In his foreword to Gershom Scholem’s collection of essays Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque. De la mystique aux Lumières (On the Religious Origins of Secular Judaism. From Mysticism to the Enlightenment), Maurice Kriegel sets out some of the threads that, in his view, might be drawn from a global reading of the great historian of Jewish mysticism’s work; invoking the “red thread of modern Jewish history,” he synthesises the general thesis that underlies Scholem’s entire theoretical project: beyond the major rupture introduced by the apostate messianism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries within Judaism, which could have resulted in a genuine schism, there remains a thread of continuity between the apocalyptic and antinomian (anti-Law) current and Hasidism, which for its part remains within the Jewish fold, but at the cost of a “neutralisation”—a kind of ideological defusing—of the most subversive potentialities of the messianic utopia as a collective phenomenon. In parallel, Scholem defends the thesis that makes heresies a neglected substratum of political modernity, in its reformist and even revolutionary aspects. He therefore introduces the concept of the secularisation of religious messianism, of the secularised conversion carried out by the haskala (the Jewish Enlightenment), which metamorphoses the radicality of the messianic rupture into a banner of modernity, well beyond its sectarian persistence in the depths of the Jewish collective consciousness.
Or, to use Kriegel’s terms: “The shock is so powerful that it triggers a chain reaction within the traditional world. Hasidism emerges from it—adopting the figure of the charismatic leader, the Hasidic chief, the tsadik, who takes over from the Sabbatean prophet with his spiritual illumination and his charisma—and at the same time ‘neutralises’ a messianism that has become suspect once it has revealed its destructive potential.”
And a little further on: “The Jewish Enlightenment movement (the Haskalah) was able to extend its grip thanks to a detachment from religious practice, legitimised at first by Sabbateanism on the basis of its own mystical theology. The struggle of the partisans of the Reform in the nineteenth century against Talmudic law was prepared by that of the Sabbateans, determined to substitute for ‘ratiocinative’ Talmudism a mystical interpretation of the biblical commandments. Polish Sabbateanism at the end of the eighteenth century gives a first formulation of the programme—destined for a long history—of autonomism, whether territorial or cultural. Certain of these currents sometimes defend, contradictorily, and there too as precursors, assimilationist positions.”
This thesis is linked in Scholem to a powerfully dialectical vision of religious history, which he makes the mirror and perhaps even the matrix of the convulsions of modernity. Paradoxically, it is to Walter Benjamin—who, unlike him, converted to Marxism and to a form of communist heterodoxy—that he entrusts, as early as 1927, the first sketches of what would become his magnum opus on the itinerary of Sabbataï Tsevi, the mystical messiah.
This thesis has, of course, been contested more recently by other approaches, far less dialectically tied to the experience of history—that of Moshe Idel in particular, another great explorer of the texts of the mystical tradition, but who takes his distance from his master’s historicist interpretation and defends a causality more strictly linked to the internal, long-term transformations of the mystical tradition, independently of, or sometimes even against, the historical logics put forward by Scholem.
The aim of this article is not to take a position on this very complex question, but simply to detail certain recurrences between the different movements in order to suggest their symbolic prolongations, drawing on Scholem’s immense work of historical reconstruction. As if this “red thread” evoked by Kriegel were also leading us toward art, fiction, and imagination, as full participants in the dialectical image binding together tradition and modernity, religion and politics.
Continuities
First of all, messianism and Hasidism are studied in some proximity by historians. In Les Grands courants de la mystique juive (Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism), G. Scholem devotes his final chapters to the movement of Sabbataï Tsevi, the seventeenth-century messiah of Smyrna, the cause of a major upheaval within Judaism; he concludes with what he calls the “neutralisation” of messianism in Hasidism, addressing only very briefly in that work the violently antinomian movement of Jacob Frank in the eighteenth century. He devotes to it, however, an important chapter that can be found in the collection Aux origines religieuses du judaïsme laïque. De la mystique aux Lumières (On the Religious Origins of Secular Judaism. From Mysticism to the Enlightenment).
Moshe Idel, who positions himself as a critical heir to Scholem’s work, reinterprets this continuity in his own way by likewise devoting the last two chapters of his work Mystiques messianiques. De la Kabbale au hassidisme. 13è-19è siècle (Messianic Mystics. From Kabbalah to Hasidism. 13th-19th centuries) to these two currents, which he sees in their successiveness and complementarity: on the one hand “Sabbateanism and mysticism” and on the other: “Hasidism. Mystical messianism and mystical redemption.” For Idel, it is rather the continuity of mystical practices that characterises this link between the different movements.
