the context of a ferocious battle against internal Jewish heresy. To my mind, the real (if implicit) theme of Emden’s letter was not a tribute to the common Jewish and Christian values but the issue of religious legitimacy versus religious deviance. Legitimate religions such as Judaism and Christianity (and Islam) were juxtaposed with and set against sectarian and heretical religious formations. In Emden, the concept of heresy acquired a trans-confessional character and became the epitome of opposition to any legitimate religiosity, be it Jewish or not. Indeed, the author of the letter to the council did praise the Christian religion. Yet he praised Christianity not qua Christianity, but Christianity as opposed to Sabbatianism.
For Emden, Christianity was a legitimate, true, and even noble religion, which—on the basis of its own theological tenets—should recognize Judaism’s legitimacy, truth, and nobility. What this meant in practice was the acknowledgment of Judaism’s total separateness. Judaism and Christianity were parallel paths to redemption: they did not intersect and should not attempt to do so. Jews and Christians should respect each other, but they had nothing substantial to offer each other. According to Emden, Jesus’ intention was to reinstate the Noahide Commandments, thereby creating a sustainable moral creed for Gentiles; the founder of Christianity had no message for his contemporary Jews, and Emden’s contemporary Jews had nothing to look for in their contemporary Christian religion.
It is no coincidence that Emden’s account of Christianity drew so deeply on the Scriptures rather than on the works of later theologians or his own firsthand experience. Tolerant and open-minded as it was, this vision of Christianity was that of its early canonical texts, not of what he saw through his window: Emden had little to say about the Christianity of his own day but referred solely to the rather abstract and idealized vision of Christianity at the time of its inception. Despite the enlightened phraseology, the argument aimed at maintaining or even increasing the distance between the two religions; Emden wanted to preserve a utopian status quo, in which Jews and Christians deeply respected each other, but never met.
The letter to the Council of Four Lands depicted the ideal scheme of things, in which the two legitimate religious establishments—the rabbis and the priests—recognized each other’s legitimacy without making attempts to interfere with each other’s business or to proselytize in any way. Jew and Christian were to join in condemnation of Jewish and Christian heretics. What is really striking in Emden’s letter is not his explicitly tolerant view of Christianity but his implicit understanding of Judaism. The true novelty of Emden’s position did not lie in the view that Christianity was based on the Noahide Commandments (which, by the mid-eighteenth century, had been generally accepted among the rabbis, though most of them based their argumentation on the Talmud rather than the Gospels).
The true novelty was the idea that the theological and practical boundaries of Judaism could and should be unequivocally demarcated once and for all. What Emden proposed was a hard ontology of Judaism: the Jewish religion was eternal and immutable, like a Platonic idea; it had clearly defined boundaries, centralized structure, and well-defined dogmas. I believe that Emden imagined his ideal Judaism in clear—though probably unconscious—analogy to the Catholic theologians’ ideal vision of Christianity. In the rabbis, he saw a professional clerical caste, hierarchically organized, uniformly trained and disciplined, and controlling the minds and bodies of the wider Jewish community. In the herem, he saw not a localized and limited tool of social control employed within a specific community but a kind of universal ban of excommunication, condemning the excommunicated to eternal punishment and having validity everywhere and for everyone. In religious dissenters, he saw “heretics” who should be burned at the stake. He saw the Jewish religion as a set of systematic and systematized doctrines incumbent upon every Jew and believed that one could abandon Judaism not only by a formal conversion to another religion but through lack of correct understanding of theological tenets: a Jew who deviated from the right path was no longer a Jew in the proper sense of the term. He belonged to another religion entirely.
As Judaism had always been a religion without clearly defined dogmas and lacking centralized religious authority, earlier rabbinic attacks on heresy were proscriptive rather than analytical. No attempt had been made to establish a contrastive taxonomy of different heretical positions or to demarcate unequivocally what distinguished one “sect” from another. Names of ancient groups, such as Sadducees or Boethusians, were routinely used to designate modern-day heretics; terms such as Karaism were utilized as a generic synonym for sectarianism. Pre-Emden rabbinic polemics against the followers of Sabbatai Tsevi habitually conflated Sabbatianism with other Jewish sects of the past and systematically obfuscated differences among various heretical groups.91
Emden deeply internalized the Christian understanding of heresy as theological error and became a kind of Jewish Irenaeus or Hippolytus: a chief heresiologist. Such an understanding of heresy has no meaning if it is not relativized to some orthodoxy: a clear definition of deviance demands an equally clear definition of the normative. Following the studies of Jacob Katz, Jewish historians have been reluctant to use the word “orthodox” in discussions of phenomena preceding the advent of Orthodox Judaism in nineteenth-century Germany. However, it should be noted that the term “orthodoxy” was already used in the 1750s by the Lutheran scholar Friedrich David Megerlin specifically to describe Emden’s position in his controversy with Eibeschütz.92 Emden was orthodox in the sense that he saw his version of Judaism as the only natural and true point of reference for all other versions of Judaism, which he considered inherently inferior, heretical, and deviant. This, in turn, made sense only within the framework of an organized church: it is little surprise that Emden’s vision of Judaism so resembled that of the Church and that his rabbis were so like the priests.
Emden brought into play the half-forgotten anti-Sabbatian apologetics of Sasportas and neglected anti-Christian works such as Hoda’at ba’al din. He then turned both on their heads. He accepted Sasportas’s idea of Sabbatianism being a new religion but used it as an argument for establishing a common front with Christianity. He employed Hoda’at ba’al din’s notion that Jewish principles were expounded in the Gospels but argued that this only proved the legitimacy of the Church in Jewish eyes. Like Sasportas, Emden believed that Sabbatianism was not Judaism and argued that the Sabbatians were descendants of the erev rav: they were ostensibly Jewish but, in fact, did not belong to the people of Israel.93
After Sasportas in the mid-seventeenth century, no other opponent of Sabbatianism took up this line of argumentation; as Sid Leiman has noted, during the first stages of polemics against Eibeschütz in the early 1750s, Emden “was a loose cannon, if not worse.”94 Yet, thanks to the mediation of Abraham of Zamońć and others, Emden’s highly radical (and highly original) perspective on Sabbatianism was accepted by the Council of Four Lands in their dealings with case of the Frankists. At the end of 1756 Emden became what he had dreamed of becoming but had never managed to achieve in his campaign against Eibeschütz: the mind behind the anti-heretical policy of the most powerful body in world Jewry.
Chapter 3
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Where Does Frankism Fit In?
The Contra-Talmudists
Emden’s strategy of involving the Christians in the campaign against the Sabbatians was designed to appeal to the sentiments of the priests. The mid-eighteenth-century Polish Church, determined to wage an intense battle against the religious dissent among the country’s Christian population, could be expected to be sympathetic to an anti-heretical case. In approaching Bishop Dembowski, the rabbis counted on his concern for established religious authority. For the Sabbatians, a natural response to this strategy was to resort to the prevalent Christian stereotype of “rabbinism” as an empty shell of legalistic casuistry and present their version of Judaism as more spiritual and based on direct divine inspiration of a mystical type. The battle lines were thus drawn: in their contacts with the Catholic clergy, the Sabbatians would play on the Church’s view of Jewish
