David B. Ruderman, “Revisiting the Notion of Crisis in Early Modern Jewish History,” in Giti Bendheim, Menachem Butler, Jay M. Harris, and Uriel Katz, eds., Jacob Katz on the Origins of Orthodoxy (Cambridge, MA: Shikey Press, 2022), 109-134

Revisiting the Notion of Crisis in Early Modern Jewish History David B. Ruderman The following is based on my talk presented at “The Jacob Katz Memorial Lecture of 2009”, at the Leo Baeck Institute in Jerusalem. I wish to thank Professor Shmuel Feiner for inviting me to give this lecture and for the honor to recall the memory of my teacher Professor Jacob Katz. Scholars have often relied too heavily on the notion of crisis to explain a wide array of historical events affecting Jewish history, making them susceptible to imprecision and overstatement, and even to the danger of identifying too readily with what Salo W. Baron long ago labeled as “the lachrymose conception of Jewish history.” When “crisis” is summoned on more than one occasion to explain such events in the seventeenth century as the Chmielnicki massacres, the messianic debacle of Shabbetai Zevi, or the Spinozist assault on religious tradition, or in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the Hasidic schism, the Haskalah, or the pogroms of Eastern Europe, one might be left wondering when the Jews were not in a state of crisis. By organizing this chapter around the theme of crisis and highlighting its significance as a primary dimension of a transregional Jewish culture in early modern Europe, i clearly risk falling into the same explanatory trap of relying simplistically on a dramatic convention too easily educed to explain historical change in Jewish life.1 1 Salo W. Baron, “Ghetto and Emancipation,” Menorah Journal 14 (1928): 526; 109 David B. Ruderman This situation is further complicated by the standard ways in which crisis appears in general historical narratives. For historians of early modern Europe, the notion of crisis as an explanatory mechanism has a long pedigree, especially in describing “the general crisis of the seventeenth century.” Beginning with a series of well-known essays published in the late 1950s and early 1960s, several prominent social historians described a general crisis of the European economy in the seventeenth century as well as a clustering of social revolts across Europe. These heated discussions about the existence of a panEuropean crisis reached their high point in the 1960s and ’70s. By 1975, the debate had seemingly run its course with the appearance of a synthetic book by Theodore Rabb, who attempted to relate aspects of the political and economic crisis to intellectual and aesthetic dimensions of Baroque culture, describing a process of political stabilization throughout Europe that followed in the aftermath of economic depression and political and social upheavals. No doubt the nature of the linkage of politics, economy, society, and culture across diverse European political and cultural units still remained as uncertain as ever, although the big questions asked by these earlier historians were most laudatory and enriching in their effort to paint European history across the widest canvass possible.2 Benjamin Nathans, Beyond the Pale: The Jewish Encounter with Late Imperial Russia (Berkeley, CA, 2002), 8–9. Compare also Katz, Tradition and Crisis: Jewish Society at the End of the Middle Ages. On the use of “crisis” as a historical category in general, see Randolph Starn,“Historians and ‘Crisis,’” Past and Present 52 (1971): 3–22; and, most recently, J.B. Shank, “Crisis: A Useful Category of Post-social scientific Historical Analysis?” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1090–99 2 See Philip Benedict and Myron P. Gutmann, eds., Early Modern Europe: From Crisis to Stability (Newark, de, 2005), especially the introduction by Philip Benedict. See also the essay by J. H. Elliott, “the General Crisis in retrospect: A debate without end,” in the same volume, 31–51. The essays that initiated the debate first appeared in the journal Past and Present and were written by eric Hobsbawm and H. R. Trevor-Roper. They were reprinted with other related essays in Trevor Aston, ed., Crisis in Europe 1560–1660 (London, 1965). See also Theodore Rabb, The Struggle for Stability in Early Modern Europe (Oxford, 1975). The latest summary and evaluation of the controversy can be found in Jonathan Dewald, “Crisis, Chronology, and the Shape of European social History,” American Historical Review 113 (2008): 1031–52. See also Geoffrey Parker, “Crisis and Catastrophe: the Global Crisis of the seventeenth Century reconsidered,” American Historical Review 113 110 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis Long before the designation of a seventeenth-century crisis by the social historians of the 1950s, Paul Hazard had called his famous book La Crise de la conscience européenne, 1680–1715 (the Crisis of the European Mind, 1680–1715; published in 1935). In it he focused on a half century of innovation and radical change fed by two “rivers”—one of rationalism and one of sentiment—that challenged and shattered cultural traditions of the past. The mood engendered by Benedict de Spinoza, Pierre Bayle, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet, and François Fenelon at the close of the seventeenth century prefigured for Hazard the age of the French Revolution in its true novelty of ideas and in its new critical thinking about the universe and social order.3 Jonathan Israel’s Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (2001) was surely a reiteration and expansion of Hazard’s Crise de la conscience européenne, while singling out Benedict de Spinoza, his radical critique of conventional religion, his separation of the powers of church and state, and the broader currents of Spinozism as the most dramatic engines leading to the secularization and transformation of European society in the seventeenth century. For Israel, the era beginning in 1650—a bit earlier than the date initially posited by Hazard—was a more radical crisis than the renaissance and the reformation and challenged all political and ecclesiastical hierarchies and authority, promoting democratic and egalitarian principles of societal organization. Like Hazard before him, Israel insisted that the so-called High enlightenment of the late eighteenth century was merely a series of footnotes based on the earlier upheaval, merely “consolidating, popularizing, and annotating revolutionary concepts introduced earlier.” Because of the crisis of the post-1650 era, the common European culture of confessional theology (2008): 1053–79. In his chart of major revolts and revolutions on 1055, Parker includes the appearance of Shabbetai Zevi 3 See Paul Hazard, La Crise de la conscience européenne (Paris, 1935); Paul Hazard, The European Mind 1680–1715, translated from the French by J. Lewis May (Harmondsworth, England, 1964); Margaret Jacob, The Radical Enlightenment: Pantheists, Freemasons, and Republicans (London, 1981); and Margaret Jacob, “the Crisis of the European Mind: Hazard revisited,” in Politics and Culture in Early Modern Europe, ed. Phyllis Mack and Margaret Jacob (Cambridge, 1987), 251–71. 