Both Scholem and Idel, despite their divergent interpretations, analyse messianism and Hasidism as mystical phenomena, inspired by a tradition at once very ancient and in constant evolution. But they also present them in terms of a quasi-political intentionality at the level of collective becoming. Idel insists more on the plurality of models and practices, their insertion into the school of myth and rite, which in his eyes makes them religious phenomena rather than political ones. He contests certain forms of essentialisation specific to Scholem’s analyses which, according to him, produce a vision of messianism that is above all historical and dialectical, strongly insisting on its apocalyptic dimension and its protest against social reality. But both grant these currents a utopian power to transform the frames of global existence, even when the redemption postulated by messianic hope has no stage other than inner transformation. For the collective dimension of the Jewish messianic experience separates it quite radically from an interiorised and individualised Christian version of salvation. The popular diffusion of Lurianic mysticism from the eighteenth century onward in Poland has, according to these two authors, a transformative effect on the global life of the Jewish masses (the ethical and penitential literature that flows from it, the musar, thus carries a very critical vision of traditional hierarchies).
For Scholem, Jewish messianism corresponds to what he calls the “life lived in deferment” of the Jewish people’s historical existence: a mixture of expectation and of unresolved tension toward the restoration of an idealised past (the national existence of ancient Israel) and at the same time the utopia of a future assimilated to “the world to come”—an unknowable dimension of redeemed existence when it comes about at the end of history. Through the coagulations of historical experience there is supposed to unfold a scenario written upstream by the texts of long-term cultural memory, to say nothing of possible interferences with neighbouring cultures and the proven influence of other sectarian formations, in Christian or Muslim contexts for example.
Thus messianic discourses are inscribed within a form of agency that is more or less politically explosive or more or less spiritually interiorised, in spaces ranging from pure individual metamorphosis to mass movements that transform the socio-historical reality of an era. Their temporality is made of brutal accelerations and underground circulations, in the form of generational transmissions through secret texts and practices (one notes the preponderant role of families and sectarian groups, obliged to lead a marrano existence on account of situations of both internal and external persecution).
Not to mention the countless conflicts—at once personal and ideological—within these movements, both inside the Jewish microcosm and in their relations with the global societies into which they are inserted. In this respect, these movements take full part in the political life of the Jews in the diaspora, and in close interaction with the hope of national renaissance associated with traditional messianism.
Moreover, messianism and Hasidism are producers of numerous texts in Hebrew and Yiddish (and even in Polish in the case of the Frankist movement), in particular theoretical, doctrinal treatises, but also hagiographic narratives and tales—a veritable tool for the diffusion of Hasidic teaching, already characteristic of the Sabbatean approach to the spread of faith.
The personalities and the movements: Sabbateanism, Frankism, Hasidism
For the three most important movements of the modern period—Sabbateanism, Frankism, and Hasidism—the initial influence is unquestionably that of the mystical tradition: the literature of the Palaces and of the Merkavah (the divine chariot), the Zohar, and Lurianic Kabbalah (developed on the basis of the teaching of Isaac Luria in Palestine in the sixteenth century, transmitted by his scribe and disciple Haïm Vital). With the Sabbatean movement and its wide sphere of influence, this initially elitist mystical form begins to spread massively, first in Italy and then in Eastern Europe, principally in Poland. Sabbataï remains attached to the Zohar while Jacob Frank, a century later, already detached from tradition, is more eclectic and syncretist in his refounding of a personal doctrine that culminates in the appropriation of distorted and subverted Christian concepts (Trinity, Incarnation, cult of the Virgin). There is a radical anti-Talmudism in Frank, who liked to pass himself off as ignorant and laid claim to his status as a man of the people, like Israel Baal Shem Tov, the “founder” of Hasidism, and unlike Sabbataï Tsevi, who had received a solid rabbinic education. But Hasidism evolves over the long term and undergoes a fragmentation of sources and influences, in connection with the different schools and the great masters of doctrine. From the reputation of “simple man of the people” attributed (perhaps falsely) to the Besht (Israel Baal Shem Tov) to the erudite mastery of tradition in certain tsaddikim (Righteous Ones, masters of Hasidic teaching and movement).
In all three cases, let us note the original refounding of traditional mystical concepts, which displace the various conceptual appropriations and adapt them to the practical aims of the movements and to their historical becoming.
