Messiah of Transgression – Thoughts on Sabbatai Zevi (Part 2)

(This is the conclusion of a two-part series.  For the first part, click here.)

To say that the Sabbatai Zevi messianic movement of the 17th century was a personality cult would be an understatement.  It was surely a great deal more than that–just what, historians are still debating–but Sabbatai Zevi’s highly distinctive, not to say weird, personality lay at its center.  Without him, the rest wouldn’t have been possible.

The powers attributed to him, almost from the movement’s beginning, were extravagant.  “Lord be praised,” wrote his prophet and publicist Nathan of Gaza in September 1665 to a well-heeled and influential admirer, “you are a believer in this faith, which is clear as the sunlight and admits no dispute or any doubt whatever.”  And part of that “faith,” necessary for the believer’s salvation, is belief in …

“the dreadful agonies, inconceivable and limitless, that Rabbi Sabbatai Zevi has suffered on behalf of the Jewish nation.  Consequently, he has full power to do with this nation whatever he pleases, to justify or (God forbid) condemn them.  He may justify the most depraved sinner in existence–even someone like Jesus–or condemn anyone who doubts him, even if he be the most pious man alive, to unspeakable torments.”  (My translation, in Pawel Maciejko’s anthology of documents from the movement.)

Nathan’s dig at the rival Messiah conceals the flattery of imitation.  This reads like a bad caricature of Christianity’s doctrine of justification by faith, directed toward a man who comes across as a lunatic with a violent streak.

From the introduction to my own collection of “testimonies” to Sabbatai Zevi:

“On sabbath morning, 12 December 1665, Sabbatai and his mob of enthusiasts appeared before the doors of the Portuguese synagogue in Izmir, which had been locked against them.  He demanded an axe; with his own hands he smashed his way into the synagogue.  Once inside, he proceeded to harangue and terrorize the worshippers.  He forced them to pronounce the sacred, always unspoken, four-letter Name of God.  To his followers he distributed the kingdoms of the earth.  His brother Elijah became sultan of Turkey that morning, his brother Joseph emperor of Rome.”

This was only the most dramatic of the “strange acts,” as people called them, for which Sabbatai became notorious–calculated nose-thumbings at the standard proprieties of Judaism.  Look!  Look! the unbelievers screamed in the ears of anyone who would listen.  Look at the awful things he’s doing!  How can you believe in such a man as Messiah?

But as the spring of 1666 warmed into summer, fewer and fewer people were willing to listen to the critics.  It was as if they believed in Sabbatai, not in spite of his “strange acts,” but because of them.  

With his penchant for transgression, the crossing of boundaries and violation of norms, he swept the Jewish masses to the exultant conviction: “He is the true Messiah, he and no other.”  And not just them.  The institutions of Jewish self-governance signed on to the movement, no less than the people they represented.  Those who wouldn’t “get with the program” (as the current phrase goes) found themselves facing excommunication–or worse.

In Venice, around the beginning of June, one luckless soul picked the wrong time and place to badmouth Sabbatai Zevi.  He was set upon and beaten, not quite to death.  Sabbatai, hearing of this, assigned his secretary to compose a letter to the Venetian rabbinate praising “the strength of Venice’s holy congregation: how they were fired with zeal to stamp out the iniquity and do away with the sinfulness of the man who spoke heresy against our righteous Messiah. … They beat that man to death [sic], thereby giving no heed to the distinction between sacred and profane; for that day was the holy and venerable Sabbath.”

The Messiah’s verdict:  “There is no finer sanctification of the Sabbath than that which those men have performed.”  And therefore “our Lord king will give wealth and honor and nobility … to those righteous men who beat to death him who rebelled against the Lord of the world.  They kept the Sabbath strictly and well, for our Lord king is himself the Sabbath.”  (Which reads almost like a grotesque parody of Matthew 12:8.)

In their helpless concern, their impotent indignation, their fear for their own lives, the upholders of the traditional sanctities must have wondered, as the current phrase goes, whether there was anything at all the man could do that might turn his base against him.

As it happened, there was.  On September 16, 1666, he converted to Islam.  And his movement, as a mass movement, collapsed.

Yet even after that, there were some who insisted he could do no wrong.  These included thinkers of great intellect and greater imagination, who fashioned out of the strangest of the Messiah’s “strange acts” something that amounted to a new religion–rooted in Judaism like Pauline Christianity, yet like Christianity transforming its values.  We call that religion “Sabbatianism.”  Its remnants survive to this day.

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The story, fantastic yet nowadays a touch familiar, is told in the magisterial writings of Gershom Scholem.  These include his thousand-page (in its English translation) biography of Sabbatai Zevi.  They include also a long essay entitled in its English version “Redemption Through Sin,” in which Scholem explores the even stranger reverberations of those “strange acts”–notably, the Messiah’s apostasy–through Sabbatian thought and practice for generations to come.

“Redemption Through Sin”–what an intriguing paradox!  When I first read Scholem’s essay nearly fifty years ago, the idea seemed exciting and rather fun–designed, as it were, for the counter-culture around whose fringes I hovered.  How deliciously subversive!  How subversively cool!  Let society’s fuddy-duddies, a.k.a. my elders, rant and rave about boundaries being trampled, norms being trashed!  It was a vicarious thrill to watch Sabbatai and his acolytes, via Scholem’s impeccably learned prose, give them the collective finger.

But when it’s boundaries and norms you deeply care about that are shredded and cast aside, from a direction you never expected, it stops being thrilling and fun.  You become a fuddy-duddy yourself right quick.  You see chaos, and beyond the chaos, horror.

Six years ago, I took for granted there were certain boundaries that couldn’t be violated with impunity, certain things that just wouldn’t be done.  I was sure it would be electoral disaster for a political candidate, say, to mock a Gold Star family, to sneer at a war hero who’d courageously endured years of nightmare in a POW camp, to be caught on tape bragging about–but you can finish the sentence for yourself.

But it wasn’t.

(Said Abraham Cardozo [p. 156], the ablest and most independent-minded of Sabbatai Zevi’s defenders: “The world could hardly have borne a man who so shamelessly violated the Torah … if he were not the Messiah.”)

And a man who incited a mob to smash its way into the time-hallowed precincts in which the Republic’s business is transacted, in an assault whose savage brutality made Sabbatai’s invasion of the Izmir synagogue look like a tea party by comparison?  Surely he’d be by common consensus banished from all public activity, despised and shunned by everyone?

But surely he wouldn’t.

“Which is very strange,” as Samuel Pepys noted in his diary; and (to amend him slightly) “certainly this year of 2022 will be a year of great action, but what the consequences of it will be, God knows.”

May they be for the good.