_ Source: _Volume 24, Issue 1, pp 31 - 59 Eschatological expectations and messianic hopes aroused by the expulsion of Jews from Spain climaxed in the seventeenth century with the appearance of Sabbatai Tzevi. In 1666, Sultan Mehmed IV, eager to halt the uproar without creating a martyr, offered Tzevi a choice between conversion to Islam and death. Tzevi chose life. Although many Jews were devastated by his apostasy, a nucleus of Sabbatai’s most ardent followers (...) preferred to interpret it as the ultimate _tiqqun_. This article presents one of the most intriguing Sabbatian literary accounts of their Messiah’s apostasy, the internal Sabbatian version of the _romansa_ “Tarquin and Lucretia.”. (shrink)

L’édition critique des œuvres de Moïse ben Sabbataï, philosophe juif actif (à Rome?) vers 1340, avait signalé, parmi d’autres sources latines lues dans les traductions en hébreu de son contemporain Juda de Rome, un exemplum présentant le sage athénien Solon sur son lit de mort en champion de la doctrine de l’élévation intellectuelle en vue de la vie éternelle. Cette note identifie comme sa source un chapitre d’Albert le Grand, De natura et origine animae II, 13, dont la traduction en (...) hébreu se trouve dans un ouvrage inédit de Juda de Rome, son Commentaire du Qaddīš et de la Qeduššāh. La traduction du chapitre est éditée, l’histoire de l’ exemplum reconstituée et son emploi par les trois auteurs, remis en contexte et interprété. (shrink)

Jean-Claude Milner’s Le sage trompeur (2013), a controversial recent piece of French Spinoza literature, remains regrettably understudied in the English-speaking world. Adopting Leo Strauss’ esoteric reading method, Milner alleges that Spinoza dissimulates his genuine analysis of the causes of the persecution and survival of the Jewish people within a brief “manifesto” found at the end of the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (TTP), Chapter 3. According to Milner, Spinoza holds that the Jewish people themselves are responsible for the hatred of the Jewish people, (...) and that the engine of their longevity is the hatred they engender. Additionally, claims Milner, Spinoza covertly insinuates that the solution to this persistent state of hatred consists in the mass apostasy of the Jewish people under the leadership of a Sabbatai Zevi-like figure. This article presents the Milner–Spinoza controversy to the English-speaking public along with the larger context of French-language scholarship on Spinoza’s relation to Judaism. While refuting Milner’s reading of Spinoza, I simultaneously clarify relevant elements of Spinoza’s discussions of Judaism in the TTP, such as Spinoza’s examination of Jewish identity and the nature of divine election, Spinoza’s understanding of the causes of national hatred, and Spinoza’s appeals to Portuguese, Spanish, Chinese, and Turkish political history. (shrink)

Field propagation on fractal structures can generate a large scale symmetric space-time geometry. The significance of this fact and the nature of the resulting space-time are discussed.“Each contained all the others, but in this totality each was confused and comingled with all the others without order and system.”—Haïm Vital, 1543–1620 (Kabbalist of Safed); English translation taken from “Sabbatai Sevi” by G. Scholem (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1973), p. 36.

In old age, I seldom keep the books I read, but The Books of Jacob has been shelved next to Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah; my copy of the latter bears an inscription on its flyleaf, “Gift of Jacob Taubes to Tantur, 1978,” which in some way (possibly mystical) authenticates bringing the two books together. It seems I have been waiting for the conjunction since first reading Gerhom Scholem on the Frankists, in his Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, in (...) the carriage of a train waiting to depart from New Street Station, Birmingham, sometime in the mid-1980s. It was a moment of revelation; reading Tokarczuk has been too.A major literary achievement—no question: published in Polish in 2014, Tokarczuk's narrative meditation on the Frankists is a model of what may be done by integrating imagination with documentation. This is how what is loosely termed historical fiction should be written. Terrific when evoking the tastes and smells of Podolia or Smyrna, Tokarczuk is no less profound when expressing the aspirations and hesitations of a Jewish people trapped between two other religions, Islam and Christianity. Like Scholem before her, but in her own, entirely different manner, she brings to center stage movements of the mind that had previously been relegated to the wings. What was once regarded contemptuously as too “other”—other, that is, to post-Enlightenment descriptions of the world, past and present—has been shown by Scholem and now Tokarczuk to be crucial to an understanding of the modern world's genesis. What Scholem did for Sabbatai Sevi, Tokarczuk has done for Jacob Frank—and for his followers as well: those beyond-the-pale Jews who saw in him a savior who was no less anti-messianic than he was the messiah. (shrink)

Razmatrajuci mesijansku ideju u novovekovnom judaizmu, autor se usredsredjuje na sabatajski pokret. On ispituje drustveno-istorijske i psiholoske razloge koji su omogucili masovno prihvatanje Sabataja Cvija za mesiju, kao i ostajanje vernim tom uverenju cak i kada je on izneverio velika ocekivanja, neocekivano presavsi u islamsku veru. Mladi rabin Natan iz Gaze, oslanjajuci se na Lurijinu kabalu, ne samo sto je ubedio jevrejski narod u to da je Sabataj Cvi dugo ocekivani mesija nego je i ponudio teorijsko opravdanje njegove navodno prividne (...) izdaje. Opravdanje sablaznjivog ponasanja Sabataja Cvija, koji je bio manijakalno-depresivna osoba, vodilo je kod ekstremnih sabatajaca do uverenja o svetosti greha, cime je mesijanska ideja u novovekovnom judaizmu izoblicena do krajnje grotesknosti. (shrink)

Most of these eight essays on contemporary figures were given as lectures or speeches between 1990 and 1996. A piece on Ernst Cassirer’s humanistic legacy gives the collection its title, but the other subjects treated are far-ranging: Karl Jaspers on the clash of religious cultures, Georg Henrik von Wright’s noncognitive ethics, Gershom Scholem’s magisterial biography of the kabbalist Sabbatai Sevi, Karl-Otto Apel’s hermeneutics, Johann Baptist Metz on the Jewish element in Christianity, Michael Theunissen on the relation of negative theology (...) to social theory, and a review of the work of script writer and film director Alexander Kluge. Habermas unifies this panoply by his fascination with the transformation of the modern West’s key symbols through their confrontation with other cultures. Prime among these symbols are language and religious doctrines, especially Christian and Jewish. When he examines this general theme in particular cases, Habermas first presents an exposé of a thinker, then raises critical questions, and finally points out insights of enduring significance. One decided advantage of his method is its attention to clarity and organization. Probably because these essays were originally delivered orally, they never leave the reader in doubt as to what topics they will handle and when each is being taken up. (shrink)