In Sabbataï’s case, sectarian antinomianism leads to conversion to Islam imposed by the Turkish authorities, and to the doctrine elaborated in part by his disciples after his death, of “redemption through sin,” to justify his conversion. The latter is read by the faithful as the descent into the Kingdom of evil (the kelipot, the Kabbalistic “shells”) in order to redeem the community of believers. The movement continues underground in its sectarian and radical form after his death, leading to a collective conversion in 1683, which is at the origin of the Dönmeh community in Turkey.
In Frank’s case, conversion to Catholicism in 1759 in Poland is accompanied by a brutal nihilism, aimed at the abolition of any constraining law upon the exceptional individual that the sectarian is supposed to be. The movement develops between an inclination toward separatism and integration practices that cause the progressive invisibilisation of believers within Polish society. At the start, declared rebels with respect to their community of origin, but also to the Christian world that grudgingly receives them, the faithful evolve toward forms of assimilation that are difficult to detect, especially as the descendants work to erase the traces of their ancestors’ heretical past.
In the case of Hasidism, these forms of separatism over time result in a religious alternative to traditional rabbinism, through the creation of a parallel sociability drawing on other models of life and pious practices. But the global movement remains within Judaism, unlike the messianic heresies that cross over into apostasy. This remarkable longevity of the Hasidic phenomenon, which still exists today, has contributed to the creation of ultra-Orthodoxy and of contemporary forms of religiosity that carry considerable political weight up to the most recent current events (see the articles in this issue of Plurielles).
What unites these three movements is above all the centrality of the charismatic personality and his close bond with the faithful in their religious relationship to God, but also—according to a properly holistic aim—the powerful idea of the elect of God’s mission, both earthly and supra-earthly: the messiah in his relation to tikkun (the “repair” of the divine cosmos shattered by the original fault), and the tsaddik as a “pneumatic” intermediary between sacred influx and human prayers, the intentionality of the faithful (kavanot), and operations of spiritual union with transcendence (yihudim).
The messianic red thread
The personal messiah (identified by a name or an appellation such as that of “son of David”) saving the people of Israel only appears progressively within Judaism, as Mireille Hadas-Lebel shows in her work Une histoire du Messie (A History of the Messiah), which complements—through a philological and strictly historicist approach—Gershom Scholem’s classic, more philosophical and existential work on Jewish Messianism.
In the Bible, the messiah is “the anointed one” (mashiakh in Hebrew), the one who receives the consecrated oil, principally the priest or the king. He is initially endowed with no supernatural or eschatological characteristic, representing rather a personality aiming at righteousness and justice in order to lead the people and turn them away from the idolatrous temptation.
Alongside the historical evolution, powerful apocalyptic currents develop, which postulate the overturning of the order of the world and the passage through destructive trials before the end of history (“the birth pangs of the Messiah”), in connection with political upheavals such as the Maccabean struggle against Hellenistic domination or the decisive period of the Second Temple and of the struggle against Rome, with—in the background—the birth of early Christianity.
The messiah is connected to humanity (“son of man” in Daniel), but endowed with particular characteristics that make him a being apart, beyond the human condition. He takes part in the ultimate combat and precedes the coming of the national redemption, which coincides with the return to Zion, and over time with the resurrection of the dead, the last judgement, and the coming of an era of universal peace in which the knowledge of God and his Torah reigns.
After the failure of the last Jewish revolts (in particular that of Bar Kokhba under the reign of Hadrian), from the second century of the Christian era onward, the rabbis at the origin of the codification of the Talmud prudently evacuate most messianic references. There remain, however, signs of the permanence of a messianic figure, sometimes doubled, in certain texts of the Talmud and especially of the Midrash (a more popular homiletic genre, up to the tenth century). The main motifs that will be found again in collective memory and in mystical or literary texts are then formalised.
Alongside motifs linked to the Prophets and the Psalms, an entire messianic imagery is elaborated in the aggadot (narratives of the Talmud) and in the Midrash: for example the striking image of the messiah among the lepers and the poor at the gates of Rome, that of the suffering messiah inspired by Second Isaiah, and finally the messiah son of Joseph who dies in the messianic combat and announces the coming of the son of David, in more apocalyptic texts.
In Maimonides (1135-1204), the legislative and rationalist approach brings the messianic figure back to a strictly national dimension without any supernatural element.