111 David B. Ruderman and scholastic Aristotelianism “weakened and then disintegrated.” the crisis of the radical enlightenment thus preceded the onset of the enlightenment proper, initiating a cultural revolution emerging in dynamic cities with exceptionally high levels of immigration. New and provocative ideas flowed from a new kind of public sphere fed by erudite journals, literary clubs, and Masonic lodges where traditional social barriers were blurred.4 The primary questions of this chapter should now be obvious: did Jews living in early modern Europe also experience a crisis of faith, a destabilization of their political and social orders, and a radical rethinking of their religious and cultural heritage? And if so, what crisis affected them directly—the crisis of the social and economic historians, or that of the cultural and intellectual historians, or both? or was the crisis they experienced not directly related to either of these crises but instead propelled by processes emerging from the particular conditions of Jewish life, such as those described in previous chapters—mobility, the laicization of communal leadership, or the knowledge explosion engendered by print? Locating the Beginnings of a Jewish Crisis in the Seventeenth Century Most historians who have considered the Jews in crisis in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries have either ignored any connection whatsoever with alleged crises affecting other European peoples or have remained judiciously vague about any actual connection between the Jewish experience and those of European society in general.5 No doubt, we should acknowledge from the outset the 4 See Jonathan Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity (Oxford, 2001), especially 1–81; the citations herein are on 7 and 17. 5 Jacob Katz, for example, despite the prominence of the notion of “crisis” in his work, ignored completely the general economic and political crises of European historiography and the cultural crisis of Hazard and others. on this, see Yosef Kaplan, “The Early Modern Period in the Historiographical Production of Jacob Katz” (in Hebrew), in Historiografia ba-Mivhan: Iyyun Mehudash be-Mishnato shel Yaakov Katz, ed. Israel Bartal and Shmuel Feiner (Jerusalem, 2008), 19–35, especially 26–35. However, in Out of the Ghetto: The Social Background of Jewish Emancipation 1770–1870 (Cambridge, MA, 1973), p. 228, note 25, Jacob Katz 112 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis genuine difficulty in finding coherence among these variegated aspects of Jewish and Christian society. Nevertheless, the important question of what crisis the Jews experienced and how to situate it within a larger historical context deserves a fresh and more precise explanation. The rest of this chapter will be devoted to addressing this question. This chapter attempts to claim that Jews did experience a crisis and to define more clearly the nature and consequences of that crisis. The primary crisis affecting European Jewish society in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries was undoubtedly that associated with the appearance of Shabbetai Zevi. In 1665–66, this bizarre individual declared himself the messiah, engendered an enormous reaction among followers and detractors alike, and ultimately was incarcerated and converted to Islam, but nevertheless remained the focus of messianic aspirations within the Jewish communities of both the ottoman empire and the rest of Europe well into the eighteenth century. The phenomenon of the strange messiah became the basis of a new antinomian and nihilistic ideology—constructed especially by Shabbetai’s two major followers, Nathan of Gaza and Abraham Cardoso—that challenged the very foundations of normative Judaism and rabbinic authority already in decline centuries earlier, as we have seen. The single most important historian of Shabbetai Zevi and Sabbateanism, the movement of his followers both during and after his lifetime, was Gershom Scholem, whose masterful and elaborate reconstruction left a significant impact on every researcher in the field. Scholem knew well the larger context of both Christian and compares his own conclusions about the beginnings of a structural change in traditional Jewish society to those of Hugh Trevor-Roper. (My thanks to Michael Silber for this reference.) Jonathan Israel, on the other hand, in European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 170, offers the following ambiguous formulation: “A mounting turmoil of inner pressures erupted in the 1650s and 1660s in a drama which was to convulse world Jewry. Furthermore, although this Jewish upheaval had some separate and independent roots, unconnected with the current intellectual preoccupations of Christian Europe, it took place during, and shared some causes with, the deepening crisis besetting European culture as a whole. Inevitably, the ferment within the synagogue interacted on the wider level within European devotion and thought, the one chain of encounters pervading the other in a remarkable process of cultural transformation.”. 113 David B. Ruderman Muslim messianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and was also fully aware of the image the Jewish messiah cut especially among Christian contemporaries. But in explaining the origin of this movement and its remarkable longevity for well over a hundred years, he turned to internal and intellectual causes—namely, the wide dissemination of kabbalistic ideas associated with the sixteenthcentury mystical figure Isaac Luria—that infiltrated, Scholem claimed, both Sephardic and Ashkenazic cultures and provided the theological premises upon which the Sabbatean prophets could explain the paradox of a Jewish messiah converting to Islam. Furthermore, these notions were then distorted even more to explain the mass apostasy of Shabbetai’s followers, the Dönmeh, to Islam and the later bizarre conversion of Jacob frank and his followers to Christianity in the eighteenth century. Anyone searching for larger connections between the European world and this Jewish crisis could not find them in Scholem’s reconstruction, which perceived the latter as exclusively an internal affair ignited by the inevitable combustion of kabbalah and anarchic Jewish messianism.6 In recent years Scholem’s own students have challenged their teacher’s grand narrative in arguing that Lurianic kabbalah was not particularly messianic in the first place, that is was not widely diffused by the late seventeenth century, and that mystical ideas, notwithstanding their usefulness to Nathan of Gaza and Abraham Cardoso in justifying the messianic apostasy, could not adequately explain the mass hysteria of a popular movement.7 Especially significant was a recent suggestion of one scholar to give more weight to the noticeable presence of a large community of converso merchants in Smyrna, the birthplace of Shabbetai Zevi, in explaining the diffusion of his messianic movement. 6 See especially Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626–1676; Gershom Scholem, Mehkarei Shabta’ut, ed. Yehudah Liebes (Jerusalem, 1991); and Liebes, Sod ha-Emunah ha-Shabeta’it. 7 See, for example, Moshe Idel, “One from a town, two from a Clan: The diffusion of Lurianic Kabbala and Sabbateanism: A reevaluation,” Jewish History 7 (1993): 79–104; Moshe idel, Messianic Mystics (New Haven, Ct, 1998), chap. 6; Yehudah Liebes, “Sabbatean Messianism,” in Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism (Albany, 1993), 93–106; Avraham Elqayam,“The Mystery of Faith in the Writings of Nathan of Gaza” (in Hebrew), Ph.d. dissertation, Hebrew University, 1993; and Elior, ed., Ha-Halom ve-Shivro. 114 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis While Scholem had previously noticed that many conversos—and especially Cardoso himself—were attracted to the Sabbatean ideology he went further in arguing for social, economic, and intellectual links of the converso communities of Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Leghorn with Smyrna, revealing that the Smyrna community was truly an international one, and that these converso networks surely contributed to the dissemination of Sabbatean currents throughout the European continent.8 Still others have continued to challenge Scholem’s insistence on isolating Sabbateanism from the larger European context to which it belongs. Some have underscored the significance of the Jewish messiah in the eschatological and millenarian schemes of Christian contemporaries. While some Christian observers initially viewed Shabbetai’s Zevi’s messiahship somewhat favorably or neutrally, they eventually came to see him as a false prophet and heretic to be denounced and ridiculed along with those emanating from their own religious traditions. The apostasy of Shabbetai Zevi was also a pretext, so other Christians argued, for Jews to abandon their false faith and to approach the baptismal font.9 Even more recently, another scholar has attempted to reattach the tenuous but nevertheless apparent linkage of this Jewish crisis with that emerging in the Christian world and, less distinctly, with the Muslim. By juxtaposing the apocalyptic anticipations of seventeenth-century Christians with analogous stirrings among ottoman Muslims and with Sabbateans, he hopes to offer a plausible account of the probable connections among all 8 Jacob Barnai, “Some social Aspects of the Polemics between Sabbatians and their opponents,” in Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, ed. Matt Goldish and Richard Popkin (Dordrecht, Netherlands, 2001), 77–90; Barnai, Shabta’ut: Hebetim Hevrati’im; and Barnai, “the spread of the Sabbatean Movement in the seventeenth and eighteenth Centuries,” 313–37. 