh ha-malkhut, 365–66. Assaf also discusses other Ukrainian courts and especially the courts in Sadegura and Czortkow, Derekh ha-malkhut, 366–80.

II CHRISTIANIZING JEWS, JUDAIZING CHRISTIANS

Immanuel Frommann’s Commentary on Luke and the Christianizing of Kabbalah Some Sabbatean and Hasidic Affinities

Elliot R. Wolfson

The focus of this essay is on the kabbalistic and conceivably Sabbatean aspects of the Christian doctrine proffered by the German proselyte Heinrich Christian Immanuel Frommann (d. 1735), in his commentary on the Gospel of Luke. In this study, I mention crucial passages where kabbalistic motifs are employed in the service of proving the truths of Christianity. Not only does Frommann from time to time utilize a mystical symbol or idea, but several passages indicate that he embraced the essential hermeneutic of Jewish esotericism by emphasizing that there are secrets that cannot be disclosed except to the humble.1 In particular, I argue that Frommann put forward a spiritualized understanding of the commandments that accords with and likely reflects the influence of the hypernomian proclivity of Sabbateanism. In contrast to the more typical Scholemian approach that emphasizes the antinomian nature of Sabbatean belief and practice, I have deployed the term hypernomianism to convey that the goal was not the abrogation of the law To the memory of Yosef H. Yerushalmi, Legum servi sumus ut liberi esse possimus (Cicero).

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but its ultimate fulfillment, a demarcating of the law by extending beyond its limits.2 What seems from an external perspective to be the breaking of religious norms is thus, from an internal perspective, a deeper realization, a spiritualization of the ritual predicated on the obliteration of the very binary that is the basis for the nomian vantage point. The messianic Torah, which derives from the Tree of Life, is the law above the law, the new Torah that is expressive of a transvaluation of the axiological framework that informs the Torah of the Tree of Knowledge. In this vein, Frommann maintained that in the eschaton the mystery of the law will be consummately revealed and the inward intent of the ritual realized in the non-differentiated unity of Christ that obliterates the dichotomy germane to the Mosaic legislation. Moreover, as I suggest in the concluding part of this essay, the Sabbatean-inflected portrayal of Jesus that we may elicit from Frommann bears a conspicuous resemblance to the messianic gnosis promoted by the leaders of the pietistic movement of Hasidism that would emerge (and remain) within the fold of traditional Judaism in eastern Europe later in the same century, perhaps influenced by a similar cluster of symbols and a homiletical penchant to emphasize inward spirituality as the true significance of external forms of religious ritual and creed. Before discussing this text, it would be beneficial to make a few general observations about the phenomenon of converts in Frommann’s time and place. Elisheva Carlebach has argued that while the actual number of converts from Judaism to Christianity in German lands was extremely small through the late eighteenth century, converts nevertheless did occupy a central position as mediators between cultures and religions. To quote her precise language: “Their role expanded beyond their rather narrow theological-polemical role in medieval disputations. Although not a meaningful sociological trend until the late eighteenth century, converts were nevertheless an extremely significant presence in Jewish-Christian discourse in German lands from the first years of the sixteenth century.”3 Particularly striking is the utilization of Jewish esoteric lore on the part of Jewish apostates, which served a twofold purpose: to prove to Jews that christological truths are implicit in the Kabbalah and to persuade Christians that they should be more cognizant of their indebtedness to Judaism and thus acknowledge that Jewish practices and beliefs should not only be tolerated but recognized as signposts that resonate with the most sublime mysteries of the Christian faith. Converts, in other words, were keenly attuned to the hybridity that, at once, reinforces

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and destabilizes the hyphen that separates and connects two foci of identity construction, Judaism and Christianity. This strategy can be traced to the Middle Ages, several centuries before the development in the Italian Renaissance of what became known as the Christian Kabbalah. Following the pioneering research of Chaim Wirszubski, two patterns of Christian Kabbalah may be distinguished: the utilization of older Jewish esoteric teachings to confirm truths articulated by Christianity, and the Christianizing application of kabbalistic methods of interpretation to fabricate new ideas and symbols. It seems to me, however, that the latter pattern is a species of the former, and thus we can speak of a single agenda that informs Christian Kabbalah. Indeed, it is necessary to contextualize the latter in the larger attempt of Christian interpreters to subvert Judaism by appropriating it, of including it as what must be excluded, revealing it through occlusion.4 This eclipsing process can be charted in three distinct stages: The first (evident already in the New Testament and Patristic writings) is restricted to the figural use of Hebrew Scripture to prove the truths of Christianity; the second (which becomes more conspicuous in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries due to the increase in Jewish apostasy) entails the use of Talmud to achieve this end; and the third (which is a central component of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, although it plainly had an earlier historical manifestation) invokes Kabbalah or esoteric lore as a ratification of christological presuppositions. In a fundamental way, however, the Jewish Christians were different from notable Christian humanists who availed themselves of the Kabbalah, such as Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Johannes Reuchlin, and Paulus Ricii. To simplify the argument, we could say that the rabbinic background of Jewish converts imposed upon them the need to preserve the nomian framework of Kabbalah even as they sought to undermine that framework by proving the truths of Christianity on the basis of traditional texts. Consequently, in contrast to the typical profile of Christian Kabbalists, including Guillaume Postel, who sanctioned a form of Christian Judaism (as opposed to Jewish Christianity) based on the belief that Christianity must be true to its origins in the Mosaic law, Jewish converts, such as Johannes Kemper (1670–1716), also known as Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, upheld the theurgical nature of the kabbalistic symbols in an effort to anchor the truths of Christianity in the esoteric doctrines of Judaism. As I have argued in a separate study,5 the literary works composed by Kemper display an astonishing blend of rabbinic halakhah, aggadah, and Christian spirituality, and the bridge that links the two

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spheres of religious discourse is the theosophic outlook derived primarily from the zoharic corpus, the anthology of kabbalistic lore and practice that began to circulate in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in fragmentary units, whence, through an extensive process of scribal transmission, whose contours may not be completely available to scholarly discernment, the manuscript witnesses were redacted into the printed versions of the Mantua and Cremona editions, the prototypes for all subsequent editions.6 With great exegetical ease and remarkable flights of speculative fancy, Kemper reinterprets halakhah and aggadah through the lens of a christologically illuminated Kabbalah. An intricate weaving of these different strands is also apparent in Kemper’s somewhat unusual messianic stance. According to Kemper, the esoteric import of Christian messianism cannot be fully appreciated unless one has a grasp on the history of rabbinic culture as it was expressed particularly in the mystical tradition. Beyond trying to persuade Jews of the truths of Christianity, Kemper is implicitly privileging a Christianity whose religious path mirrors his own. While I have no reason to assume that after his conversion Kemper continued to practice the rituals of Judaism overtly, it is reasonable to presume on the basis of his writings that he maintained that fidelity to the laws of Judaism could be an expression of the messianic belief in Jesus, since embracing Christian faith did not necessarily mean abandoning the path of Rabbinic Judaism. With respect to this claim there is a natural affinity between Kemper’s spiritual demeanor and the orientation of some of the early Jewish-Christian sects for whom there was no conflict between believing in Jesus and following Jewish law. Kemper’s works, therefore, can be seen not only as an ongoing attempt at self-legitimization, but as a more subtle attempt to affirm the innate superiority of the Jew as the real Israel and the people who possess the knowledge of the truth, which encompasses the primary principles of the Christian faith, to wit: the mystery of the Trinity, the Incarnation of the Word, and the divinity of the Messiah. Alternatively expressed, Kemper is committed to the view that from its inception Christianity is illustrative of the mystical truth of Judaism, articulated most expansively in the Zohar. We might say, then, that for Kemper the open secret of Christianity is the esoteric truth of Judaism and the concealed disclosure of Judaism is the exoteric truth of Christianity. For Kemper, the messianic task was to cultivate a religious philosophy that would simultaneously sponsor a Jewish Christianity for the Jews and a Christian Judaism for the Christians. With respect to this project, Kemper was likely indebted to the bold hermeneutic of the Sabbatean form of Kabbalah, which pushed the halakhic tradition to its limit by narrowing

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the gap separating the sacred and the profane; but it fit as well with the larger cultural patterns of his historical moment and geographical setting attested in the post-Reformation fraternities of neo-Rosicrucians and Freemasons, which loosened considerably the boundaries between Judaism and Christianity owing in large measure to an abiding interest in Jewish esotericism. JOHANNES FROMMANN’S CHRISTIAN KABBALISTIC MESSIANISM

A similar pattern is discernible in the case of Frommann. Not much is known about his personal biography,7 not even the date of his birth, although we do know that he passed away in January 1735,8 the same year that his commentary on the Gospel of Luke, together with a Hebrew translation, was published under the aegis of the Institutum Judaicum, the first German Protestant mission to the Jews, founded in Halle in 1728 by Johann Heinrich Callenberg (1694–1760), a Lutheran professor of theology and philology and a promoter of the conversion of Muslims and Jews.9 Frommann was baptized in the eastern German city of Gotha in 1722 or 1723, and in 1729, while studying to become a medical doctor, he translated Luke and several other New Testament books, including the Epistle to the Hebrews and the Acts of the Apostles, into Yiddish,10 wrote treatises addressed principally to potential Jewish converts, and also served as the typesetter for the publications of Callenberg’s institute.11 But his major work was the aforementioned commentary on Luke, which was edited by Callenberg and published in two parts in 1735 and 1737 on his institute’s printing press; the commentary was completed and published with a revised translation in Berlin in 1851 by the Polish Jewish apostate Joachim Heinrich Raphael Biesenthal.12 On the title page of the first edition Frommann is described as erudito proselyto, which I assume alludes particularly to his Jewish literacy. Frommann expounds on the gospel by citing liberally from talmudic and midrashic sources. In addition to the references from classical rabbinic literature, he cites medieval Jewish texts, including the tenth-century historical chronicle Sefer Yossipon,13 Sefer H≥ asidim of Judah he-Hasid,14 Sefer Mitzvot Gedolot of Moses of Coucy,15 Shevet Yehudah of Solomon Ibn Verga,16 Sefer Yuh≥asin of Abraham Zacuto,17 biblical commentators and grammararians (Rashi,18 David Kimh≥i,19 Abraham Ibn Ezra,20 Moses ha-Darshan,21 Isaac ben Judah Abrabanel,22 Sefer ha-Masoret),23 philosophers (Saadiah Gaon,24 Judah Halevi,25 Maimonides,26 Gersonides,27 Joseph Albo),28 mystical writings (Sefer Yetzirah,29 the Zohar),30 Kabbalists, whether by name (Nah≥manides,31 Abraham ben David, by which is meant

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Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi,32 Bah≥ya ben Asher)33 or anonymously, referred to variously as mekubbalim,34 ba‘alei kabbalah,35 h≥akhmei h≥en,36 h≥akhmei lev,37 and homiletical thinkers influenced by Kabbalah (Moses Alsheikh,38Abraham Shalom, author of Neveh Shalom,39 Isaiah Horowitz, referred to either by the full title of his major work Shenei Luh≥ot ha-Berit40 or by its abbreviation the Shelah,41 and the Maharal of Prague, designated as ba‘al netzah≥ yisra’el).42 He also frequently engages and responds to polemical works against Christianity, for example, the thirteenth-century Sefer Nitzah≥on43 and the sixteenthcentury H≥ izzuk Emunah, by Isaac ben Abraham of Troki,44 and he derogatorily refers to the polemical treatise Toldot Yeshu as a “book lacking heart” (sefer h≥aser lev).45 In Frommann’s mind, there is no gap separating rabbinic and kabbalistic sources; together they prove the authentic Jewish nature of his Christian faith. Events in the life of Jesus are elucidated by Jewish practices contemporaneous with the time of the author,46 a tactic that perceptibly undermined the long-standing supersessionism that dismissed post-biblical Judaism as irrelevant to understanding the spiritual depths of Christianity. Elisheva Carlebach has documented that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, German authors, mixing fact and fiction, recounted the story of Sabbatai Tzevi’s renunciation of Judaism to endorse the idea that once the messianic hoax was revealed, the “last deception,” the only eschatological option open to Jews was conversion to Christianity. The internal rationale for Jewish conversion exploited by Christians was augmented by the growing conflict within the Church between Protestants and Catholics. A component of the polemical attack of the former against the latter was the contention that Protestantism offered a less hostile environment for disenfranchised Jews. The eschatological interest in Jews provoked by the Sabbatean phenomenon, however, also fostered suspicion in the minds of some Christians that Jews were not to be trusted as heralds of the Second Coming, that their converting to Christianity was a continuation and extension of the messianic pretense set into motion by Sabbatai Tzevi and his followers, an event that reinforced the stereotype of the deceptive Jew.47 Summarizing the point, Carlebach wrote that the “subversive Jewish messianism and Jewish deceitfulness . . . endowed each conversion with great apocalyptic weight while undermining the convert’s claim to authenticity.”48 I would add to this astute observation that the appeal of Sabbateanism to Christian missionaries may have also been that it provided a framework to understand the hypernomian attitude to the law, a predilection that complemented the posture of Paul and could thus bring Jews to proclaim faith in Jesus as a demonstration of their covenantal relation to

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God. To the best of my knowledge, Frommann never mentions Sabbatai Tzevi or the Sabbatean movement by name.49 Nonetheless, I suspect that this phenomenon lurks behind many key passages wherein he appeals to kabbalistic symbols and concepts to substantiate the Jewish legitimacy of a Christian dogma. On a historical note, the connection between Callenberg and Sabbateanism, including especially a conventicle in Halle, has already been established.50 Not only did Callenberg take a personal interest in Sabbatean material but other missionaries in his institute used this topic as a pretext to pursue dialogue with Jews. It is not hard to imagine how this debacle could have played into the hands of the proselytizers. In 1760, during the eruption of the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy, an anonymous history of Sabbatai Tzevi, the “arch-deceiver” and “last false messiah of the Jews,” was published by Christoph Peter Francken of the institute.51 As I will argue, vital aspects of Frommann’s understanding of Christianity are best seen in this light. The most explicit statement of Frommann on the affinity between the kabbalistic and christological worldviews appears in his explanation of the Holy Spirit (ruah≥ ha-kodesh) in the commentary to Luke 12:10: “We know as well from the way of wisdom [mi-derekh ha-tushiyyah] that the spirit is in the secret of Binah, and it is one of three brains [moh≥ot] that are called the supernal emanations [sefirot ha-elyonot], but it is not permissible, God forbid, to separate or to sever them, for they are all in the absolute unity [be-takhlit ha-ah≥dut], and this is also the doctrine of the Christians set forth and preserved in all the books of the New Testament.”52 The author records that he has elaborated on this theme in the section of the introduction (haqdamah) called sha‘ar ha-yih≥ud, the “gate of unification,” but unfortunately this was never published.53 Be that as it may, Frommann’s contention is clear enough: he equates the Holy Spirit with Binah, the third of the ten sefirot in the standard kabbalistic theosophy. Drawing on a well-established distinction between the upper three and the lower seven of the sefirotic potencies, Frommann labels the former the “three brains,” a locution that signifies that they correspond to the mental processes of the divine anthropos. He points out, however, that ultimately the ten emanations cannot be divided since they constitute the oneness of God. Most important, he asserts that this is exactly the basic tenet of Christianity, by which I assume he means that just as Kabbalists conceive of the divine unity as organically composed of a tenfold, so Christians believe the one substance of God consists of three hypostases, or, in his own formulation, “the holy trinity in the absolute unity” (ha-shillush ha-kadosh be-takhlit ha-yih≥ud) is the means through which one

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“apprehends the secret of his awesome and glorious name” (lehavin be-sod shemo ha-nikhbad ve-ha-nora).54 Additionally, according to Frommann, the identification of Jesus as the Word in the New Testament is illumined by reference to the meimra of the targumic tradition55 as well as to the kabbalistic symbol of the “primordial wisdom” (h≥okhmah kedumah), which emanates from the supernal crown (keter elyon), also called the “crown of creation” (keter ha-beri’ah), since “all created beings are dependent on it,” and the “splendor of the indifferent one” (zohar ha-ah≥dut ha-shaveh), which is applied to either Keter or Ein Sof.56 Although the source is not mentioned explicitly, Frommann’s words are based on the description of the second of the thirty-two paths delineated by Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi in the introduction to his commentary on Sefer Yetzirah.57 Frommann supports his claim by referring to the “opinion of all the Kabbalists” (da‘at kol ha-mekkubalim) based on a passage in Sefer Yetzirah where the first of the ten sefirot is designated as the “spirit of the living God” (ruah≥ elohim h≥ayyim), which is further divided into the triad of voice (kol), breath (ruah≥), and speech (dibbur). Frommann also mentions the commentary of the “great Kabbalist, R. Aaron, the head of the academy in Babylonia,” to this text, a source that he likely copied from the commentary on Sefer Yetzirah by Moses Botaril, which was printed in the editio princeps of Mantua 1562 and republished in many subsequent editions. Explicating the name of Jesus (yeshu‘a), which was communicated by the angel to Mary (Luke 1:31), Frommann mentions the exegetical gloss in Matthew, “for he will save his people from their sins” (1:21), and then quotes a passage from the Zohar wherein the Messiah is depicted as bearing the hardships that come upon Israel as a consequence of transgressing the law. The zoharic homilist, quite naturally, links this idea to the verse “But he was wounded because of our sins, crushed because of our iniquities” (Isa. 53:5), a text, I might add, that was cited as the scriptural evidence to explain the suffering endured by Sabbatai Tzevi.58 In his commentary to Luke 18:20–22, Frommann refers again to this zoharic passage. The scriptural context in this case is the response of Jesus to a certain ruler that even though he has kept all the commandments, he cannot gain the heavenly treasure unless he demonstrates his love for God and sells all that he owns and distributes his wealth to the poor. I will cite Frommann’s comments in full: “You know the commandments” (Luke 18:20) that pertain between one person and another. “You still lack one thing” (ibid., 18:22), that is, the love of God “with all your heart, all your soul, and all your might” (Deut.

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6:5). For according to this matter a person is commanded to take and to disperse all the treasures of his house in love . . . and this verse, and others like it, are the foundation for the whole teaching of the apostles who said explicitly that a person does not merit the life of the world to come on account of one’s good actions but rather only through one’s true and perfect faith in accord with what the prophet said “the righteous man shall live in his faith” (Hab. 2:4) . . . to instruct about the depth of the secret of the commandments, and it is impossible for someone to fulfill even the first commandment of the Decalogue according to its law and its specifications, and hence one is in the category of “Cursed be one who will not uphold the words of this teaching and observe them” (Deut. 27:26). Since it is impossible for one to endure all the afflictions of Israel on account of the transgressions of the Torah, the Messiah will “assume and take them,” according to the dictum of Rashbi in the Zohar Vayakhel. One must dwell beneath the wings of Messiah so that one will be saved through his righteousness, as it is said, “and by his bruises we were healed” (Isa. 53:5).59

Casting the language of Jesus in rabbinic parlance, the person may have fulfilled all the commandments that relate to the intersubjective sphere (bein adam le-adam) but still lack the essential commandment to love God, the decree that exemplifies the obligations between the human and the divine (bein adam la-makom), which necessitate relinquishing one’s material possessions and distributing them to the needy. We have here validation of the standard apostolic credo—associated more specifically with Paul—of justification by faith rather than works. And yet, as Frommann insists, it is a mistake to educe from this shift that the foundation of the Christian religion is the nullification of the Mosaic Torah on account of the severity of its duties. Quite to the contrary, the stipulation that one must be prepared to relinquish all one’s material wealth to fulfill the obligation of sanctification of the name (kiddush ha-shem) underscores that the law of Jesus (torat yeshu‘a) is qualitatively more exacting than the law of Moses (torat moshe).60 It is thus understandable why Frommann refers to the cardinal rule of Jesus as the “depth of the secret of the commandments” (omek sod ha-mitzvot), which he elicits from the verse “the righteous man shall live in his faith” (Hab. 2:4).61 I surmise that this rendering of the Pauline doctrine betrays a distinct Sabbatean dimension.62 In support of this interpretation, I note that the verse from Habakkuk was frequently applied to Sabbatai Tzevi, since the first letters of tzaddik be-emunato yih≥yeh spell tzevi, an encoded allusion to the Messiah.63 To be even more precise, this

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verse is invoked by Sabbateans to advance the view that the redeemer is the personification, embodiment, or incarnation of faith (emunah), a symbolic correspondence that is applied by Frommann to Jesus, the savior (mashiah≥), who is the glory (kavod) and the angel of the covenant (mal’akh ha-berit).64 As Nathan of Gaza expressed it, maybe reflecting a Christian influence,65 the most important of all the precepts is to have faith in Sabbatai Tzevi, for by having such faith one establishes the Torah in its entirety, and hence all the other rituals can be abrogated. Nathan repeatedly relates this idea to the passage in the Babylonian Talmud according to which the prophet Habakkuk was said to have reduced the 613 commandments to the verse “the righteous man lives through his faith.”66 The belief in the Messiah, therefore, betokens the fulfillment of Torah, which is realized in the one commandment that comprises all the commandments. The conjecture that Frommann’s ideal reflects the Sabbatean understanding is corroborated by the end of the passage where reference is made to the aforementioned zoharic text in which the suffering of the redeemer is said to atone for the sins of the people of Israel that arise invariably and inevitably on account of their inability to execute the law, a sentiment very close to the logic of Paul’s argument for the supremacy of faith over deed. Moreover, according to Frommann, this is the intent of the parable of Jesus concerning the new and old garments (Luke 5:36): the old garment is the Written Torah that the Israelites received at Sinai together with the Oral Torah of the Pharisees, which appreciably augmented the number of regulations found in the former,67 and the new garment is the Torah revealed by the Messiah that is engraved and fixed on the heart of the person. Many of the laws prohibited in the old covenant will be permitted in the new one and many of the customs will be abolished; but these changes facilitate restoring the crown of Torah to its ancient status.68 It is surely noteworthy that in his commentary on Jesus’ declaration that one must hear his words and act on them (Luke 6:47), Frommann cites the maxim attributed to Simeon ben Gamliel,69 “The essence is not study but action” (ki lo ha-midrash hu ikkar ella ha-ma‘aseh).70 I see no reason to doubt the sincerity of Frommann’s appropriation of this pronouncement, which quintessentially illustrates the rabbinic ethos, in the effort to ascribe to Jesus the priority of practice over theory. The infringement of ceremonial rites induced by the epiphany of the messianic kingship (malkhut ha-mashiah≥) portends the implementation of the true intent of the law, a knowledge of the secrets of the commandments that brings about the deliverance from the darkness of Pharisaic servitude to the light of redemption.71

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Commenting on the critique in Luke 11:39–42 of the Pharisaic penchant to focus on external rituals (connected specifically to the washing of the hands before partaking of a meal) rather than on doing justice and loving God, Frommann writes, “They should not be concerned with and obsess over impure foods about which the Lord did not command, for then they will discern that foods do not contaminate the soul but transgressions do, and the merciful one desires the heart. Accordingly, those very things that were prohibited in the Torah of Moses will become permissible in the days of the Messiah.”72 Significantly, Frommann adds that the individuals who criticize the words of Jesus responding to the Pharisees—clearly an allusion to Jewish readers through the centuries and in his own time—have not “fathomed the fear of the Lord or the secret of his commandments, and they do not have the heart to comprehend at all the words of the sages and their enigmas.”73 Just as Jesus was not interested in eradicating the external ritual, which relates to the cleanliness of the body, but only in pointing out that the internal worth, which concerns the purity of the soul, should be given precedence, so in the endtime the law is not terminated but its spiritual meaning will prevail and the secret of the divine commandments will be unconditionally disclosed. The eschatological beatitude is thus described in a prototypically rabbinic way as referring to “matters that belong to the issues of the soul, for example, the gift of the Holy Spirit and its influence in the heart of man, to recognize his Creator with a true knowledge, to understand and to comprehend his Torah and the secret of his commandments, so that he will learn and teach, observe, fulfill, and establish his words, and ascend to see his face, the countenance of the presence [penei ha-shekhinah], who dwells upon the cherubim in the heavenly heights . . . and this is the true fortune in the life of the world to come, for this is the deportment of the soul and the goal of the creation of the human being, and this is the intention of the Torah, the commandments, and all of its secrets . . . to make one worthy of ascending to see the countenance of the Lord of hosts and to derive pleasure from the splendor of his presence.”74 This is the implication of Frommann’s explanation of the designation “Lord of the Sabbath” (adon ha-shabbat) assigned to Jesus (Luke 6:5): “This hints at the fact that in the days of Messiah the Sabbath will not be on a fixed day, for all the days of Messiah will be entirely Sabbath.”75 Frommann refers to section 90 of Midrash Tehillim, but it seems that what he intended were the comments in section 92, where the verse “A psalm, a song for the Sabbath day” (Ps. 92:1) is applied to the seventh world created by God, the world that is “entirely Sabbath and eternal repose” (she-kullo shabbat

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u-menuh≥ah le-h≥ayyei ha-olam).76 Even closer to the point he is making are other rabbinic texts, connected eisegetically to the same verse from Psalms, wherein the eschatological future (atid lavo),77 the world to come (olam ha-ba),78 or the seventh millennium79 are respectively designated as the “day that is entirely Sabbath” (yom she-kullo shabbat). From the christological angle, the typological identification of Jesus as the Sabbath calls attention to the belief that the savior represents the soteriological fulfillment of the Sabbath and as such true rest is realized through him rather than by observing the ritual.80 Noticeably, this is the intent of the continuation of the passage in Luke where it is recounted that Jesus presumably desecrated the Sabbath by healing the withered hand of a man. His act is no desecration, however, not only because it is halakhically acceptable to heal on the Sabbath if one can save another’s life81—the rationale that Jesus offers misleadingly (Luke 6:9) insofar as there is no unequivocal indication that the man was confronted with a fatal situation—but, more profoundly, as the hypostatic instantiation of the Sabbath the Messiah is no longer constricted by the laws pertaining to Sabbath. An analogous argument was made on behalf of Sabbatai Tzevi by his followers who argued that he corresponded to the seventh millennium and that he ascended through the secret of the Sabbath to the highest aspect of the godhead wherein all distinctions and dualities are obliterated.82 I will turn now to another extract that sheds more light on the kabbalistic influence, and possibly also the residual effect of Sabbatean messianism, on Frommann’s view of the salvation brought about by Jesus. Expounding the angel’s words to Mary that the kingdom of Jesus would have no end (Luke 1:33), Frommann writes: Thus, against your will you admit that his kingdom and his dominion will be in the eternal world, in the world that is entirely long, for no change, alteration, or death pertains there. I made note of this already in the introduction and there I offered a good explanation with conclusive proofs that according to our holy Torah and the words of the sages, blessed be their memory, the kingdom of the Messiah is not from this lower world and he has no portion in it at all, for the level of the Messiah is not from the world of nature, as the author of Netzah≥ Yisra’el proved. And with this the allegation of the ardent people who contend and say, “Why didn’t God give the throne of David to Jesus as the angel promised his mother, for he did not sit on the throne of David and he did not rule at all in Israel?” This is true, and it is good that he did not sit on the throne of David and he did not rule at all over Israel in this world for the reasons that were mentioned.83

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We can suppose that the “ardent people” to whom Frommann is here responding were fellow Jews84 who challenged the Christian conviction regarding the messianic status of Jesus by noting that he did not fulfill a basic element associated with the messianic ideal, the promise of sociopolitical restoration and the return of sovereignty to a kingly leader who traces his lineage back to the Davidic throne.85 This, they assume, is implied even by the words of the angel to Mary that Jesus “will reign over the house of Jacob forever, and of his kingdom there will be no end” (Luke 1:33). Frommann turns the argument on its head by noting that the fact that Jesus has not been accorded dominion in the historical plane is actually a sign of his messiahship, which occasions a spiritual redemption (ge’ullah ruh≥anit) as opposed to a physical redemption (ge’ullah gufanit).86 Rather than reading the first part of the promise ethnocentrically, it connotes that “all the nations are called by the name Jacob, for all the world will be one aggregate.”87 The second part states explicitly that his kingdom has no end, which is to say, the messianic kingship (malkhut ha-mashiah≥) is removed from this “lower world” (olam ha-shafel), the realm of conditionality subject to generation and corruption.88 Redemption is not a matter of the historical realm but of the “eternal world” (olam ha-nitzh≥i), the domain that is described by one of the rabbinic expressions for the world to come (olam ha-ba), a “world that is entirely long” (olam she-kullo arokh), which is associated exegetically with the biblical depiction of the reward for honoring one’s mother and father, “so that your days may be prolonged” (Exod. 20:12).89 For Frommann, the scriptural and rabbinic belief alludes to the fact that the kingdom of the Messiah—the knowledge of the secrets and mysteries of the kingdom of heaven (malkhut shamayim), the gnosis revealed in the famous parable of the sower,90 which corresponds theosophically to the Shekhinah91 and psychologically to the attribute of humility92—is not from the world of nature (olam ha-teva), an idea that is buttressed as well by reference to a passage in the Netzah≥ Yisra’el of the Maharal of Prague where it is stated explicitly that the “gradation of the Messiah is separated from this physical, natural world” and thus he “dwells amongst the impoverished . . . and amongst those who endure diseases.”93 This passage is repeated in support of Frommann’s interpretation of Jesus’ statement “Blessed is he who is not scandalized because of me” (Luke 7:23), a deliberation that verifies my previous supposition regarding the target audience of his exegesis: For the disciples of John and many other people, confused people, people of this world, thought that the messianic king will reign like a king of flesh and blood. Thus he warned them not to think evil thoughts like

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this and not to reject him because he is loathed and shunned by men, for his kingdom is not from this lower world, since the whole matter of the Messiah is divine and not corporeal, as the author of Netzah≥ Yisra’el, 48b, has proven.94 And this was a matter in which all of the community of Israel stumbled until this day. And this man is Jesus . . . and he is to them “a stone men strike against, a rock men stumble over, a trap and a snare” (Isa. 8:14). Even though they fell and were broken, they were entrapped and ensnared, they have no eyes to see and no heart to comprehend that they act foolishly, and they sinned and rebelled against the Lord by rejecting his anointed one, and in their anticipation they expect the Messiah to make them rich, to saddle them on horses, to seat them in a banquet like princes, and they will be joyous in eating and drinking and in every kind of music and pleasure. This is lunacy and an empty hope, the false hope of this day, but it was not the desire of the prophets or the yearning of the righteous.95

As we might expect, in Frommann’s mind, it is erroneous to distinguish Judaism and Christianity on the grounds that the messianic ideal enunciated by the former is political and that of the latter is spiritual, a distinction repeated by numerous scholars but none with as much influence as Scholem.96 From the Jewish-Christian standpoint, the spiritualization of the soteriological is as much a Jewish as it is a Christian article of faith; indeed, the anticipation of a sociopolitical attainment is mistaken. Jesus bears witness to the fact that the Jewish idea of redemption is a matter of interiorization and not something to be realized in the external arena of history. The very suffering of the redeemer attests to his inherently alien status vis-à-vis the world.97 The point is alluded to already in the description of the savior in Zechariah 9:9 as the “victorious” and “triumphant” king, on the one hand, “yet humble” and “riding on an ass,” on the other. Putting the messianic paradox into philosophical terms, Frommann notes that there is no way to explain this because it presumes “two opposites in one subject” (shenei hafukhot be-nose eh≥ad).98 Similarly, to entertain (as a matter of faith rather than logical inference or empirical deduction) the notion of the virginal conception of Jesus, anchored in Luke 1:34–35, one must suspend the principle of noncontradiction and affirm the coexistence of opposites in a being that is presumed to be both divine and human.99 Frommann suggests that this doctrine is indigenous to Judaism. To authenticate this claim he cites a passage from Genesis Rabbah where the phrase “other seed” (zera ah≥er), mentioned in conjunction with Seth, whose birth took the place of Abel (Gen. 4:25), is

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interpreted as a reference to the messianic king, the one who issues from “the seed that comes from another place.” The matter of the “other place” is clarified further by Jewish esoteric doctrine: According to the opinion of the Kabbalists, the seed is an epithet for the soul of the Messiah that comes from another place, that is, from a room set aside for it alone, and they bring a proof for their words from the Zohar on Exodus100 in the verse “A new king arose etc.” (Exod. 1:8), and this is the import of the language that the soul of the Messiah is in a special chamber called the bird’s nest [ken tzippor], and in the time of his coming his soul will be revealed from that place by way of a pillar of fire, as is known, and from there it will enter into the body, and this is the “other place.”101

Obviously, there are a number of sources that could support the portrait of a redeemer displaced or estranged in this world, but I think it feasible to propose that Frommann utilized this image to respond, at least in part, to the Sabbatean fiasco. In contrast to the enthusiasm toward Sabbatai Tzevi displayed by some Christian millenarians in the seventeenth century, by the time that Frommann was active in Germany, the sense of failure associated with the pseudo-Messiah dominated the discourse. This is not to deny that previous accounts, even some that were contemporary with his life, already noted the fraudulent nature of his contention—consider, for example, John Evelyn’s discussion of Sabbatai Tzevi in his The History of the Three Late Famous Imposters, which was published in England in 1669. Christian polemicists portrayed Sabbatai Tzevi as the latest example of a litany of false messiahs; the propensity of Jews to be duped by such charlatans was used to legitimate their need to profess allegiance to Jesus.102 With the passage of time the negative portrayal and condemnation of Sabbatai Tzevi prevailed and the more positive assessments that linked the Jewish apocalyptic fervor to the millenarian hopes of the second coming of Christ faded. Moreover, later reports of his life validate the spurious nature of his claim by emphasizing that the utopian vision connected to the eschatological promise was patently not fulfilled. In some cases the calamity and farce of Sabbatai Tzevi even played a role in internal Christian theological debate, serving as a warning against the dangers of prophecy and religious enthusiasm.103 Perhaps Frommann detected in this disappointment an opportunity to win over the hearts and minds of fellow Jews.104 By emphasizing that redemption is not of this world, Frommann may have intended to provide solace to disillusioned and disenchanted coreligionists.

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I conclude with one other possible hint of the Sabbatean influence on Frommann’s Christian Kabbalah. In one passage, the reader is encouraged to consider the “secret of the Messiah and the reason for his coming, and the matter of Satan, who is the primordial serpent that brought death to the world.”105 As the author frequently does in the commentary, he says he has explicated this matter in the introduction to the treatise. From the context of the commentary, however, it appears to me that the secret connected to the struggle between Jesus and Satan has to do with the fact that the polar opposites are actually two facets of the selfsame reality, an idea that is found as well in the Sabbatean literature where the numerical equivalence of nah≥ash and mashiah≥, affirmed in older kabbalistic sources, is applied to Sabbatai Tzevi to accentuate that the savior can overpower the serpent because they ultimately derive from the same potency—the scriptural analogy often summoned to drive the point home is the fact that the ostensibly antagonistic twins, Jacob and Esau, came forth from the womb of Rebekah,106 a narrative that Frommann connects to the parable of the prodigal son in Luke 15:11–32. He is reluctant to elaborate the meaning of the scriptural tale, simply saying that it is understood by the enlightened one (maskil), although he does stress that in the Lukean parable the younger son is Esau and the elder is Jacob since the birthright legally belonged to the latter.107 It is plausible that implicit here is an older typological casting—an inversion of what is found in rabbinic homilies—such that Jacob represents the Christians (or Jesus) and Esau the Jews,108 but even that framing needs to be modified by the insight that the two are not polar opposites. To be sure, there are passages wherein the struggle between powers is described by Frommann more dualistically. Thus, in one context the matter is expressed in kabbalistic terms as the mandate of Jesus “to weaken the power and dominion of the other side [sitra ah≥ara], which is Satan and the evil inclination.”109 In a second context the man in the synagogue in Capernaum “possessed by a demon, an unclean spirit” (Luke 4:33), who confronted Jesus, symbolizes the “evil inclination, which is Satan, for he renders the person impure.” His query to Jesus, “Did you come to destroy us?” (Luke 4:34) is said to teach “that the Messiah comes to weaken the power of Satan and to destroy him from amongst human beings so that he will not have the authority to dupe them, to cause them to sin, and to kill them with a worldly death.” Frommann cites a zoharic text (from the Tikkunei Zohar stratum) in the name of Simeon ben Yoh≥ai in which the Messiah is described as the one who will wage battle to slaughter the primordial serpent,110 identified also as Samael and as the evil inclination, to rectify its

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having killed the first Adam.111 The appellation “strong man” (ish gibbor) is attributed to Jesus because “he conquers and defeats Satan and he brings the kingdom of God” and hence “it was necessary for him to be stronger and more powerful than him.”112 This messianic comportment is applied as well to the believers in Jesus and thus they are called sons of Levi, a priestly attribution that allegorically denotes that “they are purified from the filth of the serpent, from the impurity of Satan, to come close to the sanctuary, to bestow an offering to the Lord in righteousness. . . . For all the believers in the Messiah will prepare their hearts to receive upon themselves the yoke of the kingdom of heaven and to throw off the yoke of Satan . . . since the Messiah removed the spirit of impurity from the earth and he destroyed the evil, which includes Satan and the evil inclination.”113 Despite the dualistic tone of these passages, I think there is good reason to affirm that the holy and unholy forces are not to be set in binary opposition and that the very power that Jesus has to prevail upon Satan stems from the fact that the latter is the shadowy side of the former rather than two discrete powers. Support for this explanation is found in the fact that the mentioning of the secret of the Messiah and the matter of the primordial serpent is preceded by Frommann repeating the idea that “the two opposites are in one subject” (shenei hafakhim be-nose eh≥ad).114 Moreover, in the continuation of the exegesis of Jesus’ encounter with the man possessed by the demon, Frommann relates Jesus’ admonition “Be quiet” (Luke 4:35) to the fact that it was Satan’s intention to ensnare people with his words so that they would say that “he also knows the hidden and mysterious matters, for he knew that Jesus was holy, divine, and the anointed one of the God of Jacob.”115 Attributing the knowledge of Jesus to Satan does not necessarily mean identifying the two but I would suggest that in this context it does imply the dialectic of Sabbatean spirituality, which is based on the paradox that a thing is both itself and its opposite—indeed, it is itself precisely because it is its opposite. This, I contend, is the intent of Frommann’s observation that Satan has the capacity to dissimulate in such a way that deceit appears as truth. In my estimation, this was the most profound philosophical import of Sabbateanism, the facet that I have referred to as the “Marrano complex,”116 that is, living outwardly in a manner than conceals what one genuinely is inwardly. Abraham Cardoso is the most prominent example of a follower of Sabbatai Tzevi who came from the Marrano community, comprising those Iberian Jews who were forced to convert to Christianity in the last decades of the fifteenth century but who still maintained something of their Jewish identity. As Scholem and other scholars have pointed out, however, beyond the

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specific example of Cardoso the dissemination of the paradoxical ideology of Sabbateanism can only be understood in light of a widespread spiritual disposition throughout the Sephardi Diaspora brought on by the duplicity that was essential to the Marrano existence, Jew on the inside and Christian on the outside.117 Frommann, the Jew who became a Christian as an avowal rather than as a rejection of his Judaism,118 not only comprehended this mystery but instantiated it in his personal life. It may very well be that only one who crosses the border between the liturgical communities has the wherewithal to ascertain the wisdom that marks the spot where the two are rendered identical by virtue of being dissimilar. Frommann’s viewpoint on redemption may be considered “Christian” only because it is “Jewish” and “Jewish” only because it is “Christian.” This, I submit, reflects the legacy of Sabbatean messianism, which required a loosening of boundaries between the three Abrahamic religions. As I have argued elsewhere, the renegade Messiah is simultaneously Jew, Muslim, and Christian; indeed, the triangulation of the three faiths, each of which is nonetheless preserved in its own theological integrity, bespeaks the spiritual magnanimity of the savior.119 In the final analysis, however, the breach between Jew and Christian is the one most difficult to bridge precisely because Esau and Jacob are twin brothers that emerge from one womb—the greater the proximity, the greater the distance. Sabbatai Tzevi may have converted to Islam but the ultimate theological repercussion of that conversion is the blurring of the line that separates Judaism from Christianity. This is most poignantly expressed by a number of Sabbatean theologians who emphasize that the demise of Sabbatai Tzevi brought about the amelioration of the sin of Adam, language that is extremely close to Christian belief regarding the passion of Jesus.120 In the garment of Ishmael and with the body of Edom, the Jewish Messiah thus became the symbol of alienation from within rather than marginalization from without. One can apply these very words to Frommann, a compelling figure for whom to be a pious Jew demanded the faith of a Christian and to be a faithful Christian demanded the piety of the Jew. THE CAREER OF AN IDEA: MESSIANIC GNOSIS IN EARLY HASIDISM

What may we glean from the admittedly idiosyncratic example of Frommann about the messianic impulse in Judaism and Christianity more generally? I propose that the impact of Sabbateanism on this Jewish convert

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lends support to Jacob Taubes’s observation that it is necessary to remove the “road-block of interiorization which Scholem has erected to preserve in a dogmatic fashion an ‘essential’ difference between the ‘-isms’—Judaism and Christianism,” so that “a more coherent reading of the inner logic of the Messianic idea becomes possible. Internalization, or opening the inward realm, belongs essentially to the career of that ‘idea,’ if such an idea should have a career at all in an unredeemed world.”121 It is merely an “illusion” to think that redemption “happens on the stage of history. For every attempt to bring about redemption on the level of history without a transfiguration of the Messianic idea leads straight into the abyss.”122 I agree with this appraisal, although Taubes neglects the fact that Scholem himself articulated a similar sentiment when he concluded that in Judaism the Messianic idea has compelled a life lived in deferment, in which nothing can be done definitively, nothing can be irrevocably accomplished. One may say, perhaps, the Messianic idea is the real anti-existentialist idea. This makes for the greatness of Messianism, but also for its constitutional weakness. Jewish so-called Existenz possesses a tension that never finds true release; it never burns itself out. And when in our history it does discharge, then it is foolishly decried (or, one might say, unmasked) as “pseudo-Messianism.”123

On balance, however, Taubes is correct that Scholem contrasted Jewish messianism with Christian eschatology, insisting that the Jewish conception requires that the spiritual dimension be complemented by the physical instantiation on the historical plane. According to Scholem, this dynamic was severely compromised through the Sabbatean misappropriation of Lurianic messianism.124 In the case of the latter, the spiritualization of the messianic did not lead to a split between internal and external because the apocalyptic expectations were not put to the test of history; in the case of the former, the internalization of the messianic without any historical outlet did suppress the this-worldly emphasis, which in turn produced the schism between symbol and reality.125 In what strikes the ear as a gratuitously doctrinaire tone, Scholem is adamant that the “redemption of the soul without the redemption of the social body, i.e., of the nation from its historical exile, of the outward world from its broken state, has never had a Messianic meaning in Judaism.” On this point, moreover, Judaism and Christianity purportedly parted ways: according to the latter, redemption of the soul is the “essential accomplishment of the Messiah,” a possibility

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steadfastly denied by the former.126 Again, Scholem singles out Sabbateanism as an anomaly that introduced into Jewish history the “notion of a purely mystical redemption without visible historical change.” Hasidim, we are reassured, “came and restored the balance by their emphatic and clear-cut differentiation. Individual redemption is to be strictly separated from the truly Messianic redemption of all.”127 According to my reading of the early Hasidic texts that purport to preserve the teaching of Israel ben Eliezer (d. 1760), the Ba‘al Shem Tov (the Besht), Hasidim actually espoused a model of redemption that in fact avoids the dichotomy imposed by Scholem. The lack of historical outlet did not result in a rift separating the symbolic and the real; on the contrary, the consciousness of the oneness of all being, which is the epistemological and ontological subtext of the messianic secret, translates the historical into the symbolic.128 Needless to say, it lies beyond the scope of this study to engage this topic in all its complexity; but I will concentrate on a few of the characteristics that help us mark the convergence of the Christian and Hasidic paths precisely at the point of their divergence. The soterial ideal presented in several of the Hasidic documents, including the well-known letter of the Besht to his brother-in-law, Gershon of Kutov,129 and the commentary on Psalm 107, which was attributed to the Besht,130 is unambiguously a process of internal transformation.131 In one of the dicta that Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye (d. 1782) transmits in the name of his teacher, the Besht,132 the “matter of the resurrection of the dead” (inyan teh≥iyyat ha-metim) is linked together with the Messiah, who is identified further as the “secret of knowledge” (sod ha-da‘at) and the “secret of the world to come” (sod olam ha-ba).133 The three rabbinic eschatological categories—the resurrection, the Messiah, and the world to come—are collapsed into one entity whose character is specified as the secret of knowledge. That this gnosis is about informing the individual’s behavior in the present rather than a future projection about the geopolitical condition of the Jewish people may be shown from the continuation of the passage: “Thus by means of the actions of a man that he draws down upon himself in this world through his understanding [binah], he comprehends how to perform all his actions through understanding and knowledge.”134 We may deduce from other passages in Jacob Joseph’s oeuvre that the messianic gesture according to the Besht135 is linked to gazing upon the “inward spirituality of the infinite light” (penimiyyut ruh≥aniyyut or ein sof ) contained in the Hebrew letters, a visionary gnosis impelled by Torah study and prayer,136 the principal

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rites that effectuate the conjunction (devekut) of the mind with the divine vitality that infuses the fullness of existence.137 The emphasis on gnostic metamorphosis, however, should not be construed as a neutralization of the messianic, as Scholem famously proclaimed, since this would suggest that the ideal is not wholly realized.138 This is not to deny that a distinction is still upheld between the attainment of personal redemption (ge’ullah peratit) in the present and the collective redemption (ge’ullah kelalit) in the future. My point, however, is that the latter is informed by the former and hence there is nothing neutralized or rendered inoperative by the priority accorded the escape from the physical that one achieves in devekut. The innovative element of the pietistic eschatology—and “innovative” is not a chronological demarcation, which would imply that there were no precedents—is to reconfigure the ultimate redemption such that there is a reorientation with regard to the spatio-temporal realm of history. The meaning of events in the world, both in the natural and cultural spheres, is to be ascertained from the reconfiguration of the historical in light of the symbolic. Messianism, following this trajectory of thought, entails the cultivation of a spiritual consciousness such that emancipation consists of being emancipated from the bind of emancipation. The Hasidic sources suggest that some of the masters, and perchance the Besht himself, harbored the possibility that pneumatic enlightenment is itself an acute form of messianic activism and not a deferment in the least. Phenomenologically, the distended and nondual consciousness is attained as a consequence of the ascent of the soul and its incorporation into the light of the infinite. The goal of contemplation is to concentrate the mind (lekhavven mah≥ashavto bi-devekut ha-shem) until one reaches the level of Moses, the “perfect knowledge” (da‘at sheleimah) that is “above nature” (lema‘lah me-ha-teva), so that one may join together the “supernal spiritual world” (olam ha-elyon ha-ruh≥ani) and the “lower corporeal world” (olam ha-tah≥ton ha-gashmi). When the soul is preoccupied with the physical it is in a state of exile that prevents it from uniting the concealed and the revealed, the first two letters of the Tetragrammaton and the last two letters. The unification of the letters of the name is the mystical knowledge that is the essence of the redemption: And this is what is written: “And you will know that I am the Lord [vida‘tem ki ani yhvh]” (Exod. 6:7), that is, by means of knowledge [da‘at] the four letters of the name will be joined together and this is the true redemption [ha-ge’ullah amittit], and so it will be in the future in the final redemption,

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“As in the day when you went forth from Egypt, I will show him wonders” (Micah 7:16), through the intervention of Moses, the aspect of knowledge, “what was is what shall be” [mah she-hayah hu she-yihyeh] (Eccles. 1:9), “for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord [de‘ah et yhvh]” (Isa. 11:9).139

Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye utilizes the older motif that the final redeemer will be homologous to Moses, the first redeemer, to underline that redemption is about the dissemination of knowledge of the name—Moses corresponds symbolically to the “secret of knowledge” (sod ha-da‘at)—a knowledge that is not theoretical but practical, indeed a praxis with erotic overtones inasmuch as it results in the fusion of the masculine and feminine, the concealed and the revealed. Also noteworthy is the temporal aspect conveyed by the acrostic linkage of the name moshe to the first letters of the words mah she-hayah hu,140 which must be completed by the rest of the verse, mah she-hayah hu she-yihyeh, “what was is what shall be.” In consonance with what was likely the original meaning of the scriptural elocution, a version of the doctrine of the eternal recurrence is here affirmed such that what was in the beginning is what will be in the end, a reading that is found in pre-Hasidic sources as well.141 However, when refracted through the prism of the kabbalistic sense of time, which is echoed by the Besht, these words convey that the very thing that returns will always be different, since what endures is change, the ceaseless coming to be of the past in the passing away of the future. The exegetical gloss on the name of Moses as what was is what shall be indicates that the knowledge connected to the redemption is emblematic of the quintessential aspect of temporality in the compresence of past, present, and future, the metaphysical import of the Tetragrammaton.142 Confirmation of this interpretation may be drawn from the following comment of Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye: The redeemer is Moses, the secret of knowledge [sod ha-da‘at], and the matter is as I have heard from my teacher that the matter of the resurrection of the dead and the Messiah is the secret of knowledge, and the words of his mouth are elegant. When it is known that the secret of the exile of Egypt and the redemption of Egypt are in every person and in every time, in the past, future, and present, and what was is what shall be [mah she-hayah hu she-yihyeh], the query mentioned above is clarified. . . . Just as in a man the particulars of the soul that dwell in the mind [da‘at] sustain all the limbs the whole time they are joined together, so that the

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action of all the limbs will be in accord with the mind. It is as I have heard from my teacher the explanation of the verse “Whatever it is in your power to do, do with all your might” (Eccles. 9:10), that one should perform the action that one does with all one’s limbs by means of the mind, and through this there is an expansion of knowledge [hitpashshetut ha-da‘at] in all one’s limbs. Similarly, in the totality of the world there is a righteous man like Moses, the secret of knowledge, and the rest of the people of his generation, when they are united with him are all called the generation of knowledge [dor de‘ah], and this is the secret of the resurrection of the dead and the Messiah.143

The promise of the resurrection and the messianic era are reinterpreted gnostically as figurative tropes for the expansion of mindfulness that is the “likeness of the world to come” (me‘ein olam ha-ba), the infusion of the infinite vitality into the body that is garbed in the holy spirit or the letters of the Torah, which is the divinity;144 the elite achieve this through contemplation, the masses by cleaving to the elite, who incarnate the quality of Moses in each generation. Reading between the lines, we learn that the event of redemption cannot transpire in the temporal flow of the world but that it is nonetheless the very condition that accounts for the continuity of time in the world.145 It is for this reason that the resurrection of the dead and the Messiah are both identified as the secret of knowledge—the coming of what will be in the future is a restoration of what was in the past. Only one who withdraws from the temporal by recognizing its contingent nature—much as one recognizes the contingent nature of materiality by taking hold of the immateriality manifest in the constant renewal of something from nothing to engender the something that is nothing—can decipher this wisdom. Messianic consciousness is the reinscription of the world of contingency by its dissolution, a retrieval of time by its extermination.146 In spite of the commonplace notion that the Besht altered the earlier kabbalistic conception of piety by celebrating the mundane and rejecting a stringent abstention,147 the dicta reported in his name (and there seems to me no reason to doubt their trustworthiness) indicate that a kernel of the ascetic discipline persists: the two most important of the Besht’s disciples, Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye and Dov Baer, the Maggid of Mezeritch (Mie$dzyrzecz), taught that contemplative ecstasy is consequent to the quietistic stripping away of corporeality (hitpashshetut ha-gashmiyyut) and purifying the mind of materiality (h≥omriyyut). The following passage attributed to the Maggid of Mezeritch can be taken as exemplary:

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When one is conjoined to the blessed holy One, who is the master of the world [alufo shel olam], one becomes human [adam]. The blessed holy One performed several withdrawals [tzimtzumim] by way of several worlds so that there would be unity [ah≥dut] with man, who could not endure his brightness. A person must separate himself from all corporeality [gashmiyyut] so that he ascends by way of all the worlds and he will be one with the blessed holy One until he is nullified from existence [yevutal mi-metzi’ut] and then he is called “human.”148

Just as the infinity of the godhead has to be contracted in the guise of the multiple worlds, so that the human being could endure the light and be united thereto, the human being, in order to be unified with the divine, has to be divested of all corporeality and annihilated completely from existence that is seemingly separate from godliness. This divestiture, however, is concurrently an investiture, a transfiguration of the somatic,149 which holds the key to understanding the much discussed Hasidic principle of worship through corporeality (avodah be-gashmiyyut). I hope to address this topic in a separate study, but suffice it here to consider the articulation of this idea in another passage transmitted as a teaching of the Maggid of Mezeritch: When a person prays and studies, and speaks words with letters, this is called “stones,” for the letters are called stones.150 However, [a person] knows in truth that it is not only when he is studying or praying that he comes to the letters but rather in everything that he does all is by means of the letters, and everything is worship for a higher need [avodah tzorekh gavoha],151 for “the Lord made everything for a purpose” (Prov. 16:4), that is to say, all that he created was for his glory, but vis-à-vis the blessed holy One he and his glory are one. It follows that everything is a disclosure of his divinity, blessed be he, which is his glory, and in truth even when he is occupied with business transactions it is by means of speech, which is through the letters, and hence by means of the business transactions he emits the twenty-two letters and he brings them to the world for rectification. . . . Everything comes to repair that which has fallen, but the person has fallen and is far from the letters, and he is in a state of brokenness himself, but when he subdues his materiality, he comprehends and draws near,152 and he knows that all is one.153

The example of business serves as paradigm for all forms of prosaic behavior that do not appear to have any value in the pursuit of a devout lifestyle. One

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who is enlightened, however, appreciates that every action can become a way of serving God, for everything that one does—not simply everything that one says—is through the agency of the letters, a point that necessarily follows from the assumption that the letters are both the instruments of divine creativity and the substance of all that is created.154 The phrase worship for a higher need is synonymous with worship through corporeality.155 What is intended by this notion was not an unqualified celebration of the physical, let alone the potential for deliberately antinomian actions.156 Nor am I convinced that “corporeal worship is grounded in the dialectical relationship between matter and form,” which makes it mandatory for one to “pass through the material stage to reach the spiritual goal.”157 The explanatory model I am proposing is based on the transformation of the carnal body into the linguistic body, the restoration of all things to their “first matter” (h≥omer ha-rishon).158 This is the import of Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye’s comment that the verse “In all your ways know him” (Prov. 3:6) imparts that through the ritual (mitzvah) that is enacted somatically one makes of the corporeal (gashmi) something spiritual (ruh≥ani).159 According to the interpretation of this verse ascribed to the Besht, an individual must “relegate his mind to every corporeal thing [litten ha-da‘at be-khol davar gashmi] to elevate it and to bind it, to unite the tent160 so that it will be one.”161 The theurgical dynamic of knowing God in all of one’s ways in the world is predicated on the admittedly incomprehensible mystery of the metaphysical being garbed in the physical, the spiritual in the material.162 The releasing of the sparks of divinity through seemingly pedestrian acts that involve the flesh is possible only because of the assumption regarding the true nature of the corporeal—I do not pretend that the majority of Hasidim ever understood this kabbalistic principle but this does not mean the masters, who promulgated the ideational foundation for the movement, did not maintain this belief, much as today millions of people benefit from digital technology without knowing a thing about computer science.163 The pietistic ideal is based on perceiving the immanence of the divine in all things, but this perception, in turn, rests on contemplating the spiritual luminosity clothed in the letters so that the base physicality morphs into the semiotic body,164 the body whose limbs are the letters comprised in the alef, the wisdom (h≥okhmah) or thought (mah≥ashavah) that is the root of all the alphabetic ciphers and hence the ontic source of all being (alufo shel olam), the oneness of infinity (ah≥dut ha-ein sof ).165 Based on an older orthographic decoding of the alef in kabbalistic sources as made up of a yod on top, a vav in the middle, and a yod on the bottom,166 this letter can be demarcated as an encoded reference to the Tetragrammaton—the

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numerical sum of yod, vav, and yod (10 + 6 + 10) is the same as YHVH (10 + 5 + 6 + 5). The alef is the name by which the nameless is vocalized, the garment through which the non-apparent becomes apparent, the vestment in which the infinite that transcends spatial locality is assigned the title “place” (makom), the materialization of the divine in the concatenation of worlds that are comprised in the Hebrew letters.167 The three modes of theological discourse, creation, revelation, and redemption, all meet in this point, but for our purposes the first and third are most salient since they illustrate how the cosmogonical and eschatological are two sides of one coin. Reiterating a fundamental doctrine of Jewish esotericism, which he reportedly heard from the Besht, Jacob Joseph writes that “just as there are twenty-two letters in the speech of Torah and prayer, so in all the material and corporeal entities of the world there are also the twenty-two letters through which the world and everything that is in it was created. . . . The letters are garbed in the matter of the entities of the world in several coverings, garments, and shells, and within the letters there dwells the spirituality of the blessed holy One, and thus his glory, blessed be he, ‘fills the whole earth’ (Isa. 6:3) and all that is in it, ‘there is no place devoid of him’ as it is explained in the Tikkunim.”168 The Hasidic innovation is to juxtapose the doctrine of radical divine immanence—expressed by the paraphrase of Isaiah 6:3 and the oft-cited passage from Tikkunei Zohar169—with the archaic belief that the substance of the material universe is composed of the Hebrew letters. Insofar as the spirituality of the divine is clothed in the letters, it follows that nature, the icon of the invisible, is the book in which the ineffable is inscribed. To probe the depth of this teaching, we must bear in mind the duplicitous function of the garment as that which concomitantly reveals and conceals, indeed it reveals in the manner that it conceals and conceals in the manner that it reveals. Therefore, we can speak of the world manifesting the divine presence only if we apprehend that this manifestation is an occlusion—precisely by hiding the infinite light does finite nature expose it. The paradox of the salvific gnosis is transmitted by Jacob Joseph as the ipsima verba of the Besht: “If a person knows that the blessed holy One is concealed there, this is no concealment . . . and this is what is written ‘I will hide my face’ (Deut. 31:18) from them, that is, he will be concealed from them, for they will not know that the blessed holy One is there in concealment. . . . When the men of knowledge [anshei ha-da‘at] know of this concealment, it is not a concealment in relation to them.”170 Salvation ensues from the

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concealment being disclosed as concealment—the secret is obtained from the iteration haster astir in the deuteronomistic verse, which is mystically read as “I will conceal the concealment”171—in uncovering the world as the exile of the divine presence,172 the facade that lays bare the amorphous essence by disguising it. I have elsewhere utilized the locution apophatic embodiment to name this dialectical understanding of worldhood (ha-olam) as concealment (he‘lem).173 The task of contemplation is to see through—rather than to discard—the veil as veil, to comprehend that concealment is what makes disclosure possible, since what is disclosed can only be disclosed to the extent that it is concealed. The messianic moment is described as a seeing of the divine glory without any garment—based on several key verses such as Isaiah 30:20, 40:5, 52:8—but the enlightened one knows that the promise to see without any garment implies that there is no seeing without a garment, that is, the light of the infinite cannot be envisioned except through the material world, which is constituted ontically by the letters that are contained within the name. This, in a nutshell, is the messianic mystery. The soteric wisdom is discerned by the “men of knowledge,” those who have divested themselves of the gross materiality and assumed the form of the transfigured corporeality, the body as letter. This transubstantiation— which is also portrayed in the hierarchical language of the submission of matter to form174 or as the act of contrition and self-abnegation175—can be attained in the present and not merely as a prolepsis of what will be realized unreservedly in some indeterminate future. This is not to deny that the Besht and the Hasidic masters who developed his teachings continued to speak of the eschaton (ketz), which is depicted (utilizing the language of Lurianic Kabbalah) as the terminus of the process of purification (berur) of the sparks (nitzotzot) that were entrapped in the demonic shells (kelippot) as a consequence of the cataclysmic breaking of the vessels (shevirat hakelim).176 My contention, however, is that when these idioms are decoded symbolically, they radically modify the meaning of eschatological futurity: the final redemption is a spiritual modulation and not a political-geographical modification, a logical consequence of the symbolic understanding of the nature of what is calculated as real. There is therefore no justification to preserve the “clear-cut differentiation” between the two types of liberation along the lines drawn by Scholem. I would go so far as to say that redemption, both individual and collective, according to the nomenclature of the Hasidic masters, is mainly a process of spiritual reprieve and not the formation of a sociopolitical sovereignty

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in the spatio-temporal arena of history. As Gedaliah of Lunitz (Iliniec), a disciple of Jacob Joseph, put it, In the moment that the blessed holy One illumines the eyes of the intellect of a person in the individual redemption [bi-ge’ullah peratiyyut] when he reigns over his spirit to fulfill a certain commandment . . . then the gates of light are opened to him . . . and everything is rectified and blameworthy acts become for him like meritorious acts,177 as the Besht, may his memory be for a blessing, said in the matter of “Come near to my soul and redeem me” (Ps. 69:19): this is a prayer concerning the individual redemption of his soul from the exile of the evil inclination, and when everyone will be redeemed in the individual redemption, then afterward there will be the collective redemption [ge’ullah kelaliyyut] and the Messiah will come.178

Expectedly, the rhetoric of the future arrival of a personal Messiah is preserved in this text. It is not implausible that it should be interpreted metaphorically but for our purposes what is far more important is that the nature of the collective redemption is on a par with the personal redemption: both allude to a spiritually enriched way of being that is beyond the duality of guilt and innocence, transgression and righteousness, a state of perfection that is characteristic of repentance whereby the opposition that informs the nomian axiology is surmounted.179 The two forms of redemption alleviate the suffering of the soul and release it from the exilic incarceration marked by the dominance of the evil inclination and its functioning as an autonomous force separated from the good inclination. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, the disciple of the Maggid of Mezeritch, expressed a similar understanding of the messianic: This is what is written: “Come near to my soul and redeem me” and afterward “free me from my enemies” (Ps. 69:19), that is, initially he requests that redemption will come to his soul from all the nations of the world, for they are the connection to the external thought [hitkashsherut be-mah≥ashevet h≥utz], and then perforce he will be freed from his enemies, which is the abrogation of the shell [bittul ha-kelippah] and the amelioration of judgments [hamtakat dinin]. And this is what the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, the Messiah comes only when the mind is diverted [be-hessah≥ ha-da‘at],180 that is, for knowledge comprises all the attributes from the seven days of the edifice and it is not an attribute in itself,181 and

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the redemption, which must be [in relation to] the seventy182 nations of the world, cannot come about unless one reaches above knowledge, that one removes oneself from knowledge, and there will be no intermediary between one and God, blessed be he, and no barrier in the world, but rather true unity. . . . But now prior to the coming of the Messiah knowledge unifies all the creatures to God, blessed be he, and nullifies evil from them and causes good to overflow to them. . . . And this is what the rabbis, blessed be their memory, said, “Great is knowledge [de‘ah] that is given between two letters, as it says ‘For the Lord is a cognizant God’ [ki el de‘ot yhvh] (1 Sam. 2:3),”183 for the knowledge unifies all the names from below to above and it unites the branch to the root, which is the name YHWH . . . and in all the creatures entirely there is the holiness of his names, blessed be he, for the Infinite, blessed be he, encompasses all worlds and fills all worlds . . . and through his mind [be-da‘ato] a person elevates them to their source and unites them to the Infinite, blessed be he. In this manner was [the function of] the Temple . . . and now in place of the Temple by means of the worthy man all the created beings are united to their source and overflow goodness. Similarly, the human being is unified through the medium of created beings, for now, prior to the coming of the Messiah, there cannot be the true unity without an intermediary, as the knowledge which is the unity, is called delight, and now prior to the coming of the Messiah it is impossible for a human being to endure the supernal delight like this true unity without any intermediary.184

From this passage we obtain a better sense that the messianic gnosis is an elevation of the multiplicity of entities to their source in the Infinite, a reattachment of the branch to the root. The difference between the present and the future is that now it is not possible for a human being to experience the delight of the true unity except through an intermediary. Contrary to scholars who have argued that Hasidism betrays a privileging of the psychological over the theosophical, in my judgment, it is pertinent to say that the coalescence of the two is highlighted in a more accessible fashion than previous treatises on kabbalistic moral piety such that the accent is indeed placed on the psychological, but the change in emphasis does not signal a drastic departure. The soul, after all, is characterized uniformly by Hasidic masters as being consubstantial with the divine; this is the ontological basis undergirding the experience of devekut—the soul can be conjoined to the One because it is of the same essence. Every act of unification, consequently, is a restitution, a feat of penitence, teshuvah, a word that etymologically means

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to return. The rabbinic teaching that the redemption is dependent ultimately on repentance185 is transposed into a mystical conception: to be redeemed is to remove all barriers of separation and to be restored via the conjunction of thought to the incomposite oneness (ah≥dut pashut) of the source, the light of the Infinite (or ein sof ), in which the particularity of the manifold is no longer discernible.186 From the consubstantiality of Israel and the divine, it follows as well that the exile of the soul is identical to the exile of the Shekhinah. To cite one relevant passage from Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye: The shell is called curse, which is the wayward thought [mah≥ashavah zarah],187 and this is the exile of the Shekhinah amidst the depth of the shells. This is [the meaning of] what is written, “Come near my soul and redeem me,” that is, to uplift the parts of the soul, which are the sparks of the Shekhinah, from the shell to holiness is called redemption. And as I have heard from my teacher, it is necessary to pray concerning the exile of one’s soul, spirit, and pneuma, which are in proximity to the evil inclination.188

The instruction that Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye received from his teacher, affixed exegetically to Psalm 69:19, is that just as the physical exile is consequent to the exile of the soul,189 so the physical redemption is dependent on spiritual redemption, not simply in a causal way such that the latter chronologically precedes the former; the intent rather is that the liberated mind understands that freedom from the evil inclination—which means seeing that the evil inclination is an aspect of the good—is the liberation of the corporeal.190 The Beshtian teaching is elaborated in a second passage by Gedaliah of Lunitz: When the mentioning of the exodus from Egypt in our hearts triggers one to come to the psychic redemption [ge’ullah nafshiyyut], then salvation will inevitably occur, for the bodily redemption [ge’ullah ha-gufaniyyut] will take place, just as the Besht, may the memory of the righteous and holy one be for a blessing, said that the essence of our prayer concerning redemption must be about the individual redemption [ge’ullah peratiyyut], which is the redemption of the soul [ge’ullat ha-nefesh], and this is [the meaning of ] “Come near to my soul and redeem me,” to my soul precisely.191

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Many more texts could have been adduced, but for the purposes of this analysis what I have mentioned is adequate enough to demonstrate that the imminence of the messianic aspiration for early Hasidic masters, in the words of the Besht’s grandson, Moses H≥ ayyim Ephraim of Sudlykow, involved being aroused from the deceitful slumber of exile and awakening to the perfect truth of redemption.192 To be released from physical exile (galut ha-gashmi), the subjection of the people of Israel to the gentile nations, one must be first liberated from spiritual exile (galut ha-ruh≥ani), subservience to the evil inclination.193 In the imagery frequently used by Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, exile is correlated with oblivion (shekhih≥ah) and redemption with reminiscence (zekhirah), the former personified by Pharaoh and the latter by Moses and/or Joseph.194 The radiance of knowing dispels the darkness of forgetfulness and this is the reparation (tikkun) of the inside and the outside. The grandson of the Besht thus reports a tradition (kabbalah) received from him to the effect that the secret of knowledge is “verily the aspect of the coming of the Messiah” (mammash beh≥inat bi’at mashiah≥).195 To continue to impose the distinction between internal and external is to think from the impoverished state of one who is still dreaming; the enlightened one knows that the opposites are identical in virtue of being nonidentical and thus the inner conversion of the soul is at the same time an outer renovation in the ontic status of the world. Addressing this issue directly, Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye mused that knowledge brings about the aspect of understanding, which is modesty and humility, as is known, and all this when [the verse] “Come near my soul and redeem me” [is fulfilled], which is in the days of redemption, whether in general or in particular [bein bi-khelal o bi-ferat], then this will be an expansion of knowledge [hitpashshetut ha-da‘at], which is not the case in the days of exile, whether in general or in particular, when a person is in the days of diminution and exile [bi-yemei ha-katnut ve-ha-galut], then the knowledge disappears . . . and this is called the disappearance of knowledge [histallekut ha-da‘at].196

There is no substantive difference between the general and the particular; in the case of both, redemption consists of the augmentation of consciousness making amends for the lack thereof. The mystical quietism is apposite

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to, and not opposite from, messianic activism. The interiorization of the religious life does not promote an a-historical resignation; rather it provides an alternative way to comprehend the historical.197 While it would be perilous to ignore blatant discrepancies between the Jewish-Christian and Hasidic eschatologies, such as the resistance on the part of the latter to the hypernomianism that informed the former, the arresting affinities stemming from a shared de-historicized messianism cannot be denied.198 Frommann, nourished as he was by the wellsprings of kabbalistic lore, provides a prism through which these affinities become especially apparent. To be beholden to the mystery of faith is to concede that the collective redemption, or the redemption of the social body, is itself a facet of the individual redemption, a change in consciousness rather than the establishment of a utopian society. The kingdom of God, on this score, is a matter of the heart: the acquisition of the apprehension that confounds ignorance. This secret has been divulged by Christians and Kabbalists alike, albeit from disparate cultural milieus.