But the contemporary mystical corpus elaborates other alternatives, broadening the mythological imaginary: for example in the Zohar (thirteenth century), the image of the “bird’s nest,” supposed to be the dwelling of the Messiah before his revelation, or that of the celestial “palaces,” where the messiah waits to be called to accomplish his earthly mission; in parallel, an interiorisation of the messianic dimension develops through the individual and elitist itinerary of the mystic, in the manner of an Abraham Aboulafia, in the thirteenth century, who is persuaded that he incarnates the Messiah. The messianic model is radically transformed and takes on an aristocratic tinge: the mystic is committed to bringing about redemption through his moral perfection, his pious—often ecstatic—practices, even through theurgy and magic (“practical kabbalah”).
The influence of Isaac Luria’s kabbalah, with its mythology of exile, of the breaking of the vessels, of the presence of divine sparks within the kelipot (demonic shells), and of the tikkun as repair at the cosmic, historical, and individual levels, no longer needs to be demonstrated and has been emphasised by researchers, even if—as in Idel—it must be nuanced by detailing its influence through a historiographical examination more attentive to local particularities, messianic idiosyncrasies, and the detail of temporalities.
We thus witness the birth of an utterance centred on the essential human participation in the coming of redemption. The messiah is supposed to arrive either in “a wholly holy generation, or in a wholly guilty generation”: the second part of the alternative is the breach through which the antinomian dimension of the historical messianisms that interest us is inserted: Sabbateanism and Frankism.
Sabbataï Tsevi (1626-1676)
The essential work retracing the entire career of the “mystical messiah” is unquestionably that of Gershom Scholem, Sabbataï Tsevi, le messie mystique. 1626-1676 (Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah). He was born in Smyrna, into a fairly well-off family originally from Greece; his father is a merchant and broker abroad; he and Sabbataï’s two brothers will be early-stage faithful. The young man receives a traditional Jewish education, undertakes an ascetic retreat at the beginning of his mystical career, and is then influenced more by the Zohar than by Isaac Luria’s Kabbalah. He begins by performing what he himself defines as “strange acts” (in fact ritual transgressions, which Scholem interprets as symptoms of his manic-depressive tendencies). He proclaims himself messiah in 1648, but only within a small inner circle, and is then driven out of Smyrna. He wanders in the Ottoman Empire between 1651 and 1654: to Salonika, from which he is again driven out and excommunicated; in 1658 to Constantinople, where he asserts his antinomianism; again to Smyrna where he is initiated into Lurianism, which he leaves for Jerusalem in 1662, passing through Egypt (at the home of Raphael Joseph, a wealthy Jewish intermediary to the Ottoman authorities). He marries Sarah in Cairo in 1664—a refugee from Poland and from the Cossack massacres, of fairly dubious reputation, perhaps a prostitute. The encounter with a young mystic, Nathan of Gaza, in 1665, is decisive and persuades him that he is indeed the messiah announced by the texts; Nathan henceforth becomes his prophet and the ideologue of the movement. His most important argument is that messianicity has no need of miracles and that the messianic transformation rests on the belief of the faithful. Sabbataï proclaims himself messiah once again in May 1665 and the moment is then favourable to a massive expansion of the phenomenon of belief, thereby tightly intertwining the religious and political dimensions.
The news propagates rapidly, fuelled by all sorts of rumours borrowed from a folkloric and legendary stock. He is nevertheless expelled from Jerusalem and subjected to the herem (excommunication) of the rabbis.
His antinomianism is principally attached to the modification of festivals and the transformation of the liturgy; he advocates for instance the consumption—forbidden—of animal fat. His eccentric attitudes push him toward transgressive ceremonial, such as his mystical marriage with the Torah. Rumours swell about the return of the ten lost tribes who are preparing to march on Mecca. Nathan announces redemption for 1666: the final phases of the mystical tikkun lead to far more political claims, such as the certainty of stripping the Sultan of his power without any weapon and through the sole power of song and ecstatic prayer.