9 Richard Popkin, “Christian interest and Concerns about Sabbatai Zevi,” in Goldish and Popkin, eds., Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, 91–106; Michael Heyd, “The Jewish Quaker: Christian Perceptions of Sabbatai Zevi as an Enthusiast,” in Coudert and Shoulson, eds., Hebraica Veritas? Christian Hebraists, Jews, and the Study of Judaism in Early Modern Europe, 234–65; Elisheva Carlebach, “The Last Deception: Failed Messiahs and Jewish Conversion in Early Modern German Lands,” in Goldish and Popkin, eds., Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, 125–38. 115 David B. Ruderman three phenomena. While he has less to say about the Muslim context of Shabbetai Zevi, he is on stronger ground regarding the messianic dialogues between Christians and Jews. The connecting link is, of course, converso messianism—specifically, the attempt of Cardoso and others to portray Shabbetai Zevi as a converso himself who was living with two separate identities and constructing a syncretistic messianic ideology based on elements of both religions. By labeling the followers of Shabbetai Zevi as “enthusiasts” and their opponents as “anti-enthusiasts,”10 he meaningfully relates Sabbateans to comparable groups within the Christian world such as the Quakers, Camisards, and female spanish visionaries, or even Mahdists and heretical dervishes in the Muslim context. Similarly, the opposition to these visionaries on the part of doctors, lawyers, and governmental officials can be correlated with the reaction of such rabbinic crusaders as Jacob Sasportas, Moses Hagiz, and Jacob Emden, who opposed the Sabbateans.11 The Sabbatean turmoil of the Eighteenth Century Scholem and most other scholars have focused primarily on Sabbateanism from its inception until the last decades of the seventeenth century. Its subsequent unfolding in the eighteenth century has been charted less exhaustively, although for the purposes of this chapter it assumes an even greater importance. Certainly by the mid-eighteenth century, with the fading memory of Shabbetai Zevi himself, the rise of the menace surrounding the anarchist Jacob frank, and especially the outbreak of a series of convulsive debates and public recriminations, Sabbateanism took on a new form and a new direction. 10 Michael Heyd, “The Reaction to Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth Century: Towards an Integrative Approach,” Journal of Modern History 53 (1981): 258–80; Michael Heyd, Be Sober and Reasonable: Science, Medicine and the Critique of Enthusiasm in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries (Leiden, Netherlands, 1995). 11 Matt Goldish, “Patterns in Converso Messianism,” in Goldish and Popkin, eds., Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern Period, 41–64; Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets. Goldish stresses the role of the kabbalah, following Scholem, as the dominant Jewish theology of early modern Jews, and a primary factor in explaining the crisis of authority in the Jewish world. He also connects the general currents of skepticism in this era with the same crisis. 116 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis It seems appropriate to refer to this period, especially in this later phase of the movement, as one of crisis, of internal polemics, deep-seated enmity, and anxiety, articulated especially in print by those leaders identified as Sabbatean emissaries and their vocal rabbinic opponents. Moreover, the subsequent witch hunt to root out these Sabbatean iconoclasts throughout the European world can best be explained by recourse to the notions of enthusiasm and antienthusiasm.12 Beginning in the first decades of the eighteenth century, the Sabbatean prophet Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon evoked unprecedented alarm among numerous rabbis writing from all over Europe. The charges surrounding Hayon had less to do with his personal relationship with Shabbetai Zevi and more to do with his pretension to understand the divine essence as expressed in a trinitarian form and to publish his selfdiscovery in a printed book for Jews and Christians to read.13 Hayon’s messianic activism is nowhere evident in his writings; nor does he even bother to refer to Shabbetai Zevi. His Oz le-Elohim Beit Kodesh haKodashim (strength to God: the House of the Holy of Holies), published in Berlin in 1713, instead reveals its author as an enthusiast whose personal quest for religious truth was of the utmost importance, that “he who will investigate every approach diligently … will be rewarded by recognition of the true essence of God, with no dilutions.”14 for Hayon it was not only legitimate for the individual to investigate the most esoteric secrets of his religious faith, unencumbered by the norms of 12 The major guide in charting the history of Sabbateanism in the first half of the eighteenth century is Elisheva Carlebach’s masterful study of Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatean controversies. Although the focus of her study is on Hagiz alone, his prominence throughout this long period as a staunch opponent of what he considered the scourge of Sabbatean heresy provides a meaningful perspective to view panoramically the violent eruptions between the Sabbateans and their pursuers. See Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian Controversies. 13 Ibid., 75–159; I.S. Emmanuel, “documents related to the Nehemiah Hayon Controversy in Amsterdam” (in Hebrew), Sefunot 9 (1965): 211–46; Menahem Friedman, “New Documents Relating to the Hayon Controversy” (in Hebrew), Sefunot 10 (1966): 483–619; Yehudah Liebes, “The Ideological Basis of the Hayon Controversy” (in Hebrew), Proceedings of the Eighth World Congress (Jerusalem, 1982), 129–34. 14 Oz le-Elohim, 1, translated by Carlebach in The Pursuit of Heresy, 99. 117 David B. Ruderman traditional authority; it was incumbent on him to initiate this quest. Moreover, the audacious act of revealing the secrets of the Godhead in a printed book to any potential reader removed all impediments to limit knowledge to elites alone. Instead God prefers those who, like Job, come to know him from independent inquiry in the solitude of their own home, being instructed by a book rather than through careful supervision and control of rabbinic mentors in the study hall.15 It was inevitable that Hayon’s trinitarian construction of the divinity as “the Ancient of days.” the Malka Kadisha, the male element, and the Shekhinah, the female element, and his instructions on how one unites them in his prayer along with separation of this triune God from the transcendent Ein Sof (the infinite), were to evoke bitter acrimony from Jewish religious leaders while arousing the curiosity and delight of Christian Hebraists eager to have Hayon join their ranks.16 the controversy was exacerbated even further, as we have seen, by the clashing interests of the lay authorities of the Jewish community of Amsterdam and those of the rabbinic emissary Moses Hagiz. In challenging the decision of Solomon Ayalon, the local rabbi considered by Hagiz as a rabbinical lackey of the lay leaders of Amsterdam, Hagiz claimed the right to interfere in the affairs of the local community when so fundamental a matter as the publication of esoteric secrets by a brazen heresiarch was at stake. And the lay leaders in turn defended their independence and local autonomy from the encroachments of a foreign rabbi who, they argued, could claim no jurisdiction over them. In the final analysis, the intrusive nature of a rabbinic emissary from the Holy Land seeking to intervene in the affairs of a distant community run by wealthy Sephardic merchants, the claims of an enthusiast pitting his own personal autonomy against the hallowed instructions of religious authorities, and the capacity of a printed book to shatter religious norms and controls all combined to produce the lethal explosion known as the Hayon affair. Its importance in precipitating a crisis long in the making by bringing together the 15 Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 99–101. 