three days later, the court ordered the arrested participants in the ceremony to be brought to Kamieniec for interrogation. The directives of the court touched upon a moot legal issue: following Sigmundus III’s privilege of 1592, the Jews of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth were granted full legal autonomy and were not subject to the jurisdiction of the Church unless they lived on Church-owned estates. While individual members of the clergy sometimes violated this privilege and encroached on the rights of the Jews, Church tribunals normally did not hear cases in which none of the parties was a Christian. Ostensibly, the intervention of the Kamieniec episcopal court in the Lanckoronie affair constituted an open—and unprecedented—breach of jurisdiction.
At the time of the Lanckoronie incident, the Kamieniec diocese was headed by Bishop Mikołaj of Dębowa Góra Dembowski (1680–1757). Jewish historiography has routinely regarded Dembowski as a rabid anti-Semite (as exemplified, for instance, by his 1750 edict expelling the Jews from the city of Kamieniec) and maintained that the bishop “heard” about the events in Lanckoronie, overstepped his prerogatives, violated the laws granting Jews legal autonomy, and forced them to appear before his court. What is certainly true about this scenario is that the bishop indeed was a rabid anti-Semite. However, the scholars who have propounded this line of argument never bothered to explain how exactly Dembowski—head of a diocese the size of half of France—could have “heard” about an incident involving a few Jews in a remote townlet only three days after it took place.
The official protocol of the consistory court’s investigation was published in Franciszek Kleyn’s Coram iudicio and was already known to the first scholars of Frankism. While Kleyn’s tortuous Latin is not free of ambiguities, the protocol is clear and unequivocal in this particular case: the episcopal court took up the case because it was explicitly and directly asked to do so by the Jewish authorities. Immediately after the arrest of the participants in the ritual by the Lanckoronie magistrates, the “elders of the Satanów and Lanckoronie synagogues” brought suit against them at the Kamieniec consistory for “deviating from the Mosaic Law and the ancient [Jewish] traditions.”27 This formulation of the accusation was fraught with consequences.
The canon law principle that the Catholic Church has supreme authority in the internal religious affairs of not only Christians but all peoples and all confessions has a long history. The popes claimed power to punish the Jews for deviations from Mosaic Law, exactly as they were empowered to punish pagans for transgressing natural law.28 Innocent IV (1243–54) already stated that “the pope can judge the Jews . . . if they invent heresies against their own law.”29 As Jeremy Cohen has noted, “Innocent’s line of thought quickly became the common opinion of thirteenth- and fourteenth-century canonists. It apparently guided the friars of the papal Inquisition. By the second half of the fourteenth century, the Dominican Inquisitor Nicholas Eymeric considered it a direct mandate to the Inquisition to defend genuine Judaism against internal heresy.”30 The functionaries of Bishop Dembowski’s court followed Eymeric’s position. They invoked the bull of Gregory XIII Antiqua Iudaeorum improbitas,31 giving the Inquisition jurisdiction over the Jews of Rome in cases of blasphemy, protection of heretics, and possession of forbidden works, and stated that since the papal Inquisition did not operate in Poland, local consistories had the right and obligation to conduct proceedings in its place. Upon the request of the Jewish authorities, the consistory court of the Kamieniec diocese claimed general jurisdiction in cases concerning heresy (nobis quoque, . . . potestats inquisitionis contra haereticam pravitatem . . . de iure competat)32 and undertook to investigate specific allegations of heresy against the Sabbatians.
To the best of my knowledge, the Kamieniec investigation was the first case in early modern Poland in which a Christian ecclesiastical court looked into allegations of a Jewish heresy. It is not clear whether the bet din of Satanów knew what they were doing when they denounced the arrested Sabbatians to Dembowski and approached the bishop’s court. The explicit formulation of the nature of the crime as “deviation from the true teachings of Mosaic Law” would suggest that the accusers knew that the Church had prima facie jurisdiction in such cases, and it seems to be no coincidence that they approached precisely this court.