Aleppo, Safed, Damascus: all the cities in which he appears experience crowd phenomena and collective ecstasy. He institutes a new calendar, has himself called Amirah (Our Lord), while the halt of all economic activity characterises the behaviour of the faithful, even in distant cities such as Amsterdam or in Germany. He dares to pronounce the Tetragrammaton publicly and claims to be the messiah son of David, since the messiah son of Joseph would already have been killed in the Chmielnicki massacres in Poland in 1648. Letters are sent by his disciples throughout the diaspora and the movement becomes worldwide: Turkey, North Africa, Yemen, London, Amsterdam, Italy, Poland, Germany, Persia, and Kurdistan. All social strata are touched, the role of women is valorised, and their presence within the heterodox liturgy is amplified; religious enthusiasm is generalised through collective prophecies. The Messiah even goes so far as to carry out the distribution of earthly kingdoms to his close followers, as a prelude to the final redemption; but the Ottoman power is determined to put an end to the career of the Jewish troublemaker: when he leaves Smyrna for Constantinople, his ship is boarded and he is imprisoned by the Turkish authorities. Their motive: risks of political unrest, disruption of the economy, Jews who are “raising their heads” and parading in the streets with portraits of the messiah. Confined in a fortress at Gallipoli, he can still hold court there; he sacrifices the paschal lamb (as if the Temple were rebuilt), blesses “the one who permits what is forbidden,” receives emissaries from the entire diaspora. He surrounds himself with royal luxury, abolishes the fasts of Tammuz and the 9th of Av, but is finally denounced as an impostor by Nehemiah Cohen, a Polish kabbalist on an emissarial visit; Sabbataï is then forced into conversion to Islam in order to save his life. His close disciples and his wife convert with him; he becomes an official of the Palace and a Muslim on 15 September 1666.
The news of the apostasy violently shakes the diaspora and unleashes very contrasting reactions: a return to orthodoxy and repentance for most of the henceforth disillusioned faithful, but also persistence in apostasy and self-justification through the creation of a new gnostic mythology, among a minority of believers. We then witness the true creation of the sectarian phenomenon, which will lead to the breaking away of entire groups from Judaism. Nathan makes himself the theoretician of the messiah’s plunge into the abyss in order to free the sparks of holiness from the sphere of evil (illustrated by his conversion to Islam) and preaches the necessary dissimulation of the faithful, as in the situation of the marranos. According to his prophet, the Messiah has taken upon himself the trial of apostasy and imprisonment in order to save the people, or at least the true “believers.” Nathan travels in order to continue spreading the “faith,” to Rome and then to the Balkans. Sabbataï is finally exiled and ends his life in Albania, where he dies in 1676; Nathan in turn dies in 1680, a tireless scribe and theoretician of the Sabbatean faith. The mass conversion of a group that had become sectarian (the Dönmeh) takes place at Salonika in 1683 and marks the beginning of a marrano existence for these Muslims who secretly preserve crypto-Jewish rites and assert the necessity of silence and of the closure of the “inner forum.”
For Scholem, Sabbateanism is truly born as a movement only after the messiah’s apostasy, obliging the believers to a scission between their faith and the judgement of history—a scission that operates in the direction of paradoxical and sectarian belief: “the Sabbatean heresy was born of the refusal opposed by broad strata of the Jewish people to submit to the judgement of history.” And consequently, “they were inclined, especially the most radical among them, to become innovators and rebels” (Le Messianisme juif—The Messianic Idea in Judaism—pp. 150, 151).
The person of the messiah remains blurred in Sabbateanism. Scholem explains this by Sabbataï’s bipolar personality, which alternated between phases of manic excitement in which he occupied the foreground of the scene through his antinomian provocations, and phases of depression in which he tended passively to efface himself and to leave the initiative to Nathan, profound theoretician and model of devotion to the cause.
Faced with the personality of Jacob Frank, by contrast, the historian has no words harsh enough to qualify his total lack of morality, his brutal desire for domination, his audacious acts of manipulation—while not being able to deny, however, a certain fascination for Frank’s profound desire for emancipation, which led him to stake his liberty in the service of the idea of exit from the ghetto. In both cases, the extreme outcome of these questionings of the Law was a tendency to sound out the “mystery of divinity” in the sense of an appropriation by the messiah of the divine essence. Both Sabbataï Tsevi and Jacob Frank came to attribute a divine character to themselves—a major transgression of the Jewish faith, especially in its confrontation with Christianity; this trait will be pushed to the extreme in Frankist theology.