16 On the Christian fascination with Hayon’s book Oz le-Elohim as an expression of Jewish Christianity, see Hans Joachim Schoeps, Philosemitismus im Barock: Religions- und gestesgeschichtlichte Untersuchungen (Tübingen, Germany, 1952), 108–14 118 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis various elements of communal transformation and rabbinic decline we have examined in earlier chapters should not be underestimated. Accelerated mobility, the laicization of Jewish communal life, and the effect of the printing press simultaneously propelled this dramatic and corrosive affair. Similarly, the other great internal schisms associated with Sabbateanism in the eighteenth century—the accusations leveled against the Ittalian kabbalist Moses Hayyim Luzzatto and the Ashkenazic rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz—were primarily concerned with their challenge to the authoritative structure of the rabbinate and the anxiety they engendered over this real slippage in its actual power.17 Luzzatto’s profile as a self-proclaimed prophet and the bearer of divine illumination could not have failed to evoke the consternation of the same rabbis who had objected to Hayon. No rabbi could countenance the temerity of this mystic who would claim, “I have been permitted to inquire and to know any matter pertaining to our Holy Torah barring none.”18 Nor could any of them ignore his brazen attacks against the rabbis for their shallowness and greediness and the absence of spirituality in their intellectual pedantry and vain dialectics. Luzzatto’s belief in the supremacy of his own endowments in relation to those of other rabbis was especially evident when he proclaimed, “there may be power among all the sages of Germany and Poland … but i have 17 See Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 195–255, on the Luzzatto controversy as well as the earlier essays of Isaiah Tishby collected in Netivei Emunah u-Minut (Jerusalem, 1964). on the Emden-Eibeschütz controversy, see Jacob J. Schacter, “Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major Works,” Phd diss., Harvard University, 1988; Mortimer Cohen, Jacob Emden: A Man of Controversy (Philadelphia, 1937) and the critical review by Gershom Scholem of Cohen’s book in Mehkarei Shabta’ut, 655–80. See also Sid Z. Leiman, “When a Rabbi is Accused of Heresy: Rabbi Ezekiel Landau’s Attitude toward Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz,” in From Ancient Israel to Modern Judaism: Essays in Honor of Marvin Fox, ed. Jacob Neusner, Ernest Frerichs, and Nahum Sarna (Atlanta, 1989), 3:179–94. See, more recently, Sid Z. Leiman and Simon Schwarzfuchs, “New evidence on the Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy: the Amulets from Metz,” Revue des études juives 165 (2006): 229–49, and Pawel Maciejko, “the Jews’ entry into the Public sphere: the Emden-Eibeschütz Controversy reconsidered,” in Feiner and Ruderman, eds., Early Modern Culture and Haskalah, 135–54. 18 Simon Ginzburg, Ha-Ramhal u-Venai Doro: Osef Iggrot uTe’udot (Tel Aviv, 1937), 1:116, translated by Carlebach in The Pursuit of Heresy, 203. 119 David B. Ruderman the power of the Holy one, Blessed be He, and the Shekhinah, and all the members of the Academy on High who illuminate my eyes with a divine light. Please do not disregard my words.”19 in this regard, Hagiz’s comparison of Luzzatto’s self-assertions with those of Jesus and Shabbetai Zevi were most perceptive. Hagiz well understood the consequences of legitimizing Luzzatto’s heavenly source of revelation that could undermine that of the Torah and its interpretative guardians, the rabbis. How might one distinguish in the end the declarations of Luzzatto from those of Jesus, for both based their claims to truth on the individual reception of divine illumination? in the end, Luzzatto had blatantly adopted a position of antinomianism and apostasy; no greater crisis could have been imagined by his rabbinic opponents!20 The other great controversy of the first half of the eighteenth century surrounded the rabbinic figure Jonathan Eybeschütz— especially those stemming from the accusations of his Sabbatean leanings voiced by his archrival, the rabbi Jacob Emden. This complex altercation has been discussed many times and involves many elements including a clash of strong personalities, professional jealousy, the zealotry and obsessive behavior of Emden, and even elements of syncretism with Christianity apparently present in Eybeschütz’s own theological proclivities and those of some of his followers.21 As in the cases of Hayon and Luzzatto, the connections between Eybeschütz and the messiahship of Shabbetai Zevi were tenuous at best. Rather, as all three cases exemplify, Sabbateanism in its eighteenth-century dimensions was simply a code word, a convenient label for enthusiasm, heresy, and the undermining of rabbinic authority. The last and most radical of Sabbatean prophets, Jacob frank, connected his own pedigree more directly to Shabbetai Zevi and articulated his own nihilistic messianic aspirations. But here, too, 19 Ginsburg, Ha-Ramhal u-Venai Doro, 1:74, 90; 2:85, translated by Carlebach in The Pursuit of Heresy, 209; italics in the original. 20 Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 223 21 In addition to the references in note 18 above, see Chaim Wirszubski, “The Sabbatean Kabbalist R. Moses David of Podhayce” (in Hebrew), Zion 7 (1942): 73–93; and Yehudah Liebes, “On a Secret Jewish-Christian Sect Whose Source is in Sabbateanism” (in Hebrew), in Sod ha-Emunah ha-Shabta’it, 212–37. On the critique of Liebes’s view, see chapter 5 of the present volume. 120 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis the inherent danger of the Frankists that well persisted into the next century was primarily their subversion of rabbinic norms and rabbinic authority. The Frankist sect negated the very essence of religious authority claimed by rabbis and church officials alike. Frankism simply confirmed in a most vivid and dramatic manner the initial suspicions articulated by the earliest rabbinic adversaries of Sabbateanism— Jacob Sasportas, Moses Hagiz, Jacob Emden, and their colleagues— decades earlier: that the menace of Sabbatean enthusiasm imperiled their very standing and legitimacy as religious leaders as well as the very foundations of their religious community.22 The Sabbatean controversies “which occurred with rhythmic regularity through the first half of the eighteenth century,”23 are significant, then, in pointing to a moment when the entire Jewish community from the ottoman empire to Amsterdam and London seemed engaged in bitter struggles between competing elites: enthusiasts and prophetic luminaries on the one hand, and rabbinic leaders on the other. Each of their altercations, however, defies easy classification. They often involved clashes among rabbis themselves, among lay leaders, among those defending local interests and those who migrated from community to community. What needs to be stressed above all is the cross-cultural nature of these embroilments and the general mood of crisis that permeated multiple European Jewish communities in this era. The Sabbatean movement is indeed the quintessential example of an early modern transregional Jewish cultural phenomenon. While emerging in Smyrna, Cairo, Gaza, and Jerusalem, it dramatically spread like wildfire, intruding into western Europe and to a lesser extent into Eastern Europe as well. The network of Sabbatean emissaries, often intersecting with converso commercial and cultural networks, moved dynamically across the continent, energizing Jewish acolytes in numerous communities, and effectively exploiting the printing press to convey its message that Shabbetai Zevi and his disciples were also noticed by Christians and Muslims across 22 The classic work on Frankism is Majer Balaban, Le-Toldot ha-Tenu’ah ha-Frankit (Tel Aviv, 1934). The most important new synthesis is that of Pawel Maciejko in The Mixed Multitude: The Development of the Frankist Movement 1755–1816 (Oxford, forthcoming). 