NOTES 1. Evangelium Lucae pars prior ab erudito proselyto Henr. Christ. Imman. Frommanno Doct. Med. in linguam ebraeam transferri ac explicari curauit ediditque Io. Henr. Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1735), part 1, 52a (henceforth cited as Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1). On the reluctance to elaborate on a particular subject, see 74b, 103a. My gratitude to Jorge Quiñónez for generously drawing my attention to a number of sources that helped clarify some crucial matters related to Frommann’s biography. 2. Elliot R. Wolfson, Abraham Abulafia—Kabbalist and Prophet: Hermeneutics, Theosophy, and Theurgy (Los Angeles: Cherub Press, 2000), 204–28; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond: Law and Ethics in Kabbalistic Mysticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 186–285; Wolfson, Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menah≥em Mendel Schneerson (New York: Columbia University Press. 2009), 55–58, 161–99. 3. Elisheva Carlebach, “Jewish Responses to Christianity in Reformation Germany,” in Jews, Judaism, and the Reformation in Sixteenth-Century Germany, ed. Dean Phillip Bell and Stephen G. Burnett (Leiden: Brill, 2006), 464. 4. For a sensitive account of this figural reading of Judaism as what is always “otherwise,” see Jill Robbins, Prodigal Son/Elder Brother: Interpretation and Alterity in Augustine, Petrarch, Kafka, Levinas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 1–20. 5. Elliot R. Wolfson, “Messianism in the Christian Kabbalah of Johann Kemper,” in Millenarianism and Messianism in the Early Modern European Culture: Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, ed. Matt D. Goldish and Richard H. Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), 139–87. The discussion here is a reworking of that essay, 140–42. Independently, the thought of this apostate was explored by Shifra Asulin, “Another Glance

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at Sabbatianism, Conversion, and Hebraism in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Scrutinizing the Character of Johan Kempper of Uppsala, or Moshe Son of Aharon of Cracow,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 17 (2001): 423–70 (Hebrew). 6. On the status quaestionis of this topic, see the thorough analysis of Daniel Abrams, “The Invention of the Zohar as a Book: On the Assumptions and Expectations of the Kabbalists and Modern Scholars,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 19 (2009): 7–142. 7. A brief biographical sketch is found in The Gospel of Luke with a Commentary by Dr. Immanuel H. C. Frommann and Dr. Raphael Hirsch Biesenthal ( Jerusalem: Keren Ahvah Meshihit, 2001), 7–8 (Hebrew). 8. See the note to the reader included in the edition of Frommann’s commentary published and completed by Biesenthal with the title Sefer Besorah Tovah al pi ha-Mevasser Lukas (Berlin, 1851). 9. Johann Heinrich Raphael Biesenthal, “Heinrich Christian Immanuel Frommann. Geschichte eines Proselyten,” Saat auf Hoffnung 6 (1869): 217–42; Biesenthal, “Dr. Heinrich Christian Immanuel Frommann,” in Leben von den Toten. Eine Sammlung von Lebensbildern gläubiger Christen aus dem Volke Israel, ed. Carl Axenfeld (Barmen, 1874), 1–31; Pinchas E. Lapide, Hebrew in the Church: The Foundations of Jewish-Christian Dialogue (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1985), 77; Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 47–57; Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Jewish Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 59, 85–86, 168; Jorge Quiñónez, “An Introductory Bibliography to Jechiel Zebi Herschensohn-Lichtenstein (1831–1912),” Kesher 15 (2002): 84; David Dowdey, Jewish-Christian Relations in Eighteenth-Century Germany: Textual Studies on German Archival Holdings, 1729–1742 (Lewiston, Maine: Edwin Mellen Press, 2006), 51–97. See also Thomas J. Müller, “Das Archivalien zu J. H. Callenberg und dem Institutum Judaicum,” in Von Halle nach Jerusalem. Konnferenzbeiträge, ed. Eveline Goodman-Thau and Walter Betz (Halle: Wittenberg, 1994), 24–44; Walter Beltz, ed., Übersetzungen und Übersetzer im Verlag J. H. Callenberg, Internationales Kolloquium in Halle (Saale) vom 22.-24. Mai 1995 (Halle, 1995); Christoph Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus und Judenmission. Johann Heinrich Callenbergs Institutum Judaicum und dessen Freundenkreis (1728–1736) (Tübingen: Verlag der Franckeschen Stiftungen Halle im Max Niemeyer, 2004), 99–104, 140–42, 165–71; Rymatzki, “Die Theologische Argumentation der auf den Reisen Verteilten Institutstraktate und das Jüdische Echo darauf im Spiegel der Institutskorrespondenz,” Kwartalnik Historii Z{ydów [Jewish History Quarterly] 4 (2006): 615–26. 10. Sefer Besorah Tovah al pi ha-mevasser Lukas . . . doz iz taitsh doz bukh fun der guten botshaft durkh Lukas, ed. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1730); Ma‘aše ha-sheluh≥im . . . dos bukh fun den geshikhten der shlokhim, ed. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1731); Epistola ad Hebraeos in germanicum iudaeorum idioma transferri, ed. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1734). Another work in Yiddish written by Frommann and edited by Callenberg to which I have found reference is Metempsychosis Emendatrix Judaicogermanice Seorsum Recudi (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1747). Two other works sometimes attributed to Frommann, the translation of the Sermon on the Mount published as Eyne shene Droshe velkhe Yeshua ha-Meshiakh gehaltn hot fun der zeligkayt, ed. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1730), and the translation of the First Letter of John published as Der este brif dez hayligen Yoh≥anan, ed. Johann Heinrich

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Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1730), were in fact translated by Carl August Fischer. I thank Christoph Rymatzki for this information. For a detailed bibliography of the publications of the Institutum Judaicum, see Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus, 494–530. 11. The following titles are listed under Frommann’s name in Eliezer Rosenthal, Catalog der Hebraica und Judaica aus der L. Rosenthal’schen Bibliothek, ed. M. Roest (Amsterdam: J. Clauser, 1875), 1:395–96: ;yhlah dwbk tlzg; twwxmb lar`y ynb !ymtmw !yl`m twm`n lwglg;

;jy`mh dyb abr anyd; #ant al yqwdqd; hlymh twkz; blb` ydwhy; hrz hdwb[h twhm ;swfyf h`[m; arwbh twayxm; !yafj trpk jy`m; wtnwmab qydx; !dab !yhla !lx; hrwth tmyyq jy`mh ta hlbqm amwr; amwr hldgh ry[h ty`[a]r; h`m trwt tylkt. All the works were edited by Callenberg and were published by the Institutum Judaicum in Halle between 1737 and 1749. In The Gospel of Luke with a Commentary by Dr. Immanuel H. C. Frommann, 7–8, it is stated that Frommann composed br[ twnpl rwa, a text that circulated amongst the Jews. It appears that this is an erroneous allusion to the missionary treatise br[ twnpl rwa written by Johann Müller (1649–1727), a pietist of the Gotha circle and former pastor of Callenberg (see Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus, 86–99, 154–64). The tract, which was published in Yiddish in 1728 with the subtitle @wyx twmjnb waryw lar`y yny[ ryahl fyyx dnba @gyq fkyl `ad @wyx ùh bw`b (the German version did not appear until 1730) and set the standards for the agenda of the Institutum Judaicum, is a dialogue between two Jews, R. Menah≥em ben Isaiah and the merchant R. Samuel ben Joseph, which in the end concludes that Christ is the prophesied Jewish Messiah. See Clark, The Politics of Conversion, 48, 74–75; Christoph Rymatzki, “Johann Müllers Licht am Abend: Ein Beitrag zur Charakterisierung der theologischen und geistesgeschichtlichen Ausrichtung des Instituts anhand seiner bedeutendsten Missionsschrift,” in Von Halle nach Jerusalem. Konnferenzbeiträge, 66–77; Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus, 97, 105–22, 154–60, 188–89; Rymatzki, “Die Theologische Argumentation,” 620–21, 624–26; Christoph Bochinger, “Die Dialoge Zwischen Reisenden Studiosi und Juden in Religionswissenschaftlicher Perspektive,” Kwartalnik Historii Z{ydów [ Jewish History Quarterly] 4 (2006): 511–12; Johannes Wallman, Pietismus-Studien (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008), 2:281; Anke Költsch, “Foundations, Institutes, Charities, and Proselytes in the Early Modern Holy Roman Empire,” Jewish History 24 (2010): 92–93; Pawel Maciejko, “Christian Elements in Early Frankist Doctrine,” Gal-Ed: On the History and Culture of Polish Jewry 20 (2006): 35. On Frommann’s alleged participation in preparing Müller’s composition for print, including rewriting it in a “Jewish language” and changing the author’s name to Yoh≥anan Kimh≥i (a Hebrew rendering of his German name), see the description of Frommann in London Jews Society (May 1852): 134. I am indebted to Jorge Quiñónez for providing me with a digital copy of this text. The main source used therein to reconstruct Frommann’s role in translating and printing the br[ twnpl rwa is Stephan Schultz, a Polish missionary who served as a principal agent of the Halle institute from 1739 to 1757. See Louis Meyer, “Stephen Schultz, Missionary to the Jews: Biographical Sketch, Chiefly Based on Schultz’s Own Writings,” Missionary Review of the World ( July 1907): 417–24, esp. 421; Clark, The Politics of Conversion, 66–70; Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus, 110–11, 220–21. Frommann’s Yiddish translation (“hochdeutsche Übersetzung”) of Licht am Abend and the corrections by Callenberg are attested in the Archiv der Franckeschen Stiftungen, Halle, as recorded by Clark, The Politics of Conversion, 74n183. See also Rymatzki, Hallischer Pietismus, 106, 111–12, 116–17. In the frontispiece of the editio princeps it is simply stated about the book: wt[w`yl !ypxmw ùh rbdl !ydrjh !ybw`j !y`na hzya taxwhw tryxp l[ swpdh tybl abwh. 12. See above, note 8. The commentary included in Callenberg’s edition ends with Luke 22:14; Biesenthal’s edition extends to the end of the gospel. For a more recent version

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of this text, see above, note 7. Unfortunately, many mistakes have crept into this publication and one is well advised to make use of the earlier versions. 13. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 3b, 5b, 17b, 21b, 28b, 29b, 34a, 44b, 107a; Evangelium Lucae pars posterior ab eruditio proselyto Henr. Christ. Imman. Frommanno Doct. Med. in linguam ebraeam transferri ac explicari curauit ediditque Io. Henr. Callenberg, pt. 2, ed. Johann Heinrich Callenberg (Halle: Institutum Judaicum, 1737), 40b, 42a, 42b, 43b, 44a [henceforth cited as Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2]. 14. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 13a. 15. Ibid., 27a. 16. Ibid., 41a. 17. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 25b. 18. Ibid., 2b, 4a, 4b, 9a, 9b, 23b, 31a, 38b, 101a, 102a, 102b; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 12b, 14a, 33a, 33b, 36b. 19. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 5a, 10b, 18a, 23b, 26b, 31a, 40a, 40b, 41a, 72a, 72b, 93b; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 13a, 34a. 20. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 5a, 31b, 46a, 72a, 72b, 102b; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 6a. 21. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 9a, 12a, 13b, 20b, 23b. 22. Ibid., 72b. 23. Ibid., 52a. The reference may be to Elias Levita’s Masoret ha-Masoret (Basel, 1536). 24. Ibid., 6b, 16b, 40a, 40b, 72a. 25. Ibid., 14b (mention is made of the Kuzari but Halevi’s name is not). 26. Ibid., 6b, 54a, 56a, 73b, 101b, 103a; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 3a, 4b, 9a, 13a, 21b, 41a. See Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 143. 27. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 102b. 28. Ibid., 9a, 9b, 24a. 29. Ibid., 2a. 30. Ibid., 8b, 14a, 19b, 24b, 46a, 74a. Passages from the zoharic compilation are cited by Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 141 (Zohar 2:41a), 142 (Zohar 1:1a, 192a, 238a, 240a), 148 (Zohar 1:204b), 153 (Zohar 1:119a), and 154 (Zohar 3:218a). In a few places (142 and 153), Biesenthal refers explicitly to the pagination in the Sulzbach Zohar (1684). Regarding this edition, see Boaz Huss, “The Text and Context of the 1684 Sulzbach Edition of the Zohar,” in Tradition, Heterodoxy, and Religious Culture: Judaism and Christianity in the Early Modern Period, ed Chanita Goodblatt and Howard Kreisel (Beer Sheva: Ben Gurion University Press, 2006), 117–38. 31. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 52a, 72b. 32. Ibid., 2b. 33. Ibid., 51b–52a. The specific passage to which Frommann refers is Bah≥ya’s commentary to Exodus 34:6–7, the verses whence the rabbinic sages adduce the thirteen attributes of divine mercy. Under the rubric of “by way of the tradition (al derekh ha-kabbalah),” he mentioned the explanation of Nah≥manides as well as his own view. See Bah≥ya ben Asher, Be’ur al ha-Torah, ed. H≥ ayyim D. Chavel ( Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1981), 2:352–53. 34. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 2a, 14a. 35. Ibid., 13b. See 46a, where Frommann refers to the “magicians” (mekhashfim) who want to be “masters of the tradition” (ba‘alei kabbalah). See ibid., 103a, where the Kabbalists are derisively portrayed as being of a “confused mind” (mevulbalei da‘at) for explaining the ritual of washing the hands upon waking in terms of the demonic other side (sitra ah≥ara).

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36. Ibid., 14b, 38b, 51b, 102a. 37. Ibid., 41b. See 42b–43a, where reference is made to the one who “meditates and contemplates them in knowledge and in the wisdom of the heart” (lema‘ayyen u-lemaskil bam be-da‘at u-ve-h≥okhmat lev). In Sefer Besorah Tovah, 140, Biesenthal refers to the Kabbalists as h≥akhmei ha-emet. 38. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 10a. 39. Ibid., 40a; see also Sefer Besorah Tovah, 140. 40. Ibid., 38b, 61b, 64a; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 27a. 41. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 37b. 42. Ibid., 11b. 43. Ibid., 34b. 44. Ibid., 11b, 23a, 34b, 35b, 40b, 41b, 42a, 42b, 44a, 72b, 106a, 108b, 113b; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 18a, 19a, 24b, 28b. 45. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 8a. 46. See, for example, ibid., 37b, where the narrative about Jesus’ preaching in the Nazareth synagogue is illumined by reference to Jewish practices current in the life of the author. For the more familiar typological understanding of Jewish ritual to explain the life of Jesus, see the supplementary commentary in Sefer Besorah Tovah, 140–41, where the injunction for the Israelites to eat the paschal sacrifice upon leaving Egypt is described as “an allusion and a secret [pointing] to the true sacrifice in the fullness of days when the Messiah would sacrifice himself, to place the guilt of his soul as atonement not only for the children of Israel but for all inhabitants of the world. . . . And this final sacrifice will be greater than all the sacrifices ever offered before the Lord and it will rise above the paschal sacrifice offered by the children of Israel when they departed from the land of Egypt.” Biesenthal notes affinities between the “material Passover” related to Egypt, and the “spiritual Passover,” which is the “messianic Passover,” but he also distinguishes them along familiar lines, concluding that “hints and secrets like these and others are revealed and known to the knowers of the esoteric wisdom [yod‘ei h≥en] who have stood in the secret of the Lord and in the secret of his Torah” (141–42). In comparison to Frommann, Biesenthal displays a harsher tone toward the rabbis, even as he is greatly influenced by them and often adduces a christological truth from their dicta. For instance, consider the criticism on 143 regarding the inability of talmudic commentators to explicate a secret pertaining to the birth pangs of the Messiah. 47. Carlebach, Divided Souls, 67–87. 48. Ibid., 73. 49. A brief discussion of false messiahs (meshih≥ei sheker) occurs in Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 21b, connected to Luke 17:22–23. Frommann alludes to the messianic figure of Bethar in the second century, that is, Bar Kokhba, and the anonymous pseudo-messiah from Yemen in the twelfth century, concerning whom Maimonides wrote in his Iggeret Teiman, which is mentioned explicitly. See Mordekhai Akiva Friedman, Maimonides: The Yemenite Messiah and Apostasy ( Jerusalem: Ben-Tzvi Institute, 2002), 9–49 (Hebrew). Frommann advises the reader to look at the introduction where he has elaborated on the subject but this has yet to surface. A second discussion of false messiahs occurs in Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 41a–b. In that context mention is made of Bar Kokhba and David Alroy (referred to incorrectly as Aldavid), the anonymous redeemer from Iraq. See Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 81–91.

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50. Carlebach, Divided Souls, 86. The connection of the institute of Callenberg and Sabbateans is also discussed by Azriel Shoh≥et, Beginnings of the Haskalah among German Jewry ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1960), 175–82 (Hebrew). I owe this reference to Carlebach, Divided Souls, 260n78. See also Maciejko, “Christian Elements,” 32. 51. Der Erzbetrüger Sabbatai Sevi, der lezte falsche Messias der Juden unter Leopold’s I Regierung im Jahr der Welt 5666, und dem 1666sten nach Christi Geburt (Halle: Christoph Peter Francken, 1760). This text is the German translation of the section on Sabbatai Tzevi in Jean Baptiste de Rocoles, Les imposteurs insignes ou Histoires de plusieurs hommes de néant, de toutes Nations, qui ont usurpé la qualité d’Empereurs, Roys et Princes (Amsterdam: Abraham Wolfgang, 1683), which, in turn, was based on the Dutch account in Thomas Coenen, Ydele verwachtinge der Joden getoont in den person van Sabethai Zevi (Amsterdam, 1669) and the French account attributed to M. Robinet published in 1673, a translation of the versions in John Evelyn, The History of the Three late famous Imposters, viz Padro Ottomano, Mahamed Bei, and Sabatai Sevi (1669), and Paul Rycaut, The History of the Turkish Empire from the Year 1623, to the Year 1677 (1680). See Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676, trans. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 941, and, in more bibliographical detail, Richard H. Popkin, “Christian Interest and Concerns about Sabbatai Zevi,” in Millenarianism and Messianism, 101–3. See also Richard H. Popkin, “Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Zevi Story,” Jewish History 8 (1994): 43–54. 52. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 108b. 53. After completing this study, Juan Morales generously called my attention to a manuscript preserved in the Franckesche Stiftungen zu Halle, AFSt/H K 9 b 85-89, catalogued as “Vorrede [zum Lukas-Evangelium] von Heinrich Christian Immanuel Frommann [im Auftrag von Johann Heinrich Callenberg].” For several reasons I am doubtful that this preface is identical to the introduction (haqdamah) that Frommann mentions in the commentary itself. First, Frommann refers to a section of the introduction with the title sha‘ar ha-yih≥ud, but this does not appear in the aformentioned preface. Second, the commentary is written in Hebrew and the preface in German. Of course, it is possible that Frommann wrote this preface in German and did not get around to translating it or perhaps he wrote it in Hebrew and the manuscript preserves the German translation done by him or by someone else. Third, and most importantly, none of the issues referred to in the commentary as being discussed in the introduction appear in the preface. The matter requires further investigation. Finally, it is worth mentioning that in the last paragraph of the note to the reader that Biesenthal included in Sefer Besorah Tovah, he draws attention to Frommann’s introduction and comments that it is quantitatively greater than the book itself. He also expresses the wish for it to be printed one day, and thus we can safely assume that he had a copy of it. His description does not match the preface in size or scope. 54. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 108b–109a. On the knowledge of the secrets of the name, see Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 20a. 55. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 38b (citing the Targum to Isa. 45:17), and 51b (the three occurrences of the Tetragrammaton in Exod. 34:6 are referred to as the “essence of the name,” which is further linked to the meimra and to h≥okhmah). 56. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 2a. On the identification of the messianic king as the “word of the Lord” (meimra de-yhvh), the “primordial wisdom” (h≥okhmah kedumah) that emanates from the supernal crown (keter elyon), see 76a. Compare 105b, where Jesus is identified as the “wisdom of God” (h≥okhmat elohim) that emanates from the supernal crown.

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57. Joseph ben Shalom Ashkenazi, Perush Sefer Yetzirah, in Sefer Yetzirah ( Jerusalem, 1990), 10a–b. The second path is designated the “luminous intellect” (sekhel mazhir), also identified as the “crown of creation” (keter ha-beri’ah) and “the splendor of the indifferent one” (zohar ha-ah≥dut ha-shaveh). Significantly, the second path is also called the “second glory” (kavod sheni), a term that quite naturally could be applied to Jesus. On the identification of Jesus as the “light of the glory” (or ha-kavod) or the “great light” (or ha-gadol) that will shine upon Israel, see Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 20b. 58. Ibid., 8b–9a. Frommann cites the passage as Zohar 95c, which corresponds to the Cremona edition, Bere’shit, 379–80 (in the Mantua edition, 2:212a). On the application of Isaiah 53:5 to Sabbatai Tzevi, see references in Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 180–81nn199–200. 59. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 24b–26a (there is no page 25 in this edition). 60. Ibid., 26a–27a. 61. Compare ibid., 23b. 62. For references to scholars who have discussed Sabbatean messianism and early Christianity, see Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 235n172. 63. Avraham Elqayam, “The Mystery of Faith in the Writings of Nathan of Gaza” (Ph.D. diss., Hebrew University, 1993), 34–48 (Hebrew); Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 278–79. 64. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 72a–b. 65. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 211. As Scholem notes, however, the possibility of Christian influence has to be tempered with the fact that “the association between faith and redemption is attested also in genuine Jewish tradition untainted by foreign influences” (212). One of the “genuine Jewish” sources he mentions is the twenty-ninth chapter of Netzah≥ Yisra’el of Judah Loew, the Maharal of Prague. From my standpoint, the two possibilities raised by Scholem need not be viewed as antinomical, since the mechanism of external borrowing is often dependent on internal resonance, that is, an idea is taken from an outside source due to the affinity it has with what is perceived to be on the inside. For an elaboration of this point, see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Hebraic and Hellenic Conceptions of Wisdom in Sefer haBahir,” Poetics Today 19 (1998): 172–73. On the influence of Christianity on Sabbateanism, see below, note 117. 66. BT Makkot 24a. 67. On the augmented stringency of the rabbinic commandments in comparison to the scriptural commandments, see Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 105a–b. 68. Ibid., 54b–55a. On the new Torah, see also 55b. 69. Mishnah Avot 1:17. 70. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 66b. 71. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 18a. See also pt. 2, 28a, where Frommann speaks of the knowledge of the “secret” of the commandments connected to the love of God. And compare Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 165: “‘The secret of the Lord is for those who fear him; to them he makes known his covenant’ (Ps. 25:14). The knowledge of the Messiah is the root and foundation of the entire Torah and without it ‘we grope like blind men along a wall’ (Isa. 59:10), we walk in darkness, not discriminating between right and left.” 72. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 104a. 73. Ibid., 104a–b. 74. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 16b. 75. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 57a.

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76. Midrash Tehillim, ed. Solomon Buber (Vilna: Rom, 1891), 92:2, 201b. In other rabbinic texts, sometimes connected eisegetically to the same verse from Psalms, the messianic future is designated the “day that is entirely Sabbath” (yom she-kullo shabbat). 77. BT Tamid 33b; Midrash Rabbah: Shir ha-Shirim, ed. Shimshon Dunaski ( Jerusalem: Devir, 1980), 4:8, 108; Massekhet Soferim, ed. Michael Higger (New York, 1937), 18:2, 312. See also BT Rosh Hashanah 31a. 78. Mekhilta de-Rabbi Ishmael, ed. H≥ ayyim S. Horovitz and Israel A. Rabin ( Jerusalem: Wahrmann, 1970), Ki Tissa, 1, 341. See also Avot de-Rabbi Natan, ed. Solomon Schechter (Vienna: Ch. D. Lippe, 1887), version A, chap. 1, 3a. 79. BT Sanhedrin 97a. 80. See Elliot R. Wolfson, Along the Path: Studies in Kabbalistic Myth, Symbolism, and Hermeneutics (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 81, and sources discussed on 217–18nn138–41. 81. Compare Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 2b–5a, and see Elliot R. Wolfson, “Inscribed in the Book of the Living: Gospel of Truth and Jewish Christology,” Journal for the Study of Judaism 28 (2007): 261–62. 82. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “The Engenderment of Messianic Politics: Symbolic Significance of Sabbatai S≥evi’s Coronation,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark R. Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 233–34, and sources cited on 234n105. Regarding the overcoming of binaries, it is of interest to consider the comment of Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 162, on Luke 24:9: “Know and discern that in the New Testament there is no difference between woman and man, between slave and his master (Gal 3:28), and on occasion the level of women is greater than that of the men.” The exegetical springboard for this assertion is the biblical account that it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women who informed the remaining eleven disciples about the crucifixion of Jesus and his eventual resurrection. On the gender implications of the baptismal formula invoked by Paul, see Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 49–50, 301, and reference to other scholarly discussions cited on 437n15. 83. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 11b. 84. See ibid., 32a where Frommann challenges the opinion of the “sinners” and “men of confused mind,” references to Jews of his time, who think they will earn a share in the world to come on the basis of the merit of the fathers. 85. The point is made explicitly by Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 164, in his commentary to Luke 24:21: “The Jews thought that the Messiah would subjugate the enemies of Israel through sword, spear, chariot, and horsemen, but they did not know and did not understand, and even to this very day their eyes are blocked from seeing the true essence of the kingdom of the Messiah, for his kingdom is eternal.” 86. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 39a. 87. Ibid., 10b. See 11a. 88. See ibid., 69a. Interpreting the words that John posed to Jesus through two disciples, “Are you the one who is to come, or are we to expect someone else?” (Luke 7:19), Frommann wrote: “John did not do this except for the sake of his disciples so that they, too, would speak to Jesus, and that they would see and believe that he is the Messiah and that his kingship is not

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from this lower world but from the eternal kingdom.” It is plausible that the final expression malkhut olam carries a kabbalistic intent. 89. BT Kiddushin 39b. Compare Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 88a, 97a; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 15b, 16b, 22b. On the tendency to conflate the kingdom of heaven, the kingdom of the Messiah, and the kingdom of the world to come, see Biesenthal’s comments on Luke 22:24 in Sefer Besorah Tovah, 145. 90. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 80b. 91. Ibid., 74b: the kingdom of God (malkhut elohim), the kingdom of heaven (malkhut shamayim), and the messianic kingship (malkhut ha-mashiah≥) are identified. See 75a, where mention is made of seeing “all the matters of the kingdom of God and the secrets of Messiah.” Compare as well 85a, and 79a where Jesus is said to disclose the “secret of the kingdom of God.” See Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 6a, 10b, and Sefer Besorah Tovah, 140, where Jesus is described as revealing the “secret of his kingdom and the secret of his coming to this lower world” (sod malkhuto ve-sod bo’o el ha-olam ha-shafel ha-zeh). And see Sefer Besorah Tovah, 163, where Jesus is described as teaching his disciples the “truth of the secret of his sufferings and the secret of his resurrection.” On the incomprehensible mystery of the resurrection, see Sefer Besorah Tovah, 164. 92. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 90a. See also Biesenthal’s comments to Luke 22:26 in Sefer Besorah Tovah, 146. 93. Judah Loew, Sefer Netzah≥ Yisra’el, ed. and annotated by Joshua David Hartman ( Jerusalem: Makhon Yerushalayim, 1997), chap. 28, 572. The depiction of the savior as being at odds with the corporeal world is repeated on several occasions by the Maharal. In the same work see chap. 17, 384; chap. 36, 671; chap. 41, 723. The perfection to be achieved in the messianic endtime is similarly described as being beyond this world, an idea that the Maharal contends is the meaning of the aggadic motif (BT Erkhin 13b) of the eight-string harp of the Messiah. See Sefer Netzah≥ Yisra’el, chap. 19, 429. Concerning the spiritual or supernatural dimensions of Maharal’s portrait of the Messiah, see Benjamin Gross, The Eternity of Israel: The Messianic Doctrine of the Maharal of Prague on Exile and Redemption (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1974), 222–23 (Hebrew); Byron L. Sherwin, Mystical Theology and Social Dissent: The Life and Works of Judah Loew of Prague (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982), 158–59. On the Sabbatean use of the Maharal’s messianic speculation, especially the identification of the redeemer with faith, an aspect that may reverberate with a Christian orientation, see above, note 65. 94. The reference is to the editio princeps of Netzah≥ Yisra’el published in Prague 1599. See previous note for the content of this passage. 95. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 70a (emphasis added). Interpreting Luke 22:30, Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 146, notes that eating and drinking in the eschaton are spiritual rather than physical acts, a figurative rendering supported by the rabbinic description of the world to come as the righteous sitting with their crowns on their heads and being sustained by the splendor of the divine presence (BT Berakhot 17a). See also 160, where Biesenthal emphasizes, in accord with Frommann, that the messiahship of Jesus is a “spiritual kingship” (malkhut ha-ruh≥ani), marked by the obliteration of Satan and the evil inclination from the earth rather than by the exhibition of material wealth and possessions. 96. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality (New York: Schocken, 1971), 1–4.

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97. On Jesus enduring the suffering with love, see Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 36b–37a. On the ideal of martyrdom and the need to suffer on behalf of Christ, see 87b. See also 54a, where Jesus is identified as the bridegroom (Luke 5:34–35) and the bride as the community of righteous ones who surrounded him. The heterosexual language is used to describe the homosocial bonding of the master and his disciples. A similar pattern is discernible in kabbalistic sources. See Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 331–32. Biesenthal, Sefer Besorah Tovah, 159, identifies Jesus as the Messiah, the son of Joseph, for, according to the rabbinic tradition, this is the savior that is killed. 98. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 11b, and see 37a; Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 21a. On the leveling out of socioeconomic differences with respect to messianic kingship, see pt. 2, 22b. 99. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 35b. 100. Zohar 2:7b (in the Cremona edition, Shemot, 11). 101. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 14a. See also 14b, where Frommann interprets the “other place” as a reference to the womb of Mary, that is, the seed of the Messiah came to be without any seminal fluid from a man. 102. Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 86. 103. Popkin, “Christian Interest and Concerns,” 91–106; Michael Heyd, “The ‘Jewish Quaker’: Christian Perceptions of Sabbatai Zevi as an Enthusiast,” in Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists, Jews, and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Allison P. Coudert and Jeffrey S. Shoulson (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 234–65; Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets, 167. 104. On the possibility of Sabbateans professing their messianic faith by becoming Jewish Christians, see the evidence concerning the circle of followers of Jonathan Eibeschütz in Prague from the early part of the eighteenth century adduced by Yehuda Liebes, On Sabbateanism and Its Kabbalah: Collected Essays ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1995), 212–37 (Hebrew). For a modification of Liebes’s conjecture, see Maciejko, “Christian Elements,” 25–26, 30–31. My gratitude to David Ruderman for reminding me of Maciejko’s critique. 105. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 37a. 106. For references, see Wolfson, “Messianism,” 185–86n236; Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 142–43n53. 107. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 13b. In Frommann’s precise language, “The statute of the birthright lawfully belonged to Jacob because he was the first one to be formed [bekhor liyetzirah] and, moreover, he purchased it from his brother.” One must assume that the formation mentioned here refers to conception in the womb rather than to birth and exit therefrom since from the chronological perspective of the narrative Esau obviously preceded Jacob. 108. Israel Jacob Yuval, Two Nations in Your Womb: Perceptions of Jews and Christians in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, trans. Barbara Harshav and Jonathan Chipman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 10–20. 109. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 38b. See 52a. 110. Tikkunei Zohar, ed. Reuven Margaliot ( Jerusalem: Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1978), sec. 21, 43a. 111. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 46a. Compare my discussion in “Messianism,” 164. 112. Evangelium Lucae, pt. 1, 99a. 113. Ibid., 74b.

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114. Ibid., 37a. 115. Ibid., 46b. 116. Wolfson, “Messianism,” 163. Also pertinent is the expression used by Richard Popkin, “The Marrano Theology of Isaac La Peyrère,” Studi Inter-nazionali di Filosofia 5 (1973): 97–126, and see Popkin, Isaac La Peyrère (1596–1676): His Life, Work and Influence (Leiden: Brill, 1987), 95–96. 117. Inyenei Shabbatai Tzevi, ed. Aaron Freimann (Berlin: Mekize Nirdamim, 1912), 88; Jacob Sasportas, Sefer Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, ed. I. Tishby ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1954), 291; Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 95; Yosef H. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto Isaac Cardoso: A Study in Seventeenth-Century Marranism and Jewish Apologetics (New York: Columbia University Press, 1971), 314–20; David Biale, Gershom Scholem: Kabbalah and Counter-History (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979), 161; Wolfson, “Messianism,” 185nn232–34; Wolfson, “Constructions of the Shekhinah in the Messianic Theosophy of Abraham Cardoso with an Annotated Edition of Derush ha-Shekhinah,” Kabbalah: Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 3 (1998): 36–37n79; Bruce Rosenstock, “Abraham Miguel Cardoso’s Messianism: A Reappraisal,” AJS Review 23 (1998): 63–104, esp. 90–99; Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings, trans. and introduced by David J. Halperin, preface by Elliot R. Wolfson (New York: Paulist Press, 2001), 5–17; Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within: The Marranos, Split Identity and Emerging Modernity (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2009), 324–26. 118. This is not to say that Frommann does not at times say very disparaging things about the Jews. See, e.g., Evangelium Lucae, pt. 2, 60a. Commenting on Luke 6:26, he writes: “Therefore Jesus warned his disciples that it should not occur to the apostles or to the students to receive praise or glory from the Jews for their work since they do not accept it. The faith of the nation has never been to provide respite to the true prophets but rather to the false prophets.” 119. Wolfson, Venturing Beyond, 176–85. In that study, I neglected to mention the following pertinent comment of Jacob Taubes, “The Price of Messianism,” in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements and Personalities in Jewish History, ed. Marc Saperstein (New York: New York University Press, 1992), 555: “The Marranic experience was a constitutive step toward neutralizing the demarcation between the established religious bodies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Lurianic Kabbalah and Sabbatean Messianism recycled the Marranic crisis of the religious consciousness in mythic terms. In the ideology of the apostate Messiah rings a melody that was expounded non-mythically in the radical critique of religion advanced by dissident Marranos.” 120. Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 205–6. 121. Taubes, “The Price of Messianism,” 553. 122. Ibid., 557. 123. Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 35. The criticism of Scholem by Taubes is analyzed by Idel, Messianic Mystics, 240–41. See also Pawel Maciejko, “Gershom Scholem’s Dialectic of Jewish History: The Case of Sabbatianism,” Journal of Modern Jewish Studies 3 (2004): 208–9. For an interpretation of Scholem’s rendering of Sabbateanism as principally a movement of “religious” as opposed to “political” redemption, see Wolfson, “The Engenderment,” 203–17. For a parallel approach to Scholem, despite being presented as a departure therefrom, see Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism, trans. Batya Stein (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 93–106; and see also Idel, Messianic Mystics, 183–85. The

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broader intellectual context that gave shape to Scholem’s perspective is assessed in Wolfson, Open Secret, 266–72. 124. Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (New York: Schocken, 1954), 287; Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 7–8; Scholem, Kabbalah ( Jerusalem: Keter, 1976), 75–76; Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 59. 125. Scholem, Major Trends, 306; Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 87–88, 109, 121–23. 126. Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 194. 127. Ibid., 194–95. Scholem’s view should be contrasted with the more nuanced, even if somewhat apologetic, approach of Elijah Benamozegh, who not only narrowed the divide between Jewish and Christian messianism but viewed the emphasis on the “metaphysical” as opposed to the “political” dimension of the latter as on a par with the kabbalistic conception of messianic deliverance and the establishment of the universal order. See Elijah Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, trans., ed., and with an introduction by Maxwell Luria, preface and appendix by Moshe Idel (New York: Paulist Press, 1995), 203; see also 168–69, 184–85, 295–96. I note, parenthetically, that the view of Scholem is very close to what is expressed in the extract from François Laurent’s Études sur l’histoire de l’humanité cited by Benamozegh, Israel and Humanity, 176–77. 128. On the affinity between inner redemption in Hasidism and Christian spirituality, see Idel, Messianic Mystics, 240–41. For an attempt to contrast the two, see Martin Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism (New York: Horizon Press, 1960), 60, 88, 129–30, 205–6, 242–54. I do not concur with Buber’s contention that in Hasidism devotion overcomes gnosis. This may be so for the masses but not for the masters. The elitist and populist elements of Hasidism have been addressed by several scholars; see the innovative approach to this question in Glenn Dynner, Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006). See the comment of Schatz-Uffenheimer cited below, note 163. Regarding Buber’s attitude on the messianic dimensions in Hasidism, see references in note 131, and compare Avraham Shapira, “Two Paths of Redemption in Hasidism through the Mirror of Martin Buber,” in Massu’ot: Studies in Kabbalistic Literature and Jewish Philosophy in Memory of Prof. Ephraim Gottlieb, ed. Michal Oron and Amos Goldreich ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994), 429–46; Ron Margolin, “Inner Redemption as a Way to Rectification of the World: How Martin Buber Wrote His Book Gog and Magog,” Ha-Tziyyonut 21 (1998): 99–120 (Hebrew). See also Israel Koren, The Mystery of the Earth: Mysticism and Hasidism in the Thought of Martin Buber (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 221–45, 304–10, 353–60. On the possible Christian inflections in Buber’s portrayal of Hasidism in Die Legende des Baalschem (1908), see Martina Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal: Martin Buber’s Early Representation of Hasidism as Kulturekritik (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 137. 129. Many scholars have discussed the textual and conceptual implications of this document, including the messianic dimensions, and here I offer a modest sampling of the relevant sources: Naftali Loewenthal, Communicating the Infinite: The Emergence of the Habad School (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 6–10; Moshe Rosman, Founder of Hasidism: A Quest for the Historical Ba‘al Shem Tov (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 97–113; Mor Altshuler, “Messianic Strains in Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov’s ‘Holy Epistle,’” Jewish Studies Quarterly 6 (1999): 55–70; Immanuel Etkes, The Besht: Magician, Mystic, and Leader, trans. Saadya Sternberg (Waltham, Mass.: Brandeis University Press, 2005), 79–91, 282–88; H≥ aviva Pedaya, “The Baal Shem Tov’s Iggeret Hakodesh toward a Critique of the Textual Versions and an Exploration of Its Convergence with the

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World-Picture: Messianism, Revelation, Ecstasy, and the Sabbatean Background,” Zion 70 (2005): 311–54 (Hebrew); Moshe Idel, Ascensions on High in Jewish Mysticism: Pillars, Lines, Ladders (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2005), 143–48; Idel, Messianic Mystics, 213–20; Netanel Lederberg, Sod ha-Da‘at: Rabbi Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, His Spiritual Character and Social Leadership ( Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 2007), 118–33 (Hebrew); Jonathan Dauber, “The Baal Shem Tov and the Messiah: A Reappraisal of the Baal Shem Tov’s Letter to R. Gershon of Kutov,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 15 (2008): 210–41. Idel, Ascensions, 148 (Messianic Mystics, 218), historically and conceptually relates the model of inner redemption in the eighteenth-century pietistic sources to the ecstatic-prophetic Kabbalah of Abraham Abulafia. (For discussion of the spiritual and noetic dimensions of Abulafia's depiction of the Messiah, see Idel, Messianic Mystics, 65–79.) For an important articulation of this conception of messianic redemption in spiritual terms as the conjunction of all individuated souls in the one universal Soul, see Isaac Ibn Latif, Rav Pe‘alim, ed. Samuel Schoenblum (Lemberg: Anna Wajdowicz, 1885), sec. 30, 10b. The felicity of the soul is often described by Ibn Latif in the image of being bound to the supernal world, an idea he maintains is affirmed by both the philosophers and the scriptural tradition. See Sara O. Heller Wilensky, “Isaac Ibn Latif—Philosopher or Kabbalist?” in Jewish Medieval and Renaissance Studies, ed. Alexander Altmann (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1967), 206, and other sources cited there, n. 135; Idel, Messianic Mystics, 52. 130. For a critical edition of the text see Rivka Schatz, “The Commentary of R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov to Psalm 107: The Myth and the Ritual of the Descent to Sheol,” Tarbiz 42 (1973): 154–84 (Hebrew); an English translation appears as the appendix in Rivka SchatzUffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism: Quietistic Elements in Eighteenth Century Hasidic Thought, trans. Jonathan Chipman (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), 342–82. 131. See Elliot R. Wolfson, “Walking as a Sacred Duty: Theological Transformation of Social Reality in Early Hasidism,” in Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 180–207 (my discussion in this essay is an elaboration of that study, and see esp. 183–84n10). The scholarly literature on the topic of messianism and Hasidism is quite vast and hence I will delineate a representative list of some of the major studies. In addition to the study of Scholem on the neutralization of the messianic element cited below in note 138, see Buber, The Origin and Meaning of Hasidism, 24–57, 90–112, 202–18; Isaiah Tishby, “The Messianic Idea and the Messianic Tendencies in the Beginnings of Hasidism,” Zion 32 (1967): 1–45 (Hebrew), reprinted in Tishby, Studies in Kabbalah and Its Branches: Researches and Sources ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1993), 2:475–519; Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer, “Self-Redemption in Hasidic Thought,” in Types of Redemption, ed. R. J. Zwi Werblowsky and Claas J. Bleeker (Leiden: Brill, 1970), 207–12; Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 326–39; Ben-Zion Dinur, At the Turning Point of the Generations ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1972), 181–227 (Hebrew), partially translated as “The Messianic-Prophetic Role of the Baal Shem Tov,” in Essential Papers on Messianic Movements, 377–88; R. J. Zwi Werblowsky, “Mysticism and Messianism: The Case of Hasidism,” in Man and His Salvation: Essays in Memory of S. G. F. Brandon, ed. Eric J. Sharpe and John R. Hinnells (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1973), 305–14; Arthur Green, Tormented Master: A Life of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1979), 182–220; Mendel Piekarz, “The Messianic Idea in the Beginnings of Hasidism as Reflected in the Homiletical and Ethical Literature,” in The Messianic Idea in Jewish Thought: A Study Conference in Honour of the Eightieth Birthday of Gershom Scholem ( Jerusalem: Israel Academy of Arts and Sciences, 1982), 237–53 (Hebrew); Stephen Sharot,

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Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic: A Sociological Analysis of Jewish Religious Movements (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 155–88; Morris M. Faierstein, All Is in the Hands of Heaven: The Teachings of Rabbi Mordecai Joseph Leiner of Izbica (Hoboken, N.J.: Ktav, 1989), 77–84; Faierstein, “Personal Redemption in Hasidism,” in Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 214–24; Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs, 199–223; Shaul Magid, “The Intolerance of Tolerance: Mahaloket (Controversy) and Redemption in Early Hasidism,” Jewish Studies Quarterly 8 (2001): 326–68, esp. 341–46; Idel, Messianic Mystics, 212–47; Ron Margolin, The Human Temple: Religious Interiorization and the Structuring of Inner Life in Early Hasidism ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), 406–8 (Hebrew); Mor Altshuler, The Messianic Secret of Hasidism (Leiden: Brill, 2006); Zvi Mark, Scroll of Secrets: The Hidden Messianic Vision of R. Nah≥man of Bratzlav (Ramat Gan: Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006) (Hebrew). 132. Concerning this disciple of the Besht, see Samuel H. Dresner, The Zaddik: The Doctrine of the Zaddik according to the Writings of Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polnoy (New York: Schocken, 1974); Gedalyah Nigal, Studies in Hasidism ( Jerusalem: Institute for the Study of Hasidic Literature, 1999), 25–29 (Hebrew); Etkes, The Besht: Magician, 176–82; Mendel Piekarz, The Beginning of Hasidism: Ideological Trends in Derush and Musar Literature ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1978), 15–21, 200–213, 228–68, 288–92 (Hebrew). 133. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef (Koretz, 1780), 201a. Compare therein 29b, and the passage from Tzofnat Pa‘aneah≥ cited below at note 143. On the identification of the Messiah and the secret of knowledge, see Lederberg, Sod ha-Da‘at, 134–43. 134. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 201a. Compare therein 28a: “The aspect of this knowledge disclosed in the exodus from Egypt was the knowledge of the feminine [da‘at de-nuqba] but the knowledge of the masculine [da‘at di-dekhura] will be revealed in the future in the days of the Messiah, and that is [the import of] ‘your eyes will see your master’ (Isa. 30:20), they will see the letters of Torah and prayer that are studied and prayed before the eyes, and they are resplendent worlds.” In that context, Moses is associated with the aspect of knowledge, a well-known motif with messianic implications (the parallelism between the first redeemer and the last redeemer) that is found in older kabbalistic sources. See Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 27b, where the dictum attributed to R. Samuel, the quintessential expression of the geopolitical ideal, “there is no difference between this world and the days of the Messiah except the servitude of the [foreign] rulers” (BT Sanhedrin 99a), is interpreted figuratively as a reference to the removal of the shells that cover the light of divinity. Salvation, consequently, consists of discarding the obstacles that prevent one from envisioning the truth. Passages such as these indicate how inadequate is the evaluation of Urban, Aesthetics of Renewal, 14: “But in contrast to the Kabbalah, transmission in Hasidism testifies to an essentially incommunicable mystical experience rather than to the dissemination of secret knowledge.” The teachings of the Hasidic masters do not justify this distinction, and it is especially with respect to the messianic potential of the pneumatic conjunction that experience and knowledge cannot be separated. 135. See the statement about the presence of “worlds, souls, and divinity” in each of the letters in the Besht’s missive to Gershon of Kutov printed in Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ben Porat Yosef (Koretz, 1781), 100a. On the implications of this text for the mystical conception of language in the Beshtian teaching, see Louis Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer (New York: Schocken Books, 1973), 75–76; Rachel Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism (Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2006), 49–50. See also Dauber, “The Baal Shem Tov,” 232–39. This passage is not found in one of the manuscript witnesses of the document, the

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so-called Frenkel-Bauminger version. For a synoptic presentation of the various recensions, see Yehoshua Mondshine, Shivh≥ei ha-Ba‘al Shem Tov: A Facsimile of a Unique Manuscript, Variant Versions and Appendices ( Jerusalem: Hanah≥al, 1982), 233–37 (Hebrew), and the English translation in Etkes, The Besht, 272–81; the rendering of the passage under discussion appears on 276–77. A similar turn of phrase occurs in a letter the Besht wrote to Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, which was copied by Dov Ber of Ilintsy in Shivh≥ei ha-Besht. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 114–15. For the text of the letter including a facsimile from a manuscript, see In Praise of the Ba‘al Shem Tov [Shivh≥ei ha-Besht], with introduction and annotations by Avraham Rubinstein ( Jerusalem: Ruben Mass, 1991), 103–5 (Hebrew), and English rendering in In Praise of the Baal Shem Tov [Shivh≥ei ha-Besht]: The Earliest Collection of Legends about the Founder of Hasidism, trans. and ed. Dan Ben-Amos and Jerome R. Mintz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), 65. Instead of extreme fasting, which is the “way of melancholy and sadness,” the Besht advised Jacob Joseph, “Every single morning while you are studying contemplate the letters with utmost devotion in worship of your Creator and God will be with you. With the help of God, blessed be His name, they will sweeten the charges against you in their source and the pressure of the charges here will be reduced.” 136. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 25a. The directive to contemplate the light of the infinite by cleaving to the letters is framed as the true intent of the rabbinic notion of Torah study for its own sake (torah lishmah, decoded as torah le-shem he, that is, Torah for the sake of the letter he, which stands metonymically for all the letters) cultivated by the Besht and his followers. See Joseph Weiss, Studies in Eastern European Jewish Mysticism, ed. David Goldstein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 56–68; Norman Lamm, Torah Lishmah: Torah for Torah’s Sake in the Works of Hayyim of Volozhin and His Contemporaries (Hoboken: Ktav, 1989), 259–62; Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 310–25; Moshe Idel, Hasidism between Ecstasy and Magic (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1995), 176–85; Roland Goetschel, “Torah lishmah as a Central Concept in the Degel mah≥aneh Efrayim of Moses Hayyim Ephraim of Sudylkow,” in Rapoport-Albert, Hasidism Reappraised, 258–67. On contemplation of the light of the letters and attachment to the Infinite contained therein, see Elias Lipiner, The Metaphysics of the Hebrew Alphabet ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1989), 193–96 (Hebrew); H≥ aviva Pedaya, “The Baal Shem Tov, R. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, and the Maggid of Mezhirech: Outlines for a Religious Typology,” Da‘at 45 (2000): 55–70 (Hebrew); Elior, The Mystical Origins of Hasidism, 41–58; Tsippi Kauffman, In All Your Ways Know Him: The Concept of God and Avodah be-Gashmiyyut in the Early Stages of Hasidism (Ramat-Gan: Bar Ilan University Press, 2009), 150–60, 381–82, 451–54, 511–13 (Hebrew). Also relevant here is the question of the Lurianic liturgical practice of yih≥udim, which are mentioned together with the experience of mental ascents (aliyyot) in the letter of the Besht to Gershon of Kutov, in Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ben Porat Yosef, 100a. For analysis of this theme, see Menachem Kallus, “The Relation of the Baal Shem Tov to the Practice of Lurianic Kavvanot in Light of His Comments on the Siddur Rashkov,” Kabbalah: A Journal for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 2 (1997): 151–67 (Hebrew). Dauber, “The Baal Shem Tov,” 239–40, argues that the yih≥udim mentioned by the Besht do not refer to the Lurianic theurgical praxis. 137. A succinct formulation of the Beshtian ideal of devekut appears in Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ben Porat Yosef, 46b: “The matter of conjunction to him, blessed be he, is by means of the letters of Torah and prayer, one cleaves through one’s thought and inwardness

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to the inwardness of the spirituality that is within the letters, in the secret of ‘Let him kiss me with kisses of his mouth’ (Song 1:2), the conjunction of spirit with spirit.” The passage appears in the anthology Keter Shem Tov compiled by Aaron ben Zvi ha-Kohen of Optaów and first published in Zólkiew in 1794–95. See Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem (Brooklyn: Kehot, 2004), 27–28. The interpretation of the verse from the Song of Songs is derived from the zoharic exegesis; see Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being, 352. On devekut in Jacob Joseph, see Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 213, 219–21; Ada Rapoport-Albert, “God and the Zaddik as the Two Focal Points of Hasidic Worship,” in Essential Papers on Hasidism: Origins to the Present, ed. Gershon David Hundert (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 299–329; Mendel Piekarz, Between Ideology and Reality: Humility, Ayin, Self-Negation and Devekut in the Hasidic Thought ( Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1994), 158–63, 166–78 (Hebrew). 138. Scholem, The Messianic Idea, 176–202. The use of the terminology “neutralize” with respect to “antinomian and eschatological possibilities inherent in Kabbalah” on the part of Hasidic leaders is also affirmed by Dynner, Men of Silk, 7. On the application of this locution to H≥ abad, see Naftali Loewenthal, “The Neutralisation of Messianism and the Apocalypse,” Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 13 (1996): 59–73 (English section). The lingering impact of the Scholemian approach can be detected in Pedaya, “The Baal Shem Tov’s Iggeret Hakodesh,” 352–53. The fundamental orientation of the Besht’s letter is that the messianism is a “spiritual process” in which the worldly Messiah is not accorded centrality, and thus the “final meaning” of the messianic goal according to the document is deferment. On the application of Scholem’s approach to Levinas, see Catherine Chalier, “The Messianic Utopia,” in Emmanuel Levinas: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, vol. 3: Levinas, Judaism, and the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Claire Elise Katz (New York: Routledge, 2005), 44–58, esp. 55–52, and see Chalier, La Trace de l’Infini: Emmanuel Levinas et la source hébraïque (Paris: Cerf, 2002), 168–69. A similar challenge to Scholem’s notion of neutralizing the messianic is offered by Idel, Hasidism, 16–17; Idel, Messianic Mystics, 217–19. 139. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Tzofnat Pa‘aneah≥ (Koretz, 1782), 24d (Zofnath Paaneah, critical edition with introduction and notes by Gedalyah Nigal [Jerusalem: Institute for the Study of Hasidic Literature, 1989], 110). 140. See H≥ ayyim Vital, Sha‘ar ha-Gilgulim ( Jerusalem, 1803), 53b; Vital, Sha‘ar ha-Pesukim ( Jerusalem: Yeshivat Kol Yehuda, 1995), 148; Vital, Sefer ha-Likkutim ( Jerusalem: Yeshivat Kol Yehuda, 1995), 391. 141. See, for example, Natan Shapira, Megalleh Amukot (Cracow, 1637), sec. 226, 142b. Compare Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 154d, and see 123b, where the encoding of the name of Moses in Ecclesiastes 1:9 grounds the idea that in every generation there will be leaders who are sparks from Moses, whose generation was the one of knowledge (dor de‘ah). See Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 90c, and reference cited in note 143. 142. Elliot R. Wolfson, Alef, Mem, Tau: Kabbalistic Musings on Time, Truth, and Death (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 107–17; Wolfson, Open Secret, 85, 99, 127, 164, 277–79, 287. 143. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Tzofnat Pa‘aneah≥, 48c (Zofnath Paaneah, 214). See Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 229–30. 144. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz ( Jerusalem: Hamesorah, 2007), 30. 145. For an elaboration of this theme, see Wolfson, Open Secret, 276–84. 146. See Wolfson, Open Secret, 92–93, 126–27, 164–65.

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147. See Rosman, Founder of Hasidism, 33–34, 115; Etkes, The Besht, 122; Gershon D. Hundert, Jews in Poland-Lithuania in the Eighteenth Century: A Genealogy of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 173–75. A critical text presented as proof of the Besht’s anti-asceticism is the letter he wrote to Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye condemning the latter’s excessive acts of mortification; see above, note 135. For a different approach to the role of asceticism and the problem of corporeality, see Miles Krassen, Uniter of Heaven and Earth: Rabbi Meshullam Feibush Heller of Zbarazh and the Rise of Hasidism in Eastern Galicia (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 107–21, and Elior, The Mystical Origins, 118–20. 148. Dov Baer of Mezeritch, Maggid Devarav le-Ya‘akov, critical edition with commentary, introduction, and indices by Rivka Schatz-Uffenheimer ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1976), sec. 24, 38–39. Compare Likkutim Yekarim ( Jerusalem, 1974), sec. 35, 6a; sec. 39, 6b. These passages were included in the Tzava’t ha-Ribash, the compilation of the Maggid’s teaching first published in Ostrog in 1793. See Tzava’t ha-Ribash (Brooklyn: Kehot, 1982), sec. 5, 2; sec. 9, 3. And consider the bold formulation of the son of the Maggid known as Abraham ha-Mal’akh, H≥ esed le-Avraham ( Jerusalem: Siftei Tzaddikim, 1995), 30: “And this is the essence of the creation that the blessed holy One created ex nihilo, so that the righteous one will break the corporeality and elevate everything to its source . . . and everything is by means of the Torah that one studies in fear and in love.” The passage appears verbatim in Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 12. On the depiction of materiality as a curtain separating the soul from the divine, which must be conquered by striving for perpetual conjunction even when occupied with corporeal matters, see Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Likkutei Amarim (Lemberg, 1911), 31a. 149. Closer to my own interpretation is the comment of Scholem in his critique of Buber’s interpretation of Hasidism in The Messianic Idea, 243–44, but even in this context he continues to speak of the postponement of the full actualization of the messianic paradigm: The here and now does indeed present a valuable opportunity for meeting between God and man, but such meeting can occur only when man tears open another dimension in the here and now—an act which makes the “concrete” disappear. . . . For it is not the concrete reality of things that appears as the ideal result of the mystic’s action, but something of the Messianic reality in which all things have been restored to their proper place in the scheme of creation and thereby been deeply transformed and transfigured. . . . Since, in addition, the Hasidim laid great stress on the teaching that human activity is not able to really bring about or reveal the Messianic world . . . they were left, in their own view, only with prescribing ways and means for the individual to use the concrete as a vehicle to the abstract and thereby to the ultimate source of all being. [Emphasis in the original]

Scholem’s distinction between the concrete and abstract imposes an extraneous construct on the sources. When one is cognizant of the linguistic nature of materiality, then the most concrete is, in fact, the most abstract. See my discussion of the semiotic transubstantiation of the somatic in Open Secret, 130–60. 150. The metaphorical depiction of the letters as stones in kabbalistic lore can be traced to Sefer Yetzirah 4:12. 151. Compare Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 128a; Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Likkutei Amarim, 28b.

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152. Here I have followed the reading in Menah≥em Nah≥um of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim (Slavuta, 1798), 136b: massig u-mitkarev. This is the reading as well in Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Likkutei Amarim, 22a. The recently published version of the text of the Maggid of Mezeritch in Likkutei Amarim ( Jerusalem: Shuvi Nafshi, 2009), 33, is meshiv u-meh≥akker. 153. Likkutei Amarim, 32–33; Me’or Einayim, 135d–136b. 154. Compare Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 40. 155. For a recent study of this topic with ample reference to previous scholarship, see Kauffman, In All Your Ways Know Him. 156. Etkes, The Besht, 141–44. 157. Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 53. 158. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 186c. See Likkutei Amarim, 188: “When he was contracted in the aspect of H≥ okhmah, which is called yod . . . the hylic matter [ha-hiyyuli] whence he was able to produce all the letters, and everything was contained in him in a great concealment, and he wanted to reveal his divinity, and the disclosure is by means of the letters . . . they are all the worlds . . . for all that he contemplates are letters.” On the identification of the hylic matter (hiyyuli) and wisdom (h≥okhmah), which is also on occasion designated as the nothing (ayin), compare Maggid Devarav le-Ya‘akov, sec. 56, 83; sec. 60, 91; sec. 78, 134; sec. 180, 281; Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Likkutei Amarim, 21a (parallel in Menah≥em Nah≥um of Chernobyl, Me’or Einayim, 135c), 43a. Also relevant, but beyond the parameters of this study, is the further characterization of the hylic nature of divine wisdom as the means by which one thing is turned into its opposite, which is indicative of the metaphysical principle of the coincidentia oppositorum. See Maggid Devarav le-Ya‘akov, sec. 123, 208; sec. 178, 277; and compare Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 31. 159. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 3a; compare 25d, 172a. The transfiguration is implied in the comment of Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 27, that the bodies of the righteous are called gufei torah, the rabbinic idiom for the principles of the Torah, which is rendered hyperliterally. See also Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Likkutei Amarim, 19b, where the depiction of the spiritual substance of the sages in the world to come is said to be attained by them in this world. And compare Likkutei Amarim, 36b, where the divesting of corporeality (ritually performed in the fast of Yom Kippur) is presented as the means to comprehend something of the transcendent, which is designated by the Tetragrammaton. 160. Based on Exod. 26:11. 161. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 39a; Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 59. See Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 38a, where the secret of knowledge (sod ha-da‘at) elicited from Proverbs 3:6 is linked to the physical eating, which facilitates the union of the masculine and feminine potencies of the divine. Compare the similar theurgical explication of the verse as the conjunction of the he and the waw, which is attributed to the Besht, in Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 163, found as well in Tzawwa’t ha-Ribash, sec. 94, 17. On the erotic and theurgic connotations of the knowledge communicated in Proverbs 3:6, see Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 127a. 162. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 197a. 163. It is relevant to recall the remark of Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 55. Commenting on the dissemination of the ideal of avodah be-gashmiyyut in the Hanhagot literature (regimens vitae), she noted that even in this text the attitude of indifference toward the

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mundane was emphasized and that such an idea “is not particularly powerful as propaganda for winning over souls: if Hasidism in fact intended to missionize . . . it did not do so at the price of vulgarization of its ideas. I reject from the outset the idea of the ‘popularization’ of Hasidism as an intellectual system.” 164. This is the basis for the meditational praxis laid out in Dov Baer of Mezeritch, Maggid Devarav le-Ya‘akov, sec. 57, 85–86: “In prayer one must place all one’s power in the words and to go from letter to letter until one forgets one’s embodiment [gufaniyyut], and one should contemplate that the letters are joined together and combined one with the other, and this is a great pleasure. One should imagine that if this is a great pleasure with respect to corporeality [gashmiyyut], how much more so with respect to spirituality [ruh≥aniyyut], and this is the world of formation [olam ha-yetzirah]. Afterward one comes to the letters of thought and one does not make audible what one is speaking, and this is when one comes to the world of creation [olam ha-beri’ah]. Afterward one comes to the attribute of the nothing [middat ayin] wherein all one’s somatic faculties [Koh≥otav ha-gashmiyyim] are eradicated, and this is the world of emanation [olam ha-atzilut], the attribute of wisdom [middat h≥okhmah].” The passage appears in Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 235–23; see Jacobs, Hasidic Prayer, 77–78. Compare Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 41–42. On contemplative prayer in the teaching of the Maggid of Mezeritch, see in more detail Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 215–41. 165. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 7a; Ben Porat Yosef, 46c. Compare Keter Shem Tov ha-Shalem, 28, 50. 166. For instance, see Tikkunei Zohar, sec. 40, 80b. 167. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 25a. Reference is made to the passage mentioned in the previous note to elucidate the description of Jacob as having come upon a “certain place” (Gen. 28:11), that is, the place of the pure marble stones (according to the warning of R. Akiva in the version of the legend of the four sages who entered Pardes recorded in the BT H≥ agigah 14b), which are the letters contained in the alef, the “root of the letters of the Torah that is the most proximate to the spiritual vitality of the infinite light.” In the same context, the alef is identified with the Tetragrammaton in accord with the older decoding and the passage from Tikkunei Zohar cited in the previous note is mentioned explicitly. The interpretation of Jacob’s vision of the ladder is found in many other Hasidic sources; see, for instance, Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 27. 168. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 7a. 169. Tikkunei Zohar, sec. 70, 122b. 170. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 7a. 171. See Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ketonet Passim, critical edition with introduction and notes by Gedalyah Nigal ( Jerusalem: Makhon Peri ha-Aretz, 1985), 239: “As I have also heard from my teacher, may his memory be for the life of the world to come, ‘I will hide etc.’ (Deut. 31:18), that is to say, I will hide [astir] from him and he will not know that he is in the concealment of the face [hastarat panim].” Compare Nah≥man of Bratzlav, Likkutei MoHaRaN (Bnei Brak: Yeshivat Breslov, 1972), I, 56:3, 65b: “There are two concealments, when God, blessed be he, is concealed in one concealment, it is also very difficult to find him, but nevertheless . . . it is possible to exert an effort and to search until one finds him, blessed be he, since one knows that God, blessed be he, is hidden from him. However, when God, blessed be he, is concealed in the concealment within the concealment, that is, the concealment itself is concealed from him, and he does not know at all that God, blessed be he, is

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hidden from him, then it is impossible to find him . . . and this is the aspect of ‘I will hide’ [we-anokhi haster astir] (Deut. 31:18), that is, I will conceal the concealment.” 172. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 73: “Thus the contraction of the holy vitality within all the material beings [tzimtzum ha-h≥iyyut ha-kodesh she-be-tokh kol mitgashmim] is called the exile of the presence [galut ha-shekhinah], for the contraction is an exile to the one that dwells in them.” See Peri ha-Aretz, 31, where the contraction is related more specifically to the delimitation of the Ein Sof in the letters of the Torah, the permutations of which constitute the stuff of the material existents. 173. Wolfson, Open Secret, 66–129. 174. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 57b–c. Egypt, which paradigmatically symbolizes the exile, is described as a state of limitation (based on a wordplay decoding mitzrayim as metzer yam) in which matter is subservient to form. See Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 150d, where the six days of the week are characterized as the exile, a condition of constriction, and the Sabbath, a prolepsis of the future, is the “day of rest and repose” or the “property without boundaries” when the form can delight in spiritual pleasure without any limitations. 175. See, for example, Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ketonet Passim, 237–38. 176. See Wolfson, “Walking,” 184–97, and for a more general discussion of the theme, Louis Jacobs, “The Uplifting of Sparks in Later Jewish Mysticism,” in Jewish Spirituality From the Sixteenth-Century Revival to the Present, ed. Arthur Green (New York: Crossroad, 1987), 99–126. 177. This is a reference to the power of repentance according to the teaching attributed to Reish Lakish in BT Yoma 86b. See Wolfson, Open Secret, 56, 166–71, 180–82, 191, 263, 274, 279. 178. Gedaliah of Lunitz, Teshu’ot H≥ en ( Jerusalem: Makhon Zera Avraham, 2007), 21. A similar exegesis of Psalm 69:19 as something that was heard from the Besht is attested in Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 79b, 95a, 198a, and references below, notes 188 and 190. See also Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ketonet Passim, 70. 179. See Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 189b. In that context, the Beshtian interpretation of Psalm 69:19 is associated with the rabbinic idea that repentance is the agency by means of which one is liberated from exile (BT Sanhedrin 97b). See my comments on human repentance and divine forgiveness in Venturing Beyond, 215–16n101, 217–18n108. 180. BT Sanhedrin 87a. 181. That is, knowledge (da‘at) is here identified as the totality of the lower sefirotic emanations rather than being an independent attribute. 182. The editio princeps (Kapust, 1814), 20d, reads “seven,” but it is likely that this was an error that should be corrected in light of the standard rabbinic trope of the seventy nations of the world. The passage has been so emended in the more recent edition; see note 184 for reference. 183. BT Berakhot 33a. 184. Menah≥em Mendel of Vitebsk, Peri ha-Aretz, 101–2. 185. BT Sanhedrin 97b. 186. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 2b. 187. Many scholars have discussed the idea of mah≥ashavot zarot in Hasidic lore. See, most recently, Moshe Idel, “Prayer, Ecstasy, and ‘Alien Thoughts’ in the Religious Experience of the Besht,” in Let the Old Make Way for the New: Studies in the Social and Cultural History of Eastern European Jewry Presented to Immanuel Etkes, ed. David Assaf and Ada Rapoport-Albert,

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vol. 1: Hasidism and the Musar Movement ( Jerusalem: Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History, 2009), 57–120, and reference to other scholars cited on 59n8 (Hebrew). Passages from Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye are discussed by Idel, “Prayer, Ecstasy,” 66–71. 188. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 35d. See, however, his Tzofnat Pa‘aneah≥, 14a (Zofnath Paaneah, 63). Three types of redemption are distinguished: the redemption of the Shekhinah, the redemption of the soul (Ps. 69:19 is cited), and the physical redemption, which is explained further as the return of the people of Israel to their land. 189. Compare Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Tzofnat Pa‘aneah≥, 24c (Zofnath Paaneah, 110). 190. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Ketonet Passim, 171. 191. Gedaliah of Lunitz, Teshu’ot H≥ en, 71. The passage is cited and analyzed by Idel, Messianic Mystics, 218. 192. Moses H≥ ayyim Ephraim of Sudlykow, Degel Mah≥aneh Efrayim ( Jerusalem: Mir, 1995), 38 (Ps. 69:19 is cited in that homily). 193. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 166a. 194. Ibid., 70a–b; Ben Porat Yosef, 57a; Ketonet Passim, 60. On this theme, see Lederberg, Sod ha-Da‘at, 137, 139–41; Idel, “Prayer, Ecstasy,” 69, and, in more detail, Idel, “Remembering and Forgetting as Redemption and Exile in Early Hasidism,” Arbeit am Gedächtnis, ed. Michael C. Frank and Gabriele Rippl (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2007), 111–29. 195. Moses H≥ ayyim Ephraim of Sudlykow, Degel Mah≥aneh Efrayim, 84. 196. Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, Toldot Ya‘akov Yosef, 95a. 197. I am here responding to Schatz-Uffenheimer, Hasidism as Mysticism, 30. 198. The respective attitudes of Christian theologians and Hasidic masters to the law and the question of antinomianism (or what I have called hypernomianism) is beyond the parameters of this study. See Shaul Magid, Hasidism on the Margin: Reconciliation, Antinomianism, and Messianism in Izbica/Radzin Hasidism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2003), 207–16. See also the discussion on ritual performance and inner enthusiasm, law, and spirit in Arthur Green, Devotion and Commandment: The Faith of Abraham in the Hasidic Imagination (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1989), 9–24 (my thanks to Glenn Dynner for reminding me of this reference). The relationship between Christianity and Hasidism was explored by the Jewish apostate Paul P. Levertoff, Die religiöse Denkweise der Chassidim (Leipzig: J. C. Hinrichs, 1918), and in the abbreviated version of this monograph published as Love and the Messianic Age (London: Episcopal Hebrew Christian Church Publications, 1923), 2nd ed. (Marshfield: Vine of David, 2009). According to the family tradition, Levertoff was related through his mother to Shneur Zalman of Liady. See Jorge Quiñónez, “Paul Phillip Levertoff: Pioneering Hebrew-Christian Scholar and Leader,” Mishkan 37 (2002): 22. Whatever the historical veracity of this claim, H≥ abad sources are used predominantly by Levertoff to draw the analogies between Christian faith and Hasidic devotion. I explore this indebtedness in a study that I am currently writing on Levertoff ’s religious philosophy.

