messiah would be recognized not by the Jewish leaders, whom he defined as the progeny of the mixed multitude, but by simpletons.30 The denial of Sabbatai Tsevi as the messiah and the failure to understand hints about him in the Jewish canon came to be attributed to a kind of metaphysical blindness stemming from the very roots of the nonbelievers’ souls. According to the Sabbatians, the “pretended rabbis”31 could no longer assert any rights to leadership over the Jewish people or lay claims to the authoritative interpretation of Jewish tradition. Their learning was false, their worldly position based on abuses of power, their ostensible piety worthless and lacking deeper sense.
As Nathan of Gaza and Israel Hazzan composed their polemics against the rabbis, detractors of the new messiah attempted to turn the tables on the Sabbatians. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas, the preeminent adversary of early Sabbatianism, heard about Nathan’s statements.32 Angered by the preposterous claims that the very cream of the cream of the rabbinic elite consisted of descendants of the mixed multitude, Sasportas proclaimed that it was not the leaders of the generation but the Sabbatians themselves whose souls originated among the erev rav. In a short time, the symbolic opposition of the “mixed multitude” and the “true Israelites” permanently entered the lexicon of the debate between the Sabbatians and their opponents. This became especially pronounced in the eighteenth century and in the documents directly concerning Frank. In one of the first accounts of the Lwów conversion, Ber Birkenthal of Bolechów reported that “they call us [the anti-Sabbatians] the erev rav, and their faction they call the mahaneh [company, fellowship].”33 Frank’s most important competitor for leadership over all the Eastern and Central European Sabbatians, Wolf Eibeschütz, also defined the conflict between the sectarians and the rabbinate as a struggle between bne mehimenuta (children of the faith) and the children of the erev rav.34 On the other side of the barricade, Rabbi Jacob Emden, the most zealous anti-Sabbatian of the period, interpreted Frank’s baptism as the final severance of the erev rav from the chosen people, so that the purified Israel might taste from the Tree of Life and achieve redemption.35 Shortly after the conversion of the Frankists, Emden composed a laudatory poem praising God for “separating between the unclean and the pure . . . between us and the mixed multitude, who tried to bring the world back to its antediluvian state.”36
The issue was not merely terminological and went far beyond the mutual mudslinging. The dichotomy between the true Israel and the mixed multitude constituted the major conceptual axis of the theological controversies that tore apart eighteenth-century Judaism. Approximately a century after the advent of Sabbatai Tsevi, most debates concerning Sabbatianism (and, more broadly, Jewish heterodoxy) did not revolve around messianism, let alone Sabbatai’s specific messianic claims. Rather, the disputes concentrated on the limits of religion and conditions for belonging to the Jewish people.37 Each side considered only its own version of Judaism legitimate and claimed to be the one true Israel. Each party branded the other as “progeny of the mixed multitude,” implicitly denying its Jewishness. Thus the discourse of the mixed multitude endeavored to establish the boundaries of Judaism and of the Jewish people independently of the traditional halakhic criteria of who is a Jew: within the framework of this discourse, certain groups of people might have been “externally” Jewish for generations but were said to remain alien in the depths of their souls. By drawing a line between those whose souls originated from “children of Abraham” and those who came from the erev rav, the Sabbatian debate aimed to distinguish between the “real” Jews and pseudo-Jews, “true” Judaism and false faith. Frankism, the movement that crystallized around Jacob Frank in the 1750s, was the last—and, in many ways, most dramatic—word in this debate.