23 Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 75. 121 David B. Ruderman the continent suggest how successful the organization was in gaining prominence and notoriety as a global Jewish movement among followers and detractors alike. Sabbateanism and the Birth of “Orthodoxy” in the Eighteenth Century The Sabbatean network, as we have seen, also galvanized a counter network of vociferous opponents—primarily rabbis—who saw their own authority and standing deleteriously affected by such unruly characters as Hayon or Luzzatto and their magnetic appeal among large Jewish followings. To the extent that the rabbinic opposition to Sabbateanism organized itself in a unified way across the continent to defend its exclusive authority to determine Jewish norms and beliefs, it also offers significant testimony to the connecting links between divergent Jewish communities of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and the consciousness of an early modern Jewish rabbinate transcending specific geographic areas and cultural zones. Indeed, it might be fair to conclude that the united rabbinic front that coalesced around their vigorous opposition to the Sabbateans, attempting to undermine their legitimacy and to separate and sequester the ‘infidels” from the community of the faithful through denunciation and even excommunication, might be labeled as the first “orthodox” rabbis. The notion that orthodoxy emerged first in the nineteenth century as a response to the large numbers of Jews who had abandoned the normative tradition and considered their nonobservance as a legitimate form of Jewish behavior has been most cogently articulated by Jacob Katz and followed by his students and colleagues in their subsequent writings.24 When Elisheva Carlebach suggested in her 24 See, for example, Jacob Katz, Ha-Halakha Be-Meizar: Mikhsholim al Derekh ha-Orthodoxsiya be-Hithavutah (Jerusalem, 1992); Jacob Katz, “Orthodoxy in Historical Perspective,” in Studies in Contemporary Jewry 2 (1986): 3–17; Moshe Samet, “Halakha vereforma,” Phd diss., Hebrew University, 1972; Israel Bartal, “‘True Knowledge and Wisdom’: On Orthodox Historiography,” Studies in Contemporary Jewry 10 (1994): 178–92; David Ellenson, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer and the Creation of Modern Jewish Orthodoxy (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1990); Mordechai Breuer, Modernity within Tradition, trans. Elizabeth Petuchowski (New York, 1992); and Michael Silber, “The Emergence of Ultra-Orthodoxy: The Invention 122 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis study of Hagiz that the beginnings of orthodoxy as a defensive reaction to the challenges posed by deviant Jews might have begun as early as the eighteenth century rather than the nineteenth, she was subsequently refuted by Katz himself in a review of her book. Katz consistently maintained that the conditions of Jewish observance in Hagiz’s time was still quite different from those of the nineteenth century as exemplified by the staunch defender of orthodoxy Moses Hatam Sopher. Sabbatean deviances from tradition did not constitute a self-conscious ideology such as that of reform Judaism that argued that ritual observance was no longer obligatory for the Jewish faithful.25 Even more recently, another scholar of modern orthodoxy has claimed that groups such as the medieval Karaites and the Sabbateans never posed a real challenge to the hegemony of Jewish law as the authentic form of behavior for those who considered themselves normative Jews. Only in the nineteenth century, when nonobservance became a legitimate form of Jewish behavior for a significant number of Jews, did orthodoxy emerge. Before this era rabbis simply dealt with deviants by excommunicating or isolating them. But in the nineteenth century they chose to voluntarily separate themselves from other Jews by enclosing themselves as a united front and thus preventing the incursion of modern values and practices.26 The only challenge to the Katz thesis has been presented in a recent doctoral dissertation that locates the origins of orthodoxy not in the nineteenth century surrounding the ideology of Moses sopher but in the sixteenth century in the ideology of the Maharal of Prague. According to this view, orthodoxy was more than a reaction to the enlightenment and the reform movement and more than an attempt of a Tradition,” in The Uses of Tradition: Jewish Continuity in the Modern Era, ed. Jack Wertheimer (New York, 1992), 23–84. See also Michael Silber, “orthodoxy,” in Yivo Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, ed. Gershon Hundert (New Haven, Ct, 2008), 2:1292–97, especially 1293: “orthodoxy thus emerged in response to ideologies that challenged tradition and presented themselves as legitimate alternatives.” 25 Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 277. Katz reviewed Carlebach’s book in Zion 59 (1994): 521–24. 26 See Adam Ferziger, Exclusion and Hierarchy: Orthodoxy, Nonobservance, and the Emergence of Modern Jewish Identity (Philadelphia, 2005), especially 1–17. 123 David B. Ruderman to fortify the borders of traditional Judaism from the encroachments of heterodoxy. By pitting the progressive forces of enlightened reform against those of reactionary orthodoxy, the genesis of orthodoxy is not adequately understood and described. Instead, one needs to understand the Prague rabbi’s distinction between the supernatural path of the Jewish people and the natural path of the other nations of the world as the pathbreaking formulation of Jewish orthodoxy and to locate it within the context of reformation notions of law and society, the Jewish-Christian debate, and nationalist ideologies emanating from Prague. This notion of the separateness of the Jewish people from the rest of humanity became the cornerstone of later reiterations of orthodox spokesmen in subsequent centuries.27 This is not the place to offer a comprehensive discussion and refutation of the views of Katz, his followers, or his detractors. Whatever the virtues or flaws in these new interpretations, the impact of this new scholarship has been critically important in locating the construction of orthodox theory and praxis at the center of discussions of modernity and modernization in Jewish history. On the semantic level alone, the distinction between a definition of orthodoxy as a theological and cultural alienation from the rest of humanity and the more restricted notion of a voluntary act of separation from other Jews is substantially different. No doubt there is a conceptual similarity between the Maharal’s elevation and separation of the Jewish people from other nations and Hatam sopher’s insistence on the purity of the faithful in their isolation and insulation from nonobservant Jews. But this similarity alone clearly does not denote an identity of the two postures or even a causal relationship from one to the other. The first articulation calls ultimately for a renewal and reunification of Judaism and Jews; the second rigorously and aggressively calls for secession and self-differentiation from other Jews. To my way of thinking, orthodoxy in the context of early modern and modern Jewish history is indeed a response to a crisis. It emerges out of a critical need to legitimate rabbinic authority among a growing 27 See David Sorotzkin, “Kehillat ha-al Zeman be-idan hatemurot: Kavim leHithavutan shel tefisot ha-Zeman ve-ha-Kolektivke-Basis le-Hagdarat Hitpathut ha-orthodoksiyah ha-yehudit Be˙eropah be-At ha-Hadasha.” Phd diss., Hebrew University, 2007. 