The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith The Quest for a Common Jewish-Christian Front against Frankism

Pawel Maciejko

Frankism, the religious movement that crystallized around Jacob Frank in the 1750s and constituted a late continuation of the messianic movement created around Sabbatai Tzevi (1626–76), was unique among other forms of Jewish heterodoxy in its extraordinary public profile, in the degree of involvement of gentile authorities in what was an ostensibly internal Jewish affair, and, most important, in the shrillness of the rabbinic campaign organized against it. The latter was not only unprecedented in its brutality, but also in its attempt to cast the Sabbatean offshoot as a new religion that was inimical to Judaism and Christianity alike. In making the case for a united Jewish-Christian front against Frankism, rabbinical leaders like Jacob Emden were actually moved to endorse aspects of Christian doctrine. THE PREHISTORY OF EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY ANTI-SABBATEANISM: RABBI JACOB SASPORTAS

Tracing these remarkable developments requires that we go back beyond the eighteenth-century opposition to Frankism and understand the strategies of Sabbatai Tzevi’s opponents during his lifetime. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610– 1698) was the principal opponent of Sabbateanism in the 1660s. He was born

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Areas of Sabbatean, Frankist, and Beshtian activity, seventeenth–eighteenth centuries. From The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, edited by Gershon David Hundert, available at www.yivoencyclopedia.org (© YIVO Institute of Jewish Research, 2010), based on a map by Michael Silber in Evyatar Freisel, Atlas of Modern Jewish History, rev. ed. (New York, 1990). Used by permission.

in North Africa and served as a rabbi in a number of Sephardic communities in western Europe. During the outbreak of Sabbatean enthusiasm he was living as a private individual in Hamburg. Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, his collection of letters and accounts pertaining to the period directly preceding and following Sabbatai Tzevi’s conversion to Islam, remains the indispensable source for any analysis of the early stages of Sabbateanism. Rabbi Jacob’s activities were first reconstructed in Gershom Scholem’s monumental biography of Sabbatai Tzevi. Scholem had little sympathy for his subject: on just one page of his book he managed to attribute to Sasportas’s harshness, irascibility, arrogance, fanaticism, hunger for the power and status of rabbinic office, bitterness and frustration, arrogance and unsteadiness in human relations, egotism and excessive self-confidence. On the adjacent page he called the

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rabbi “a Jewish Grand Inquisitor.”1 If Scholem’s discussion of Rabbi Jacob’s character is, to put it mildly, biased,2 his reconstruction of Sasportas’s polemical activities is masterful. What Scholem did not analyze, however, was the content of Sasportas’s ideas about Sabbateanism. Tzitzat Novel Tzevi was presented not as a text expounding a consistent theological and ideological position, but as an expression of its author’s twisted character. Since Sasportas’s book described otherwise unknown events from an early phase of the Sabbatean movement, it has paramount significance for historical research, but it has not been subjected to an in-depth conceptual analysis. In my opinion, Sasportas’s ideas should be treated with the utmost seriousness: in addition to his being the first prominent anti-Sabbatean strategist, the rabbi was the first to try to understand what the Sabbatean movement was all about. Scholars have emphasized that Sasportas attacked Sabbatai well before his apostasy, and the target of his ire was not messianic enthusiasm per se: the rabbi explicitly stated that he would be prepared to accept him as the Messiah if he fulfilled the traditional criteria for that role.3 Isaiah Tishby and Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer have argued that Sabbateanism was for Sasportas first and foremost a halakhic issue: the polemic was motivated mainly by Sabbatai’s open violations of the principles of religious law.4 Matt Goldish posits that Sasportas took issue with the rise of “unauthorized” prophecy as a source of religious legitimacy independent of or even hostile to the rabbinic establishment.5 Thus, according to Goldish, Sabbateanism 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 no longer had significance for Jews and Judaism.6 Sasportas was certainly taken aback by Sabbatai’s antinomianism and worried about the threatened subversion of the position of the rabbis brought on by popular prophets. Yet it seems to me that his deepest fears lay elsewhere. In the opening pages of Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, Sasportas favorably quoted the young Sabbatai Tzevi’s teacher, Rabbi Joseph Eskapa, who stated, some twenty years before his pupil’s conversion to Islam, “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, he expressed 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

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two peoples . . . . So began the faith of Jesus that his followers [adopted].”10 In September 1666, upon hearing the news that Sabbatai Tzevi 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 foreign 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 Sabbateanism was 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 Sabbateanism “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 the absolute rejection of all 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 Sasportas intended the term in its precise meaning; he considered Sabbateanism a rebellion against the very fundaments of religiosity rather than a specific transgression. 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.” This assertion, according to Goldish, constituted a rebellion against the official institutions of the rabbinate and an attempt at a radical overturn of the authority of the rabbinic tradition.15 This might have been the way the Sabbateans themselves saw it: for all the rhetorical flourish, Sabbatean talk about the “new torah” and the new prophecies being “like the Torah of Moses”16 was meant to simply emphasize Nathan’s higher status as one possessing direct revelation, unmediated by the rabbis. The Sabbateans saw in Sabbatai the fulfillment of the traditional redemptive promises; they regarded themselves not as founders of a completely new religion, but as renewers of Judaism from within. Sasportas, however, took the ideas about the “new Torah” in a deliberately literal fashion. Sabbateanism 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

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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 lead 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’s worries were neither about the Christian “influences” on Judaism introduced by Sabbatean theosophy nor about messianic “enthusiasm” playing into the hands of the Catholic priests.17 Sasportas displayed little or no interest in contemporary Christendom: in fact, all references to Christianity in Tzitzat Novel Tzevi refer not to the seventeenth-century Church and her theologians but to the ancient Jewish sect that led some Jews astray.18 Before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, Sasportas foresaw the danger of Sabbateanism becoming a new religion branching from Judaism, as had early Christianity. He expressed hope that the sages would manage to do what they had failed to do in the case of Jesus: nip the birth of a new faith in the bud.19 It is in this context that Sasportas invoked the symbolism of the “mixed multitude.” The concept appears in the Bible in the narrative account of the Exodus (Exod. 12:37–38): “And the People of Israel journeyed from Rameses to Succoth, about six hundred thousand on foot, who were men, besides children. And a mixed multitude [erev rav] went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, and very many cattle.” Jewish tradition interpreted the phrase erev rav as denoting a group of foreigners who joined the Israelites following Moses from Egypt. While some midrashim understood it as a reference to the “righteous among the Egyptians, who celebrated Passover together with Israel,”20 a prototype for future converts to Judaism, the majority of rabbinic exegetes saw in the mixed multitude the force of corruption, sin, and discord: accustomed to idolatry, the erev rav enticed Israelites to make the Golden Calf 21 and angered God by demanding the abolition of the prohibition against incest.22 The Zohar universalized the midrashic image by removing it from its original place in the sequence of biblical narrative: the presence and activity of the mixed multitude was not restricted to the generation of the Exodus, but extended over the entire history of humanity. The erev rav were the impurity the serpent injected into Eve;23 they were the descendants of Cain;24 the nefilim, “sons of God,” who procreated with the daughters of men (Gen. 6:2–4);25 the wicked ones who survived the deluge.26 They were progeny of the demonic rulers, Samael and Lilith.27 They contributed to the building of the Tower of Babel28 and caused the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem.29 They practiced incest, idolatry, and witchcraft.30 They were the cause of the imprisonment of the Divine Presence in the demonic realm of the “husks” (kelippot) and, likewise, the exile of Israel among the nations.31

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Shortly after proclaiming Sabbatai as the Messiah, Nathan of Gaza composed a commentary on an ancient apocalyptic text he had supposedly discovered in an old synagogue storage room. In order to counter rabbinic opposition to the budding messianic upheaval, he invoked the symbolism of the mixed multitude: “His [the Messiah’s] contemporaries shall rise against him with reproaches and blasphemies—they are the ‘mixed multitude,’ the sons of Lilith, the ‘caul above the liver’ [Lev. 3:4], the leaders and rabbis of the generation.”32 In his subsequent writings, Nathan developed a doctrine of salvation attainable solely by messianic belief (as opposed to the observance of commandments) and extended his use of the motif of erev rav claiming that all Jews, who fully observe the Law but deny the Messiah, are not true Israelites but souls of the mixed multitude.33 Before long, Nathan’s idea that those denying Sabbatai’s messiahship were descendants of the mixed multitude gained currency among his followers. Sasportas knew Nathan’s statements about disbelievers coming from the erev rav and “laughed at them.”34 Inspired by the writings of Nathan of Gaza, Hosea Nantava, a Sabbatean serving as a rabbi of Alexandria, claimed that rejecting Sabbatai Tzevi 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.35 In responding to the rabbi, Sasportas turned the tables on the Sabbateans: And you destroyed your place in the land of the living [i.e., the afterlife] by saying: “Anyone who does not believe in this [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 above the liver.”36 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! It is not as your prophet wrote, but as 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 called Saturn [Sabbatai] and is cold and dry as dust. . . . ‘Her mistress’ is a garden; ‘the handmaid’ is a dung-heap, and she is soiled from the side of the mixed multitude, a dung-heap mingled with a garden in order to grow seeds from the side of the Tree of Knowledge of

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Good and Evil, and from the side of idolatry she is called ‘saturn [Sabbatai] Lilith soiled dung-heap.’ It consists of all kinds of filth and vermin and dead dogs and donkeys are thrown upon it.”37 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.38

“Sabbatai” is the Hebrew name of the planet Saturn, and the Jewish tradition often links the reign of Sabbatai—the astrologically elevated position of the planet Saturn—with the advent of the Messiah. Moshe Idel has suggested the fascinating possibility that the outburst of messianism in the seventeenth century owed much of its potency to such astrological speculations. Young Sabbatai’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 him, his followers, and many contemporary observers.39 Sasportas was clearly well acquainted with astrological interpretations of the advent of Sabbateanism: in a letter to Rabbi Raphael Supino he noted that “it is not enough, as you said, for the gentile sages and astronomers to claim that the ascension of the planet Saturn hints [at the coming of the Messiah] and is a sign of Redemption,”40 and he linked the renewal of messianic claims among the Jews with the ascent of the “bloody star,” Sabbatai-Saturn.41 In this context, Sasportas’s invocation of the quote from the Zohar tying the symbolism of Saturn with that of the mixed multitude was an exegetical masterstroke: it drew upon previous, separate Sabbatean interpretations of both motifs and, by connecting them, inverted their meanings: the ascension of Saturn was indeed linked with the advent of Sabbatai Tzevi, but it signified the beginning of the reign of the erev rav, not the coming of the Messiah. The mixed multitude were not, as Nathan of Gaza would have it, the rabbis who opposed Sabbatai, but the Sabbateans themselves. What is even more interesting is what Sasportas left out of the passage: in printed editions of the Zohar the dead dogs and donkeys that are thrown on the dung heap are equated with “sons of Esau and Ishmael,” the Christians and the Muslims, respectively. Some manuscript versions explicitly identified the dead dog with Jesus and the dead donkey with Mohammed.42 The astrological reception preceding the idea that the advent of Sabbateanism paralleled the birth of Christianity was strengthened by the concept of the so-called conjunctio maxima, the “great conjunction” between Saturn and Jupiter. Astrology—both Jewish and Christian—often interpreted the great conjunction as the moment of emergence of a new religion.43

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The Star of Bethlehem was taken to be a great conjunction,44 and some astrologers linked the messianic pronouncements of Sabbatai Tzevi with the great conjunction that took place in November 1648. While Sasportas made no explicit mention of the 1648 conjunction, he linked the ascension of the planet Saturn with the rise of a threat of a profound rift within the Jewish people that “would turn the hearts of sons from their fathers and set husband against wife.”45 Intellectually fascinating as it must have been, this interpretation was far too radical for other rabbis; the subsequent rabbinic anti-Sabbatean works used the literary form of Tzitzat Novel Tzevi (a collection of letters, firsthand testimonies, and polemical commentary) as a basis for polemics and borrowed many specific motifs from Sasportas’s writings, but they largely refrained from accepting his conclusions. Sasportas’s conceptualization of Sabbateanism as a new religion had no direct continuation: the most important anti-Sabbatean work of the early eighteenth century, Moses Hagiz’s Shever Poshe’im (1714), contained only one reference each to the erev rav and the establishment of a new faith, and both terms were used loosely to suit the argument.46 It also lacked any mention of Sasportas.47 During his lifetime, Sasportas was a lone warrior against Sabbateanism. His open opposition to Sabbatai during the height of the movement earned him little sympathy among the Jews of Hamburg and might have even endangered his life.48 Tzitzat Novel Tzevi had been prepared for publication but remained in manuscript.49 In 1737, Sasportas’s son produced an abridged edition of his father’s magnum opus. However, leaders of the Amsterdam community, who were eager to suppress the memory of the involvement of their families in Sabbatean enthusiasm sixty years earlier, ordered that the entire print run be confiscated and destroyed.50 The book would have disappeared completely, if not for the fact that a copy (allegedly the only remaining one) of this suppressed edition was found in Amsterdam by Rabbi Jacob Emden. In 1757, at the height of the antiFrankist polemics, Emden published this abridged version of Tzitzat Novel Tzevi. The publisher felt a deep affinity between himself and Sasportas: he emphasized that his namesake Rabbi Jacob shared his anti-Sabbatean zeal and had been required to pay a similarly high price for his relentless campaign against the heretics. Like Sasportas—and unlike other rabbis of the period—he also believed that heresy should not be swept under the carpet but rather confronted through open polemics without regard for communal feelings, family ties, reputation, or the high social status of his opponents. As the pattern of rabbinic apologetics established in the first half of the

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eighteenth century failed to accomplish the eradication of Sabbateanism, and as the conceptual tools employed in the battle against crypto-Sabbateans were not apt to engage their more outspoken advocates, Emden abandoned the line of polemics embraced by Hagiz and returned to that of the first major opponent of Sabbatai Tzevi, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas.51 Emden became the most important figure in the rabbinic campaign against the Frankists. Before analyzing his understanding of Sabbateanism, however, I discuss the practical side of his involvement in the Frankist affair. THE EMDEN-EIBESCHÜTZ CONTROVERSY AND THE COUNCIL OF FOUR LANDS

Shortly after the foundational act of Frankism—a secret ceremony conducted by Frank and his followers in Lanckoronie in January 1756—Emden was contacted by one of the most prominent members of the Jewish establishment in eighteenth-century Poland, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamos´c´.52 Abraham ha-Kohen was a district rabbi in Brzes´c´ and a rabbinic judge in Tarle. The extant sources first mention him in 1751; despite his relative youth, he already belonged to the inner circle of trustees (ne’emanim) of the Council of Four Lands and signed the Council’s approbation for the Amsterdam edition of the Talmud.53 A year later, he became embroiled in the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy and denounced “the writer of the amulets,”54 stating, nevertheless, that it could not be conclusively determined who this writer was.55 In October 1753, when the Council condemned the printing and distribution of pamphlets related to the controversy and ordered the existing writings burnt (which in practice meant mainly burning of the writings of Emden), he signed the writ together with other Polish rabbis.56 Nevertheless, it would seem that Rabbi Abraham was not actually convinced of Eibeschütz’s innocence. Two months later, he wrote a letter calling for the public condemnation of Sabbateans and deemed some writings attributed to Eibeschütz blatantly heretical.57 In 1755, it seemed that the victory of the Eibeschütz party was complete: Rabbi Jonathan collected letters in his favor and published them in Altona under the title Luh≥ot Edut. Within a few months Emden responded with his refutation, Shevirat Luh≥ot ha-Even. The Council of Four Land’s 1753 ban on publications pertaining to the Eibeschütz controversy was in force; however, in contrast to earlier polemical works by Emden, which all came from his private printing press in Altona, Shevirat Luh≥ot was printed first in Z{ ółkiew with an approbation from Rabbi Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamos´c´.58 The open violation of the Council’s ban

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and his endorsement of the publication of the book in Poland constituted an unequivocal signal of support for Emden. Abraham became one of the leaders of the anti-Eibeschütz faction among the rabbinic establishment in Poland. The July-September 1756 sessions of the Council of Four Lands had two main items on the agenda. The first one was a wave of blood libels, in particular the Jampol ritual murder trial, which commenced in April of the same year.59 The second was the rise of Sabbateanism, culminating in its repeated, overt challenges to the authority of the rabbinate and the involvement of the Catholic consistory of Kamieniec in the Lanckoronie affair. The issue of the blood libel accusations will be discussed in detail elsewhere; for now, suffice it to say that the Council obviously spoke with one voice on this issue: the delegates decided to send an emissary to Rome, Elyakim ben Asher Zelig, to seek an official papal condemnation of the libel. The matter of Sabbateanism was more complicated. As noted, during the first part of the eighteenth century the Council avoided direct involvement in the campaigns led by anti-Sabbatean zealots. Throughout the early 1750s, the president (parnas) of the Council, Abraham ben H˘ayyim of Lublin, was a staunch Eibeschütz supporter and the major force behind the attempts to hush up the accusations against Rabbi Jonathan that led to the burning of Emden’s pamphlets in 1753. However, during the 1756 sessions, Rabbi Abraham haKohen of Zamos´c´, Baruch me-Eretz Yavan,60 and Rabbi Isaac ben Meir of Biała61 managed to convince the parnas that Emden’s writings did in fact contain some true information (it is not clear if this referred to Eibeschütz himself or only to the cases of less prominent Polish Sabbateans).62 The former president of the Council and a staunch rival of Abraham of Lublin, Abraham Yoski of Lissa, also threw his weight in favor of the unequivocal and forceful action against the Sabbateans in Podolia: he agreed to disseminate anti-Sabbatean pamphlets among the rabbis and requested ten copies of each of Emden’s polemical works, “for we cannot prevail if we do not have a weapon” against the heretics.63 In the summer of 1756, the competing factions of the Jewish establishment in Poland, which had so far been at odds over the matter of crypto-Sabbateanism and Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, agreed upon a common policy against open Sabbateans in Podolia. In late September, the Council of Four Lands confirmed the h≥erem promulgated earlier in Brody and extended its validity to other communities.64 Bans of excommunication were pronounced in the major Jewish centers of the region, including Lwów, Łuck, and Dubno in addition to Brody.65 While the

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wording of the respective bans repeated the more or less standardized texts of earlier excommunications, this time there seems to have been a concerted effort to actualize the bans and publicize the general condemnation of the Sabbateans. Toward the end of September, Rabbi Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamos´c´ informed Emden that the president of the Council of Four Lands had ordered that the bans be printed and disseminated among all the Jewish communities of Poland.66 Concurrent with the July-September sessions of the Council of Four Lands, the investigation at the Bishop of Kamieniec’s Consistory Court was gaining momentum. At the end of July, as the rabbis ignored calls to appear at the gatherings of the Consistory, the body dispatched priests who were supposed to interview the Jews and gather evidence locally.67 On August 2, the Sabbateans submitted a Latin manifesto to the Consistory detailing their position and attacking the Talmud and the “Talmudists.” This manifesto contained an early version of the motions that were later put forward during the public disputation, which I have discussed elsewhere.68 The legal battle at the Consistory raised the public profile of the Sabbatean controversy and embroiled the Jewish authorities in an unwanted—and potentially damaging—conflict with the bishop. Yet the involvement of the Catholic authorities was seen by some rabbis as an opportunity to eradicate Sabbateanism once and for all. On September 28, the shtadlan Baruch meEretz Yavan wrote to Emden: “The lord bishops and leaders of the righteous among the gentiles already heard of the matter: the issue became of great significance and already reached the highest lord of their faith, the Pope in the city of Rome. And also we will go ready armed before them,69 and will stand before the lord bishops here [in Poland] and will bring them to be burned [at the stake].”70 The idea that Christians burn people at the stake for inventing a new faith and that the same principle should be applied to the Sabbateans had previously appeared in a letter Emden had written to the Council of Four Lands in 1751.71 Yavan was quoting Emden’s own ideas to their author. Jewish excommunication, like its Christian counterpart, carried the right to invoke bracchium saeculare: after the Council pronounced the ban, the Jewish authorities could demand its enforcement by state authorities. Yavan’s proposed solution was to pursue Christian involvement to the hilt and obtain a condemnation of the Sabbateans as heretics. The remark that the Pope had been already informed seems to be an allusion to the hopes concerning Elyakim’s trip to Rome. On December 26, 1756, Rabbi Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamos´c´ wrote to Emden:

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And they wrote a manifesto against the Talmud. . . . And there is certainly no way they can be brought back into the fold. Especially now, when they offered to the bishop to uproot [the faith of] Mount Sinai, the Temple, and God of Jacob . . . and we already gave money to the bishop and we pronounced upon them a h≥erem . . . so the rest of Israel will not do as they do and will keep apart from them. And now we seek your advice, for we have no refuge except to obtain from the Pope the writ of excommunication against this evil faith [ha-emunah ha-ra‘ah]. So we here and you there should write to the [Jewish] leaders in Italy to make efforts towards this end.72

As the priests of Kamieniec were already involved in the investigation concerning Sabbateanism, Rabbi Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamos´c´ suggested the rabbis should go straight to the highest authorities of the Catholic Church, over the head of the local bishop. The fact that the Council of Four Lands was sending an emissary to Rome in any case greatly helped to facilitate the matter; indeed, in another section of the letter to Emden, Abraham explicitly confirmed that he had contacted Elyakim ben Asher Zelig on the issue of the Frankists.73 Elyakim’s primary mission was to acquire a writ against blood libels from the Holy See; his secondary objective was to obtain a papal condemnation of Sabbateanism. Rabbi Abraham ha-Kohen was an official of the Council of Four Lands, and Emden interpreted the remark “now we seek your advice” as a formal request on behalf of the Council. In his autobiography, Emden describes how, in response to the request for assistance from the leaders of the Polish Jewry, he “advised that the abominations [of the Sabbateans] should be publicly exposed in print and their evil be proven on the basis of Christian writings, for ‘from the very forest itself comes the [handle of the] axe [that fells it].’”74 He also mentions that he had written an open letter to the Council with the aim of “bridling the deceivers’ tongues.” Such a letter was indeed written. It was composed some time in the early months of 1757 and published for the first time as an appendix to Emden’s edition of the Midrash Seder Olam Rabbah ve-Zuta (before July 1757). An expanded version appeared in Sefer Shimush (1758–1760). This expanded version was given the title Resen Mateh [Bridle for the Deceiver]. The title is an allusion to the Hebrew translation of the New Testament’s Epistle of James: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious, and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s

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religion is worthless.” It is one of the most extraordinary documents spurred by the Frankist affair. EMDEN’S LETTER TO THE COUNCIL OF FOUR LANDS

Even before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, some rabbis expressed concern that the messianic enthusiasm he had aroused would provide grist for the mills of Christian missionaries. Indeed, the Jews’ naivety in pinning their hopes on the “new impostor” immediately became a target of ridicule for anti-Jewish writers.75 The fact that shortly thereafter “the Messiah became a Turk” made things much worse: the story of Sabbatai’s conversion was told and retold by Christians convinced that the obvious failure of yet another pseudo-Messiah would finally pave the way for the Jewish acceptance of Jesus. Sabbatean doctrines themselves offered Christian parallels. Many prominent Sabbateans, including the most important theologian of early Sabbateanism, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, were former Conversos who had been brought up as Christians and returned to Judaism only later in their lives. Cardoso’s opponents promptly pointed out that many of his ideas were in fact elaborations of Christian concepts garbed in Jewish terminology that he had acquired in his youth and ornamented with references to Jewish sources. Although Cardoso vehemently attacked Christianity, his Jewish adversaries argued that he never truly freed himself from his Christian upbringing and that his tracts supplied ammunition for the missionaries. The task of purging Judaism of heretical elements thus became intertwined with anti-Christian polemics, as rabbinic attacks on Sabbateanism routinely targeted the alleged and real links and parallels between Sabbateanism and Christianity. As noted, Sasportas was the only one to take this issue to its ultimate theological conclusion; others worried mainly about the practical influences of Christians and Christian ideas upon Jews and Judaism. Emden, who at times presented himself as a kind of new Sasportas,76 accepted many of his theses and often employed the characteristic rhetoric of earlier anti-Sabbateans. Nevertheless, Emden departed from the previous anti-Sabbatean apologetics of Sasportas and of others in one crucial regard: he went to great lengths to break the link between anti-Sabbatean polemics and resistance to Christianity. The crux of the argument of his letter to the Council of Four Lands was that, with regard to Sabbateanism, Jews and Christians were in the same boat.

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Emden’s letter to the leaders of the Council of Four Lands opened with praise for the rabbis of Poland, who had been divided on the issue of cryptoSabbateanism but, after the Lanckoronie affair, had finally assumed a united and uncompromised stance against the heretics: they “excommunicated and cut off the mixed [multitude] from Israel, and gave their heretical writings to burning.”77 The Podolian Sabbateans countered the excommunication by telling the Bishop and the Kamieniec clergy that the real reason for their persecution by the Jews was the similarity of the tenets of their belief to those of the Christianity: they portrayed themselves as representatives of a pristine version of Judaism that rejected the Talmud and accepted the Trinity and incarnation. By doing so, they immediately won the hearts of the Catholic clergy. Restoring the astrological symbolism of Saturn/Sabbatai (discussed earlier in the context of Sasportas), Emden attributed the temporary advantage won by the Sabbateans and the support they had gained from Bishop Dembowski to the fact that the September 1756 Consistory investigation took place at a time particularly propitious for the followers of Sabbatai: the autumnal equinox of that year fell on the hour ruled by the planet Saturn. However, continued Emden, astrology could not guarantee the victory of Sabbateans, even if Saturn stood like the sun in the middle of the sky. True Jews would reject the false prophets and triumph over heretics.78 The link between Sabbateanism and Christianity, seen thus far in rabbinic attacks on Sabbateanism intended for an internal Jewish audience, immediately became a pressing theme of Jewish-Christian debate. The outer layer of Emden’s writing provided Polish rabbis with handy arguments for confronting Catholic theologians. If the priests challenged the Council about the Frankists’ claim that their belief was similar to Christianity or about their accusations against the Talmud, they would be able to argue on the basis of Christian writings that Rabbinic Judaism had been long recognized by the Christians while Sabbateanism—despite its apparent similarities with Christianity—actually contradicted the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Large parts of Emden’s letter were thus written in the second person, directly addressing a Christian straw man and providing the potential Jewish disputant with useful quotations and lines of argument. As some priests might have been tempted to regard Sabbateanism as a “more progressive” version of Judaism entailing the abolition of the “ceremonial law,” Emden argued that Christianity’s own principles demanded something very different: And it is known that also the Nazarene and his disciples, especially Paul, warned that all those circumcised are bound to keep the entire Torah of

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the Israelites. And you, the Christians, should accept this teaching and not the teachings of the new false messiah Sabbatai Tzevi. For truly, the Gospels do not permit the Jew to forsake the Torah. As Paul said in the Epistle to Galatians 5:3, “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law,” and in the First Epistle to Corinthians 7:18, “Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision.” And the Acts of Apostles 16:1 also mentioned that he circumcised his disciple Timothy. And they [Christian theologians] did not know how to interpret it, because this act contradicted his own statement that circumcision is a temporary commandment that will be abolished in the times of the Messiah, and this happened in the times of the Nazarene. But from this we know that the Nazarene and his apostles did not come to abolish the Torah of Israel. It is written in Matthew 10:17–18,79 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfil them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” And the episode with Timothy proves that, as he was the son of a Jewish woman and a Greek man, and Paul, who was a learned man and a disciple of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, knew that the son of a Jewish woman and a non-Jew is a Jew and that therefore he should be circumcised and observe all the commandments.80

In Emden’s view, the involvement of the Catholic authorities in the Lanckoronie affair was almost providential. The publicizing of the deeds of the Sabbateans forced the hand of the rabbis and provided an incentive for using the gentiles to quash the movement. While it put the Jewish community in temporary danger by inviting Christian interference in an internal Jewish matter, it also opened an avenue for the ultimate eradication of Sabbateanism. What was needed was to demonstrate that, whereas Rabbinic Judaism was legitimate according to Christian categories, Sabbateanism constituted a dangerous and heretical religious novelty: it contradicted not only strict Jewish precepts but the teachings of the Church as well. Sabbateans were heretics, and Jewish heretics should be treated exactly the same way the Church treated Christian heretics. According to Emden, if the Christians became convinced that the self-proclaimed pro-Christian Jews in fact deviated from the accepted forms of normative religiosity, “they would condemn them to burning, for they created a new faith that should not be allowed to be professed openly

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anywhere, even in the free countries where all old faiths are allowed, as it is the case in Muslim countries, or in Holland, or in England: nowhere is it allowed to invent a new faith.”81 As I mentioned in the previous section, Emden floated the idea of having the Christians burn the Sabbateans at the stake as early as 1751; at that time, however, nobody took him seriously. This time, leaders of the Polish Jewry were more receptive to his suggestions. Emden argued that the rabbis were not only permitted, but even obliged to demand that the authorities burn the Sabbateans as heretics; hopefully, he remarked, “they will soon be burned on the order of the Pope of Rome.”82 Emden’s argument contained a deeper stratum as well. Besides providing the Council with quotations from the Gospels and lines of reasoning for possible debate with priests, and in addition to suggesting the overarching, opportunistic strategy of having Sabbateanism eradicated by Christians, Emden wanted to convince the rabbis that the Christians could and should be their true allies in the fight against the Sabbateans. Whereas some fragments of the letter purported to defend Judaism from Christian charges and to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jewish religion on the basis of Christian writings, others amounted to an apology for Christianity. For Emden, the advent of Sabbateanism fundamentally changed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity: the Sabbatean movement constituted a common enemy, in the face of which erstwhile quarrels between Jews and Christians should be immediately set aside. The Christian should accept the validity of Judaism within the theological framework of his religion, while the Jew should understand that there was no real contradiction between Judaism and Christianity, and that the mutual animosities stemmed from a series of misunderstandings: some Christian theologians misinterpreted the Gospels by claiming that Jesus called for the abolishment of the Torah of Moses, whereas “crazy people among the Jews who do not know left from right, nor do they understand the Written or Oral Torah,”83 came to believe that Christianity was a bastardized, idolatrous faith. The eradication of Sabbateanism required breaking the connection the rabbis made between Sabbateanism and Christianity and concomitantly changing the stereotype of Christianity among the Jewish elite. Many arguments ostensibly aimed at Christians who disparaged Judaism were, in fact, aimed at the Jews, who mistook the existing Christian disparagement of Judaism for the true essence of Christianity: And the writers of the Gospels did not claim that the Nazarene came to abolish the Jewish faith. Rather, He came to establish a faith for the

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gentiles from that day onward. And even this faith was not new, but old: it was [based on] the Seven Noahide Commandments that had been forgotten and reinstated by the apostles. . . . And so Paul wrote in Chapter 5 of his Epistle to the Corinthians that everyone should remain in his own faith84 . . . and so the Nazarene did double kindness to the world: on the one hand he sustained with all his powers the Torah of Moses . . . and on the other he reminded the gentiles about the Seven Commandments.85

In the rabbinic tradition, the Seven Commandments of the covenant between God and Noah (the prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, bloodshed, incest, theft, and eating of flesh torn from a living animal, as well as the injunction to establish a legal system)86 were considered the minimal moral standards enjoined by the Bible upon all mankind. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers universally maintained that the strictly monotheistic religion of Islam was in accord with the Noahide laws, while the status of the Christian religion was subject to debate; some rabbis argued that it violated the prohibition of idolatry. From the sixteenth century onward it became more and more common to exclude Christians from the category of idolaters and therefore to consider Christianity too as compatible with the Seven Commandments.87 Yet Emden went much farther than his predecessors in justifying aspects of Christianity. Not only did he claim that Christian doctrines were congruent with the Noahide Commandments, he also argued that the very essence of Jesus and the apostles’ mission was to establish a faith based on Noahidism for pagans. In his commentary on Pirke Avot (published in 1751), Emden had already stated that the “assembly” (a pun on the Hebrew word knesiah, which means “assembly” but also “the Church”) of the contemporary peoples could be adequately termed an “assembly for the sake of heaven” (knesiah le-shem shamayyim): its aim was to spread monotheism among “those who otherwise worshipped wood and stone, did not believe in the reward in the afterlife and had no idea of good and evil.”88 In the letter to the Council of Four Lands, he advanced the same argument. The main line of division did not lie between Jews and Christians (or, more broadly, non-Jews), but between members of legitimate religious groups on the one hand and heretics on the other. From this perspective, Sabbateanism was a kind of universal heresy, denying general human moral principles and embodying the idea of reversion to paganism or even—along the lines of the mythology of the mixed multitude—the primeval “waste and void” and immorality that preceded God’s covenant with Noah:

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O generation!89 Jews, Christians, and Muslims! The chief peoples, who uphold the fundamentals of the Torah of Moses and facilitate their proliferation in the world! Open your eyes and see . . . that there is no worse sect than the sect of Sabbatai Tzevi. . . . They are worse than all the ancient idolaters . . . , worse even than the generation of the Flood . . . , for they want to turn the world back to the state of waste and void [tohu va-vohu] . . . and they call good evil and evil they call good, they call light darkness and the sweet they call bitter. And such things are called heresy [minut].90

To the Jews, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas had argued that for their faith the nascent Sabbatean movement constituted a danger akin to that of early Christianity rising around Jesus and the apostles. He had viewed both Sabbateanism and Christianity as new, cancerous growths on the body of Judaism. Emden accepted Sasportas’s idea that Sabbateanism was a new (and hence illegitimate and dangerous) faith, but he claimed that, from the Jewish perspective, Christianity had never been a new religion: early Christianity was not an illicit sectarian offshoot of Judaism; rather, Judaism and Christianity stemmed from the same roots and were equally legitimate, since they were intended for different people. Thus, in Emden’s view, Christianity (and Islam) were elaborations of the fundamental mosaic revelation, parallel to Judaism and sharing Judaism’s moral principles and redemptive goal. Rabbi Jacob Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands elicited substantial scholarly discussion. Both Jewish and Christian scholars were amazed by the rabbi’s familiarity with Christian texts, for in his account of Christianity he did not use Jewish sources but went directly to the text of the New Testament.91 The extensive citations from the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul drew special attention. While there existed several Hebrew translations of Christian scriptures, Emden’s renderings seemed original and his consistent usage of Latinized personal names and titles of the books of the New Testament would suggest that he relied on a Latin or German text. Some argued that the quotations might have been translated into Hebrew by Emden himself.92 Such a possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand: there is no doubt that Emden knew some German, Dutch, and Latin and read numerous non-Jewish books in order—as he put it—to “understand the views of different peoples in matters of their religions and religious customs and to reveal their thoughts about us and our holy faith [italics mine].”93 It is entirely feasible that he had some first-hand knowledge of the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is clear that his command of foreign languages was superficial94 and it is unlikely that he would have been able to undertake a

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sophisticated exegesis of the Gospels solely on the basis of his own study. I submit that Emden’s ostensibly unmediated account of the New Testament’s theology was based on an earlier Jewish source, a little known manuscript entitled Hoda‘at ba‘al din.95 The work was supposedly written in 1430 by one David Nasi of Candia, brother of the Duke of Naxos, Joseph Nasi, and a factor in the service of Cardinal Francisco Bentivoglio. According to David, the cardinal became convinced of the falsity of his Christian belief through independent philosophical investigations and undertook to ponder the truth of Judaism. He therefore asked, in great secrecy, to be supplied with Jewish anti-Christian works. David Nasi lent the cardinal several polemical books and composed a short tract entitled Hoda‘at ba‘al din for him. The title alludes to the talmudic principle according to which the admission of guilt by a person charged with a crime takes precedence over witnesses’ testimonies.96 In this case, the principle was metaphorically related to the writers of the New Testament: the tract aimed to demonstrate that the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles unwittingly affirmed the principles of Judaism and contradicted the dogmas of Christianity. The impact and reception of Hoda‘at ba‘al din have not been studied. It is certain that in the mid-eighteenth century a copy existed in Amsterdam. It belonged to the treasurer of the Sephardic community, David Franco Mendes. Mendes had numerous contacts with Emden’s father, H˘akham Tzevi, and might have had contacts with Emden as well.97 Another manuscript might even have belonged to Emden himself.98 In the letter to the Council of Four Lands, Emden drew heavily upon Hoda‘at ba‘al din: the titles of the books of the New Testament and personal names have the same or very similar Hebrew forms both in Hoda‘at ba‘al din and in Emden’s letter;99 the Hebrew translations of excerpts form the Gospels and the Epistles quoted in the latter exactly reproduce or closely paraphrase those in the former;100 and Emden’s entire argument that baptism did not seek to replace circumcision is structured along the lines of Hoda‘at ba‘al din.101 Moreover, the central thesis that Jesus and the Apostles never intended to abolish the Torah of Moses but wanted to perpetuate the fulfillment of the commandments of Judaism derives from the same source.102 The strategy of demonstrating the internal contradictions and incoherencies of Christianity on the basis of the New Testament had antecedents in Jewish apologetics.103 Nevertheless, using the Gospel as a prooftext for the truth of Judaism was highly original, and possibly entirely unprecedented. In his forthcoming study, Hayyim Hames argues that Hoda‘at ba‘al din was likely an eighteenth-century pseudepigraphic composition: neither of the names

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“David Nasi” and “Cardinal Bentivoglio” appear in any other source, and neither personality ever existed; the earliest extant manuscripts date from the eighteenth century; and there is no mention of the work in other medieval Jewish polemical tracts.104 If Hames’s conjectures are correct, Hoda‘at ba‘al din was composed not in the context of medieval Jewish-Christian polemics, but against the backdrop of the internal Jewish debate on Christianity spurred by Sabbateanism. The rise of Sabbateanism highlighted the need to make a clear distinction between the two religions, which was the main aim of Hoda‘at ba‘al din. The work’s central argument is that since all major Jewish articles of faith are already present in the New Testament, conversion is an act of folly, and this, too, might be anti-Sabbatean in nature. Despite its anti-Christian thrust, Hoda‘at ba‘al din legitimized Christian Scriptures in a way absent in earlier Jewish sources.105 The same is true of Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands: Jewish and Christian scholars marveled at the rabbi’s “open-minded” and even “ecumenical” views on Christianity and other monotheistic religions. Emden has been portrayed as an “orthodox champion of religious tolerance,” “enlightened traditionalist” interested in comparative religion, or “rabbinic zealot” preaching openness to outsiders and their beliefs. However, this scholarly praise generally misses the polemical context in which the letter was written (indeed, the existing translations of the excerpts from the letter into English and German conveniently leave out the fragments devoted to Sabbateanism).106 Emden’s aim was not to eulogize Jesus and the Christians, but to combat Jewish sectarianism. To be sure, the rabbi himself emphasized that his sympathetic views of Christianity were not empty flattery but a consistent theological position, which he developed and expressed also in other—non-polemical—works.107 Nonetheless, it must be pointed out that his pro-Christian ideas took their shape in the context of a ferocious battle against internal Jewish heresy. To my mind, the real (if implicit) theme of Emden’s letter was not a tribute to common Jewish and Christian values, but the issue of religious legitimacy versus religious deviance. Legitimate religions such as Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) were juxtaposed with sectarian and heretical religious formations. In Emden, the concept of heresy acquired a trans-confessional character and became the epitome of opposition to any legitimate religiosity, be it Jewish or not. Indeed, Emden praised Christianity. However, he praised Christianity not qua Christianity, but in opposition to Sabbateanism. For Emden, Christianity was a legitimate, true, and even noble religion, which—on the basis of its own theological tenets—should recognize Judaism’s

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legitimacy, truth, and nobility. What this meant in practice was the acknowledgment of Judaism’s total separateness. Judaism and Christianity were parallel paths to redemption: they did not intersect and should not attempt to do so. Jews and Christians should respect each other, but they had nothing substantial to offer one another. According to Emden, Jesus’ intention was to reinstate the Noahide Commandments, thereby creating a sustainable moral creed for gentiles; the founder of Christianity had no message for his contemporary Jews and Emden’s contemporary Jews had nothing to gain from the contemporary Christian religion. It is no coincidence that Emden’s account of Christianity drew so deeply on the Scriptures, rather than on the works of later theologians or his own firsthand experience. Tolerant and open-minded as it was, this vision of Christianity was that of its early canonical texts, not of what he saw through his window: Emden had little to say about the Christianity of his own day but referred solely to an abstract and idealized vision of Christianity at the time of its inception. Despite the enlightened phraseology, the argument’s aim was to maintain or even increase the distance between the two religions. Emden wanted to preserve a Utopian status quo in which Jews and Christians deeply respected each other but never met. The letter to the Council of Four Lands depicted the ideal scheme of things, in which the two legitimate religious establishments—the rabbis and the priests—recognized each other’s legitimacy without making attempts to interfere with each other’s business or to proselytize in any way. Jew and Christian were to join in condemnation of Jewish and Christian heretics. What is really striking in Emden’s letter is not his explicitly tolerant view of Christianity, but his implicit understanding of Judaism. The true novelty of Emden’s position did not lie in the view that Christianity was based on the Noahide Commandments (which by the mid-eighteenth century was generally accepted among the rabbis, though most of them based their argumentation on the Talmud rather than the Gospels). The true novelty was the idea that the theological and practical boundaries of Judaism could and should be unequivocally demarcated once and for all. What Emden proposed was a hard ontology of Judaism: the Jewish religion was eternal and immutable like a Platonic idea; it had clearly defined boundaries, centralized structure, and well-defined dogmas. I believe that Emden imagined his ideal Judaism in clear—though probably unconscious—analogy to the Catholic theologians’ ideal vision of Christianity. In the rabbis he saw a professional clerical caste, hierarchically organized, uniformly trained and disciplined, and controlling the minds and bodies of the wider Jewish community. In the h≥erem (ban), he saw not a

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localized and limited tool of social control employed within a specific community, but a kind of universal ban of excommunication, condemning the excommunicated to eternal punishment and having validity everywhere for everyone. In religious dissenters he saw “heretics” who should be burned at the stake. He saw the Jewish religion as a set of systematic and systematized doctrines incumbent upon every Jew and believed that one could abandon Judaism not only by a formal conversion to another religion but through lack of correct understanding of theological tenets: a Jew who deviated from the right path was no longer a Jew in the proper sense of the term. He belonged to another religion entirely. As Judaism had always been a religion without clearly defined dogmas and lacking centralized religious authority, earlier rabbinic attacks on heresy were proscriptive rather than analytical. No attempt had been made to establish a contrastive taxonomy of different heretical positions or to demarcate unequivocally what distinguished one “sect” from another. Names of ancient sects, such as Sadducees or Boethusians, were routinely used to designate modern-day heretics; terms such as Karaites were utilized as a generic synonym for sectarianism. Pre-Emden rabbinic polemics against the followers of Sabbatai Tzevi habitually conflated Sabbateanism with other Jewish sects of the past and systematically obfuscated differences between various heretical groups.108 Emden deeply interiorized the Christian understanding of heresy as theological error and became for Judaism what Irenaeus and Hippolytus had become for Christianity: a chief heresiologist. Such an understanding of heresy has no meaning if it is not relativized to some orthodoxy: a clear definition of deviance demands an equally clear definition of the normative. Following the seminal studies of Jacob Katz, Jewish historians have been reluctant to use the word “orthodox” in discussions of phenomena preceding the advent of Orthodox Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. However, it should be noted that the term “orthodoxy” was already used in the 1750s by the Lutheran scholar Friedrich David Megerlin specifically to describe Emden’s position in the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy.109 Emden was orthodox in the sense that he saw his version of Judaism as the only natural and true point of reference for all other versions of Judaism, which he considered inherently inferior, heretical, and deviant. This, in turn, made sense only within the framework of an organized church: it is little surprise that Emden’s vision of Judaism so resembled that of the Church and that his rabbis were so like the priests. Emden brought into play the half-forgotten anti-Sabbatean apologetics of Sasportas and Jewish anti-Christian polemics exemplified by works such as

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Hoda‘at ba‘al din, and then turned both on their heads. He accepted Sasportas’s idea of Sabbateanism being a new religion, but used it as an argument for establishing a common front with Christianity. He employed Hoda‘at ba‘al din’s notion that Jewish principles were expounded in the Gospels, but argued that this only went to prove the legitimacy of the Church in Jewish eyes. For Emden, the concept of heresy acquired a universal character, and Sabbateanism was understood as a new religion threatening both the Church and the Synagogue equally, albeit in different ways. Like Sasportas, Emden believed that Sabbateanism was not Judaism and argued that the Sabbateans were descendants of the erev rav: they were ostensibly Jewish but in fact did not belong to the people of Israel.110 After Sasportas in the mid-seventeenth century and prior to the eruption of the Frankist affair in 1756, no other opponent of Sabbateanism took up this line of argumentation; as Sid Leiman has noted, during the earlier stages of anti-Sabbatean polemics Emden was considered a loose cannon, if not worse.111 Yet, thanks to the mediation of Abraham of Zamos´c´ and others, Emden’s highly radical (and highly original) perspective on Sabbateanism was accepted by the Council of Four Lands in their dealings with the Frankists. At the turn of 1756–57, Emden became what he had dreamed of becoming but had never managed to achieve in his campaign against Eibeschütz: the mind behind the anti-heretical policy of the most powerful body in Ashkenazic Jewry. NOTES This essay is based on a chapter from Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 1. Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1973), 566–67. 2. This point had been first made by Isaiah Tishby in his essay “‘Al Mishnato shel Gershom Shalom be-Heker ha-Shabbeta’ut,” in Netive emunah u-minut ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 1982), esp. 258–62. Scholem “remained unconvinced of the validity of [Tishby’s] strictures”; see Sabbatai S≥evi, 566n252. 3. Jacob Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, ed. Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 1954), 39; Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 133. 4. Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer, “Tzitzat Novel Tzvi u-madurato ha-shlemah,” Ra‘ayon ha-meshihi me-az girush Sefarad ( Jerusalem: Magnes Press, 2005), 139–61. 5. Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 131–51. 6. Ibid., 143. 7. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 4; Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 142.

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8. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 43. In the text, “my faith”; cf. Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 143. 9. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 113; see also Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 582. 10. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 115. 11. Ibid., 131. 12. Ibid., 205. 13. Ibid., 256, cf. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 718. 14. BT Sanhedrin 99a–b. For the discussion of both terms, see Maimonides, Hilkhot Teshuvah, chap. 3. 15. Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 143, 145–46. 16. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 489. 17. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 166; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 582; Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 137. 18. See, for instance, Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 98, 115, 131. 19. Ibid., 83, 98. 20. Exodus Rabbah, 18:10; see also Mekhilta de-R. Simeon b. Yohai, 12. 21. Exodus Rabbah 424:6. 22. Numbers Rabbah 15:25; Midrash Tanhuma (Wilno, 1885), Beha‘alotekha, 35. 23. Zohar 1:28b. 24. Ibid. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid. 27. Zohar H˘adash, 645, 31d. 28. Zohar 1:25a–25b. 29. Ibid., 1:25b. 30. Ibid., 2:191a. 31. Tikkunei Zohar, Tikkun 19. 32. Scholem, ed., Be-ikvot mashi’ah≥ ( Jerusalem, 1944), 59–61; Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 226. 33. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 283. 34. Ibid., 7. 35. Ibid., 489, 697. Nantava’s writings are based on Nathan’s apocalypse; see Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 224, 274. 36. Lev. 3:4. The sentence paraphrases the words of Nathan of Gaza; see Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 226. 37. Zohar 3:282a. I partly rely on the translation provided in Isaac Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar, trans. David Goldstein (London and Washington, D.C.: Littman, 1989), 3:1436. 38. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 180–81. 39. Moshe Idel, “Saturn and Sabbatai Tzevi: A New Approach to the Study of Sabbateanism,” in Toward the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer and Mark Cohen (Leiden: Brill, 1998), 173–202, esp. 191–99. For important corrections to Idel’s interpretation of Sabbatai’s own views on Saturn and on Nathan of Gaza, see Abraham Elqayam, “Le-yidata ha-shenyyiah shel ha-mashiah≥: Giluyyim hadashim le-Rabbi Ber Perlhafter,” Kabbalah 1 (1977): 104–11. For Christian astrology linking the ascension of Saturn with the rise of Jewish false prophets, see Eric Zafran, “Saturn and the Jews,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 42 (1979): 16–27, esp. 18–19. 40. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 93; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai S≥evi, 647n155.

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41. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 99–100; see also Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), 354. 42. See, for instance, the Munich MS quoted in Mortiz Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer Sprache: Zwischen Muslimen, Christen und Juden, nebst Anhängen verwandten Inhalts (Leipzig, 1877), 362. 43. For Jewish views, see Jacques Halbronn, Le Monde Juif et l’astrologie (Milano, 1985), 142; Idel, “Saturn and Sabbatai Tzevi,” 180–81, and references therein. 44. See, for instance, Paul L. Maier, “Herod and the Infants of Bethlehem,” in Chronos, Kairos, Christos II (Winona Lake, Ind.: Eisenbrauns, 1998), 171. 45. Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 80. 46. Moses Hagiz, Shever poshe’im (Amsterdam [London], 1714; photo offset, Jerusalem 1970), 17, 61. 47. On the lack of references to Sasportas in Hagiz, see Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 150. 48. Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 131. 49. The first full edition was published only in 1954 by Isaac Tishby. 50. Tishby, introduction to Sasportas, Tzitzat Novel Tzevi, 42. 51. Emden, ed., Kitzur Tzitzat Novel Tzevi (Altona, 1757), 1r. 52. For an analysis of the Lanckoronie incident, see Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, chap. 1. For earlier, largely contradictory accounts of the events, see Kraushar, Frank i frankis´ci polscy, 1:70–73 (Cracow, 1895); Balaban, Le-Toledot ha-tenuah ha-Frankit (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:116–18; Doktór, S´ladami mesjasza apostaty (Wrocław: FNP, 1998), 152–55. 53. PVAA, 359–60. Graetz’s statement that Abraham was the president of the Council is erroneous. 54. Emden, Edut be-Ya‘akov (Altona, 1756), 70 [50]r. 55. Ibid., 52v; PVAA, 398. 56. Emden, Edut be-Ya‘akov, 55v; PVAA, 396–97. 57. [Joseph Prager], Sefer Gah≥alei Esh, Oxford, BOD, MS Neubauer 2187, 2:206r–208v. 58. Emden, Shevirat Luh≥ot ha-Even (Z{ółkiew, 1755), 1v. 59. Jacob Emden, Sefer Shimush (Amsterdam [in fact: Altona], 1762), 2v. 60. For the role of Baruch Yavan in the Frankist affair, see Maciejko, “Baruch Yavan and the Frankist Movement: Intercession in an Age of Upheaval,” Jahrbuch des Simon-DubnowInstituts 4 (2005) 333–54. 61. He was the son of the rabbi of Prossnitz who persecuted the Sabbatean Leibele and sided with Emden from the very beginning. See Emden, Edut be-Ya‘akov, 67v–69v; 70 [50]r, 74 [54]r-v. 62. A letter of Isaac of Biała to Emden dated December 7, 1756, in Sefer Shimush, 3r. Isaac of Biała does not refer to the Lanckoronie incident, but to the event in Lwów involving the Sabbatean Samuel of Busk. See Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, chap. 1. 63. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 2v. 64. Ibid., 7v. 65. Ibid., 2v. 66. Ibid., 2r. 67. Kleyn, Coram judicio, sig. D7-E; see also Kraushar, Frank i frankis´ci polscy, 1:77. 68. Maciejko, “Christian Elements in the Early Frankist Doctrine,” Gal-Ed 20 (2006): 13–41.

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69. Num. 32:17. 70. Letter of Yavan to Emden, September 28, 1756, in Sefer Shimush, 3v (the 1760 date of this letter is a misprint). 71. Emden, Edut be-Ya‘akov, 49v. 72. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 1v. 73. Abraham stated that he had intended to send to Elyakim a responsum on the issue of an agunah; Elyakim took up this issue in an undated letter published by Abraham Berliner: Otzar Tov, a supplement to the Magazin für Wissenschaft des Judentums 2 (1888): 9–14. 74. Emden, Megillat Sefer, ed. David Kahana (Warsaw, 1897), 185; cf. BT Sanhedrin 39b. 75. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto, 340–47; Yosef Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism: The Story of Isaac Orobio de Castro (Oxford: Littman Library, 1989), 214–15. 76. Emden, Kitzur Tzitzat . . . , 1r; Edut be-Ya‘akov, 35r, where he compares himself to Sasportas; Sefer Shimush, 18r, where he says he continues Sasportas’s line of argument. 77. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 15r. 78. Ibid. 79. In fact, 5:17–18, 80. Emden, Sefer Smimush, 15v–16r. 81. Ibid., 15r. 82. Ibid. 83. Ibid., 17v. 84. In a note, Emden gives a reference to 1 Cor. 7:17. 85. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 16r–17v. 86. Gen. 9:4–7; cf. BT Sanhedrin 56a. 87. For the development of this attitude, see Jacob Katz, Exclusiveness and Tolerance: Studies in Jewish-Gentile Relations in Medieval and Modern Times (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), 162–64. 88. Emden, Etz Avot (Altona, 1751), 40r–41v. 89. Cf. Jer. 2:3. 90. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 20r–21v. 91. Blu Greenberg, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: The Views of an Enlightened Traditionalist on Christianity,” Judaism 27, no. 3 (1978): 351–63, here 354–55, 363; J. J. Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works” (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1988), 515. 92. Thomas Willi, “Das Christentum im Lichte der Tora—Jakob Emdens Sendschreiben: Theologische und philologische Beobachtungen zu einem unbekannten hebräischen Dokument der Lessinzeit,” in Vergegenwärtigung des Alten Testaments: Beiträge zur biblischen Hermeneutik, ed. C. Bultmann and W. Dietrich et al. (Göttingen, 2002), 257–71, here 260. 93. Emden, Megillat Sefer, 97. 94. Schachter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden,” 514–15 and notes therein. 95. I am grateful to Hayyim Hames for bringing this work to my attention and for providing me with a typescript of his unpublished paper on it. 96. See BT Gittin 40b. 97. Hayyim Hames, “‘And on This Rock I Will Build My Community’: Jewish Use of the Gospel in Fifteenth-Century Spain” (unpublished typescript courtesy of the author), 6; Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 109–10. 98. Oxford, Bod, MS Michael 259. The Michael collection includes manuscripts and printed books from Emden’s personal library.

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99. For instance, “Aktus Apostolorus”: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, MS Oxford, 54, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16r; “Poil/Paul/Paulo”: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 48–49, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16v–18v; “Timotius”: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 50, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16r. 100. For instance, Matt. 5:17–19: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 20, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16r; 1 Cor. 7:18: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 49, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16v, 17v; Act 16: Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 54, vs. Sefer Shimush, 16r-v. 101. Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 45–49 vs. Sefer Shimush, 17r-v. 102. Hoda‘at ba‘al din, 16, 20, 23, 54–44, vs. Sefer Shimush 16r–18r. 103. The best-known examples are Shem Tov Shaprut’s Even bohan and Profiat Duran’s Kelimat ha-goyyim. 104. Hames, “And on This Rock,” 5. 105. Ibid., 8. 106. Partial English translations were published by O. Fasman, “An Epistle on Tolerance by a ‘Rabbinic Zealot,’” in Judaism in a Changing World, ed. Leo Jung (Oxford, 1939), 121–36, and by H. Falk, “Rabbi Jacob Emden’s Views on Christianity,” Journal of Ecumenical Studies 19, no. 1 (1982): 105–11. A partial German translation appeared in Thomas Willi, “Das Christentum im Lichte der Tora.” 107. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 17b. 108. Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 10. 109. David Friedrich Megerlin, Geheime Zeugnüsse vor die Wahrheit der Christlichen Religion, aus vier und zwanzig neuen und seltenen Jüdischen Amuleten, oder Anhäng-Zetteln gezogen (Frankfurt a. M./Leipzig, 1756), introduction. 110. Emden, Sefer Shimush, 19v–20r. 111. Sid Z. Leiman, “When a Rabbi Is Accused of Heresy: The Stance of Rabbi Jacob Joshua Falk in the Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy,” in Rabbinic Culture and Its Critics, ed. Daniel Frank and Matt Goldish (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008), 435–58, here 438.

From Poland to London Sabbatean Influences on the Mystical Underworld of Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, and Blake

Marsha Keith Schuchard

In 1790, the English poet and artist William Blake produced a provocative but puzzling work entitled The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. Written as a radical rejoinder to a conservative faction of Swedenborgians in London, Blake’s “illuminated prophecy” seemed to echo the antinomian and erotic themes of Jacob Frank and other crypto-Sabbateans. In plate 3, he declared: As a new heaven is begun, and it is now thirty-three years since its advent, the Eternal Hell revives. And lo! Swedenborg is the Angel sitting at the tomb; his writings are the linen clothes folded up. Now is the dominion of Edom, & the return of Adam into Paradise; see Isaiah xxxiv & xxxv Chap. Without contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human Existence. From these contraries spring what the religious call Good & Evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason. Evil is the active springing from Energy.1

Referring to 1757, the year of his own birth and the beginning of the Last Judgment according to Baron Emanuel Swedenborg, Blake went on to proclaim the necessity of overturning the Ten Commandments, of achieving divine vision through “an improvement of sensual enjoyment,” and of

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believing that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” When Blake asked Ezekiel “why he eat dung,” the Jewish prophet answered, “The desire of raising other men into a perception of the infinite.”2 These and other flamboyant aphorisms—advocating the breaking of Jewish law and the use of sexuality as a vehicle for spiritual vision—find their closest parallels in those of Frankist- and Sabbatean-influenced contemporaries of Blake. Sabbateanism, in its various manifestations, seemed to provide a secretive bridge between European Jews and Christians, and it appealed especially to radically imaginative and ecumenical artists and thinkers. But how could the teachings of “heretical” Polish Jews reach the London milieu of Blake, who never traveled abroad and who eked out a precarious living on the margins of England’s artistic and theosophical worlds? Recent archival discoveries have enabled us to begin to reconstruct the long-suppressed esoteric underground in London, which received Jewish and Masonic emissaries from Poland and other east and east central European nations, who infused their antinomian and esoteric beliefs into the spiritual quests of various heterodox Christians, including two who were especially relevant to Blake—Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf and the aforementioned Swedenborg. We now know from newly discovered letters in the Moravian archives in Muswell Hill, London, that Blake’s mother, Catherine, and her first husband, Thomas Armitage, participated in the elite, inner circle of the Moravian “Unitas Fratrum” in 1749–51. This “brotherhood” descended from Jan Hus and Jan Amos Comenius, Czech Protestants whose radical reform movements in the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries were violently suppressed, causing their descendants to flee to Moravia, where they maintained “the Hidden Seed” of their pansophic, universalist teachings. By the time the Armitages joined the Moravian church, it had undergone a revival under Zinzendorf and his charismatic son, Christian Renatus, who ushered in a period of radical sexual, mystical, alchemical, and ecumenical experiments.3 The Moravian historian Craig Atwood compares this period, known as the “Sifting Time,” to the “Summer of Love” in San Francisco in 1968, when “a youth culture frightened the authorities.”4 Eleven months after the death of Thomas Armitage in November 1751, his widow married James Blake, whose brother and house-mate, John Blake, was evidently a Moravian. Though Catherine went to work in the family’s hosiery shop and left the extremely demanding and time-consuming Congregation of the Lamb, the Blakes—including their third child, William— continued to attend the public services of the Moravians in the Fetter Lane Chapel, until they moved on to Swedenborgianism.5 In the 1780s, William

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Blake and his wife, Catherine Sophia, participated in the Swedenborg Society in London, whose members included not only admirers of Zinzendorf but sons of Moravian parents. But what does this have to do with Poland and the Sabbateans? During the period of the Armitages’ Moravian involvement, Zinzendorf had expanded the Brethren’s Jewish mission to include the establishment of a Jewish-Christian kehillah (congregation) in London, which was led by a Polish Jewish couple who had converted to Moravianism without giving up their Jewish identity and traditions.6 Swedenborg, the Swedish scientist-seer, also participated in the services at Fetter Lane in London, where he became immersed in Moravian versions of kabbalistic theosophy and meditation.7 At a time when Zinzendorf ’s missionaries to the Jews—Leonard Dober, Samuel Lieberkuhn, and David Kirchof—sought contacts with cryptoSabbateans on the Continent, Swedenborg recorded many scenes in his diaries in which he conversed and argued with Judaizing Christians and Christianizing Jews.8 Like Zinzendorf, he considered the Sabbateans’ version of Kabbalah close to Christian beliefs, and he believed it could end the ancient divisions between Judaism and Christianity. Though Swedenborg later broke with the Moravians, he continued to infuse kabbalistic concepts into his Christian theosophy through a process that had begun in his youth in Uppsala, Sweden. Because Sweden played a significant yet little examined role in the transmission of Sabbatean ideas from eastern to western Europe, it will be useful to give a brief history of Swedenborg’s access to such traditions. SWEDENBORG, SABBATEANISM, AND THE CHRISTIAN KABBALAH

At the University of Uppsala, Hebraists and Orientalists had known about Sabbatai Tzevi’s messianic movement from the time when the abdicated Queen Christina was the confidante of the Jewish banker Abraham Texeira, her Resident in Hamburg. According to reports that reached Sweden, she danced in the streets with her Jewish friends upon hearing news of Sabbatai Tzevi’s messianic pronouncements in 1665.9 A sympathetic Texeira received letters and news reports from the Orient about the movement, and he showed them to the Christian Hebraist Esdras Edzard, who then followed the rise and fall of the “false Messiah.”10 In 1685 Edzard recounted Texeira’s initial enthusiasm and subsequent embarrassment to Johann Jacob

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Table 3. Key Figures in Europe’s Mystical Underworld, in Order of Appearance William Blake (1757–1827). English artist and poet, reader of Swedenborg, radical in politics. Jacob Frank (1726–91). Podolian-born Sabbatean “messiah,” convert to Catholicism in 1759. Baron Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). Swedish scientist and visionary, inspiration for founding of New Jerusalem Church. Count Nicolaus Ludwig von Zinzendorf (1700–1760). German leader of Unitas Fratrum, the revived Moravian Church. Catherine Wright Armitage Blake (1725–92). Mother of William Blake, early member of Moravian Church. Thomas Armitage (1722–51). First husband of Catherine Blake, early member of Moravian Church. Leonard Dober (1706–66). Moravian missionary to the Jews, leader of Moravian Church in London. Samuel Lieberkuhn (1710–77). Moravian Missionary to the Jews. David Kirchof (1716–84). Jewish convert to Moravianism, missionary to Sabbateans. Queen Christina (1626–89). Queen of Sweden, abdicated in 1654, convert to Catholicism, neo-Rosicrucian court in Rome. Abraham Texeira (1581–1666). Jewish banker in Hamburg, friend and financial advisor to Queen Christina and Swedish court. Johann Kemper, formerly Moses ben Aaron of Cracow (1670–1716). Sabbatean convert to Christianity, Hebrew lecturer at Uppsala University. Eric Benzelius the Younger (1675–1743). Orientalist scholar, librarian of Uppsala University, brotherin-law of Emanuel Swedenborg. Nehemiah Hayon (ca. 1655–ca. 1730). Crypto-Sabbatean Kabbalist, Hebrew scholar. Stanislaus Leszcyznski (1677–1766). King of Poland, 1704–9, 1733–35 (abdicated). Protégé of Charles XII and son-in-law of Louis XV. R. Jonathan Eibeschütz (1640–1764). Hebrew scholar and Kabbalist, crypto-Sabbatean. Johann Brockmer. Head of German Moravian congregation in London, Swedenborg’s landlord. Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk (1708–82). Kabbalist and magician, “Baal Shem of London.” Peter Böhler (1712–75). Moravian missionary, philo-Semite, head of Moravian Church in London. Christian Renatus von Zinzendorf, known as “Christel” (1727–52). Charismatic son of Count Zinzendorf, leader of radical Moravian youth movement Joseph La Paz Buzaglo (d. 1767). Moroccan-born Jewish entrepreneur, crypto-Sabbatean. Joachim Fredrik Preis (1667–1759). Swedish ambassador at The Hague, confidante of Swedenborg. Moshe ben David of Podhayce, or Moses David (1696–). Sabbatean prophet, friend of Eibeschütz and Falk. Richard Cosway (1742–1821). English artist, Swedenborgian Freemason, friend of Blake. Edward Goldney (1710–77). English writer, Protestant proselytizer to Sabbatean-Frankist Jews. Reverend Benjamin LaTrobe (1728–86). English Moravian minister. Johan Gustav Burgmann. Pastor of German Lutheran Church at The Savoy, London, 1768–74. Tobias Boas (1696–1782). Jewish banker at The Hague, patron of Dr. Falk. Abraham Boas (1728–98). Son of Tobias Boas, student of Falk. Simon Boas (1730–95). Son of Tobias Boas, student of Falk. Christian Salomon Dober (1743–1827). Nephew of Leonard Dober, Moravian emissary to cryptoSabbatean sect in Amsterdam. Johann Daniel Müller (1716–ca. 1786). Pseudonym “Elias Artista,” ecumenical Rosicrucian, financial supporter of Swedenborg. Benjamin Henry Latrobe (1764–1820). English Moravian, son of Benjamin LaTrobe, political radical and Freemason, architect for United States capitol. “Count” Alessandro Cagliostro (1743–95). Siciliarn-born Giuseppe Balsamo, Kabbalistic magician, cofounder with Falk of Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry. Count Thaddeus Grabianka (1740–1807). Polish Catholic Kabbalist, co-founder of Avignon “Illumines,” “King of the New Israel.”

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Schudt, and he explained how he exploited Jewish disillusionment in his conversionist campaign. In that same year, 1685, Swedenborg’s father, Bishop Jesper Swedberg, spent ten weeks in the home of Edzard, and he was greatly impressed by the learned Hebraists’s success in bringing hundreds of Jews to Christianity.11 At this time, Abraham Texeira’s son Manuel still served as Resident for the Swedish monarchy, and news about Jewish affairs and Sabbatean controversies on the Continent continued to be of great interest to the Orientalist scholars at Uppsala University. After leaving Hamburg, Swedberg determined to implement a Swedish outreach to heterodox Jews, including Sabbateans, Karaites, and the supposedly Jewish Native Americans. In 1697 he and his academic colleagues at Uppsala supported the employment of Rabbi Johann Kemper, the former Moses ben Aaron of Cracow, whose initial enthusiasm for and subsequent disappointment with the Sabbatean prophet Zadoq led to his conversion to Christianity.12 In 1700, the Swedish scholar Eric Benzelius (the Younger) returned to Sweden after a three-year study tour in Europe and England, where he had visited Edzard, discussed the “Pythagorean Kabbalah” with Leibniz and F. M. Van Helmont, and studied various editions of the Zohar in the Bodleian Library.13 Appointed university librarian at Uppsala, he was delighted to meet Rabbi Kemper, for he had earlier heard in London from Dr. Francis Lee about the excitement provoked by Zadoq’s messianic mission. For the next sixteen years, Benzelius worked closely with Kemper on kabbalistic, zoharic, and Philonic studies, while the rabbi wove subtle Sabbatean themes into his own Christian kabbalistic treatises. During this period, from 1703 until 1710, Benzelius’s young brotherin-law, Emanuel Swedenborg, lived with him, and Benzelius became his primary intellectual mentor for the next forty years. While Swedenborg studied Hebrew, it seems certain that Kemper was his instructor, and we know from a recently discovered booklet, inscribed by Swedenborg in 1705, that he was learning about the Sefer Yetzirah and kabbalistic theories of divine influx and cosmic emanations.14 He also had access to Benzelius’s great library, which contained many works of Christian Kabbalah and Jewish mystical lore.15 In 1715, when Charles XII returned from his captivity in Turkey, he was accompanied by a party of Jewish creditors and their families, who came from Podolia, northern Greece, and Turkey, areas with strong Sabbatean traditions.16 Benzelius knew that the king planned to declare a policy of “liberty of conscience” in all Swedish territories, and he envisioned a more enlightened kingdom in which Jews, Moslems, and Christian dissenters would be not

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only tolerated but studied by Lutheran theologians.17 Thus, in 1716, after the death of Kemper, Benzelius sent his student (and future son-in-law) Andreas Norrelius to Amsterdam in order to investigate Jewish and Christian opinions of Kemper’s Christian kabbalistic treatises.18 Norrelius found reinforcement for Kemper’s theses in Nehemiah Hayon’s Oz l’elohim (1713), but he was apparently ignorant of Hayon’s role as a crypto-Sabbatean.19 As we shall see, Hayon’s syncretic Kabbalism would influence the development of a secret Jewish-Christian sect that later had links with Swedenborg and the Moravians. The killing of Charles XII in 1718 (“by a dubious hand”) and the installment of an intolerant new regime frustrated the efforts of Benzelius, Norrelius, and Swedenborg to open up Sweden to research in both natural and supernatural sciences. After Norrelius’s return to Sweden, he and his Benzelius and Swedenborg in-laws would suffer hostility and repression over the next two decades.20 The young scientist Emanuel Swedenborg became so disillusioned by the political situation that he sought spiritual refuge first in Dippelianism and then in Moravianism, at a time when both movements began to assimilate Jewish theosophy into their heterodox Christianity.21 In the 1730s, Benzelius, Swedenborg, and their political allies were deeply implicated in Polish affairs, for they backed the Polish “Pretender,” Stanislaus Leszczynski, in his effort to regain the Polish throne.22 In 1733–34, during the War of the Polish Succession, Swedenborg traveled throughout Germany and eastern Europe. I argue in a forthcoming book that he carried out an intelligence mission concerning proposed Swedish military assistance to Leszczynski.23 But during this journey he also began the transformation that turned him from a natural into a supernatural scientist. In Dresden he met the learned Orientalist Benedict Michaelis, who was in contact with the famous chief rabbi of Prague, Jonathan Eibeschütz.24 Benzelius was familiar with Eibeschütz’s high reputation for kabbalistic erudition, and Swedenborg may have learned more about him when he visited the Jewish community in Prague. He had already discussed with an unnamed Jew a new method of preventing seaworm damage to ships in the Baltic (two years earlier, a special Hebrew prayer was composed for this purpose).25 Alfred Acton suggests that Swedenborg’s experiences in Prague led him to his “first philosophical thoughts as to the human form of the soul.”26 He was already familiar with the kabbalistic-influenced notion of the Ur-mensch advocated by Dippel, and he now began to experiment with meditation that produced trance states.27 Eberhard Zwink argues further that Swedenborg drew upon zoharic notions of the seminal point, the nexus between the

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divine and natural worlds, in “The Principia” section of his Opera Philosophica et Mineralia (1734), which he published in Leipzig after his visits to Prague.28 In 1736–39 Swedenborg returned to the Continent, where he visited Jewish synagogues and communities in Hanover, Rome, and Amsterdam. In Hanover, where the Moravians were seeking cooperation with the local Jews, he recorded the Hebrew inscription over the synagogue doorway: “This is the entrance gate to Jehovah.”29 In 1740, when he made a previously unknown, secret journey from Amsterdam to London, his visit coincided with that of Samuel Lieberkuhn, the main Moravian missionary to the Jews, who reported that he received a sympathetic hearing from “the Jews in England.”30 Though we do not know if Swedenborg was in contact with Lieberkuhn, he now began to include Jewish terminology and kabbalistic concepts in his writings.31 SWEDENBORG, ZINZENDORF, AND THE BA‘AL SHEM OF LONDON

In August 1743, when Swedenborg returned to Amsterdam, he was determined to study “the Hebrew language, as well as the correspondences, according to which the whole Bible is composed.”32 He was thereby “put in a position to receive instruction from the Lord who is the Word.” From the entries in his dream diary, it is clear that he was deeply involved in Moravian spiritual and meditational practices, which produced ecstatic visions as well as troubling hallucinations.33 In May 1744, he traveled to London, accompanied by a Moravian friend, and he regularly attended services at Fetter Lane. He yearned to join the inner congregation and, apparently, the secretive Order of the Mustard Seed, but an episode of mental illness led to his rejection by the Elders. It was probably through the Jewish Mission that Swedenborg met two unnamed Jews, who visited him where he lodged with a Moravian friend, Johann Brockmer.34 Did the Jews collaborate with him in kabbalistic meditation? They reportedly witnessed his achievement of a visionary trance state. According to Brockmer, during Swedenborg’s illness, he claimed that he was the Messiah, “that he was come to be crucified for the Jews,” but because of his speech impediment (a stammer) “Brockmer was chosen to be his mouth, to go with him the next day to the synagogue, and there to preach his words.”35 Though Swedenborg eventually recovered, he “would never give up the point” that he was the Messiah. There is much circumstantial evidence (but still no definitive proof ) that the visitors were Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk and his factotum Hirsch Kalisch.

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Swedenborg could have met Falk, the Ba‘al Shem of London, through their mutual friend, the eccentric physician and Freemason Dr. William Smith, a student of Falk and associate of the Moravians.36 Swedenborg had met Smith in Holland and then maintained an “intimate” relationship with him in London. Smith drew upon Jewish and kabbalistic lore for his medical theories, which he utilized to cure Swedenborg of his mental breakdowns in summer 1744 and spring 1745. It was perhaps relevant that Falk also performed cures of mental illness and epilepsy, for Swedenborg seemed to suffer intermittent bouts of temporal lobe epilepsy (he experienced altered states of consciousness, but he was definitely not insane).37 For the next five years Smith studied Kabbalah with, and transferred French funds to, Dr. Falk. As we shall see, it was mainly through Falk’s Polish and eastern European connections that Sabbatean influences flowed secretly into London. The Ba‘al Shem was a native of Podolia, a center of radically syncretistic Sabbateanism that merged Jewish, Islamic, and Christian esoteric themes. He then spent his formative years in Fürth, Germany, which also harbored many Sabbateans. This connection would have interested Zinzendorf, who had been deeply influenced by Hirsch Fromb, a learned Jew from Fürth, whose openness to dialogue with Christians was “possibly influenced by Sabbatean ideas.”38 Zinzendorf instructed his missionaries to consult with the Jews of Fürth about the Moravians’ plans to go into Poland, Russia, and China.39 One of these missionaries, Arvid Gradin, was a Swedish Moravian and friend of Swedenborg.40 After Falk moved to London ca. 1740, he continued his contacts with and sent donations to Jewish friends in Fürth.41 At the same time, he was criticized by his orthodox enemies for revealing kabbalistic secrets to Christians and harboring secret Sabbatean sympathies.42 Similar charges would be made against Eibeschütz, which did not prevent the Jews of Fürth from later inviting him to leave his post at Metz and become chief rabbi of their community (his Metz contract prevented his acceptance).43 During Swedenborg’s periodic residences in London (from 1744 to 1772), he lived either in Wellclose Square, which was quite small, or its close neighborhood, where the bearded, be-turbaned, white-robed Falk became a famous figure, almost a tourist attraction. Falk was a great admirer of the erudite Kabbalist and suspected Sabbatean Moses H˘ayim Luzzatto, who in summer 1743 had moved from Amsterdam to Accra, and he always carried Luzzatto’s works with him.44 Thus, it is possible that the striking similarities between the theosophy and meditation techniques of Luzzatto and Swedenborg may have been influenced by Falk.