Jacob Frank (1726-1791)
He was born Lejbowicz, in Podolia, in a region where the Sabbatean sect is well established; the name Frank will be given to him in Turkey, where it designates the foreigner, the Christian. His family, originally from Poland and already steeped in heretical culture, settles in Moldavia, a region of borderlands and multicultural contacts. The young man is a merchant in the Ottoman Empire and travels throughout the zone where Sabbateanism was formed: Izmir, Salonika… He is married to Hanna in 1752, whose father is in all likelihood a Sabbatean leader; he is by then already converted to the sectarian rites and begins to surround himself with a circle of faithful. He returns to Poland, where the serious Lanckorona incident occurs in 1756 (marked by ritual orgy practices characteristic of the Sabbateans, but accompanied, in an unprecedented way, by the highly transgressive use of the Christian cross). As a result, the herem (excommunication) of Brody attempts to curb the study of kabbalah in Poland. Frank then founds the community of Iwanie, and begins to justify his search for the political protection necessary for the survival of the sect. He appeals to Bishop Dembowski at Kamieniec, and proposes a public disputation, in 1757, against the rabbis. This theological confrontation, initially, results in the condemnation of the Talmud, which is publicly burned, and in new waves of anti-Jewish persecution. The seductive approach to the Catholic Church continues in 1759, at Lwów, concluding with the decision of baptism and accompanied by the Frankists’ denunciation of supposed ritual crimes among the Jews—a definitive and irrevocable scission with respect to the community. Frank’s baptism in 1759 takes place under the sponsorship of the King of Poland; it is accompanied by the conversion of approximately one to two thousand followers, with changes of name being carried out for the new converts called “neophytes.” Frank requests a status of semi-autonomy for the sect, a territory where the faithful could settle and live among themselves, renouncing any messianic hope of return to Zion. Shortly thereafter, Frank is denounced as having already converted to Islam in Turkey. For thirteen years he is imprisoned at Częstochowa, nonetheless maintaining a court that does not cease to grow and where his heretical doctrine takes formal shape. The latter borrows as much from Christianity (cult of the Virgin, particularly marked in this place of Marian pilgrimage) as from Jewish gnosis, introducing the idea of the Trinity, of the Incarnation, and of a feminine messiah who would be none other than his daughter Eve. With Frankism, we are dealing with extreme forms of syncretism mixed with a radical antinomianism, a nihilism abolishing all the limitations of the law, not only Jewish but human (incest and sexual license are advocated). Liberated by the Russians who conquer the city at the moment of the first partition of Poland (1772), he settles in Brünn in Bohemia, with part of his family already suspect of sectarianism. He attempts to have his claim of territorial autonomism accepted at official meetings with Maria Theresa and Joseph II in Vienna. Denounced as a swindler, in debt, he is finally driven out of Austria, and settles in Germany, in Offenbach, where he advocates a form of offensive militarism, breaking with the quietism adopted by the Jewish world as a whole at that time. Financed by his disciples from Warsaw and Bohemia, he surrounds himself with ostentatious luxury and rumours spread that he practices alchemy in the cellars of his castle.
He dies in 1791; his daughter succeeds him at the head of the sect, but the family, riddled with debts, is increasingly contested by the evolution of the faithful and their detachment from the original faith toward greater integration into the host society; Eve, the “feminine messiah,” dies ruined and under house arrest in 1816.
Frank was the younger contemporary of a generation of Israel Baal Shem Tov. Legend has it that the latter died on account of the wounds to his soul caused by Frankism, by the conversion and the accusations of ritual crime that accompanied it. Nevertheless, the Besht shows a relative leniency in “deploring” Frank’s conversion, which removed him from the Jewish universe—whereas the rabbis obviously preferred this solution, which made of the sect a Christian problem and no longer a Jewish one. The image of the limb definitively severed from, or still bound to, the trunk is taken up in an apologue of the Besht. The latter is moreover credited with a youthful proximity to Sabbatean writings and a spiritual master who could have been part of the forbidden sect. One can see the spiritual movement around the Besht as an attempt to bring an answer to the abyss dug by heretical ideas, particularly represented by numerous mystical conventicles in his region of birth, Podolia. But to the conception of the historical “crisis” defended by Scholem, Moshe Rosman, in his major work on the founder of Hasidism (a notion that he strongly contests), brings more nuanced responses. Far from being a reaction to the historical crisis, in particular to the massacres of the time of the Deluge in 1648, the Hasidic phenomenon would be due rather to sectarian geography and to the persistence of anti-rabbinic contestation in these borderland regions, which saw the multiplication of messianic upheavals.
Israel Ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov, called the Besht (1698-1760)
It is difficult to separate the real biography from the legend (in particular in the apologetic writings, the Shivhei ha-Besht, the “Praises of the Besht,” 1814-1815). The composition of the “praises” arises essentially from a firmly implanted hagiographic tradition. Buber, who is one of its diffusers in the West, has rather adapted than truly translated the Hasidic tales (see Scholem’s article in Le Messianisme juif—The Messianic Idea in Judaism). These tales are characterised by their supernatural approach to the exploits and personality of the master and are modelled on patterns referring to the motifs of the “birth of the hero” and to the biographies of saints.