124 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis number of Jews who either question it because of a competing ideology or ignore it out of indifference. Orthodoxy emerged in the eighteenth century under the conditions of a beleaguered rabbinate, one insecure and anxious about itself, no longer capable of leading effectively, and acutely aware that its constituency—or at least a conspicuous part of it—was seduced by an alternative ideology and leadership. To cope with this new unpleasant reality, it responded by erecting barriers between itself and the “impure,” by differentiating itself from other Jews now deemed heretical, denouncing and delegitimating them categorically, and declaring itself the only authentic version of Judaism. The difference between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries regarding the emergence of Jewish orthodoxy is a matter of degree, not of substance, as Katz has argued. Such rabbinic critics of the Sabbatean prophets as Sasportas, Hagiz, and Emden were obsessed with their mission to defend a traditional faith and legal system that seemed in danger of disintegrating before their eyes. Whatever the actual number of Sabbatean deviants, the rabbis encountered an ideology that challenged the very rationale of their legal system and their exclusive right to be the sole arbiters of its rulings. Sabbateanism, especially in the formulations of Hayon, Luzzatto, and frank, offered an ideology of Judaism based on the authority of personal revelation and was antinomian at its core. Judaism’s leaders were now selfanointed charismatic mystics whose authority came from divine illumination and not from the mastery of Jewish legal texts. The threat of this new ideology was magnified even more by the systemic opposition and interference of lay leaders in the communities the rabbis served from Amsterdam to Eastern Europe, as we have seen. The rabbis were also wounded by their inability to control the flow of printed books in Hebrew and other languages, allowing any author a platform to articulate his own idiosyncratic understanding of Jewish faith and practice. Hayon’s scornful declaration that he knew the secret of God’s essence and could disclose it in a book for all to see was only the tip of an iceberg. Jewish religious leaders helplessly observed the incessant flow of new books and bemoaned their utter futility in controlling and censoring that flow. The toxic combination of a new ideology delegitimating their very existence with the new cultural and social limitations in which they were obliged to function were an overwhelming burden for them to bear. 125 David B. Ruderman Symptomatic of this mood of crisis among Jewish religious leaders was the outpouring of works written by them throughout this period with the repeated title Emunat Hakhamim—that is, a desperate plea for “faith in the rabbinic sages.”28 Moses Hagiz, in his own work titled Mishnat Hakhamim, underscores the unmistakable connection between the goals of the Sabbatean leadership and the attack on the oral law and rabbinic authority, writing, “[those] who have licentiously rebelled against the Torah of Moses and israel and have inclined towards evil beliefs which they have devised and fabricated in their sinful hearts, the well-known imposter Shabbetai tsevi and his friends, may their bones be pulverized, the accursed Cardoso, and the abominable Nehemiah Hiyya Hayon, may the name of the wicked rot… the insane fool Leib Prossnitz and his friend, as evil as he is, Moses Meir of Zholkva and the aforementioned snake [Shabbetai Zevi].” (it should be noted here that Hagiz’s spelling of Zevi’s name references the word tsefá, “snake.”) And he adds, even more explicitly, “He [Shabbetai Zevi] spoke slanderously not only about all the aggadot [rabbinic stories] and midrashim [homilies] of the sages, interpreters of the twentyfour [books of the Torah], but also about the works of the rabbinic authorities and moralists, recent as well as ancient, until they have caused us to be abhorred.”29 28 See Shalom Rosenberg, “Emunat Hakhamim,” in Jewish Thought in the Seventeenth Century, ed. Isadore Twersky and Bernard Septimus (Cambridge, MA, 1987), 285–342; and consider the reservations of Yosef Kaplan regarding the essay in “‘Karaites’ in the Early Eghteenth Century,” in An Alternative Path to Modernity, 234–79. Compare more recently Kaplan’s use of the term orthodoxy in describing developments in the Amsterdam Jewish community of the early eighteenth century in his “Secularizing the Portuguese Jews: Integration and Orthodoxy in Early Modern Judaism,” in Feiner and Ruderman, eds., Early Modern Culture and Haskalah, 99–110. Shmuel Feiner has also located the beginnings of orthodoxy in the eighteenth century, albeit at the century’s very end and primarily as a reaction to the corrosive impact of the enlightenment on traditional Jewish faith. See Shmuel Feiner, “to Uproot Wisdom from the World: enemies of the enlightenment and the roots of Ultra-orthodoxy” (in Hebrew), in Kana’ut Datit, ed. Meir Litvak and ora Limor (Jerusalem, 2008), 57–83 29 Moses Hagiz, Mishnat Hakhamim (1864; reprinted Tel Aviv, 1964), 519:64a–65b; see also 521, translated in Rosenberg, “Emunat Hakhamim,” 297; emphasis added. On the Sabbateans Leible of Prosnitz and Moses Meir of Zolkiew, see Carlebach, 126 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis Earlier Jacob Sasportas had labeled Sabbateanism as “the ultimate apikorsut” (epicureanism, or irreligion) adopted by “the uneducated who perceive a lack of truth in the teachings of the sages, who open their mouths neither in holiness nor purity and say: ‘one cannot rely on the sages … ’ and from this time on, the teachings of the sages are not [regarded as] prophecy.” Sasportas thus understood the danger of the Sabbateans in devaluating rabbinic authority since, unlike their own teachings, those of the rabbis were not prophetic.30 And again, he uses the same label to designate the Sabbateans as a new religion, a new sect distancing themselves from rabbinic Judaism, writing, “it seems to me that it is the beginning of apikorsut among the Jews and that it constitutes the foundation of a new faith and a different religion, as happened in the days of that man [Jesus]. And it is incumbent upon all the sages in every city to come together and gird themselves and hound those who follow their irreligion.”31 Sasportas, Hagiz, and Emden thus felt a critical need to defend the legitimacy of their own religious leadership by publishing books and pamphlets defending the rabbinic tradition they embodied while lashing out at all those who sought to undermine their position. Hagiz especially succeeded in enlisting a large number of rabbis from all over Europe to act in unison and to fortify the image of the institution of the rabbinate. Through a series of orchestrated letters, exchanging information on the defamers of the rabbinic class, garnering and maintaining support for the rabbinic cause, and publicizing the evidence of the alleged apostasy of the Sabbatean infidels, the rabbinic class attempted to speak in one voice. Judah Briel of Mantua joined forces with Hagiz and the Hakham Zevi, the Ashkenazic rabbi of Amsterdam in excoriating Hayon and his book. Their efforts were rewarded with the publication of a collection of letters offering retractions of previous support for Hayon or repudiations of his positions from such notables The Pursuit of Heresy, 174–76. 30 Jacob Sasportas, Sefer Zizat Novel Zevi, ed. Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem, 1954), 87, translated in rosenberg, “Emunat Hakhamim,” 296–97. 