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4. CHAPTER 13    Messiahs of the Post-Inquisition Age

CHAPTER 13
Messiahs of the Post-Inquisition Age

THE BRUTALITY OF THE SPANISH INQUISITION, begun in 1492 and spanning more than three centuries, was itself a horrifying climax to a century of massacres, torture, forced conversions, and exile. The Inquisition especially persecuted the Jewish conversos (referred to by the Spanish as marranos, meaning “pigs”) – those Jews who had converted to Catholicism to avoid persecution but who were always suspected of “relapsing” into Jewish practices or secretly being Jews. Between 1480 and 1808, about 350,000 Spanish conversos fell victim to the Inquisition; many were burned at the stake. Some escaped to Salonika (Thessaloniki), Venice, Amsterdam, London, and the New World, especially Mexico.

Jewish hearts around the Mediterranean were galvanized with the hope that the messiah would appear at any moment and the universe would be healed and perfected. The sufferings of that period were often interpreted by kabbalists and other Jewish religious leaders as the “birth pangs” of the messiah, orchestrated by God to precipitate the messianic age.

Several messiah figures and “prophets” did indeed appear, appealing to both conversos and openly practicing Jews. They offered hope for a political resolution to the suffering of the Jews, as well as spiritual strength to undergo it. Some were bent on leading armies of true believers to defeat the “powers of evil” and restore the Jews to the Holy Land; some sought to influence destiny through prayer, miracles, and magic (sometimes called practical Kabbalah); others (mainly conversos) found meaning in the renewal of their commitment to traditional Jewish religious rites and customs. And still others focused on developing an inner spiritual awareness – the direct experience of God through what has been called ecstatic Kabbalah, a path which provided an alternative reality to the tragic circumstances they found themselves in. Most of the messiahs and spiritual leaders who appeared combined elements of all these approaches. The belief that God had taken direct interest in their welfare by sending them a messiah brought solace.

Moshe Idel, in his insightful work Messianic Mystics, proposes that it was divine revelation, or a mystic experience of some sort, that propelled each of the messianic figures. For some it was a one-time, life-changing revelation experienced through the grace of God, while others had sustained inner communion through their dedicated, concentrated efforts in meditation, generally using the Abulafian model of name practices. Idel terms this the “ecstatic model, in which the major messianic activity occurred on the intellectual level, and in personal ecstasy as a prophetic experience.”³⁶⁹ These messiahs translated their inner experiences into the basis for their external mission, but few taught their meditation practices openly to large groups of disciples.

Some messiahs tried to influence the divine power by using the kabbalistic kavanot and Lurianic yihudim, repeating and manipulating holy names and prayers in order to bring about the tikun olam. They tried to precipitate redemption by creating cosmic harmony and “repairing” the universe, along the lines of Luria’s tikunim.

Some of the messiahs who appeared, like Rabbi Joseph della Reina in the late fifteenth century, went even further. They believed that they could force the messiah to appear by engaging in magical acts which would actually alter history. There was a series of books, purporting to be written by God himself (but which were really written by anonymous kabbalists) giving magical incantations which could destroy the demonic realm. The practitioners’ mystic experiences were “viewed as a means of attaining and eventually transmitting magical information. Heavenly revelation is now the channel for the descent of supernal magic, the main tool for the annihilation of the powers of evil as well as bringing of the redemption.”³⁷⁰

Among the messiahs who appeared during this time was a converso cobbler named Ludovico Diaz, from Setubal, Portugal; his disciples included the converso physician to the bishop of Portugal, who returned to Judaism. Eventually, he and his followers were condemned by the Inquisition and burned to death. Ines de Herrera was a female prophet from a converso family who received visitations of her mother’s spirit after her death, advising her to engage in acts of charity. Then she was given an inner experience of light, which brought her messages from the supernal realms about the coming of Elijah the prophet, who would announce the messiah. She predicted that certain signs would appear from heaven to herald his coming. In a vision, she saw the souls of those who had been tortured and burned by the Inquisition. She fasted frequently, as per Jewish law, and kept the Sabbath, urging her followers to do likewise. At this time, throughout Catholic Europe, ordinary Jewish religious practices like fasting, charity, observing the Sabbath, and Jewish dietary laws became extreme statements of faith in Judaism and the messiah.

Another prophet appeared in the same period near Venice among the Ashkenazic Jews.^* Asher Leimlin of Germany was active in north Italy for just a few years of the sixteenth century although his reputation was later spread throughout Europe by his followers. A student of Abulafia’s name mysticism and the vocabulary of the inner ascent in the chariot, the merkavah, he documents his use of letter and name combinations to travel to heavenly realms and receive divine revelations, some from a feminine entity named Tefillah (prayer), who insists on the importance of the correct recitation of the prayers. Leimlin predicted the imminent coming of the messiah and called for acts of repentance, charity, and fasting. When he died and the messiah still hadn’t appeared, many of his disciples lost faith in Judaism and converted to Christianity.

Another messianic figure after the expulsion was Rabbi Abraham ben Eliezer ha-Levi, who developed a series of vigils called mishmarot (lengthy sessions of extra prayers) that he taught would help ease the sufferings of the people in the period preceding the messiah’s coming. Other traditional religious expressions were redirected towards messianic ends. These were dangerous activities in those days, due to the threat from the Inquisition. Yet Rabbi Abraham courageously disseminated his writings concerning “the secret of the redemption” to an eager audience throughout most of Europe.

