longest testimony, described events that took place nine years before the Satanów investigation). The famed Frankist “orgies” were, in fact, the custom of sexual hospitality, which was not a singular ritual but a daily practice; according to the testimonies, it was upheld by the Sabbatians for years before Frank’s appearance in Poland and was in no way connected to his activity. It is highly unlikely that none of this had come to the attention of the rabbis prior to the Lanckoronie incident; even less likely is that it would not have came to their attention had they really wanted to pursue the matter.
As for the specific practices involved, stories about a Sabbatian who wanted to “copulate with a married woman while she was menstruant” and another one, who publicly masturbated in the study hall, had already emerged in 1725; the concerned congregants went to their rabbi who “replied that he knew of many worse acts” and did nothing.86 None of the earlier cases gave rise to a public investigation like the one in Satanów; in none of them were the Sabbatians forced to describe their misdeeds in public.
Before the Lanckoronie incident, the Polish rabbinate’s standing policy toward Sabbatianism was to let sleeping dogs lie. There seems to have been a tacit agreement between the Sabbatian and anti-Sabbatian factions within Polish Jewry, and even the anti-Sabbatian rabbis clearly thought that open scandal was not a price worth paying for the eradication of heresy. This agreement was broken only if one side failed to keep to the bargain. Until the eruption of the Frankist affair, the so-called anti-Sabbatian campaigns were, in fact, individual campaigns of zealots such as rabbis Moses Hagiz or Jacob Emden. During Hagiz’s campaign against Hayon, the Council of Four Lands refused to get involved and did not answer his pleas for Hayon’s condemnation.87 During Emden’s controversy with Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, the council put much more effort into silencing Emden than into censuring Eibeschütz: the October 1753 herem of the council targeted not so much Sabbatian manuscripts as it targeted Emden’s anti-Eibeschütz pamphlets. The council’s explicit intention was to hush up the quarrel and to avoid spreading public discord among the Jews; silence, not loud condemnation, was seen as the most appropriate response to heresy.
The very first known event involving Frank, the Lanckoronie incident, shattered the status quo between the Sabbatians and the rabbinate and caused the abandonment of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, preferred up to that point by most Polish rabbis. The question remains as to why, in this particular instance, the Polish rabbinate discarded its standard (and largely successful) policy of appeasement, embarked upon a public investigation in Satanów, and reported the Sabbatians to the Catholic Church. I suggest that at least some of the rabbis recognized that the Lanckoronie rite had transgressed the boundaries not only of normative Judaism but also of earlier Sabbatian antinomianism. This, I believe, was not due to the sexual element of the rite: as noted, the sexual misdeeds of the Sabbatians had been known before and never caused such an upheaval.
What really troubled the rabbinate was the use of Christian symbols in the ritual: regardless of the Frankists’ intention (be it antinomian or syncretistic), the use of a cross in a Jewish rite put all the Jews in danger and exposed them to Christian charges of desecration and blasphemy. The participation of several communal rabbis in the rite further complicated the situation. While rabbis (and even prominent rabbis) had previously been accused of Sabbatianism, the illusion of the unity of the Jewish religious establishment in opposition to heresy remained. Both halakhah and widespread practice were reluctant to excommunicate rabbinic scholars: the accused rabbis loudly denied any involvement in heresy and quickly made appropriate anti-Sabbatian gestures. Yet, in contrast to the earlier cases of banning the unspecified “people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi,” the post-Lanckoronie rabbinic reaction targeted five specific communities: Lanckoronie, Busk, Jezierzany, Opoczna, and Krzywcze;88 one cannot fail to notice that the rabbis of three of these communities (Lanckoronie, Busk, and Krzywcze) figured in testimonies as alleged participants of the Lanckoronie ritual.
While the text of the May 1756 herem of Brody did not depart from standard texts of earlier anti-Sabbatian bans, the form of its imposition significantly differed from the established pattern: according to the testimony of Isaac of Biała, before imposing the herem the chief rabbi of Lwów, Hayyim Cohen Rapaport, “stood before bishop [Wyżycki] . . . and obtained permission to excommunicate them and put them in prison.”89 Rapaport did not need permission from the bishop to pronounce a ban of excommunication on Jews, and such a practice had never been employed by Polish rabbis: he was apparently trying to hedge his bets by ensuring that he had Church backing for his herem. Yet Christian involvement was a double-edged sword. Initially, it might have given the author of the herem unprecedented power. But before long, the Sabbatians bribed the bishop to pressure the rabbi to cancel the ban, and Rapaport was forced to have a beadle pronounce in the synagogue that “people of the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi are no longer excommunicated.”90 Like the elders of the Satanów synagogue who approached Bishop Dembowski, the rabbi of Lwów overplayed his hand.
Chapter 2
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The Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New Faith
Prehistory of Eighteenth-Century Anti-Sabbatianism: Rabbi Jacob Sasportas
From the very outset, the Frankist case deviated from the established pattern of the rabbinic struggle against Sabbatianism in the first part of the eighteenth century. Frankism was unique in its extraordinary public profile, in the level of involvement of Gentile authorities in an ostensibly internal Jewish affair, and in the brutality of the rabbinic campaign against it. In order to understand these developments, we must extend our inquiry beyond eighteenth-century anti-Sabbatianism and retrace the strategies of opposition to Sabbatai Tsevi during his lifetime. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas (1610–98) was the principal opponent of the messianic movement that arose around the figure of Sabbatai in the 1660s. Sasportas was born in North Africa and served as rabbi in a number of Sephardic communities in Western Europe. During the outbreak of Sabbatian enthusiasm, he was living as a private individual in Hamburg. Tsitsat novel Tsevi, his collection of letters and accounts pertaining to the period directly preceding and following Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, remains the indispensable source for any analysis of the early stages of Sabbatianism.
Rabbi Jacob Sasportas’s activities were first reconstructed in Gershom Scholem’s monumental monograph on Sabbatai Tsevi. Scholem had little sympathy for his subject: on just one page of his book, he managed to attribute to Sasportas harshness, irascibility, arrogance, fanaticism, hunger for the power and status of rabbinic offices, bitterness and frustration, arrogance and unsteadiness in human relations, egotism and excessive self-confidence. On the adjacent page, he called the rabbi “a Jewish Grand Inquisitor.”1 If Scholem’s discussion of Rabbi Jacob’s character is, to put it mildly, somewhat 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 Sabbatianism. Tsitsat novel Tsevi was presented by Scholem not as a text expounding a consistent theological position but as an expression of its author’s twisted character. Since Sasportas’s book described otherwise unknown events from the early phase of the Sabbatian movement, it had paramount significance for historical research, but it has not been subjected to a more 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-Sabbatian strategist, the rabbi was the first to try to understand what the Sabbatian movement was all about.
Scholars have emphasized that Sasportas attacked Sabbatai well before his apostasy, and the target of his ire was not the messianic enthusiasm per se: the rabbi explicitly stated that he would be prepared to accept Tsevi as the messiah if the latter fulfilled the traditional criteria of the messiahship.3 Isaiah Tishby and Rivka Shatz-Uffenheimer have argued that Sabbatianism was for Sasportas first and foremost a halakhic issue: the polemic was motivated mainly by Sabbatai’s systematic violations of the principles of religious