31 Sefer Zizat Novel Zevi, 256, translated by Pawel Maciejko in The Mixed Multitude; italics in the original. The citation is from chapter 2, titled “the Peril of Heresy, the Birth of a New faith.” I am grateful to Dr. Maciejko for allowing me to read a draft of this chapter prior to publication 127 David B. Ruderman as Naphtali Kohen of Frankfurt am Main, Gabriel Eskeles of Moravia and Nicholsburg, Jacob Aboab of venice, and David Oppenheim of Prague. Other well-known rabbinic figures were enlisted to the cause against Hayon, including Jacob Kohen Popers of Koblenz, Joel Pincherle of Alexandria, Abraham Segre of Casale Monferrato, Joseph Ergas of Leghorn, and David Nieto of London, as well as other rabbis throughout the Middle east.32 Moses Hagiz even turned to the Council of the four Lands, the powerful supracommunal institution of Eastern European Jewry, in the hope that it would issue a ban against the Sabbateans. Despite its character as a powerful lay body with a rabbinical court at its service, both Hagiz and Emden considered the council’s support critical in their universal campaign against sectarians such as Hayon and Eybeschütz.33 In the case of Emden, his appeal to the council for support was carefully crafted to legitimate officially sanctioned versions of Christianity and Judaism while excoriating the obnoxious mixture of religious ideologies that constituted sectarian Sabbateanism. Displaying an impressive familiarity with the New Testament, Emden argued that Christianity was a legitimate religion appealing to gentiles while Judaism appealed, appropriately, to Jews. Both represented parallel paths to redemption, but they were paths that should never intermingle; the theological boundaries between them and their welldefined dogmas preserved their integrity and guaranteed their selfimposed separation from one another. It was only when the Sabbateans crossed these boundaries, mixing elements from each religion in their syncretistic heresy, that they impaired the purity of each traditional faith. Emden thus posed as “a chief heresiologist” in his appeal to the council, understanding religious orthodoxy in a way parallel to the representatives of the Catholic Church. In fact, the Lutheran scholar Freidrich David Megerlin had specifically designated Emden’s position against the Sabbateans as “orthodoxy.”34 In turning to the most powerful body of Eastern European Jewry to combat the Sabbatean scourge, Hagiz and Emden understood 32 See Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 123–59. 33 Ibid., 191–63. 34 See Maciecjko, The Mixed Multitude, chap. 2. 128 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis well the ultimate danger to which the entire Jewish community was subjected and why Jewish leaders were obliged to separate themselves from the heretics. Abraham Segre similarly grasped that all fellow rabbis were under siege and needed to act in concert in suppressing their local interests and loyalties on behalf of the greater good: “for in matters pertaining to Jewish law we [the rabbinate] are members of one city.”35 Segre’s defiant declaration offers the clearest expression of an awareness of a pan-European Jewish community and an idealized unified rabbinate of Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Italian rabbis. And Emden’s forceful separation of an authentic Christianity from an authentic Judaism, delegitimating the hybrid religion of the sectarians, illustrates well the orthodox posture of the rabbinical opponents of Sabbateanism. The consciousness of rabbinic unity was also reinforced by the publication of extensive documentation about the “sins” of the infidels so as to record for posterity the war of words the Sabbatean crisis had engendered and the hoped-for victory of the rabbis, the “repairers of the breaches.” Jacob Sasportas’s Zizat Novel Zevi (the fading flower of Zevi) was surely the model of a massive collection of historical documents on the travesties of the Sabbateans. Jacob Emden’s Torat ha-Kena’ot (the teaching of Jealousy [Numbers 5:29]) performed a similar function, substantiating his charges against those he deemed the enemies of faith. Other rabbis consciously collected published and unpublished materials; as Samson Morpurgo of Ancona wrote to his colleagues concerning the Hayon controversy, “send me all the books that have been published hitherto, and those that will be published in the future pertaining to this controversy… the full and complete editions. I will store them in my library as a keepsake for generations.” these rabbis saw themselves as litigants before the court of public opinion that included other rabbinic colleagues but also lay leaders and even Christians fascinated by the fireworks igniting the Jewish community. Their efforts on behalf of the rabbinic establishment would be crowned with success if they meticulously recorded and documented the crimes of their generation and their courageous efforts to stand together to preserve rabbinic Judaism as they understood it.36 35 Cited in Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 132. 36 See especially Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy, 149–55. The citation is found in 129 David B. Ruderman Sabbateanism and the other Crises of Early Modernity: Some Tentative Conclusions Until now we have focused exclusively on the Sabbatean menace, especially the well-publicized affairs of Hayon, Luzzatto, and Eybeschütz of the first half of the eighteenth century in describing the crisis of Jewish life. From the perspective of the beleaguered religious establishment, as we have seen, these events were indeed crises that called for a total and unified response, bringing together all communities throughout the Jewish in a show of strength against the heretics. This chapter began by mentioning several other so-called crises of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries besides that of the Sabbateans. Before concluding this discussion, we need to ask whether it is possible to link the internal Jewish crisis in the name of Shabbetai Zevi with the larger intellectual crisis engendered by Benedict de Spinoza and his contemporaries and followers.37 Can one be more explicit in arguing Isaiah Sonne, “Correspondence between R. Moses Hagiz and R. Samson Morpurgo regarding Nehemiah Hayon and his Sect” (in Hebrew), Kovez al Yad 12 (1937): 190b, translated by Carlebach in The Pursuit of Heresy, 151; her citation on 316, note 29, should read “190b” instead of “19b.” 37 One fascinating instance of a contemporary attempt to link the Sabbatean Nehemiah Hayon and Spinoza is found in a French article written by the hakham of the spanish and Portuguese synagogue of the Hague, David Nuñez-Torres, published posthumously several months after his death in 1728. The essay is found in Bibliotheque raisonnée des ouvrages des savans de l’Europe, i (1728): 335–352. In this long review of Hayon’s controversial book, the author presents its major ideas on the divine essence objectively and dispassionately, pointing out that the rabbis of Amsterdam had not found the work heretical, while completely ignoring the bitter critiques of Hagiz and his rabbinic colleagues. It is not clear why there was such a long time lag between the book’s publication in 1713 and this review fifteen years later. Nuñez-Torres casually points out (on 340) that ideas especially found in chapter 8 of Hayon’s book well conform to the philosophical system of Spinoza. This scholarly comment from an intellectual who owned a vast private library that included Spinoza’s works appears to be a curiosity at best. Neither Hayon’s bombastic publication nor Spinoza’s philosophical tomes appeared troubling to this hakham. On the contrary, he innocently collected Spinoza’s books for his library while he deemed Hayon’s theology important enough to publicize in the pages of a non-Jewish journal. My sincere thanks to Yosef Kaplan, from whom I first learned about Nuñez-torres and his remarkable library, and who pointed me to this reference. 