In the early seventeenth century, an interesting phenomenon occurred in Mexico, when several women messiahs appeared among the conversos. Prominent among them were Dona Juana Enriquez and Ines Pereira, who were actually revered as potential mothers of the messiah, as it was impossible to conceive of the messiah as being anything but male! The arm of the Inquisition reached far, however; they were accused of “Judaizing” and condemned to death. Dona Juana Enriquez inspired so much faith in her followers that the Inquisition reported:

Among the Judaizers of this kingdom, she came to be acclaimed as the perfect and saintly Jewess because they saw her [as] a great faster and reciter of prayers.… [She was also venerated] because of the many charities she dispensed to those who observed her lapsed law or because of their good deeds.… Maybe, because of her false zeal, many died as Jews. She made them give heed to the law of Moses with their last breaths, telling them that it was necessary for their salvation. A woman could not be more daring.³⁷¹

Ines Pereira’s followers believed in her messianic role intensely. It is hard not to think of parallels with the worship of the Virgin Mary in Catholicism.

It appears that as soon as she was old enough to use her reason, she began to Judaize because by the time she was seven years of age she was observing the law of Moses. The reason for this was that all her relatives … were falsely persuaded that this young Jewess would give birth to the messiah. [One relative] convinced his sons and daughters of this and thus compelled them to keep the law of Moses. This is also why, in her young years, they dressed her with a tunic of voile. They would place her in the middle of the drawing room and surround her with burning candles. They worshiped her and adored her as a person from whom would be born their redeemer and chief. Without a doubt, they awaited this during her first pregnancy, and when the baby was born all of her relatives fasted [as an expression of thanks to the Lord].³⁷²

David Reubeni and Shlomo Molkho
David Reubeni and Shlomo Molkho were two important messianic figures in the first half of the sixteenth century who combined their outward political vision of liberation with the mystical and magical. The attraction of both these figures was based on the myth of the Ten Lost Tribes who would gather and march to Jerusalem under the messiah’s leadership.

Reubeni assumed his name as a symbol of the lost tribe of Reuben. He was probably of Arabian Jewish descent, though his precise place of origin has never been established. He traveled to Italy and other areas of Europe, where he claimed to be a brother of a Jewish king in a distant land and leader of his military force, whose mission it was to retake the Holy Land from the Turks with the help of Christian and Jewish troops gathered from all over Europe. He was accepted by the Pope and other Christian rulers who initially offered him protection, as long as he did not Judaize their conversos.

A young Portuguese man named Diogo Pires, of a converso family, met Reubeni in the court of John II of Portugal in 1525. Pires saw Reubeni as the commander of the forces of the messiah and re-Judaized himself, “swept up, like other conversos, in apocalyptic passion.”³⁷³ He changed his name to Shlomo Molkho (meaning “Solomon his king”) and circumcised himself. Molkho wrote about his internal mystical experience at the time of his circumcision:

And after I was sealed with the signet of my Creator, awful [awesome] things appeared to me, great and mighty, and great secrets, and they made known to me the hidden things of the wisdom of the holy Kabbalah and great combinations among the sefirot and showed me the treasuries of wisdom and illuminated my heart with our God’s teaching. And then they ordered me to go to the kingdom of Turkey.… But now I will tell the truth before him who made the sky and the earth, that I neither circumcised myself nor traveled, at the direction of flesh and blood but according to the will of the Lord our God.³⁷⁴

Overnight, seemingly miraculously, Molkho became proficient in Kabbalah, which was attested to by all the authorities of his time who were awed by his genius and the scope of his knowledge. He apparently experienced many divine revelations, which started even before his circumcision and continued throughout his life. The revelations centered around secrets of the redemption and the hidden sense of biblical texts, and were translated into a clear messianic vision. Claiming to be the messiah, he, along with Reubeni, who had become his prophet, embarked on a program of preaching to conversos throughout Europe; they also visited various European rulers to gain their support for their military campaign to liberate the Holy Land.

Molkho taught that the messiah exists at all times, in every generation, as the positive force that diffuses the negative, impure energies that are active in the creation. Idel comments that “the messiah is conceived of as the antidote to the impure influx descending from above. In fact, he must return in every generation in order to ensure the preservation of the world, to maintain the cosmos against the centrifugal force of chaos. Therefore, the redemptive role of the messiah is not only a matter of a certain final act or series of acts performed during the eschaton (the final days), but is an ongoing activity performed throughout common history.”³⁷⁵ The role of the messiah here is reminiscent of the legend of the tsadik (the righteous or virtuous one) who sustains the world. He is sometimes manifest and sometimes hidden, but his presence in the world is essential for its continuation. In the passage below, Molkho defines his idea in terms of the incarnation of the messiah from the time of Abel, the son of the first man, Adam, through Moses, to every messiah who incarnates to overcome the power of evil, symbolized as the serpent from the Garden of Eden.

Abel is Moses, who is Abel, because all the deliverances are done by him, because his soul will transmigrate into the messiah, and this is why he [Moses] has been buried abroad. “What is the gain of man from all his labor that he labors under the sun,” if the redemption does not come? And he [Solomon] answered: “One generation goeth, another generation cometh,” namely it is a necessity that the messiah will come, because he is [equivalent to] the power of Satan [and] serpent, and he removed the impurity of the serpent from the world, and this is the reason that he goes, because in the very moment and time that Israel will repent, they will immediately be redeemed.… This is why in each and every generation there was a person [stemming] from [the children of] Israel, worthy and prepared to become the messiah, and fulfill what has been written … “because a generation goeth and another generation cometh, and the earth abideth forever.” [This is] because it cannot subsist without the messiah, because of the impurity of the serpent … because the impurity of the serpent spills over all the spheres and comes from the power of the seventh, lower sphere, which is that of the moon.³⁷⁶

Reubeni and Molkho followed ascetic lifestyles which made them appear holy and distant from worldly concerns. They inspired repentance and acts of charity. Primarily known to later generations as magicians with secret knowledge and the ability to predict the future, they did try to use magical techniques, gained through revelations, to bring about the messianic age. They emblazoned the “holy divine names” on special flags, shields, and swords.^* Thus they had a strong appeal for Christians, Jews, conversos, and crypto-Jews (those Jews who practiced their religion in secret while pretending to be Christian). In their travels Molkho and Reubeni put themselves in harm’s way, and were eventually executed under the Inquisition, probably on charges of having persuaded conversos to return to Judaism. Their execution inspired increased faith in their purity and martyrdom – “sanctification of the name of God.”

