Christianity: they portrayed themselves as representatives of a pristine version of Judaism who 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 (already discussed above in the context of Sasportas), Emden attributed the temporary advantage won by the Sabbatians 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 Sabbatians: even if Saturn stood like the sun in the middle of the sky, true Jews would reject the false prophets and triumph over heretics.61
The link between Sabbatianism and Christianity, seen so far in rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism 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, the rabbis would be able to argue on the basis of Christian writings that rabbinic Judaism had long been recognized by the Christians, while Sabbatianism—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 Sabbatianism as a “more progressive” version of Judaism entailing the abolishment 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 the Israelites. And you, the Christians, should accept this teaching and not the teachings of the new false messiah Sabbatai Tsevi. 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 10:17–18,62 “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill 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 therefore he should be circumcised and observe all the commandments.63
In Emden’s view, the involvement of the Catholic authorities in the Lanckoronie affair was almost providential. Publicizing the deeds of the Sabbatians 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 stemming from the Christian interference in an internal Jewish matter, it also opened an avenue for the ultimate eradication of Sabbatianism. What was needed was to demonstrate that, whereas rabbinic Judaism was legitimate according to Christian categories, Sabbatianism constituted a dangerous and heretical religious novelty: it not only contradicted strict Jewish precepts, but the teachings of the Church as well. Sabbatians were heretics, and Jewish heretics should be treated exactly the same way that the Church treated their Christian counterparts.
According to Emden, if the Christians became convinced that the self-proclaimed pro-Christian Jews 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 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.”64 As I mentioned in the previous section, Emden floated the idea of having the Christians burn the Sabbatians at the stake as early as 1751; at that time, however, no one 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 obliged, to demand that the authorities burn the Sabbatians as heretics; it was hoped that, he remarked, “they soon will be burned on the order of the pope of Rome.”65
Emden’s argument had a deeper stratum, however. Besides providing the council with quotations from the Gospels and lines of reasoning for possible debate with priests, or even in addition to suggesting the general opportunistic strategy of having Sabbatianism eradicated by Christians, Emden wanted to convince the rabbis that the Christians should and could be their true allies in the fight against the Sabbatians. 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 addressed to the Jews. For Emden, the advent of Sabbatianism fundamentally changed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity: the Sabbatian movement constituted a common enemy, in the face of which erstwhile quarrels between Jews and Christians should immediately be 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, claiming that Jesus called for abolishing 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”66 came to believe that Christianity was a bastardized, idolatrous faith.
The eradication of Sabbatianism required breaking the connection that the rabbis made between Sabbatianism 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 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 faith.67 . . . 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.68
In rabbinic tradition, the Seven Commandments of the covenant between God and Noah (the prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, bloodshed, incest, theft, eating of flesh torn from a living animal, as well as the injunction to establish a legal system)69 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 Christianity 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 the Christian religion, too, as compatible with the Seven Commandments.70
Yet Emden went much further than his predecessors. Not only