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When Swedenborg returned to Sweden in August 1745, he learned of the efforts of his political allies to attract wealthy Jews to Sweden in order to expand Swedish trade, in collaboration with the Swedish East India Company.45 That he participated in the process is suggested by the many references to his “spirit” conversations with Jews over the next months. During the period when a party of Jewish negotiators was in Sweden, he recorded: “These words are written in the presence of many Jews who are around me . . . that it is no phantasy can be clearly known by those in Sweden, etc. with whom I have conversed in the meantime. It can also be evident from an historical account of my life, if opportunity be afforded for describing this.”46 Though the Jewish recruitment effort eventually failed, Swedenborg continued his effort to decipher the “interior sense” of the Hebrew Scriptures. In summer 1747, Swedenborg returned to Amsterdam, where he intensified his Hebrew studies in company with Moravian friends. Though he made many critical comments about the Jews in general, he also referred to certain Jews who seemed sympathetic to his Christian message and esoteric interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures. He gave no names, but his description of Jews who wore Turkish clothes and turbans seemed to point to Doenmeh, from Turkish controlled Salonika, whose Sabbatean antinomianism allowed them to outwardly convert to Islam (or in other countries to Christianity).47 Pawel Maciejko notes that Sabbatai Tzevi “demanded that his followers wear turbans,” and later Sabbatean groups often wore turbans during special prayers.48 Lutz Greisiger observes further that rumors about these Doenmeh-type groups circulated in Christian Pietist circles; moreover, they reflected “a real conversional movement emerging from that syncretism which aimed at integrating the divine sparks dispersed over Judaism, Christianity and Islam by connecting through conversion to the other two religions.”49 These Greek-Turkish Jews were likely disciples of the Salonikan prophet Baruchia Russo, who drew on the syncretic teaching of Nehemiah Hayon that linked kabbalistic concepts of the three faces within God to Christian notions of the Trinity.50 As noted earlier, Swedenborg had early access to Hayon’s theories through Norrelius and Benzelius, who admired the rabbi’s writings. Like Hayon, Baruchia “wanted to link three religions—Judaism, Islam, and Christianity—and to create a single religion at the end of time.”51 For Swedenborg, who respected the Moslem religion and whose family and political allies supported a close Swedish-Turkish alliance, this kind of syncretism would be particularly appealing.52

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When the Turkish-Greek Jews asked Swedenborg whether “he has known their Messiah, who should lead them to Jerusalem with greater miracles than Moses,” he replied that their Messiah was only a man who does not live to eternity, an argument that upset and confused them.53 Though he spoke with one Jew “who was quite sensible, for he suffered himself to be informed,” Swedenborg worried that he was being deceived by other Jews, who “plotted that they would say something to me which yet was a fiction.” Even more confusing were the Jewish sorcerers, who “simulated friendships, for the sake of sweet conversations,” but who are “interior magicians, charmers, and the like.”54 Despite his misgivings, Swedenborg also received a precious kabbalistic revelation of the “Grand Man (Maximus Homo),” and he noted that “it is a great mystery that the entire angelic heaven is so formed that in every respect it corresponds to man in the universal and singular, and to all its members.”55 Zinzendorf and his missionaries to the Jews were also interested in this kabbalistic notion of the God-Man, and they identified the Jewish Adam Kadmon (primordial Man) with the Christian Jesus.56 After the stunning revelation of the Grand Man, which became key to his whole theosophy, Swedenborg moved to London in September 1748, where he once again contacted the Moravians, who were enthusiastic about the progress of the Jewish mission. For nearly ten years, the Moravians had celebrated Yom Kippur, while Zinzendorf infused Jewish and kabbalistic terms into his hymns and sermons, leading some followers to call him “Rabbi.” At the Brethren’s Synodal Conference in London in 1749, Zinzendorf affirmed that the Jews were preserved “as Jews” until the present day because of their importance in Christ’s salvific plans, and he instructed Peter Böhler and the congregation to buy a house in the Jewish quarter and to establish a “judenchristen Gemeinschaft unter Juden,” rather than, as previously, “unter Christen.”57 Böhler had become fluent in Hebrew while preaching to Jews in Pennsylvania and New York, and they continued to support him when the colonial authorities persecuted him.58 As leader of the Fetter Lane congregation, Böhler worked closely with a Polish Jew, David Kirchof, and his wife, Esther (née Naveroffsky), who had converted to Moravianism without giving up their Jewish identity and traditions.59 Before his conversion, Kirchof had visited Holland and Sweden, where he could have met Moravian friends of Swedenborg. These developments would later become relevant to William Blake’s interest in Christian Kabbalism, for Böhler had been close to his paternal uncle and mother. In 1750 John Blake addressed to Böhler his passionate letter of application to

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join the inner congregation, and in 1751 Catherine Armitage was protected and assisted by Böhler in the wake of her first husband’s death.60 The ambitious Jewish mission was not the only exciting (and controversial) Moravian development in 1748–51, the years when Blake’s mother was so emotionally attracted to Moravianism. Zinzendorf ’s beautiful and androgynous son, Christian Renatus, had implemented radical innovations in ritual, music, and theology that unleashed orgiastic behavior in a virtual “Summer of Love.”61 Swedenborg was also attracted to the erotic theosophy, but when he was invited by two Moravians to participate in a secret, underground gathering of the more extremist Brethren, he was shocked by the promiscuous ceremonies and antinomian pronouncements made by the young men and women. In the hallucinatory scenes recorded in his spiritual diary, he described a preacher who proclaimed that the Lord took away all evil and pollution and who presides over erotic ceremonies: “They court obscurity, but when those they fear withdraw, they bring a light and kindle it, when their rites are detected, which from their abominableness are not to be described; and as they say the intercourse is to be common, so they act promiscuously, that a wife may not know by whom she is pregnant, and thus the progeny will be common to all.”62 The New Church editor of Swedenborg’s spiritual diary makes the odd comment that “the scenes here portrayed were really transacted in the natural world, but under the instigation of spirits such as those Swedenborg describes.”63 These “spirits” seemed to emulate the antinomian practices of Sabbateans in Turkey, which were “transmitted to the Balkans and Eastern Europe,” and which included rituals involving “wife-swapping and dances around a naked woman.”64 Swedenborg was repelled by the radicals’ acceptance of adultery and group sex, but he apparently hoped to learn more about kabbalistic notions of sacramental conjugal love and its linkage with divine sexuality. At this time, Dr. Falk had a public reputation as a pious holy man who had influenced the moral reformation of some of his students. In November, Swedenborg moved into a tavern in Wellclose Square, where he became the close neighbor of Falk. In his spiritual diary, Swedenborg described a charismatic magician and alchemist, whose features, garb, and rituals seem to point to the Ba‘al Shem, who taught Kabbalah and performed Hermetic experiments for curious (and wealthy) Christians.65 Over the next eleven months, while Swedenborg worked on his treatise Arcana Coelestia, he referred to Jewish instructors who both enlightened and frightened him. Though he claimed unique personal revelation for his mystical interpretations of Genesis, he clearly drew on kabbalistic theories of male-female emanations,

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earthly-heavenly correspondences, and esoteric interpretation of Hebrew letters and numbers.66 Despite his concern about the extremist Moravians, he utilized a Moravian publisher for the anonymous work, which was secretly subsidized by the French king, Louis XV.67 During his last month in London, Swedenborg also recorded his conversations “with certain Jews” about the degrees of spiritual illumination and “had much discourse with them about their commercial transactions in the world.”68 These discussions were almost certainly connected with a Swedish project to establish a Jewish-Swedish colony in Morocco.69 The initiating agent was a Moroccan Jew and crypto-Sabbatean, Joseph La Paz Buzaglo, who was currently negotiating in Holland with the Swedish ambassador Joachim Fredrik Preis, a close friend of Swedenborg.70 Preis became concerned about Joseph’s honesty, and he evidently asked Swedenborg to contact the Jew’s brother Jacob, who conducted business in Houndsditch Square in London. Preis himself consulted with his friend Tobias Boas, a Jewish banker and patron of Dr. Falk, who investigated Joseph Buzaglo and then warned Preis that he was “a slippery fellow.”71 They may have advised Swedenborg to consult Rabbi Eibeschütz in Metz, when he passed through the city on his way to Aix-la-Chapelle (Aachen). Years earlier, the learned Hebraist Wilhem Surenhuys had urged Eric Benzelius to visit the synagogue at Metz, and Swedenborg perhaps acted on this same advice in October 1749. He described the “Jews at this day,” whom he observed “in their rites and also when they read the word of the Old Testament in their synagogues.”72 He recorded that the Jews’ “ardor, which appears as holy when they are in worship, is carried off into Heaven by Divine Means.” At this time, Eibeschütz had instituted changes in the synagogue services at Metz, in order to infuse them with more beauty, emotion, and spirituality. Despite Swedenborg’s grudging acknowledgment of the holy appearance of the synagogue services, he privately noted that the Jews’ worship does not “make them blessed,” for “their communication with heaven is effected by that disposition of evil spirits.” Eibeschütz’s enemies accused him of “consorting with good Lutherans,” and it is certainly possible that Swedenborg was one of them.73 Moving on to Aix, Swedenborg spent the next seven months working on volume 2 of Arcana Coelestia, while he recorded in his diary many bizarre scenes of magical instructors, who taught him esoteric interpretations of Hebrew. They also aroused him sexually, inspired him spiritually, and ultimately frightened him. He described a Jewish magician “named Bisk or Barek” and his followers who, like “harlequins,” dance, twirl, and turn

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somersaults in the air.74 The attack on Eibeschütz that linked him with “good Lutherans” mentioned the visit of a Polish Jew to Metz, who could have described the enthusiastic gyrations of the new Hasidim.75 Unfortunately, it is still unclear whether these Jewish magicians and somersaulters were real or fantasy figures in Swedenborg’s troubled imagination. THE EMDEN-EIBESCHÜTZ CONTROVERSY

After Swedenborg left Aix, he traveled for several months in the region, perhaps returning to Metz, and then spent two months in Amsterdam, while Preis and Boas finalized their investigation of Buzaglo’s colonial project. Feeling that his mission was completed, Swedenborg returned to Stockholm in late summer 1750, just as Sabbatean affairs were moving toward an explosion of controversy, which would ramify from Poland into London. In May 1750, when Eibeschütz was named chief rabbi of the triple community of Hamburg, Wandsbeck, and Altona (the latter under Danish rule), his rival for the position, Rabbi Jacob Emden, determined to expose his secret Sabbatean beliefs. Reports were spread that the amulets used by Eibeschütz to protect pregnant women contained Sabbatean references, which gave Emden an opportunity to publicly accuse the new chief rabbi of heresy in February 1751. The controversy divided the Jewish community, with Christian commentators joining the fray. Several Christians, believing that Eibeschütz was a crypto-Christian, published defenses of him, which attracted the interest of the Moravian Jewish Mission and the virulent hostility of Jacob Emden and the anti-Sabbateans.76 By this time, the Moravian missionary Samuel Lieberkuhn had so Judaized himself that many Jews believed he was a “converted Israelite,” and Zinzendorf himself feared that his missionary was becoming “a secret Socinian,” who did not believe in the divinity of Jesus.77 It was possibly at this time that the Moravians and followers of Eibeschütz learned of their mutual interests.78 The Moravians must have been pleased when the Danish king reinstated Eibeschütz as chief rabbi.79 By 1755, the Moravians in London had become so engulfed in scandal, with hostile pamphlets pouring from the British press, that Zinzendorf was forced to leave England. Over the next five years, until his death in 1760, he continued to press for Moravian-Jewish rapprochement. He was especially excited by news of Jacob Frank’s messianic movement in eastern Europe, and in 1758 he sent the convert David Kirchof to Poland, from

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where Kirchof initially reported on his encounters with many Jews “who believed that the Messiah had already come but did not believe that Jesus was the Messiah.”80 He subsequently reported (happily) that more than fifteen thousand Jews openly declared that “the true Messiah already has come and Jesus of Nazareth is the Messiah.” These Jews wanted to study various Christian books to decide which church they should join, but they were forced “to take a shortcut and convert to Roman Catholicism because of unrest among the Jews.” In 1758, Lieberkuhn traveled to Altona to contact “the famous rabbi,” probably Eibeschütz, and it is possible that he learned about another Polish Sabbatean, Rabbi Moses David, who was currently living with Wolf Eibeschütz, Jonathan’s flamboyant son.81 Wolf had earlier met Jacob Frank, and he now presented himself “as a transmitter of secret Sabbatean beliefs from the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans to Eastern Europe.”82 In Altona Wolf established “a private house of study headed by one of his friends or followers, Moshe ben David of Podhayce.” Moses David had been a member of the Baruchia sect in Podolia, and he subsequently lived in Fürth, where he gained a reputation as a ba‘al shem. Persecuted by orthodox rabbis, he fled to Altona, where he was welcomed and given shelter by the Eibeschütz family. However, a series of “furious and zealous letters” from Poland to authorities in Hamburg forced him to leave for London, where he moved into the Wellclose Square residence of Dr. Falk. Also living in Wellclose Square was Swedenborg, who was currently working with his Moravian publisher and a Rosicrucian-Masonic translator to issue several post-Arcana Coelestia treatises.83 He was apparently privy to the instruction and rituals of his famous kabbalistic neighbors, for he described his attempts to learn a new pronunciation of Hebrew letters and his acquisition of a mysterious parchment which revealed the celestial arcana hidden in Hebrew script.84 In a curious entry, he compared the late Eric Benzelius, who collaborated with the crypto-Sabbatean Kemper, to a similar personality named Falker: “Another one—Eric Benzelius—was able to attract through simulated affections; another, by honest words and a sincere countenance,—for example Falker.”85 This was likely Falk himself: in his diary of the period, he called himself the “son of Joshua Raphael Falker.”86 At this time, Falk received a new Polish visitor, Simon Shesnowski, who came from Amsterdam to participate in the rituals of Falk and Moses David. Writing to his son in Poland, Shesnowski enthusiastically described the wonder-workers of Wellclose Square:

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Hear, my beloved son, of the marvelous gifts entrusted to a son of man, who verily is not a man, a light of the captivity, who hath set his heart to gather the dispersed of Ariel. . . . His name is Samuel Falk . . . who dwells at present in the great city of London. . . . He wrote an explanation of his words to the worthy Moses David, the aged and renowned Cabalist who formerly dwelt in Podhayce and was then famed as a Ba‘al Shem. . . . I am grateful that I have been received into this Brotherhood, who by their piety can hasten the advent of the Messiah. . . . My son, be very circumspect, and show this only to the wise and discrete men. For here in London, this matter has not been disclosed to any one who does not belong to our Brotherhood.87

Falk wrote a treatise on his secrets for Moses David, who took notes on the kabbalistic ceremonies in Wellclose Square and wrote a dangerously explicit letter to Eibeschütz, in which he described the magical deeds of the holy man Falk, “who is still human but already above human.”88 After some months, Moses David returned to Wolf Eibeschütz’s residence in Altona, where their enemies stepped up their attacks. They claimed that David indulged in antinomian rituals, so that “everybody who is unholy did turn him [Falk] into a Messiah because he is unholy.” Though Falk had “entrapped” many wealthy Jews and Christians, in order to raise money for the Brotherhood, the orthodox rabbis expelled his protégé David, who had “broken the tablets of Haon.”89 The later confiscation of David’s amulets— with references to Falk, Eibeschütz, Baruchia, and Sabbatai Tzevi, while featuring a Christian cross—revealed that Falk’s Brotherhood aimed at some kind of syncretism between Sabbateanism and Christianity. Was Falk’s Brotherhood connected with the Kirchofs’ proposed kehillah? Some peculiar entries in Swedenborg’s spiritual diary certainly suggest the possibility. He wrote that “for a couple of days I was with the Moravians”:

They stated that they behaved thus, in the world, in order to attract others to them; and that when they conjoined themselves with them in that way, they disclose, but very cautiously, as many of their secret tenets as they appear to receive. This secret tenet of theirs has been threshed out, namely, that they utterly deny the Lord’s Divine, and make his Human meaner than the body of another man; also, that he was not conceived of Jehovah God, but was a bastard; that he did not rise with the body, but it was stolen away by the disciples of others; that when he was transfigured,

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it was a vision introduced by certain spirits; and many such things, that recorded of the Lord in the Word, they deny, pervert, and profane. . . . They believe, that . . . if they receive their secret doctrines, they are justified and living, and that then all things they do are good, even that evil is good—which they explain in an abominable manner—such as killing those who are opposed to their religion, also defrauding, stealing, and the like; because they pervert [the commandments forbidding] those things, by sinister [interpretations].90

These charges strikingly echo those made by Jacob Emden against Falk, Eibeschütz, and the Sabbateans. Moreover, the Moravian Elders worried that Lieberkuhn wanted so much to conciliate the Jews that he diminished the divinity of Christ. Pawel Maciejko points out that the Sabbateans were aware of the Moravians and there may have been mutual influences, but it is still unclear whether Falk’s Brotherhood was connected with the Kirchofs’ proposed kehillah.91 Curiously, in 1759 the Papal Nuncio in Warsaw reported to the Vatican that Frankist Sabbateanism had spread into Turkey, Germany, and “Sweden [!].”92 Since Sweden had no Jewish population, could this surprising claim refer to Swedish students of Rabbi Kemper’s manuscripts, to Kirchof ’s earlier contacts in Sweden, or—just possibly—to Swedenborg himself ? SABBATEANISM REACHES WILLIAM BLAKE

It is at this point that news of Sabbatean and Frankist affairs began to reach someone who would become important to William Blake—his future art teacher and life-long friend, Richard Cosway. The young Cosway was intrigued by Jewish lore and the esoteric sciences, and he befriended various Moravians and Swedenborgians while studying art in London. In 1759, his first commission to paint a portrait came from the bookseller Edward Goldney, an eccentric philo-Semite, who for three years had argued the need for Christian outreach to the Jews. Cosway’s flattering portrayal of Goldney was used for the frontispiece of the latter’s book, A Friendly Epistle to Deists and Jews (1759), in which he responded to news of the Frankists’ mass conversion to Catholicism.93 He lamented that the Papists had gained the Frankist Jews rather than the more deserving Protestants, who should appeal to the Jews by adopting St. Paul’s policy of assimilation or dissimulation: “Unto the Jews I became as a Jew, that I might gain the Jews.”94 Cosway’s subsequent behavior suggests that he took the advice of St. Paul and Goldney, for five years later the Italian Kabbalist Giacomo

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Casanova, who commissioned an obscene portrait ring from the artist, assumed that he was Jewish. As art historian Alfred Rubens observes, “Cosway had a great deal more to do with Judaism than we know about.”95 Goldney also argued that to “gain them that are without law,” one should adopt a similar pose. Did young Cosway learn that the Frankists rejected the Mosaic and talmudic laws and had proclaimed a new kabbalistic dispensation? His deepening plunge into esoteric and erotic experiments suggests some kind of antinomian influence. After Zinzendorf ’s death in 1760, the Moravians in London implemented a conservative retrenchment, in which they destroyed many records of the “Sifting Time.” One veteran of that turbulent time, the Reverend Benjamin LaTrobe, had moved from his youthful enthusiasm for the radical themes of the “Sifting” to an older man’s rejection and fear of its excesses. Like John Blake and the Armitages, the young LaTrobe had been attracted to the Brethren by the passionate preaching of Peter Böhler, and it seems likely that Blake’s mother knew LaTrobe in those early days. As LaTrobe and the Moravian elders became more conservative and puritanical, he became a watchdog and inquisitor on the homosexual misconduct of adolescent boys.96 Thus, it is curious that in 1773 LaTrobe was chosen as the mediator between the London Moravians and a crypto-Sabbatean sect of Judeo-Christians in Amsterdam.97 Perhaps it was LaTrobe’s “reputation for rigorous, even hostile investigations” that led Johann Gustav Burgmann, pastor of the German Church in the Savoy, to share his correspondence with the crypto-Sabbatean sect in Amsterdam with him.98 Burgmann had earlier served as a Pietist missionary to the Jews for the Institutum Judaicum et Muhammedicum in Halle, and he probably assumed that LaTrobe was familiar with the Moravians’ earlier outreach to the Jews. While visiting London for six months in 1764, Burgmann heard that the majority of rich Jews in Amsterdam were convinced of the truth of the Christian religion and that they met together secretly to worship Jesus; however, they kept their beliefs secret in order to avoid slander and persecution, which would cause irreparable damage to their business and trade.99 During the same year, Emden launched a bitter attack on Falk’s Sabbatean heresies and Christian associations, which may have provoked the indiscrete report about the Jewish Christians in Amsterdam. In 1768, four years after the death of Jonathan Eibeschütz, Falk recorded in his diary his concern about the conversion undertaken by Abraham and Simon, the sons of Tobias Boas, who were then in London. He wrote that he did not like them to have a religion in which their ancestors did not believe, but he added, “I myself have a choice.”100 Emden accused Falk of

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organizing a “Sabbatean club,” which exploited credulous Jews and wealthy Christians, and it is certainly possible that his followers had links with the Amsterdam Jewish Christians mentioned earlier by Burgmann. Soon after 1768, Simon, an emissary of that sect, arrived in London, where “contrary to his oath,” he opened “himself to a clergyman.”101 It is currently unknown who the clergyman was, but this breach of secrecy greatly upset his Jewish brothers in Amsterdam. In 1773, Burgmann informed LaTrobe about his correspondence with Simon’s crypto-Christian sect, whose members believed in the theosophy of the crypto-Sabbatean Kabbalists, Nehemiah Hayon and Jonathan Eibeschütz.102 LaTrobe translated the correspondence and recorded a history of the sect, and he sent Christian Solomon Dober (nephew of the earlier missionary to the Jews, Leonard Dober) to Amsterdam to meet with them.103 The question arises of possible links between Simon and Falk, whose “brotherhood” drew on the same traditions revered by Simon and who had many Christian students and admirers.104 Two years earlier, while Burgmann was in contact with Simon, he was witness to a report about Swedenborg’s earlier mission to the Jews of London. In company with Aaron Mathesius, pastor of the Swedish church (located just behind Wellclose Square), Burgmann heard from Johann Brockmer, Swedenborg’s Moravian landlord in 1744–45, about his lodger’s earlier mental illness and determination to take his messianic message to the Jewish synagogue.105 The accounts by Simon and Brockmer occurred in a peculiar international context, for Swedenborg, while en route to Amsterdam and London, had recently stopped over in Hamburg, where he stayed with a mysterious Rosicrucian, Johann Daniel Müller (pen name “Élie Artiste”). A brilliant musician, practicing alchemist, and ecumenical theosophist, Müller allegedly acted as Swedenborg’s private banker.106 He also provided a link between Swedenborg and Eibeschütz’s followers in Hamburg, Poland, and Amsterdam. In 1761 Müller had visited Eibeschütz in Altona, and he subsequently sought contacts with mystical Jews in Poland. Like the radical Sabbateans in Turkey and eastern Europe, Müller advocated a syncretic religion that merged Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, and his beliefs evidently influenced Swedenborg, while the latter worked on a new book, Vera Christiana Religio, continens universam Theologiam Novae Ecclesiae.107 His emphasis on the “universal theology” of the new church seemed to echo Müller’s beliefs. When Swedenborg left Müller’s residence and moved on to Amsterdam, he decided to add sections to the manuscript, in which he praised the Mohammedans as “nations who acknowledge one God, love justice, and

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do good from a religious motive.”108 He also described Jesus, the heavenly bridegroom, wearing “a tunic and an ephod, like Aaron,” and a scene of “Jews in the Spiritual World,” in which “converted Jews are set over them, who warn them not to speak disrespectively of Christ.”109 Those who pay heed to the warning “are sent to synagogues of converted Jews, where they receive instruction.” According to his friend J. C. Cuno, Swedenborg now met with “Jews and Portuguese with whom he joined in, without distinction” (the Portuguese were evidently Marranos).110 Were Swedenborg’s “synagogues of converted Jews” connected with the late Eibeschütz’s followers, who believed in a similarly syncretic religion? As discussed earlier, these Amsterdam Jews would soon be put in touch with Swedenborg’s former Moravian associates in London. After his move to London in September 1771, Swedenborg had another tenuous connection with Poland and the Sabbateans, for his portrait was painted “from life” by Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, a Strasbourg-born artist and esoteric Freemason, whose father was of Polish descent and who had earlier served at the French court of the deposed Polish king, Stanislaus Leszczynski.111 As noted earlier, Swedenborg and his family had been strong supporters of Stanislaus’s attempt to regain the Polish throne, and he had recently reported on his conversations with the spirit of the deceased “Stanislaus, King of Poland.”112 A liberal-minded Freemason, Stanislaus had been an advocate for tolerance toward the Jews, and Swedenborg’s current political allies supported the anti-Russian nationalists in Poland, who often collaborated with Sabbatean Jews.113 Their leader and Masonic organizer, Prince Adam Czartoryski, was called a “half Sabbatean” by his opponents, and he would soon travel to London to seek support from Dr. Falk.114 Loutherbourg shared these Polish sympathies and kabbalistic interests, and—according to the art historian Stephen Lloyd—he not only painted Swedenborg’s portrait at this time but also the great, luminous portrait of Dr. Falk, who soon became involved in Polish political and Swedenborgian Masonic affairs.115 Though Swedenborg had broken from the Moravian church, he had continued to use Moravian booksellers and many of his early supporters came from Moravian families. According to William Muir, who first suggested the Moravian connections of Blake’s parents, they subsequently became interested in Swedenborg’s teachings.116 If Blake’s mother and her second husband James Blake maintained connections with their old Moravian friends, they may have learned from the Moravian preacher Peter Böhler about the contact established between Benjamin LaTrobe and the Jewish Christians in Amsterdam. On May 8, 1773, the missionary Samuel Lieberkuhn wrote from

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Gnadenberg (in Silesia, later part of Poland) to Böhler in London expressing his thoughts about the sect’s overture to the Moravians.117 Lieberkuhn had received copies of the Jews’ letters to Burgmann and LaTrobe’s comments on the correspondence. He was delighted at the news and suggested that the Moravians at Zeist, in Holland, were perhaps familiar with the sect. However, he advised Böhler that while the London Moravians should encourage the Jews’ secret conversion, the sect should maintain its independence from the Christian church and function as a “church within Israel.” Given Böhler’s involvement in this affair, news of the MoravianSabbatean contact could have entered young William Blake’s world through his parents as well as his artistic colleagues, such as Richard Cosway. During the 1770s, Cosway read Zinzendorf ’s and Swedenborg’s writings and was friendly with LaTrobe and other Moravian leaders.118 For Blake, who was now studying art under Cosway and who almost certainly knew Loutherbourg, this mixed Swedenborgian-Moravian-Sabbatean-Masonic milieu provided a fertile ground for his developing antinomian radicalism and spiritual eroticism. In the 1780s, when Blake studied at the Royal Academy of Arts, he would have met a kindred spirit, Benjamin Henry Latrobe, who returned from Moravian schooling in Germany in 1783 in order to study art and architecture in London.119 Son of the aforementioned Moravian minister Rev. Benjamin LaTrobe, who had collaborated with Burgmann and may have known Blake’s mother, Benjamin Henry’s radical political ideas and interest in the erotic spirituality of various religions were similar to those of Cosway and Blake, and over the next decade they moved in the same artistic circles.120 It was apparently through Latrobe that Blake gained access to the visionary sexuality of the Ethiopic Book of Enoch, which created great interest among the more liberal Swedenborgians.121 By 1795, Benjamin Henry’s revolutionary sympathies led him to emigrate to America, where he became the friend of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and allegedly contributed the esoteric Masonic symbolism embedded in the architecture of Washington, D.C.122 In the meantime, in London, “illuminist” emissaries from the Continent brought their kabbalistic theories to small groups of Freemasons and Swedenborgians. The Sicilian-born magician “Count” Cagliostro worked with Dr. Falk to develop the Egyptian Rite of Freemasonry, and he employed the artist Loutherbourg to illustrate the rituals.123 Cagliostro then carried the Rite to eastern Europe where, according to Catherine the Great, the Masons welcomed him because they were so infatuated with Swedenborg’s writings that they yearned for the secrets of Dr. Falk.124 The London Swedenborgian, General Charles Rainsford, and several initiated brethren also collaborated

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with Falk in supporting a new Masonic system, the “Asiatic Brethren,” in which Jews and Christians participated without giving up their religions.125 According to a Christian member of the order, the Jewish initiates drew on the thaumaturgic traditions of “Shabbetai Zevi, Falk (the Ba‘al Shem of London), Frank, and their similar fellows.”126 In 1786, the same year when Cagliostro recruited Swedenborgians to his Egyptian Rite, another kabbalistic emissary was active in London, where he targeted the same group. The wealthy Polish magnate Count Thaddeus Grabianka was a native of Podolia, where he had received a magical book from “a rich Cabbalon philosopher,” which he used to develop rituals of prophecy and illumination by interpreting a pyramid of Hebrew letters and numbers (designated as “the oracle”).127 The flamboyant Grabianka made a sensational impression among the more liberal Swedenborgians (including, arguably, Blake and Cosway), and it seems certain that he transmitted Sabbatean notions into his “theosophy of desire.” Cosway and his wife, Maria, also maintained friendships with members of the Lubomirski and Czartoryski families, who were sympathetic to the Polish Sabbateans.128 Jacob Frank spread rumors that Prince Adam Czartoryski and Prince Jerzy Marcin Lubomirski both sought the hand of his daughter, Ewa.129 Lubomirski had witnessed the Frankists’ disputation in 1757, and, two years later, one hundred and fifty converted Frankists were settled on the estates of the Lubomirskis. Prince Jerzy Marcin subsequently became commander of Frank’s guard and “the only non-Jewish Frankist.” After Grabianka returned to his Masonic base in Avignon, several London Swedenborgians traveled to southern France and underwent the grueling initiation rituals of the “Illuminés.” From the sensational revelations of the antinomian aphorisms produced by the “oracle” at Avignon, published by the London artisans William Bryan and John Wright, it is clear that Grabianka either drew upon or paralleled the teachings of Jacob Frank.130 The Polish count allegedly returned to London in 1796 and 1800, where his message of Sabbatean-style illumination and regeneration was welcomed by the more radical members of Blake’s circle. Though more research is needed on the influence of the “Asiatic Brethren” and the Polish Frankists in London, it seems clear that Blake shared many of their syncretistic and antinomian sentiments. For example, in 1790, when Blake declared that “Now is the dominion of Edom,” he pointed his readers to the chapters in Isaiah that prophesy the downfall of princes and the return of the Jews to Zion. At this time, such a dream was shared by Grabianka and Frank, who fantasized about actual

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military marches to the Middle East. After Frank’s death in December 1791, his followers circulated his treatise that focused on the same verses. Gershom Scholem notes that in this sensational work, entitled “The Prophecies of the Prophet Isaiah, Member of the Holy Sanhedrion, as Revealed by the Great Shaddai, Lord of White Magic,” Frank transformed the biblical prophecy into “an entire mystical theory of revolution.”131 At Avignon, Grabianka and the Illuminés had moved beyond Swedenborg (“the linen clothes folded up”) into a revolutionary vision of liberated sexuality. For traditional Jewish mystics, the “dominion of Edom” had long stood for Christianity, but for the Frankists Edom became the domain of “holy sin,” in which all rules, especially sexual norms, would be reversed. As Scholem explains, In order that God and the virgin be revealed, it would be necessary to embark upon a completely new road, untrodden as yet by the people of Israel: this road Frank called “the way to Esau.” In this context, Esau or Edom symbolizes the unbridled flow of life which liberates man because its force and power are not subject to any law. . . . In order to achieve this goal [of freedom and licentiousness] it was necessary to destroy the law, teachings, and practices which constrict the power of life, but this must be done in secret; . . . it was essential outwardly to assume the garb of corporeal Edom.132

At this time, Blake’s friend Cosway grew “a long patriarchal beard,” instructed his four-year-old daughter in Hebrew, studied kabbalistic treatises, painted himself as Esau (surrounded by kabbalistic and Masonic symbols), and indulged in adulterous affairs.133 From his intense immersion in visionary and erotic experiments, Cosway seemed to have embarked on the way to Esau or Edom, at a time when a student of the late Falk and several Swedenborgian friends were exploring the esoteric Masonic rite of “Asiatic Brethren.” In the wake of Frank’s death, his followers appealed to a number of synagogues to band together in “a sect called Edom,” which accepts Jews and Christians alike. However, it is still unclear if they referred to the Asiatic Brethren. While Blake satirized the conservative New Churchmen, other radical Swedenborgians rejoiced in Grabianka’s fiery antinomianism. John Wright and William Bryan, the London artisans who had been initiated at Avignon in 1789, later published the pronouncements of the oracle, whose secret technique had been revealed to Grabianka by the rich Polish Kabbalist. They bore striking resemblances to those of Blake in The Marriage of Heaven

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and Hell—and to those of Jacob Frank. Blake proclaimed that “the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom”; “Prudence is a rich ugly old maid courted by Incapacity”; “The lust of the goat is the bounty of God”; “The nakedness of woman is the work of God”; did Jesus “not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbath’s God? . . . I tell you, no virtue can exist with out breaking those ten commandments.”134 At Avignon, Grabianka’s oracle declared, “Tread under thy feet the prudence of men”; “Here is the time in which God will break the laws made for the children of earth”; “Heaven is already going to permit Hell to ransack the earth”; “Follow the bent, follow the desires of the child of promise, and leave corruption to run into the sepulchre of old men.”135 Even more intriguing is the parallel between Blake’s pubescent prophet “Orc” and Grabianka’s “secret child,” who was the “child of promise” prophesied by the oracle and described by Bryan to friends in London.136 Grabianka seemed to draw on the Polish Sabbatean tradition of the Wunderkind, which the Jewish-Christian sect in Amsterdam had earlier described to Burgmann. Benjamin LaTrobe transcribed this letter in which the sect claimed that Jonathan Eibeschütz was recognized as the Wunderkind at age fourteen, when it was revealed to him that he had been both circumcised and baptized.137 This tradition may have influenced Grabianka’s bizarre attempt to raise an actual secret child. According to Bryan, the child was eleven in 1789, and he was being groomed to assume at puberty his revolutionary role, which will restore the Jews to Palestine and “that country will become the beauty and glory of the whole earth.”138 In 1793 Blake portrayed the fourteenyear-old Orc (a name derived from orcheis, Greek for testicles), who bursts forth with pubescent energy to pronounce the reversal of the moral law in the name of sexual and political liberation: “The fiery joy, that Urizen perverted to ten commands. . . . That stony law I stamp to dust; and scatter religion abroad.”139 In Blake’s subsequent poetic and visual works, there are many more examples of Sabbatean-style spiritual eroticism and antinomianism, which secretly and subversively traveled from Poland to London. As Blake’s predecessors—Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, Falk, and Frank—explored the imaginative world of Sabbatean Kabbalah, they moved beyond orthodox Christianity and Judaism to envision a new universalist religion that bridged the age-old divisions. In so doing, they provoked controversy and scandal, but also a liberating sense of moving onto a new spiritual path, “the way to Esau,” where in a new “dominion of Edom,” their multi-cultural theosophy of desire could finally be realized.

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NOTES 1. William Blake, Blake: Complete Writings with Variant Readings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 151. 2. Ibid., 154. Randel Helms argues that Blake has Ezekiel “eat dung” to “show that the voice of prophetic inspiration can contravene the Mosaic law”; see his article “Why Ezekiel Ate Dung,” English Language Notes 15 (1978): 279–81. 3. For the context and documentation of the Armitage-Blake-Moravian experiences, see my book Why Mrs. Blake Cried: William Blake and the Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision (London: Random House/Century, 2006); published in the United States as William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision (Rochester, Vt.: Inner Traditions, 2008). 4. Craig Atwood, Community of the Cross: Moravian Piety in Colonial Bethlehem (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 17n57. The author and rock musician Gary Lachman (of “Blondie” fame) observes wryly that the new research findings certainly put the “rave” back into the Moravians. 5. According to William Muir, the great nineteenth-century Blake facsimilist; see Thomas Wright, The Life of William Blake (1929; reprint, New York: Burt Franklin, 1969), 1:2. 6. Christiane Dithmar, Zinzendorfs nonkonformistische Haltung zum Judentum (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 2000), 186–98. 7. Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried, 59–121; Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Dream Diary, trans. Anders Hallengren (West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2001), 12–16, 30–38, 53–57. 8. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Spiritual Diary, trans. Alfred Acton (London: Swedenborg Society, 1977), #18, 19n1, 2881, 2097, 4385. 9. Susanna Åkerman, Queen Christina of Sweden and Her Circle (Leiden: Brill, 1991), 188–94. 10. Elisheva Carlebach, Divided Souls: Converts from Judaism in Germany, 1500–1750 (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2001), 81–83, 259n56. 11. Rudolph Tafel, Documents Concerning the Life and Character of Emanuel Swedenborg (London: Swedenborg Society, 1875), 1:102–03. 12. Elliot Wolfson, “Messianism in the Christian Kabbalah of Johann Kemper,” in Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern Period, ed. Matt Goldish and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), 138–87. 13. Marsha Keith Schuchard, “Leibniz, Benzelius, and Swedenborg: The Kabbalistic Roots of Swedish Illuminism,” in Leibniz, Mysticism, and Religion, ed. A. P. Coudert, R. H. Popkin, and G. M. Weiner (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1978), 84–106. 14. Susanna Åkerman, curator of the Swedenborg Library in Stockholm, reports that the booklet De Sapientia Salomonis (Uppsala, 1705) by Daniel Lundius was inscribed “Emanuel Svedberg,” which means he owned it before his name was changed to Swedenborg in 1721. He probably received the booklet from the author when it was published, for Lundius was a close family friend. 15. Moshe Idel has long argued for Swedenborg’s interest in Kabbalah; for example, see his Absorbing Perfections: Kabbala and Interpretation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1984), 305, 356f., 589. For the most thorough accounts of Swedenborg’s access to Kabbalah, see Bernd Roling, “Erlösung im angelischen Makrokosmos: Emanuel Swedenborg, die Kabbalah Denudata, und die schwedische Orientalisk,” Morgen-Glantz: Zeitschrift der Christian

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Knorr von Rosenroth-Gesellschaft 16 (2006): 385–457; and “Emanuel Swedenborg, Paracelsus und die esoterischen Traditionen des Judentum in Schweden,” Offene Tore 52 (2008): 181–228. I am grateful to Thomas Noack for sending me a copy of the latter article. The catalogue of Benzelius’s library is in the Linköping Diocesan Library: MS Benzelius, Catalogus Librorum. 16. Theodor Westrin, “Anteckningar om Karl XIIs kreditorer,” Historisk Tidskrift (1900):1–53. 17. The French traveler La Motraye, who accompanied Charles XII to Norway, wrote Benzelius on May 21, 1716, that he had good news, for the king “has given liberty of conscience in his lands to all kinds of nationalities.” MS letter in Linköping Stiftsbibliothek: Bref til Benzelius, V, 40. 18. Hans Joachim Schoeps, Baroke Juden, Christen, Judenichristen (Berne and Munich: Francke, 1965), 69–74. 19. Shifra Assulin concludes that Norrelius also remained ignorant of the Sabbatean roots of Kemper’s “religious syncretism” and “messianic dream” (private communication, April 4, 2008). See her article, “Another Glance at Sabbateanism, Conversion, and Hebraism in Seventeenth-Century Europe: Scrutinizing the Character of Johan Kemper of Uppsala, or Moshe Son of Aharon of Cracow” (Hebrew), in The Sabbatean Movement and Its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbateanism, and Frankism, ed. Rachel Elior ( Jerusalem, 2000), 2:423–70. 20. Despite the opposition, Benzelius and Norrelius determined to publish the late Kemper’s manuscripts and to continue instruction in his theories to university students. See Schoeps, Barocke Juden, Christen, Judenchristen, 60–67; George Dole, “Philosemitism in the Seventeenth Century,” Studia Swedenborgiana, 7 (1990): 5–17. 21. Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Secret, trans. Norman Ryder (London: Swedenborg Society, 2005), 98–100, 169–70, 202–5. 22. See ibid., Bergquist’s chapter “Why Should We Care about Poland’s Affairs,” 103–11, 364. In my article “Jacobite and Visionary: The Masonic Journey of Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772),” Ars Quatuor Coronatorum 115 (2002): 33–60, I provide the Masonic context for his political activities. 23. In my forthcoming book, Emanuel Swedenborg: Secret Agent on Earth and in Heaven, I examine the political-diplomatic-financial context of Swedenborg’s clandestine intelligence activities during the War of the Polish Succession and subsequent Swedish-Polish relations. 24. Tafel, Documents, 2:19, 37–39, 68, 71. 25. L. Fuks and R. G. Fuks-Mansfeld, Hebrew and Judaic Manuscripts in Amsterdam Public Collections (Leiden: Brill, 1975), 2:246. 26. Alfred Acton, “Life of Emanuel Swedenborg,” typescript in Academy of New Church, Bryn Athyn (1958), 382. I am grateful to Reverend Chris Baun for allowing me to study his copy. 27. Emanuel Swedenborg, Psychologia, being Notes and Observations on Christian Wolf ’s Psychological Empirica, trans. Alfred Acton (Philadelphia: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1923), 158–60. 28. Eberhard Zwink, “‘Schrauben-förmige Bewegung ist in allem’—Oetinger lenkt den Blick auf Swedenborgs ‘irrdische Philosophie,’” Contubernium 63 (2005): 197–229. 29. Acton, “Life,” 453. 30. Stockholm, Riksarkiv: Hollandica, #608 (Preis to Desaguliers, March 24, 1740); Alfred Acton, Letters and Memorials of Emanuel Swedenborg (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1948), 1:241. Acton was unaware of Preis’s letter and of Swedenborg’s visit to

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London. For Lieberkuhn’s visit, see “Brief Narrative of the Brethren’s Church among the Jews, between the Years 1738 and 1764,” Periodical Accounts Relating to the Missions of the Church of the United Brethren Established Among the Heathen (London, 1831), 12:348. 31. For “marriage bed of the mind,” the “Divine Abyss,” the “Holy of Holies,” assigning numerical values to Hebrew letters, and so on, see Emanuel Swedenborg, The Economy of the Animal Kingdom, trans. A. Clissold (New York: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1955), 2:209, 238–39, 313, 327. 32. Acton, Letters, 2:630. 33. Lars Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Dream Diary, trans. Anders Hallengren (West Chester, Pa.: Swedenborg Foundation, 2001), 30–38. 34. Benedict Chastanier, ed., Tableau analytique et raisonée de la doctrine céleste (Londres, 1786), 21–24. 35. Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Dream Diary, 55–57. As we shall see, Brockmer’s account was given (ca. late 1771–early 1772) before two witnesses, the Swedish minister Aaron Mathesius and the Lutheran minister Johann Gustav Burgmann. At this time, the latter was the liaison between the London Moravians and a sect of crypto-Sabbatean Jewish Christians in Amsterdam 36. On Falk, Smith, and Swedenborg, see my articles “Yeats and the Unknown Superiors: Swedenborg, Falk, and Cagliostro,” in Secret Texts: The Literature of Secret Societies, ed. Marie Roberts and Hugh Ormsby-Lennon (New York: AMS, 1995), 114–68, and “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk: A Sabbatean Adventurer in the Masonic Underground,” in Goldish and Popkin, Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern European Culture, 203–26. 37. Moravian Archive, Muswell Hill, London: Minutes of Saturday Conferences (4/15 May 1745): “The Swedishman at Br Brokmer’s, that was lately besides himself is now better again, and goes out.” This document, recently discovered by Dr. Keri Davies, suggests that Swedenborg had a second bout of mental illness in spring 1745, when he began writing “The Messiah About to Come,” which included many mystical Jewish and Jacobite references. On temporal lobe epilepsy, see D. Frank Benson, “The Geschwind Syndrome,” Advances in Neurology 55 (1991): 411–21; Elizabeth Foote-Smith and Timothy J. Smith, “Emanuel Swedenborg,” Epilepsia 37 (1996): 211–18. For further details of his epileptic symptoms, see my book, Emanuel Swedenborg, Secret Agent. 38. Dithmar, Zinzendorfs, 104–8; Lutz Greisiger, “Recent Publications on the German Pietists’ Mission to the Jews,” European Journal of Jewish Studies 2 (2008): 151. 39. Otto Tegner, Die Herrnhuter in Russland (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2006), 203, 559. 40. Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Dream Diary, 32, 160–61, 256. 41. Falk moved to London circa 1740, not in 1742–43 as usually claimed; see the account in Memoires du Comte de Rantzau (Amsterdam: Pierre Mortier, 1741), 222–23. Swedenborg’s friend, Count Carl Gustaf Tessin, owned this book, which described Falk’s kabbalistic exploits. 42. Hermann Adler, “The Baal Shem of London,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 1902–1905 (London, 1908), 148–73. 43. Mortimer J. Cohen, Jacob Emden: A Man of Controversy (Philadelphia: Dropsie College, 1937), 96–97. 44. I am grateful to the late Mrs. Cecil Roth, who allowed me to read her unpublished translation of the diary of Kalisch, which is now published in Hebrew by Michal Oron, Mih’al

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Shed Leb’al Shem: Schmuel Falk, Hab’al Sehm Mi-London ( Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik, 2003). An English translation is forthcoming. 45. Hugo Valentin, Judarnas Historia I Sverige (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers, 1924), 115–36. 46. Published posthumously in Emanuel Swedenborg, The Word Explained, trans. Alfred Acton (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Academy of the New Church, 1928–48), #5292. 47. Emanuel Swedenborg, The Spiritual Diary, trans. Alfred Acton (London: Swedenborg Society, 1977), #732. 48. Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: The Development of the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 89, 200. I am grateful to Dr. Maciejko for sending me a draft chapter from his book. 49. Greisiger’s summary of the argument of Jan Doktor; see Greisiger, “Recent Publications,” 143. 50. Pawel Maciejko, “Christian Elements in Early Frankist Doctrine,” Gal-Ed 20 (2005): 21–25. 51. Jan Doktor, “The Non-Christian Frankists,” Polin 15 (2002): 130. 52. For his positive comments on Islamic beliefs, see Emanuel Swedenborg, A Philosopher’s Notebook, trans. Alfred Acton (Philadelphia: Swedenborg Scientific Association, 1931), 487–89. Swedenborg’s political party, the Hats, worked for a Swedish-Polish-Turkish alliance against Russia. 53. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #2256, 2881. 54. Ibid., #3136–37. 55. Ibid., #488. 56. For the suggestive documents at Herrnhut, see Lutz Greisiger, “Jüdische Kryptochristen im 18 Jahrhundert: Dokumente aus dem Archiv der Evangelischen Brüderunität in Herrnhut (Teil II),” Judäica: Beiträge zum Verständnis des jüdischen Schicksals in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart 60 (2004): 338n119. 57. Dithmar, Zinzendorfs nonkonformistische Haltung, 177–79. 58. J. P. Lockwood, Memorials of the Life of Peter Böhler, Bishop of the Church of the Moravian Brethren (London: Wesleyan Conference Office, 1868), 100, 116, 126; Daniel Benham, The Memoirs of James Hutton (London: Hamilton, Adams, 1856), 156. 59. Dithmar, Zinzendorfs nonkonformistische Haltung, 177–79, 182–209. 60. Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried, 44, 56, 342. 61. Paul Peucker, “‘Inspired by Flames of Love’: Homosexuality and Eighteenth Century Moravian Brethren,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 15 (2006): 30–64. 62. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #3450–52. 63. Ibid., #3451n1. 64. Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, 23, 27. 65. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #3771, 4047, 4072, 4140, 4305. 66. For kabbalistic influence on his biblical exegesis, see David S. Katz, God’s Last Words: Reading the English Bible from the Reformation to Fundamentalism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2004), 165–76. 67. Bergquist, Swedenborg’s Secret, 353–66. For documents suggesting Louis XV’s subsidy, see the important series of articles by F. G. Lindh, “Swedenborgs Ekonomi,” Nya Kyrkans Tidning (May 1927–October 1929). I will argue that Swedenborg functioned as a secret agent for Louis XV’s private intelligence network, known as the Secret du Roi.

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68. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #4385. 69. Carl Sprinchorn, “Sjuttonhundratalets Svenska Kolonisationsplaner,” Svensk Historisk Tidskrift 43 (1923): 132–35. 70. Cecil Roth, “The Amazing Clan of Buzaglo,” and Charles Duchinsky, “Jacob Kimchi and Shalom Buzaglo,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 7 (1915): 11–22, 282–89. 71. After the Swedes rejected the project, Buzaglo took the colonial enterprise to Denmark, where King Frederik V supported it. According to Jacob Emden, Buzaglo hoped to gain a Sabbatean toehold at the Danish court. See Jan Doktor, “Karl Anton: Die Karriere eines Schülers des Jonathan Eibeschütz,” in Manfred Voigts, Von Enoch bis Kafka: Festschrift für Karl E. Grözinger zum 60. Geburtstag (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2002), 151. 72. This passage was omitted from the published text; see Alfred Acton, “Unpublished Parts of the Arcana Coelestia,” New Church Life 52 (1942): 399–400. 73. Bernhard Brilling, “Das erste Gedicht auf einen Deustschen Rabbiner aus dem Jahre 1752,” Leo Baeck Institute Publications 2 (1968): 41–47. 74. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #5059. 75. Brilling, “Das erste Gedicht,” 46. 76. Cohen, Jacob Emden, 205–10; Michal Oron, “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk and the Eibeschütz-Emden Controversy,” in Mysticism, Magic and Kabbalah in Ashkenazi Judaism, ed. Karl E. Grözinger and Joseph Dan (Berlin and New York: Walter de Gruyter, 1995), 243–56. 77. J. E. Hutton, A History of Moravian Missions (London: Moravian Publication Office, 1922), 149–50, 154. 78. For suggestions of early, mutual influences between the Moravians and the cryptoSabbateans in Amsterdam, see Maciejko, “Christian Elements,” 30–31. 79. Zinzendorf had initiated Frederik V’s father, the late Christian VI, into his highly secretive, quasi-Masonic Order of the Mustard Seed, and he himself was kinned to the Danish royal family. 80. Maciejko, “Christian Elements,” 34. 81. Dithmar, Zinzendorfs nonkonformistische Haltung, 203. She identifies “the famous rabbi” as Eibeschütz. 82. Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, chap. 8. 83. He utilized the Moravian booksellers John and Mary Lewis; his personally chosen proofreader and translator was John Marchant, a Mason with Rosicrucian ties and kabbalistic interests. 84. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #5578–80, 5620–22, 5800. 85. Ibid., #5885. 86. Solomon Schechter, “The Baal Shem, Dr. Falk,” Jewish Chronicle (March 9, 1913), 15n. 87. Adler, “Baal Shem,” 158–59. 88. Chaim Wirszubski, “The Sabbatean Kabbalist R. Moshe David of Podhayce” (Hebrew), Zion, n.s. 7 (1941–42): 73–93. 89. See Yehudah Liebes, “New Writings in Sabbatean Kabbalah from the Circle of R. Jonathan Eibeschütz” (Hebrew), Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought 5 (1986): 191–398. 90. Swedenborg, Spiritual Diary, #5988–89. 91. Maciejko, “Christian Elements,” 31, 33–35. Several years later, a correspondent (“Observator”) to the Gentleman’s Magazine 32 (1762): 418–19, sent a description of “a

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christened Jew,” who about four years ago “came from Germany to London, and swaggered to be the greatest physician and cabalist.” Though Adler and Michal Oron suggest that the letter writer referred to Falk, it seems more likely that he was Moses David or some other emissary from the Continental Sabbateans (or perhaps a portmanteau fictional figure of various Kabbalists). The Kabbalist made his Christian student swear “a very strong oath” not to talk about the secrets revealed to him and three other adepts, but the passage of time allowed him to now disclose the deceptions and trickery of the Jewish magician. 92. Pawel Maciejko, “Baruch Yavan and the Frankist Movement: Intercession in an Age of Upheaval,” Simon Dubnow Institute Yearbook 4 (2005): 350. 93. Edward Goldney, A Friendly Epistle to Deists and Jews (London: Printed for the Author, 1759), part 2, iii, viii, 1–12. He also sent a letter to the Gentleman’s Magazine 29 (1759): 269–70. 94. 1 Cor. 9:19–24. 95. Alfred Rubens, “Early Anglo-Jewish Artists,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 14 (1935–39): 101. He identifies Cosway, not Jeremiah Meyer, as the painter of Casanova’s ring. 96. For a fascinating account of LaTrobe’s role as inquisitor of young Moravian single brethren, see Jonathan Yonan, “Evangelicalism and Enlightenment: The Moravian Experience in England, c. 1750–1800” (Ph.D diss., St. Cross College, Oxford University, 2006 [2007]), 256–74. 97. For the Sabbatean roots of the sect, see Yehudah Liebes, “A Crypto Judaeo-Christian Sect of Sabbatean Origin” (Hebrew), Tarbiz 57 (1988): 110, 349–84. 98. Yonan, “Evangelicalism,” 265. 99. Greisiger, “Jüdische Kryptochristen,” 207–8. 100. Schechter, “Baal Shem,” 15–16. Schechter finds this statement “suspicious” (i.e., suggesting Sabbateanism), but it is not clear what kind of change the Boas brothers underwent. 101. Members of the Amsterdam sect were so worried about Simon’s indiscretions in London that they sent a long letter (dated January 25, 1773) to Pastor Burgmann, giving their version of the sect’s history. The full letter, in German, was published in Jan Doktor and Lutz Greisiger, “‘Wielka Tajemnica’: List Amsterdamskich Judeochrzescijan do Pastora Johanna Burgmanna z 1773 Roku,” Kwartalkni Historii Z y{ do[w/Jewish History Quarterly 4 (2005): 576–92. For Pawel Maciejko’s suspicions that the letters were a hoax, see his article, “A Jewish-Christian Sect with a Sabbatean Background Revisited,” Kabbalah: Journey for the Study of Jewish Mystical Texts 14 (2006): 95–113. 102. Ibid., 109. David Ruderman, in Early Modern Jewry (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2010), 168–69, repeats Maciejko’s early doubts about the authenticity of the Moravian correspondence and the existence of the Amsterdam sect. However, Maciejko has since modified his conclusion, while Greisiger and Doktor continue to affirm the reality of the Moravian communication with the Judaeo-Christian sect (personal communications, 2010). 103. Gustaf Dalman and Diakonus Schulze, Zinzendorf und Lieberkuhn: Studien in der Geschichte der Judenmission (Leipzig: Hinrich, 1903), 68. These meetings eventually came to no fruition, and the contacts were severed by 1776. 104. The possibility of a Simon-Falk link is reinforced by Simon’s determination to open a business for lottery tickets, for Falk had gained fame as an expert in predicting lottery winners, and many viewed his skill at Hebrew letter-number transpositions to be the key to his success. For Simon’s success, see Greisiger, “Jüdischer Kryptochristen,” 207.

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105. Academy of New Church, (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Academy Collection of Swedenborg Documents), #1673.13. Bergquist did not quote the whole account from Mathesius. For information on Burgmann, see Greisiger, “Jüdische Kryptochristen,” 206–8. 106. For Swedenborg’s visit, see Journal Encyclopédique (December 1, 1785); for Müller and Eibeschütz, see Reinhard Breymayer, “‘Élie Artiste’: Johann Daniel Müller de Wissenbach/ Nassau (1716 jusqu’à aprés 1785), un aventurier entre le piétisme radicale et l’Illuminisme,” in Emanuel Swedenborg: Naturforscher und Kundiger der Überwelt (Stuttgart: Württembergischen Landesbibliothek, 1988), 91. 107. For a valuable biography and bibliography on Müller, Swedenborg, and their Rosicrucian and Jewish contacts, see Reinhard Breymayer’s article on Müller in the online BiographischBibliographisches Kirchenlexikon 6 (1993): 255–67. 108. Emanuel Swedenborg, True Christian Religion, trans. W. C. Dick (1770; London: Swedenborg Society, 1950), #832–34. 109. Ibid., #841–42. 110. John Christian Cuno, J.C. Cuno’s Memoirs on Swedenborg, trans. Claire Berninger and Alfred Acton (Bryn Athyn, Pa.: Academy Book Room, 1947), 166. 111. “Anecdotes of P. J. de Loutherbourg,” European Magazine 1 (1782): 181–82; G. LevalletHaug, “Phillipe-Jacques Loutherbourg (1740–1813),” Archives Alsaciennes d’Histoire de l’Art, n.s. 27 (1948): 77. 112. Cuno, Memoirs, 12–13; Acton, Letters, 2:751–52. 113. Michael Roberts, British Diplomacy and Swedish Politics, 1758–1773 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1980), 260–61. 114. Adler, “Baal Shem,” 155; Schechter, “Baal Shem,” Jewish Chronicle (March 9, 1913), 15. 115. Dr. Lloyd attributed Falk’s portrait to Loutherbourg after examining the painting, with the permission of Mrs. Cecil Roth, owner of the portrait and Falk’s great-great-granddaughter. She had earlier believed that it was by John Singleton Copley; see Irene Roth, “London’s Baal Shem, Still a Magical Mystery Man,” Jewish Week (August 23, 1985). 116. For Muir’s claims, see Keri Davies and M. K. Schuchard, “Recovering the Lost Moravian History of William Blake’s Family,” Blake: An Illustrated Quarterly 38 (2004): 36–43. 117. Herrnhut, Unitätsarchiv, R. 16.6.6. I am grateful to Lutz Greisiger for sending me a copy of the original letter, with his typed transcription. 118. For the following information on Cosway and Benjamin Henry Latrobe, see my book Why Mrs. Blake Cried, 144–47, 269–72. 119. Benjamin Henry always spelled his name Latrobe, versus his father’s LaTrobe. 120. For his liberal, eclectic views on sex and religion, see The Virginia Journals of Benjamin Henry Latrobe, ed. Edward Carter (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977), 22–25. 121. For B. H. Latrobe’s familiarity with James Bruce’s Ethiopian manuscript, see Schuchard, Why Mrs. Blake Cried, 270–71. 122. David Ovason, The Secret Architecture of Our Nation’s Capital (New York: Harper Collins, 2002). Benjamin Henry Latrobe was first initiated in the Lodge of Antiquity, No. 2, in 1788 in London. This lodge included many members of Blake’s circle in its membership. Latrobe continued his Masonic career in America. 123. Rüdiger Joppien, Philippe Jacques de Loutherbourg, R.A. (London: Greater London Council, 1973), 4, no. 62; Iain McAlman, The Last Alchemist: Count Cagliostro, Master of Magic in the Age of Reason (New York: Harper Collins, 2003), 164–68.

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124. Jacques Grot, ed., Lettres de Grimm à l’Impératrice Catherine II (St. Petersburgh, 1884), 212–13. 125. M. K. Schuchard, “Dr. Samuel Jacob Falk,” 220; Gordon Hills, “Notes on Some Contemporary References to Dr. Falk, the Baal Shem of London, in the Rainsford MSS. in the British Museum,” Transactions of the Jewish Historical Society of England 8 (1915–17): 125. 126. Gershom Scholem, Du Frankisme au Jacobinisme (Paris: Le Seul Gallimard, 1981), 39. The Christian historian of the order was Franz Joseph Molitor. 127. M. L. Danilewicz, “The King of the New Israel: Thaddeus Grabianka,” Oxford Slavonic Papers, n.s. 1 (1968): 49–74. 128. Frederick Daniell, A Catalogue of the Engraved Works of Richard Cosway (London: Daniell, 1890), 4, 21–24; Arthur Mandel, The Militant Messiah (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press, 1979), 110–11. 129. For Lubomirski’s flamboyant career, see Maciejko, Mixed Multitude, chap. 8. 130. John Wright, A Revealed Knowledge of Some Things that Will Steadily Be Fulfilled in the World, Communicated to a Number of Christians, Brought Together at Avignon, by the Power of the Spirit of the Lord, from All Nations (London, 1794), 30, 32, 52–57; M. K. Schuchard, “William Blake and the Jewish Swedenborgians,” in The Jews and British Romanticism, ed. Sheila Spector (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 61–86. 131. Mandel, Militant Messiah, 52; Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York: Schocken, 1971), 138. 132. Gershom Scholem, Kabbalah (New York: Dorset, 1974), 295–96. 133. Stephen Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 127, no. 161. 134. Blake, Complete Writings, 150–51, 158. 135. Wright, A Revealed Knowledge, 4–5, 30, 32, 52–57. 136. Greisiger, “Jüdische Kryptochristen” (Teil I), 212. 137. Maciejko, “Jewish Christian Sect,” 103. 138. London, Friends’ House Library: John Thompson MS. Jt35; Clarke Garrett, Respectable Folly: Millenarians and the French Revolution (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1975), 105–6, 115–16; Micheline Meillassoux-LeCerf, Dom Pernety et les Illuminés d’Avignon (Milan: Arché, 1992), 189. 139. Blake, Complete Writings, 198.

Me’ayin yavo ‘ezri? The Help of Jacob Frank and His Daughter, Ewa

Harris Lenowitz

On the 21st of October, 1784 the Lord saw a dream, I had a golden ring on my hand and I dropped that ring onto a mirror which broke into small pieces. Having turned that mirror onto the other side, I found shining glass there also and, likewise, a bracelet fell from my hands and broke the other side. He himself gave the interpretation that, My help hastens to come.

This dictum, numbered 451 in the manuscripts of the “Collection of the Words of the Lord [Jacob Frank]” (Zbiór słów pan´skich), is the most beautiful, most self-revelatory, and, in some ways, the most puzzling of all of Jacob Frank’s Words delivered and recorded in the Cracow mss. The lectures were not delivered at a single sitting. From the material therein (covering holidays, significant events, and, occasionally, dates), it must be concluded that he began talking this way, in these genres and employing Sabbatean language as well as his own, during his early youth (1735); and that there might have been several gatherings of notes, editings, and, ultimately, Polish translation from Yiddish—if there was a Yiddish version—in stages, until almost the moment of his death in 1791 and then, mutatis mutandis, in additions and editings. The puzzle here is not—as often is the case in Frank’s lectures—how to understand an allusion to biblical or rabbinic literature, but how to view the relationship between the fable and the text’s moral. The beauty of the dictum is manifested first by the symbols in the field it generates and what

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they picture forth; thereafter, between the symbols of the fable and the actor in the dream; and then between the actor in the dream and the Interlocutor who stands in the middle, speaking back to the text and speaking out to his listeners, the Company, the Brothers and Sisters. The simplest interpretation might be that the dictum describes how Frank sees himself, draped in riches, eternal golden power and a wealth of selves, the cynosure of more than a few attentive devotees. The dictum generates multiple selves, achieved not through repeated reflections from one object to a number of mirrors but through a single reflection that shatters when observed, faithfully mirroring that which is reflected, the smashing of the eidolon, the astral double that represents the shattering, the liberation of the universe from its bounds and constraints. Or, alternately, how Frank wishes others to mirror him. There is no element on the surface of the imagery of the fable connected to the moral’s “help,” and precisely what links the imagery of shattering to that moral is a puzzle. This paper begins with that break and describes the processes and agencies Frank might have been invoking in his desire to create an enabling force that operates throughout the universe for himself as well as for others. This enabling force materializes out of the space that the term “help” energizes, for himself as well as for his following. His wife’s role in the conduct of the sect was rather restricted; and it appears that, disappointed with his sons and unwilling to share his power, Frank settled on his daughter Ewa Frank as his messianic successor. He never ceded his authority to Ewa. But her aristocratic manners and French proficiency were a great “help,” especially after they left Poland and began to socialize with western nobility; and on a theological plane her gender was a great “help” as an object upon which he could project feminine religious symbolism. Ewa, for her part, periodically struggled to free herself from her father’s narcissistic grip and, as certain dicta suggest, his incestuous passions. Quite a lot has been written about Frank and his following.1 He was successful from his youth onward in gleaning manners and conduct from common as well as from rarer sources (like Turkish folklore and the Persian Shahnameh), not only from traditional Jewish sources but from all sources and encounters that could be turned to use as parables, tales with “morals.” He worked as a caravaneer, traveling especially between south Poland and the Ottoman Empire. His encounters with Sabbateans in these areas seem to have taken hold of his native rebellious, antinomian, mischievous, selfaggrandizing inclinations; following on the career of Baruchia Russo (who was the most important heir of Sabbatai Tzevi’s following), but working in south Poland and then, after a time in prison, moving west in the character

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of an exotic noble, Baron von Frank took advantage of wealthy and aristocratic Europeanizing Jews and noble European Christians and the Catholic hierarchy’s dreams of the conversion of the Jews. He had earlier rather casually dispensed with his sons and settled on his daughter, Ewa—Awatchka, Hawachunja—as his heir, the Lady, Panna to his Lord, Pan; “Her Highness,” “Jej imos´c´,” in the Dicta. Possessing the manners and courtly talents of a young and attractive aristocratic woman, she gave him entry to very high levels of society in Brno and Offenbach once he was released from prison in the fortress at Czestochowa. Frank’s most important contribution to Sabbatean literature was his Book of the Words of the Lord (Ksie$ga sło[w Pan;skich), a collection of his “teachings” as he delivered them. The manuscript(s) includes speeches he made to his following, occasionally historic memories, occasionally ethical and moral instructions and a very wide variety of other genres, including biblical criticism, a sort of rabbinic literature, folk tales and songs, tall tales, bad jokes, “moral/ethical” instructions; and draws upon a wide variety of Jewish literature and local tales, most of which are made to fit his program. Frank mentions his “help” hundreds of times in the dicta, translating both the Hebrew roots yod-shin-‘ayin and ‘ayin-zayin-resh, whether as nouns or as verbs.2 The Polish “help” is the noun pomoc and the verbs that are formed from pomagac´. The Hebrew root y-sh-‘ indicates a salvific help, while ‘-z-r is more general even when applied to divine acts. The nominals from both Hebrew roots are grammatically feminine; the Polish pomoc, likewise. From the outset, the formal similarity between the Hebrew nouns ‘ezra, yeshu‘a and shekhinah, the last a very close approximation to the Christian Virgin Mother, is worth considering since they are all grammatically feminine in gender3 and since it is clear that the “help” in the dictum is not something that Frank supplies but is exterior to him, something that responds to his circumstances in order to assist him at critical moments in his task of redeeming the world. (Since Yiddish is, like Hebrew, a candidate for the “original language” of the dicta, it might be useful to note that Yiddish, like German, uses Hilf [e], likewise a “feminine” noun.)4 How does Frank’s “help” operate in practice? “Help” seems to be an elemental aspect of the universe. But in order for it to deploy, “help” requires an act of volition on the part of both the helper and the recipient. Help can be refused by anyone; anyone can refuse to help. Seen from the human perspective: emotionally, “help” is a wholehearted, immediate, and fearless dedication above all to the goal of salvation of the self and the world; indeed, obeying Frank’s orders is the most that one can do, and even then, things

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might seem not to go as intended. This feminine noun “help” is presented as a male capacity, though: the Brothers are called pomocniki, helpers; the Sisters are not so designated. Ewa and her mother are each simply referred to as female royalty, jej imos´c´, “Her Highness.” 120. There was [once] a bear. During its absence its children were taken from the lair. Out of the great pain of not finding the children [when she came] back, the bear fell upon the village and wounded animals and people. . . . Finally it was sent to [the bear] with these words, saying, “In our village there are 4 brothers. We shall send them against you.” When [the bear] heard this, it collected itself and went off on its way, after having withdrawn from the village right away. So it is with you. I set you up as Brothers so that I myself would not go upon these dangerous roads, so that you would be my helpers, but you did not want it. From now on I admonish you that you be whole with God and people with all your heart, without falseness as you have been till now; at that time you'll be worthy to see what God does in this world and everything, particularly his miracles and his greatness.

Frank almost always found the Brothers lacking in what would be necessary to provide proper “help.” This shortcoming is a matter of urgency because the absence of “help” leads to disasters of different kinds, ranging from the daily to the cosmic, and, in a complementary fashion, the disasters are in turn evidence of the absence of “help.” “Help” is commonly found as the object of negated conditional sentences, this one as “If you had been whole with God and people, you would have been my helpers and would have been worthy [of contributing to/witnessing my wonders].” In this very practical theological construction, sin is defined as the failure to carry Frank’s norms into practice, power, and fame in accord with his wishes, whether clearly stated or improvised. FRANK’S CONCEPTION OF SIN

Several dicta elaborate Frank’s conception of the nature, causes, and operation of sin. In 518 and 542, he restates the theme of the descent into sin that must precede the rise to virtue through the metaphor of the ladder of Jacob’s vision, which, he notes, Jacob never did climb. In 910, foreseeing his death, he says that at the second instance of continued contact with the Company, the next time he sees them he will reach a “difficult place, where

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those atoning for sin stand (waiting).” In 600, he restates the ultimate origin and distant cause of the “lack” or “deficiency”: “it is unknown to Solomon but known to David who said concerning it, ‘My mother conceived me in sin’ [Ps. 51:7].” Here, he equates “sin” with “deficiency” (lack), telling his listeners that neither Solomon nor David, though cognizant of the cause, knew the way to the Zufen (the north, i.e., that which is hidden) through which one must pass, avoiding the great and powerful deity there. (Frank’s theology certainly has its animistic moments.) In 2200, when Ewa sees a woman who is dead, Frank explains the cause of her mortality as having been “the sins of the True Believers” (prawowierniki; ma’aminim; Sabbateans) which have—perhaps as a result of their deaths—“been absolved, their sins forgiven.” It is not clear what sins Frank means here. It seems reasonable that he is assuming that there are norms, a bit of a problem in this range of religion, and that the Sabbateans have transgressed them. In this context, it might be better to understand that he means “sins,” as casually understood, and not the “holy sins” themselves. Furthermore, in dictum 2183, based on Zohar 3:83b, it is Adam’s sin that causes the concealment of Eve;5 and Frank rereads the text of Zohar 1:34b in such a way that the second Eve is the concealed one. Frank’s ideas about sin, as with other concepts that do not quite reach antinomianism, change to fit the circumstances and inner-sect politics, particularly if he seems to contradict himself and this is noticed by a follower who then asks about the conflict. In 2178, Frank refers to the midrashic legends elaborating the miraculous nature of the slaying of Ahab for his sins, principally, adultery.6 In 361, Adam’s sin is laid to God (“We will make man”) but, as in the “fortunate Fall” theology, this is precisely what leads to redemption. At several points, Frank links the conception of sin with normative Jewish practice. In 513, he characterizes the Law and prayer as necessary evils “to the present,” promising that these are no longer required, “but only to attend and do and tread [the vineyard, dictum 69, cf. Isa. 63:3].” In 820, he mocks the guilt that praying Jews confess in prayers as intentionally anti-survival. In 913, he shows that his Father, too, harbored non-orthodox/-orthopraxis ideas on the limits of sin: His mother finds him swimming on the Sabbath and reports it to his father, “[who then asked me] if I had gone swimming. I answered, ‘No, I only floated with my belly up.’ ‘Nu,’ he said, ‘if so it is no sin.’” These dicta set the stage for Frank’s wholesale rejection of Jewish law. From where does Frank’s help come, if it ever does? The following dicta suggest the satanic realm:

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327. Every man is in two forms, one right, the other left, as it stands with you, that two were created, one for light, the other for darkness. . . [cf. Gen. 1:16]. And he said of this, When a man is inclined to evil, then so the right will follow him, however with you your right side wandered away from you; but if he inclines to good, then that dark side will still help him in that good [cf. Zohar 1:144b]. 700. It is written concerning Joshua the son of Jehozadak the priest: Remove from him the filthy garments [cf. Zech. 3:4]. But was he then wearing robes soiled with filth? Rather to every thing one shall go in the form proper to it, for there are two forms; there is a helpful one and there is an inimical one. Likewise concerning Daniel it stands that God sent an angel to him, that was his own form [Dan. 6:23]. Similarly, when they were both in the womb, they struggled with each other and each wanted to come out first [Gen. 25:22ff.]. Just like now: They are in the womb, and it is not known which will come out first, whether Jacob or Esau.

When Frank quotes the beginning of Zechariah 3:4: “Take the filthy garments away from him,” he reverts to the theme of the “garments of Esau,” those which Jacob took upon himself, substituting himself for his elder brother, his superior, and thereby achieving a cosmos-disturbing superiority. This is one of Frank’s central plot figures, recurring frequently, one that is basic to his history of his own character formation: the denial of his own proper place in Jewish society and old/new history. (There are not a few canonic midrashim, as well, that question and defend this act of the patriarch.) As presented here, from the beginning of humanity, and quite possibly before that, a sort of Adam Kadmon (primordial Man) exists for Frank with its sinister and dark sides, possessing both helpful and inimical urges. The battle for supremacy between these sides gives every indication of coming to a draw. Certain deeds and certain states of mind might influence the outcome of the struggle or at least temporarily interfere with the balance. Yet, even in moments or events where one side or the other seems to predominate, the second side is present and, astonishingly, the complementary aspect is essential to the process, no matter which is mentioned first. Similar to the traditional, zoharic formulation, the good always contains an admixture of the bad, and vice versa. This last point is crucial, since writers on Frank/ism have tended to place his theological considerations as entirely—at the very least,

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instrumentally—pro-evil. The most famous example of this is the approach taken by Gershom Scholem, wherein a clear distinction rather than a matter of temporary weightings governs, and terms like mitzvah and ‘avera are taken to be appropriate and categorical rather than dynamic. It is important to note at the outset that these two terms do not appear in the Dicta at all as absolutes, rather only in connection with concrete instances; second, that neither appears in an imperative form, such as a command from Frank: “Do sin!”; nor can an imperative to sin be implied in any other case, such as, “Do my command [and sin].” In fact, Frank uses “sin” and “commandment” (and even their synonyms) in the same sense as the Bible and traditional Jewish usages: to sin is to fail in following a law, commandment, or other “rule of conduct,” whether a traditional one or one of Frank’s own. While it might be possible to describe Frank’s ethical or legal philosophy as it relates to such ideas, it should be clear that with such a personality as his, the requirement of discipline from his followers could hardly countenance any confusion over proper conduct, not to mention a complete absence of standards of obedience. “HELP BE A LADY?”

