Poland saw an endeavor to revive the tradition. In the early 1740s, Franciszek Antoni Kobielski, bishop of Łuck and Brzeńć, attempted to institute the practice of presenting missionary sermons in the synagogues of Poland to “demonstrate to the Jews the truth of the Catholic faith.”48 The practice existed in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, but in the early modern period it was carried out only in the Papal States and in some parts of the Habsburg monarchy; although the Polish bishops were specifically reprimanded by Popes Gregory XIII (1584) and Clement XI (1705), no attempts to implement it in the Commonwealth ensued. Kobielski delivered a series of sermons in the synagogues of his diocese, and in January 1743 he challenged the Jews of Brody to a disputation about five points concerning the Trinity, the coming of the messiah, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the destitute state of Israel after the rejection of Christ.49 The Jews of Brody prepared a written answer to Kobielski and complained to the owner of the town about the bishop’s encroachment upon their religious autonomy. They do not appear to have been particularly upset by his missionary efforts or even to have taken them seriously. As for the sermons in the synagogues, a Protestant (and hence admittedly biased) source described what really happened: “Bishop [Kobielski] was taken by religious zeal, and he resolved to bring to the Roman faith not only the Jews, but also the Protestants. . . . Once he went to a synagogue in Węgrów and started to preach a sermon. Since he was completely drunk, he fell asleep while talking. A vicar had to finish the sermon in his stead and the bishop was carried out of the synagogue. . . . While he spoke, his eyes constantly kept closing and it took him a quarter of an hour to complete one sentence. The Jews could not stop laughing during the entire spectacle.”50
Kobielski’s sermonizing and his missionary ventures were more than a little pathetic and did not present a serious danger for the Jews. Still, they revived the memory of medieval public Jewish-Christian debates and set a precedent for such a disputation in Poland. The Brody precedent was almost certainly known to Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski of Kamieniec Podolski, especially since his brother (also a bishop) Antoni was also involved in Kobielski’s campaign.51
The Brody debate of 1743 might be seen as a prelude to the disputation of Kamieniec in 1757 (much more sophisticated and much more dangerous from the Jewish perspective). During the ensuing fourteen years, Kobielski’s rather primitive arguments became substantially refined. This process of refinement drew directly upon material from the medieval disputations. In 1681, the great Hebraist Johann Christian Wagenseil published a compilation of Jewish anti-Christian writings, Tela Ignea Satanae. Among other texts, the publication brought the Hebrew and Latin versions of the most important Jewish account of the Barcelona disputation, Nahmanides’ Sefer ha-viku’ah (Wagenseil’s Hebrew edition contained many interpolations, including some from the accounts of the earlier Paris debate).52 There is direct evidence that Wagenseil’s publication was known to some of the priests who became involved in the Frankist affair in 1759.53 I suggest that in 1757, it was already known to Moliwda or some of the priests from the Kamieniec consistory. Five out of six controversial items on the Kamieniec agenda (the Trinity, the earlier coming of the messiah, the messiah’s nature both divine and human, Original Sin, and the cessation of Jewish self-rule after the advent of the messiah) had also been raised in Barcelona. It is certain that Christians not only translated the manifestos of the Contra-Talmudists but also influenced their content. The Frankist theses reveal substantial knowledge of Christian Scriptures and employ very specific technical theological terminology, unlikely to be known to the Jews. For instance, thesis two uses the technical notion of łaska Boska osobliwa (the standard Polish rendering of gratia efficax, efficacious grace) and alludes to the Epistle to the Romans; thesis four is a loose paraphrase of the Nicene Creed.
The Barcelona disputation had marked the beginning of a completely new strategy of Christian anti-Jewish polemics, whereby the Jews were to be convinced that their own texts recognized fundamental truths of Christianity.54 Kobielski’s ventures show that five hundred years later, he was entirely unable to deploy this strategy: he merely repeated the pre-Barcelona apologetics, in which the arguments aimed at convincing the Jews of the truth of Christianity were drawn from typological exegesis of the Old Testament or based on scholastic logic. The few references to Jewish texts that appeared in his sermons had a clearly ornamental character: the bishop was not even able to get the names of the authors and the titles of the books right.55
However, Kobielski’s primitive technique had one advantage over the more sophisticated counterpart first employed in Barcelona by Pablo Christiani. The apostate’s strategy was laden with inner tension: Jewish canonical texts were condemned for their alleged absurdity and offensiveness to Christianity, yet they were to serve as the basis for the Christian anti-Jewish argument. Rhetoric, if not logic, demanded that some theory reconcile these two elements. Hyam Maccoby has argued that such a theory was provided by the “two-tier conception of the Talmud”: the Christian position in Barcelona was based on the claim that the Talmud was “evil in its final redaction but the earliest strata, dating from the time of Jesus and before, contain material as yet undefiled by rabbinism.”56 This broad structure of medieval argumentation recurred during the Kamieniec disputation of 1757. The argument, however, underwent an important modification. The tension between attacking Jewish texts and simultaneously using them in a missionary effort was resolved not by reference to the “two-tier theory of the Talmud” but to the idea of a dichotomy of the Talmud and kabbalah: the former was entirely rejected for its supposed blasphemies and absurdities, while the latter was said to contain—albeit in a distorted form—the basic truths of Christianity.
The Kabbalisshten
Strong emphasis on kabbalah and its study characterized Sabbatianism from the very outset: Nathan of Gaza already called upon the believers “not to dabble any more in halakhah, but rather to study the Zohar, tikkunim, and midrashim.”57 He also stressed the prime role of kabbalah in determining halakhah, arguing that in matters not explicitly mentioned in the Talmud, the Zohar should be used as the basis for issuing binding legal rulings. Needless to say, the most important matters—from Nathan’s perspective—were to be decided on this Zoharic foundation: the Talmud did not provide the foundation for judging the messianic mandate of Sabbatai Tsevi, yet his messiahship could be unequivocally established on the basis of the Zohar.58
Nathan’s statements provoked angry reactions from some traditionally minded rabbis (including Jacob Sasportas)59 but were enthusiastically received by Sabbatians themselves. Abraham Cardoso presented the entirety of the past thousand years of Jewish history as a conflict between the rival camps of kabbalists and “literalists” (pashtanim) and argued that the Judaism of the latter was in no way better than the idolatrous faiths of the Gentiles: it did not contain even the slightest speck of the knowledge of the True God.60 Nehemiah Hayon boldly called for printing and distributing all kabbalistic works,61 advocated open individual inquiry into esoteric matters, and demanded total abolition of any constraints imposed on the study of kabbalah.62 In 1700, Hayyim Malakh wrote to Rabbi Abraham Broda of Prague “to send him learned people skilled in the matters of kabbalah in order to debate the faith of Sabbatai Tsevi together with him.”63 Two pupils of Broda went to Vienna to take up the challenge and suffered a miserable defeat in the disputation, in which Malakh argued that the Zohar unambiguously supported the truth of the faith in Sabbatai Tsevi. (Records of the Vienna disputation are not known to exist, but Emden—who did not witness them, either—mused that they might have formed a basis for the Kamieniec theses of the Frankists).64
The presentation of Sabbatian belief as a legitimate corollary of kabbalah in general, and the Zohar in particular, was a source of constant difficulty for its opponents. The Zohar had firmly established canonical status in Judaism, and many respectable halakhists engaged in kabbalistic speculation. Some maintained that the Zohar was more authoritative than any other source, insofar as it did not explicitly contradict the Babylonian Talmud. Over time, “the golden rule evolved that whenever halakhic rulings contradict the kabbalistic precepts, preference must be given to the former; otherwise, the kabbalistic precepts become
