Once upon a time, I've learned from reading the comic strips, schoolkids coming back from summer vacation were made to write essays on "What I Did Last Summer." (Linus to Lucy: "What did I do last summer?" Lucy to Linus: "You read comic books and watched TV.") I was in elementary school back … [Read more...]
“Sexualized Spirituality” and the Heretic Rabbi – Jonathan Eibeschuetz and the Moravian Connection
We talked about William Blake, a little bit. We talked a little bit about Jacob Frank, the 18th-century Polish-Jewish cult leader who carried the faith of the long-dead and even longer-discredited Messiah Sabbatai Zevi into previously undreamed of territories of weirdness and erotic … [Read more...]
Conspiracy Theories Revisited – The Strange Case of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz (Part 3)
(This is part 3 of a three-part post. For part 1 click here; for part 2 click here.) In last week's post, I began to describe the scandalous book of Kabbalah that surfaced in Germany in 1725, with the title Va-avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayin, "I Came This Day to the Spring." Rumor had it that the book … [Read more...]
Conspiracy Theories Revisited – The Strange Case of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz (Part 2)
(This is part 2 of a three-part post. For part 1, click here.) “I came this day to the spring of wisdom … and now I shall enlighten you with words of understanding.” This is the beginning of what may have been the most controversial Jewish book of the 18th-century. It was a book of … [Read more...]