These terms and their grammatically feminine gender suggest that a balance of a sort is what Frank is after, one in which he will, inevitably, designate one act or another as having won out: praise for the good; disgrace for evil. Perhaps the Maiden Help is the female counterpart of the Big/Older Brother to whom Frank turns as to a distant superior and model. (Frank expounds a theory about such doubles in a dozen or so dicta.) Inasmuch as Frank’s own double is the Big Brother, Ewa’s might be the Maiden. There are, however, two kinds of Maidens, one good and one evil. For example, according to the formulation in dicta 107, 173, 190; 397, “She is that maidservant who inherited the properties of her mistress. . . . The true maiden is in great distress, and hides and preserves herself at the time when the other takes power.” The following dicta elaborate the Maiden’s dualism, with key phrases italicized: 107. “Was it arranged that he [Jacob] should pursue a Maiden such as would die? If you had asked me, then I would have answered that he did pursue a maiden, but she was only a portrait of the real Rachel, on whom all life depends, and she stands before God.” 173. The Lord said, You have heard about the Maiden of Israel, and about the Daughter of Edom, the Daughter of Egypt, but there is yet one more

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who still is dormant and nobody in this world has heard about her, or knows where is her place. But when the gate will be opened for us, the one for which we hope, then we will raise up that thing. The whole world will see [it], not knowing what it is. And I will be like a schoolteacher and ask everyone individually what he sees, because everyone will be worthy to see as much as his degree will permit. 190. The Maiden may hide herself when one alone sees her, but when several become worthy to see her and look upon her, she can no longer hide or conceal herself. Even though she might be able to keep out of sight for a short time, in the end she must stand revealed to all. Recall the parable of the servant girl who inherited her lady’s property [Prov. 30:23; Zohar 3:265b f.; Zohar 3:69a associates the “servant girl” with Lilith. The “servant girl” is very likely a stand-in for the Virgin Mary.]. 325. How often do people try to paint her so that she might never disappear and the whole world might look upon her? But that only comes from the side of death. But we, when we are worthy to see her and shelter ourselves beneath her wings, be they invisible, will attain life; and she will reveal herself more charming every day; and each will see her according to his degree, the more worthy one is, the more beautiful he will see her; and each will look upon her in accord with his own heart.

In the following, rather lengthy dictum we encounter the “maidservant” as an evil Maiden (from Prov. 30:23)—Lilith as opposed to the Shekhinah— but rather more here: the evil, man-hating female, enemy of the Virgin. Frank instructs the Company not to follow her ways and desires, but rather to follow him, where good will reward the faithful, where the king will provide for her. Those who have been so tried and resisted temptation, however difficult the way and however tempting to turn aside from it, will achieve redemption. All who succumb to the sexual and gluttonous longings within themselves will be punished by their very own ways: their goal becomes their gaol. The turn comes when we hear that no escape is certain: to fast, to study the law will lead only to beatings; their fears and fasts are themselves the sources of their loss of power and happiness. The True Maiden is driven away from them and hides herself. Her presence might still be felt or perceived, but removing her enemy will lead unavoidably to strengthen that one and enfeeble the other. The two tendencies/

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worlds are just so, delicately balanced. The task must be undertaken with stealth, and falseness, as well. If the Maidservant catches wind of their lack of obedience to her she will deploy her weapons—deceit, misconstruction, miscalculation—and sure disaster awaits. (In the wake of the disputations and the discovery of his false Catholicism, Frank’s emphasis on silence among his followers can be easily understood as any bully’s fear of others leads to his deploying it on others, i.e., transference.) Frank accuses the Brothers and Sisters of exposing the secrets of the faith and its conduct to inimical others and points to the origin of such acts in the plots of the Evil Woman. This counter-Eve Lilith-character is, in the Kabbalah, in exact but dynamic balance with her fair opposite; still, her powers, obviously, include much worse weapons than her rival can match. Turning to the history of Sabbateanism, where Tzevi is “the First” and Baruchia “the Second” (and Frank is to be the Fortunate Third), Frank finds there no rescue for the Jews (or Christians) because they depend upon a Maiden’s (Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary) salvation, while no such figure is to be found in Islam. Her history is shrouded in mystery but her powers are intact and earthly and they balance those of her rival. In recounting her history, Frank says that she was the favorite of the Tree of Death, one of the three gods “who direct the world” and her fiefdom is all misfortune. Yet within her there is a force for good through which one may pass and achieve “an enormous good thing,” and the effort to achieve this good thing has as much to do with self-recognition as anything else. The Company must be baptized and deny the baptism in its heart, but it must proclaim and demonstrate its fidelity to the conversion before others. This must have been sufficiently difficult. As is known, almost all followers of Frank and his doctrines became “good” Christians. 397. I was drawing you along and you should have said, We will go with you even to the dirt, to an empty country in which no one sows [Jer. 2:2], we will follow you. Then the verse would have been fulfilled, Hawiani Hameilech chadorof [Song 1:4]—The king led me to his chambers. But when a man turns away from the good side, then right away they lie in wait for his life and she leads him to her chambers. Various chambers are there; in one they drink; in others, fast; in still others they dance. And she was trying to persuade you to fast in that estate and to study the Law, and through the fear which she possesses all people [are drawn] to her, then she herself becomes the beating for the punishment of those people. She is that maidservant who inherited the properties of her

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mistress [Prov. 30:23].7 And that is exactly what I told you at first, that the true Maiden is in great distress, and hides and preserves herself at the time when the other takes power. Nevertheless she shows herself sometimes in the shape of a doe, so that she might not be recognized in her form as she really is. That maidservant knows well that when the other one will take over the rule, then she will fall and that is, Imolo hechraiwo8—When that one is filled, then the other is emptied and God set up one against the other.9 That is why I reminded you several times to be silent about everything and told you this verse, Dumiio tehilo10— Silence is your praise, O Lord. Therefore it is necessary to walk in stealth, but you let the sounds out. From the beginning of the world all arms are given into her hands.11 And all distress, pain, and mortifications come forth from her;12 and all who have fallen, fell there, even that First who did a good deed to break the Laws of Moses, and to open that estate; even though he thought to get out to freedom from her net thereby, yet in that country where he was it was impossible to carry out the thing, because there is no mentioning there of the Maiden, but he took a wife from Poland from that state,13 however that was only a deed/tale therefore he fell there. And now I will reveal to you the beginning of her coming forth. From the beginning she is the most beloved of the tree of death, which is one of those three gods who direct the world. His love for her is without limits. He has chosen her and established her over sicknesses, worries, and the various means of death which occur in this world, for all his arms are entrusted into her hands. She is called that foreign woman, that evil woman who is more bitter than death.14 She is the opening to the abyss, yet there is an enormous and good thing hidden in her, and one cannot come near that thing without having entered her. She is the lower door, the sphere of baptism, therefore all great people, knowing that in her a great thing is hidden, came close to her, but did not enter her, because she is like the husk which protects the fruit [Zoh. 2:108b]. What did she do? She led all the righteous hermits and the God-fearing into great love and fear of herself; she inspired them with the holy spirit and she revealed to them all the secrets of the law but through fasting, all these in order that they might fall into the net set by her, and she strangled them with that vile fear. She is the one who is called Esther; even though through her a great miracle was done for the Israelites, yet because of that three-day fast they fell into her hands and the net. Therefore she enticed you to fast for three days, and that is why you fell. But our hope is, even though we go into the shadow of

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death, we have nothing to fear because you are with us [cf. Ps. 23] because I was given that thing, that I might enter into baptism, that I might break everything and annul all laws which have been until now. She was the one who was called till now the queen ruling everything; for everything is in her hands, She is called by the name of Rachel, but the one about whom it stands, The one who is weeping over [her] children [Jer. 31:14]. She inspired the building of those two Temples, the First and the Second, and she destroyed them herself. If Solomon had destroyed the deed of his own hands himself he would have come forth from her net to freedom and would have reached a good thing and would have lived. Although the Queen of Sheba informed him of it, yet it was not in her power to give him life for she is a woman and of lower degree than a male. If she had appeared to a woman in this world, then to such [a one] she could have given life. Moses, Aaron, and David as well—they held onto a certain thing and thought that they gripped a good thing but this was from her. She gave them the rose to hold, therefore they fell, for no one has yet come to the true rose and has not held it. That is why they died. As I told you in the parable about the roses being on the hidden island, where the black princess reminded the prince not to take any other but the 7th rose and thereby he would have more power than she.15 Also those two who came to show the road, Mahomet and Christ, also fell by her, for it is her custom that she elevates a man and makes him great, and then cuts off his head; just as I told you about that unworthy princess who, having lured everybody, changed them into what she pleased.16 But it was given to me that I enter into this baptism. What did I do? I established Brothers and Sisters for myself, as is at [the place of ] that great king who is before God. He also has brothers and sisters just like you. I was supposed to give you also signs like they have; then you would have united with them. If you had followed me, just like Iwan Iwaniewicz17 reminded the people who followed him, neither to diminish, nor to add, despite the fact that Iwan had only two who went; but here it would have been equal, just as with those who go out to war so with those who sit on a pot [1 Sam. 10:22]. But when this foreign woman saw that I had established you, she realized that this was no vain thing. What did she do? She sent her elder servant to you to entice you to serve her and she put into you that evil fear of hers and blinded your eyes and your hearts so that it seemed to you that you were going along the right road. Despite the fact that I forbade you and called to you to turn back to me, yet she turned your heads so that you could not look back to me for you had

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already fallen into her net. By my advice—because her net has not been laid there and a screen is between him and her—she would have fallen by herself. Through that Big Brother you would have been able to come to wholeness and life, that is, to freedom from the one who rules over death, freedom from subjugation, great riches beyond count, with everything, as was said above, until you attained the worthiness to come to the true God himself; only thereafter would you see the difference. When we had a leader from our ancestors, like Moses, when Korah≥ stood against him and they went to Sheol alive [cf. Num. 16:1–32]; also with Joshua; when Achan transgressed his prohibition and was therefore burnt with everything [Josh. 7:18ff.] and so many others. All this happened because of her enticement, that they might fall into her power. That is how you would have fallen there, unresisting, and it would have been easier for those to rise up, because they fell into her from outside, for they did not go into baptism, but you came into baptism and to her and would have fallen, God forbid, without rising up. If I had fallen into her with you then that good thing which is hidden in her would have saved me from her; but you would not have been able to see my face anymore. And such a prostak as I am, without teaching, that God has chosen me [to be] over you, I did not want to accept, neither teaching from her, nor the fear of God. She repeatedly enticed you to compel me to reveal to you the thing, so that this thing might have upheld you in your degree, but her intention was for you to get that thing so that afterward it might be revealed to the nations, and then not one of you would have remained, God forbid. But I stood in my place and you had no greater power. But I remember you for your youth in which you followed me [Jer. 2:2] and your beginning was to go to her with me and to baptism. Repeatedly I led you by that good thing that is hidden in her, and that power has saved you from her hands and you did not fall with everything into her. That is why I kept silent and came stealthily out of the prison, and my coming out did not cause any noise in the world. I also had to come out from Warsaw to another gate, to another country, and I had to abandon the succession of God. Yet you have heard from me distinctly, We will go to Poland. And in this country here there is a great thing to tread upon, and I trod it until now, but she makes note of my treading and my steps and looks at what [comes] from me, thinking to herself that you are still holding on, and still you want to listen to her enticements. What did I do? I ordered two of you to perform that vile thing. Her first great servant fled with great noise and with all his cavalcade because I had ordered

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such a thing for them, and that one can no longer come [back] to his first place because they are thrust out of their place. And so I just oppress you and abuse you; this is only so that I may purify you and rid you of her, and thereby her power is broken. That is why this year I have great difficulties from everywhere with sickness, poverty. I have hope in my living God that my help will come from him; and when the sums come into my hands, I hope to make one more step into a certain place, and will try to raise this estate up to heaven, so that this voice may strike against the place where I have to tread initially; and afterward an innumerable force of Jews will come and they will accept baptism. From the beginning there has been a saying that she should accept everybody into that estate because she is the gate and the door to that baptism. She will accept them with love, for she thinks that all will fall into her like those first ones who fell. However, just from this greatness she will be broken thereafter, as it stands, When it will get overstuffed, then it will burst. Nevertheless, I tell you, she is a royal daughter and has royal esteem. She keeps watch with all of her powers that people not get out of her net. If you had followed me in wholeness then I would have pulled you out from her, but when she had realized that she has power over you no more, then her own esteem would dictate that she not do any evil to you. And she would in fact protect you from all sides. For there it is a question of understanding and not hastiness.

As can be seen from the ending of the sermon, at important points Frank felt it necessary to move from his own invention to ideas and expressions more familiar and so, perhaps, less discomfiting to an audience that included both some from the inner circle of the Company and others not so deeply steeped in antinomianism who might have been listening from a relatively religious Jewish perspective. EWA AS THE TRUE MAIDEN

Frank was deeply impressed by the earthly power and possibilities of Polish Catholic mariolatry and consequently in its utility to him and his conduct of his sect. This could be due to his counter-experiences in Islamic environs, his Jewish circumstances, or a result of the time he spent learning Catholicism and staying in the marian shrine/fortress/prison of Cze$ stochowa. This does not mean that he accepted religious behavioral norms of any sort; if Frank ever did become religious in accord with a system that entailed constraints

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other than those he imposed on followers, we know nothing of it. But there are 60–70 dicta that mention the Maiden/Virgin. Frank’s Maiden indicts the Virgin Mary—both are called Panna. For example, in 1194 Frank says: “[Just as it is improper for you to recall the modesty of Moslem women here,] likewise it is not proper to recall that name Shekhinah but only the name Virgin, as the [non-Jewish] peoples call out.” Five of these dicta, furthermore, refer to the Black Virgin of Cze$ stochowa (106, 307, 597, 614 and 778). This one (106) is quite rich: “Cze$ stochowa was called from ancient times the Maiden. Now, when we have come here, so the Moscovites have entered Her” (597). The play on words here—“entering/deflowering”—is a wonder of an insult to the Polish Catholic Church, devoted to its Lady, the Panna, the Black Madonna of Cze$ stochowa. Not only are the Russian forces having their way with the national divinity but they are coming second (or third) behind others, including, of all people, the Jews. “If you had gone about Cze$ stochowa in wholeness then that maiden who is there would have led you to another Maiden” (614). The doubling of supportive, powerful “maidens,” as in dictum 397 above, is yet quite different here. “Also why did you not ask me what it means that the Maiden is in Cze$ stochowa and is hidden in a portrait[?] . . . How is it fit that the Maiden should be hidden in painted boards?” Frank retains some access to iconoclasticism: his gods and goddesses are real, not paintings, at least as far as he presents them to the Company and, perhaps, in preparing the way for his daughter’s accession to power and ultimately the semi-divine persona she will inherit. The Maiden qua Virgin Mary is a resource to be drawn on who can help in Frank’s struggle to create and guide his following and, ironically, engage the forces of different churches, priests and bishops, noblemen and government officials. Here it is crucial to point out that no male figure or any person not related to Frank successfully resisted Frank’s supreme authority nor threatened his absolute control of the Company. His sons were kept far from the center of things and he hardly mentions them in the dicta. His messengers and aides are typically described as powerful, knowledgeable, and cunning, but they are kept away from the Company, at foreign tasks. Instead, Frank relies on the Maiden as an intercessory figure: 124. All the efforts of the ancestors were dedicated to this, that they might pursue that Maiden upon whom the whole of life depends and who gives protection from all evil; no weapon has any power over men because of her help.

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The co-dependency of this female potency, as with the Virgin Mary, requires that she be helped. Somehow her attention must be attracted in order to help against inimical forces and figures: 370. More than 500,000 years since the world stands and no creature knows about her until now. She rests in one place; all powers are concentrated in her. Without her it is not possible to go from one place to another. From outside she is black18 and [she] herself hopes for help to be uncovered to the world. At that time he who will see her will live just as she lives and is always stable in her beauty as a Maiden. At her [place] is virtue and stability, since she endures for such a long time. Jacob and Rachel had to give a sign,19 but that bridegroom who now belongs to her, since he is chosen for her, need not give her a sign because their love itself will lead to recognition. Jacob had only the portrait of Rachel.20 Jacob, having recognized that this was not the perfect Rachel and that he could not therefore come to any power, for that reason he had to flee from Laban. The snake which guards her—he who knows the road and trail to go to her, he also knows how to protect himself from that snake; and that snake itself also has the same trust, that the one who will come will open for her so that she may receive freedom and thereby free the snake from the obligation of guarding [her].

Rachel is probably one more name for the hypostasis of the Maiden. Frank associates her with Tzipporah (who was one of seven sisters [Exod. 2:16ff.]) and states that she is “the beginning of direction” (i.e., guidance) (670). When “the choicest of the Patriarchs,” i.e., Jacob (I assume this is Frank in the tale) makes his search for a well, he finds it already dug out by Abraham and Isaac, too; and so he finds Rachel there. (Tzipporah and Rachel and the well come together in Zohar 2:12b.) This Rachel was, however, not the perfect one. Thus, along with the Virgin of Cze$ stochowa who is locked behind a portrait (the Black Madonna), there is a “True” Rachel, who saves and is beautiful but guarded and not easy to find. In a similar manner, the Virgin Mary may help. Both these require help in a way that neither the male god nor Christ his offspring do—the latter need not seek beyond themselves, while the power of the Virgin is precisely in her dependency. Ewa, Jacob Frank’s daughter, plays that part as well, without espousing any concomitant morality. As time went on and it became clear that Ewa was going to be her father’s choice to inherit the leadership of the Company, we find dicta

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directed toward establishing her as a royal personage. The earliest appearance of the theme is dictum 9: In Nicopolis, the Lord told Osman [a servant of Frank’s from the Doenmeh] about Her Highness [Ewa] who was then only a year and a half old, Do you see my daughter? Know that she is a queen, and do not take it that I call her a queen because of her beauty; no, she is in fact and undoubtedly in her essence a queen.

A few other dicta record Ewa taking on her father’s role as tale-teller, narrating biographical/historical events, telling her dreams and interpreting them. Although she models herself on her father’s performances, her own performances as they appear in her dicta lack elements such as citations/ quotations from rabbinic literature, including the Zohar, which play such an important role in her father’s dicta, as well as his moral and “ethical” teachings. Ewa’s teachings, presented to her father, are modeled after his own dicta and recorded in the Words with the same generic features and the same formulae as her father’s, but lack impressions of life outside the court. As he presents her in his own dicta, she is uniformly subservient to him, necessarily lacking the strength to propound her own visions, a female golem to be shaped by him, a doll to be manipulated. This, and perhaps some political foresight that he himself will need a stronger presence as he ages, leads him to include some of her visions and dicta: 784. When my help comes to me, I will buy a beautiful house and furnish it splendidly; I will set aside a beautiful room for my daughter may she be healthy and dress her in royal robes and in precious jewels. I will not permit anyone to come in to me, but I will rejoice only with her alone together and go about together with her; perhaps when guests come from the nations, they will eat with us. But I will sit together with her day and night, and alone I will speak briefly of everything with her so that she may know the greatness of our faith; because of that I have not yet chatted with her not even a word. But at that time with no other but her alone will I speak, whether at home or on the road. For it is my desire to make of her a man and she will go through everything.

Frank might mean by the last sentence that his daughter would come to possess male qualities, duties, and capacities in addition to her own, native

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ones. She would thereby become a hermaphrodite, and in alchemical terms her “blackness” would be lost with her unification. EWA PERFORMS

Perhaps as a consequence of the lowered expectations of Ewa’s gender, whether in Jewish or Christian social structures, as well as the passive status in which Ewa is held captive by her father, the narrative range in her own teaching genres is quite limited. She cannot, for example, appear in a dictum as the savior of a male, but she can rescue a maid; all this, in spite of the fact that extraordinarily powerful women are active at Russian and European courts during this period. These two limitations—gender and passivity—reinforce each other. For example, her access to models drawn from the traditional sources of Jewish literature is limited: she has neither training nor experience in such literature other than what she has happened to pick up directly from her father or indirectly in conversation with others. She never uses and surely does not know Hebrew or, evidently, traditional Hebrew sources. Though it is not clear whether she spoke any other Jewish language varieties, none appear in the recorded dicta. This limited range may seem surprising, given her father’s stated desire to bring her out from her (female) state. But despite Frank’s talk of her as royalty, her actual status as it emerges from her own teachings—and, again, her platform is not on the same level as her father’s—is one of dependence. The Maiden/Virgin is at once dependent and powerful. Ewa’s dicta accord with the dependent roles she plays. No three-fold tales, no magic deeds of strength or strength at all, no accounts of miraculous protection. She is not, after all, the Lord. She lacks access to Jewish women’s society and traditions, since the females of her father’s court are, with the possible exception of Ewa Jezieranska,21 powerless to direct their own activities within the group. 1168. On the 24th of November [17]84, Her Highness saw a dream: I saw an old man with a beard lying stretched out; but his length was some 10 cubits; he was as if half-dead and half-living, therefore I went away from him. He called me back, Have no fear or fright of me, he said. Come over near me. I went near him. He folded his hands and lifted them up, he gave thanks to God several times, saying, I am blessed to see you this hour face to face. God himself has permitted me that I bring you the tidings, that this might make the end for me of 500 years lying on the earth. Up till now I

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have wandered. Now give me your hand—I gave. He looked at my hand and told me every little thing that had happened to me since the beginning of my birth. Also what had happened with me in prison, and even the thoughts and sorrows I had had until then he described to me, even what I had thought to myself, that I would never marry. He enumerated to me all my suitors who had endeavored to have me, with their names. But because, he said, you inclined your heart to God, and you have rested your hope in him, for the help which comes soon, I have come to betide you that from this very day you no longer will sorrow. Your time has arrived, a time of friendship. Your groom is prepared for you since the beginning of the world; and he even revealed to me the time of my marriage. You will bear 4 sons with whom you will rejoice in great happiness. Your youth will be renewed and your beauty will be like the rays of the sun. I asked him, How long will I live? He answered me, Though you grow old you will again be renewed and become young.22 He also revealed to me what would happen to me in eternity. As a sign that all I say to you is true I will advise you that the coronation of Kherson as emperor of Russia will not take place, for your help must be delayed a long time. I asked him his name. He then said to me, Your father will tell you for he knows me.—The Lord agreed that that old one had told me the genuine truth, for a great many words of this news had been revealed to Mateusz first.

What Ewa says in this dictum shows every sign of naivety and sincerity. It is a bit sad to read Ewa’s attempt to accommodate her father and imitate him despite lacking his crude force. Frank’s response is intended to keep her under his thumb. He is the one who has connections on high and he even provides a history to accompany his knowledge of what his daughter has undergone in her experience of the “other world” Frank has invented: he’s known it all along and her revelation is de-/valued by the information that another, a servant of sorts, had it long before. The dictum is conscious of the forms of her father’s teaching texts; yet it is not a teaching, nor does it come to Ewa in an entirely independent manner: she lacks the key to its understanding, acknowledges that its interpretation rests with her father, and turns to him for his approval. It might be that she heard much of this tale and her other interventions from him; certainly the elements are familiar. If she actually had suitors independent of her father’s control and the use he hoped to make of her (and did, especially once the two had made their way into higher society), we do not hear of them. The dictum likewise lacks any quotations in original “Jewish” languages, tales or texts

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or folkways, while the figure of the old prophet and his enormous length hardly disguises her father, who, after all, does know the ancient, the source of mystic knowledge in the dictum. As agent of the divine Maiden, Ewa is, however, able to provide blessings and help, mediating and distributing the power of supernatural sources. She has some power of her own as a result of the development of the themes that associate her with this Virgin/Shekhinah figure, the Maiden and her place in the cosmos; she has no need of her father’s access to the rabbinic literature. In fact, she doesn't need the literary support as she gains the faith of new followers who themselves may lack training in rabbinics and are not looking for any. 124. All efforts of the ancestors were dedicated to this, that they might pursue that Maiden, upon whom the whole of life depended and who gives protection from all evil; no weapon has any power over men because of her help. Just as the Patriarchs dug a well, and Jacob found a well, and at it Rachel, and removed the rock from that well; even so Moses, after having come to the spring, met a Maiden there [Tzipporah]. In a parable: There is a supervisor of forest animals and whenever these animals gather in groups, he sends a guard to see that no shot harm them. When he sends one in the form of a male, then the hunters may do harm, since he goes away, jumps about, plays pranks while, in the meantime, the hunter kills. But when he sends a guard in female form, then no animal will die, because she guards well and protects them from all evil. A wise hunter notices who is the guard and, when he sees the Maiden, he doesn’t even raise his weapon, and goes away. The same way we should try and find such a guard.

There are three tales here: the marriages of Jacob and Moses; the good and bad guards; and the Company’s need for such help as a/the maiden and their program for finding it. The supervisor of forest animals might be a stand-in for God. If the maidens in the parable are the images of Rachel and Tzipporah they protect their animals, Jacob and Moses, as envoys of the Maiden (‘alma). Just as the wise hunter and the two patriarchs pursued the Maiden, so Frank and the Company should try and find her so that she might accomplish her task which is to enable their success at escaping or defeating evil and finding “life.” No doctor can help here, perhaps because he is a male (140), but homeopathic remedies will do it and cures can be accomplished precisely through exaggerating the symptoms to a breaking point, a point of elemental change. As described here and elsewhere in

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the dicta, this change often involves magic sign-conversion, especially the conversion of the female to the male. The change rewrites the relationship between the female (help) and the male (helplessness). What does this lead to in the reevaluation of Ewa? Frank’s dispraise of the male is to be understood in terms of his rule of the sect. Whatever one may say of his engendering power as female as well as male (or of surrendering any of his own) must be understood in this light. The short answer to the question of what his tale does to raise her status by degrading the feckless male in the dictum is that this changeable existence impales her on the horns of more than one constructed identity. In one of these configurations, Ewa is the model combined being: Jew, Christian, Frankist, and heir to the leadership of the group; in another, she is both Frank’s daughter and his consort. I have not found any clear evidence or references concerning any of her sexual relationships, if there were such. Whether Frank encouraged affairs between her and others, especially noble others, is another matter; he sought and made introductions for her that might help them. As both her “noble” father’s daughter and his partner, she could provide a suitable, apparently attractive, mistress for distinguished figures of Polish and Austrian nobility. The following is an entry from the Kronika, an account of events rather than a “teaching,” and a part of the literature sacred to the Company, as well. Kronika 100. November 19, 1781 the great prince of the Russians [Paul I, tsar from 1796] and his wife came to Brünn. The 20th of November the Lord went for a ride with a whole ceremony and there, on the highway that goes to Vienna, he appeared with him and was presented to him by Emperor Jozef. At that time Her Highness [Ewa] saw a dream, that she herself let blood 12 times, one after another, from her left hand. In 1782 the Lord was in court against Pawłowski and Jakubowski. That was on the 20th of October. The 16th of November the Lord sent a letter to Warsaw by Matuszewski in which stood: that my help is near & . . . & . . . In June 1783 Schönfeld [Franz Thomas von Schönfeld] accused the Lord before the Lords and incited everyone, but at that time he was taken to prison for a whole year. The 11th of August the Lord and Her Highness were with the Emperor at the encampment. The 13th the Lord and Her Highness were again at the Emperor’s and at that time the whole general staff received the Lord with honor in the hut & . . . & . . . In 1784 a messenger came to Brünn and at that time the Lord ordered to write that letter, that now the time had come that the sheep were to be led by the hand of the shepherd. 1768[86] The 7th of November the Lord gave a sign and said, In this week begins

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a new year for the Company; blessed be he who endures, that one will be written in that register, even though they have been inscribed a long time but yet hesitated. 1769[89] Thereby he ordered that even those who were in Brünn should be inscribed in that register and the Lord himself inscribed in it his own name and that of Her Highness.—The 26th the register returned from Warsaw and all were inscribed and that same day he ordered all the old ones to go on watch that night, with a warning that if they should see anything that they should tell no one, not even their Brothers.

Ewa’s bloodletting is a matter of interest here. Generally, the notion of draining “excess” blood as a cure was a homeopathic idea: the process was thought to relieve the pressure of an “unhealthy” amount of blood in the body in the same way that menstruation relieved women of superfluous amounts of blood which were causing various mental derangements. (The practice has never been universally condemned or abandoned.) Of course, Ewa was dreaming of this act, not actually carrying it out; still, the dreamact was not meaningless in any of the adventures of the father-daughter, whether among nobility or among the lower classes, as it were; and it is the more significant for appearing in a dream (innocent of the dreamer’s intention and all the more portentous) with its interpretation handed over to her father. The relevance of twelve drops of blood might derive from the Tribes of Israel and/or the disciples of Jesus or the (doubled) number of Elders. That is likely the significance of the number here: the number of the Brothers and (in theory) of the Sisters. Bleeding cures any number of emotional disturbances typified as “melancholy” and is undertaken as treatment for the “black bile.” The act was a common one for the folk-doctor known as a feldsher in Yiddish (from German, field-shearer, i.e., military barber/doctor). The Left side is the residence of the kabbalistic sitra ah≥ra (Other Side), a term established on purpose to avoid arousing the demonic Wrathful Left. Ewa is draining herself of her femininity, her sinistrality (female=left) as well as her sexuality itself in order to maintain herself as her father’s intimate relation and become an appropriate heir to him. (Even though the number varied, there were, in theory, twelve Brothers and the same number of Sisters in the Company.) Ewa appears, at times, to be a bit more engaged in the defense of her own position in the Company, such as in the following: 749. Her Highness saw that the entire Company was brought to Judgment, men separately, women separately. But the Lord stood to the side

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and everyone was judged who was to come to life and their good deeds were deliberated. Ewa Jezierany was there too and someone came forth to bear witness for her, saying that she had been in prison for H˘akham Jankiew [Jacob the Wise]. But for Her Highness they said: You need not stand trial, they will inscribe you in the Book of Eternal Life and they said to her three times: Leh≥ayim To Life, To Life, To Life.

The two Ewa’s are contrasted here in two ways. The phrase “to come to life” restates Frank’s image of “Life,” one that is employed primarily as the opposition to the “death” of orthodox religious practice. Frank is acting as the angel at the gates, determining the fate of the soul. Ewa J. has to answer for herself and her deeds; she needs a witness and finds one. Ewa F., being pure of “sin,” needs no witness and receives a threefold leh≥ayim, which may plausibly be associated with the “halakhic” (legal) opinion that a deed done three times establishes a certainty, one of several trinities in Jewish thought and practice to be found in both the kabbalistic realm and Frank’s theology. In the following dictum, Trinitarianism, never very far from Ewa’s own experience of Christianity, appears. Out of the beginning of her narrative of the dream we find “three tall men,” erect, white candles, and the central one radiates. She is frightened, perhaps recognizing the imagery of ejaculation, and cannot look upon him, but ultimately, after a number of failed attempts, Ewa-in-the-dream sees him clearly, having been told what to expect by her father meanwhile: an encounter with the man who became the leader of the following of Sabbatai Tzevi on his death, her father’s predecessor. 750. On the 5th of May, 1784 Her Highness saw a dream. I was in a great and lovely hall. I walked around it by myself. I saw that one door was open on the side; there I saw three tall men. But the one in the middle, taller than the others, carried a canopy in his hands and upon it was a light as if from a candle. I thought that there was a candle there, but when I came near I saw that that light, which was great, gave off rays. I became somewhat frightened at that. They said to me, We came to inform you that your help is near. It seemed to me as if I awoke and saw the Lord, and in the dream I told him the dream. The Lord said to me, That was that Sig:[nor] San:[to]. I was very unhappy that I had not seen his face. It seemed to me in the dream as if I fell asleep again. The room and the three men once more came into view. Wishing to see his face, I raised my eyes, but on account of the terrible brightness and rays, I could not look him straight in the face. That happened a second, third, and fourth time. It seemed to me in the

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dream, that I was seeing him clearly, and I gave thanks to God that I was seeing clearly what I had seen at first in a/the dream.—The Lord gave an interpretation of the dream: If you had only looked upon his face, then neither weakness nor any grief would ever again have come to you, for I know who that was—To us he said: You yourselves do not know what you have done. Your beginning was good, for you went from the place of your birth [Gen. 12:1], from your Fathers, just as was told to Abraham. If you had been stable and heeded my voice, then help would already have come. I wanted that the assistance be for the whole world and you did not want it. Abraham was led to that place where one must go, but he himself did not go there. But now one must go, and that place cannot be opened, except by God himself. You will see and the whole world will see and be astonished just as that whole city was surprised by Naomi.

Signor Santo is the title by which the “Second,” Baruchia Counio, is known (the “First” is Sabbatai Tzevi). The tallest of the Trinity that Ewa sees is also holding an erect lit candle, and one is inclined to see a phallic configuration. Ewa is not able to look her own awareness of desire—or perhaps her actual deeds—in the face. It is likely that she knows what to expect from him and he seems to remind her of her commitment to their creed of shamelessness and abandon. The “astonishment” of the whole city of Bethlehem may come from a midrash23 on the verse that tells the tale of Ruth and Naomi disguising themselves so as not to be recognized as women, as they travel alone or after they reach town. Phallic imagery recurs in another of Ewa’s dicta: 839. On the first of July [17]84, Her Highness saw a dream: I saw as if the Lord was brought a pair of pistols of pure silver. The Lord took the pistols and having loaded each of them with three silver balls, fired straight at my heart.

Beyond the phallic imagery of the shooting pistols, it might be that the three silver balls—only one of which could normally emerge at a time, after all—could have come to Ewa’s mind or reminded her of sanctuary lamps in a Roman Catholic church. These are always hung from three chains or cords and often have balls midway up the chain. In some cases the balls serve as devices for maintaining an even strain so that the lamp itself hangs perpendicular and will not spill. The implied sexual tension between father and daughter is heightened in the following dictum:

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852. Her Highness saw a dream on the 5th of July 1784: I saw a little child in my room; one black man came in with horns on his head. I asked him, What do you want here? He answered, I have come to take that child from your house. I will not give you that child, I said. He said, If you will not give him to me willingly, then I will take him by violence. I asked him who he might be? He replied, First I will take the child, then I will tell you who I am. He took the child by violence under one arm and under the other he caught up that French girl who was with me. [Ewa had a French tutor in Brno.] I asked him again, Who are you? He answered, I am the worst devil of all the devils. The French girl started to scream loudly and to ask that I rescue her from him, but he did not listen to her and left with her. Immediately a great fire began to burn in my room, which I tried to put out, but I couldn't. The Lord came along to put it out, at which a great outcry arose that in the Lord’s room it was burning terribly.

The child might be Ewa; the worst of devils, her father. The (real) French maid surely would have been an object of Frank’s passion. Frank has stolen Ewa’s innocence along with her dreams in his terrible lust—which he is always happy to proclaim. Among several other roles, it seems natural that Frank would play at being a noble soldier. The Hungarian huszar outfit became the standard for fancy military dress in Europe. A characteristic feature might have been the long coat with tunic sleeves, the dolman; alternatively, he might have liked the short cape and a long, curved pendant sword. In either case he might have carried a lance. The best-known image of Frank shows him in a fur kalpak with a dashing handkerchief around his neck and a neat, military mustache. The hat testifies to his origins and background in Turkey. Frank appears in this guise in the following dictum: 1015. Her Highness’s dream: I saw that I was playing the clavichord. Our uhlans came to me, saying, Stop playing the clavichord, for the Hungarian noblemen have arrived and want to pay you a call. I said to them to bring me white and lovely ribbons, and I will divide them up and give them out among you. I did so. Then I saw the Lord dressed in Hungarian style, seated on a horse, and I too rode a horse and all the people after us; and seeing them somewhat far away, I called loudly to them that they should come near.

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Ewa’s clavichord is portable; the piano, which had already achieved popularity, all but replacing the clavichord, was perhaps not quite so ladylike. Her white ribbons are the insignia of her purity and innocence and the token serves to identify the soldiers as her corps. EWA ESCAPES

Certain visions appear to constitute Ewa’s attempts to free herself from the grip of her father’s incestuous passion: 1033. Her Highness’s dream of the 18th of October: I saw that a great many people came from Turkey; I drove to the church. I encountered an old woman taller than all the other people. I asked who she might be? I was told that she was a lady of high rank who was married to a great lord. They had told her to come to Wise Jacob, that then she might live forever, therefore she had now come to him.

It might be that the older taller woman, who is not said to be from Turkey, is not “taller” in physical terms but is in status (“high rank”) and could then be Catherine of Russia. Ewa’s yearning for freedom is sometimes expressed even more powerfully: 1045. On the 24th of October [17]84 Her Highness had a dream: I was in a great hall. A terrible bear came toward me with a gaping mouth, but he licked my hands and feet with his tongue. From the great fear I had from that I flew through the air and stood as if on a pulpit. The bear flew up there after me. At that I saw a great red chair, like that of the Lord in Cze$ stochowa. A man dressed in red—like the Lord wore—came up and sat in that chair. I thought, It is some lord; but having flown over to see him, I saw it was a very young man and very handsome. I heard a voice saying to me, Ask the man; he will save you from that bear. I asked him, not by words but by signs. The man had a short white wand in his hands; as soon as he pointed with the wand, the bear went off and I flew in the air. Then I saw myself in a church, there was a Greek pope there. He gave me two great candles in my hands, that I should go from one altar to the other. It seemed to me in the dream that I was telling the Lord that dream. The Lord gave me the interpretation in the dream: Soon God will rejoice you, and all your enemies will unite with you.

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This last dictum displays a wealth of fascinating symbolism, gathering together many of what I think might be Ewa’s hopes and fears. The connection between the bear (niedzwiedz) and the pulpit, which seems a bit inexplicable, might register a pun on the word for Sunday (Niedzela) (few Polish words begin with the syllable niedz); its flying, sudden, ineluctable appearances everywhere, as in nightmare pursuit. Her savior from the bear (masculine gender)—not yet the symbol of Russia at this time, the bear may represent her father—is not “some lord”—so not her father, but a young, handsome man who will save her from her pursuer. The disembodied voice (glos) that speaks to her is a common feature in the dicta, connoting spiritual authority and making demands. The cathedra is manifestly her father’s red chair—one of several plays on Edom/’adom/’udom/’edom in the dicta; here it is both the chair and the cardinal color. The young man saves her from the bear by his wand which, although short, is one of mercy: not red but white, not gross but delicate, a phallus that is out on good behavior. The great hall turns out to be an orthodox church with a priest who offers her fair phalluses so that she can make sexual choices and go forward without her father. At last, Ewa may have become the master of her dreams. As she dreams of her father in the dream-within-the-dream, he is little more than a converted and quieted image. He promises the reunion of her fragmented self—alluded to in the shattered mirror dictum cited in the introduction—and the removal of her fears. This is Ewa’s fantasy; as far as we know, her reality will remain that of a captive child. As a central European lady, a Christian of quietened manners and talents, she was well suited to the role she played out in the upper reaches of European society, literate, piano-playing, Frenchspeaking. Her visions show her hopeless subduction in the struggle to break free from the heavy atmosphere of her adolescence: the visions cease and, from the portrait of her we have, it appears that she may be free of them, a cultured, Christian woman with an intriguing background in a society open to her, a remade, newly silvered mirror. NOTES 1. On Frankism, see Meir Balaban, Toward the History of the Frankist Movement (Tel Aviv: Devir, 1934), 1:23 (Hebrew); Kraushar, Frank i frankis´ci polscy, 1:70–73 (Cracow, 1895), trans. as Jacob Frank: The End to the Sabbataian Heresy, ed. Herbert Levy (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 2001); Bernard Weinryb, The Jews of Poland (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1972), 236–61; and Harris Lenowitz, The Jewish Messiahs: From Galilee to Crown Heights (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 167–98. A complete bibliography will be

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found in Pawel Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755–1816 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 2. Which of the two roots he refers to only becomes clear when he cites biblical passages or bits of rabbinic literature where an original in Hebrew/Aramaic is present, cited or known in addition to the Polish. 3. While we can be sure that the Polish pomoc (power, strength) hardly differs in meaning from moc, the Hebrew case is not quite the same: nominals on the pattern of ‘ezer seem to be somewhat less active than those formed on the pattern ‘ezra. 4. Of course, though the noun forms in either case are feminine in terms of noun/ verb or noun/adjective agreement, there is a difference between the grammatical gender of nouns that are animate and those that aren't. The terms here are overdetermined as feminine, given the absence of “Jewish” female deities or even female attributes of male deities in the defining texts of Jewish culture on the one hand and the grammatical feminine gender of the derived noun patterns. Shekhinah (“dwelling”) is no different from ketiva (“writing”), both kal nouns of activity, though ktv is active and transitive while shkhn is neither (note the difference in contrast between the active and stative patterns of some participles, kotev and shakhen). “The Shekhinah” is defined as a divine hypostasis only (but not always) when a marker of determination is present, one way or another. Divine titles of god-in-action (Hebrew participles in masculine gender and singular in number) also call for the definite article and lose their titular function when they appear in any of the other three gender/number patterns (singular, male/female). Pomoc does not mean “heavenly power” when the context lacks a further noun/adjective, nor do the parallel Hebrew terms. 5. “2183. Even Adam could not look at the face of the first Eve because of her extraordinary beauty and that one remained in concealment; but when the second Eve came forth, he immediately went forth to sin with her.” 6. In 1316, he denies that there is any punishment for “the sins of the fathers”; in 2159, he links Ecclesiastes 9:8 (“let your clothes always be white”), Daniel 7:9 (“garment white as snow”), Isaiah 1:18 (“whiten your sins”), and the first part of Leviticus 11:44 (“sanctify yourselves for I am holy”) with Leviticus 20:7 (“sanctify yourselves therefore and be holy”) as prooftexts for the moral instruction he gives to the Brothers/Sisters to approve or create their own purified state; note the imperatives. 7. Dictum 85 establishes the symbolism: the Mistress is the Shekhinah, the Servant Girl, Lilith. 8. Ezek. 26 as interpreted by BT Megillah 6a; cf. dictum 235. 9. Eccl. 7:14. 10. Ps. 65:2. 11. Cf. Zohar 2:44b, 2:50ff., 3:269b. 12. Cf. Zohar 2:66b. 13. The legend of Sarah, wife of Sabbatai Tzevi; cf. 376n on Zohar 1:35b, 3:165b. 14. Cf. Eccl. 7.26 15. Cf. dicta 206, 696. 16. Cf. dictum 382. 17. See dictum 138f. 18. Frank employs the image of the “Black Virgin/Madonna” of Cze$ stochowa here, and see Song of Songs 1:5.

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19. The sign is mentioned in BT Megillah 13a, and see midrash ha-gadol 1:463f. where the sign itself is said to be her touching the extremities of his right side (earlobe, thumb, and toe). 20. See dicta 240, where the association between Rachel and Frank’s pursuit of “life,” a vital, perhaps rejuvenating principle, is mentioned, and 671: “How could you not understand that, that the beginning of direction would be through her hands? Yet it is clearly written of Rachel that she was a shepherdess” (cf. Gen. 29:6). 21. A similar point could be made in connection with the “democratized” 500 black virgins still extant throughout Europe and the Americas, doubly burdened and, though apparently independent authorities, largely impotent in interrelationships between the groups of their followers and the national political and economic powers. The latter, whenever possible, stand off; while the following threatens a seizure of power, they interfere only as an extreme measure in order to maintain determinative roles in the governance of the community. 22. See dicta 128, 561, 749, and, in the Kronika, 42, 103, 104. Notice that Ewa’s scriptural resources are limited to paraphrases rather than quotations, as here. 23. See the ’Iggeret Shmu’el (Kuru Geshme: [n.p.], 1597) of Shmu’el Uceda (a Safed Kabbalist of the mid-sixteenth century) on the verse.

Judaism and Jewish Influences in Russian Spiritual Christianity The Practices of the Early Dukhobors and the Prophecies of Maksim Rudometkin

J. Eugene Clay

The relationship between Judaism and Christianity on the eastern European plain has been complex, fraught with violence and conflict on the one hand, and, on the other, a creative and fruitful cultural exchange. This relationship has a long history: the rulers of the Turkic Khazars converted to Judaism in the eighth century, and, according to the Russian chronicles, Jewish missionaries sought to convert the pagan Grand Prince Vladimir of Kiev as early as 987.1 Ultimately, however, Vladimir chose to accept baptism and become a Christian, adopting the Eastern Orthodox rite that his ambassadors had found to be so beautiful when they visited Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. Despite Vladimir’s decision, Judaism continued to exercise an important influence on eastern Christianity. First, Russian Christianity inherited a rich theological tradition in which the fathers had engaged with—and sometimes adopted— Jewish interpretations of the Hebrew scriptures. For example, Christian efforts to find the doctrine of the Trinity in Genesis—the subject of Andrei Rublev’s famous 1405 Old Testament Trinity icon—developed arguments that

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the Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria (20 BCE–50 CE) had advanced in the first century.2 Second, Christians also adopted and adapted Jewish apocryphal and pseudepigraphal writings. The extensive literature about Adam and Eve, for example, probably originated in a Hellenized Jewish milieu, but Christians used this Jewish framework to compose their own works about the primal couple, reflecting Christian concepts about humanity, sin, Satan, and salvation.3 Third, although largely absent from Russia until the late eighteenth century, Jews loomed large in the Christian imagination.4 If spiritual verses (dukhovnye stikhi) about the crucifixion pictured the Jews (zhidy) as the enemies of Christ, Jews also provided an example of a “textual community” that remained faithful to its scriptures. For one group of Russian religious dissenters, the Spiritual Christians, Judaism played an especially complex and significant role. The Spiritual Christians, who first appear in the historical record in Russia’s black-earth provinces in the 1760s, represented the second largest tradition of religious dissent from the Orthodox Church after the Old Believers, who, a century earlier, had refused to accept the liturgical reforms of Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (r. 1652–58). While the Old Believers, who grew to approximately ten million by 1914, regarded themselves as true Orthodox Christians who had remained faithful to the unreformed church and its liturgy, the Spiritual Christians, who may have numbered two million by 1914, consciously rejected both the Orthodox church and its traditions.5 Unlike the Old Believers, they rejected the very principle of the Orthodox hierarchy and sacraments. On the basis of their reading of the Old Testament, the Spiritual Christians were also iconoclasts who denied the power and authority of holy images. Never a monolithic movement, Spiritual Christianity quickly split into many competing denominations. Although Spiritual Christianity initially arose without any direct Jewish influence, Jews and Spiritual Christians shared the common practice of serious scriptural study. There were very few Jews in the Russian empire before 1772, and there is no indication of direct contact between Jews and the early Spiritual Christians. But through their emphasis on reading the Bible and especially the Old Testament, the first Spiritual Christians adopted elements of the Mosaic law, including iconoclasm and the prohibition against the consumption of pork. These early similarities with Judaism—and their common opposition to the state church—made Spiritual Christianity open to further developments that brought them closer to Judaism. Most dramatically, in the late eighteenth century, the so-called Subbotniks or Sabbatarians—ethnic Russians from the central and southern provinces—even turned away from

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the fundamental Christian doctrines of the Incarnation and the messiahship of Jesus to embrace the Mosaic law of the Old Testament. As the work of Aleksandr L’vov, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Panchenko, Sergey Shtyrkov, and Nicholas Breyfogle demonstrate, these Russian sabbatarians developed strong communities that survived the severe persecution of both the imperial and Soviet governments.6 Although the Subbotniks did not, as a rule, follow the Talmud, some of them took the next step and began following the practices of different Jewish communities, both talmudic and non-talmudic, even as they retained their separate ethnic identity. In the religious census of 1912, the Department of Spiritual Affairs of the Interior Ministry noted the presence of 8,412 Subbotniks who had “fallen away” from Orthodoxy; 12,305 “Judaizing Talmudists”; and 4,092 Russian Karaites. The common practice of scriptural study shared by Jews and Spiritual Christians opened the door to direct Jewish influence. Other groups of Spiritual Christians, while retaining their fidelity to Jesus, also adopted more of the Mosaic law. In the 1860s, one Spiritual Christian prophet, Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin (1832[?]–1877), ordered his followers to cease celebrating Orthodox holidays and instead to observe the Old Testament holy days of Paskha (Passover), Pentecost (Shavuot), Trumpets (Rosh Hashanah), the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), and Tabernacles (Sukkot).7 Through astronomical observation and their own reading of the Old Testament, Rudometkin’s followers determined their calendar independently of all other religious communities, whether Jewish or Christian. Unlike the early Spiritual Christians, Rudometkin, who lived in the Caucasus, clearly had enough contact with Jews to know about their ritual practices. Although Rudometkin promoted the Mosaic calendar, he and his followers gave these fasts and feasts Christian meanings; they sharply criticized the Jews, who rejected Christ and who failed to follow Moses’ instructions about the Passover. Rudometkin was aware, for example, that Jews no longer celebrated Passover by sacrificing a lamb, as Moses had indicated in his third book (Lev. 23), and he chastised them for this failure: “But I wonder by what permission all the remaining Jews everywhere celebrate it (Passover) without the Lamb? Therefore I see that their Passover is invalid and may even be said to be false and deceptive.”8 Jews also influenced Spiritual Christianity indirectly, through apocryphal and folk traditions that were transmitted and elaborated in both written and oral form. Pseudepigraphal traditions about Adam and Eve were especially rich in the Russian empire; the Slavonic, Georgian, and Armenian translations of the books of Adam preserve unique traditions unattested elsewhere.

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These books typically begin with Adam’s lament after his expulsion from Paradise, and they include various stories about his repentance and the establishment of agriculture. Russian folk poetry elaborated this theme in the various versions of the spiritual verse known as “The Lament of Adam” (Plach Adama).9 The largely unexamined prophetic tradition of Russian Spiritual Christian Molokan-Jumper writings also provides an important window into popular folklore about Adam and Eve and its theological significance. In particular, Rudometkin’s prophecies draw upon and extend the Adam and Eve apocrypha. These extensions reflect both the oral context in which the prophecies were composed and the particular concerns of the Spiritual Christian community in the late nineteenth century. In this chapter, I explore two ways in which Spiritual Christians adopted ideas and practices that brought them closer to Judaism. In the 1760s, the very earliest period of Spiritual Christianity, the common heritage of the Hebrew scriptures—and the common practice of studying those scriptures—led the first Spiritual Christians of Tambov and Voronezh Provinces to break with the state church, reject the veneration of images, and stop eating pork. A century later, the Spiritual Christian prophet Maksim Rudometkin, in monastic imprisonment far from his followers, drew upon apocryphal traditions about Adam and Eve to prepare his followers for Christ’s millennial kingdom. RE-READING THE SCRIPTURES: THE EMERGENCE OF SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY IN TAMBOV AND VORONEZH PROVINCES IN THE 1760S

The very existence of a separate Jewish community offered an alternative interpretation of the Hebrew scriptures that various Christians had embraced as their own. When Christians argued among themselves, this alternative reading offered resources for their internal polemics. When confronted by conflict, opposing groups within the Russian Orthodox Church often labeled their rivals as “Jews” or “Judaizers” or as practitioners of “Jewish philosophizing” (zhidovskoe mudrstvovanie)—even when such labels had no basis in reality.10 In the seventeenth century, when the Russian Orthodox Church split over the liturgical reforms introduced by Patriarch Nikon of Moscow (r. 1652–58), the two sides accused each other of playing the roles of those Jews who had crucified Christ. Archpriest Avvakum (1620–82), one of the leaders of the Old Believers who rejected the reforms, accused Nikon and his allies of being “today’s Jews [who] put Orthodox Christians into the fire.”11

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Yet at the same time, through their emphasis on scriptural study, Jews could serve as a positive example, especially for those Christians who emphasized the authority of the Bible over Church tradition and the moral teaching of Christianity over its ritual practices. The Reformation’s emphasis on the study of the Bible caused Protestant Christians to look at the Old Testament with new eyes. Some Protestants began to rethink questions about the observance of the Sabbath, Mosaic dietary restrictions, and the place of the Jews in the divine economy of salvation.12 Likewise, when pietism began to influence Russian Orthodoxy in the eighteenth century, Orthodox Christians also began to rethink these questions. One such group appeared in the rich black-earth region of Tambov and Voronezh Provinces in 1767, on the eve of the Russo-Turkish war. In a memo dated May 29 to the Holy Synod (the ruling council of the Russian Orthodox Church), the new bishop of Tambov, Feodosii (Golosnitskii, 1729–1786, r. 1766–1786), reported the arrest of 33 heretics who, based on their reading of the Bible, rejected icons, priests, church buildings, and the consumption of pork.13 The Synod promptly ordered a broader investigation that ultimately led in 1769 to the punishment and exile of 232 Spiritual Christians, many of whom were forced to serve in the war with the Ottoman empire. The government seized their minor children, placing them in military schools or with Orthodox Christian families.14 According to the documents of these first heresy trials, the Spiritual Christians reinterpreted the Psalter in a way that caused them to break with the state church and adopt elements of the Mosaic law (such as the prohibition on pork) that Orthodox Christians had long ago dismissed. When questioned in 1769 in the interrogation chamber of the Secret Expedition (the imperial secret police), Kirill Petrov, an Orthodox subdeacon [d’iachok] of Goreloe village in Tambov Province, claimed that the Psalter itself forbade the veneration of icons and worship in man-made church buildings. Even though the Psalter was impeccably Orthodox, sent to the Goreloe parish for the use of the clergy, Kirill’s interpretation of the book departed sharply from that of the established church. As the interrogators noted in their memorandum, the subdeacon “had seduced some from the true path by his crooked exegesis of holy scripture.”15 Jews did not directly influence Kirill Petrov’s interpretations. Before Russia seized much of Poland in the partitions of 1772, 1793, and 1795, there were few Jews in the empire, and there were none in the rural regions of Tambov and Voronezh. The ecclesiastical and state authorities who prosecuted the heresy did not so much as mention the presence of Jews among

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the Spiritual Christians that they arrested; if Jews had been involved in the heresy, church and state officials would certainly have made a special note. Instead, the early Spiritual Christians seem to have been indirectly influenced by Protestant pietism, which emphasized a personal and emotional relationship with God, Bible reading, and the moral and ethical demands of Christianity over sacraments and ritual. Pietist writers, such as Johann Arndt (1555–1621), greatly influenced many Russian and Ukrainian hierarchs of the eighteenth century, including Bishop Simon (Simeon Fedorovich Todorskii, 1700?–1754) of Pskov (r. 1745–54), who studied in the Pietist center of Halle and who translated Arndt’s Four Books of True Christianity in 1735. Significantly, Bishop Tikhon (Timofei Sokolov, 1724–83, canonized 1861), who ruled in Voronezh from 1763 to 1768—at the very time that Spiritual Christians were first active there—was a great admirer of Arndt. In the school that he opened for the clergy, Tikhon used Protestant textbooks; he urged priests to read and teach from the Bible—not just from the liturgical books—and he expressed regret that many did not have or did not read the Bible. Rejecting the hierarchy, priesthood, and external rituals of the state church, the early Spiritual Christians sought a heavenly and interiorized faith that reflected spiritual, not earthly, realities. For example, instead of venerating icons—manmade painted boards—the Spiritual Christians venerated one another by greeting one another—and taking leave of one another— with bows and fraternal kisses. In this way, they honored each other as true living images [obrazy] of God, instead of honoring lifeless icons [obrazy].16 Refusing to worship in man-made churches, the Spiritual Christians instead declared their own assemblies to be the true churches of God; they preferred to worship in the heavenly church, the “church of the air.” Likewise, true baptism was not performed in water by priests, but was a spiritual experience performed by the Holy Spirit. The Spiritual Christians confessed their sins directly to God, avoiding corrupt priests. Singing hymns drawn from both the Bible and their own compositions, they also eagerly awaited the end of the world and the Last Judgment, which would vindicate their faith, for which they suffered in this world. RUSSIAN SPIRITUAL CHRISTIANITY: DUKHOBORS, MOLOKANS, AND JUMPERS

Sometime in the 1770s, Spiritual Christianity split into two major branches, which later came to be known as the Dukhobors and the Molokans. While honoring the Bible—and using biblical texts and images in their songs—the

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Dukhobors placed greater emphasis on the interior voice of the Spirit of God. The future Molokans, led by the Tambov smallholder [odnodvorets] Semën Matveevich Uklein (1733–1809), insisted to a much greater extent on the authority of the Bible, available to them only in Church Slavonic. Thanks to the preaching of Uklein and his companions, the Molokan movement grew substantially in Tambov Province in the last quarter of the eighteenth century, and important Molokan communities migrated to the lower Volga frontier provinces of Saratov and Astrakhan. Under the relatively tolerant regime of Alexander I (r. 1801–25), the Spiritual Christian Molokans benefited from a series of decrees that gave them greater religious liberties.17 On July 22, 1805, in a decree preserved by the Molokan community, but not in the complete collection of Russian Laws published in 1830, Alexander I granted Molokans permission to practice their faith. Orthodox priests were not to enter the homes of the Molokans, who could read and interpret the Bible as they wished. The decree, of course, did not grant complete religious freedom to the Spiritual Christians, who were still forbidden by existing legislation from proselytizing. Nicholas I (r. 1825–55) put an end to the relative toleration of his older brother, and in 1830, in an effort to solve two problems at once, decreed the administrative exile of thousands of Spiritual Christians to the Caucasian frontier, where a resurgent mystical and militant Sufi Islam threatened Russian interests. By placing Molokans and Dukhobors in the recently conquered provinces of Transcaucasia, the Russian government hoped to consolidate gains in the Russo-Persian War (1826–28) and the Russo-Turkish War (1828–29) even as it removed the “sectarian infection” from its central provinces. Far from most Orthodox peasants, the Spiritual Christians in the Caucasus could spread their heresy only on the frontier. But these government decrees and administrative exile ultimately failed to halt the expansion of Spiritual Christianity; indeed, state repression may have helped provoke a revival in 1833 when, in the words of the Molokan prophet Fedor Osipovich Bulgakov (also known as David, the son of Jesse, 1809–76), there was “a powerful outpouring of the Holy Spirit, Who miraculously acted on many people given over to the will of God.”18 In the lower Volga region, where many Molokans lived, peasants suffered from cholera, crop failures, and a severe famine in 1832 and 1833.19 Faced with the crises of forced deportation, famine, and disease, the Molokans turned to God, who responded by sending His Holy Spirit into the hearts of his people.

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The 1833 revival split the Spiritual Christian-Molokans into two denominations: the Zionists (sionisty, later called the Jumpers [pryguny]), who, inspired by the Holy Spirit, danced and prophesied in their prayer meetings; and the Constants (postoiannye), who rejected these latest manifestations of the Holy Spirit. While recognizing their spiritual kinship with the Constants, the Jumpers sought to emphasize their special divine election within the Molokan community by identifying themselves with Mount Zion, the site of Solomon’s temple. As “Zion” within “Israel,” they had been favored by God with the visitation of the Holy Spirit, who spoke through their prophets and announced the secrets of the end of the world. The Jumpers remained a fervent minority of the Spiritual Christians: in the 1912 census, the Department of Spiritual Affairs found only 4,844 Jumpers as opposed to 133,935 Constant Molokans (molokane-voskresniki).20 The revival was fed in part by the pietistic writings of the German mystic Johann Heinrich Jung-Stilling (1740–1817), whose works, translated into Russian under Alexander I, proved very popular among Orthodox Christians, Old Believers, and the Spiritual Christians.21 In his 1799 commentary on the biblical book of Revelation, entitled Die Siegsgeschichte der Christlichen Religion (The Victorious History of the Christian Religion), Jung-Stilling adopted and popularized the calculations of the great biblical textologist Johann Albrecht Bengel (1687–1752), who had predicted that Christ would return in 1836. Translated into Russian as Pobednaia povest’ ili torzhestvo khristianskoi religii in 1815, Jung-Stilling’s work had a profound impact on Russian religious thought. Believing that Christ would return from the East, Jung-Stilling and his readers looked to Russia for the fulfillment of St. John’s apocalyptic prophecies.22 Beginning in 1816, evangelical German millenarians began to migrate to Russia, hoping to reach Mount Ararat where, based on the speculations of Baroness Juliane von Krüdener (1764–1824), Christ would return to establish his millennial kingdom. As the last site of Noah’s ark, Mount Ararat had already served as the cradle of a renewed civilization after the first cosmic catastrophe of the biblical flood; according to this reasoning, it would serve the same purpose as the starting point of Christ’s terrestrial rule.23 Several inspired Molokan prophets also adopted this reasoning and predicted the end of the world in 1836, urging their followers to move to Mount Ararat in expectation of the return of Christ. Whether voluntarily or by forced exile, thousands of Molokans established villages in Transcaucasia in the 1830s and 1840s.24 Two prophets in particular, Fedor Osipovich Bulgakov (1809–76) and Luk’ian Petrovich Sokolov (d. 1858), were especially important in the revivals of the 1830s and 1850s.25

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THE PROPHECIES OF MAKSIM GAVRILOVICH RUDOMETKIN

Among the converts won by the preaching of Jumper prophets were Maksim Rudometkin’s parents, who were forcibly exiled to the Caucasus because of their new faith. Rudometkin himself grew up as one of the most zealous members of the Jumpers in the village of Nikitino (Aleksandropol’ District, Erivan Province).26 By January 1853, when the district police reported a “new insanity” [novoe bezumie] among the Molokan-Jumpers who had settled there, Rudometkin had become one of the most prominent prophets and leaders in this spiritual revival. Once again inspired by the Holy Spirit, some Molokans began to dance involuntarily, to speak in other tongues, and to prophesy about the imminent end of the world. The dramatic appearance of the Klinkerfüs comet in the summer of 1853 served as confirmation of their apocalyptic views, and the Molokan-Jumpers circulated manuscripts interpreting the comet as a sign of the end.27 Concerned by any internal dissent in the strategically important Caucasus during a time of increasing tension with the Ottoman Empire, the local government tried to suppress the new religious movement. In October, the Ottoman Sultan Abdulmecid (r. 1839–61) declared war on the Russian empire, and the Chechen and Avar rebels led by Imam Shamil (1797–1871) proudly publicized the Ottoman firman calling on all Muslims to wage jihad against the Russians.28 Faced with the menacing specter of war with Turkey and the continuing guerrilla war in the North Caucasus, officials demanded from the Molokan exiles a formal, signed renunciation of the new practices. But many of the Molokan-Jumpers refused to sign, and Rudometkin led an energetic opposition to the government’s campaign. He even succeeded in getting his fellow sionisty who had signed the renunciation to withdraw their signatures and openly proclaim the truth of this new outpouring of the Holy Spirit. Nikitino, Rudometkin’s home village, became the center of this apocalyptic movement. Meeting in the home of his neighbor and disciple Ivan Manuseev, Rudometkin and his followers prepared themselves for the imminent end of the world, preaching long sermons urging repentance, and declaring their firm conviction in the prophetic word that they had received. Unfortunately, these sermons were not recorded. Devoting himself completely to preaching the gospel, Rudometkin gave up his profession as a wheelwright and lived on alms. Others, in expectation of Christ’s return and the establishment of his millennial kingdom, followed Rudometkin’s example, living like heavenly birds that neither sow nor reap.29 Rudometkin

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predicted that Christ’s reign would begin in 1857, and as that year drew nearer, more and more of his disciples abandoned their jobs in anticipation of the new heavenly kingdom. Alarmed by these developments, local officials brought more repressive measures to bear on these believers. Besides their concern for the economic development of the Caucasus, and the effect of apocalyptic preaching in wartime, government officials also had heard wild and unsubstantiated rumors that the ecstatic visitations of the Spirit ended in sexual orgies. Ten of the Molokan-Jumpers were arrested and placed in a fortress prison until they signed a renunciation of their new practices, and the authorities made plans to exile Rudometkin and two of his close allies to the prison island of Sara in the Caspian Sea. One of the imprisoned Molokan-Jumpers died under the harsh conditions of prison life.30 Fortunately for the Molokan-Jumpers, the new Viceroy of the Caucasus, Aleksandr Ivanovich Bariatinskii (1814–71, r. 1856–62), disagreed with the proposed punishment, ordered the release of the prisoners, and ended the practice of requiring signed renunciations. At the same time, he warned that depravity [rasputstvo] would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. He also sought to end any further expansion of the movement by all appropriate legal means.31 But even under Bariatinskii’s relatively more liberal policies, Rudometkin’s fervent preaching ultimately led to his arrest on September 12, 1858, and his long monastic imprisonment, which lasted the rest of his life. Rudometkin’s claim to spiritual and political authority as the one who would announce and establish Christ’s millennial kingdom made him, in the eyes of the Russian authorities, a dangerous figure. At first locked in the confines of the famous Solovetskii monastery, the prophet was later transferred, thanks to the intervention of Count Dmitrii Tolstoi (1823–1889), to the Suzdal Spaso-Evfim’ev monastery, where he died in 1877. Rudometkin’s manuscripts only began to be published posthumously, over thirty years after his death—and in the United States, not in Russia. In the early twentieth century, Molokans, including both Constant and Jumpers, left Russia to seek religious liberty in the New World. Universal military conscription, initially introduced into Russia by the military reform of 1874 and extended to Transcaucasia in 1887, presented a serious challenge to the Molokans.32 The new measures pushed the pacifist Molokans to request exemption from military service, but these petitions were routinely denied.33 With the onset of the Russo-Japanese war in 1904, both Constant and Jumper Molokans began to leave Russia in large numbers. The first émigrés left in the fall of that year for California, where they established themselves in

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Los Angeles.34 Within two years, a second Molokan community had formed in San Francisco.35 These early migrants carried with them their apocalyptic traditions, as well as Rudometkin’s prophecies, which they smuggled out of Russia. For some of the Molokan-Jumpers, the San Francisco earthquake of April 18, 1906, seemed to confirm the imminent end of the world. Just a few months later, in October 1906, during the Jumpers’ observance of the Feast of Tabernacles, one of the Molokan prophets in Los Angeles predicted that a new earthquake would destroy the city of Los Angeles, and hundreds of his followers fasted, prayed, and temporarily left the city. God in his mercy accepted their acts of penitence, and postponed the city’s annihilation.36 In this apocalyptic atmosphere, Rudometkin’s writings were especially relevant for the Spiritual Christian community that had bought its freedom at a high price indeed. The cost of leaving the Caucasus for the United States was estimated at $1,000 per person, and newspaper accounts reported that Molokans sometimes faced death at the hands of border guards as they tried to leave the country. In 1910, the Molokan community in Los Angeles first published Rudometkin’s prophecies in the form of a small twenty-page booklet.37 Five years later a much more substantial version of Rudometkin’s prophecies were published in Los Angeles as The Morning Star by the Raduga Publishing House.38 The definitive edition of Rudometkin’s writing—and the writings of several other Molokan prophets—was issued in 1928 by the Samarin publishing house, which continued to publish the most important Molokan religious books. The 1928 edition, which also includes the writings of several other important nineteenth-century Molokan-Jumper prophets, has become the canonical version of God’s revelation to the Spiritual Christians, and it is often placed alongside the Bible on the front table-altar in Molokan prayer houses. Published under the long title Divine Discourses of the Preceptors and Martyrs for the Word of God, the Faith of Jesus and Spirit of the Holy Religion of the Spiritual Christian Molokan-Jumpers, the 1928 edition is now more commonly known simply as Spirit and Life (Dukh i zhizn’). The editors of the canonical 1928 edition clearly sought to put Rudometkin’s writings in a form appropriate for Holy Scripture. His prophecies are divided into fourteen books (knizhitsy), presumably corresponding to fourteen individual notebooks that he managed to smuggle out of his monastic prisons. The books are subdivided into chapters or articles (literally, “tales,” povesti), and each article is further subdivided into numbered verses. Moreover, like the Bible—but unlike the 1910 and 1915 editions—the 1928 version of Rudometkin’s prophecies begins with an account of creation

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and the fall of humanity. This account clearly draws from Jewish traditions about Adam and Eve as well as Christian elaborations on these traditions. RUDOMETKIN’S VERSION OF THE CREATION AND FALL

Rudometkin’s account of the creation of the world and the fall of humanity clearly draws from Christian and Jewish pseudepigraphal and folkloric sources. In the first book of the 1928 edition, Rudometkin gave himself the mystical name Admeil, and claimed to have received a revelation from God. The revelation was addressed to both the Molokan community, which “everywhere confesses the Spirit of my suffering,” and to the individual believer, who must “faithfully serve me” in accordance with the revealed teaching.39 Drawing from the second psalm, Rudometkin made a messianic claim: “For I by this true Spirit will break all nations as they break clay pots with a rod of iron.”40 Echoing the warnings in the canonical book of Revelation, Rudometkin insisted that his followers not skip over a single word. Sometimes, he went on to explain, these words were difficult to understand, for they included mystical revelations of heavenly names and terms.41 Rudometkin received his revelation in response to his prayer for secret knowledge, which he first uttered when he was seven years old.42 “Who and by whom from the pre-eternal times directs these limitless heights and widths and the lowest depths?” he asked.43 Raptured into a mysterious, limitless field, which was like a “foggy sea, eternally uninhabited,” Rudometkin then met two divine beings, both in human form, who greeted him and began to answer the questions he had posed in his prayers.44 The first of the two divine beings was the “God of gods, God the Father Himself,” the “first Almighty one,” whose name is Alkhaim Fatmi.45 The second being was his son, whom he created and whose name is “Alfeil Likhtamis, or to say it more clearly: the Image of the Beginning of God and Humans.”46 The two divine figures explained to Rudometkin that long ago, when Alkhaim Fatmi was the only being who existed, he began to explore the vast reaches of space: “He walked alone for a long time, and nowhere did he find a friend like himself, with whom he might form a Divine Council to carry out all his newly conceived plans.”47 These plans included the construction of a seven-storied heaven.48 Suddenly crying out “Let there be!” Alkhaim Fatmi brought into being a tall young man like himself.49 And so, God the Father Himself, Alkhaim Fatmi, approached his new creation, Alfeil, as a father

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would approach his son. God the Father greeted his Son with the words of the messianic Psalm 110:3 (109:3 LXX): “You are My Son, before the morning star I gave birth to you [Syn Moi esi Ty, chto prezhde dennitsy rodikh Tia].”50 Working through the voice of His Son, God the Father brought forth the angelic host [voinstvo angelskoe], who sang praises eternally to their Father, God, and his firstborn son, Alfeil.51 Alfeil’s privileged position was quickly challenged by the angel of light, named Lebeil. Known as the spirit of impenetrable light and divinity, Lebeil was called the Morning Star (dennitsa) by the other angels, and his light illuminated the entire universe. Refusing to recognize Alfeil’s superiority, Lebeil suddenly tried to ascend to the highest height of the divine powers. But a single glance from God the Father so frightened Lebeil that he lost all of his light and fell from heaven into the bottomless abyss of Tartarus. The angels who joined Lebeil’s rebellion suffered the same fate from the glance of the Son, Alfeil. They, too, lost their heavenly beauty, and became burned and blackened. From being the angel of light, Lebeil also lost his original name; after his fall, he became the devil, the evil spirit Asmodeus.52 Caught in a pit of filth with his allies, Asmodeus—the former angel of light—built a throne from charred logs, sat upon it, and illuminated the abyss with “the fire of moonlight” so that he could see and identify his companions.53 Asmodeus changed the name of Tartarus to Kremenchuk, and he found a bubble floating in the filth of the abyss. This bubble was “the dungeon that God had prepared for him long ago,” but the cunning Asmodeus soon learned to control the bubble so that he could navigate through the watery filth, descending and ascending as he wished.54 In the meantime, the fallen angels began to fight among themselves, despite the devil’s best efforts to keep the peace. Nevertheless, Asmodeus succeeded in imposing order upon the fallen spirits when he sought out his companion Beelzebul: “Where is my partner Beelzebul, your prince?” he demanded. The other fallen spirits denied having seen him. In an effort to find Beelzebul, Asmodeus called roll and assigned each spirit a rank. He divided the spirits into two groups. Those who resembled Beelzebul were called “demons” (besy); those who resembled Asmodeus were known as agels (agely). Altogether, the fallen spirits numbered 200 legions. Asmodeus ordered his troops to find Beelzebul—also known as Satan— whom they discovered floating like foam on top of the water. From this vantage point, Beelzebul overheard God the Father conversing with His Son, Alfeil, about His intention to create a new world and new creatures in His image and in the image of His Son—and not in the image of the angels.

