In mid-March, during the Fast of Esther, Frank gathered the Sabbatians in Kopczyńce and announced: “‘If we have the True God and you believe in him, why should we hide? Let us go in the open and do public damage. Whoever wants to give his body and cling to the love of the Faith, let him walk with me.’ And they went. . . . The Lord himself had jam and vodka in his hand and gave everyone in public in the streets something to eat.”43
Open violation of the Fast of Esther must have been part of Frank’s wider strategy of instigating public confrontation with the rabbis. The account fits nicely with the claim that he deliberately opened the windows in Lanckoronie; Frank apparently sought to provoke the Jewish authorities in hopes that he would be given access to the bishop and thus gain the support of the Christians. He succeeded: two days after the Kopczyńce incident, he was arrested, together with several other participants, and brought to face Dembowski. Those arrested were released after a week and granted salvus conductus for the duration of the consistory’s proceedings.44 The Sabbatians dispersed to their homes; Frank left the Commonwealth and headed for Salonika.45
While the cases were being tried before the consistories of Kamieniec and Lwów, Jewish authorities conducted their own investigation. The rabbinic council of the Land of Ruthenia gathered in Lwów on 10 May46 and obliged the rabbi of Satanów to collect testimony concerning Sabbatianism in the area of his jurisdiction. The Satanów bet din sat between 31 May and 13 June; the testimony that it collected (along with the testimony from the Lwów case of Samuel of Busk sent to the nuncio by Baruch me-Erets Yavan) is the fullest extant account of Sabbatian antinomianism.
The Satanów rabbinic court collected twenty-seven short depositions and one long confession from a repentant Sabbatian. The vast majority of the short depositions were given not by the Sabbatians themselves but by people who saw their misdeeds (on one occasion, spying through a keyhole)47 or even by those who had only heard about them. Most deponents took great pains to emphasize that they themselves did not participate in the crimes ascribed to others; some claimed that they had been given the opportunity to participate but had declined to do so or escaped at the last minute.48 The offenses attributed to the Sabbatians pertained to three main spheres of activity. First, they involved violations of Shabbat and dietary laws. Thus Joseph of Rohatyn, who did admit to having taken part in prohibited rites, described in detail how during Passover he had eaten a slice of bread with “the other thing” (pork) and butter and had drunk nonkosher wine; he also stated that it was customary among the Sabbatians to include a piece of pork and a piece of cheese in a Shabbat meal.49
Second, they touched upon theological issues. For instance, Samuel of Busk professed his belief that “there is One God in the Trinity, and the Fourth Person is the Holy Mother”;50 others mentioned the belief in the annulment of the Torah of Moses and its replacement by the new Torah of Sabbatai Tsevi51 and admitted possessing and copying heretical books and manuscripts.52 Third, they constituted sexual transgressions. Samuel of Busk stated that “it is permissible to have children and to have sexual intercourse with someone else’s wife or one’s own sister, or even—though only in secret—with one’s own mother. As I am old now, I no longer do it, but twenty years ago (and I have professed this faith for twenty-four years), I had carnal relations with the wife of my son. . . . And I believe that all this is permitted because God commanded us to do thus.”53
Other testimonies described the breaking of the prohibition of incest,54 having sexual relations with menstruating women,55 masturbation (also in public),56 as well as the practice of “sexual hospitality,” whereby a host offered his wife or daughter to a stranger coming as a guest to his house. This custom was known to the Hebrew Bible, as attested by the episodes with Lot’s daughters (Gen. 19) and the Levite and his concubine (Judg. 19:22–30); it had been widespread in the ancient Middle East and Central Asia and was known to survive in tribal societies until modern times.57 The Dönmeh branch led by Frank’s putative father-in-law, Yehudah Levi Tova, also was rumored to practice sexual hospitality,58 and it seems that the custom filtered down to the Podolian Sabbatians as well. Thus, the women interrogated by the Satanów bet din reported that they slept with strangers “upon the wish of the[ir] husband[s],”59 who “told [them] it was a positive commandment.”60 One deposition dealt with a woman who had had intercourse with a stranger without her husband’s permission and thereby provoked his ire, “for such a deed is not considered by them a commandment.”61 Another mentioned a complaint voiced by a Sabbatian who came to a house of a fellow believer: “Why did we come here? He would not honor us with his wife.”62
After completing the proceedings, the Satanów bet din imposed penalties. Joseph of Rohatyn made a public confession of sins and described his deeds in front of the entire congregation (a matter uncommon in Jewish tradition, which normally forbade public description of one’s sin). Then he received thirty-nine lashes and prostrated himself on the threshold of the synagogue so that those coming and going would tread upon his body. He divorced his wife (because she had had sexual relations with others)63 and declared his children bastards. He was banished from the Rohatyn community and was prohibited ever to make any contacts with other Jews. He was supposed to wander alone for the rest of his days.64
Herem
The humiliating ceremony undergone by Joseph of Rohatyn in his hometown synagogue—public confession followed by thirty-nine lashes with the congregation treading upon the penitent—is not unknown in early modern Judaism: Uriel da Costa underwent exactly the same ordeal in Amsterdam in 1639.65 In da Costa’s case, the ceremony was expiation preceding the annulment of a ban of excommunication previously imposed upon him. In the case of Joseph, the Satanów documents make no explicit reference to such a ban, but the banishment and prohibition of communicatio civilis were typical sanctions associated with excommunication.
Jewish sources describing the Lanckoronie incident mention that the participants in the rite were placed under a ban; we also know that on 26 May 1756, a week or so before the launching of the proceedings of the Satanów bet din, the rabbinic assembly of Brody pronounced a herem on the Sabbatians. “The wicked men” belonging to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi were to be “excluded and repudiated by the community of Israel; their wives and daughters were to be regarded as harlots, their offspring as bastards.” Other Jews were forbidden to have any dealings with them or to assist them in any way. The ban restricted the study of printed kabbalistic works, which had an official rabbinic approval, to those over the age of thirty, and manuscript works (including Lurianic writings) to the age of forty.66 It is highly interesting that on the very same day, the very same assembly also issued a pro-Eibeschütz proclamation.67 The “Sabbatian” and “anti-Sabbatian” camps, often depicted as monolithic, had much more fluid boundaries: the same rabbis simultaneously exonerated the alleged Sabbatian Eibeschütz and vigorously condemned the Frankists, thereby drawing a clear line between the two cases.68
Herem (the Jewish ban of excommunication) developed from the biblical anathema and became one of the chief means of social control and coercion available to the leadership of medieval and early modern Jewry. Technically, the herem could have been imposed by an individual Jew (especially in matters relating to debt settlement), but it was normally used by rabbinic tribunals as a judicial measure for certain prescribed offenses. The Talmud lists twenty-four such offenses (the list ranges from speaking ill of a learned man to failure on the part of a ritual slaughterer to show his knife to the rabbi for examination), but common practice substantially extended the applicability of the herem. The scope of its authority also increased over time: initially, the ban was applicable only in the area under the direct jurisdiction of a given bet din; but later times increasingly saw instances of pronouncing a herem on foreigners. As with Christian excommunication, a procedure developed for informing other communities that a herem had been imposed so that it could be repeated and enforced in other localities.69