The rationalist currents of Jewish historiography (Graetz, Dubnov) have been little flattering in tracing the figure of the one who is seen as the “founder” of Hasidism, describing him as an ignorant, simple, uncultivated man, a “savage,” characterised by eccentric conduct, an anticonformism on the edge of deviance with respect to orthodoxy. He is assigned the function of “baal-shem,” of “master of the name,” that is to say a thaumaturge, a sort of “shaman,” often itinerant, who heals thanks to popular “recipes,” herbal remedies, amulets, a ritual borrowed from practical kabbalah. He himself designates himself in a letter as Israel Baal Shem Tov (the “master of the good Name”), of the community of Medzhybizh (today in Ukraine).
The works of Jean Baumgarten and of Moshe Rosman attempt to restore a more concrete and exact vision of the figure in the light of new sources and new approaches, in Le Baal Shem Tov. Mystique, magicien et guérisseur (The Baal Shem Tov. Mystic, Magician, and Healer) by the former, and A Quest for the Historical Baal Shem Tov by the latter.
Both contest the designation of “founder of Hasidism” by insisting on the pre-Hasidic milieu, the existence of brotherhoods, around the kloyz (the oratories alongside the synagogue, for example at Brody)—sorts of mystical conventicles. Podolia is a region where crypto-Sabbateans have long been established; it is a borderland zone, of ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. It is in these marchland regions that the sufferings of populations linked to the Cossack insurrections, to wars, to the multiple accusations of ritual crime are the most acute. But for Rosman, the economic and demographic recovery of the region takes place from the beginning of the eighteenth century. The small town of Międzybóż, where the Besht settles in 1740, is in full development and the latter enjoys the respect of the authorities and certain privileges granted by the kahal, the community council (exemption from the property tax and a service residence, for example).
Israel ben Eliezer, the Besht, was born on 25 August 1698 at Okopy, not far from Tłuste, in the Carpathians on the border of Moldavia and Podolia. His youth is known only through legend. He would have been orphaned very early on, living a life apart from the community and close to nature; his first master would have been the mysterious rabbi Adam Baal Shem, within a cenacle perhaps of Sabbatean inspiration. He practices mystical seclusion in a “house of isolation” or within nature (a cavern, says the legend), acquires medicinal knowledge linked to herbal remedies, practices various manual trades and that of primary teacher in Galicia. Married very young, he marries for a second time Hanna, sister of Abraham Gershon of Kuty who will become his disciple; she is the daughter of a rabbi and a religious judge, from a much higher social milieu. In 1734 he lives at Tłuste in Podolia, in an inn run by his wife, as a solitary mystic (he is designated as a hidden Righteous one, a nistar), whose spiritual guide—appearing to him in the form of ecstatic visions—is Ahijah ha-Shiloni, a prophet from the time of Solomon. He will write later in a letter that he had a messianic revelation during a “soul ascent,” a mystical operation linked to the techniques of ecstasy: it was revealed to him that the messiah would come when his teaching would be dominant and widely disseminated. As a consequence, he reveals himself in 1736, abandoning his status as a nistar and beginning to preach in public. But he never claimed to institute himself as a “guide” of his generation or as the founder of a new religion. According to Rosman and Baumgarten, he is a respected community figure at Międzybóż, designated as Doktor, balsem, healer and thaumaturge for Jews as well as for non-Jews, a “well-known person filling a public role in an important city, maintaining relations with non-Jews” (Rosman). It is therefore the inverse of the traditional imagery of the schismatic mystic or of the romantic rebel.
His first circle is constituted by his brother-in-law before the latter’s emigration to Palestine, by Zeev Wolf Kutzes and David Purkes, hasidim (devout ones) avant la lettre, who at first received him poorly only to become subsequently among his most devoted disciples, as well as by his scribe, Hirsch Tsevi. The faithful begin to flock in, whereas previously it was he who was itinerant and preached in the small towns. He henceforth intervenes in communal affairs, in a context marked by anti-Jewish violence, in questions of disputes over kosher meat. He thus has official contact with the local lords and carries out a genuine work of social harmonisation.
His first disciples are Jacob Joseph of Polnoye (one of the first theoreticians of his doctrine) and the one who will give the sect its expansion, Dov Ber of Mezeritch. Although less present initially in Lithuania, Hasidism is represented there by prestigious rabbis: Pinhas of Korets and Nahman of Horodenka, whose son marries the Besht’s granddaughter—a union from which will be born Nahman of Bratslav, one of the great mystics of Hasidism.
The Besht’s fame grows in ever wider circles, and one can say that the virulent opposition of the opponents (the mitnagdim) dates from after his death, on 21 May 1760: in 1777, the first official condemnation is pronounced by the rabbis at Vilna.