Molkho was a friend of Joseph Karo, the renowned Talmud scholar and legal codifier, and his death greatly distressed Karo. From that time onwards Karo experienced the voice of Moses, the Mishnah, and the Shekhinah speaking through him. He moved to Safed, where he became one of the leading Safed kabbalists, a companion of Cordovero and Luria.

Shabatai Tsevi
In 1648, the massacre of 100,000 to 200,000 Jews in the Ukraine (the Chmielnicki pogrom) reaffirmed the Jewish community’s belief that the apocalyptic time had come. They were yearning for God to send them the messiah who would bring salvation and release from suffering. That the messiah could appear in their own time was a distinct possibility to Jews of that period, as it was in many other periods of history. The worse the worldly situation, the greater the impetus for the messiah to reveal himself. Such was their faith in divine love and protection! As mentioned earlier, there was a belief that in every generation there is one worthy person who can be the messiah for that time, provided the people are deserving.³⁷⁷

Nathan of Gaza, who lived in the Holy Land and was an ardent student of Luria’s Kabbalah, declared himself the prophet of the coming messiah. Following his own internal spiritual experiences, he prophesied that the messiah’s appearance was imminent. Meanwhile, in 1648, Shabatai Tsevi (1626–1676), a lonely Jewish student of law and mysticism in Izmir, Turkey, proficient in Lurianic and Abulafian mystical teachings, had an experience of inner illumination and revealed himself as the messiah. He publicly recited the forbidden “explicit” name of God and announced that the time of redemption had come. Unfortunately, however, his declaration was received coolly and he was excommunicated by the religious authorities. Banished from Izmir, Shabatai went to Salonika, where he persisted in his divine calling; then, during a trip to Israel, he met Nathan of Gaza, who confirmed that he was indeed the messiah.

For approximately the next fifteen years, Shabatai and Nathan brought news of Shabatai’s messiahship to a slowly increasing number of devotees in Jewish communities around the Mediterranean basin, from Turkey to England, Egypt, and Palestine. While the rabbis in most countries rejected his claims at first, eventually almost all of them subscribed to his messiahship. There was great ecstasy and excitement among the Jews that finally the messiah had come, that God had not abandoned them to eternal suffering. They believed that they would be returned to the Holy Land in triumph.

The cornerstone of Shabatai’s teaching was his experience of a personal revelation of God, which he called sod ha-elohut, the secret of divinity, whose true nature he revealed to only a few disciples whom he swore to secrecy. Even so, it is thought that to most of them he only revealed it partially, seeing that they were not of a sufficiently high spiritual level to comprehend it. He never wrote about his revelation or discussed it publicly and there are no first-hand descriptions of what he meant, though it seemed to be based on Shabatai’s inner spiritual journey and his mystic experience of God within.³⁷⁸

Shabatai would often say that he had experience of “his own God.”³⁷⁹ He would not use kabbalistic terminology or any human language to describe this experience of God. Yehuda Liebes, contemporary Israeli scholar of Jewish mysticism, comments: “The God known to Shabatai Tsevi was more easily found in his soul than in his mind.”³⁸⁰ In a letter to his brother, referring to his previous incarnations as well as his current life, he wrote that his God was “the true One that only I have known for generations and for whom I have so strenuously toiled.”³⁸¹

There are accounts in a document called the Yemenite Apocalypse of Shabatai experiencing a specific mystical event in 1650, when during his meditation he ascended through the seven inner levels of the sefirot, from malkut through hesed, until he finally reached the third sefirah of binah (understanding), which is considered the “mother” or source of all the sefirot below.³⁸² Scholem proposes that this is what Shabatai meant by the secret of divinity: that he merged into the level of binah, thus entering the divine realm and experiencing the deity. It is possible that this is the experience described by many Sufi and Indian mystics, of one’s true, higher self being identical to God – one realizes one’s true spiritual identity and that it is of the essence of God – a state that Indian mystics call “I Am That.”

The methods Nathan and Shabatai used to obtain the revelation of God probably involved some kabbalistic meditation techniques taught by Abulafia, Luria, and other Jewish mystics, and were a result of sustained, concentrated effort. Nathan “explicitly states that certain matters that came to him from ‘elevated and holy souls’ were ‘revealed … by way of the power of meditative concentration and formulae of unifications (hitbodedut and yihudim).’”³⁸³ Hitbodedut, as we saw earlier in discussing the biblical and Sufi use of the term, involves self-isolation from external and internal distractions, and yihudim are mental concentration techniques combining divine names. Nathan also said he received revelations about the messiah from an angel.

Nathan taught that the messiah’s stature does not depend on his being a miracle-worker, rather on his transformation into a divine being, “the chariot of the Light of Life,” through a mystical process. This transformation “invests the messiah with a new type of existence, which allows him to be called divine.”³⁸⁴ Nathan felt that Jesus’ attainment was marred by his performance of miracles. Moshe Idel summarizes:

Having built up the possibility that a man may become a complete divine being, Nathan now turns to the personality of his messiah. He argues that unlike the mystical attainment of the messiah, which is defined in terms of becoming a merkavah, a chariot of the divinity, Jesus’ claim to incarnation is built upon another argument, which turned out to be the reason for Jesus’ failure and ultimately the reason for the deception of the Jewish people. He proved to be a false messiah because the standard for measurement of this claim was his ability to perform signs and wonders. Herein lies the fault, for the people believed primarily in this magical aspect of his messianism.…

Actually, Nathan of Gaza alters the popular Jewish attitude toward Jesus. According to the Shabatean prophet, the theological problem was not that Jesus was deified, as many Jewish thinkers would argue, for that is just the rank that the messiah should attain. The cardinal failure was in Jesus presenting himself as a wonder worker. It may then be inferred that the process of deification of the messiah will take place only after he has perfected the lower world. This transformation into the chariot of the Light of Life invests the messiah with a new type of existence, which allows him to be called divine. By being absorbed into the divine structure, apparently after following a certain mystical path, one is able to be deified and so become messiah.³⁸⁵

Whether or not Jesus’ miracles as recounted in the Gospels actually took place on the physical level, or whether they were symbolic references to inner healing, nourishment, and reawakening from a state of spiritual death, is not our concern. However, it is noteworthy that Nathan used the stories of Jesus’ miracles to illustrate an important truth – that the dependency on miracles cannot lead one very far spiritually. Spiritual redemption – the liberation of the spirit – cannot be brought about through an external agent. That would take away any part the individual has to play in the process. The individual must make effort and have a commitment to a spiritual life.

