The Sabbatean Prophets

Abstract

The Sabbatean Prophets, by Matt Goldish. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004. 221 pp. $39.95. This work arose from a paper the author, Samuel M. and Esther Melton Associate Professor of History at Ohio State University, wrote while a student of Michael Heyd at the Hebrew University. His dissertation, reworked as Judaism in the Theology of Sir Isaac Newton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), received the American Academy of Jewish Research's Salo Baron Prize. Between that work and the present monograph, Goldish has co-edited with Richard Popkin Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 2001), the first volume of the series Millenarianism and Messianism in Early Modern Europe, and another collection of essays, Spirit Possession in Judaism (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2001). With Daniel Frank, he is completing at present one other collection of essays, on rabbinic culture and its critics, for Wayne State. I confess to being a close friend and occasional associate of Goldish and to having essays in his edited volumes. We have a common interest in Sabbateanism, its texts and leaders in particular. In this book Goldish extends our understanding of the 17th-century messiah Shabtai Zvi and his prophet, Nathan Ashkenazi of Gaza, and some of their contemporaries, including other prophets, followers, and opponents. He does this by presenting the Sabbateans in the wider context of a mass movement incorporating Mediterranean Jewish, early modern European, and Middle Eastern cultures in a single milieu of religious enthusiasm, a universe of vibrant cross-cultural call-and-response. The work ties together two perspectives denominated by the phrase "Sabbatean prophets" that have not been previously so foregrounded in Sabbatean studies: that there were more than one important prophet associated with the Sabbatean event; and that these were "Sabbatean" prophets. The latter concept calls for a comparison of these with other prophets associated with other, contemporary, religious movements/manifestations, some of which were rather distant from this one, for example the prophets James Nayler, Isaac de La Peyrere, and Jean de Labadie; and the movements of the Quakers, the Ranters, and the French Camisards. Thus, mass, popular events both within Jewish circles, generally involving the support of important rabbis, and outside them played a more significant role than has been brought out in previous scholarship. By illuminating this context, Goldish brings previous overviews such as the nonpareil tome(s) of Gershom Scholem into relief. In the first part of the Prologue (pp. 1-6) the book stays quite close to Scholem's apprehension of the biography of Shabtai Zvi (but its conclusions are no more clinically substantiated than were Scholem's). In the last pages of the Prologue, the book begins to make its own contribution to the study of the Sabbatean event, pointing away from the biography to motives for the widespread acceptance, throughout the Jewish world, of Zvi's claim. Contemporary popular Jewish and non-Jewish support for the centrality and maintenance of the belief in a messiah and the expectation of his immediate appearance was quite strong. The acceptance of Zvi as that messiah took place at the deepest, broadest and most powerful strata of Jewish communities and cultures and was not lacking among non-Jewish millenarians. Emphasizing the fact that this was a mass movement, the work restates the widely acknowledged post-Scholem thesis that the mystical teachings of the Safed school, in particular those of R. Isaac Luria and R. Hayim Vital, played, at best, a minor part in controversial literature, and that Nathan of Gaza's mystic readings of the time and events of Shabtai were even less known, understood, or relevant. Moreover, in contrast to the importance of these figures' actual teachings, the popular images of both Luria and Vital (in the hagiographic literature), as well as Nathan's standing and performance in the role of prophet were highly relevant to Zvi's success, as was the support of important rabbinic authorities. …