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When brought before Asmodeus, Beelzebul reported this news. Both fallen angels, envious and angry at the thought of another creation—a creation designed to supersede them—decided to resist the divine plan. The two set sail on the ocean, and ultimately reached the borders of Paradise, where they met the serpent, who secretly smuggled them inside the garden.55 In Paradise lived those extraordinary creatures, Adam and Eve, created in the image and likeness of God on the sixth day. For seventy years they live a sinless and celibate life in the garden as bride and groom.56 Like the good angels, they praised their Creator God in song and always kept his commandment. Unfortunately for the primal couple, the serpent proved to be an especially vulnerable and valuable ally for the two demons. Unlike the other animals, the serpent had no mate, and he longed to be united with the beautiful Eve. Promising the serpent that they would help him to seduce Eve, Asmodeus and Beelzebul entered the reptile and possessed him: “You, serpent, take her as your wife, and God will give Adam another wife to replace her, for He always loves him.”57 Aware of the habits of the primal couple, the serpent knew that Adam and Eve remained separated for six days of the week, and came together only on the Sabbath. So he sought Eve and found her singing a song of praise under the Tree of Life. The serpent greeted Eve as the “mistress of the whole divine Paradise,” and she responded in kind, greeting him tenderly as an “unmarried brave young man” (bezzhennyi malodets). Eve explained that Adam would return only in six days, and that the two of them could eat from any tree of the garden except for the Tree of Life. (Rudometkin conflated the two separate trees of Genesis—the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and the Tree of Life—into a single tree.) But the serpent already understood that Eve was attracted to the fruit of the Tree of Life; he could see her mouth watering. Suddenly, with the help of the spirit of the devil, the serpent tore an apple from the tree and gave it to Eve: Eat, mistress, from this beautiful Tree of Life; in this way you will know much about good and evil which you did not know before, and you will always be like an immortal goddess, eternally for yourself and your husband, who will in this hour know you as his wife. From this [coupling], you will conceive a son by the name of Kadmi.58

In places, Rudometkin’s revelation describes the very act of handing the fruit—with its aphrodisiacal powers—to Eve in a highly suggestive way:

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The serpent boldly gave her his lascivious pair [tu bludnuiu svoiu paru], which he placed directly in her hands, so that she could play and amuse herself with them, and he told her clearly, “Well, now, eat this fruit, madam, for it is very sweet and healthful for the stomach and for the secret knowledge of marriage.”59

Fooled by the serpent, whom she took for a messenger of God, Eve ate the fruit that he had plucked for her. The fruit awakened her sexual desire for her absent husband. Remembering the devil’s promise that Eve would become his eternal wife, the serpent made the most of this opportunity: Do you not wish to be my wife? For I really am no worse than your first husband, Adam. And since he is not here, you and I can be married without him. And even if he does come, then he will not take you back from me. For I have heard that to replace you God will give him many wives, who will be taken from his side just as you were; but you will be my one and only wife.60

For a second time, Eve was deceived by the cunning spirits who had possessed the serpent, and she succumbed to his advances. “With a kiss and a quiet coupling of the two,” the serpent made love to Eve and placed his seed inside of her.61 The serpent’s happiness did not last, however. Convinced by the serpent’s arguments that eating the fruit of the Tree of Life brought only wisdom, not death, Eve sought with all her power to get her Adam to eat the apple as well. When Adam arrived, Eve fully returned to him, and greeted him as both “husband and king.”62 She brought him the apple from the Tree of Life, and Adam, forgetting God’s command, accepted from Eve “the poison of death, which is to say, the fornication of the love of her wickedness [iad smerti ili skazat’ blud liubvi eia skvernoty].”63 Because Adam also ate the fruit that Eve brought him—and so joined his fate to hers—the serpent failed to keep Eve as his wife. “With sorrow he [the serpent] himself fled from her like a thief and a villain.”64 But until Adam had sex with Eve himself, he was unaware that the serpent had cuckolded him. Rudometkin strongly implied that consuming the fruit of the Tree of Life aroused such strong sexual desire that Adam and Eve immediately had intercourse: But Adam did not know of this [the serpent’s sexual seduction of Eve] until he had fornicated with her himself. And suddenly they both became

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naked and nasty [nagie i skvernye]. At this time, Adam immediately and loudly told Eve, “O, why did you do this to me? You have deprived me of eternal life and of God’s sweet paradise. So now we both must die from this, for we have not kept God’s command, for which God always threatened us with death.”65

After recounting the fall of humanity, Rudometkin, from his monastic imprisonment, makes explicit the lesson that he wants his community in the Caucasus to draw: O, I ask you now, each brother and sister! Stand firmly upon the point of the new divine command and of the love of the Spirit of Christ, which you received from heaven from God the Father of all lights and worlds, personally through His beloved Son, Alfeil, who is Jesus Christ, with the sign of the work of new flaming tongues. Who everywhere visibly signifies to all of you to abide in him, alive for the age of the age, not dead like Adam and Eve.66

In his anger, God mercilessly drove the primal couple from paradise into the “earth of work and the curse.”67 The Almighty punished the serpent for his crime of seducing the innocent Eve by cursing him and breaking his arms and legs with His scepter. He also issued this warning to the serpent: At the end of all the ages, truly from just such an innocent woman will be born a male Son, who in my anger with My own iron rod will smash your head into eternal death. And you will not entice a single one of his wives for fornication and seduction, for there will be no seducer for you anywhere in all My promised land. I am God, his Father, and I will establish with him My eternal Covenant and Testament of the law of flaming love and peace. And with his very same iron rod, I will crush quarrels and the sword in his presence. And I will give him the throne of the kingdom of all the saints of the Most High for a thousand years. In his days I will raise all the dead saints who lie in the graves.68

Rudometkin’s account of the fall thus culminates in a millenarian prophecy, whose subject is Rudometkin himself, the promised male child of the innocent “Woman, Clothed in the Sun,” prophesied in the twelfth chapter of Revelation.

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JEWISH SOURCES OF RUDOMETKIN’S VISION OF THE CREATION AND FALL

Rudometkin clearly drew from many different sources in composing this prophetic work. Initially, he deliberately assumes the role of the visionary in an apocalyptic text. Like John, the fiery Jewish author of the canonical New Testament book of Revelation, Rudometkin experiences his vision while in prison for his faith (Rev. 1:9). Like the biblical prophet Daniel, whose prophetic vision comes as an answer to prayer (Dan. 9:18), Rudometkin specifically prays for revelation and receives a divine response. As an apocalyptic seer, Rudometkin is taken up into heaven and has an audience with God himself. Rudometkin’s account of the angelic rebellion against God echoes Jewish legends. In the Midrash Konen, God asks three groups of angels for their opinion of His plan to create Man. The first group, led by Archangel Michael, scornfully responds with the words of Psalm 8:4, “What is man that thou art mindful of him?” Displeased, God destroys the entire band of angels, sparing only Michael. A second band of angels, led by Gabriel, meets the same fate. The archangel Labbiel (which sounds very much like Rudometkin’s Lebeil) saves a third group of angels by instructing them to acquiesce to God’s will. Unlike Rudometkin’s Lebeil, the Jewish archangel promises to serve humanity; his name is changed to Raphael, the Angel of Healing and the conqueror of the demon Asmodeus in the book of Tobit.69 In his account of the rebellion of the Angel of Light, Rudometkin has Alfeil play the role of the heavenly Adam. Created in the image and likeness of God, Alfeil was given dominion over God’s creation. Lebeil, however, refused to acknowledge Alfeil’s superiority and instead sought to ascend into heaven and become like God. Here Rudometkin draws from Isaiah 14:12–20, which describes the rebellion and fall of Lucifer. But in much of the Adam apocrypha, the Angel of Light fell because he refused to bow before Adam, in defiance of God’s command. For example, in the Armenian Penitence of Adam, Satan explains to Adam how and why he rebelled against God: When God breathed his spirit into you, you received the likeness of his image. Thereupon, Michael came and made you bow down before God. God said to Michael, “Behold I have made Adam in the likeness of my image.” Then Michael summoned all the angels. And God said to them, “Come, bow down to god whom I made.”

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Michael bowed first. He called me and said, “You too, bow down to Adam.” I said, “Go away, Michael! I shall not bow down to him who is posterior to me, for I am former. Why is it proper for me to bow down to him?” The other angels, too, who were with me, heard this, and my words seemed pleasing to them and they did not prostrate themselves to you, Adam. Thereupon, God became angry with me and commanded to expel us from our dwelling and to cast me and my angels, who were in agreement with me, to the earth; and you were at the same time in the Garden.70

Rudometkin also drew upon another tradition from the literature about the fall of Satan. In reporting the new creation to Lebeil, Beelzebul expresses shock at the idea that God would create a new creature “in the image of His Own Son Alfeil and God Himself—and not in our image.”71 This objection echoed the words of Sataniel (the future Satan) in the Coptic Encomium on Michael: “It befits not us to worship Adam, for he is virgin [parthenikos] of earth; but we are angels [formed] of flames of fire and honourable [made] from the elements [hyle pl.] of fire, while he is earth from the earth.”72 The names of the demons also draw from Jewish and Christian sources. Beelzebul was called the chief of the demons in the gospel of Matthew, and Asmodeus was the villainous demon of lust who killed Sarah’s seven husbands in the deutero-canonical Book of Tobit. Both of these books are part of the Slavonic Bible upon which Rudometkin and his fellow Molokans relied. The idea that the serpent had sexual relations with Eve is present in Jewish folklore and in the Babylonian Talmud. The Midrash ha-Gadol or Great Midrash, a fourteenth-century compilation of biblical commentaries, claimed that Cain, the first murderer, was conceived when the serpent copulated with Eve.73 Rabbi Yoh≥anan ben Zakkai (ca. 30–90), a first-century scholar who helped compile the Mishnah, also held that Eve fornicated with the serpent: Rabbi Yoh≥anan said: When the serpent copulated with Eve, he injected her with lust. For the Israelites who stood at Mount Sinai, lust terminated, but the lust of those who did not stand at Mount Sinai was not terminated. (BT Yevamot 103a–b)

Like other rabbis, however, R. Yoh≥anan emphasized the purification accomplished by the reception of the Torah at Sinai.74 Although none of the primary Adam literature speaks as explicitly as does Rudometkin about sex with

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the serpent, several of the books connect the fruit to lust. In the Armenian Penitence of Adam, Eve relates how the serpent infected the fruit with evil desires: When he had caught me through an oath, he then led me and brought me to the tree and he went forth to the tree. He set the deception in its fruit, that is desire of sins, harlotries, adulteries, greeds.75

Similarly, the Greek Apocalypse of Moses also portrays the serpent placing lust into the forbidden fruit: He came and entered and placed upon the fruit the poison of his wickedness—which is (the sense of ) desire, for it is the beginning of every sin—and he bent the branch on the earth and I took of the fruit and I ate.76

Rudometkin’s account also has many original elements. He is transported not only in space, up to heaven, but also in time, for he observes the creation of heaven itself. Significantly, in contrast to Orthodox theology, God the Father turns to the act of creation because of his own limits and weakness. Lonely and unable to find anyone to aid him in carrying out his plans, God the Father is compelled to create a being like himself, a being in his own image. Rudometkin’s revelation also severs the creation of the heavenly world of Alfeil and the angels from the creation of the world of Adam and Eve. While Jewish tradition held that God created the angels on the second day of creation, Rudometkin’s vision places them in an indeterminate time before the making of the heaven and earth of our world. For the Jews, the angels were part of the same created order as Adam and Eve, but Rudometkin makes them part of a different and older order altogether.77 Indeed, the news that God intended to create another world populated by beings made in his own image pushed the demons to seek humanity’s destruction. CONCLUSION

From its very beginnings, Russian Spiritual Christianity had a complex relationship with Judaism. Like the Jews, Spiritual Christians valued the Hebrew Scriptures, which they knew through the Old Testament of the Slavonic Bible. Because Spiritual Christians emphasized the authority of the Bible and its ethical teachings over the tradition of the Orthodox Church, they adopted some biblical practices that drew them closer to the Jews. From

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their study of the books of Moses and the psalms, the Spiritual Christians learned to eschew icons and pork. Curiously, this rapprochement occurred without direct contact between the Spiritual Christians and the Jews, who lived far from the black-earth region where Spiritual Christianity arose. Some branches of Spiritual Christianity, such as the Subbotniks and the Russian Karaites, left Christianity altogether, but most Spiritual Christians remained faithful to Jesus, whom they recognized as the savior of the world. Jews also influenced Spiritual Christianity through folkloric and pseudepigraphal traditions. For example, Maksim Rudometkin’s original retelling of the lives of Adam and Eve drew from a wide variety of biblical, apocryphal, and oral literature. Styling himself as an apocalyptic visionary, like the prophet Daniel or the Apostle John, Rudometkin also wove the narratives and language from the pseudepigrapha. Rudometkin, however, shaped this literature to dramatize his own concerns. Locked away in the far northern Solovetskii monastery in the White Sea, Rudometkin sought to warn his followers—and his family—against the temptation of leaving him for a rival teacher. Unlike the Adam literature, which usually opens with Adam’s lament after his expulsion from paradise, Rudometkin’s revelation emphasizes the seduction of Eve. Her fall and punishment serves an admonition against infidelity for the family that he had left behind, as well as for the MolokanJumper community. Rudometkin’s story also emphasizes the promise of the millennial kingdom, a major theme of several of his other prophecies. Although under persecution, the Molokan-Jumpers could look forward to a day, not far hence, when God’s promise to the serpent would be fulfilled. Born of the “Woman, Clothed in the Sun” of Revelation 12, Rudometkin would take his rightful place as the ruler of the millennial kingdom, a final reversal of humanity’s fall. NOTES Research for this essay was supported by the Pew Evangelical Scholars Initiative, by seed grants from the Institute for Humanities Research and the Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict at Arizona State University, and by the International Research and Exchanges Board with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State. I would like to express my appreciation to Andrew Conovaloff, who has generously shared his personal library and papers with me and who maintains an excellent website devoted to Molokan history (http:// www.molokane.org). Any errors of fact or interpretation are my own. 1. Norman Golb and Omeljan Pritsak, Khazarian Hebrew Documents of the Tenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1982); D. M. Dunlop, The History of the Jewish Khazars

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(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1954); Kevin A. Brook, The Jews of Khazaria (Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006); Serge A. Zenkovsky, Medieval Russia’s Epics, Chronicles, and Tales, rev. ed. (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1963), 66, 68. 2. Philo held that the “Angel of the Lord” (Gen. 16:7–11) was the divine Logos. De Somnis 1:228–39; De Cherubim 1–3. 3. Michael E. Stone, A History of the Literature of Adam and Eve (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1992). 4. O. V . Belova, “Narodnaia Bibliia”: Vostochnoslavianskie etiologicheskie legendy (Moscow: Indrik, 2004). 5. A 1912 religious census numbered the Old Believers at 2,206,621, but this is widely conceded to be an undercount. Staticheskie svedeniia o staroobriadtsakh (k 1 ianvaria 1912), Izdanie Departamenta dukhovnykh del Ministerstva vnutrennikh del (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia MVD, 1912), 3. In 1904, the journalist Aleksandr Stepanovich Prugavin (1850–1920) famously suggested the actual number of Old Believers was twenty million. Staroobriadchestvo vo vtoroi polovine XIX veka (Moscow: Tip. I.D. Sytina, 1904), 1–18. The 1912 census also found 297,863 “sectarians” who had “fallen away” from the Orthodox Church; although the department used a different taxonomy, about 200,000 of these could be classified as “Spiritual Christians.” Staticheskie svedeniia o sektantakh (k 1 ianvaria 1912), Izdanie Departamenta dukhovnykh del (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia MVD, 1912), 12–13. On the issues of enumerating religious dissenters in Imperial Russia, see Irina Paert, “‘Two or Twenty Million?’ The Languages of Official Statistics and Religious Dissent in Imperial Russia,” Ab Imperio 6, no. 3 (November 2006): 1–8. 6. Sergey Shtyrkov, “Strategies of Constructing a Group Identity: The Sectarian Community of the Subbotniki in the Staniza Novoprivolnaia,” Folklore 28 (Tartu, 2004): 91–110; Eugene M. Avrutin, “Returning to Judaism after the 1905 Law on Religious Freedom in Tsarist Russia,” Slavic Review 65, no. 1 (Spring 2006): 90–110; Aleksandr L. L’vov, “‘Pervoe uchenie otrokom’ Feofana Prokopovicha i genezis russkogo sektantstva,” Russkaia literatura, no. 1 (2008): 159–70; Aleksandr Aleksandrovich Panchenko, “Subbotniki i ikh sny,” Svoi ili chuzhoi? Evrei i slaviane glazami drug druga (Moscow: Sefer, 2003): 288–319; and see Nicholas Breyfogle’s contribution to this volume. 7. Luk’ian Petrovich Sokolov; David Esseevich [Fedor Bulgakov]; Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin; Efim Gerasimovich Klubnikin, Bozhestvennye izrecheniia nastavnikov i stradal’tsev za Slovo Bozhie, veru lisusa i dukh sviatoi religii dukhovnykh khristian molokan-prygunov: Trudy dukhovnogo prosvieshcheniia po izvoleniiu Bozhiiu vylity imi vo svete chelovechestvu v temnichnykh, tiuremnykh zakliucheniiakh i monastyrskikh vechnykh zatocheniiakh, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: Dukh i zhizh‘, 1928), 277–78. Some of Rudometkin’s followers insist that he never died, but either ascended into heaven or went into hiding. John K. Berokoff, “Introduction,” Selections from the Book of Spirit and Life, Including the Book of Prayers and Songs by Maxim G. Rudametkin (Los Angeles: Stockton Trade Press, 1969), 18; Steve Alex Tolmachoff, Sr., email message to the author, December 18, 2009. 8. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 2nd ed., 200; Willard Moore, Molokan Oral Tradition: Legends and Memorates of an Ethnic Sect (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), 13; Pauline V. Young, The Pilgrims of Russian Town (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1932), 42. 9. Belomorskie stariny i dukhovnye stikhi: Sobranie A.V. Markova (St. Petersburg: Dmitrii Bulanin, 2002), 994; O. A. Savel’eva, “Plach Adama v ‘Molenii’ Daniila Zatochnika,” in Lokal’nye traditsii v narodnoi kul’ture Russkogo severa (Petrozavodsk, 2003), 373–75; N. D.

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Zol’nikova, “Opyt geograficheskoi i religioznoi migratsii: Osobennosti odnogo sobraniia rukopisei’ (stat'ia pervaia),” Gumanitarnye nauki v Sibiri, no. 3 (2006): 18–23. 10. Natal’ia Aleksandrova Kazakova and Iakov Solomonovich Lur’e, Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizheniia na Rusi XIV-nachala XVI veka (Moscow: Izd-vo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1955); J. S. Luria, “Unresolved Issues in the History of the Ideological Movements of the Late Fifteenth Century,” in Medieval Russian Culture, ed. H. Birnbaum and M. Flier (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 52–53. 11. Aleksandr Kornilievich Borozdin, Protopop Avvakum: Ocherk iz istorii umstvennoi zhizni russkogo obshchestva v XVII v. (St. Petersburg: Izd. A.S. Suvorina, 1900), 71. 12. B. W. Ball, The Seventh-Day Men: Sabbatarians and Sabbatarianism in England and Wales, 1600–1800 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); Daniel Liechty, Sabbatarianism in the Sixteenth Century: A Page in the History of the Radical Reformation (Berrien Springs, Mich.: Andrews University Press, 1993). 13. Nikolai Gavrilovich Vysotskii, ed., Materialy iz istorii dukhoborcheskoi sekty (Sergiev posad: Tipografiia I. I. Ivanova, 1914). 14. Vysotskii, Materialy, 4; Pavel G. Ryndziunskii, “Antitserkovnoe dvizhenie v Tambovskom krae v 60-kh godakh XVIII veka,” Voprosy istorii religii i ateizma 2 (1954): 154–93; Svetlana A. Inikova, “Tambovskie dukhobortsy v 60-e gody XVIII veka,” Vestnik Tambovskogo universiteta, seriia Gumanitarnye nauki 2, no.1 (1997): 39–53; Svetlana A. Inikova, “The Tambov Dukhobors in the 1760s,” Russian Studies in History 46, no. 3 (Winter 2007–08): 27 15. Ryndziunskii, “Antitserkovnoe dvizhenie,” 177; Inikova, “Tambov Dukhobors in the 1760s,” 27. 16. Vysotskii, Materialy iz istorii dukhoborcheskoi sekty. Spiritual Christians, both Molokans and Dukhobors, continue the custom of beginning and ending their prayer meetings with mutual bows and kisses. Nikolai Dingelshtedt, a government official serving in the Caucasus in the mid-nineteenth century, described the end of the Molokan prayer meeting: “All the brothers and sisters approach [the table] in turn and make three prostrations to one another and kiss one another three times. Those who have completed the kisses stand in a line and wait until someone who has not yet completed the ritual kisses approaches them. The fraternal kissing lasts a half hour even in the smallest assembly, and each brother and sister receives, at a minimum, a hundred kisses.” Nikolai Dingelshtedt, Zakavkazskie sektanty v ikh semeinom i religioznom bytu (St. Petersburg: Tipografiia M. M. Stasiulevicha, 1885): 9–10. 17. Pervoe polnoe sobranie zakonov Rossiiskoi imperii, 46 vols. (St. Petersburg: Gosudarstvennaia tip., 1830–39), 28: 746–47, no. 21556; 33:1110, no. 26549; 33:1110–12, no. 26550; 37:181–83, no. 28254; “Proshenie, podovaemoe molokanami Gosudariu Imperatoru Aleksandru Pavlovicha 1805 g. 12 iiuliia Vseavgusteishii Monarkh i Vseprisvetleishii, Vsemilostiveishii i Velikii Tsar’ i Vserossiisskii Imperator Aleksander Pavlovich,” in Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles: Dukh i zhizn’, 1948), n.p.; Timofei Ivanovich Butkevich, Molokanstvo (Khar’kov: Tipografia Gubernskogo Pravleniia, 1909), 5–6. 18. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 2nd ed., 80. 19. Arcadius Kahan, Russian Economic History: The Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 121. 20. Staticheskie svedeniia o sektantakh, 12–13. These numbers provide only a general idea of the magnitude of the movements and must be taken with caution; about 4,000 Jumpers had emigrated to the United States by 1912.

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21. On Jung-Stilling, see the works in Klaus Pfeifer’s Jung-Stilling Bibliographie (Siegen: Im Selbstverlag der J.G. Herder-Bibliothek Siegerland e. V., 1993); Tatjana Högy, Jung-Stilling und Russland (Siegen: Verlag der J.G. Herder-Bibliothek Siegerland, 1984); Max Geiger, Aufklärung und Erweckung: Beiträge zur Erforschung Johann Heinrich Jung-Stillings und der Erweckungstheologie (Zurich, 1963); John David Zuern, “Imaginary Emergencies: Conversion, Hysteria, and the Body in Narratives of Masculine Development” (Ph.D. diss., University of Texas, Austin, 1996), 123–77. 22. Pobednaia povest’, ili torzhestvo Khristianskoi religii (St. Petersburg: v Morskoi tipografiii, 1815). In his 1794 novel Heimweh, Jung-Stilling had placed the divine kingdom of “Solyma” on the Russian border in Central Asia, near the cities of Samarkand and Bukhara. Das Heimweh (Marburg: In der neuen akademischen Buchhandlung, 1794–95); Walter Unger, “Mennonite Millennial Madness: A Case Study,” Direction 28, no. 2 (Fall 1999): 201–17. 23. Detlef Brandes, Von den Zaren adoptiert: Die deutschen Kolonisten und die Balkansiedler in Neurussland und Bessarabien, 1715–1914 (Munich: Oldenburg, 1993), 94; Andreas Gestrich, “German Religious Emigration to Russia in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries,” in In Search of Peace and Prosperity: New German Settlements in Eighteenth-Century Europe and America, ed. Hartmut Lehmann, Hermann Wellenreuther, and Renate Wilson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 77–98; Robert Pinkerton, Russia or Miscellaneous Observations on the Past and Present State of That Country and Its Inhabitants (London: Hatchard and Son, 1833), 144–52; Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin, Utrenniaia zvezda. Izrechenie Maksima Gavrilovicha Rudometkina. Byl v zatochenii v Solovetskom monastyre i Suzdol’skom monostyre [sic], v 1858 godu 12 sentiabria. Zhitel’ sel. Nikitino, Aleksandropol’skogo Uezda Erivanskoi Guber. Vypisyk slov iz Knigi pamiati, nebesnogo zhurnala, Amin’, Alliluia (Los Angeles: Tipografiia T-va Raduga v Amerike pod Tipografiei V.P. Shanin i V. I. Kobzin, 1915), 119. 24. Nicholas Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); Dingelshtedt, Zakavkazskie sektanty. 25. Nikolai Vasil’evich Varadinov, Istoriia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del (8 vols.), vol. 8, Istoriia rasporiazhenii po raskolu (St. Petersburg: V Tipografiia Vtorogo Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1863), 345. 26. During the Soviet period, Nikitino was renamed Fioletovo, in honor of the Bolshevik commissar Ivan Timofeevich Fioletov, but it has remained an important center of Spiritual Christianity to the present day. K. I. Kozlova, “Izmeneniia v religioznoi zhizni i deiatel'nosti molokanskikh obshchin,” Voprosy nauchnogo ateizma 2 (1966): 305–21; O. Krikorian, “Armenia: Lessons for a Molokan,” Transitions Online, September 5, 2005. 27. Gary W. Kronk, Cometography: A Catalog of Comets, Vol. 2: 1800–1899 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 222. When a group of Molokan preachers was arrested in 1855, one of the manuscripts seized from them was entitled “A Description of the Comet, which Occurred September 1853 and an Interpretation of Its Meaning.” Dingelshtedt, Zakavkazskie sektanty, 50. The Klinkerfüs Comet came closest to earth on September 5, 1853. 28. Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’ (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus; St. Petersburg: I. A. Efron, 1890–), q.v. “Kavkazskie voiny”; Shamil, “Three Letters from Imam Shamil to His Followers,” ed. Ernst Tucker, in The Modern Middle East: A Sourcebook For History, ed. Camron Michael Amin, Benjamin C. Fortna, and Elizabeth Frierson (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 231–33. 29. Dingelshtedt, Zakavkazskie sektanty, 61–63. 30. Ibid., 63–67. 31. Ibid., 64–65.

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32. Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Swords into Plowshares: Opposition to Military Service among Religious Sectarians, 1770s to 1874,” in The Military and Society in Russia, 1450–1917, ed. Eric Lohr and Marshall Poe (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 48. 33. Young, Pilgrims, 12; Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 748–50. 34. “Russians Rush to Sunland,” Los Angeles Times, January 27, 1905; “Fresh Batch of Molokans,” Los Angeles Times, February 5, 1905. 35. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 752. 36. “Faker’s Quake Doesn’t Shake,” Los Angeles Times, October 16, 1906; “Lambkin Eaten, Not Sacrificed Publicly,” Los Angeles Times, October 15, 1906; “Take to Hills in a Scare,” Los Angeles Times, October 14, 1906. 37. Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin, Izrechenie Maksima Gavrilovicha Rudometkina (Los Angeles: Izdanie Molokanskoi kolonii, 1910). 38. Rudometkin, Utrenniaia zvezda. In the same year, another version of Rudometkin’s prophecies was published in Los Angeles under the title The Gorlion Stone: The Theological Utterances of Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin, the Leader of the People of Zion, the Transcaucasian Spiritual Christian-Jumpers. Maksim Gavrilovich Rudometkin, Kamen’ Gorlion: Bogoslovskie izrecheniia Maksima Gavrilovicha Rudometkina, vozhdia sionskogo naroda zakavkazskikh dukhovnykh khristian-prygunov (Los Angeles: Dukh i zhizn’, 1915). 39. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 2nd ed., 169, knizhitsa 1, povest’ 1, stikh 1 (hereafter, references to the book, tale, and verse take the form 1:1:1). 40. Ibid., 1:1:2. 41. Ibid., 1:1:3–5. 42. Ibid., p. 170, 1:3:1. 43. Ibid., p. 171, 1:3:2. 44. Ibid., p. 172, 1:4:1. 45. Ibid., p. 173, 1:4:9; p. 172, 1:4:4; p. 175, 1:5:12. 46. Ibid., p. 175, 1:5:12. 47. Ibid., p. 174, 1:5:5. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., p. 174, 1:5:7–8. 50. Ibid., p. 175, 1:6:4. 51. Ibid., p. 175, 1:6:6. 52. Ibid., 176–77, 1:7:1–10, 1:8:1–5. 53. Ibid., p. 178, 1:8:10. 54. Ibid., 1:8:7. 55. Ibid., 181–84. 56. Ibid., p. 182; 1:12:10; Serafima Nikitina, “Sotvorenie mira i kontsept iskhoda/pokhoda v kul'ture molokan-prygunov,” in Ot bytiia k iskhodu: Otrazhenie bibleiskikh siuzhetov v slavianskoi i evreiskoi narodnoi kul’ture: Sbornik statei, ed. V. Ia. Petrukhin (Moscow: GEOS, 1998), 220–30. 57. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 2nd ed., p. 184, 1:14:1. 58. Ibid., p. 185, 1:14:9–10. 59. Ibid., p. 217. 2:9:6. 60. Ibid., p. 185, 1:15:4b–6. 61. Ibid., p. 186, 1:15:9. 62. Ibid., p. 187, 1:16:3. 63. Ibid., 1:16:2.

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64. Ibid., 1:16:4. 65. Ibid., 1:16:4b–6. 66. Ibid., p. 187, 1:17:1–2. 67. Ibid., p. 187, 1:17:5. 68. Ibid., p. 188, 1:17:6–9. 69. Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, trans. Henrietta Szold, 7 vols. (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1937), 1:53–54; 5:70–71. 70. A Synopsis of the Books of Adam and Eve, ed. Gary Anderson and Michael E. Stone, 2nd ed. (Atlanta: Scholars Press), 15–18E. 71. Sokolov et al., Bozhestvennye izrecheniia, 2nd ed., p. 180, 1:10:6. 72. W. E. Crum, “Texts Attributed to Peter of Alexandria,” Journal of Theological Studies 4 (1903): 387–97. 73. Samuel Tobias Lachs, “Serpent Folklore in Rabbinic Literature,” Jewish Social Studies 27, no. 3 ( July 1965): 168–84; Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, 1:96–98, 105; 5:133; The Zohar, trans. and commentary by Daniel C. Matt, 4 vols. (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2004), 2:217; BT Shabbat 145b–146a. 74. Elliot R. Wolfson, Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and the Poetic Imagination (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 58; BT Shabbat 145b–146a; BT Avodah Zarah 22b. 75. Synopsis, 57–57E. 76. Johannes Tromp, ed., The Life of Adam and Eve in Greek: A Critical Edition (Boston: Brill, 2005), 144, 19:3. 77. Ginzberg, Legends, 1:13–18; 5.

In Search of the Millennium The Convergence of Jews and Ukrainian Evangelical Peasants in Late Imperial Russia

Sergei I. Zhuk

The spread of the radical Christian evangelical movement in the Ukrainian provinces of Kiev, Kherson, and Tavrida during the 1880s coincided with a surge in revolutionary activity throughout tsarist Russia. Prominent among the revolutionaries were Jews, and some found common cause with the persecuted evangelicals against the tsarist state.1 These Jewish revolutionaries formed Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhoods based on Tolstoyan Christian principles and forged close relations with peasant Christian dissenters. As a result of their contact and dialogue, a number of Jewish Brotherhood members were moved to convert to Christianity, becoming known to Russians as “New Testament Jews.” Many Christian dissenters, in turn, were influenced by Brotherhood members. Ukrainian evangelical peasants not only read the literature disseminated by Brotherhood members, but also participated in the meetings of the Jewish organization. Alarmed by this collaboration, the Russian police sought to dissolve it; while Orthodox clergy and the Russian conservative press used it to tar evangelical peasants. As it turned out, radical Jews and Christian dissenters participated in the same “eschatological” discourse and shared the same belief concerning the end of “this sinful world

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of social injustice” and the destiny of mankind. Remarkably, cooperation between the Jewish radicals and Christian evangelicals was especially strong in Elizavetgrad, Odessa, and Kishinev, the very locales that gained notoriety as launching points of anti-Jewish pogroms in late Imperial Russia. SUBBOTNIKS AND STUNDISTS IN THE RUSSIAN EMPIRE

A return to the Hebraic origins of the Christian faith and an emphasis on the Jewish roots of Christian theology were prominent features of the European Reformation.2 From medieval times, Russian religious radicals had an interest in the Jewish religious background of the first Christian communities described in the book of the Acts of the Apostles. The so-called “Judaizers” (“Zhidovstvuiushchie”) of medieval Russia emphasized Judaic traditions, including the celebration of the Sabbath instead of a Christian Sunday.3 During the eighteenth century in the central provinces of European Russia, their ideas and religious practices laid the foundation for the religious movement of “Subbotniks” (“Sabbatarians”), who observed the Sabbath on Saturday in conformity with the letter of the fourth commandment, introduced circumcision, and denied the universal authority of the Orthodox Church hierarchy. According to Saint Dmitrii of Rostov (Dmitrii Rostovskii), Subbotniks “celebrated Jewish Sabbath and did not worship Christian icons because they were influenced by Lutheran, Calvinist and Judaizers’ ideas.” At the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth centuries, the Subbotnik movement spread southward. In these new regions of Russian colonization in the southern Ukraine and northern Caucasus, their ideas of “Mosaic law” and “Hebrew rituals” affected local Molokans and other religious dissenters. According to Nicholas Breyfogle, Molokans “believed that the Old and New Testaments of the Bible constituted the only source of religious authority and spiritual teaching. . . . They did not practice water baptism because they understood the word water in the nonliteral sense of ‘living water’ ( John 7:38) and believed that baptism was concluded by hearing the word of God and living in a godly way. Molokans were also characterized by their fascination with the coming of the apocalypse and their tendency to fracture into ‘subsects’ based on theological differences and the power of certain charismatic leaders.”4 By 1812, Subbotniks became especially popular among the Cossack settlers in the Don Army and Terek regions. Some Molokans in Ukraine accepted Sabbatarian religious practices, which

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led to divisions in the Molokan movement. During the 1820s and 1830s, according to official calculations, there were more than 20,000 Subbotniks in the European part of the Russian empire. The first Russian Subbotniks introduced Sabbatarian (“Hebraic”) theology and practices to evangelical Russian and Ukrainian peasants and developed rituals based on the Old Testament, which became an important component of the popular Sabbatarian movement up to the twentieth century.5 The largest sect among the first evangelicals in the Russian empire was that of the Ukrainian Stundists, who became predecessors of different evangelical Christian churches in southern Russia, including Baptists (Stundo-Baptists), Adventists, and Pentecostals. The word was derived from the German “Stunde” (hours). From the outset, Stundism was related to the religious awakening in the German and Mennonite colonies, since it was an outgrowth of a convergence between the pietist evangelical movement among the German colonists and a religious revival among Orthodox peasants. Contemporary authors and historians noted this as a remarkable moment in the popular evangelical movement’s development in the Russian empire.6 At the beginning of the eighteenth century, members of the German Pietist movement, followers of Philip Jacob Spener, organized meetings in their houses to read and discuss the Bible during the special hours (Stunde) after church ceremonies. These Pietists from Württemberg, called the Stundist Brothers, brought their new religious experience to German colonies in the Russian province of Kherson in 1817, and the German colony of Rohrbach became a center of Pietist activity. The Pietist minister Johann Bonnekemper was pastor of the Lutheran community in Rohrbach and a leader in the new Pietist Stundist movement among local Germans. From 1824 his meetings, known as “the Stundist meetings,” laid the foundation for a broad Pietist movement among German-speaking settlers of the province.7 German Pietism converged with religious revivals among members of the Nazareth sect in the German colonies in Bessarabia during the 1840s and among Mennonites in the provinces of Ekaterinoslav and Tavrida during the 1850s. Along with the western Baptist influences, which were brought by German missionaries to southern Russia during the late 1860s, these evangelical awakenings among German and Mennonite colonists laid the foundation for the movement among Ukrainian peasants, called “Ukrainian Stundists” (Khokhly-Shtundy) by Russian contemporaries. The core of Stundist theology came from the German Baptists’ preaching, and many

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contemporaries defined them theologically as “evangelical Christians.”8 By the beginning of the 1890s, thousands of peasants from the Ukrainian provinces, who were for the most part ethnically Ukrainian, joined the evangelical movement. Beginning with only twenty members in 1862, the Stundist sect among the Ukrainian peasants grew to the thousands and spread over the southern and central Ukraine in the 1870s. During the 1880s, Stundism reached the provinces of Tavrida, Ekaterinoslav, Poltava, Kharkov, Chernigov, Volynia, and Podolia. There were 2,956 dissenters in the province of Kherson in 1886, 2,006 in the province of Kiev in 1884, and 300 in the province of Ekaterinoslav. Overall, in 1885 the members of the Ukrainian Stundist meetings registered by the local police numbered more than 7,000 people.9 By 1889, the Kiev administration alone counted more than 3,500 Stundists, and just three years later the number had reached 4,897. Stundists estimated their figures at between 100,000 and 200,000 in 1882–83.10 These figures were apparently exaggerated, since, according to annual reports of the local administration and police, the number of Stundists had grown from 200 in 1872 to 5,002 in 1890 in Kiev Province; from 20 in 1862 to 4,648 in 1890 in Kherson Province; and from 300 in 1888 to 1,000 in 1897 in Ekaterinoslav Province. Overall, more than 25,000 Stundists were officially registered in the southern Ukrainian provinces of the Russian empire in 1890. The Kherson governor also noted their organizational élan. “The huge number of Stundist leaders (one for every 29 adult members),” the governor wrote, “indicates the larger inner strength of this growing sect.”11 By 1895, there were nearly 7,000 Stundists in Kherson Province, according to official calculations.12 Stundism had become, during the 1890s, the most popular evangelical movement among the rural population of southern Russia. According to our calculations, from 1891 and 1895 in the main southern provinces, Kiev, Podolia, Volynia, Kherson, Tavrida, Ekaterinoslav, Kharkov, Bessarabia, Stavropol, and Astrakhan, the police registered no fewer than 20,000 Stundist activists.13 However, Stundist influence was much greater than the numbers suggest. Stundists dominated villages in which they composed little more than two percent of local population, influencing no less than one-third of the population there.14 Even those Orthodox peasants who were not registered as Stundists but were influenced by the Stundist ideas participated in Stundist meetings on a regular basis. In his report to the tsar in 1890, the Kherson governor claimed that the Stundist sect had spread to “the three fourths of the entire territory of the province.”15

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When German Baptists interacted with Ukrainian Stundists in 1869, the latter divided into two parts: (1) Stundo-Baptism, which had a more conservative theology and religious praxis and tried to reproduce the institutions of the German Baptist congregations in the Ukrainian countryside; and (2) a more radical and more numerous “New” or “Young” Stundism, which resisted institutionalization and formalization, emphasized the unmediated spiritual communication of believers with God, and promoted millennial expectations of social justice and equality. According to the first reports from Kiev Province in 1874, members of this newer, more radical branch comprised around 85 percent of detected Stundists there.16 RUSSIAN JEWS AND STUNDISM

The participation of Russian Jews in Stundism dates back to the movement’s early days. A police officer from the Odessa District reported to the Kherson governor that in 1870 he discovered a Jewish woman in the village of Adamovka who had converted to Stundism.17 As early as 1875, the Orthodox press noted the presence of Jews among Kherson and Kiev Stundists. These Jews were attracted to Stundism “because of its Protestant character,” the journalist wrote, and “its stress on the inner spirituality which had disappeared from the Jewish religion long ago.” Jews from the southern provinces of Russia, along with Ukrainian peasants, became active members.18 The first records of Kherson Stundists mention a seventeen-year old Jewish boy named Israel who “had been invited to join Stunda and baptized into the new faith” and followed a leader of the Ukrainian Stundo-Baptists, Ivan Riaboshapka, “loyally everywhere.” When Riaboshapka baptized Israel, he became one of the first Russian Jews to be converted to the Baptist faith.19 Another Jew, Joseph (Ios’ka) Zeeserman, a tavern keeper in the village of Chaplinka (Kiev Province), assisted Gerasim Balaban, another leader of the Ukrainian Stundists, by allowing local Stundists and their co-religionists from neighboring villages to use his tavern for “Stundist agitation” among peasant customers.20 Some converted Jews became “zealot Stundist preachers,” according to an 1887–88 report from the Orthodox missionary organization of the Kherson diocese. Orthodox missionaries complained about “one unknown Jew who was preaching Stundism” in the village of Izhitskoe (Tiraspol’ District) in March 1888. According to another report, “In the small village of Soldatskoie of Novoukrainskii District a Jewish preacher, who had been converted from Judaism to Orthodox Christianity

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before joining the ‘Stunda,’ delivered purely Stundist sermons for local peasants.”21 A majority of these converted Jews came from the local towns and cities; few were village Jews or agricultural colonists. The Russian secret police traced the relationship between Jews and Ukrainian peasants back to the first Stundist meetings in the 1860s and 1870s. Famous revolutionary populists (both of Jewish and Russian origin) such as L. Deich, I. Fesenko, and E. Breshko-Breshkovskaia had tried to organize revolutionary propaganda among sectarians, but their efforts had been fruitless. In February 1888, Lazarev and Drovogub, two revolutionary populists, tried to settle among the Stundists from Zvenigorodka District and propagate socialist ideas among them. They were unable, however, to influence the peasant evangelicals because the police arrested them immediately upon their arrival in a Ukrainian village.22 Jews were linked to conspiratorial activities involving religious dissidents in other cases, as well. In 1875 the Jewish populist Lev Deich lived with Tavrida Molokans and tried, unsuccessfully, to propagate socialist ideas among sect members.23 Additional revolutionary Jews attempted this among the Kherson and Kiev Stundist peasants in 1874–75. The most alarming case of Jewish involvement from the police perspective was the Chigirin conspiracy of 1877, when at least three Jewish intellectuals—Lev Deich, Anna Rozenshtein and Mark Natanson—helped organize a peasant movement in Kiev Province.24 Jewish revolutionaries’ involvement in socialist propaganda among Stundist peasants made the police suspicious of any mutual contact. Even when Jews were not engaged in socialist activism, such as local literate Jews composing letters for Stundist peasants, the police persecuted them. In March 1891, the administration of Kiev Province submitted a request for the exile of Leiba Itskov Portnoy from Vasil’kov District. Local Stundists (who called themselves “evangelical Baptists”) from the villages of Romashki, Ol’shanitsa, and Teleshovka (Vasil’kov District) sent letters to the Russian Minister of Interior requesting permission to hold meetings for religious worship. When the police checked these letters, it turned out that the “Stundist petition” and letters were composed and handwritten by local Jewish “resident” Leiba Portnoy and his twenty-one-year-old son, Nekheim. On March 29, 1891, Portnoy was exiled to Radomysl’ in the western part of the Russian empire because, according to the police papers, “Jews writing for Stundists were considered very undesirable, especially since an unemployed Jewish person [without a certain profession] composed various petitions and documents for [the ignorant local peasants].”25

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Police records from the 1870s to the February Revolution of 1917 disclose the Stundists’ unusually tolerant attitudes toward Jews. Whereas Orthodox Ukrainian peasants participated in the infamous pogroms of 1881–82 and 1903–06, Stundist peasants not only eschewed violence against their Jewish neighbors but extended help to them and invited them to their meetings for worship. According to police, evangelical peasants never participated in anti-Jewish pogroms.26 Tolerant attitudes toward Jews were also found among radical peasant evangelicals such as the Maliovantsy, a radical eschatological group of the Ukrainian Stundists who expected the coming apocalypse because Christ himself had already been revealed for them in the body of their preacher, Kondrat Maliovannyi. The first followers of Kondrat Maliovannyi tried to preach to the Jews about the Millennium, since, like all members of the Radical Reformation, they considered Jewish conversion to Christianity a precondition for the Millennium. One Maliovanets, a peasant from the district of Vasil’kovka, regularly visited the synagogue in the town of Belaia Tserkva from September 1891 to March 1892 and preached to Jews about Maliovannyi and the Millennium. But the local police put an end to his proselytizing activities and eventually sent him to the Kiev mental asylum.27 IAKOV GORDIN AND THE SPIRITUAL-BIBLICAL BROTHERHOOD

One of the most confusing cases for the police was the “Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood” in Elisavetgrad (Kherson Province), a town that was also the scene of the outbreak of the 1881–82 pogrom wave, because both Jewish intellectuals and peasant Stundists belonged to this group. At the end of 1888, the Russian secret police submitted its report along with an analysis by the local periodical of the Russian Orthodox Church, published in Kherson. The Orthodox correspondent complained about the activities of the Jewish “Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood,” which involved both Orthodox Christians and Stundist peasants. In the debates of the Orthodox missionaries with Stundists, he wrote, “Those Jews took the Stundist side and supported the sectarians in everything.” The police agent cited a fragment from the Orthodox publication about the active participation of Jews in the Stundist meetings in the Elisavetgrad area: “During a meeting one pale Jew solemnly argued that the present day Orthodox Christian Church did not resemble the original Christ’s Church of the first century AD and that Jesus Christ would drive out the Russian people from their new churches as he had done before with the Jews in Jerusalem.”28

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In response to requests of the Orthodox Church administration, the police initiated their own investigation. In December 1881, the head of the local police in Kherson scrutinized the activities of Iakov (Iankel’) Mikhelev Gordin, a Jewish resident from Vitebsk, who had organized the “SpiritualBiblical Brotherhood” in Elisavetgrad. In fact, Iakov Gordin pioneered the liberal Jewish intellectual effort to create organizations for a cultural dialogue with Christian dissidents of the southern Russian empire. His society particularly targeted Stundist peasants. Gordin is a fascinating figure in the history of the Jews in Russia and America. He was born on May 1, 1853, in Mirgorod, in the Ukrainian province of Poltava, to a poor Jewish family. Although he did not receive a formal college education, he was a talented student of both Jewish and Russian literature. After 1870, he contributed essays and articles to various Russian periodicals. During the 1870s, he worked as a farm laborer, longshoreman, traveling actor, teacher, and journalist. He became a permanent author for such periodicals as Zaria, Nedelia, and Elizavetgradskii vestnik, where he also worked as an editor, and Odesskie novosti, where he published under the pseudonym Ivan Koliuchii (Ivan the Sting). During his travels, he visited Stundist meetings in the Ukrainian countryside. The police noted that Gordin was a close friend of the revolutionary populists who visited Elisavetgrad, where he had lived since the late 1870s. He even published a novel, LiberalNarodnik, in which he described his personal experience and his meetings with religious dissenters and populists.29 In 1877, Iakov Gordin invited progressive-minded Jews from Elisavetgrad to establish a Jewish Bible society in the city. This society would unite those who “denied all religious dogmas and ceremonies and would acknowledge only the moral doctrines of the Bible.” Its members rejected “all mercantile pursuits, and endeavored to live by physical labor, primarily by agriculture.”30 The main goals of this society were the religious education of Jews, the transformation of Jews into farmers living off the land, and the prevention of their further practice of usury and financial speculation. Under pressure from the Orthodox clergy, the police investigated Gordin’s old connections in Elisavetgrad with the revolutionary circle of the “People’s Will” (the populist organization involved in the assassination of the tsar in 1881). The police also confirmed Gordin’s connections with the Ukrainian Stundists, who often visited his “Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood.” Moreover, the police learned that he had lectured to Stundists on the political economy of Karl Marx. In May 1890, a Kherson police officer tracked down Populist revolutionaries such as Galushkin (Teraspol’sky), Gaevsky, Afanasii

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Mikhalevich, and Ivan Basovsky, “who came to Elisavetgrad specifically to propagate revolutionary ideas among Stundists.” All were Jewish. According to the police reports, “all revolutionary efforts to collaborate with Stundist peasants turned out to be a failure.” For this reason, the disappointed Populists decided to combine their propagandist efforts among Stundists with agitation among local Jews. In 1877, Gordin, Zlatopol’sky, and Portnoy founded what police termed “an organization for Jewish artisans” (i.e., the above-mentioned “Brotherhood”). The Jewish populists used meetings to read Marx, Ferdinand Lassale, and other Western socialists. According to the police, Jewish populist’s Vasilii Gorbunov, Vladimir Tsenkovsky, and Pavel Levandovsky visited the Stundist meetings, and “by presenting Jesus Christ as the first socialist in world history, they tried to persuade the Stundists to quit their sect and join the revolutionary movement.”31 But the religious Jewish “Brotherhood” and its leader, Gordin, rejected the violence and terrorism of the Populists and distanced themselves from revolutionary radicalism. Members of the organization moved to the countryside and organized their own community on communist principles, following Leo Tolstoy’s ideas of non-violence. The activists of the Brotherhood, including Gordin himself, visited cities with significant Jewish populations like Odessa, where they promoted ideas of cultural dialogue between Jews and Christians, and, for the Jewish community itself, agricultural activity and non-violent politics.32 The Jewish members of the “Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood” distanced themselves from the local, traditionalist Jewish community, as well. As the governor of Kherson Province reported in January 1885, the local administration had already permitted this society to establish its own separate synagogue and elect its own rabbi in July 1884. The Ministry of the Interior initially tolerated the society because it rejected “Jewish nationalism and fanatical religiosity.”33 On December 8, 1888, the Ministry of Justice agreed to the Bible Brotherhood’s request to establish a register of births separate from other Elisavetgrad Jews. These Jews also demonstrated their non-traditional Jewish character by attempting to appear more “civilized” and “Russified.” They kept all their records “exclusively” in the Russian language, and rejected circumcision, prenuptial agreements, and other “barbarous customs.”34 In 1888 they elected the founder of their “Brotherhood,” Iakov Gordin, as their new rabbi. They asked the local administration for special privileges for their agricultural community and demonstrated their innovative

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practices in the distribution of goods, mutual assistance, rejection of traditional circumcision, and their acceptance of marriage between Christians and Jews according to the ancient Hebrew rituals described in the Old Testament. Kalenik Kozhemiachenko and Larion Dragulenko, two Ukrainian Stundists, both former Orthodox peasants, participated in meetings and followed the rules and rituals established by the Brotherhood. The marriage of Russian Orthodox doctor Evgenii Gar and Jewish obstetrician Rosa Fainzilberg according to the rituals of the Brotherhood symbolized the ideal of this society—the rapprochement of Christians and Jews. Members of the Brotherhood declared that their main goal was “the spiritual and moral renovation of the Jewish religion, and the introduction of Christian teachings to Jews.”35 At first, the Jewish Brotherhood did not appear dangerous to police, especially considering its conflict with Jewish revolutionaries and its opposition to terrorism. According to police reports, the Brotherhood tried to create a version of Christian Tolstoyanism among Elisavetgrad Jews and brought pacifist evangelical groups, such as Stundists, into their improvised Judeo-Christian community. But the persistent demands of the administration of the Russian Orthodox Church and conservative leaders of the Jewish community provoked police persecution of the new Jewish agricultural community in the Elisavetgrad District. Police agents were at first reassured, since the Jewish members of the “Brotherhood” who settled in the Ukrainian countryside and tried to establish contacts with local Stundist peasants did so “without any terrorist goals.”36 But new cases of socialist propaganda among the Ukrainian Stundists of Kherson and Kiev Provinces during the years 1888–1891 and the disclosed connections of Evgenii Gar and Iakov Gordin with peasant evangelicals changed their minds. In 1890, a police detective observed the unusual popularity of Stundist ideas among young radical Jewish intellectuals like Iakov Gordin, who visited numerous Stundist meetings in Kherson Province. According to the police, these young Jews were influenced by the populist version of socialism. As a result, they decided to combine the evangelical ideas of social justice with a communist utopia, but without political violence. Therefore, they tried to organize communist agricultural colonies in localities with a strong Stundist influence. By 1890, all Russian (narodniki) populists (including Jews) were divided into various factions—some of them rejected terror and emphasized mainly socialist propaganda among peasants, while some stressed only terror and revolutionary violence. Of course, the revolutionary Jews from

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Kherson Province shared the ideas of the populists-propagandists. On June 18, 1890, a police officer informed his superiors that in November 1889, “prominent members” of the “Spiritual Biblical-Brotherhood” established an “agricultural colony on communist principles in Glodossy [a famous center of Ukrainian Stundism], got acquainted with local peasants, invited these peasants to their houses and read them the Gospels with their own Jewish interpretation.”37 The members of the “Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood” followed Leo Tolstoy’s interpretation of Christianity, as well. Along with the Bible and socialist literature, they read and discussed Tolstoy’s work and even tried to put Tolstoy’s ideas into practice on their colony. In 1889 they opened a building for the distribution of agricultural products among needy members and among local peasants. Simultaneously, the “Biblical Brothers” used this building for readings and discussions with the peasants. The Glodossy Stundists became active participants. As one police officer noted, the peasants liked their new Jewish neighbors because they helped them with medication and with “various advice of a medical and agricultural character.” But the Jewish colonists also disseminated evangelical literature and tried to influence the Stundist peasants in “a direction that was unreliable from the political point of view.”38 In August 1891, the Department of Police came to a conclusion about the “Brothers Biblicists” among the Stundists, confirming the prevalence of socialist ideas among the religious radicals. As a result, they closed the “Spiritual Biblical Brotherhood” on October 7, 1891, and canceled the election of a new rabbi for a new synagogue established by Gordin’s adherents. Moreover, police agents initiated a surveillance of Gordin and ordered his arrest in January 1892. But they missed their chance. Gordin and sixty followers had immigrated to the United States a year earlier and become American citizens. The secret police ordered frontier-guards all along the Russian border to arrest Iakov Gordin as “a dangerous criminal” if he appeared, even if he was carrying a U.S. passport.39 Iakov Gordin, as far as we know, never returned to Russia.40 Convinced that “the only remedy for Jewish persecution was economic reconstruction,” Gordin tried to establish a Tolstoyan-type agricultural colony in America for Russian Jews. When these attempts failed, he eventually settled in New York City and became a famous Yiddish playwright and writer for the local radical press. Until his last days, he played an important role among New York’s socialists and kept the old traditions of his SpiritualBiblical Brotherhood alive among Russian-speaking Jews. In his works and lectures he resisted any kind of nationalism, including Zionism, and

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rejected political violence even in the name of socialism. Gordin remained convinced that the Judeo-Christian ideal of the Bible pointed to the friendship of all nations rather than to the superior position of one particular ethnic group.41 THE NEW ISRAEL AND NEW TESTAMENT JEWS

In 1882, the young Odessa Jewish intellectuals made another attempt to establish a cultural dialogue between Jews and Christians. Iakov Priluker, a Jewish teacher from Odessa, followed Gordin’s example and organized the group of “New Israel,” which was open to both Christians and Jews. As Simon Dubnow notes, “New Israel” followed only the teachings of Moses “and rejected the Talmud, the dietary laws, the rite of circumcision, and traditional forms of worship.” They transferred the day of rest from Saturday to Sunday, the “Russian language was declared to be the ‘native’ tongue of the Jews and made obligatory in everyday life; usury and similar distasteful pursuits were forbidden.”42 As with Gordin’s group, a majority of the Jews did not support the idea of cultural dialogue. According to contemporaries and historians alike, Russian Jews tended to oppose Gordin’s and Priluker’s experiments, accusing them of “seeking to win from the Russian government those equal rights denied to the Jews collectively.” Conservative critics in the Jewish community argued that “reform of Jewish religious practice would only be accepted by the masses if based on the Talmud and sanctioned by established rabbis.”43 After the pogroms of 1880–81, Russian Jews became preoccupied with physical survival. A mass emigration from Russia was more realistic for the majority than the utopian projects of JewishChristian communities. Only a radical minority of Jewish intellectuals, who had already been involved in Russian revolutionary activities, joined Gordin’s and Priluker’s organizations. When the police repressed the activities of the “New Israel” in Odessa at the end of the 1880s, Iakov Priluker emigrated to England, joined one of the local Protestant congregations, and devoted his life to Christian missionary activities among the Jews. Attempts to establish new relations between Jews and evangelical peasants resulted in the conversion of some Jews to Christianity. A new movement sprung up among young Jewish intellectuals, whom Russian contemporaries called “New Testament Jews,” which converged with the evangelical movement of Ukrainian peasants and demonstrated again the international character of the religious revival. The participation of Jews in the evangelical movement also influenced the peasant dissenters, who

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developed more tolerant and cosmopolitan attitudes. Outside observers were quite confused. The most important representatives of the New Testament Jews belonged to a group established by Iosif Rabinovich in 1884 in Kishinev (Bessarabia). As the governor of Bessarabia reported to the Ministry of the Interior on November 3, 1884, eleven Jews from Kishinev requested permission to establish a community separate from so-called Old Testament Jews. Their community included Jews who believed in Jesus Christ and the New Testament. Their leader, Iosif Rabinovich, had entered a special Protestant theological seminary in Berlin (Germany), converted to Christianity, and was ordained as a “Congregationalist minister” in March 1885. In Russia, he prepared for publication four books about the Christian Jews and submitted the manuscripts to a censor. At the same time, he established connections between his “New Testament Israelites,” local evangelicals, and Orthodox Christians. The governor of Bessarabia supported his activities among Jews and asked his superior in St. Petersburg to satisfy Rabinovich’s request for the official registration of his “sect” and the publication of his books. Rabinovich planned to expand the activities of the New Testament Jews to other provinces of the Russian empire and to attract young Jews to Christianity. He conceived a propagandist “literature and special schools for Jews who would join Christianity.”44 The Ministry of the Interior consulted the Holy Synod about Rabinovich’s “New Testament Israelites.” Meanwhile, the local Orthodox clergy and Kishinev landlords submitted complaints about his activities among the peasant population, on the grounds that New Testament Jews “recast all Christian principles in their own Jewish fashion” and brought “obvious German influences to the Russian countryside,” confusing the local Orthodox population. In their letters to the Holy Synod, Russian conservatives, who knew about Rabinovich’s graduation from a German theological institution, treated him like a German spy and portrayed him as “the secret agent of German imperialism and the German Protestant Church.” The Holy Synod asked the police to halt the anti-Russian activities of Rabinovich and his Jewish adherents. The secret police investigated in 1886 but found nothing criminal. Nevertheless, K. Pobedonostsev, the Ober-Procurator of the Holy Synod, known by historians as “the symbol and the author of Alexander III’s program of reaction,”45 insisted on banning the New Testament Jews’ movement in southern Russia. Pobedonostsev explained to officials of the Ministry of the Interior that it was pointless to officially permit “the activities of Rabinovich’s sect in the localities noted for the

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mass spread of Baptism and various rationalist sects like the Stundists.” According to Pobedonostsev, “This sect promoted a new religious dissent among Russian citizens and their defection from Orthodoxy.” Rabinovich should join the officially permitted Protestant church in Russia rather than establish a new sect, he argued. On August 4, 1886, the Holy Synod refused Rabinovich’s request and banned his publications. Rabinovich tried to persuade the local administration that his activities were legal. He ceased his contacts with Stundist peasants and, in December 1888, wrote to the Minister of the Interior explaining his intention to promote a rapprochement of Jews and Christians, even agreeing to register his sect with the police and adhere to the requirements of the Orthodox Church. But the Ministry and the Department of Police did not wish to contradict the Holy Synod. Moreover, they were scandalized by rumors about Gordin and Priluker’s Jewish organizations. Thus, while it may seem strange that Russian officials should oppose the conversion of Jews to Christianity in any form given the prevailing anti-Jewish sentiment, their fear of socialist propaganda among the peasants trumped other considerations. The Russian legislation, moreover, discriminated against Jews who converted to evangelical Christian sects.46 Yet police were unable to sever ties between Rabinovich’s New Israel sect and Stundists in Kishinev which, along with Odessa, became an important center for the expansion of the evangelical movement among the rural population of southern Russia in the 1890s. Christian Jews and Russian and Ukrainian evangelicals received religious literature via Rabinovich’s German co-religionists. Stundist peasants regularly visited meetings for worship in Rabinovich’s house in Kishinev. Nikita Sharakhovich, one of Rabinovich’s Russian followers, played a prominent role in maintaining contacts with dissident peasants. In 1895, the local clergy complained to the governor of Bessarabia about new cases of defection from the Orthodox Church under the influence of the “New Israel” and the Kishinev Stundists. As it turned out, all suspected Stundists, including Sharakhovich, were using Rabinovich’s meeting house for “Stundist propaganda” among the local Orthodox peasants. In December 1895, the district court of Kishinev sentenced Sharakhovich and his co-religionists to imprisonment for their Stundist propaganda among Orthodox Christians.47 The evangelical movement united New Testament Jews, radical intellectuals, and peasant religious radicals in one single opposition against Russian Orthodoxy and the tsarist administration. Socialists, radical evangelicals, and New Testament Jews believed in the possibility of “a new human Paradise on

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the Earth” without exploitation and humiliation.48 They envisioned future society as a congregation of individuals who would live a life based on principles of moral purity and human dignity. According to their eschatological dreams, such a society would have no racial or ethnic hatred. In his memoirs, Tymophii Zaiats described a future society where Jesus Christ would establish equality for everybody—Russians, Jews, Ukrainians—and they will be happy living together. Iakov Priluker, the aforementioned Jewish convert to evangelical Christianity, dreamed about this “Christian communism” as well.49 Not surprisingly, this ideal attracted intellectual radical Jews in the Russian revolutionary movement. Under the influence of other Western Christian missionary organizations, additional Russian Jews converted to Christianity. In addition, the leaders of the local Ukrainian Stundists and Baptists, such as Riaboshapka and Balaban, invited Jews to join the evangelical movement and convert to the Baptist faith.50 According to various sources, after 1881, more than 500 Russian Jews converted to evangelical Christianity, while 60 members of Gordin’s organization created their own version of a “Jewish-Christian church.”51 Alarmed by cases of Jewish conversion to Stundism and Baptism, police closely followed the formation of the Jewish evangelical organization in Odessa from the 1880s to the 1910s. Agents analyzed publications of the Jewish newspaper Zions Freunde, which concerned the activities of Jews who preached for evangelical Christians. They discovered that IsaacLeon Rosenberg, an Odessa Jew, regularly preached evangelical sermons at the Stundist meetings for worship on Tuesday and Friday evenings. During meetings in 1908–09, the police calculated that forty Stundists usually visited the “meeting house with the Jewish preacher” on 23 Kouznechnaya Street in downtown Odessa. As the police discovered, the Ukrainian Stundists and Baptists met with local Jews in other meeting houses of Odessa as early as 1891.52 Their suspicions and concerns led police to scrupulously document the convergence of New Testament Jews and Stundo-Baptists. One police agent reported that the Jewish Baptist Christian community in Odessa had a “Jewish priest Rosenfeld who was preaching Christian sermons exclusively in Hebrew.” The Russian administration worried that “given the Jewish inclination to political intrigues, the Jewish intrusion in the Russian sectarian movement could turn these sectarians in an undesirable anti-Russian political direction.” The administration of the Russian Orthodox Church informed the police about four Jewish Baptist ministers in southern Russia, but the police found only three—Vladimir I. Melamed, Barukh N. Shapiro,

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and Leon Rosenberg, who all served as Baptist preachers for local StundoBaptist communities. In addition, police discovered that Rosenberg, a Jewish shopkeeper from Odessa, corresponded with another Christian Jew, Samuil Vilshenzon, an agent of the London Biblical Society, who sent money and literature to Jews and Stundists in the Odessa District.53 In November 1902, in the village of Snegurovka (Vasil’kovka District of Kiev Province), police agents arrested a group of “enthusiastic” Stundist peasants who were waiting for “the works and performance of the Holy Spirit and liberation from the earthly oppression.” Among the 126 spectators of this “performance,” at least two were Jewish sufferers of earthly oppression. One was “a Jewish resident of town Korsun’ (Kanev District, the province of Kiev) named Berko Ievsei Gershkov Ostrovsky, who called himself a Stundist and who had been arrested as a Stundist on April 10 [1902]”; the other was “a subject of the Austrian crown, a baptized Jew, Piotr Kramar’, who had converted to Greek Roman Christianity (Uniate Church) from Judaism.” As it turned out, these Jews were connected to the New Testament Jewish movement and brought new religious literature and money to local Stundists (see Appendix A).54 THE STUNDISTS’ CULTURAL DIMENSION

In addition to fears of political influences on the Orthodox peasants, the police and Orthodox press shared a fear of foreign (i.e., Jewish and German) cultural influences. Their fears were not completely unfounded. All observers noted that the Stundists were different “ethnographically” from their Orthodox peasant neighbors.55 In protest, Stundists preferred to associate with German colonists or even Jewish city dwellers rather than with their Orthodox peasant neighbors. “The German colonists live much better than the Orthodox peasants,” Stundists told the Orthodox missionary, “therefore we prefer to live like the Germans and that is why we join the German nation.”56 They cut off all relations with the Orthodox peasant community, whom they associated with “heavy drinking, corruption, theft, violence, adultery and sloth.” They used the model of the German colonists’ lifestyle to construct their new social identity.57 The denial of local Ukrainian identity was so evident among Ukrainian Stundists that some called them anti-Ukrainian: The Stundists removed all elements of Ukrainian folk culture from their life. They changed their morals, customs, character and songs. Even their

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language changed—it became a strange mixture of Ukrainian, German, Polish and literary Russian. Stundists suppressed any expression of the folk culture—Ukrainian songs, dances, customs and dress. There is no sound of a folk song or sign of traditional Ukrainian folk rituals in the localities where Stundists live. It looks as if the Stundists aspire to become a separate nation, distinct from their Orthodox peasant neighbors.58

Denial of one’s peasant past and traditional Orthodox identity became a central component of the “Stundist reformation” in the Ukrainian countryside. Stundists changed more than just their lifestyle. To contemporaries, they looked more like European farmers who tolerated Jews than ostensibly antisemitic Russian Orthodox peasants.59 This radical denial of Orthodox peasant identity reached its apex among Stundist followers of “charismatic prophet” Kondrat Maliovannyi during the 1890s. In expectation of the Millennium of Jesus Christ, the Maliovantsy stopped working and changed their diet, dress, and hairstyle. They replaced all peasant aspects of their everyday life with practices they associated with an urban middle-class existence. They wore fashionable urban clothing and used decorations, perfumes, and makeup, all unusual for Ukrainian peasants. Rather than following a peasant diet, they ate sweets, candies, and chocolate, and drank tea and “other non-peasant beverages.” They changed their manner of speaking, trying to avoid peasant words and to imitate the language of the literate elite.60 Members of the investigating committee, for example, discovered in May 1892 that followers of Maliovannyi had expensive food in their houses and were dressed in fashionable European dresses. A community of the Maliovantsy had paid the large sum of 140 rubles to Jewish merchants for a set of expensive clothes for their community. As Vasilii Skvortsov, one of the members of the investigating committee, noted, “The dissenters threw away their national costumes as peasant emblems of their former slavery and labor; their new dress served as the symbol of their anticipated new forms of a better social life and of their expected privileged position in the kingdom of their ‘Redeemer,’ which will be established for them here on the Earth rather than in the Heaven.”61 CONCLUSION

Ukrainian dissenters rejected their peasant and Ukrainian identities because they associated them with exploitation and humiliation. But beyond denying the national principle in the construction of their identity, they invoked one

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of the conditions for the Advent of Jesus Christ, the conversion of Jews to Christianity, and admitted Jews as “Christian converts” into their community. Some Jewish intellectuals responded positively and joined their movement. Orthodox authors, who frequently excoriated “the Jews who exploited our countryside and our peasants in particular,” concluded that Jews were inciting Stundist peasants against the Russian Church and state and pushing them in the direction of “communist revolution.”62 But police documents present a picture of genuine friendship and mutual assistance. Educated Jewish intellectuals tried to help the Russian and Ukrainian peasants in their search for a better life and social justice. Evangelical religion and the revolutionary movement thus formed a common ground between Ukrainian peasants and Jews, the outsiders of Russian society. While a majority of moderate Baptists actually distanced themselves from the “New Testament Jews” and avoided collaboration with Gordin and Priluker, poor Ukrainian peasants—who formed a majority of the radical evangelicals known as “New” or “Young” Stundists—became active collaborators with them to advance the Millennium of Jesus Christ, a Heavenly Kingdom of justice and equality for all. APPENDIX

The Kiev Governor Report to the Department of Police, December 1, 1902. According to police agents, the Stundists planned a long prayer meeting in the village of Snegurovka, Vasilkov District, at the house of the peasant Efrosinia Liasota. They expected 300 guests for this meeting for three nights—19, 20, and 21 November of this year. . . . When the police appeared unexpectedly at midnight on November 20 at their meeting, the Stundists (all together 126 people, including ten children from 7 to 14 years of age) continued to pray for fifteen minutes in the presence of the police officers, and only after finishing their prayer did they come out of the house. . . . The police officer reported that the Stundists did not resist, but remained calm and were submissive to the policemen’s orders. . . . When a bailiff ordered the crowd to disperse, the famous peasant Stundist propagandist from Snegurovka, Andrei Ignatiev Kobyliazhskii, shouted to the crowd several times: “On your knees, let’s pray, brothers!” Then all the Stundists kneeled and began their prayers again, their women and children crying loudly. Many raised their hands, pronounced incoherent and nonsensical words, trying to shout down their neighbors. The hostess of the house, Pavlina Andreeva Kobyliazhskaia, stood on a bench so everybody could see her and pretended to convulse. Then while falling into the arms of a young boy,

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she gesticulated with her hands like she was trying to bless all the Stundists. Another woman, standing on a bed, pretended that she was going to fly away. One small girl, kneeling among this loud crowd, let out a sound resembling a dog’s bark. . . . During the interrogation, the incarcerated Stundists explained that they came to Snegurovka without any invitation and were just following inspiration from the Holy Spirit to meet for three days’ prayer to hasten the Messiah, who was coming to bring freedom for all. Other Stundists, guests from a village of Dedovshchina, explained that they had similar inspiration from Anna, an eleven-year-old daughter of a local Stundist, Gerasim Tsabekal, who while sleeping had visions from Heaven that the Messiah would come and open the Heavenly Kingdom for the suffering people if they would go for a three-day prayer meeting to the village of Snegurovka on November 19, when God would announce His Will to them. . . . Among the arrested Stundists [in Liasota’s house] there were the following people: (1) a dweller (meshchanin) of the town of Korsun, a Jew named Berko Evsei Gershkov Ostrovskii, who presented himself as a Stundist, and who had already been arrested for participation in a Stundist meeting, on April 10 of the same year, and (2) an Austrian national (poddannyi) named Piotr Kramar, a Jew who had converted to the Greek Roman Christian Church (uniatstvo) before, and who had with him a personal collection of panoramic pictures of religious character. . . . These Jews told the police that they visited the Stundist meeting out of a curiosity about the approaching Advent of the Messiah and the announcement of the Divine Will by pious and clairvoyant people. . . . Source: Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (GARF, Moscow, Russian Federation), Fond (Fund) 102: Departament politsii (the Department of Police), Osobyi otdel (Special Section), Opis (Inventory) 226, delo (File) 12, chast (Part) 5. “Shtundisty” (The Stundists). Listy (Sheets) 32–35 oborot (reverse). NOTES I wish to thank the American Council of Learned Societies, IREX, Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, and the Mellon Foundation for financially supporting this research, which is a part of my larger research project. See the detailed analysis of relations between the Stundists and Jews in chapter 7 of my book Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 321–95. 1. Alexander Etkind, “Whirling with the Other: Russian Populism and Religious Sects,” Russian Review 62, no. 4 (October 2003): 565–88.