Yehuda Liebes, in his illuminating study of Shabatai’s life and career, states that Shabatai was primarily interested in a spiritual redemption, rather than political. He was trying to redeem the religion itself – to renew it through teaching about the true experience of God. His redemption of religion meant freeing the individual soul from religion’s strictures. The real exile, to Shabatai, “is the exile of religion, and its place of exile is the fossilized tradition, which has long since forgotten its roots and its aims.”³⁸⁶ He wrote to his brother: “Because they do not have the true God, their Torah is not Torah.”

A sense that the Torah had fossilized, coupled with a hope for reform and renewal, had once resulted in a dramatic and ritual breakthrough in halakhic [legal] prohibitions, mainly those under penalty of karet [transgressions punishable with death by Heaven], turning them into commandments. Shabateans had an ambivalent attitude to religion: On the one hand, they aspired to its renewal, reform, and redemption; and on the other, they wanted to destroy, punish, and relinquish religion. This was their attitude to other religions as well. Latent in this phenomenon is also the explanation of one of Shabateanism’s greatest paradoxes – a movement for the redemption of Judaism that at times leads to apostasy.³⁸⁷

Shabatai’s claim to divinity, to having had the personal experience of God, was heretical to classical Jewish religion, as it meant that a human being could become God through mystic practice. Although Abulafia and his circle had written about unio mystica (mystic union), achieving that high spiritual level was generally considered impossible for mortals; it was only for supernatural beings. This shows that conventionally there was an assumption that human beings, while in the body, could not undergo a total spiritual transformation. It assumes that man cannot totally shed his physical nature. However, according to some scholars, the experiences and writings of numerous Jewish mystics belie that assumption and give evidence that various degrees of mystic union are possible. Ultimately, it was inconceivable for the mainstream Jewish establishment to imagine a messiah who began his life as an ordinary human being. It was easier to conceive of a supernatural being, born supernatural, who would bring redemption sometime in the hazy future.

Shabatai’s claim to divinity also carried with it the underlying assumption that he and his experience were higher than the Torah and Talmud, the inherited legal framework for the reli-gion. He was declaring his freedom to act independent of rabbinic law and conventional morality, in a bold declaration of a new age governed by a higher law – his own law gained through his perception of God. In many respects Shabatai was not concerned with the public’s perceptions of him; he was totally immersed and governed by his own personal mystical experience. Even Nathan of Gaza failed to understand him and projected his own beliefs and kabbalistic interpretations of Shabatai’s actions and pronouncements.³⁸⁸

In 1664, after his first two marriages were annulled because they were not consummated, Shabatai married Sarah, a woman of questionable virtue. It has been conjectured that Shabatai saw himself as the prophet Hosea, commanded by God to marry a prostitute in order to demonstrate the faithlessness of the people of Israel to God, and God’s eternal faithfulness to his covenant with them. Sarah was projected as the fallen-woman-become-virgin through her marriage to Shabatai, who redeemed her and made her virtuous.

Shabatai’s disciples elevated him to the status of king and Sarah to queen. Redemption was based on their acceptance of Shabatai as messiah and their belief in his divinity. They would do whatever he told them to do, whether it made sense or not, whether it followed moral norms or not. He was above the law and could act as he wished. He even created a new prayer: “Blessed be thou, O God, who has permitted that which is forbidden.” Some of his actions, such as his marriage to Sarah and his flaunting of religious prohibitions, were explained using the Lurianic concept of the kelipot, the shells of coarse matter that imprison the sparks of light released at the time of the creation. Nathan used the concept to explain why Shabatai needed to perform certain immoral actions – in order to liberate the sparks imprisoned by the kelipot. He had to descend to the realm of evil (the kelipot) in order to liberate the good (the sparks) that were imprisoned there. It was this metaphor that became the guiding principle of Shabatai and his followers.

In 1666, Shabatai publicly proclaimed himself the messiah and was denounced to the Sultan, who saw the potential for instability and disloyalty arising among the Jewish community. Shabatai was arrested and imprisoned for a short time. Later that year he was brought before the Sultan and was offered two options: death or conversion to Islam. He chose conversion. He was made Gatekeeper of the Sultan’s palace at Edirne Sarayi, a position of honor. In Edirne, which is near the Greek and Bulgarian borders in western Turkey, Shabatai was visited by some of his disciples, many of whom followed him into apostasy. During the years in Edirne, Shabatai experienced times of inner illumination, after which he would preach the importance of conversion to Islam. As we shall see later, it is possible that dur- ing this time he had contact with Muslim Sufi mystics, which would explain his receptivity to conversion. In 1668 he had the “great illumination,” and insisted that his followers convert, saying that unless they did so he would not be able to plead for them with God or lead them back to the Holy Land.³⁸⁹

Shabatai said that he had adopted Islam because God willed it. Initially he gave no other reason. Later, Shabatai and Nathan attributed his conversion to the need to gather the sparks of light that were scattered among the kelipot, the shards of gross matter. To do so, he had to descend into that realm of grossness himself.