Sabbatianism in the Eighteenth Century
The beginning of Sabbatianism was Sabbatai Tsevi’s messianic self-revelation and the prophecies of Nathan of Gaza. The news of the messiah’s advent spread like wildfire through Jewish communities in the Ottoman Empire and Europe and, for a brief period, the majority of the Jewish people seem to have been inclined to accept his claims. Sabbatianism became “the most important messianic movement in Judaism since the destruction of the Second Temple.”38 Yet Sabbatai was an odd messiah. The concept of true Israel’s simplicity, as expressed in the commentaries of Rabbi Israel Hazzan, had two fundamental aspects: belief in the superiority of non-mediated religious experience over any learned knowledge and the established religious canon; and the conviction that this experience by its very nature articulates itself in a totally paradoxical, incomprehensible way, one that may even be scandalous for nonbelievers. During the early stages of Sabbatai’s career, the second aspect quickly found its expression and theological elaboration in the concept of ma’asim zarim, “strange deeds”— odd or absurd acts that the messiah “had to commit under the spell of a mysterious impulse.”39 Some of these acts were merely bizarre. For instance, one day Sabbatai bought a large fish, dressed it up like a baby, and put it into a cradle.40 Others displayed a clearly antinomian character and were typified by evident transgressions of Jewish religious law, such as contravening the Sabbath and dietary laws, shifting the dates of religious festivals,41 abolishing fasts,42 and pronouncing aloud the ineffable Name of God.43
Worried by the rise of religious enthusiasm among the Jews, the Ottoman authorities had Sabbatai arrested. In September 1666, he faced Sultan Mehmed IV, and—in a move completely unexpected and profoundly shocking even to his most faithful followers—he performed the most bizarre of his bizarre acts: he cast off his Jewish garb and donned a turban, thereby signaling that he had embraced Islam. Most of his followers parted ways with Sabbatai and proclaimed him yet another false messiah. They undertook penitence and returned to their daily lives. But some did not. Sabbatianism did not die with Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, but that act radically altered its social profile. After the conversion, Sabbatianism as a public messianic movement gave way to sectarian crypto-Sabbatianism: a secret creed observed by clandestine believers who pretended to be perfectly orthodox Jews but continued to regard Sabbatai Tsevi as the true messiah, redeemer of Israel. Confronted with rabbinic opposition, crypto-Sabbatians protested their innocence, vociferously rejected heresy, and, in some cases, even signed anti-Sabbatian bans of excommunication. Never did they intend to separate themselves openly from Judaism, and, for the most part, they practiced Sabbatian rituals in addition to normative Jewish observances rather than instead of them.
The two largest Jewish religious controversies that erupted in the eighteenth century were connected with crypto-Sabbatianism. The first scandal broke out in 1713 in Amsterdam, when the kabbalist Nehemiah Hayon (ca. 1650–ca. 1730) succeeded in publishing a tract titled Oz le-Elohim. Even though the book was printed with the approbations of several prominent rabbis and its text did not mention Sabbatai Tsevi by name, the Sabbatian character of the work was recognized almost immediately. This led to a bitter and protracted quarrel between Hayon’s supporters and his opponents, the latter led by Rabbi Moses Hagiz (ca. 1671–1750), who managed to rally other rabbis against heretics and, in the words of Elisheva Carlebach, transfigured “the rabbinate to a vigorous, aggressive force in the pursuit of Sabbatianism.”44
Twelve years later, another scandal emerged. In 1725, Moses Meir Kamenker, a Sabbatian emissary traveling from Poland to Germany, was detained by rabbinic authorities in Mannheim. A search of his luggage revealed a manuscript of the heretical treatise Va-avo ha-yom el ha-ayyin. The subsequent investigation disclosed that Kamenker had been disseminating copies of this work among sectarians all over Europe, and a clandestine network linking Sabbatian groups in different European countries came to light.45
The treatise itself, although distributed anonymously, was widely attributed to Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz of Prague (1690–1764), one of the most illustrious rabbinic scholars of the time. Along the lines of the crypto-Sabbatian paradigm, Eibeschütz promptly distanced himself from the heretics and signed a ban publicly condemning Sabbatai Tsevi and his followers.46 For a time, the matter was closed. But the accusations refused to go away. In 1751, Eibeschütz, by then having attained the position of chief rabbi of the triple community of Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbeck,