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2. See Louis Israel Newman, Jewish Influence on Christian Reform Movements (New York: AMS, 1925); Salo W. Baron, “John Calvin and the Jews,” Essential Papers on Judaism and Christianity in Conflict: From Late Antiquity to the Reformation, ed. Jeremy Cohen (New York: New York University Press, 1991), 380–400; Armas K.E. Holmio, The Lutheran Reformation and the Jews: The Birth of Protestant Jewish Missions (Hancock, Mich.: Finnish Lutheran Book Concern, 1949); Peter Toon, Puritans, the Millennium and the Future of Israel: Puritan Eschatology 1600 to 1660 (Cambridge: James Clarke, 1979); Richard H. Popkin, “Jewish Messianism and Christian Millenarianism,” in Culture and Politics from Puritanism to the Enlightenment, ed. Perez Zagorin (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 70–71; David S. Katz, Philo-Semitism and the Readmission of the Jews to England, 1603–1655 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982); Sergei Zhuk, “‘La tradition hébraïque’: Les Puritans, les Calvinistes hollandaise et le début de l’ambivalence des Juifs dans l’Amérique britannique coloniale,” in Les Chrétiens et les Juifs dans les sociétés de rites grec et latin. Approche comparative. Textes reunis M. Dmitriev, D. Tollet et E. Teiro (Paris, 2003), 123–64. 3. On Subbotniki, see Nicholas Breyfogle’s chapter in this volume; N. A. Kazakova, Ia. S. Lur’e, Antifeodal’nye ereticheskie dvizhenia na Rusi XIV-nachala XVI v. (Leningrad, 1955); Ia. S. Lur’e, Ideologicheskaia bor’ba v russkoi publitsistike kontsa XV-nachala XVI v. (Moscow-Leningrad, 1955). More recently, see Mikhail V. Dmitriev, “Joseph de Volokolamsk était-il anti-Semite?” and Tat’jana A. Oparina, “La polémique anti-juive en Russie au XVIIe siècle,” both in Les Chrétiens et les Juifs, 77–98, 165–82, respectively. 4. See citation in Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005), 11. He repeats this definition of Molokans in his recent article: Nicholas B. Breyfogle, “Prayer and the Politics of Place: Molokan Church Building, Tsarist Law, and the Quest for a Public Sphere in Late Imperial Russia,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russia, ed. Mark D. Steinberg and Heather J. Coleman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 225. Orthodox missionaries considered Sundukov, a peasant from a village of Dubovka in Saratov Province, a founding father of “Subbotniki” sect in imperial Russia. See N. N. Golitsyn, Istoria zakonodatel’stva o evreiakh (1649–1825) (St. Petersburg, 1886), 1:642; T. I. Butkevich, Obzor russkikh sekt i ikh tolkov (Khar’kov, 1910), 368–87, 393. 5. See Gosudarstvennyi arkhiv Rossiiskoi federatsii (hereafter, GARF), f. 109, 1 ekspeditsiia, op. 40, d. 21, part 2, l. 40–41. In the 1860s the creed of the Russian Sabbatarians who followed Hebraic theology and practices included “1. A complete belief in various acts of the Holy Spirit; 2. Non-admittance of sinful people to the meetings; 3. A public repentance in front of the whole meeting or the elected person; 4. A celebration not only of New Testament holidays, but Old Testament biblical holidays as well (Sabbath). Following the old Jewish tradition, they kept observance of three such days: September 1, Day of Labor (or Pipes); September 10, Day of Purification, and September 15, a celebration of the Feast of Tabernacles. They celebrate both the Old Testament and New Testament holidays according to the lunar calendar rather than the general Christian one.” GARF, f. 109, op. 40, d. 21, l. 6–8ob. 6. The development of Stundism has been covered in detail by both Russian and Western historians. See Heather Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); and O.V. Beznosova (Kudinova), “Pozdnee protestantskoe sektantstvo Iuga Ukrainy (1850–1905)” (Ph.D. diss., Dniepropetrovsk University, 1998). 7. C. Bonnekemper, “Stundism in Russia,” Missionary Review of the World 17 (March 1894): 203.

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8. The Ukrainian Stundists did not fit an official scheme of a dissident movement in Russian historiography. Historians now agree that eventually Ukrainian Stundism contributed to the development of the broad evangelical movement in Russia and the Soviet Union as well. Yet the history of the Stundist peasants and their theology and religious practices is still unclear. Even in the beginning of the twentieth century, Russian observers of the Stundist movement were not sure about its real origins. The obvious similarities between German and Russian sectarians, who were both referred to as the “Stundists,” confused both liberal and conservative authors. At the same time, all observers noted millenarian trends in the theology of Ukrainian peasant dissidents. The more insightful Orthodox scholars of Stundism, such as Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii, Alexei Dorodnitsyn, and Piotr Kozitskii, expressed their uncertainty about the origin of Russian Stundism. See Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhno-russkii shtundizm (St. Petersburg, 1889), 12–13, 42–43, 59–60; A. Dorodnitsyn, Yuzhno-Russkii Neobaptism, izvestnyi pod imenem shtundy. Po offitsial'nym dokumentam (Stavropol, 1903), 117, 122; P. Kozitskii, Vopros o proiskhozhdenii yuzhno-russkago Shtundizma v nashei literature (St. Petersburg, 1908), 3ff. According to their analysis: (1) Stundism was primarily a Russian phenomenon and influenced by native Russian sects (Molokans, Shalaputs, and Dukhobors); (2) although Stundism may have foreign (mostly German) origins, its development was dependent on the psychology of the Russian people; (3) Stundism was a product of German propaganda, but other causes, which prepared the ground for it in the Russian countryside, were more important; (4) Stundism was entirely a product of German propaganda and the Germanization of the Ukrainian peasantry; (5) Stundism was not simply a product of Russian conditions or of the propaganda of German Stundism among the German colonists, but also a direct result of German Baptists’ impact on southern Russian society. 9. Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhno-russkii shtundizm, 145, 147. According to the official report of the Kiev governor, there were 3,085 Stundists in the province in 1885. In the province of Kherson, the local governor counted 3049 Stundists in 1885. In Volynia, the police registered from 36 to 65 Stundists. In the province of Ekaterinoslav by 1890, the police registered 267 Stundists. Before this, 260 Stundists had returned to the Orthodox Church. Therefore, between 1885 and 1890 we can calculate 527 officially registered Stundists in the province of Ekaterinoslav. Between 1885 and 1890, the Kharkov police registered 240 Stundists among the local peasants. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (hereafter, RGIA), f. 1263, op. 1, d. 4546, l. 836; d. 4543, l. 424ob.; RGIA, Otchet Volynskogo gubernatora za 1885 god, 8; Otchet Volynskogo gubernatora za 1889 god, 7; Otchet Ekaterinoslavskogo gubernatora za 1890 god, l. 371ob.; Otchet Kharkovskogo gubernatora za 1890 god, l. 607. 10. Russian journalists from a popular Moscow newspaper calculated in 1884 that there were 24,700 Stundists in Kiev Province, 9,000 in Kherson Province, 7,500 in Bessarabia Province, 4,000 in Ekaterinoslav Province, and 1,000 in Tavrida province. Moskovskie vedomosti, 1884, no. 326. Cf. KEV, 1885, No. 19, 902. 11. RGIA, Otchet Khersonskogo gubernatora za 1890 god, 14. The majority of the Kherson Stundists were concentrated in Elisavetgrad District, 167 places: including 20 towns and cities, 42 villages, and 105 rural settlements. The number of Stundists who had officially separated from the Orthodox Church comprised 4,648 people (including 2,169 children under the age of twenty-one). The police discovered 83 Stundist leaders in the province. Among these leaders, 30 were called the ministers (presvitery), who performed the religious ceremonies, “including the baptism of the children, the weddings, the communion and burial rituals.” In

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1890, Stundists lived in 167 localities (villages and towns) in Kherson Province. See especially Otchet Khersonskogo gubernatora za 1890 god, 13–14. 12. RGIA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 4182, l. 431–34. The governor of Kiev also noted the growth of Stundism and criticized the Orthodox clergy’s underestimation of the numbers of dissidents among Ukrainian peasants. By 1895, there were more than 6,000 Stundists in the province of Kiev. See RGIA, f. 1263, op. 1, d. 4868, l. 138ob. According to his report, in 1890 the Stundist movement in the province of Kiev had increased by 131 members and comprised 5,002 activists. The governor noted an expansion of Stundism in 18 new localities of the province as well. The Orthodox clergy reported the figure of 4,681 Stundists the same year, i.e., 320 people fewer than the police detected. According to the report of the General Governor of the South Western Region (which included the provinces of Kiev, Podolia and Volynia), by 1893 in the province of Kiev alone lived between 5,500 and 6,000 Stundists in 200 localities. See in RGIA, f. 1276, op. 17, d. 189 (1911), l. 88. 13. See the provincial governors’ reports and A. I. Klibanov, Istoria religioznogo sektantstva v Rossii (60-e gody XIX v.-1917 g.) (Moscow, 1965), 208–9. We can assume that the number of participants in the Stundist meetings was larger than that reported by the police. 14. See Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii, Iuzhno-russkii shtundizm, 134, 135, 136, 145, 147. All other scholars base their studies on the calculations of Arsenii Rozhdestvenskii. Cf. Klibanov, Istoria religioznogo , 208ff. My calculations are based on data from TsDIAU, f. 442, op. 52, d. 433, l. 35, 36ob., 61–62; f. 127, op. 690, d. 43, l.5ob.; f. 442, op. 53, d. 357, l. 14, 29; f. 442, op. 55, d. 447, l. 67–67ob.; f. 442, op. 623, d. 364, l. 36ob., 37. RGIA, Obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi goubernii za 1881 god, p.8, 23,24; Obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi goubernii za 1882 god, p.8, 21, 22; Obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi goubernii za 1883 god, p.8, 25, 26; Obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi goubernii za 1884 god, p.7, 24; Obzor Ekaterinoslavskoi goubernii za 1889 god, p.27, 56, 57. 15. RGIA, Otchet Khersonskogo gubernatora za 1890 god, 13. In the Russian original, the governor literally complained of “the spread” of Stundism influence: “Raion rasprostranenia shtundizma okhvatyvaet okolo ¾ obshchei ploshchadi gubernii.” 16. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 241, d. 181. Calculations based on the material RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 21, l. 275ob.–277ob. 17. Episkop Alexii [Dorodnitsyn], Materialy dlia istorii religiozno-ratsionalisticheskogo dvizhenia na iuge Rossii vo vtoroi polovine XIX-go veka (Kazan’, 1908), 174. 18. “Izvestiia o shtundizme,” Pravoslavnoe obozrenie, 1876, no.1, 810–11. 19. Kievskaya starina, 1884, no. 10, 316–17. 20. Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (Kiev, 1884), 1:192. 21. “Otchet Odesskogo Bratstva Sv. Apostola Andreia Pervozvannogo za 1887–88 g,” Khersonskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti, 1889, no. 4, 115. 22. GARF, f. 102, op. 88 (1890), l.1ob. 23. L. Deich, Za poveka (Moscow, 1926), 60, 66–67, 110–31, 134–35. 24. Erich Haberer, Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth-Century Russia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 139. Jewish themes contributed to the construction of the anti-Russian image among the first Stundists in Russia, who were Ukrainian peasants by origin. I. Strel'bitskii, Kratkii ocherk shtundizma i svod tekstov, napravlennykh k ego oblicheniyu (Odessa, 1893), 17, 22, 198. Compare with other publications: “Kommunisticheskaya propaganda v Rossii,” Moskovskie vedomosti, 1890, no. 106, 2; “Sotsialisticheskaya propaganda

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shtundizma,” ibid., 1890, no. 183, 2; “Shtunda i eya protivogosudarstvennyi kharakter,” Russkoe slovo, 1895, no. 107, 1–2. 25. Tsentral’nyi derzhavnyi istoruchnyi arkhiv Ukrainy (hereafter TsDIAU), f. 442, op. 620, d. 22, p.1–3ob. As John Klier notes, the Russian Orthodox Church was concerned about the risk of “Judaizing” by peasants exposed to Jewish religious life and cultural influences. This concern was translated into law in 1825. See John Klier, Russia Gathers the Origins of the “Jewish Question” in Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986), 166. 26. This happened with the peasants of Zvenigorodka District in April 1882. TsDIAU, f. 442, op. 832, d. 126 (1882), l.1. 27. Ivan A. Sikorskii, “Psikhopaticheskaya epidemia 1892 goda v Kievskoi gubernii,” in Sbornik nauchno-literaturnykh statei V 5-ti knigakh (Kiev, 1900), vol. 5, 78; Privetstvie Russkomu narodu ot Kondrata Maliovannogo (Moscow, 1907), 10, 11–12. On Ivan Sikorskii’s influence on Russian psychiatry, see Irina Sirotkina, Diagnosing Literary Genius: A Cultural History of Psychiatry in Russia, 1880–1930 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), esp. 136–39. Compare the confusing picture of these events in a recent article by Daniel Beer, “The Medicalization of Religious Deviance in the Russian Orthodox Church (1880–1905),” Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 5, no. 3 (Summer 2004): 451–82. Beer apparently dismissed original documents about the movement of Maliovannyi, and, moreover, mistakenly treated the Maliovantsy as Old Believers, calling their leader not Kondrat, but Vitalii. 28. Police officers paid special attention to information supplied by the anti-sectarian St. Andrew Brotherhood of the Orthodox Church. A report of the Spiritual Affairs Department to Police Department authorized an investigation about Jewish involvement in Stundist activities. See GARF, f. 102, op. 84 (1888), d. 454, l. 2, l.2ob.; RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l. 97. See also “O polozhenii sektantstva v Khersonskoi eparkhii,” Khersonskie eparkhial'nye vedomosti, 1888, no. 21, 315–16. 29. See The Jewish Encyclopedia, ed. Isidor Singer (New York, 1904), 6:46; Simon Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland from the Earliest Times until the Present Day, trans. I. Friedlaender (Philadelphia, 1918), 2:333–35; Kalman Marmor, Yaakov Gordin (New York: Ik uf farlag, 1953); Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried: Jewish Socialist Movements, 1871–1917 (London: Littman Library, 1977), 143–46; Jonathan Frankel, Prophesy and Politics: Socialism, Nationalism, and the Russian Jews, 1862–1917 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 56–57; John Klier, “From Elisavetgrad to Broadway: The Strange Odyssey of Iakov Gordon,” in Extending the Borders of Russian History: Essays in Honor of Alfred J. Rieber, ed. Marsha Siefert (Budapest: CEU Press, 2003), 113–25. Compare with more popular versions of Gordin’s biography in Jacob Gordin, The Jewish King Lear: A Comedy in America, trans. Ruth Gay (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007), 107–21; and Beth Kaplan, Finding the Jewish Shakespeare: The Life and Legacy of Jacob Gordin (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2007), 8–33. 30. Quoted from Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 2:333. 31. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l. 36. 32. Ibid., 38ob. The police emphasized Leo Tolstoy’s influence on Russian Jews. 33. The Russian administration praised the goals of the new society, which “attempted to eradicate the coarse fanaticism and religious delusions in the Jewish masses.” Ibid., l. 3–4ob. 34. Ibid., f. 1405, op. 89, d. 2269, l.1–1ob., 3–3ob. 35. GARF, f. 102, op. 87 (1889), d. 606, l. 20, 61ob., 65ob., 71ob. 36. On Stundist pacifism and rejection of revolutionary violence and terror, see “the manuscript, written by Timofei A. Zaiats,” published in Materialy k istorii i izucheniyu russkogo

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sektantstva i raskola, ed. Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich (St. Petersburg, 1910), 3:15, 16. Russian priests worried about the positive example Stundist communities represented for Ukrainian and Russian peasants because “sectarians reject violence and live like members of one family and in this regard they serve as an exemplary model of brotherly relations, help each other by advice and in a material way, and are tender and cordial in their contacts.” Missionerskoe obozrenie, 1899, July-August, 103. 37. GARF, f. 102, op. 87 (1889), d. 606, p.4, 11, 19–20, 21, 23, 24, 57–57ob. In his report this officer noted, “in November 1889 Isaac Finerman, a prominent member of the Jewish society bought two peasant houses, rented 20 desiatins of the land in village Glodossy in the Elisavetgrad District, settled there with like-minded Jews having in mind the propagation of their religious anti-government notions among the adherents of the Stundist persuasion who densely inhabit this area. Finerman’s wife, Khana Liubarskaia, Antolii Butkevich, Mark Goldfeld, Kelman Galitsky, and his wife Roza Kogan, Izik Ostry and Isaia Burshtein, who followed after Isaac Finerman, were the most active propagandists among the settlers of this Jewish colony.” See also the memoirs of the Russian Jew who converted to the Baptist faith and emigrated later to England: Jaakoff Prelooker, Under the Tsar and Queen Victoria: The Experiences of a Russian Reformer (London, 1895), 109–11. 38. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l. 118–19ob. During the 1880s, these Christian Jews even tried to establish a Baptist colony in the Crimea. See Christopher M. Clark, The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 246. 39. GARF, f. 102, op. 87 (1889), d. 606, l. 60, 61, 65, 66, 71, 73, 90–91. 40. For a different view, see Klier, “From Elisavetgrad to Broadway,” 113–25. 41. For his socialist ideas, see Ezekiel Lifschutz, “Jacob Gordin’s Proposal to Establish an Agricultural Colony,” The Jewish Experience in America, ed. Abraham J. Karp (Waltham, Mass.: American Jewish Historical Society, 1969), 4:253–64; Nora Levin, While Messiah Tarried, 143–45. 42. Dubnow, History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, 2:334. 43. Quotations are from M. [M. I. Rabinovich], “Talmud li, ili zhizn’ prepiatstvuet evreiam zanimatsia proizvoditel’nym trudom?” Vol’noe slovo (August 15, 1882), no. 43, 11, and Jonathan Frankel, Prophesy and Politics, 57. See Priluker’s memoirs, Under the Tsar and Queen Victoria; on the close connections of Gordin and Priluker with peasant Stundists and their meeting with Balaban, see 109–11. 44. RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l.1, 11–11ob., 14–15, 16, 17, 22–23. A detailed description of Rabinovich’s plans is presented in a special police report, “The Religious Movement among the Jews in the South of Russia.” RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l. 45–83. 45. James H. Billington, The Icon and the Axe: An Interpretive History of Russian Culture (New York: Knopf, 1966), 439. 46. See about this in RGIA, f. 821, op. 8, d. 345 (1884), l. 24, 34, 41–44, 47, 102–7ob. See also a biographical study of Rabinovich in English: Steven J. Zipperstein, “Heresy, Apostasy, and the Transformation of Joseph Rabinovich,” in Jewish Apostasy in the Modern World, ed. Todd M. Endelman (New York: Holmes & Meier, 1987), 206–31. Compare with Kai KjaerHansen, Joseph Rabinowitz and the Messianic Movement (Edinburgh: Handsel Press, 1995). On the Russian laws on emancipation of Jews and legal restriction on their converting to nonOrthodox faith, see RGIA, f. 821, op. 133, d. 283, ll. 11–11ob., 14–15, and d. 540, ll. 11–11ob. See also their analysis in Paul W. Werth, “Arbiters of the Free Conscience: State, Religion,

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and the Problem of Confessional Transfer after 1905,” in Steinberg and Coleman, Sacred Stories, 188–89. 47. RGIA, f. 796, op. 176, d. 2145, l.1–8, 10–14. 48. See this description in memoirs of different participants of the events, such as the Ukrainian Stundist Tymophii Zaiats and New Testament Jew Iakov Priluker. The adherents of Leo Tolstoy, P. Biriukov, and V. Chertkov used their periodicals published abroad for promoting principles of religious toleration. They published letters and other materials about persecution of sectarians in Russia. The most active among Chertkov’s correspondents was the Ukrainian Stundist peasant, Tymophii Zaiats, who was exiled to Siberia for his nonOrthodox beliefs. In 1913 Anna Chertkova translated, from Ukrainian into Russian, edited, and published memoirs of T. Zaiats in Sytin’s magazine: “Zapiski Timofeia Zaitsa,” Golos minuvshego, 1913, no. 8, 152–76, no. 10, 149–74, no. 11, 162–93, no. 12, 168–83. Cf. Prelooker, Under the Tsar and Queen Victoria, 109–11. 49. “Zapiski Timofeia Zaitsa,” Golos minuvshego, 1913, no. 12, 168–83; Prelooker, Under the Tsar and Queen Victoria, 110–11. 50. Prelooker, Under the Tsar and Queen Victoria, 105ff. 51. GARF, f. 102, op. 87 (1889), d. 606, l. 60, 61, 65, 66, 71, 73, 90–91. 52. Rosenberg was a respected bookseller in Odessa. According to his announcement, he sold exclusively “biblical spiritual-moral” books. See TsDIAU, f. 268, op. 1, d. 448 (March 19–November 3, 1909), l. 14, 16. 53. TsDIAU, f. 268, op. 1, d. 448 (March 19–November 3, 1909), l. 17, 18, 19, 20–23ob. 54. GARF, f. 102, op. 226, d. 12, part 5, p.35; TsDIAU, f. 275, op. 1, d. 1 (1902), l. 89–89ob.; GARF, f. 1597, op. 1, d. 7, l. 8–8ob. 55. Alexii, Materialy, 69, 70; see also on stereotypes of Stundists in GARF, f. 102, 3 d-vo, op. 88, d. 281, l.1–2. 56. On the ethnographic differences of the Stundist peasants, see Ekaterinoslavskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti, 1890, no. 13, 342–43. 57. Alexii, Materialy, 305. 58. Ekaterinoslavskie eparkhial’nye vedomosti, 1889, no. 23, 658–59. The observers noted that these changes took place during ten years, from 1878 to 1888. 59. RGIA, f. 1284, op. 222 (1902–04), d. 29, l. 31, 35. 60. See I. Sikorskii, “Psikhopaticheskaya epidemia 1892 goda v Kievskoi gubernii,” 52–54 (a description of 1892), and RGIA report of the Kiev General Governor (of 1895). On peasant diet in Russia, see R.E.F. Smith and David Christian, Bread and Salt: A Social and Economic History of Food and Drink in Russia (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 152ff. 61. Vasilii Skvortsov, “Novoshtundism,” Moskovskie vedomosti, 1892, no. 227. 62. P. Petrushevsky, “O shtundizme . . . ,” Trudy Kievskoi dukhovnoi akademii (Kiev, 1884), 1:187. See also I. Strel'bitskii, Kratkii ocherk shtundizma i svod tekstov, napravlennykh k ego oblicheniyu (Odessa, 1893), 17, 22, 198; cf. other publications: “Kommunisticheskaya propaganda v Rossii,” Moskovskie vedomosti, 1890, no. 106, 2; “Sotsialisticheskaya propaganda shtundizma,” Moskovskie vedomosti, 1890, no. 183, 2; “Stunda i eya protivogosudarstvennyi kharakter,” Russkoe slovo, 1895, no. 107, 1–2.

The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians (Subbotniks) Nicholas Breyfogle

One of the least well-known chapters in the remarkable and vibrant history of religiosity in Russia is the story of the Sabbatarians (variously known in Russian as Subbotniki, Iudeistvuiushchie, Zhidovstvuiushchie, and Gery, among numerous other appellations; here I generally use “Subbotniks” as a blanket term).1 Subbotniks were ethnic Russians who adhered to some, or all, of the tenets and laws of Judaism as they interpreted them. Throughout the nineteenth century, they debated to what degree a true believer should follow the dictates of Mosaic Law and how close to Judaism a person should gravitate in order to worship God properly and attain salvation. As a result, the beliefs and practices of those who considered themselves Subbotniks (or whom the state labeled as Subbotniks) varied widely. On one end of the spectrum were those who kept the Sabbath on Saturday, believed the Old Testament to be of greater importance than the New, followed some Mosaic rules, and might still consider themselves Christians in some form or other (or continue to practice various Christian practices). At the other end were those who identified themselves as Jewish (“I am of the tribe of Abraham,” declared one),2 followed Jewish law as closely as they could, denied Christ’s divinity, refused to recognize the Trinity, hired rabbis to conduct their services in Hebrew, took biblical names, joined Jewish communities, and married Jews. In between these poles, Subbotniks followed any combination of the above-mentioned practices as well as circumcision,

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Jewish dietary restrictions and ritual slaughter, Jewish sartorial customs (especially tallit and tefillin), Jewish holidays (particularly Passover), Jewish services (conducted in Russian and eventually Hebrew), and the Jewish custom of using separate cemeteries. As such, the people who fell within the “Subbotnik” category—and the label was often assigned to quite distinct communities by officials, clerics, and other observers—were a highly diverse and hardly unified religious grouping, whose internal differences and disagreements were often severe.3 The Subbotniks entered the modern historical record in the late eighteenth and especially early nineteenth centuries when, quite suddenly (at least from the perspective of tsarist authorities) their communities appeared in a variety of locales around the empire, including Saratov, Astrakhan, Voronezh, Stavropol’, Riazan, Tula, Orel, Penza, and Moscow Provinces. They expanded in number noticeably in the first half of the nineteenth century (at least more of them were found and catalogued by state census agents during these years).4 Almost immediately, tsarist officials and Orthodox clerics strove to clamp down on this Subbotnik faith, fearing them on two fronts. On the one hand, they saw the Subbotniks as yet another dangerous example of the tendency of Russian Orthodox Christians to embrace dissident forms of Christianity (from the Old Believers to the Molokans, Dukhobors, Skoptsy, Khlysty, among many others),5 which secular and religious authorities alike saw as a threat to the social, moral, and political order. On the other hand, the authorities feared that the Subbotniks might represent some sort of pernicious Jewish influence on the purportedly unsuspecting and gullible Russian peasantry. Concern over Jewish influence was running very high in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries because the partitions of Poland (and the later acquisition of the Congress Kingdom of Poland) had brought a large Jewish population into Russia for the first time in centuries. Russian officialdom and elite society were trying to figure out what to make of, and do with, this new and unknown population.6 Efforts to suppress the Subbotniks came quickly, including trials, arrests, and forced resettlement (especially to the Caucasus Mountains region and Siberia).7 What most Subbotniks shared, then, even if they did not always practice the same religion, was a strong memory of suffering for their faith, especially during the reign of Nicholas I.8 Despite state mistreatment and at times a cold shoulder from Jews in Russia who considered them trespassing and mystifying goyim, the Subbotniks have shown a remarkable longevity and continue to this day to live in

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Russia and other locations around the world. Throughout, there has been an intense debate involving Subbotniks, tsarist and Soviet officials, Jews in Russia, Israel, and the United States (among others), and even Nazis in France over whether and in what ways they should be considered “Jewish.” Most recently, the Subbotniks were at the center of a legal case before the Supreme Court in Israel concerning their status as “Jews” and their rights of aliyah (immigration to Israel).9 The religious history of tsarist Russia’s Subbotniks speaks to the enduring richness of the ever-evolving spiritual amalgam that the people of eastern Europe forged together in the modern era. It underscores the way in which the territory that is now Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, Lithuania, and Russia has acted for centuries as a vibrant meeting ground of different variants of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and paganism. Creative and forceful new religious movements, like that of the Subbotniks, evolved through synthesis and competition.10 The policies and practices of various state powers—frequently vying for control and influence—further catalyzed new religious formations through persecution, naming, and resettlement. At the same time, the story of the Subbotniks underscores the vibrancy of the religious world that existed in rural peasant and Cossack communities. In their small huts and interconnected—if often out-of-the-way— villages, they struggled, worried, discussed, and sought out the best route to salvation and spiritual truth. Here we find a flourishing of creative ideas among peasants, who took the beliefs and practices of Orthodox Christianity and then reformulated them according to their own understandings of the Bible. Moreover, the story of the Subbotniks serves as an important reminder to be wary of assigning clearly demarcated boundaries between “Jew” and “Christian”—even if clerics and others at the time aspired to such a dichotomy. Rather than discrete groups in terms of beliefs and practices, Jews and Christians should be understood as forming part of a spectrum of religiosity with the hues and shades of faith and practice often blending with one another and influencing each other.11 The Subbotniks are but one example of this sort of spiritual mixing, boundary crossing, and interconnectedness. That the Jumpers (“Pryguny,” Christian religious community that developed in the first half of the nineteenth century) kept Mosaic laws such as the dietary restrictions and placed special importance on the Old Testament is indicative of the ways that a fertile fusion of religious views and practices was readily available in these lands for Russian peasants to choose from and explore.12

Arkhangel Astrakhan Baku (Shemakha) Bessarabia Caspian (see also Elisavetpol’ and Baku) Dagestan oblast’ Don oblast’ Ekaterinoslav Elisavetpol’ Eniseisk Erivan Georgia (see also Tiflis ) Iaroslavl’ Iakutsk Irkutsk Irkutsk with Iakutsk Kaluga Kars oblast’ Kavkaz (see also Stavropol’, Dagestan, Terek, Kuban) Kharkov Kherson Kiev g. Kronshtadt Kuban oblast’ Kursk Lifland Moscow

Province

Year

Name given to Sabbatarian group

295

1825

Zhidovstvuiushchie

403

376

274

315

1653

915 1

915 31

196

135

1382

17

326

2 9

1827

Subbotniki

247

10

2 15

1826

Subbotniki

37 150

1344

529

71

585

65

1837

Subbotniki

1

6

3

1248

664

220

1839

Subbotniki

Table 4. Population Estimates of “Subbotnik” Communities in Tsarist Russia, 1825–1915

1

31

865

607

1215

1841

Subbotniki

1631

1842

Subbotniki

1659

95

1843

Subbotniki

2128

155

1844

Subbotniki & Iudeistvuiushchie

362 Nicholas Breyfogle

Total of column

Nizhegorod Novgorod g. Odessa Olonets Orenburg Orlov Perm’ Riazan g. Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg Samara Samarkand oblast’ Saratov Semipalatinsk oblast’ Simbirsk Sloboda Ukraine Stavropol’ Syr-Daria oblast’ Tavricheskaia Tambov Terek oblast’ Tiflis Tobol’sk Tobol’sk and Omsk Tomsk Tula Turgai oblast’ Ufa Ural oblast’ Viatka Vil’no Voronezh Zeml’ia voiskaia donskikh kazakakh Zeml’ia voiska Chernomorskogo

100

5864

59

39 7120

785

879

167

13 56

67

4786

18 4 2 1

204

235

6

7

1 12

1025

1121

41

1

217

60

62 72

50

130 393

1

1120

408

9

2

6

1

6 16 720 100 37

11 67 2

4377

1

6

1

528

15

1252

11

77 339

5

4470

1

87 1

508

694

17

81 359

3

(continued)

The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians 363

Arkhangel Astrakhan Baku (Shemakha) Bessarabia Caspian (see also Elisavetpol’ and Baku) Dagestan oblast’ Don oblast’ Ekaterinoslav Elisavetpol’ Eniseisk Erivan Georgia (see also Tiflis ) Iaroslavl’ Iakutsk Irkutsk Irkutsk with Iakutsk Kaluga Kars oblast’ Kavkaz (see also Stavropol’, Dagestan, Terek, Kuban) Kharkov Kherson Kiev g. Kronshtadt Kuban oblast’ Kursk Lifland Moscow Nizhegorod Novgorod

Province

Year

Name given to Sabbatarian group

148

28

7

1467

262

2338

57

1846

Iudeistvuiushchie

198

883

448

3239

1886

Subbotniki

28

619

1912

Molokane Subbotniki

78 19 660

506

1954

5200

106 19 660

506

11 291

6 883

77

3498 4683

1912

Total of all 4 names

6 883

5

2076 1141

1912

Russkie Karaimy

1792

5200

1228 2116

1912

Iudeistvuiushchie

77 5 11 291 1335 1792

194 1426

1912

Subbotniki

Table 4. Population Estimates of “Subbotnik” Communities in Tsarist Russia, 1825–1915 (continued) 1915

Subbotniki

364 Nicholas Breyfogle

Total of column

g. Odessa Olonets Orenburg Orlov Perm’ Riazan g. Saint Petersburg Saint Petersburg Samara Samarkand oblast’ Saratov Semipalatinsk oblast’ Simbirsk Sloboda Ukraine Stavropol’ Syr-Daria oblast’ Tavricheskaia Tambov Terek oblast’ Tiflis Tobol’sk Tobol’sk and Omsk Tomsk Tula Turgai oblast’ Ufa Ural oblast’ Viatka Vil’no Voronezh 753 Zeml’ia voiskaia donskikh kazakakh Zeml’ia voiska Chernomorskogo

5382

114

182

535

23

134 87

4890

122

4423

8869

13 429 22

1884 250 21

106

346

43 43

34 7

158 5

404

1791 9 773

184

180

12305

753

183

155 484

4

374

466

2

4092

9 875

2317

See notes and sources page 385

29689

183 359 429 22

2145 734 21

201 52

2056 7 404

2257

184

2 180

The Religious World of Russian Sabbatarians 365

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THE ORIGINS OF THE SUBBOTNIKS

Traveling through the Caucasus Mountains in the 1990s, the Israeli-born journalist Yo’av Karny came across the Subbotnik community in the village of Elenovka near Lake Sevan in present-day Armenia. Like many Jews who have come face to face with Russians who had turned their backs on Eastern Orthodoxy and embraced the Jewish faith, Karny was both amazed and confused to stumble across this little-known branch of Judaism. Speaking with the few older people left in the community, Avram, I said, I do not understand at all. Why did your ancestors choose the God of Israel? They had never seen Jews. They lived in the most oppressively anti-Semitic state in the world. They were severely punished for their choice. So why did they do it? “No one knows,” Avram said impassively. “No one knows how it all began.”13

The genesis of the Subbotniks is indeed obscure. Tsarist-era officials and observers, together with more recent scholars, have generally posited four different origins for the Subbotniks, without reaching any definitive conclusion. Yet each of these etiologies of their beginnings—regardless of its veracity—has had significant effects on both tsarist policies and Orthodox treatment of the Sabbatarians as well as on the Sabbatarians’ sense of self and community. First, tsarist officials frequently understood the Subbotniks as representing a reappearance among Orthodox Russians of the “Judaizer heresy” that dates back to the fifteenth century. Ultimately, there is little evidence to support this viewpoint and, while widespread in the nineteenth century, it is generally now discounted.14 Second, many state and Church observers in the nineteenth century argued that the Subbotniks arose from a divergent wing of the Christian sectarian movement known as the Molokans.15 This splinter group began to keep the Sabbath on Saturday (as Christ would have done) while preserving many of their religious practices generally unchanged and producing so-called “Molokan-Subbotniks” (Saturday Molokans) and “Molokan-Voskreseniki” (Sunday Molokans).16 For these observers, the Subbotniks had little to do with Jews or Jewish-ness at all, but rather represented another chapter in the larger book of Russian Christian sectarianism.17 Indeed, the Russian countryside was then exploding with new variants of Christianity and challenges to the Orthodox Church, and the Subbotniks were hardly alone in

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the rich, vibrant, effervescent religious world that was tsarist Russia. In this explanation, the shift to Jewish practice for the Subbotniks was one that stemmed from a larger spiritual searching that characterized the mystical world of the Russian peasantry.18 Other analysts went so far as to deny any connection to Judaism at all, seeing the Subbotniks simply as a manifestation of Unitarianism and anti-Trinitarianism.19 Whether or not Subbotniks actually evolved from among Molokans (or any other Orthodox or Christian dissenting movement), many tsarist officials and Orthodox clerics held such a view of the Subbotniks’ origins. On one level, this perspective produced some confusing naming practices: for instance, “people who practice the Jewish faith, named Molokans,” as one official called a community of Sabbatarians.20 Indeed, on certain levels the “Subbotniks” came into existence as a discrete religious movement because of the insistence of tsarist officials and Church elites in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to classify them as such regardless of their actual religious beliefs and practices, lumping together diverse religious tendencies under more simple labels. More important, the decision to see the roots and essence of the Sabbatarians in Christian nonconformism also affected tsarist religious policy in significant ways. In particular, by not recognizing the Subbotniks as “Jews” but rather as “sectarians,” the Subbotniks were placed in a much more restrictive religious category and were barred, as “sectarians,” from receiving many of the benefits that Jews did. Such was particularly the case concerning the right to build prayer houses. Tsarist law specifically forbade sectarians from building houses of worship, whereas Jews, as representatives of an officially recognized non-Russian religious faith, were entitled to synagogues. In the nineteenth century, Subbotnik places of worship were repeatedly closed because they were legally categorized as “Russian” and “sectarian”—this despite extensive Subbotnik efforts to define themselves as Jews.21 Like Karny, quoted above, most Jewish observers of the Subbotniks—both then and now—were baffled as to why any Russian would want to have himself considered a “Jew” given all the painful mistreatment Jews faced in Russia. Yet being categorized as a “sectarian” was legally far worse than being “Jewish,” which was a marked step up in legal rights and treatment. This is not to argue that Russian sectarians consciously chose to be “Subbotniks” solely in an effort to improve their legal condition—Subbotniks had generally already shifted their religious practice before they became concerned not only to define themselves as Jews but to ensure that the state did as well. Rather, the ways that Russians chose to explain the origins of the Sabbatarian movement—as

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an outgrowth of Christian sectarianism, for example—profoundly affected their legal status and public identity. In consequence, Subbotniks struggled throughout the tsarist era to have themselves legally defined as Jews. According to one journalist, A. I. Masalkin: “Considering themselves followers of the teachings of God’s original chosen people, they do not consider themselves raskol’niki [schismatics] or sectarians and wherever they run into the necessity of describing themselves they will say and write ‘Jewish faith’ [veroispovedaniia iudeiskago].”22 Yet tsarist officials and prominent publicists refused to accept this self-definition. As one newspaper author wrote: Coming from the Russian family, belonging to her in spirit and in flesh, having left at one time from their shared religion and taken up the laws of Moses, Subbotniks should not be permitted to merge with the Jewish nation [evreiskoiu natseiu] which is entirely foreign to them in ancestry . . . since the separation of them from the Russian people who are tied to them by blood [ibo otdelenie ikh ot krovno-sviazannago s nimi russkago naroda] . . . would castrate the feeling of national self-love [natsional'nago samoliubiia], and . . . would tear them away from a united body. . . . By necessity Russian sectarians are separated from the Empire’s governing Church. But the law does not separate them from the nation, and by placing them in the situation of raskol'niki, it joins them to the Russian family, and prohibits only the further spread of their newly adopted faith (or heresy from the Orthodox point of view) which is considered dangerous for society and the interests of the dominant religion.23

Another author asserted: “Being in all respects Russian [russkie], in language, customs, situation and clothing, they sometimes call themselves Jews, or simply zhidy, they give Biblical names to their children . . . , circumcise them, and adopt many external signs of Judaism. But, in general, I repeat that these people are those self-same Russians . . . good souls, hard-working and honest.”24 Third, and most commonly, tsarist officials attempted to ascribe the appearance of the Subbotniks to their contact with Jews. For Orthodox leaders, Subbotniks were the illegitimate progeny of the interaction of Jews and Orthodox Russians.25 In the 1810s, the Bishop of Voronezh, for one, believed that the Russian peasants in his flock had come into contact with Jews around 1796, had appropriated some Jewish beliefs and practices (including circumcision of adults and children, marriage and burial according to

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Jewish practice, separation from their wives during menstruation, and worship on Saturdays “according to the Old Testament”), and then had helped to spread these Jewish ideas to their neighbors.26 On one level, the decision to see the Subbotniks as the outcome of Jewish-Russian peasant contact is unsurprising given the general tendency of tsarist officials and Orthodox clerics to see the peasantry as “dark,” unenlightened people who were easily swayed by cunning outsiders and devious leaders, and who were unlikely to develop complicated religious perspectives on their own. At the same time, the choice of the Jews as debauchers of the otherwise stout-hearted peasantry was part of a larger process through which Russian officialdom and society was coming to terms with what they called the “Jewish Question.” In the wake of the partitions of Poland in the late eighteenth century (and then the creation of the Congress Kingdom of Poland after the Napoleonic Wars), Russians found themselves not only with the much-coveted Polish territories but also with the largest concentration of Jewish settlements in Europe. Just how to think about and to govern these Jews became a central concern of state leadership in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries—a new “problem,” as Muscovy and Imperial Russia had not had Jews living in its borders for generations. One consequence of this “Jewish Question” was a fear of Jewish connivance and a concern to protect the supposedly “child-like” Russian peasants from nefarious Jewish influences. By the 1820s, some in the Ministry of the Interior had come to fear particularly the influence of Karaite Jews, with their renunciation of the Talmud, and saw them as particularly active in trying to influence the Subbotniks.27 The concern that Jews were the cause of the Subbotnik movement led tsarist officials to take certain actions in response. In particular, they worked to separate Subbotniks from Jews, which was ultimately not difficult because, despite tsarist assumptions, few Jews and Subbotniks lived near each other. They made it illegal for Jews to live anywhere near Subbotnik communities, and those who were already there were sent away. Subbotniks too were banished from their homes, often to Siberia and South Caucasia, in an effort to separate them from their co-religionists and also from nearby Jews.28 The state also sent in priests in an effort to help the Subbotniks leave behind their “errors,” although this was to be done carefully and softly. Officials began an intense effort to collect data and knowledge on the Subbotniks so as better to combat them.29 They also employed an unusual shaming tactic. Officials believed that Russian peasants were by nature haters of Jews; therefore, in an effort to tarnish the Subbotniks with the same negative brush, there was

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an official decision to call the Subbotniks “zhidy [Yids]” in all official documents. In 1825, for example, the Tsarist Committee of Ministers informed governors that “since nothing can have as big an impact on the simple people as disdain, contempt, and being made fun of,” local officials should use the terminology “zhid” or “zhidovskaia sekta” henceforth when referring to the Subbotniks. The name “Subbotnik” was not sufficiently descriptive, they argued, and “does not produce a repugnance” in the Russian people the way that “Yid” did. By linking the Subbotniks with Jews, state authorities hoped to reduce the possibility of further Jewish influence and to dissuade any neighboring Russian peasants from joining.30 Notably, banishment of Subbotniks to the periphery of the empire in an effort to restrict and suppress the new religious movement actually ensured the rapid geographical spread of the religious movement to the far-flung parts of the empire where state control was often much weaker. Movement came at a cost, however. Tsarist regulations required, in many cases, that Subbotniks slated for relocation leave behind their children. Here, tsarist officials hoped to prevent the passage of Subbotnik ideas from one generation to another. Many Subbotnik documents relay the agony of having to leave their children behind to be raised by others, especially Orthodox Christians. However, their certitude in their new faith made them willing to break from their children and start anew.31 In addition to these three nineteenth-century explanations, with the distance of time one can see that the changing nature of tsarist religious policy also helped to bring the Subbotniks to life, or at least out into the light. Especially from 1797 on, there was a rush of “discoveries” of the Subbotniks by tsarist officials in various provinces across the empire. It seems clear that there had been communities of people who practiced Sabbatarian beliefs before this date, but that the Subbotniks came into the historical record as a result of a combination, on the one hand, of greater interest and intervention in the religious lives of the population on the part of tsarist authorities and Orthodox Church clerics and, on the other hand, of an enhanced willingness on the part of Subbotniks publicly to declare their faith rather than keep it secret and continue to practice the rituals of Eastern Orthodoxy (even if they no longer believed in them). A broad shift in religious practice took place during the reigns of Catherine the Great (1762–1796) and her grandson Alexander I (1801–1825) that made these changes possible. Early in the latter’s reign, for instance, the young tsar took a quite different approach to religious dissent than his predecessors, focusing on tolerance of religious diversity and the use of persuasion rather than coercion in conversion efforts.

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Within weeks of taking the throne, Alexander ordered that when dealing with those “who have deviated from the correct faith and the rightful Holy Church” because of their “simplicity and ignorance,” spiritual authorities were to replace “severity” and “coercion” with “meekness, patience and diligent insistence which alone can assuage the cruelest heart and lead them from inveterate stubbornness.” The response on the part of Russian peasant believers to this and many other policy statements was increasingly to go public with their “heresies.” They understood Alexander I’s policy declarations as statements of religious toleration, which would mean they no longer needed to hide their non-Orthodox beliefs and practices in fear. The result was an intense and expanding religious ferment that gripped the southern Russian countryside and produced waves of dissenting religious movements.32 In contrast to these four origin narratives set forth by tsarist officials and other observers then and now, the Subbotniks themselves have told a variety of different stories about their beginnings, almost all religiously based. For many who chose to embrace sabbatarianism, the ultimate impetus was concern over salvation—“that the Jewish faith was better than the Christian faith for the salvation of the soul.”33 For others, when asked about their origins—why they had left behind Orthodoxy—there were those Subbotniks who claimed that it was not a matter of having abandoned Orthodoxy since they and their ancestors had for generations already—always, some said—remained faithful to the laws of the Old Testament.34 Moreover, Subbotniks also explained the beginnings of their move toward Judaism as, in part, an effort to imitate Christ. One Subbotnik, when asked by an Orthodox priest why he had left Orthodoxy, replied that he had simply embraced the religion of Christ. “Christ, what faith was he? Jewish? And so I went over to his faith.”35 Here the porousness of boundaries and the slipperiness of categories in tsarist Russia are manifest, as efforts to be more Christian by imitating Christ brought them closer to Judaism. Most often and most important, however, when Subbotniks in the tsarist period were offered a chance to describe their origins, they attributed their religious transformation to reading the Bible (most likely having the Bible read to them). As one Subbotnik relayed in the early twentieth century, “Reading the Bible—The Old and New Testaments, in Church Slavonic— was the first and foundational shock to the conversion of Orthodox families to the Jewish faith.”36 Indeed, in one court trial in the early part of the nineteenth century, when asked who had taught them the new faith, one Subbotnik had some fun with the judge: “An old, aged old man.” When the

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judge asked for the old man to be summoned to appear before the court, the Subbotnik went home and, evidently with a smile on his face, brought his Bible to court.37 The importance of the Old Testament and biblical writings remained with the Subbotniks throughout the nineteenth century. As another Subbotnik noted early in the twentieth century, “Life is Hell, the Bible is the net of human souls, of live fish. . . . I carry the net with me. I see a living fish, I put out the net and save it from hell.” Many Subbotnik communities accepted neither kabbalistic texts nor the Talmud as sacred texts, only the Old Testament.38 The centrality of reading the Bible to the formation of the Subbotnik religious community was not unusual at this time. During the reign of Alexander I, the Russian Bible Society made available throughout Russia the Slavonic Bible and other Holy Scriptures in more than forty languages and in impressively large print runs (hundreds of thousands of copies, a hitherto unprecedented feat in Russian publishing history). Translations of the New Testament and Psalter into modern Russian had appeared by the time the RBS closed in 1826, as had a translation of the Old Testament, at least up to the book of Ruth. As Stephen Batalden has argued, “At least for a brief decade in the nineteenth century, technological changes in printing—particularly the early development of stereotyping—facilitated a major new publishing effort that challenged the prevailing political and religious culture.”39 Much of the southern parts of Russia experienced a religious ferment as a result of the sudden appearance of Bibles and an increase in people who would interpret and spread the Holy Scriptures.40 The few literate members of the community tended to read from the Bible to others and to carry on services; individual travelers would bring the word of the Bible with them to share. BECOMING “JEWISH”: SUBBOTNIKS AND JEWS

The few tsarist-era Subbotniks who have left behind written records are emphatic that they did not initially learn their new faith from Jews, since there were so few in their provinces, but only later came into contact with them. Upon arriving in Siberian exile, for instance, the Subbotniks had meager knowledge of Jews and of Jewish practices. “In the internal provinces of Russia, they [the Subbotniks] almost never met Jews, and had no one to learn Jewish rituals from.”41 For them, the shift in faith was a result of personal searching and direct engagement with the Holy Scriptures, not something simply handed to them fully formed through contact with Jews.

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Yet, if Jewish influence was generally lacking in the initial shift of the Russian peasants to sabbatarianism, contact and influence increased over the nineteenth century. The expanded interrelations began in part because of the dispersal of Subbotniks to various peripheral points of the empire that put them into contact (often for the first time) with Jews. More important, certain segments among the Subbotniks, in an effort to become more “Jewish,” actively sought out Jews to teach them. In a number of cases, Subbotniks who considered themselves Jews (or Judaized; roditeli moi uzhe “gerstvovali”) nonetheless felt that they possessed a limited understanding of Jewish practice, ritual, and law. These “deficiencies”—as they themselves often understood it and as Jewish passersby certainly saw it—led to a desire to learn from Jews. The reverse was also true—there were some Jews who were more than happy to work with the Subbotniks and enlighten them in proper Jewish ways. These interactions were by no means always harmonious, but they transformed a segment of the Subbotniks from a group who began by embracing the Old Testament and Mosaic practice to one that more closely approximated Judaism. Over time, many Subbotniks increasingly embraced Judaism in its entirety, and the purity of “Jewish” practice became a baseline by which the Subbotniks judged themselves. Of course, there was not simply one “Judaism” to which they could aspire, and many of the same divisions that split Jews apart came also to fracture the Subbotniks. For instance, among Subbotniks there was also a divide between Talmudists and Karaites.42 Even more important than what variant of Judaism the Subbotniks chose to approximate was who would teach them. The specifics of Judaism could vary drastically because many of the Jewish teachers were by no means learned religious figures but rather Jewish traders and artisans who roamed the countryside or political exiles to Siberia. These Jews were not always the most upstanding or knowledgable individuals to begin with, and Subbotniks at times complained about their low morals. Many obstacles stood in the way of these relations, not the least of which were tsarist legal and police efforts to stop them. To further complicate matters, many Jews considered the Subbotniks to be outsiders and poseurs or fake Jews, treating them as second-class citizens and unwanted cousins. As one Jew described them: “Subbotniks are really ‘goys’: ignorant, dirty tillers of the soil, and everywhere good-for-nothing people.”43 Moreover, other more practical matters blocked meaningful interaction. For instance, while Subbotniks often looked to Jewish preachers and/or rabbis for direction and advice—and some even tried to hire them to live with and minister

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to their communities—the fact that few maggidim spoke enough Russian made these sorts of relations difficult.44 Moreover, even when communities wished to embrace a fuller version of Judaism, they often found themselves blocked for lack of appropriate functionaries. The Subbotniks of Elenovka in Erivan Province wanted to keep kosher, for example, but much to their consternation the absence of a nearby shoh≥et (ritual slaughterer) made it impossible.45 Similarly, the absence of a locally available mohel complicated the circumcision process—one might be brought in temporarily for the circumcision, but he was often not there on the right day and then left again as soon as he arrived.46 The Elenovka Subbotniks employed a rabbi for a short time as a prayer service leader, although his dismissal from the community reflected the very large differences that separated Jewish and Subbotnik culture and practice.47 Despite these obstacles, some Subbotniks consciously sought out more contact with Jews and strove to learn from them. In some cases, these interactions happened by accident. In one story, a wandering Jewish artisan had taken up temporary residence in what seemed to him a Russian peasant village (although he immediately noticed the absence of icons). He kept his Jewish identity secret. However, he began to realize that the peasants in the village were beginning the Sabbath on Friday nights, lighting candles and following other Mosaic practices. Eventually, both the artisan and the Subbotniks realized who the other was and began a long period of interaction and learning.48 In other cases, the contact was much more consciously chosen. By the early twentieth century, for instance, some Subbotniks sent their sons away to learn from rabbis elsewhere in the empire (especially to Vilna).49 Jews, too, made special efforts to enlighten Subbotnik communities. In one instance, a traveling Jew—a Vitebsk merchant and master distiller by the name of Levin—came to the village of Elets (Saratov Province), where he knew there were followers of the Jewish faith, and he stayed with them for some time. Like many, Levin’s teachings involved much critique of Subbotnik practices. He told them that “they could not in any way properly fulfill the Jewish faith since they did not have the proper books, or a rabbi, without which, and without the proper Biblical regulations, it was not possible to keep the faith.” Among other things, Levin scolded the villagers that it was not acceptable to circumcise oneself.50 Similarly, in a different example of a Jewish-led reformation of a Subbotnik community, the first thing the Jewish “teacher” brought to the Subbotniks was a tallit and tefillin to wear, so that they would know properly how to pray. He then had them build a mikveh

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(ritual bath), after which he taught the women “all their female behaviors: like to plunge in. How to cut one’s nails, how to look so that on the body there would not be a single stranger’s hair—everything as it should be.” When Passover came, he explained to them how to clean the mill. He also taught the children how to read prayers from the Bible and the broader community how properly to kill and cut livestock and fowl; and he took on the role of cantor. He lived with the community on the Volga for four years before moving on.51 In Siberia, the Subbotniks who came to live in the little village of Zima found that several Jewish families lived there also. These Jews took on extremely important roles in bringing the Subbotniks’ faith and ritual closer to that of standard Judaism. The Jewish villagers carried out circumcision on the arriving Subbotniks, and taught them (“like children”) the Jewish faith and Hebrew language. For their part, the Subbotniks often took Jewish arrivals in need of shelter into their homes. At least in the early days, services were separated between Jews and Subbotniks in Siberia—a separation that was in many ways only natural. Subbotniks through much of the nineteenth century spoke, prayed, and read only in Russian (if they read at all), and utilized a Church Slavonic Bible. Some might try to pray in Hebrew, using prayer books with the Hebrew original transliterated into Cyrillic letters, but they did so without understanding what they were saying.52 Most Subbotniks continued to pray in Russian, arguing that it made little sense to conduct prayer services in Hebrew when they did not understand the words. For them the understanding of the prayers was more important than the actual language in which prayers were written. Similarly, across the vast expanse of the Russian empire, Subbotniks in Tiflis (now Tbilisi, Georgia) wanted access to Jewish books and oaths in Russian language, and read the Torah in Russian.53 Over time, the interest of Subbotniks in the printed religious word fostered a push toward literacy, especially in Russian but also in Hebrew. Among the Subbotniks of Elenovka village in Erivan Province, for instance, observers noted that they were for all intents and purposes Jewish in their beliefs and practices, with the exception of the Talmud, which they could not read because they did not have sufficient Hebrew. However, there was little doubt that this would soon change and that the Subbotniks would soon be fluent in Hebrew; it was “only a matter of time.”54 Among the Sabbatarians in Siberia, many of the impediments that divided Jews from Sabbatarians fell away over the course of the nineteenth century. Some of the more religious Subbotniks began to pray along with

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the Jews in the village and to break down the divide. It was during these sessions that the Subbotniks first began to really learn Jewish rituals and practices. They started to translate the Jewish prayer books into Russian. They became increasingly concerned to form a minyan (prayer quorum) and to separate men from women during services. Over time, they began to replace Russian in their services with Hebrew, as some of the spiritual leaders of the community learned the language, and took to wearing a tallit and tefillin.55 Marriage between Jews and Subbotniks was rare, but did occur, usually a Subbotnik woman marrying a Jewish man.56 After about thirty years, the Subbotniks in Zima, Siberia, took possession of a Torah scroll, which the local Jews helped them to obtain. They also began to adhere more strictly to ritual purity laws for women during their menstrual cycle, and to keep more strictly kosher. They took on Jewish names. They began to follow major Jewish holidays, including Passover, Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, H˘anukkah, Purim, and Rosh H˘odesh.57 Throughout the late Imperial tsarist period, debate flourished among Subbotniks all over tsarist Russia over how far to become Jewish. For some, only complete absorption into Jewish life and ritual was acceptable, and by the end of the nineteenth century there was great frustration on the part of the most zealous Subbotniks that their co-religionists had remained too distinct from Jewish religious life.58 In some cases, there was marked integration into Jewish life: certain Jewish communities quite readily took the Subbotniks into their communal life. In Tsaritsyn, for example, a Subbotnik served as the cantor in the local synagogue. Elsewhere, in the village of Solodinki in Astrakhan Province, the leaders of the Subbotniks were taken into the Jewish community by the local spiritual rabbi, changing their names to Shmuel and Abraham. The rabbi then married these men and, later, others according to Jewish rites.59 In the town of Lenkoran (Baku Province, on the border of Persia) officials gave permission to a group of twenty-two Jews who arrived in the region to intermarry with Subbotniks since there were no female Jews in the area. This intermarriage facilitated a fusion of religions as the Jews passed on to their Subbotnik spouses the tenets and rites of their faith.60 Yet, even with those who went to the greatest extremes of embracing Judaism, and despite all these transformations and approximations of Jewishness, it was not uncommon for Subbotniks still to consider themselves, in the words of one of the Siberian Subbotniks, “artificial Jews” (Subbotniki sut’ iskusstvennye evrei).61 Similarly, many Gery saw themselves as somehow

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lower in the Jewish hierarchy than “real” Jews. “We, Gery, should remember our place. It is said that during the Jews’ exodus from Egypt, the Gery were for them little more than a scab in their skin.” At the same time, the Gery realized that, unlike born Jews who would remain Jews whether or not they were observant, if the Gery turned non-observant, then they would no longer be members of the chosen people.62 AWAITING THE MESSIAH AND THE DREAM OF PALESTINE

At the heart of Subbotnik religiosity was the refutation that Jesus was the Messiah, although they generally saw him as an enlightened prophet. Instead, they lived in the passionate expectation of the prophesied Messiah’s arrival. As one Subbotnik noted, “I believe in the anointed one of God, the named Messiah, and every hour I wait for his arrival.”63 When asked why they did not believe that the Messiah had already arrived, another Subbotnik replied: “Because in the Bible it is said that ‘when the Messiah arrives, Israel will live quietly.’ And is it really the case that Israel lives peacefully right now? You [NBB: Russian Christians] are striking it and tormenting it, and subjecting it to any and all kinds of defamation. That means that the Messiah has not yet arrived.”64 The Subbotnik understanding of the Messiah varied from community to community and from region to region. Observers of the Subbotniks in the South Caucasus noted that they saw the coming Messiah not as divine but as the arrival of a great prophet (from 2 Esdras), and that he would be born of a virgin (from Isaiah 7:14). They also believed in the existence of the ten generations who would reside at Ephrath, and with whom the Subbotniks would unite at the end of the world.65 One Orthodox critic of the Subbotniks in Tambov Province wrote: The zhidovstvuiushchie delight in the understanding of the person of the Messiah. In the opinion of the shaposhniki [“hat wearers,” talmudist Subbotniks], this Messiah has not yet arrived. He will appear at the end of the second millennium of our era and will be a great earthly tsar, under the power of whom all the clean Jews and the “converts” will be united with him in Jerusalem from among the pagans [iazichniki] (Isa. 56:1–7).66

Other Subbotniks were less certain or triumphant about the coming Messiah. Some expected that the Messiah would appear at some point, but had

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little sense when and were unsure what the Messiah might do or accomplish upon his arrival.67 For most Subbotniks, however, the arrival of the Messiah could not have been a more triumphant event. They believed that when the Messiah appeared he would reduce the enemies of Israel to ashes. Christians who had believed in the “cunning Christ” would perish while the Subbotniks would be saved along with the other “descendants of Abraham.”68 As one observer noted, All people, the Subbotniks dream, will be required to submit to the Jews and be their personal slaves. And the Jews will own homes that they themselves didn’t build, and vineyards that they didn’t plant. And they will suckle at the breasts of the daughters of tsars, and the elite of the goys will be happy to give them their daughters as concubines. The recalcitrant peoples “will languish on their knees,” that is they will be slaughtered.69

As newcomers to Judaism, Subbotniks saw themselves as enjoying the same rights and laws as the Jews, including similar land allotments and similar opportunities to rule.70 However, some took their understanding of the implications of the coming Messiah even further, arguing that they would take a preeminent place in the world of the Messiah because they were voluntary converts to the “true path” of Judaism. “The Zhidovstvuiushchie were not content with this and said that the native-born [prirodnye] Jews were guilty of idol-worship and the killing of prophets; and they said that they, the sectarians, were clean of these sins and, in addition, had freely embraced the sacred precepts. In consequence, they have the right to the best locations in Palestine,” building these ideas from Isaiah 56:1–7 and 49:22–23, and Deuteronomy 6:10–11.71 At the end of the nineteenth century and with rising intensity in the early twentieth century, there was an increasingly strong movement on the part of the Subbotniks—indeed, a cherished dream—to migrate to Palestine to greet the coming of the Messiah who would destroy the kingdom of pagans (especially Christians).72 A combination of motivating factors lay at the heart of this desire to relocate. Certainly, Subbotniks felt an urge to move to Palestine in order to leave tsarist Russia—a polity they associated with persecution. At the same time, land considerations and the possibility for greater economic success in Palestine than in Russia helped impel some to move to the Holy Land. In one case in Astrakhan Province in the mid-1880s, the leader of the “Molokan-Karaites” (as the Orthodox author

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labeled them) was complaining that the local priest was misappropriating and misusing local lands, because he was not dividing the lands “according to the laws of Moses.” The leader began to announce “that it was time to begin to prepare to resettle to Jerusalem, where they awaited all the benefits of those who fulfill the laws of Moses.”73 Yet reporters covering the Subbotnik resettlement efforts noted that many of those moving were merchants of some economic means who had the wealth to travel in style and, more important, the wealth available to purchase land on the other end—which casts some doubt on land need as a causal agent of emigration. Whatever material incentives were at play, however, religious concerns were primary for most emigrants. The desire to live in a location where they would not be pressured to work on Saturdays and where they would be surrounded by their co-religionists represented a golden opportunity.74 Perhaps even more important, the migrants moved in anticipation of the imminent arrival of the Messiah. For many Subbotniks at the turn of the century, there were events taking place on earth that marked his imminent approach and the time had come for them to go and prepare the ground for his coming. In particular, they regarded the transportation revolution that accompanied European and American industrialization as a crucial sign. Technological improvements that eased mobility heralded the coming Messiah because they permitted Jews from around the world more easily, comfortably, safely, and cheaply to meet in Palestine, where in the Valley of Josephat the Messiah would come to judge all the peoples of the world.75 In particular, as propitious signs, they pointed to the opening of the Suez Canal and the construction of the Panama Canal; the laying of railroads through the Alps, Balkans (especially to Constantinople), Central Asia and Siberia, Asia, Africa, and Australia; and the building of roads and the expansion of maritime travel. At the same time, European wars heralded the ascension of Jewish power since these wars were “goyish” wars that served only to weaken these great powers. And this weakness would only make it easier for the Jews, upon the arrival of the Messiah, to destroy them. The active expectation of the Messiah, and agitation to move to Palestine, took on new life among the Subbotniks in the 1880s, especially in Astrakhan Province. “Every day they waited for the Messiah. In the Bazaars they discussed it. Crowded together in heaps, they drew maps of Palestine directly onto the soil and then divided the lands among themselves. They sent scouts to Palestine to look over the best locations.” Women, for their part, prepared for the road. They baked rich buns [pyshka] or dried crusts

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[kokurok] so that they would be ready when a Persian boat came to take them to Palestine.76 The talk of the end of the world consumed much of their day-to-day discussions. For instance, the Subbotniks debated at great length what would happen to their family members who were not Subbotniks and were therefore not among the chosen—“mixed” marriages, especially with Molokans but also with Orthodox and Old Believers, were not uncommon. Would their family and “good neighbors” who were Christians be forced to suffer along with the others? After three to four meetings, filled with shouting and noise and intense debate, the Subbotniks had come to no resolution.77 That this sort of spiritual ferment appeared in Astrakhan Province is not surprising. Beginning in the 1860s, there were certain parts of the province that developed into highly religiously charged locales, with hundreds, sometimes thousands of people—including Subbotniks, Orthodox, and Molokans— meeting for public discussions and debates on religious questions, usually on the basis of quotations from the Bible and with representatives of each group waving their Bibles and jabbing their fingers at the sacred words on the pages to make their points. Similarly, in the mid-1880s elsewhere in the province, according to one priest writing in the Astrakhan eparchial newspaper, the Akhtubin Subbotniks every single day were waiting for the arrival of the Messiah, who, according to their beliefs, will collect and return to Palestine all of the Jews who are currently dispersed. In addition, the Messiah will subjugate all the peoples and force their tsars and princes to their knees to supply Jews on their Promised Land, where the rivers run with milk, and the mountains will pour out honey, etc. The Jews would settle there in the houses built for them by tsars, with gardens and vineyards, planted by them, and the tsars and peoples would be in Israel as servants for them. But even more fortunate things await the Subbotniks themselves, according to their views. The Messiah will put them, as voluntary converts, even better and higher than the Jews, because they have not taken part in the sins of the latter.78

In this case, they sent scouts to go find the best land in Palestine, but only got as far as Odessa, where they ran out of money and were forced to return. A decade later, in the 1890s, we can see a similar process in action. One Subbotnik who was in military service in the South Caucasus sent a letter with songs to his co-religionists, a poem in acrostic form that mused

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on the meanings of Isaiah 43:10 and Jeremiah 31:30–32. He writes that he had received news about all the great doings in Palestine: that many Jewish colonies were appearing, especially in places where in ancient times there had been Jewish settlements (he mentions “our ancestors” here, clearly linking the Subbotniks to the Jews). The author believed that everything was going so perfectly in the process of colonization—rains were coming on time and in sufficient quantities, for instance, as the Bible predicted— that he could only assume that it was according to the will of God. He also noted the importance of railroad building, as well as the portent that the children settled there were being taught in Hebrew, in preparation for the new life after the arrival of the Messiah. He also highlighted the assistance and beneficence of Baron Gershon, who “with the help of God was helping to set up his people in Palestine.”79 In response to this letter and poem, Shmuel Dmitrievich Grachev, the head “rabbi” of the local Subbotniks, wrote to Paris to the “sustainer” of the Jewish colonies in Palestine, Baron Rothschild, asking him to provide the funds to send them to Palestine. He explained to Rothschild that they, “having taken up the Jewish faith,” worked in a variety of trades that could be useful for the Jewish settlements in Palestine. The response from Paris came from a Rabbi Lubtskii, who, while noting that Baron Rothschild could not send colonists to Palestine at the moment, did promise that if the Subbotniks could find a way to move to Palestine he would try to round up money for them in Paris.80 As these examples underscore, Subbotniks took a great deal of interest in Jewish territorialism and efforts at colonization in Palestine. For instance, Cossacks in the Kuban oblasts in the early twentieth century evinced an interest in moving to “Jewish territory,” where they might take part in a sort of Jewish religious revival.81 We see similar rumors and a similar desire to emigrate to Palestine among the Gery in Privol’noe, Baku Province, in approximately 1902. The Jewish writer An-ski, who reported this story, notes that “it began, as always, with legends.” The Privol’noe Gery heard the snippets of a speech about Zionism by Max Nordau that included the words “thunder and lightning,” and these words apparently had a peculiarly strong impact on them. They said to themselves, “The Thunder has already thundered and the lightening has blazed and the time of God has come and the Messiah has arrived.” They recognized Theodore Herzl as the Messiah, and rumors flowed that Palestine had gone to the Jews and that all one needed to do was to hurry to buy land there before others did. As was common

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practice, they sent out guides first and they could not be dissuaded from their views, despite efforts to convince them that Palestine had not in fact been taken by the Jews.82 In 1903, newspaper reporters noted the appearance in Odessa of several parties of migrant peasants from the “Subbotnik sects” from Tambov and other provinces with plans to emigrate to Palestine, where they would either set up their own agricultural activities or hire themselves out to Jewish colonists to work. However, the flow of emigrants had slowed by that date owing to insufficient economic opportunities. Some Subbotniks who had made it to Palestine even began to return to Russia. That said, Subbotniks were among the early settlers in the Galilee, and the Dubrovin Farm (founded early 1900s) is now a reconstructed tourist site owned by the Jewish National Fund.83 Notably, the expectation of the coming of the Messiah (whether the first or second coming) was by no means unique to the Subbotniks at this time, nor were the thoughts about migration and emigration. There is a long history of messianism and apocalypticism in Russian religious history—especially among those Christians who split from the Orthodox Church—and the Messiah was on the minds of many Russian peasants during the nineteenth century. In the 1830s, for instance, in the very same southern Russian milieu that helped to produce the Subbotniks, Molokans became excited and agitated for the second coming of Christ. Many Molokans took to the road to head south to the borders with Persia, where they believed Christ would arrive and begin his thousand-year reign. The idea of the imminent arrival of the Kingdom of Christ spread rapidly: “The time of the triumph of spiritual Christians over heathens has come; soon the heavenly redeemer will appear and on the holiday of Easter gather together from north to east all his chosen people, from whence He will rule with them for one thousand years . . . and this time is close, since signs of the coming of Christ have already appeared.”84 By the late nineteenth century, messianism and apocalypticism had become very common among the Russian peasantry and educated society alike.85 Moreover, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries witnessed not only the massive internal migration of Russian people, but also the demand for emigration, which the tsarist state generally tried to discourage or avoid, on the part of other religious minorities and Christian sectarian groups who lived near or with the Subbotniks. This was especially the case with the Dukhobors and Molokans of the South Caucasus region, large numbers of whom

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migrated to Canada and the United States/Mexico, respectively, in the 1890s and early 1900s.86 SABBATARIANISM IN RUSSIAN AND JEWISH HISTORY

Despite their relatively small numbers and often isolated dispersal throughout the tsarist empire, the history of the Subbotniks offers a variety of different ways to think about the broad patterns of Russian and Jewish history. In recent years, scholars of Jewish history have begun to revise the classical narrative of Jewish isolation, segregation, and otherness in the tsarist empire. Bound to “hermetically Jewish shtetls,” according to the old view, social seclusion was both self-imposed through communal practices, distinctive clothing, and conscious promotion of the Yiddish and Hebrew languages, and imposed from the outside by a tsarist state that enforced geographic and social segregation in the Pale and a Russian popular culture that disdained Jews and refused to accept them into the “Russian” fold even after conversion.87 These same scholars have also worked to rethink the general assumption that in Jewish-Russian relations it was the latter that acted upon and transformed the former; that the patterns of acculturation and assimilation worked only in one direction. For their part, Russian leaders and Orthodox clerics in the nineteenth century helped to foster this longstanding view. They tended to fear the possibility of Jewish influence on Russians, and tried as best they could not only to prevent it but to deny its existence, censoring any public discussion of conversions to Judaism. This brief foray into the history of Russian Sabbatarianism complements these historiographical trends. As the Subbotnik case underscores, Jews were more integrated, influential, and active in the broader history of tsarist Russia than the traditional picture allows. Through the Sabbatarians, Jewish religious practices and cultural ideals spread to far-flung areas of the Russian empire. Here, Jews were influential forces themselves, changing the religious world of the rural landscape; actors rather than those simply acted upon. Indeed, the case of the Subbotniks underscores one way in which Russian society acculturated to the Jewish presence and to Jewish religion and culture. The story of the Subbotniks also helps to spotlight the nature of daily life, rural contacts between Russians and Jews. Much of the focus of existing scholarship on Jewish-Russian relations has been on state policies toward Jews, the perceptions of the “Jewish Question” among the Russian educated

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public (obshchestvo), on Jewish proponents of integration, or one or another internal Jewish religious and social development, especially the Haskalah and Hasidism—and generally involves a focus on literate and educated Russians and Jews. The influence of generally unknown artisans, traders, and exiles, in addition to men of learning, on rural Russian communities has received much less attention. Yet as the history of the Subbotniks highlights, it was just such itinerants and peddlers who did much to spread Jewish religious practice among the waiting Subbotniks.88 If the story of the Subbotniks speaks to many questions in Jewish history, the same is true in Russian history. Here, the Subbotniks highlight the highly diverse and dynamic religious world in which Russian peasants made their existence. They also spotlight the ways in which—whatever processes of secularization were at work in elite Russian circles—a religious worldview dominated the cultural landscape of rural Russia throughout the nineteenth century and was a primary lens through which the major events of that time were understood and acted upon. At the same time, the Subbotniks highlight how “religious” did not necessarily mean static or unchanging. Just as faith and a spiritual worldview was changing for other Russian peasants across the empire, what it meant to be Sabbatarian in thought and practice changed over the course of the nineteenth century as the Subbotniks actively sought to transform—and in their eyes improve—their practice of worship through dedicated study of Judaism and the importation and transformation of Jewish ritual and practice as their own. Like the majority of Russian peasants, much of how Subbotniks understood the rapidly changing world around them—including world historical events such as industrialization, modernization, wars, and revolutions—was filtered through their spiritual concerns—especially such heartfelt questions as salvation, the imminent coming of the Messiah, and the appropriate ways to worship God.89 This study of the Subbotniks also contributes to our larger understanding of the ways in which tsarist Russia, arguably the world’s most multiethnic and multi-confessional state, was a powerfully creative social space. In bringing such a diverse group of peoples and religions together in the same sociopolitical unit, tsarist expansion (and social meddling and religious politics) set the stage for a vibrant and ongoing process of cultural blending through the interaction of diverse peoples in wide-ranging environments. The progeny of this ethno-confessional mixing was the formation of radically new social, cultural, and religious amalgams and identity categories like the Subbotniks.90

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NOTES The research and writing of this article were supported by grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, an independent federal agency, the National Council for Eurasian and East European Research (NCEEER) under authority of a Title VIII grant from the U.S. Department of State, the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Program, the International Research and Exchanges Board, with funds provided by the U.S. Department of State (Title VIII program), the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies, the Mershon Center, The Ohio State University College of Humanities and Department of History, and the University of Pennsylvania. None of these people and organizations is responsible for the views expressed within this text. I would like to extend my deep thanks to Kristin Collins, Vefa Erginbas, Jieun Kang, Aleksandr Polunov, and Mark Soderstrom for their very able research assistance at various stages of the research and writing of the article. I also express my thanks to Eugene Clay for his above-the-call-of-duty assistance in sharing with me population statistics for the Subbotniki that he collected. Notes and Sources to Table 4 pages 362–365: 1. These population statistics are extremely unreliable and incomplete, and need to be approached as highly impressionistic at best. Although a concerted effort at gathering population numbers for religious dissenters began in 1825, it was not until the late nineteenth century that tsarist officials began to be systematic in the collection of such data regarding so-called sectarians. Throughout the nineteenth century, officials had trouble counting different groups of sectarians because the latter feared that enumeration would lead to persecution, the draft, or heavier taxation, and they tried to hide themselves from government counting. At the same time, state and church officials in different regions often gave different names to similar religious phenomena, so it is difficult to compile full statistics for any one group. “Subbotniks” in particular were often counted as Molokans, and more often hid from census agents or told the agents that they were Orthodox in order to avoid any negative repercussions. 2. The most complete and reliable statistics (although these should be approached with critical caution) are those for the five provinces of South Caucasia in 1886 and the empire-wide statistics from 1912. 3. The statistics for 1912 offer four different entries that might be subsumed under the umbrella term “Subbotniki” as I use it inclusively here. I give the statistics separately for each name and then a total for all four (hence five different column entries for 1912). 4. Population is both male and female “souls.” 5. In addition to population, one finds the following number of “Subbotnik” congregations registered between 1906 and 1917 in accordance with the law of 1906: Astrakhan province (4), Baku (8), Irkustk (2), Kuban (5), Samara (3), Saratov (1), Simbirsk (1), Tambov (3), Terek (1), and Erivan (1), for a total of twenty-nine officially registered congregations. See Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg, RGIA) f. 821, op. 150, d. 445. My thanks to Eugene Clay for sharing this information with me. Sources: D’iakonov, Andrei. “Istoricheskii ocherk sektantstva v predelakh Astrakhanskoi eparkhii (po dokumentam mestnykh prikhodov). Kursovoe sochinenie studenta

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52-go kursa Kazanskoi dukhovnoi akademii Andreia D’iakonova.” Typescript, 1911. Natsional’nyi arkhiv Respubliki Tatarstana (Kazan, NART) f. 10 (Kazanskaia dukhovnaia akademiia), op. 2, d. 1390, ll. 263–66. My thanks to Eugene Clay for sharing this information with me. Klibanov, A. I., et al., eds. Sovremennoe sektantstvo i ego preodolenie, Vol IX, Voprosy istorii religii i ateizma. Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk, 1961. Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg, RGIA) f. 1284, op. 200 - 1843, d. 714, ll.3–4, 9–10ob, 16ob–17. Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi, (Tbilisi, SSC’SA) f. 2, op. 1, d. 12327, ll. 3ob–4. SSC’SA f. 2, op. 1, d. 9900, ll. 3–4. Statisticheskie svedeniia o sektantakh (k 1 ianvaria 1912). St. Petersburg: Izdanie Departamenta dukhovnykh del, Tipografiia MVD, 1912. My thanks to Eugene Clay for sharing this information with me. Svod statisticheskikh dannykh o naselenii zakavkazskogo kraia izvlechennykh iz posemeinnykh spiskov 1886 g. Tiflis, 1893. Varadinov, Nikolai. Istoriia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del. Vol. 8, Supplementary. Istoriia rasporiazhenii po raskolu, 89–98, 275, 157–79, 374–79, 446–48. St. Petersburg, 1863. 1. While I use the most inclusive definition of Sabbatarians, other authors distinguish between subbotniki and iudeistvuiushchie as separate religious movements. They describe the latter as a smaller group, but one that more closely embraced the tenets and language of Judaism (and had indeed become Jews). The former were a much larger group who had not become and did not necessarily have aspirations to become “Jews” per se, but rather to keep certain tenets of the Jewish faith, especially Mosaic laws and the tenets of the Old Testament. The Gery appeared later than the Subbotniki, in the mid-nineteenth century (especially the 1860s). The Subbotniki tended to be followers of the Karaite Jews. The Gery were more closely tied to Talmudists. “Subbotniki,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 31 (St. Petersburg, 1901), 874–75; “Iudeistvuiushchie,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 13, pt. 2 (St. Petersburg, 1894), 768–69; “Zhidovstvuiushchie,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, vol. 11:2 (St. Petersburg, 1894); S. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh: Iz putevykh zametok (n.p., 1912), 280–81. 2. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 294. 3. For a general introduction to the Subbotniki, see the following: http://www. subbotniki.net/ (accessed January 4, 2010); A. I. Masalkin, “K istorii zakavkazskikh sektantov: II. Subbotniki,” Kavkaz, no. 307 (November 19, 1893): 2; Il’ia Zhabin, “Selenie Privol’noe, Bakinskoi gub., Lenkoranskogo uezda,” in Sbornik materialov dlia opisaniia mestnostei i plemen Kavkaza, vol. 27 (Tiflis, 1900), otdel 2, 42–94; “‘subbotniki’ v Erivanskoi gubernii,” in Pamiatnaia knizhka Erivanskoi gubernii na 1912 g. (Erivan, 1912), Literaturnyi otdel, chap. 3, 1–11; T. B., “U beregov Kaspiia (iz putevykh zametok i vospominanii) Tri goda nazad,” Kavkaz, no. 58 (1881): 2–3; N. St-v, “Obychai i zakon v brachnykh delakh subbotnikov,” Kars, no. 41 (October 8, 1891): 3; Nikolai Vasil’evich Varadinov, Istoriia Ministerstva vnutrennikh del., 8 vols. Istoriia rasporiazhenii po raskolu (St. Petersburg: V Tipografiia Vtorogo Otdeleniia Sobstvennoi E. I. V. Kantseliarii, 1863), 8:93–94; Aleksandr L’vov, “Gery i Subbotniki—‘Talmudisty’ i “Karaimy,” viewed at http://lvov.judaica.spb.ru/gersub.shtml (accessed January 4, 2010).