Another reason for the conversion, as Nathan later pro- posed, was that Shabatai was descending into exile (in Islam) as atonement for the faithlessness of the people of Israel, just as the Shekhinah is in exile. By converting, he was becoming a sacrifice and a martyr. Nathan would quote the biblical passage, “Thou art wounded because of the guilt of the people” (cf. Isaiah 53:5). He wrote in a letter: “Know therefore … that [it is] he and no other, and besides him there is no savior of Israel. And although he has put the fair miter [the turban of Islam] on his head, his holiness is not profaned, for God has sworn with his right hand he will not deceive. This is one of God’s mysteries, and no one who has any knowledge of the mysteries of the Torah will consider it strange.”³⁹⁰

Nathan’s explanations were designed to make Shabatai’s conversion and enigmatic behavior acceptable to his followers. Whether Shabatai subscribed to these ideas is difficult to say, as he was not always consistent in his pronouncements. The key point is that Shabatai was always true to his personal God, to the will of God as it came to him regardless of the traditions and taboos of religion. He wrote in a message to his followers, cited in John Freely’s The Lost Messiah:

Know ye … that I recognized with great clarity that the true God … has willed that I should come with all my heart into the Islamic religion, the religion of Ishmael, to permit what it permits, and to forbid what it forbids, and to nullify the Torah of Moses until the time of the End.³⁹¹

Freely continues with the substance of Shabatai’s message:

Shabatai goes on to say that it is important for the glory of God that he should bring into Islam all those to whom he would reveal the Mystery of His Godhead. He answers those who said that he had become a Muslim on the strength of a vision, and that when the illumination left him he would regret what he had done. “This is not so,” he insists, ”for I did this on my own, through the great power and strength of the Truth and Faith which no wind in the world and no sages and prophets can cause me to leave my place.… Thus speaks the master of Truth and Faith, the Turco [Turk] and Mesurman [Egyptian].”

During this time, recounts Israel Hazzan, one of Shabatai’s devoted disciples who remained a Jew, Shabatai continued to sing both sacred songs and secular Spanish love songs, including his favorite, “Meliselda,” which those who didn’t understand its mystical significance thought to be a lewd love song. (How similar was the confusion of those who regarded the biblical Song of Songs as a worldly collection of love songs!)

MELISELDA

To the mountain I ascended,
To the river I descended,
Meliselda I met there,
The king’s daughter bright and fair.
There I saw the shining lass
As she came up from the bath.
Her arched brow dark as the night,
Her face a gleaming sword of light,
Her lips like corals red and bright,
Her flesh as milk, so fair and bright. ³⁹²

Earlier, before his conversion, Shabatai had taught the mystic significance of this song. He saw himself, the messiah, as the bridegroom of the Torah, which was the embodiment of the Shekhinah, the “feminine” immanent presence of God in the creation. The Shekhinah, the Torah, was his bride. In the description of the beautiful Meliselda, Shabatai understood deep mystic symbolism. He would often sing this song to the Torah.

Hazzan described the spiritual heights that Shabatai attained in his meditation after his conversion: “When Amirah^* practiced solitude with his holy soul, he would unite his soul [to the four supernatural worlds of the kabbalistic cosmos] and I beheld all this. Blessed be the Lord that I was vouchsafed to see his face when he practiced this solitude.”³⁹³

Hazzan noted also that Shabatai and his disciples were frequently visited by Nathan, and together they made preparations for Shabatai’s second coming or manifestation as the messiah, to take place seven years after his apostasy, in 1673–74, “by which time Shabatai would have finished ‘collecting the seed that was sown among the Gentiles.’” At one point Shabatai revealed to the group that “God was like unto a glorious youth that resembled him [i.e., Shabatai himself].”³⁹⁴

It has also been recorded that during his exile Shabatai was good friends with a Turkish Sufi dervish, a renowned poet and mystic named Mahomet Niyazi (d. 1694, also called Niyazi Misri Dede). Niyazi was associated with the Bektashi order of dervishes; he came to Edirne around 1670, and that is when he apparently met Shabatai, if not earlier during previous visits to Constantinople. The Bektashis were noted for their unorthodox and even heretical beliefs and flaunting religious convention, including the incorporation of Christian and other non-Muslim mystical practices. Apparently, Shabatai stayed at Niyazi’s monastery (tekke) during his visits to Constantinople and was initiated into the Bektashi order there. This implies that he became Niyazi’s disciple and accepted Niyazi as his master.

It is probable that Niyazi and Shabatai found a great commonality in their equally heretical approaches. Freely writes: “Shabatai and Niyazi seemed to have a strong influence upon one another, which, given the extreme unorthodoxy of their views, could only take each of them even further from the accepted religious beliefs of Judaism and Islam.”³⁹⁵

In many ways Shabatai’s life and teachings are formed by a perspective drawn from Kabbalah; and Kabbalah, according to the contemporary scholar Paul Fenton, itself was influenced by Islamic mysticism during the early period of its development in Spain, the seat of Islam in Europe. It is in this context that Fenton examines the reciprocal influences of Sufi and Jewish mysticism on Niyazi and Shabatai. Fenton points out that few scholars have looked at the influence of Sufism on Shabatai’s teachings from the very beginning of his calling. He says that “the missing issue [in Scholem’s ‘masterful’ study of Shabatai] is the investigation of the role played by Shabatai’s Islamic background in forming his personality and doctrine.”³⁹⁶

One of the areas of similarity Fenton looks at is the use of the numerical value of the Arabic letters in Niyazi’s mystical writings, in a manner similar to the kabbalistic use of gematria. He also mentions the Bektashis’ belief in “reincarnation and the divine manifestation in human form,”³⁹⁷ concepts which are parallel with Shabatai’s belief in his messianic role. In both religions there was a prevailing atmosphere of messianic fervor. Niyazi was also thought to have been the fulfillment of messianic predictions.