130 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis that both crises took place more or less simultaneously (Shabbetai Zevi appeared in 1666, and Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise was published in 1670) and shared some (unnamed) causes? Spinoza, of course, was born into a converso family who had settled in the Jewish community of Amsterdam and received a traditional Jewish education. His impressive mastery of Jewish sources is well known. Furthermore, recent scholars of Spinoza have made much of his Jewish/converso connections.38 sharing a common attitude toward the obsolescence of rabbinic law were two other contemporaries of Spinoza, Juan de Prado and Uriel da Costa, the latter writing an impressive critique of Jewish law.39 Beyond these three outspoken critics of the rabbinic position, one scholar has unearthed a small group of Amsterdam Jews accused of so-called Karaite tendencies at the beginning of the eighteenth century who eventually converted. Despite the attractiveness of the of Karaism to some Christian Hebraists like Richard Simon, the reality of a genuine ideological movement challenging rabbinic Judaism, a kind of Jewish Protestantism, seems most unlikely to him.40 Another contemporary Hebrew work, the Kol Sakhal (voice of a fool), most likely written by the italian rabbi Leon Modena, offers a remarkable in-house critique of the foundations of rabbinic Judaism, but it need not be linked to converso heterodoxy in Amsterdam at all.41 It is not only difficult to tie Spinoza with any sizable number of contemporary ideological critics of traditional Judaism in Amsterdam or beyond but difficult to trace the evolution of deistic or Spinozist trends among Sephardic intellectuals after his lifetime.42 The only 38 See, for example, Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton, NJ, 1989); and Steven Nadler, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge, 1999). 39 For more on these other heretics, see Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, especially 122–78; and Uriel da Costa, Examination of Pharisaic Traditions, ed. Herman P. Salomon (Leiden, Netherlands, 1993). 40 See the references to Yosef Kaplan’s article and his reservations about the conclusions of Shalom Rosenberg in note 29, above. 41 Talya Fishman, Shaking the Pillars of Exile: ‘Voice of a Fool,’ an Early Modern Jewish Critique of Rabbinic Culture (Stanford, CA, 1997). 42 See Jonathan Israel’s rather unsuccessful attempt in “Was there a Pre-1740 131 David B. Ruderman well-known reaction to Spinoza among contemporary Jews was the rebuttal of his views by Isaac Orobio de Castro.43 the London rabbi David Nieto was accused of Spinozist leanings in 1703, but it is clear that he was wrongly accused.44 Most recently, another scholar has assiduously collected the existing evidence surrounding a colorful group of Jewish deists across the continent and England to support his contention of a wide-ranging secularizing trend among Jews in the eighteenth century.45 But these individuals, like the so-called Karaites mentioned in Amsterdam, hardly constitute a significant organized conspicuously associated with the Spinozist trends so prominent across Europe. The many references to atheists, deists, epicureans, and other deviants from rabbinic Judaism that have so far been unearthed are not easy to contextualize precisely or to assess their impact on the larger community. Hagiz and Emden were also prone to conflating Sabbateans with other heretics, blurring the differences between Sabbatean enthusiasts and those offering a philosophical challenge to religious orthodoxy. It may be plausible to assume that Jews inevitably would be dragged into the intellectual arena of Spinozism that pervaded European society and significantly provoked the radical enlightenment, but the evidence for this activity on a massive or public scale has not yet been unearthed. Modern Jewish thought from Moses Mendelssohn on is certainly a direct or indirect response to Spinoza’s devastating assault on traditional Judaism, but the Jewish responses to Spinoza in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries remain generally unknown. Perhaps a conspiracy of silence was the most effective response Jews could offer to counter the acute heretical tendencies ever present in sephardic Jewish enlightenment?” La Diaspora des Nouveaux-Chrètiens: Arquivos do Centro Cultural Calouste Gulbenkian 48 (2004): 3–20. 43 See Kaplan, From Christianity to Judaism, 263–70. 44 Israel, European Jewry in the Age of Mercantilism, 219–20. on Nieto, see Ruderman, Jewish Thought and Scientific Discovery in Early Modern Europe, 310–31. 45 I refer to Shmuel Feiner’s forthcoming book, tentatively titled Olam Hadash, Olam Hafukh: Shorshei ha-Hillun Be-Yahadut Europah be-Me’ah ha-18 (Jerusalem) and eventually to be published in an English translation. My thanks to Professor Feiner for allowing me to read an early version of his large manuscript. 132 Revisiting the Notion of Crisis the environments they inhabited, but this is no more than conjecture. The Jewish upheaval remains virtually unconnected to the Spinozist crisis of the same time period. What remain to be stressed are the common conditions under which Shabbetai Zevi and Benedict de Spinoza emerged in the second half of the seventeenth century and the common results they achieved. Both were patently linked to the converso experience; Sabbateanism and Spinozism in general were nurtured in Amsterdam itself; and both represented two kinds of enthusiasm, generating ideologies that challenged the legitimacy of rabbinic norms and rabbinic authority. In the end, both converge in remarkably interesting ways, although it is impossible to weigh them equally as factors in the collapse and deterioration of rabbinic authority at least before 1750. It is equally risky to posit any meaningful connections between the other well-known economic and political crises of the seventeenth century discussed by social and economic historians nearly a half century ago.46 Precisely during the years in which this crisis was taking place (1650 or earlier), Jews seem to have been experiencing the height of their political and economic integration into western Europe.47 on the other hand, the Jews of Eastern Europe had experienced a significant trauma in 1648 with the onset of the Chmielnicki massacres although they eventually recovered their losses and regained much of their autonomy and economic power years later. While the connections between the Jewish crises of 1648 and 1666 and those larger institutional and societal crises seem most opaque, their coincidence is surely worth noting. In the absence of specific evidence binding the Jewish phenomenon to a general cultural or political crisis, it is sufficient to note the genuinely shared human condition experienced by Jews and Christians alike and the remarkably common perception particularly felt by their religious and political leadership of living through an era of crisis that they could neither control nor arrest. 46 Chimen Abramsky, “The Crisis of Authority within European Jewry in the eighteenth Century,” in Studies in Jewish Religious and Intellectual History Presented to Alexander Altmann, ed. Raphael Loewe and Siegfried Stein (Tuscaloosa, AL, 1976), 13–28, offers no links to larger European crises either. 47 See the essay of Jonathan Israel mentioned in chapter 2, note 31, and my comments there on the difference between economic stability and lack of cultural production. 133 David B. Ruderman This chapter was first published as an article in David B. Ruderman, “Revisiting the Notion of Crisis in Early Modern Jewish History,” The Jacob Katz Memorial Lecture, no. 2 (2010), based on a talk delivered as the Jacob Katz Memorial Lecture of 2009, at the Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem, on June 4, 2009, and was expanded into David B. Ruderman, Early Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History (Princeton: Princeton University, 2010), and reprinted in this volume with permission of the author and Leo Baeck Institute, Jerusalem. 134 Jacob Katz on the Origins of Orthodoxy EDITED BY Giti Bendheim • Menachem Butler Jay M. Harris • Uriel Katz Shikey Press Cambridge, MA 2022