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4. Varadinov, Istoriia; and numerous files in Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi istoricheskii arkhiv (St. Petersburg, RGIA), f. 1473, op. 1. See Table 4, pp. 362–65, for a statistical table of the number of Subbotniki in various parts of tsarist Russia. 5. For a small sampling of the recent scholarship on sectarians, see John Eugene Clay, “Russian Peasant Religion and Its Repression: The Christ-Faith (Khristovshchina) and the Origin of the ‘Flagellant’ Myth, 1666–1837” (Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1989); Claudio Sergio Ingerflom, ed., La Secte Russe des Castrats (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1995); Aleksandr Etkind, Khlyst: sekty, literatura i revoliutsiia (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1998); Laura Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1999); Sergei I. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press and the Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2004); Heather J. Coleman, Russian Baptists and Spiritual Revolution, 1905–1929 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005); Nicholas B. Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2005); Breyfogle, ed., Russian Religious Sectarianism, thematic issue of Russian Studies in History 46, no. 3 (Winter 2007–08); Leonid Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity: Popular Religion and Traditional Culture under the Last Tsars (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008); A. A. Panchenko, Khristovshchina i skopchestvo: fol’klor i traditsionnaia kul’tura russkikh misticheskikh sekt (Moscow: Ob"edinennoe gumanitarnoe izdatel’stvo, 2002). 6. On the so-called “Jewish Question” in tsarist Russia, see John Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1986); Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Hans Rogger, Jewish Policies and Right-Wing Politics in Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). 7. For examples of court cases from the early nineteenth century, see Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv drevnykh aktov (Moscow, RGADA), f. 1431, op. 1, dd. 537, 987, 988, 990, 992, 1002, 1006, 1007, 1008, 1009, among numerous other files in this fond and opis. See also Polnoe sobranie zakonov (1), no. 30,436a ( July 29, 1825), 397–408, and no. 30,483 (September 15, 1825), 465–67; Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola, sostoiavshikhsia po vedomstvu Sv. Sinoda (St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del, 1860), 2:138–41, 183–86, 222–23; Sobranie postanovlenii po chasti raskola (St. Petersburg: Tip. Ministerstvo Vnutrennykh Del, 1875), 61–63, 74–78, 80–81, 87–90, 101, among others; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, chaps. 1–2. 8. See for instance, An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 282–83. This sense of martyrdom and suffering infuses the memories of most of the sectarian communities in Russia. See Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, chap. 2. 9. Among recent articles in the Jerusalem Post, see Michael Freund, “Russia’s New Jewish Refuseniks,” Jerusalem Post (October 2, 2007), available at http://www.jpost.com/Home/ Article.aspx?id=77085 (accessed May 5, 2010); Leora Eren Frucht, “The ‘subbotnik’ Case,” Jerusalem Post (December 10, 2008), available at http://www.jpost.com/Home/Article. aspx?id=123881 (accessed May 5, 2010). See also A. I. Klibanov, History of Religious Sectarianism in Russia (1860s–1917), trans. Ethel Dunn, ed. Stephen Dunn (New York: Pergamon Press, 1982); A. I. Klibanov et al., eds., Sovremennoe sektantstvo i ego preodolenie, vol. 9, Voprosy istorii religii i ateizma (Moscow: Izd. Akademii Nauk, 1961); Richard Weisberg, Vichy Law and the Holocaust in France (New York: New York University Press, 1996). 10. See, for instance, Borys A. Gudziak, Crisis and Reform: The Kyivan Metropolitanate, the Patriarchate of Constantinople, and the Genesis of the Union of Brest (Cambridge, Mass.:

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Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute, 2001); Serhii Plokhy, The Cossacks and Religion in Early Modern Ukraine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation; Catherine Wanner, Communities of the Converted: Ukrainians and Global Evangelism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2007); Barbara Skinner, The Western Front of the Eastern Church: Uniate and Orthodox Conflict in Eighteenth Century Poland, Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2009); Magdalena Teter, Jews and Heretics in Catholic Poland: A Beleaguered Church in the Post-Reformation Era (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 11. Kate Brown, A Biography of No Place: From Ethnic Borderland to Soviet Heartland (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), esp. 72–74. 12. A. Voskresenskii, “Dukhovnye Molokane v Karsskoi oblasti,” Kars, no. 42 (October 22, 1891): 3–4; Zhabin, “Selenie Privol’noe,” 49, 59; Sak’art’velos saistorio c’entraluri saxelmcip’o ark’ivi (Tbilisi, SSC’SA), f. 5, op. 1, d. 183, 1865; f. 5, op. 1, d. 776, 1868; f. 240, op. 1, d. 1392, 1865–66; Akty sobrannye Kavkazskoiu Arkheograficheskoiu Kommissieiu 12:2 (1893), no. 490, p. 1098; Gosudarstvennyi muzei istorii religii (St. Petersburg, GMIR), f. 2, op. 8, d. 336, 1910–1912, ll. 3ob–4ob, 6, 10–10ob; RGIA, f. 1268, op. 9, d. 481, 1957; N. D. Dingel’shtedt, Zakavkazskie sektanty v ikh semeinom i religioznom bytu (St. Petersburg, 1885); http://molokane. org/molokan/index.html (accessed January 4, 2010). 13. Yo’av Karny, Highlanders: A Journey to the Caucasus in Quest of Memory (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000), 304. And the lack of memory was by no means a recent thing. Almost a hundred years before, An-ski noted that the Gery among the Kuban Cossacks really did not know what their own origins were, with some feeling that they had come from the Khazars, a view that An-ski considered mistaken. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 282. 14. Zhabin, “Selenie Privol’noe,” 57; Valery Dymshitz, “Expedition to Azerbaijan,” East European Jewish Affairs 30, no. 2 (2000): 37–52. 15. On the Molokans, see http://molokane.org/molokan/index.html (accessed January 4, 2010); Klibanov, History; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers; Breyfogle, “Prayer and the Politics of Place: Molokan Church Building, Tsarist Law, and the Quest for a Public Sphere in Late imperial Russia,” in Sacred Stories: Religion and Spirituality in Modern Russian Culture, ed. Heather Coleman and Mark Steinberg (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2007), 222–52. 16. Masalkin, “Subbotniki,” 2; Zhabin, “Selenie Privol’noe,” 42–94; “Subbotniki,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 31:874–75; “Iudeistvuiushchie,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 13:2; “Zhidovstvuiushchie,” in Entsiklopedicheskii slovar’, 11:2; “‘subbotniki’ v Erivanskoi gubernii,” Literaturnyi otdel, chap. 3, 1–11; T. I. Butkevich, Obzor russkikh sekt i ikh tolkov (Petrograd, 1915). On denominational shifting between different sectarian communities, see Nicholas Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers: Religious Dissent and Russian Colonization of Transcaucasia, 1830–1890” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1998), chap. 5. 17. Varadinov, Istoriia, 280; S-tv, “Obychai,” 3; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, 168. 18. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 306; Aleksandr L’vov, “Emigratsiia iudeistvuiushchikh v Palestinu,” available at http://lvov.judaica.spb.ru/emigration.shtml (accessed January 10, 2010), 1. 19. Anatole Leroy-Beaulieu, The Empire of the Tsars and the Russians, vol. 3, Religion (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896), 456–58. 20. Varadinov, Istoriia, 92. 21. Masalkin, “Subbotniki,” 2; St-v, “Obychai,” 3; B., “U beregov kaspii,” 2–3; Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers,” 196–99; Breyfogle, “Prayer and the Politics of Place,” 222–52.

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22. Masalkin, “Subbotniki,” 2. See also GMIR, f. 14, op. 2, d. 104, l. 88, and “Subbotniki v Erivanskoi gubernii,” 4. 23. St-v., “Obychai,” 3. 24. B., “U beregov,” no. 58:2. Italics in original. 25. Varadinov, Istoriia, 442–43 (although Varadinov did not agree that Subbotniki were simply a wing of the Molokans). 26. Polnoe sobranie zakonov (1), no. 30,436a ( July 29, 1825): 397–408, and no. 30,483 (September 15, 1825): 465–67; Varadinov, Istoriia, 87–99. 27. Klier, Russia Gathers Her Jews; Klier, Imperial Russia’s Jewish Question, 1855–1881; Varadinov, Istoriia, 280–81. 28. Antoine Scheikevitch, “Alexandre Ier et l’hérésie Sabbatiste,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 3 (1956): 223–35, esp. 229 and 233; M. Koz’min, “Iz byta subbtonikov. Razskazano so slov moego otsa,” Evreiskaia starina 7, nos. 3–4 ( July–December 1915): 386; Varadinov, Istoriia, 272. 29. Varadinov, Istoriia; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, chaps. 1 and 2. 30. Varadinov, Istoriia, 273; Scheikevitch, “Alexandre Ier et l'hérésie Sabbatiste,” 233; V. Zaitsev, Iz lichnykh nabliudenii nad zhizn’iu zakavkazskikh sektantov (St. Petersburg, 1899), 5. 31. Koz’min, “Iz byta subbtonikov. Razskazano so slov moego otsa.” 32. For a full discussion on the religious policies of Alexander I and the response of non-conformist religious communities in rural Russia, see Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, chap. 1; Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation; E. A. Vishlenkova, Religioznaia politika: Ofitsial’nyi kurs i “obshchee mnenie” Rossii aleksandrovskoi epokhi (Kazan, 1997); and Svetlana Inikova, “Tambovskie Dukhobortsy v 60-e gody XVIII veka.” Vestnik Tambovskogo universiteta. Ser. Gumanitarnye nauki no. 1 (1997): 39–53. See also Scheikevitch, “Alexandre Ier et L’Hérésie Sabbatiste,” 223–35; M. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee sibirskikh sektantov-subbotnikov,” Evreiskaia starina 5, no. 1 ( January–March 1913): 4; An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 292. 33. Varadinov, Istoriia, 89. 34. Scheikevitch, “Alexandre Ier et L’Hérésie Sabbatiste”; Varadinov, Istoriia, 96. 35. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 293. 36. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 4; and Varadinov, Istoriia, 90–92, 280–81. On the history of literacy in Russia generally, see Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). 37. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 5. 38. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 291. 39. Stephen K. Batalden, “Printing the Bible in the Reign of Alexander I: Toward a Reinterpretation of the Imperial Russian Bible Society” in Church, Nation, and State in Russia and Ukraine, ed. Geoffrey A. Hosking (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991), 65–78, esp. 67; and Alexander M. Martin, Romantics Reformers, Reactionaries: Russian Conservative Thought and Politics in the Reign of Alexander I (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 1997). Russian officials in the nineteenth century also made the connection between the advent of the Bible Society and the appearance of the Subbotniks. 40. Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation; John R. Staples, Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2003); Inikova, “Tambovskie Dukhobortsy,” 39–53. 41. Koz’min, “Iz byta subbtonikov. Razskazano so slov moego otsa,” 386.

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42. Mikhail Tiflov, “O pereselenii sektantov zhidovstvuiushchikh v Palestinu,” Missionerskoe obozrenie, no. 5 (1904): 531. 43. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 7; and Karny, Highlanders, 313, 345. 44. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 8; and I. L. Neiman, “O Subbtotnikov na Amure,” Evreiskaia starina 7, no. 2 (April–June 1915): 184–85. 45. “‘subbotniki’ v Erivanskoi gubernii,” 8. 46. Varadinov, Istoriia, 91. The shift to circumcision was one of the first Jewish ritual practices taken up by the Subbotniki. They looked to find mohels to circumcise their newborns on the eighth day (brit milah), as laid out in Genesis 17:1–14 and Leviticus 12:1–3. When mohels were not available, the fathers conducted the circumcision themselves as prescribed in the Bible. Such was also true with adult males who came to join the Subbotniki. Many of these men carried out self-circumcision in an effort to properly follow the dictates of the Mosaic Scriptures. 47. B., “U beregov,” no. 58:2. 48. M. Koz’min, “Iz byta subbotnikov. Vospominaniia,” Evreiskaia starina 6, nos. 3–4 ( July–December, 1914): 453–54. See also Varadinov, Istoriia, 90. 49. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 284; and Koz’min, “Iz byta subbotnikov. Vospominaniia.” 50. Varadinov, Istoriia, 92. 51. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 288–89. 52. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 16; and “Subbotniki v Erivanskoi gubernii,” 5. Many Subbotniki based their religious practices and understandings on the Five Books of Moses, the books of the Prophets, and the Psalms of David. Most of their prayer books were initially printed in Russian (although with Hebrew printed in them as well sometimes) and came from Vilna, Odessa, and Warsaw, with some from abroad (Vienna and London). Specifically, the Subbotniki utilized the “Jewish Prayer book” in Russian translation by O. Ia. Gurvich, with the seventh printing from Vilna. They also utilized the “Extensive Jewish Catechism” by B. L. Segal’ (Warsaw, 1873). In their efforts to approach as fully as possible the “true” Jewish practice, and to give them some credibility, some Subbotniki brought with them to prayer services a Hebrew Torah, although few could actually read what was in it. 53. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 306. 54. “Subbotniki v Erivanskoi gubernii,” 4–5. However, mastery of the Talmud would have required knowledge of Aramaic as well. 55. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 16–22. On the translation of Jewish biblical texts into Russia, see also Neiman, “O subbotnikakh na Amure,” 185. 56. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 8; B., “U beregov,” no. 58:2; and Neiman, “O Subbtotnikakh na Amure,” 184–85. 57. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee,” 20–22. On names, see also Neiman, “O subbotnikakh na Amure,” 185. 58. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee”; Koz’min, “Iz byta subbotnikov. Vospominaniia”; Koz’min, “Iz byta subbtonikov. Razskazano so slov moego otsa.” 59. Tiflov, “O pereselenii,” 532. 60. B., “U beregov,” no. 58:2. 61. M. Koz’min, “Proshloe i nastoiashchee sibirskikh sektantov-subbotnikov (okonchanie),” Evreiskaia starina 5, no. 2 (April–June, 1913): 181. 62. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 290. 63. Ibid., 295.

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64. Ibid., 296. 65. “Raskol’niki za Kavkazom. Dukhovnye. Subbotniki. Obshchie,” Pravoslavnyi sobesednik (April 1859): 437–38. 66. D. Bogoliubov, “Tambovskie zhidovstvuiushchie,” Missionerskooe obozrenie (May 1898): 799. Italics in original. 67. Varadinov, Istoriia, 90 and 92. 68. “Raskol’niki za Kavkazom,” 437. See also L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” 5; and the following quotation from Masalkin, “Subbotniki”: “The Subbotniki, like Jews, await the arrival of the Messiah, who will collect all of them together in Palestine, where he will usher in his Jewish kingdom [tsarstvo], and himself will be the tsar, making the rest of the people the slaves of the Jews.” 69. Tiflov, “O pereselenii,” 533. The Subbotniki were not alone in this triumphal vision. Other Russian Christian sectarians held similar views (albeit about the Second Coming rather than the First). Among the Pryguny, for instance, on describing the thousand-year kingdom of Christ, their leading prophet Maksim Rudometkin envisioned the Muslims as their eternal subordinates. “They themselves will be the servants and breadwinners forever and their wives will be the servants and wet nurses of our children, everywhere with bows to them to the earth.” From the sacred Prygun text, Dukh i Zhizn’, quoted and translated in Klibanov, History, 166. See also the chapter by Eugene Clay in this volume. 70. Tiflov, “O pereselenii,” 533. 71. Ibid.; L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” 5. 72. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 284. On travel to the Holy Lands earlier in the century, see Eileen M. Kane, “Pilgrims, Holy Places, and the Multi-Confessional Empire: Russian Policy toward the Ottoman Empire under Tsar Nicholas I, 1825–1855” (Ph.D. diss., Princeton University, 2005). 73. L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” 4. 74. On the Saturday question, see Tiflov, “O pereselenii,” 530–31. 75. Ibid., 532–33. 76. Ibid. The likely route of travel would have been to take a boat from Astrakhan south on the Caspian Sea, either to Baku, where they could travel by train through the South Caucasus to Batumi and then on into the Ottoman Empire, or overland from the south end of the Caspian through Persia and the Ottoman territories to Jerusalem. 77. L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” 6; and Breyfogle, “Heretics and Colonizers,” chap. 5. 78. Quoted in L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” 4. 79. Tiflov, “O pereselenii,” 535. Copies of his letters can be found in the addenda to L’vov, “Emigratsiia,” at http://lvov.judaica.spb.ru/letter1.jpg and http://lvov.judaica.spb. ru/letter2.jpg (both accessed July 9, 2009). 80. Tiflov, “O pereselenii.” 81. An-ski, Sredi iudeistvuiushchikh, 281. 82. Ibid., 281–82. 83. “The Dubrovin Farm: The Sobotniks,” Gems in Israel (April/May 2002), available at www.gemsinisrael.com/e_article000065676 (accessed July 9, 2009). As An-ski notes, several tens of families of Iudeistvuiushie did resettle to Palestine, where they settled in Jewish settlements and began to work as agriculturalists/grain farmers. 84. “Istoricheskiia svedeniia o molokanskoi sekte,” Pravoslavnyi sobesednik (November 1858): 297–98; Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, 63–64.

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85. Etkind, Khlyst; Zhuk, Russia’s Lost Reformation; Engelstein, Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom; and Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity. 86. On the history of migration, see Breyfogle, Heretics and Colonizers, chap. 7 and conclusion; and Nicholas Breyfogle, Abby Schrader, and Willard Sunderland, eds., Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (New York: Routledge, 2007). 87. See, for instance, Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 2; Roshanna P. Sylvester, Tales of Old Odessa: Crime and Civility in a City of Thieves (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Brown, A Biography of No Place; Natan Meier, “Jews, Ukrainians, and Russians in Kiev: Intergroup Relations in Late Imperial Associational Life,” Slavic Review 65, no. 3 (Fall 2006); and Yuri Slezkine, The Jewish Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2004). 88. On the importance of daily life and the lived experience of empire to understanding Imperial Russian history, see Nicholas Breyfogle, “Enduring Imperium: Russia/Soviet Union/Eurasia as Multiethnic, Multiconfessional Space,” Ab Imperio: Studies of New Imperial History and Nationalism in the Post-Soviet Space, no. 1 (2008): 35–86. 89. Heretz, Russia on the Eve of Modernity; Nadieszda Kizenko, Prodigal Saint: Father John of Kronstadt and the Russian People (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000); Vera Shevzov, Russian Orthodoxy on the Eve of Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 90. I discuss tsarist Russia as a religiously, socially, and ethnically “creative space” in more detail elsewhere. See my “Enduring Imperium,” 92–101. See also Brown, Biography of No Place.

Contributors

Nicholas Breyfogle is associate professor of history at Ohio State University. He is author of Heretics and Colonizers: Forging Russia’s Empire in the South Caucasus (Cornell University Press, 2005). He is also co-editor of Peopling the Russian Periphery: Borderland Colonization in Eurasian History (Routledge, 2007) and guest editor of Russian Religious Sectarianism, a thematic issue of the journal Russian Studies in History (Winter 2007–08). J. Eugene Clay is associate professor in the School of History, Philosophy, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. He has written extensively on religious movements in Russia and eastern Europe and is most recently the co-editor, with Russell Martin and Barbara Skinner, of Centers and Peripheries: Interaction and Exchange in Eastern Christianity (Ohio State University Press, forthcoming). Glenn Dynner is professor of Judaic studies at Sarah Lawrence College and Hans Kohn Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University. He is author of Men of Silk: The Hasidic Conquest of Polish Jewish Society (Oxford University Press, 2006) and a forthcoming monograph on the role of Jews in the Polish liquor trade. Moshe Idel is the Max Cooper Professor of Jewish Thought at Hebrew University in Jerusalem and senior researcher at the Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem. He is author of several prizewinning books, including Kabbalah: New Perspectives (Yale University Press, 1988), Kabbalah & Eros (Yale University

394

Contributors

Press, 2005), and Ben: Sonship and Jewish Mysticism (Continuum, 2007). He is the recipient of the Israel Prize in Jewish Thought, the Emmet Prize under the aegis of the prime minister of Israel, the Gershom Scholem Prize for research in Kabbalah, and several National Jewish Book awards. Harris Lenowitz is professor of languages and literature at the University of Utah. He is author of The Jewish Messiahs: From the Galilee to Crown Heights (Oxford University Press, 1998) and a forthcoming annotated translation of The Collection of the Words of the Lord, attributed to Jacob Frank (forthcoming from Wayne State University Press). Pawel Maciejko is a lecturer in the Department of Jewish Thought at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is author of several articles on Sabbateanism and The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement (1755–1831) (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is professor in Jewish history in the Department of History and director of the Crown Family Center for Jewish Studies at Northwestern University. He is author of several books, including Jews in the Russian Army, 1827–1917: Drafted into Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), The Anti-Imperial Choice: The Making of the Ukrainian Jew (Yale University Press, 2009), and Lenin’s Jewish Question (Yale University Press, 2010). Paul Radensky is the museum educator for Jewish schools at the Museum of Jewish Heritage—A Living Memorial to the Holocaust. He is author of a number of articles on Jewish life in eastern Europe as well as a dissertation entitled “Hasidism in the Age of Reform: A Biography of Rabbi Duvid ben Mordkhe Twersky of Tal’noye” ( Jewish Theological Seminary, 2001). Marsha Keith Schuchard is an independent scholar living in Atlanta. She holds a Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin and is author of Restoring the Temple of Vision: Cabalistic Freemasonry and Stuart Culture (Brill, 2002) and William Blake’s Sexual Path to Spiritual Vision (Inner Traditions, 2008). Hanna We$ grzynek is a research fellow and lecturer at the Emmanuel Ringelblum Jewish Historical Institute, Warsaw, and a lecturer at the Warsaw School of Economics. She is author of “Czarna legenda” Z{ydów. Procesy o rzekome mordy rytualne w dawnej Polsce [“Black legend” of Jews: Trials of alleged ritual

Contributors

395

murders in old Poland] (1995), Historia i kultura Z{ydów polskich. Słownik [The history and culture of the Polish Jews. Dictionary], with Alina Cała and Gabriela Zalewska (2000), and The Treatment of Jewish Themes in Polish Schools (American Jewish Committee, 1998). Elliot R. Wolfson is Abraham Lieberman Professor of Hebrew and Judaic Studies and professor of Hebrew and Judaic studies at New York University. He is author of several books, including Through a Speculum That Shines: Vision and Imagination in Medieval Jewish Mysticism (Princeton University Press, 1994), winner of a National Jewish Book Award and the American Academy of Religion award; and Language, Eros, Being: Kabbalistic Hermeneutics and Poetic Imagination (Fordham University Press, 2005), which also won a National Jewish Book Award. His most recent books are Open Secret: Postmessianic Messianism and the Mystical Revision of Menahem Mendel Schneerson (Columbia University Press, 2009) and A Dream Interpreted Within a Dream: Oneiropoiesis and the Prism of Imagination (forthcoming from Zone Books). Sergei I. Zhuk is associate professor of history at Ball State University. He is author of Russia’s Lost Reformation: Peasants, Millennialism, and Radical Sects in Southern Russia and Ukraine, 1830–1917 ( Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004) and Rock and Roll in the Rocket City: The West, Identity, and Ideology in Soviet Dniepropetrovsk, 1960–1985 ( Johns Hopkins University Press and Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2010).

Index Aaron and Gershon (printers), 40 Abdulmecid (alt. Abdulmajid), Sultan, 317 Abraham ben Hayyim of Lublin, 232 Abraham Gershon of Kutov, 83 Abraham Jacob of Sadegura, 153 Abraham of Ciechanów, 118, 120, 123 Abraham of Polotzk to Vitebsk, 84 Abraham of Turisk, 132 Abraham Yaakov of Czortkow, 154 Abraham Yaakov of Sadegura, 132, 153, 154 Abraham Yoski of Lissa, 232 Abraham, biblical, 21, 72, 109, 303, 378 Accra, 257 acculturation, vii, viii, ix, 106, 109, 122–23, 383 Achan, biblical, 292 Adam Kadmon (primordial Man), 259, 286 Adam, biblical, 187, 188, 250, 285, 307n5, 310, 311, 312, 320, 322–28 Adamovka village, 338 Aharon of Chernobyl, 139 Aharon of Karlin, 77 Aix-la-Chappelle (Aachen), 261, 262 alchemy, 14, 27–28, 29–32, 47n28, 51n78, 52n87 Aleksandr L’vov, 311 Aleksandropol’ district, 317 aliyah (immigration to Israel), 361 All Saints’ Day, 58, 60 All Souls’ Day, 59, 60 Allemano, Yohanan, 30 Alter, Isaac Meir of Ger (Góra Kalwaria, the Gerer rebbe), 107 Amsterdam, 17, 31, 230, 241, 255–58, 262, 263, 266–68, 272, 275n35, 277n78, 278n101 amulets, 15, 16, 18, 26, 231, 262, 264 angels, 321–27 An-ski, S., 58, 63, 381, 387, 388n13, 391n83 antinomianism, 222, 225, 258, 271–72, 285, 293. See also Sexuality antisemitism, 2 anti-Trinitarianism, 367

apikorsut (irreligion), 143, 226 apocalypticism, 382 Armenia, 366 Armitage, Catherine, 260 Armitage, Thomas, 251, 253 Arndt, Johann, 314 Aronson, Hayim, 41 Ashkenazi, Isaac Luria, 81 Ashkenazi, Tzvi Hirsch ben Yaakov (Hakham Tzvi), 241 Asiatic Brethren, 270, 271 assimilation, vii, 106, 265, 383 Astrakhan Province, 376, 379–80, 385n5 astrology, 23, 24, 27–28, 42, 47n28, 52n88, 230, 236, 246n39 Augustus III, King, 3 Avar rebels, 317 Avicenna, 31 Avimelekh, biblical, 109 Avvakum, Archpriest, 312 ba‘alei shem, 5, 14–18, 23, 26, 32, 34–43 Balaban, Gerasim, 338 Baltic Sea, 255 Bar, 33 Bariatinskii, Aleksandr Ivanovich, 318 Basovsky, Ivan, 342 Batalden, Stephen, 372 Beelzebul, 321- 322, 326 Behush (Buhusi, Romania), 151 Belaia Tserkov, 135, 139, 163n39 Belarus, 19, 21, 41, 57, 60, 361 Belova, Olga, 13, 23 Belzer, Nisi, 139–43 Bengel, Johann Albrecht, 316 Bentivoglio, Cardinal Francisco, 241- 242 Benzelius, Eric (the Younger), 253–55, 258, 261, 263, 274n20 Ber of Radoszyce, 107, 117 Berdichev (Berdyczów), 58 Bessarabia, 336–37, 346–47, 354n10, 362, 364

398

Bethlehem, 303 Biala, 110 Biłgoraj, 56 Black Virgin of Cze$stochowa, 294, 307n18 black wedding (Shvartse khasene), ix, 5, 55, 57–60, 62–65 Blake, William, 7, 250, 253, 259, 265, 269, 279n122, 394 blood libel, 232, 234 Boas: Abraham, 253; brothers, 278n100; Simon, 253; Tobias, 253, 261–62, 266 Böhler, Peter, 253, 259, 266, 268 Boethusians, 244 Boguslav, 135 Bonus, Doctor Joseph, 17 Borenthius, Helicarnathus (Michał Se$dziwój), 30 Botosani, 83 bracchium saeculare, 233 Breshko-Breshkovskaia, E., 339 Brockmer, Johann, 253, 256, 267, 275n35 Brody, 33, 36, 149–50, 152–53, 167n108, 233 Brody Synagogue in Odessa, 139, 164 Brothers and Sisters, the, 282, 289, 291. See also Frankism Brünn (Brno), 3, 283, 300–301, 304 Brzes´c´, 231 Buber, Martin, 77, 213n128 Bucharest, 87 Bukovina, 71, 73, 85, 91, 100n47, 150, 155 Bulgakov, Fedor Osipovich (David, the son of Jesse), 315–16 Bundism, 109 Burgmann, Johann Gustav, 253, 266–67, 269, 272, 275n35, 278n101 Buzaglo, Joseph La Paz, 253, 261–62 Cagliostro, Count Alessandro, 253, 269–70 calendar, 20, 27–28, 42, 50n65, 311, 353n5 Callenberg, Johann Heinrich, 175, 177 Cantemir, Prince Dimitrie, 83–84, 99–100n42 cantor, 139, 375, 376 Capernaum, 186 Cardoso, Abraham Miguel, 187–88, 235 Carlebach, Elisheva, 172, 176 Carpathian Mountains, 6, 79–81, 84, 99n37 Caucasia, 315; South Caucasia, 369, 385n2 cemetery, 5, 55–60, 63, 67, 126, 135, 162n18, 360 Charles XII of Sweden, 253–255, 274n17 Chechen rebels, 317 Chernigov province, 337 Chernobyl dynasty, 132, 155 Chigirin conspiracy, 339

Index

childbirth, 15 Chmielnicki uprising (1648), 57 Christian dissenters, 2, 254, 334; Dukhobors, 1, 309, 314–15, 354n8, 360, 382; “flagellants” (khlysty), 1, 360; Jumpers (including Molokan-Jumpers), 1, 314, 316–19, 361; 326, 328, 330n16, 335, 339, 360, 366–67, 380, 382, 385n1, 389; Raskol’niki (“schismatics”), 368; Subbotniks (Sabbatarians), 1, 7, 310–11, 328, 335–36, 359–61, 366–84, 389; Stundists, 1, 7, 335–44, 347–58 Christianity, ix, 3–7, 42, 86, 103n65, 108, 171–77, 184, 187–89, 208n65, 212n119, 222–23, 227, 230, 235–36, 238–45, 252–55, 258, 264, 267, 271–72, 302, 309, 310–15, 327–28, 334, 338, 340, 344–49, 351, 360–61, 366; Catholicism, 253, 263, 265, 289, 293; Mennonites, 336; Protestantism, 176; Russian Orthodox, 14, 16, 21–22, 28, 32, 37, 40, 42, 312–13, 340, 343, 347–50, 356, 360 Christina, Queen of Sweden, 252–53 Christmas, 59 chuppah (canopy), 57, 63 Church, 1, 53n116, 59–60, 104–5, 118, 161, 176, 227, 237, 239, 244–45, 263, 267, 269, 294, 305–6, 310, 312–14, 366–68; Catholic, 234, 303; Christian, 269, 336; Christ’s, 340; German, 266; German Lutheran, 253; German Protestant, 346; Greek Roman (Uniate), 349, 352; Jewish-Christian, 348; Moravian, 251, 253, 268; New Christian, 260; New Jerusalem, 253; Orthodox, 60, 136, 306, 310, 312–13, 327, 329n5, 335, 340–41, 343, 347–48, 351, 354n8, 356, 366, 370, 382; Polish Catholic, 294; Protestant, 347; Slavonic, 315, 371; Swedish, 267; Uniate, 349; Unitarianism, 367 Chuvashes, 61 Ciechanów, 117–19 Cohen, Tobias, 15 Comenius, Jan Amos, 251 Company, the, 282, 284, 288–89, 293–95, 299–301. See also Frankism Congregation of the Lamb, 251 conjunctio maxima (“great conjunction”), 230 Conrad, Israel, 26 Constantinople, 3, 85, 309, 379 Constants (postoiannye), 316 conversion, vii, 3, 108, 174, 175–76, 188, 201, 235, 242, 244, 254, 258–59, 265,

Index

266, 269, 283, 289, 300, 340, 345, 347–48, 351, 371, 383 Copenhagen, 31 corporeality, 193–195, 197; divestment of, 193–194, 197, 218n147, 219n159; worship through, 194–95, 219n163 Cosway, Richard, 253, 265–66, 269–71, 278n95 Council of Four Lands, 18, 46n23, 231–34, 236, 239–45 Council of Trent, 161 Cracow, 18, 28, 31–35, 46n23, 56, 173, 253–54 Csángós, 76, 88, 90, 102n57 Czerniaków, Adam, 64, 68n69 Czernowitz, 154–55 Cze$stochówa, 3, 123, 283, 293–95, 305 Dacians, 102n58 dance, viii, 58, 60–61, 110, 123, 149, 153, 252, 260, 261, 289, 316–17, 350 Daniel, biblical, 286, 325, 328 de Campos, Moshe, 17 de non tolerandis Judaeis, 116–17 de Yona, Barukh (Emanuel de Jona), 17 Deich, Lev, 339, 355 Dembowski, Bishop Mikołaj, 3, 236 demonic husks (kelipot), 123 demons, 15, 20, 26, 30, 62, 120, 129n71, 321–22, 326–27; Asmodeus, 321–22, 325–26; exorcism, 26, 123; Lilith, 15, 227–29, 288–89, 307n5, 305n7; Samael, 186, 227; sitra ahra (other side), 186, 205n35, 301 Denmark, 30, 277n71 devekut, 123, 148, 191, 199, 216n137 Dioscorides, 31 Dippelianism, 255 disease, 17–26, 28–31, 41–42, 47–48nn29– 36, 62, 107, 150, 183, 315 Dmitrii of Rostov, Saint (Dmitrii Rostovskii), 335 Dober, Christian Solomon, 253, 267 Dobrochowski, Doctor Simon, 26 Doenmeh, 3, 258, 296 Dosoftei, 87 Dovid Moshe of Czortkow, 154 Dragomirna monastery, 85 dreams, 7, 15, 72, 283, 296, 304, 306, 348 Dresden, 255 Dubno, 28, 233 Dubnow, Simon, 69–70, 82, 92, 99n41, 132, 149, 345, 356 Dubrovin Farm, 382 Duvidl of Savran, 140–43, 147, 149

399

dybbuk, 15, 145–146. See also demons Dybbuk, The, 58, 63 Edom, 188, 250, 270–72, 287, 306 Eiger, Akiba, 112 Eiger, Judah Leib, 112 Ekaterinoslav province, 336–37, 354n9, 363–64 Elenovka village, 366, 374–75 Elets village, 374 Eliezer, father of R. Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov, 15–16, 71, 92, 190 Elijah of Chelm, 15 Elijah, the Gaon of Vilna, 72 Elizavetgrad, 335 Elyakim ben Asher Zelig, 232, 234, 248n73 Emden, Jacob, 7, 223, 230–45, 262, 265–66, 277n71 Emden-Eybeschuetz controversy, 177, 231, 244, 262 Enlightenment, 14, 40, 44, 54n128, 75, 109, 132, 191 epidemics, 5, 15, 20, 24, 31, 42, 57, 61, 64 Erenburg, Ilya, 58 erev rav (mixed multitude), 227–30, 245 Erivan Province 317, 362, 364, 374–75, 385n5 Ernst Friedrich, 36 Esau, biblical, 186, 188, 211n107, 229, 271, 272, 286 Eve, biblical, 227, 285, 289, 307n5, 310–12, 320–28 Evelyn, John, 185 Even, Yitzhak, 150–51, 155 exile (galut), 201, 221n172, 221n174 Eibeschütz, Jonathan, 15, 211n104, 232, 245, 253, 255, 257, 261–68, 272 Ezekiel, biblical, 251, 273 Fainzilberg, Rosa, 243 Falk, Dr. Samuel Jacob, 45n8, 253, 256, 260–72, 275n41, 280 Fatmi, Alkhaim, 320 Feldsher, 43, 301 Fesenko, I., 339 Fetter Lane congregation, 259 Feyge Yente, daughter of R. Zusya of Annapoli, 133 Forefathers Eve, 59. See also All Souls Eve Fortish, Avraam Isaac, 17, 46n18 Franciscan Street, Warsaw, 110, 111 Francken, Christoph Peter, 177 Frank, Ewa, 282, 300

400

Frank, Jacob, ix, 3, 7, 82, 87, 223, 250, 253, 262–63, 270, 272, 281, 295 394 Frankism, 82, 223, 231 Freemasons, 175, 269 Frommann, Immanuel, 6, 171–72, 175–88 Gabriel, biblical, 325 Gajzler, Baruch, 112, 115 Galen, Aelius, 29, 31 Galicia, 19, 108, 149–56 Galilee, 382 Galushkin (Teraspol’sky), 341 Gar, Evgenii, 343 Gdan´sk, 28, 33 Gedaliah of Lunitz (Iliniec), 198, 200 Gematriah, 15 Gentiles, ix, 15–16, 76, 96n27, 106–8, 111, 120–22, 125n21, 129n71, 223, 229, 233, 237, 239, 243 German colonists, 336, 349, 354n8 Germany, vii, 15, 36, 40, 61, 185, 244, 255, 257, 265, 269, 278n91, 346 Gery, 359, 376–77, 381, 386n1, 388n13 gezeras tzaddikov, 136, 138–40 Goldish, Matt, 4, 7, 9, 225 Goldney, Edward, 253, 265–66 Gordin, Iakov, 7, 341–48, 351, 356–57 Goreloe village, 313 Gotha, 175, 204n11 Grabiankam Count Thaddeus, 253, 270, 280 Grachev, Shmuel Dmitrievich, 381 Greek, 34, 47n28, 86, 87, 89, 237, 349; Apocalyse of Moses, 327; Catholic, 161; Judeo, 29; Pope, 305; Roman Christianity (Uniate), 349, 352; Turkish Jews, 258–59 Gries, Zeev, 18 Grodzisk, 110 Guttmacher, Elijah, the “Tzaddik of Gratz”, 121, 129n79 Gypsies (Roma), 90, 102n57 Habad (Lubavitcher), 137 Ha-Cohen, Binyamin Beinish of Krotoszyn, 16 Hagia Sophia, 309 Hagiz, Moses, 230–31 Ha-Kohen, Abraham of Zamos´c´, 231–34 Halberstam, Hayyim of Sanz, 154 Ha-Levy, Aaron and David, 18, 53n115, 291 Ha-Levy, Uri Phoebus (Faivush), 18 Halevy, Yehuda, 22–23 hallah, 131, 148 Halle, 31, 175, 177, 266, 314 Hamburg, 224, 230, 252–54, 262–63, 267

Index

Hames, Hayyim, 242, 248n95 Hasid, 107, 116, 120, 123, 126, 129n79, 148, 162n24, 168n124; Ciechanów, 129n69; Habad, 139; Judah, 175; Polish, 137; Ruzhinev, 154; Satmar, 122; Tolner, 163n34 Hasidism, vii, viii, 5, 6, 9–10, 14–15, 42, 44–45n3, 62, 69 73, 75, 77–79, 81, 84–91, 109, 115–16, 124n2, 126, 131–42, 144–45, 147–54, 156, 164, 172, 188, 199, 384, 394 hasidism (old-style), 14 Haskalah, 2, 8, 103n62, 384 Haur, Jakub Kazimierz, 20, 31, 40 havdalah ceremony, 149 Hayon, Nehemiah, 253, 255, 258, 267 Hayyim ben Solomon (Hayyim Tirer) of Chernovitz, 83, 84 Hayyim Meir Yehiel of Mogielnice, 113 Heilman, Samuel, 112, 123, 130n89 Heilperin, Joel ben Uri from Zamos´c´, 16–17 herem (ban), 3 heresy, 7, 143, 223, 226–27, 231, 239–42, 244–45, 262, 306, 313–15, 366, 368 hermaphrodite, 297 Herzl, Theodore, 381 hesychastic, viii, 6, 79, 85–89, 98n36, 101n50 Hillel Ba‘al Shem, 17, 19–22, 26–27, 41 Hintzke, Jan Chrystyan, 36 Hippocrates, 31 Hippolytus, 244 Hirsch Frankel from Ansbach, 15 hitbodedut (seclusion), 81, 97n35, 159 Hodja, Nassr a-Din, 76 Holocaust, the, 64 Holy Synod, 313, 346–47 Horodetsky, Samuel A., 132, 160n4 Horowitz, Isaiah, 15, 176 Hus, Jan, 251 Hutzulian practices, 89 hypernomian, 6, 171, 176, 202, 217n138, 222 iatrochemistry, 29–33, 39, 51. See also herbal medicine icons, 196, 309, 313–14, 328, 335, 374 idolatry, 227–29, 239 incest, 227–28, 239, 282, 305 Institutum Judaicum, 175, 266 Irenaeus, 244 Isaac ben Meir of Biała, 232 Isaac, biblical, 21, 295 Ishmael, biblical, 188, 229 Islam, ix, 3, 76, 112n119, 188, 224–25, 227, 235, 239–40, 242, 258, 267, 289, 293, 315, 361 Israel Ba‘al Shem Tov (The Besht), viii, 6, 69

Index

Israel of Ruzhin, 132, 150, 153–155 Israel, Land of, 75, 81, 83–84, 108–9, 122, 135, 143, 149, 174, 178–82, 184, 201, 226–28, 234, 236, 245, 269, 271, 287, 301, 316, 345, 347, 361, 366–78, 380 Israel, the Maggid of Kozienice, 113, 129n68 Italy, 15, 234 Izhitskoe village, 338 Izmir, 3 Jacob Joseph of Polonnoye, 91, 190–93, 195–96, 198, 200–201, 215n133, 215n134, 216n137, 218n147, 220n171, 221n174, 221n179 Jacob, biblical, 21, 183, 186–88, 211n107, 220, 234, 261, 284, 286–87, 295, 299 Jan Balwirz, 32 Jan III Sobieski, King, 17 Jasien´ski, Bruno, 58, 66n21 Jefferson, Thomas, 269 Jesus of Nazareth, 263 Jewish mission, 252, 256, 259, 260, 262, 309. See also conversion Jewish National Fund, 382 Jewish Quarter (rewir and “compass”), 110, 112, 116–17, 128n59, 259 Jezieranska, Ewa, 297 John the Baptist, 183, 209n88, 316, 325, 328, 335 Joseph Isaac of Luavitch, 74 Joshua, biblical, 286, 292 Judaizers (“Zhidovstvuiushchie”), 312, 335 Judenrat, 64 Jung-Stilling, Johann Heinrich, 316, 331n22 Kabbalah, 2, 5, 13–21, 25–27, 30, 40, 42, 52n88, 171–76, 197, 201, 252, 254, 257, 260, 272, 289, 394; Christian, 173, 186, 254; divine sparks (nitzotzot), 197, 258; Ein Sof (infinite Divine), 178, 221n172; letters, 16, 166n93, 179, 190-199, 215n134, 216n136, 218n150, 219n158, 220n164, 220n167, 221n172, 261, 263, 270, 275n31; names, 15, 21, 23, 26, 199, 320, 326; Sefirot, 30, 177–78; Shekhinah, 149, 183, 200, 222, 229, 283, 288–89, 294, 299, 307n4, 307n7; Zohar, Book of, 174–75, 178, 185, 205n30, 227–29, 254–55, 285–86, 288, 295–96 Kagarlyk, 135 Kalisz, 33 Kalisz, Isaac of Warka, 116 Kalnibalt, 135

401

Kamieniec-Podolsk, 3, 33, 56, 76 Kamien´, 36 Kantor, Tadeusz, 65 Karaites, 244, 254, 311, 328, 373, 378 Karny, Yo’av, 366–67 Kashubia, 59 Katowice agreement (1699), 76 Katznellenbogen, Pinhas, 15 Kemper, Johann, (former Moses ben Aaron of Cracow), 173–74, 253–55, 265, 274n19 Kharkov province, 337, 354n9, 362, 364 Kherson “Genizah”, 70, 74, 93n5, 97n35 kiddush ha-shem (martyrdom), 137, 179 Kielce, 33 Kingdom of Poland (Congress Kingdom), 2, 8, 55, 70, 104–9, 360, 369 Kirchof, David, 252–53, 259, 262–65 Kishinev, 135, 139–40, 335, 346–47 Klimontów, 60 Klinkerfüs comet, 317, 331n27 Kobylan´ska, 123 Kolberg, Oskar, 61 Koliuchii, Ivan (Ivan the Sting), 341 Kołła$ntaj, Hugo, 42 Kolomaya, 79 Korah, biblical, 143, 292 Korsun’, 349 Kotik, Ezekiel, 110–11 Kotzk, 104–5, 110, 117 Krochmal, Nahman, 75, 92, 103n62 Krotoszyn, 16, 33 Kutno, 33 kvitlekh (petitions), 121, 128n62 Labbiel, biblical, 325 Lament of Adam [Plach Adama], 312 Lanckoronie Affair, 232, 236–37 Landau, Elazar Ha-Levi, 153 Lassale, Ferdinand, 342 Latin, 17–24, 26, 32, 34–35, 49n53, 83, 101n56, 233, 240 LaTrobe, Benjamin Henry, 253, 266–69, 272, 278n96, 279n119, 279n121 Leahkes, David, 133 Lee, Dr. Francis, 254 Leibniz, 254 Leiman, Sid, 245 Lenkoran (Baku province), 376 Leszcyznski, Stanislaus, 253, 255, 268 Leszno, 32, 33, 35 Lewi, Samuel and Emanuel, crown alchemists, 30, 35 Lieberkuhn, Samuel, 252, 253, 256, 262–63, 265, 268 269

402

Lifschitz, Shlomo Zalman, 120 Lifschitz, Yehiel Meir of Gostynin, 116 Likhtamis, Alfeil, 320 Lilith, 15, 227–29, 288–89. See also demons liquor, 25, 27, 33–35, 126, 159, 393 Lithuania, 13, 23, 27, 57, 60, 62, 73, 75, 85, 90, 106, 109, 137, 361 Litvaks, 109 Lodz, 109 Loew, Judah ben Betzalel, the Maharal of Prague, 208n65 Łomz˙a, 33 London, 250–72, 275n41 London Biblical Society, 349 Los Angeles, 318–19 Lotz, Jan, 36 Louis XV, King, 253, 261, 276 Łowicz, 33 Lubavitcher Hasidic movement, 70. See Habad Lublin, 18, 28, 33, 46n23, 55, 56, 60–61, 65n7, 112, 127n44, 232 Łuck, 33, 233 Ludmir (Włodzimierz), 62 Luke, Gospel of, 171, 175, 177–78, 180–84, 186–87, 209n88 Luzzatto, Moses Hayim, 257 Lwów, 3, 17, 30, 33, 35, 56, 152, 233 maggid (preacher and spiritual authority) 16, 133, 135, 218; of Kozienice, 113, 129n68; of Mezeritch, Dov Baer, 77–78, 96n21, 133, 165n61, 193–94, 198, 220n164; of Trisk, 138 magic, 5, 13–26, 33, 35, 37–38, 42–43, 53n116, 62–64, 72, 80–90, 97n35, 103n61, 147, 262, 264, 270–71, 297, 300 Maimon, Solomon, 41, 72–73, 106 Maliovannyi, Kondrat, 340, 350, 356 Maliovantsy, 340, 350, 356 Małopolska, 62–63 Malorossia, 40 Manuseev, Ivan, 317 Markuze, Moses of Słonim, 41 Marrano, 112n119, 187–88, 268 marriage, vii, 56, 57, 154, 250, 271, 298–99, 323, 343, 368, 376 Marx, Karl, 341–42 Mary, biblical, 48, 178, 182–83, 288–89, 294–95 Masalkin, A. I., 368 maskilim, 109, 126, 132, 137, 149, 152–56. See also Haskalah Masonic, 251, 263, 268–71, 277n79, 279n122

Index

Massalski, E. T., 120 Matatia, Kaliora, 35 Mayer, Dawid, 31 medicine, 1, 5, 13–18, 23–37, 40–43, 51–52nn87–88, 52n96, 62 Megerlin, Friedrich David, 244 Meissner, Jan, 104 Mekler, Dovid, 145, 151 melancholy, 24 149, 216, 301 melaveh malkah (farewell party for the Sabbath), 149 Menahem Mendel of Rymanów, 295 Menahem Mendel of Vitebsk (Witebsk) 198, 219n158, 219n159, 221n172 Mendes, David Franco, 241 Messiah, 3, 174, 177–93, 198–99, 201, 204n11, 206n49, 208n17, 225–26, 228–29, 235, 237, 252, 256, 259, 263–264, 311, 352, 377–82, 384, 391n68. See also Sabbateanism; Frankism Michael, biblical, 325–26 Mickiewicz, Adam, 59 Midrash, 175, 180–81, 227, 234, 285, 303, 325–26 Miedzyboz, 75, 78, 81, 83 Mikhalevich, Afanasii, 341–42 Mikhoels, Leybele, 143 mikveh (ritual bath), 145, 159, 374 Milkh, Ya‘akov, 110 Minkovsky, Pinhas, 139–142, 145, 147–149, 159, 164 Minsk, 36 minut, 226, 240. See also heresy minyan (prayer quorum), 376 Mitnaggdim (non-Hasidic traditionalists), 109–10 mitzvah, 57, 195, 287 mohel (circumciser), 374, 390n46 Mohilev, 100n44 Moldavia, 6, 71, 73, 76–91, 94n9, 99–100n42, 101n50 Moravians, 251–52, 255–66, 269, 273, 275n35, 277n78, 277n83 Mordecai (Motele) of Chernobyl, 132 Mordecai Shraga of Husiatyn, 154 Morgenstern, Menahem Mendel of Kotzk (Kock), 104, 117 Morgulis, Menashe, 138 Morits Ungrin, 25 Morocco, 261 Moscow, 29, 360, 362, 364 Moses Eliyakim Beriyah of Kozienice, 108 Moses Hayyim Efraim of Sudilkov, 42, 77

Index

Moses, biblical, 181, 191–93, 201, 215n134, 217n141, 226–228, 238–41, 259, 290–92, 299, 311, 327–28, 345, 368, 379 Moshe ben David of Podhayce (Moses David), 253, 263–64 Mount Ararat, 316 Mount Athos, 85- 87 Müller, Johann Daniel, 253, 267 Muntenia, 81–85 Nahar, Isaac, 225 Nahman of Kosov, 78 Nantava, Hosea, 228 Napoleonic Wars, 369 Nasi, David of Candia, 241–42 Nasi, Joseph, 241 Natanson, Mark, 339 Nathan of Gaza, 3, 180, 226, 228–29, 246n39 Nazis, 361 Neamtz monastery, 90 Nefilim, 227 Neo-Rosicrucians, 175 Neushtadt, 110 New Israel, 345, 347 New Testament Jews, 334–45, 346–48, 351 New York City, 344 Nies´wiez˙, 26, 36, 38 niggun (Hasidic melody), 104 Nikitino village, 317, 331n26 Nikon of Moscow, Patriarch, 310, 312 Noahide Laws, 239, 243 Nordau, Max, 381 North Africa, 224 Odessa, 8, 81, 109, 135–36, 139, 163n34, 164n41, 335, 338, 342, 345, 347–49, 358, 363, 365, 380, 382, 390n52 Okopy (Okop Góry Swie$ty Trojcy), 6, 69–76, 79, 94–5, 99n41, 100–101n47 Ol’shanitsa village, 339 Old Believers, 310, 312, 316, 329n5, 356, 360, 380 Old Testament, 1, 7, 22–23, 261, 309–11, 313, 327, 336, 343, 346, 353n5, 359, 361, 369- 373, 386n1 Olkusz, 33 Opatów, 55 Orc, 272 Order of the Mustard Seed, 256, 277n79 Orel province, 360 Osherowitch, Mendl, 141 Ottoman Empire, 3, 15, 70, 85, 263, 282, 313, 317, 391n76

403

paganism, ix, 239, 361 Pale of Settlement, 2, 137, 157 Panama Canal, 379 Panchenko, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich, 311 Paracelsus (Phillip von Hohenheim), 5, 14, 29–32, 35, 39, 43–44n2 paramedics, 14, 18, 27, 29, 32, 34, 36–37, 39–41, 43–44, 45n9 Paris, 381 parnas (president), 232 Passover, 50n65, 127n43, 206n46, 227, 311, 360, 375–76 Paul, biblical, 176, 179–80, 237, 239–40 peasants, 14, 16, 41, 99n37, 119–20, 123, 137, 315, 334, 336–45, 347, 349, 350–51, 354n8, 357, 361, 368–70, 373–74, 382, 384 Pedaya, Haviva, 88, 98n36, 217n138 Pedhatsur (klezmer band), 141 penitence (teshuvah), 199, 319; of Adam, 325, 327 Penza province, 360 People’s Will, 341 Perl, Joseph, 75, 96n22, 103n62 Perzyna, Ludwik, 40–41 Petrov, Kirill, 313 Petrukhin, Vladimir, 13, 23 phallus, 306 Pharisees, 180–81 Philo of Alexandria, 310 Pia$tek, 6, 112, 115–18 Pico (Giovanni Pico della Mirandola), 30, 173 pidyonot nefashot (“redemption money”), 132 Pietism, 14, 313–14, 336 pilgrimage, Hasidic, 123, 156 Pinców, 33 Piotrków Trybunalski, 55 plague maiden, 61 plait, 28, 41 Płock, 33, 38, 112, 127n45 Podlasie District, 60 Podolia, 6, 19, 21, 62, 69–71, 74–82, 85, 87–92, 100n47, 102n57, 232–33, 236, 254, 257, 263, 270, 337, 355 Podvolchisk (Galicia), 152 pogroms, 2, 70, 92, 335, 340, 345 Poiana Marului monastery, 86, 101n50 Polesie District, 60 Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 13, 23, 27, 57, 73, 75, 85, 90 Poltava province, 85–86, 337, 341 populists (narodniki), 343 Portnoy, Leiba Itskov, 339, 342 Poznan´, 33, 35–36, 52n96, 56 Praga, 33

404

Prague, 176, 183, 255–56 Preis, Joachim Fredrik, 253, 261–62 Preuss, Jan, 36 Prikaz (Pharmacist Department), 36–40 Priluker, Iakov, 345, 347–48, 351, 357–58 printing, 17–18, 40, 46n23, 53n115, 175, 231–32, 372 Privol’noe, 381 Pron´, Stanisław, 31 prophet, 7, 179–80, 184, 212n118, 225, 228, 236–37, 247, 251, 253, 254, 258, 271–72, 299, 311–12, 315–19, 325, 328, 350, 377–78, 391n69 Prostak (commoner), 88, 292 Prut river, 78–79, 99n36 pseudepigrapha, 310–11, 320, 328 Qedar, 83 Queen of Sheba, 291 Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, 237 Rabinovich, Iosif, 7, 346–47, 357 Rabinowicz, Jacob Isaac, the “Holy Jew” of Przysucha , 106 Rabinowicz, Jacob Tzvi of Parysów, 118 Raccanello, Dario, 86 Radom, 33 Raduga Publishing House, 319 Radzymin, 110 railroad, 137, 155, 379, 381 Rakhmistrivke, 141, 164 Rambro, Jacob, 58 Rawa, 33 Rebbe, 59, 104, 107, 111–12, 119, 131, 150, 156; Hasidic, viii; Kotzker, 117; Tolner, 6, 140; See also Gerer Reiner, Elchanan, 74 Reisher, Ephraim, dayan (judge) from Rzeszów, 16 Renaissance, 5, 29, 173 Renatus, Christian, 251, 260 Reuchlin, Johannes, 173 Riaboshapka, Ivan, 338, 348 Riazan province, 360, 363, 365 Ricii, Paulus, 173 Rohrbach colony, 336 Romania, 70–71, 73, 75, 77–88, 94n9, 97–98n35, 99n37, 99n41, 151 Romashki village, 339 Rome, 17, 124n5, 232–34, 238, 253 256 Rosanski, Tomasz, 36 Rosh Hashanah, 116, 135, 144, 146, 153, 167n109, 311, 376 Rosman, Moshe, 15, 88, 103n64

Index

Rothschild, 381 Royal Academy of Arts, 269 Rozenshtein, Anna, 339 Rubinstein, Avraham, 71, 94n9 Rublev, Andrei, 309 Rudometkin, Maksim Gavrilovich, 7, 311–12, 317–28, 391n69 Russia, 2, 29, 36, 74, 86, 139, 150–52, 257, 276, 298, 305–6, 310, 313, 316, 318–19, 334–38, 341, 344–48, 359–62, 364, 367, 369, 371–72, 376, 378, 382–84, 387, 389, 383 Russo-Persian War, 315 Russo-Turkish War, 313, 315 Ruzhin dynasty, 132 Ryki, 55 Rzeszów, 16, 27, 33 Rzhishchev, 135–36 Sabbatai Tzevi, 2–3, 9, 103n65, 176–82, 185–88, 223–31, 237, 240, 244, 252, 258, 264, 282, 302–3 Sabbateanism, 2–3, 9, 103n65, 171, 176–77, 187–88, 190, 212n119, 223–45, 251–52, 257, 264–65, 278n91, 289, 294 Sabbath, 16, 79, 80, 98n36, 107, 110–12, 115–16, 125n21, 131, 141, 147–49, 154–55, 159, 165n73, 165n78 Sadducees, 244 Sadegura, 152, 154–55, 160n8, 164, 168n125 San Francisco, 251, 319 Sandomierz, 33 Sara prison island, 318 Sarah, wife of Sabbatai Tzevi, 307n13 Saratov Province, 315, 360, 363, 365, 374, 385n5 Sasportas, Jacob, 223–31, 236, 240, 245 Satan, 15, 20, 59, 186, 187, 210, 285, 310, 321, 325, 326. See also demons Saturn, 50n65, 229–30, 236, 246n39 Scholem, Gershom, 171, 185, 187, 189–91, 197, 208n65, 212n123, 213n127, 217n138, 218n149, 224 Secu monastery, 85 self-abnegation, 197 seminal emissions, 15, 211n101 Sergey Shtyrkov, 311 serpent, biblical, 186, 198, 227, 322–24, 326–28 sexuality, 251, 260, 269, 271, 301 Shalash, 132, 147–49, 162n25 shalosh-seudos, 148–49, 155 shamanism, 43, 80 Shamil, Imam, 317

Index

Sharakhovich, Nikita , 347 Shas Association, 110 Shatz-Uffenheimer, Rivka, 225 Shepetovka, 42 shirayim (“remains” of food, drink), 148 Shivehei ha-Besht (In Praise of the Besht), 70, 92, 100n45 Shlomo of Savran, 150 Shneur Zalman of Liady, 73, 133, 222 shohtim (kosher slaughterers), 133, 140, 144 Shpoler Zeyde, 140 shreimel (Hasidic headgear), 107 shtetl (small town), viii, 2, 6, 14–15, 23, 105, 111–12, 119, 122, 124n4, 383 shtibl (prayer house), 110 Shuvalov, Count Pyotr Pavlovich, 136, 151–52, 156; family, 141 Shuvalov, Pavel Petrovich, 151–52, 166n99 Siberia, 136, 156, 358, 360, 369, 372–73, 375–76, 379 Sieciechow, 33 Siedłiec, 33 Sifting Time, 251, 266 sihat hulin (discussion of secular, worldly matters), 145, 149 Silesia, 30, 45n9, 269 Simeon bar Yohai, 186, 228 Simkhah Menahem ben Yohanan, 17 sin, 57, 61, 83, 108, 122–23, 178, 180, 184, 186, 188, 225, 227, 271, 284–85, 287, 302, 307n6, 310, 314, 327, 334, 353n5, 378, 380 Singer, Isaac Bashevis, 59 Singer, Israel Joshua, 59 Skvira, 154 Sleszkowski, Sebastian, 15 Słuck, 21 Smielowski, Adam, 23 Smilovichi, 21 Smolensk, 29 Sokal District, 33, 60 Sokolov, Luk’ian Petrovich, 316 Sokolov, Timofei (Bishop Tikhon), 314 Soldatskoie village, 338 Solodinki village, 376 Solomon of Radomsko, 107 Solomon, biblical, 285, 291, 316 Solovetskii monastery, 318, 328 songs, viii, 149, 283, 314, 349, 350, 380 Soviet Union, 66n22 Spektor, Mordkhe, 142 Spener, Philip Jacob, 336 Spiritual-Biblical Brotherhood, 334, 340–41, 344

405

St. Petersburg, 109, 346 Star of Bethlehem, 230 Stavropol’ province, 337, 360, 362–65 Stempenyu (klezmer band), 141 Stern, Abraham, 74–76, 92 Suez Canal, 379 Sufi Islam, 315 Summer of Love (1968), 251, 260 Supino Raphael, 229 Surenhuys, Wilhem, 261 Swedenborg, Baron Emanuel, 7, 252–69, 273–76 Swedenborgians, 250, 265, 269–71 Swedish East India Company, 258 Synodal Conference, London (1749), 259 Syreniusz, Szymon, 27 Szmul Izrael, Rabbi of Pia$tek, 112–13 Talmud, 3, 30, 167n119, 173, 180, 226, 231, 233–34, 236, 243, 311, 326, 345, 369, 372, 375 Tambov province, 312–13, 315, 363, 365, 377, 382, 385n5 Tanya (Likkutei Amarim), 120 Tarle, 231 Tatars, 30, 72 Taubes, Jacob, 189, 212n119 Tavrida province, 334, 336–337, 354n10 Teleshovka village, 339 Telezhinskii, Moshko, 42 Tetragrammaton, 26, 191–92, 195, 219n159, 220n167. See also Kabbalah: names Texeira, Abraham, 252–54 Thessaloniki, 3 Tiflis (Tbilisi, Georgia), 262–365, 375 Tish (lit. “table”), 131, 144, 147–48, 165n73 Tishby, Isaac, 225, 245n2 Tluste, 73, 74 Todorskii, Simeon Fedorovich (Bishop Simon of Pskov), 314 Tolstoi, Count Dmitrii, 318 Tolstoy, Leo, 342, 344, 356, 358 Tolstoyan, 334 Tolstoyanism, 343 Torah, 16, 120, 144, 148, 151, 172, 179–82, 190, 193, 196, 206n46, 208n71, 215n134, 216n136, 218n148, 225–26, 228, 237–41, 326, 375–76, 390n52 Torun´, 33, 62 Tower of Babel, 227 Transcaucasia, 315–18 Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, 172, 229, 322

406

Tree of Life, 172, 322–23 Trinity, 70, 174, 177, 236, 258, 303, 309, 359 Trisk, 110, 138 Trismegistus, Hermes, 29 Trojanów, 36 Tsar Alexander I, 315, 370–72, 389 Tsaritsyn, 376 Tula province, 360, 363, 365 Twersky, Duvid of Tal’noye, the Tolner Rebbe, 6, 131–32, 146, 150, 152, 157 Tymophii Zaiats, 348, 358 Tzaddik, 6, 88, 104, 106–26, 129n68, 129n71, 129n79, 132, 135–60, 179. See also Rebbe Uklein, Semën Matveevich, 315 Ukraine, 6, 9, 30, 40, 57, 60, 62, 81, 86–87, 100n44, 136, 140, 141, 144–45, 152, 154, 156, 162n24, 162n28, 335, 337, 361–65 Ulishija village, 107 Ultra-Orthodoxy, 110 Uman, 135 Unger, Abraham Elkhanan (Chuna), 6, 112–15, 128n50 United States, 318–19, 330n20, 344, 361, 383 University of Mantua, 17; of Padua, 17; of Rome, 17; of Uppsala, 252 Uvarov, Sergei Semionovich, 167n122 Valley of Josephat, 379 Van Helmont, F.M., 254 Vasil’kov, 133, 135, 138, 156, 339, 340, 349 Vasile, 86–87, 101n52 Velicikovsky, Paisie, Starets, 85–86, 101n52 Verbermacher, Hannah Rachel, the Maid of Ludmir, 62 Vienna, 50n65, 150, 164, 225, 300 Vistula river, 111 Vitebsk, 84, 341, 374 Vladimir, Grand Prince of Kiev, 309 Volhynia, 19, 21, 62 von Zinzendorf, Count Nicolaus Ludwig, 7, 251–53, 257, 259–62, 266, 269, 272 Voronezh province, 312–14, 360, 363, 365, 368 Walachia, 6, 69–78, 81–92, 94n7, 94n9, 96n22, 97n31, 99n42, 100n45, 103n62 Warka, 110, 116–17, 120, 128n56

Index

Warsaw, 19, 28, 32–33, 35, 38, 44, 64, 68n69, 104, 109–20, 126nn27–29, 265, 292, 300–301, 390n52 Warsaw Synagogue Council, 112–16 Washington, D.C., 269 Washington, George, 269 Wellclose Square, 257, 260, 263, 264, 267 werewolf, 89, 102n58 Wilno (Vilna), 33, 36 Wirszubski, Chaim, 173 Włodzimierz (Wołyns´ki), 33, 62 Wodzinski, Marcin, 75 Wojcech Bełza, 31 World War I, 56, 58 World War II, 64 Wormser, Seckel from Michelstadt, 15 Wrocław, 32 Wschowa, 33 Württemberg, 336 Yaakov Yosef ben Moshe (Mandel) of Rzhishchev, 135 Yaakov Yosef of Kashavat[ni], 138 Yaakov Pesakh ben Yitshak, maggid meisharim from Z˙ółkiew, 16 Yavan, Baruch me-Eretz, 232–34 Yiddish, 2, 6, 19, 41–42, 47n28, 50n65, 71–72 Yohanan ben Zakkai, 326 Yom Kippur, 108, 219n159, 259, 311, 376 Yosele Tolner, “dem rebins,” 141, 164 Zacuto, Moshe, 17 Zadoq, biblical, 254 Zahalon, Yakov, 17 Zamojska, Anna, 27 Zamos´c´, 16–17, 19, 33, 231–34 Z˙arki, 56, 65n10 Ze’ev Wolf of Stryków, 106 Zeeserman, Joseph (Ios’ka), 338 Z˙elechów, 128n56 zemirot, 148 Zima, village, 375–76 Zionism, 7, 344, 381 Zipporah, biblical, 295, 299 Zohar, Book of, 98n35, 174–75, 178–79, 185, 196, 220, 227–29, 254, 285–86, 288, 295–96 Z˙ółkiew, 16–18, 40, 232 Zygmunt III Wazy, King, 15, 32