Fenton traces Shabatai’s history and probable contacts with Niyazi. He concludes that there is a good possibility that from 1666 until his banishment to Montenegro in 1672 or 1673, Shabatai may have been a regular visitor at Niyazi’s tekke. “Were it true, this tradition would also indicate that from its very inception, the Shabatean movement had contacts with the Dervish and Bektashi milieu. This concurs with the unambiguous testimony of Israel Hazzan, who reports that while in Edirne, Shabatai was wont to participate in Dervish prayer circles which would consist in the innumerable repetitions of the name of God. Later, as it is known, the Shabateans adopted a certain number of Bektashi doctrines and rituals.³⁹⁸ It is quite possible that Shabatai and Niyazi shared a universalist approach to spirituality, based on their inner mystical experiences.

It appears that Shabatai initially had experienced a certain degree of spiritual attainment and attracted a large following, fueled by his own and Nathan’s pronouncements of his messiahship. Despite the messianic fervor surrounding him and his own belief that he was the messiah, however, he felt that few of his disciples, if any, understood him. What he meant by “messiah” and “God” and what they understood and projected on him may have been very different things.

Shabatai’s destiny took him to Islam and ultimately to initiation by a Sufi dervish into a mystic order, whose teachings were based on the transcendence of religious boundaries. What role his conversion had in this final transformation is not known. His mission of spiritual renewal took him to renew his own soul with a form of devotion and mystic practice that existed outside of orthodox religious practice and belief. His spiritual attainment carried with it the conviction that the restrictive boundaries of religion needed to be broken in order to experience God directly.

Shabatai was quite radical, and perhaps none of his followers understood what he was doing or saying. Even in his lifetime, not to speak of later generations, he was interpreted as an advocate of conversion and multireligious syncretism. But this could have been only a crumb of his spiritual realization. It is also difficult to authenticate or evaluate the accusations of immoral behavior, but it is possible that a certain mental and moral confusion resulted from the concept of the descent into the realm of evil to liberate the good.

Shabatai’s conversion to Islam caused a great crisis and fragmentation in the Jewish community. He had galvanized Jews around the entire Mediterranean basin, and even northern Europe, by his claims of messiahship and promise of imminent redemption. Despite his conversion, many still clung to their faith in him. Among his followers were a large number of conversos or marranos, descendants of the Jews who had been forced to convert to Catholicism during the Inquisition, but had returned to Judaism in the century and a half that followed. They were not so attached to the strict observances of Judaism and were able to accept the concept of conversion. Many of them adopted Muslim ways on the surface, but continued with Jewish observances privately. A sect of these Shabatean followers, known as the Donmeh, survived as a separate Muslim community in Turkey into the twentieth century.

But for the majority of Jews who did not follow Shabatai into conversion or accommodate his syncretistic approach, Shabatai’s conversion was a betrayal and they lost their faith in him as the messiah. Despite the fact that Shabatai had become the most influential messianic figure in Jewish religious history since Jesus – even more than Luria, as Shabatai became more popularly known – it quickly became taboo to speak of him in conventional religious circles, and he was disparaged by most writers of succeeding generations. Another impact of Shabatai’s activities (and the activities of other “messiahs” who followed him) was that Kabbalah, which had enjoyed an almost universal acceptance in his time, became anathema, as it was associated with heresy and apostasy. Nevertheless, many of Shabatai’s ideas, particularly the need to descend to the realm of evil in order to liberate the good, did influence kabbalistic teachings, and penetrated Hasidism as well, in a different form. Yet the practice of kabbalistic mysticism was driven underground in some places, until it resurfaced in the form of Hasidism a century later.

Following Shabatai’s death in 1676, there was a proliferation of messianic movements in Poland and other areas of Europe. Many of the messianic figures were disciples of Shabatai or were inspired by his achievement and messianic role. Some were sincerely convinced of their messianic calling; they offered spiritual guidance to the Jewish community according to their perceptions of the divine will, taught kabbalistic “secrets,” and urged repentance in order to prepare for the messianic time. Others seemed to have been advancing their own personal interests, riding the waves of excitement and hysteria, and receiving the unqualified reverence of the desperate and gullible Jewish community which was easily swayed by stories of miracles, complex mythologies, and predictions of messianic redemption.

The following will give an idea of the variety of messiahs who followed Shabatai. Most of these individuals traveled widely, bringing their teachings – generally variations on Shabatai’s legacy – to disciples in Europe, North Africa, and the Holy Land. Even the presence of imperfect masters who betray their disciples may have a positive consequence in that it can create the longing for a true spiritual master or messiah to appear. The fact that some messiahs proved untrue did not deter the people from searching, although it did give rise to occasional excommunications and spiritual crises. Masters came in every size, shape, and form, as it were: scholars, the uneducated, Shabateans, ethicists; divine, mundane; miracle-workers, magicians; ascetics, sensualists; teachers of meditation; women who were to give birth to the messiah. It was as if a dam had broken on spiritual possibility, as masters of every sort rose to the surface to claim those souls marked for them and their teaching.

Abraham Miguel Cardozo (1626–1706) was a close disciple of Shabatai’s who did not convert to Islam, reserving this as a holy act appropriate for the messiah alone. He was expelled from both Tunis and Tripoli because of his heretical Shabatean teachings and, on his arrival in Izmir, announced that he was the messiah. A recent biography introduces Cardozo as a kabbalist who was much more than a simple follower of Shabatai. “He was one of the most vivid, complex, and original personalities to emerge within Judaism during the seventeenth century.… Cardozo lived not only in a different world from ours but in a different universe. His was not the universe of Newton and Descartes, but the magical universe of kabbalistic mysticism, which has mostly vanished today.”³⁹⁹

Yehoshua Heschel Tsoref (1633–c. 1700) was another messiah of this period who was active in Lithuania and Poland. An uneducated jeweler, he lived an ascetic lifestyle and was devoted to Shabatai. When Shabatai converted, Tsoref became inspired and got involved with carrying Shabatai’s message to Poland. Many Polish Jews made pilgrimages to see him and hear his stories and prophecies. It is probable that his book, Sefer ha-tsoref, was one of the esoteric texts that inspired the Ba’al Shem Tov, the first hasidic master, fifty years later.