Very quickly, however, the rabbis realized that the voluntary renunciation of the Jewish judicial autonomy was not a good idea. A week after the commencement of the investigation in Kamieniec, they tried to backtrack; the consistory protocol noted that “on 9 February, the accusers withdrew their case and refused to continue the proceedings.”33 But it was too late: the Catholic clergy had already gained the opportunity to meddle in what until then had been an internal Jewish affair. The consistory “decided to continue the proceedings for its own information,” demanded that the arrested parties be transferred from Lanckoronie to Kamieniec, and ordered that the inspection of books and manuscripts confiscated by the bet din be carried out by qualified priests.34
The Kamieniec consistory also demanded more information. Detentions and interrogations of suspected Sabbatian heretics by local Polish authorities occurred in other locations in Podolia: on 1 March, four suspects were apprehended in Jezierzany, and three weeks later, a large group was arrested in Wielchowiec. The detainees were brought to Kamieniec for questioning and faced Bishop Dembowski.35 Further incidents attesting to the antinomian behavior of the Sabbatians took place. One Shabbat, the Sabbatian Samuel of Busk “out of spite” rode a horse and smoked tobacco in front of the house of the chief rabbi of Lwów and the Land rabbi of Ruthenia, Hayyim Cohen Rapaport. He also publicly reviled the rabbi.36 Rapaport’s response was similar to that of the elders of Satanów and Lanckoronie: he brought Samuel to the court of the archbishop of Lwów, Mikołaj Wyżycki.
The protocols of the Lwów consistory for 1756 are no longer extant, so we do not know the legal basis of the case; all that is left is an index to the protocols that attests that the bishop’s court indeed heard the case against Samuel in causa intuitu certarum cathegoriarum.37 The Lwów trial was apparently similar to the one from Kamieniec and invoked the Church’s jurisdiction in cases of heresy against the Mosaic Law and natural law. Some information can be culled from a Latin letter sent in 1757 to the papal nuncio in Warsaw by the shtadlan of the Council of Four Lands, Baruch me-Erets Yavan. When describing the case to the nuncio, Yavan stated that Samuel “professed and disseminated new religious tenets contrary to the Ten Commandments, the Old [Testament] Law as well as the natural law.”38
The shtadlan also mentioned that the delinquent was deemed a heretic by Bishop Wyżycki’s court and was delivered to the secular authorities for punishment (pro quibus criminibus fuit haereticus adinventus, et pro paenis ad forum saeculare remissus).39 According to Emden’s anonymous informant, Samuel was condemned to death and hanged. Neither the Jews nor the Christians wanted to bury him, so the body lay under the gallows for days.40 Emden’s informant seemed to have exaggerated: execution for heresy was extremely rare in Poland, and when it did occur (as in the 1689 case of the nobleman Kazimierz Łyszczyński, author of the tractate De non existentia Dei),41 it was widely publicized and discussed. The complete absence of any mention of Samuel’s case in Polish sources suggests that it did not end in any spectacular way. Ber Birkenthal (who mentioned a trial in Bishop Wyżycki’s court without giving Samuel’s name) reported that the defendant was accused of “inventing a new faith and new religion” (al hamtsa’ah emunah ve-dat hadashah) and that he was pronounced guilty but that bribery had saved him from any punishment.42
Regardless of what the true outcome of Samuel of Busk’s case was, it is clear that a new paradigm of the struggle between the Sabbatians and their opponents was being established in Podolia. Provocative public violations of normative Judaism and challenges to rabbinic authority became a daily matter. The standard response of the rabbinate became denunciation to Christian ecclesiastical authorities and the accusation of heresy. The involvement of episcopal courts and of such prominent and powerful clergymen as Dembowski and Wyżycki constituted a mortal danger for the Sabbatians (even if the testimony about Samuel’s hanging is probably untrue),
