each of Emden’s polemical works, “for we cannot prevail if we do not have a weapon” against the heretics.47
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-Sabbatianism and Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz, agreed upon a common policy against the open Sabbatians in Podolia. In late September, the Council of Four Lands confirmed the herem previously imposed in Brody and extended its validity to other communities.48 Bans of excommunications were pronounced in the major Jewish centers of the region, including Lwów, Łuck, and Dubno.49 While the wording of the bans repeated the more or less standardized texts of earlier excommunications, this time there seems to have been a concerted effort to put them into practice and to publicize the general condemnation of the Sabbatians. Toward the end of September, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć informed Emden that the president of the Council of Four Lands had ordered the bans to be printed and disseminated among all the Jewish communities of Poland.50
Concurrent with the July–September sessions of the Council of Four Lands, the investigation at the bishop of Kamieniec’s consistory was gaining momentum. At the end of July, since the rabbis ignored the calls to appear at the gatherings of the tribunal, the body dispatched priests who were supposed to interview the Jews and gather evidence locally.51 On 2 August, the Sabbatians 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 shall discuss in the following chapter. The legal battle at the episcopal court raised the public profile of the Sabbatian 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 the opportunity to eradicate Sabbatianism once and for all. On 28 September, the shtadlan Baruch me-Erets Yavan wrote to Emden: “The lords, 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 them52 and will stand before the lords bishops here [in Poland] and will bring them to be burned [at the stake].”53
The idea that Christians should be asked to burn Sabbatians at the stake for inventing a new faith had previously appeared in a letter that Emden wrote to the Council of Four Lands in 1751:54 Yavan was quoting Emden’s own ideas to their author. Yavan’s proposed solution was to pursue Christian involvement to the hilt and obtain a condemnation of the Sabbatians for heresy. The remark that the pope had been already informed seems to be an allusion to the hopes concerning Elyakim’s trip to Rome. On 26 December 1756, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć wrote to Emden:
And they wrote a manifesto against the Talmud. . . . 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 herem . . . 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 [Poland] and you there [Germany] should write to the [Jewish] leaders in Italy to make efforts toward this end.55
Since the priests of Kamieniec were already involved in the investigation concerning Sabbatianism, Abraham ha-Kohen of Zamońć suggested that 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 greatly helped to facilitate the matter in any case; 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.56 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 Sabbatianism.
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, he later described how, in response to the request for assistance from the leaders of the Polish Jewry, he “advised that the abominations [of the Sabbatians] should be publicly exposed in print, and their evil be proved on the basis of Christian writings, for ‘from the very forest itself comes the [handle of the] ax [that fells it].’”57 He also mentioned 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 sometime 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 (1758–60). 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 1:26: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s 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 that he had aroused would provide grist for the mills of Christian missionaries. Indeed, the Jews’ naïveté in pinning their hopes on the “new impostor” immediately became a target of ridicule for anti-Jewish writers.58 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.
Sabbatian doctrines themselves offered Christian parallels as well. Many prominent Sabbatians, including the most important theologian of early Sabbatianism, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, were former Marranos 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 that he had acquired in his youth, garbed in Jewish terminology 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 closely intertwined with anti-Christian polemics, as rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism routinely targeted the alleged and real links and parallels between Sabbatianism and Christianity.
Sasportas was the only one to pursue this issue to its ultimate theological conclusions; others worried mainly about the practical influences of Christians and Christian ideas upon Jews and Judaism. Emden accepted many of Sasportas’s59 theses and often employed the characteristic rhetoric of earlier anti-Sabbatians. Nevertheless, he departed from the previous anti-Sabbatian apologetics (of Sasportas and of other rabbis) in one crucial regard: he went to great lengths to break the link between anti-Sabbatian polemics and resistance to Christianity. The crux of the argument of his letter to Council of Four Lands was that, with regard to Sabbatianism, Jews and Christians were in the same boat.
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 crypto-Sabbatianism, but after the Lanckoronie affair, they had finally taken 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.”60
The Podolian Sabbatians countered the excommunication, however, by telling the bishop and the Kamieniec clergy that the real reason for their persecution by the Jews was the similarity