Hayim ben Shlomo (c. 1655–c. 1716) was known as the Mal’akh (the angel). He proclaimed himself the messiah while awaiting Shabatai’s second coming. The Mal’akh was active in Poland, Italy, Israel, and Turkey, and was quite controversial because of his teaching of radical Shabatean practices. After being expelled from Israel and Turkey, he returned to Poland to teach.

Yehuda Leib Prossnitz (1670–1730) was an uneducated peddler, an ascetic who gathered large groups of followers, including many children. His spiritual ministry began when he received visions and dreams of Luria and Shabatai. In 1724, after meeting some adherents of Shabatean messianism, he declared himself to be the messiah of the lineage of Joseph. Though excommunicated and banned from several Jewish communities, his teachings were passed down through a close disciple to Yonatan Eybeschuetz, who became a popular Shabatean teacher and folk magician.

Jacob Frank
It was in this period of spiritual ferment and messianic longing that Jacob Frank (1726–1791), one of the most influential messiahs of the eighteenth century, made his mark. A follower of Shabatai, Frank converted initially to Islam and then to Catholicism, taking his followers with him. He was “a fearless and physically powerful figure but uneducated and disdainful of religious traditions, above all the Jewish rabbinic elite. His messianic activities were at the local level, in Poland and Moravia for the most part, but were imbued, as had been those of Luria and Tsevi, with cosmic significance and the mystic vision.”⁴⁰⁰

Once he had converted to Catholicism, he denounced Judaism and engaged in numerous Church-sponsored public disputations with rabbis concerning Jewish law, religious practices, and the Talmud. Naturally, his side always won, and numerous copies of the Talmud were burned. As the foundation for his teachings, he developed a complex mythology based on Shabateanism, Lurianic Kabbalah, the Zohar, and other rabbinic sources.

Frank’s theology was based on a concept of “doubleness,” or the duplication in this world of everything in the upper realms. He interpreted the concept in a literalistic manner. God became Big Brother, Frank’s supernal double. He called his disciples brothers and sisters and envisioned them duplicated in the court of Big Brother. He taught that embodied forms of divine powers in higher realms were lower reflections of even-higher powers. God himself has a lower power to carry out his work in the material world. The positive and negative forces of the upper realms, which derived from the higher Unity, were embodied as beings who were good and evil. He taught that hints exist in this material world of the reality of the upper realms.

Frank developed a pattern to guide his followers’ actions. Everything was to be contrary. All orthodox Jewish law and ritual was to be broken and violated.

Nothing is what is seems; that which is held to be holy is deadly, and the awe must be stripped from it in order to expose what is real. This achieves the repair of the holy.⁴⁰¹

Frank elevated himself to emperor-like status and projected his daughter, Ewa, whom he named “the matronita,” into the figure of the Virgin Mary, attracting many followers to her shrine. Despite his seemingly bizarre theology, he had a wide appeal for the Jewish community of his time. Exhausted by persecutions from Christian authorities and the government, and suffering from the stringent religious requirements of eighteenth-century Eastern European Judaism, which was demanding both in practice and intellectual effort, the Jewish community found in Frank’s teachings a path of assimilation into non-Jewish society that allowed them to still maintain some sense of Jewish identity, even if Frank’s stance was heretical. As history has unfolded, many Jewish and non-Jewish families in that part of Europe share Frankist origins.

Moshe Hayim Luzzatto
One of the most significant of the post-Shabatai messianic figures was Moshe Hayim Luzzatto (1707–1747), who was born in Padua, Italy, and died in Akko in the Holy Land. From a wealthy family, Luzzatto was well educated in the secular humanities and sciences, wrote drama and poetry, and spoke Italian and Latin. He was also a scholar of traditional rabbinic Jewish texts like the Talmud and a devoted kabbalist.

Luzzatto, also called the Ramhal (from the initials of his name) revealed his messianic calling to his circle of disciples, whom he called the Holy Society. From his youth, he claimed to be a channel for the revelations of a maggid, an angel who had spoken through him during his meditative states. He wrote an excellent survey of the Lurianic kabbalistic system, as well as a popular work on ethics, Mesilat yesharim (Path of the Upright), a manual to the path of holy living resulting in the attainment of the divine spirit. He consciously obscured and hid its underlying kabbalistic and mystical ideas, and thus it found acceptance in the wider Jewish community as a guide to an ethical way of life.

The first passage cited below is from a letter written by one of his disciples, Yekuthiel Gordon, to Rabbi Mordecai Yoffe, telling him about Luzzatto’s spiritual gifts, specifically that a maggid has appeared to him instructing him to teach certain spiritual exercises to his disciples and giving him knowledge of their successive incarnations and many other divine secrets. The letter is illuminating because it reveals the close devotional relationship Gordon had with his master, and the biblical and kabbalistic religious context in which Luzzatto received his revelation and framed his teachings. It also shows that he was regarded as the successor and transmitter of the spiritual wisdom received from masters of old, such as Rabbi Akiva of the rabbinic period, “members of the Heavenly Academy” (various historic and legendary religious figures), and the Ari (Rabbi Isaac Luria). The exercises he taught his disciples were tikunim, Lurianic meditative techniques (involving permutations of the divine names) and other special actions to be performed with complete dedication and kavanah, in order to repair or perfect the cosmic disharmony into which the world had presumably fallen. According to the kabbalistic conceptual framework, it was the messiah’s duty to teach these techniques in order to redeem the world and restore the primordial harmony within the Godhead.

I come regarding things of the Torah to inform my lord of the choice gift the Holy One, blessed be He, has granted to us from his treasure store. There is here a young man, tender in years, no older than the age of twenty-three. He is a holy man, my master and teacher, the holy lamp, the man of God, his honor Rabbi Moses Hayim Luzzatto. For these past two and a half years a maggid has been revealed to him, a holy and tremendous angel who reveals wondrous mysteries to him. Even before he reached the age of fourteen he knew all the writings of the Ari by heart. He is very modest, telling nothing of this even to his own father and obviously not to anyone else. It was by the counsel of the Lord that I discovered it by accident, here is not the place to describe how.

For the past month I have been ministering to him, drawing water from his well, happy the eye that has seen all this and happy the ear that has heard of it. He is a spark of Akiva ben Joseph. Eight months have passed since the time that the holy and tremendous angel was first revealed to him. He delivered to him numerous mysteries and imparted the methods by means of which he could summon to him the members of the Heavenly Academy. With the approval of the Holy One, blessed be He, and his Shekhinah, he ordered him to compose a Book of the Zohar, called in Heaven, the Second Zohar, in order that a great tikun known to us should be carried out.

This is what happens. The angel speaks out of his mouth but we, his disciples, hear nothing. The angel begins to reveal to him great mysteries. Then my master orders Elijah to come to him and he comes to impart mysteries of his own.… He knows all men’s previous incarnations and all the tikunim they have to carry out and he knows the science of reading the lines of the hand and face. To sum up, nothing is hidden from him. At first permission was only granted to reveal to him the mysteries of the Torah but now all things are revealed to him. But no one outside our circle knows of it. He told to me personally a great secret regarding why I have come here to study under him, for nothing occurs without reason. He told me about my soul and the tikunim I have to perform.⁴⁰²

Most of Luzzatto’s writings have entered kabbalistic literature, but some are imbued with a type of devotion generally associated with Hasidism. For that reason he is considered an important transitional figure between classic Lurianic Kabbalah and Hasidism. In his book Derekh ha-shem (The Way of the Name), he discusses the importance of the spiritual master in channeling the divine will into the realm of man. He writes that the master acts as a lens that focuses the divine inner light and allows us to see God:

The prophetic experience must come about through intermediaries. A human being cannot directly attach himself to God’s glory, perceiving it as one sees a man standing in front of him. The perception of God involved in true prophecy [spiritual experience] must therefore come about through God’s servants, whose task it is to provide such a vision. These intermediaries then act as lenses through which the individual sees the Glory.⁴⁰³

He stresses the need for a spiritual master of the highest order:

It is therefore crucial for those who strive for true prophecy to do so under the guidance of a master prophet.⁴⁰⁴

He describes the qualifications of the master prophet:

He must have an adequate knowledge of the prophetic methods, and be able to teach his disciples what each one must do to attain the desired result, according to each one’s particular level of readiness.

When the neophyte prophets begin to experience revelations, the master prophet continues to guide them. On the basis of what is revealed to them, he instructs them and informs them what is still lacking in their quest. Until they attain full prophecy, they will require a master for all of this. Even though some influence and revelation may have started to come to them, this in itself is not enough to immediately bring them to the ultimate goal. Before they can reach this, they need much guidance and training, each one according to his degree of readiness.⁴⁰⁵

Luzzatto took his mission very seriously and felt deeply responsible for the spiritual welfare of his disciples. The following passage is from a letter Luzzatto wrote to Rabbi Benjamin ben Eliezer ha-Kohen Vitale, a famous kabbalist and the father-in-law of Luzzatto’s teacher, Rabbi Isaiah Basson. He explains his refusal to flee Italy because of the responsibility he feels to guide his young disciples spiritually.

Praise to the God of Israel, many of the people now give up their sins to seek the Lord. All the God-fearing come daily to me to hear the new things the Lord tells me. The young men who had previously walked in the ways of youth’s vanities, now, thank God, have turned from the evil way to return unto the Lord, each of them coming to me to receive tikunim for his past deeds. Only yesterday did they come; shall I, then, forsake them by going to another country? Such a thing cannot be right! I have the obligation to encourage them until their feet have become firmly planted, as I hope, in the way of the Lord. Furthermore, it is impossible to rely on a miracle by bringing my book with me because of the danger from the censor.^* Nevertheless, I am obliged to reveal to your honor, whose soul is so dear to me, the mysteries of God to the extent I am permitted so to do and within the confines of this letter. With the eye of your great and pure intellect you will see how profound these matters are, for deep are the thoughts of the Lord.⁴⁰⁶

Because he claimed to be the messiah and talked about having a maggid, and because he predicted that some of his writings would replace the Bible during the time of the messiah, Luzzatto was suspected of being a Shabatean (which he wasn’t) and engaging in heretical activities. He was excommunicated by the Jewish religious authorities and many of his works were banned. He ultimately fled from Italy to the Holy Land where, soon afterwards, he died of plague. It was only posthumously that he became respected as an influential kabbalist and teacher of mussar, the ethical life.

Yemenite messiahs
Yemen had been an important center of Jewish life since the tenth century, and several important messianic figures appeared there between the twelfth and late nineteenth centuries. Some were inspired by Shabatai and Lurianic Kabbalah, others drew on Muslim messianist traditions. Because they ministered to the isolated Jewish community of Yemen, they have not been studied frequently.

There was a certain mystique to the legends surrounding the origins of the Yemenite Jews, and many thought they represented the Ten Lost Tribes, a theme which was woven into the teachings of all the Yemenite messiahs. Asceticism and the need for communal repentance were two other important aspects of the Yemenite messianic movements. The subject is discussed in detail in Harris Lenowitz’s comprehensive work, The Jewish Messiahs.⁴⁰⁷

A return to inwardness
In the mid-eighteenth century, the messianic impulse that had informed kabbalism for six centuries turned inward to focus on individual salvation. No longer was the leader only a political-mystical messiah, he became a savior to the masses, a teacher of the inner path; he offered the possibility of a spiritual way of life that anyone could follow through true devotion to a master and his teachings.

1. Next:  CHAPTER 14    Hasidism: A New Paradigm