Israel Baal Shem Tov leaves few written documents; his teaching is deliberately oral, even if scribes and close followers commit his lessons to writing, which will be assembled with numerous variants in the “Praises.” He nonetheless institutes a different regime of piety, which may have been influenced at the start by the Sabbatean tradition, but which he “neutralises” so as to make it lose its antinomian and apocalyptic edge.
Messianism henceforth passes through fervour, faith (devekut), and no longer through the apocalyptic tikkun, the violent contestation of the established order. It is interiorised and is inserted more within the individual mystical tradition. Nevertheless, historical evolution transforms Hasidism into a powerful collective phenomenon, whose political weight becomes ever more apparent.
Ecstatic prayer, at moments not necessarily fixed by the ritual order, is an important marker of Hasidic practice. The matrical conception of the doctrine is that of divine immanence, of the interpenetration of the divine and the worldly. This passes through the rejection of excessive mortifications, and the affirmation of pleasure in the accomplishment of divine service (avoda be-gashmiut). The idea that “nothing is empty of God” implies the necessary sanctification of the profane, its elevation to a higher spiritual rank.
The Besht’s personal ascendancy implies a change in the style of religious life, with the legend developing alongside the extension of the faith: spiritual halo, supernatural revelation, gift of ubiquity, travel at a speed incompatible with the criteria of science, gift of reading the future, of seeing afar, of reading physiognomy, visions in dreams, incomparable mystical knowledge making him the equal and the successor of the great biblical figures are then attributed to him by a myriad of tales and apologues.
The movement touches all social strata, the more urban and educated elite as well as the more rural popular strata attracted by the thaumaturge’s powers of healing. In the last part of his life, his personal radiance begins to provoke a geographical and doctrinal scattering. The movement in formation is reinforced by persecutions and attacks, both by rabbis and by the maskilim (partisans of the Enlightenment). Having become a mass movement, it is soon unavoidable in the landscape of Eastern European Judaism. It becomes institutionalised, obtains a certain recognition from the authorities, and inserts itself with force into Jewish society as a whole. A later phase of the movement, called “tsaddikism,” is linked to the formation of courts, implying specific forms of sociabilities (pilgrimages, masculine societies welded together by the cult of the personality of the rebbe, social bonds alternative to traditional hierarchies, religious pietism directed against traditional study). We then witness the intervention of the hasidim in the political sphere: for example at the moment of the Napoleonic Wars, motivating opposing stances by the great masters of the movement (Buber describes these stakes in his historical novel Gog et Magog — Gog and Magog). Sometimes fierce quarrels take place between the different schools, over doctrinal questions or simply matters of influence. The new model of a power different from that of the traditional hierarchies (the scholars of the Talmud, the rabbinic caste, the notables of the shtetl) is established. Little by little, the political influence of the Hasidic religious leaders characterises the overall functioning and gives birth to what is today designated as ultra-Orthodoxy.
Drawing the threads
While it did not succeed in imposing itself as a new faith or in provoking a true religious schism, Sabbateanism in the broad sense has left profound traces in Jewish society, well beyond the creation of syncretist tendencies between cults and the perpetuation of strange and no doubt transgressive rites in small sectarian groups in Greece, Turkey, the Balkans, and even in Western Europe… Born in the same borderland regions, Frankism and Hasidism, a century later, take up anew the questionings formulated in the time of Sabbataï Tsevi: a diffuse struggle against rabbinic orthodoxy, the prestige of study, the carcan of the Torah that stifles the individual, but also more globally a pneumatic and exalted activism against the lack of socio-economic outlets for the Jewish minority, deprived of any true political agency despite the framework of religious semi-autonomy that characterises—at least in Poland—the communal functioning. While the premises of the demands are tinged with a religious legendary characteristic of traditional messianic expectation, the after-effects of the Sabbatean effervescence unfold upon the political stage. With the Frankist conversion, tactics of conquest of power and of minority endurance are set in place, partly transforming the landscape of assimilation in Poland, Bohemia, Moravia—from which modernity will inherit a few complex and fascinating personages on more than one count: one thinks of Junius Frey, formerly Moses Dobruzka or Thomas von Schönfeld, this member of the extended family of Frank in Brünn, who should have succeeded him at the head of the sect, but who died on the revolutionary scaffold alongside Danton. In Poland, the great Romantic poet Mickiewicz is attributed a Frankist ancestry.
The Polish novelist and Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk has devoted ten years of intense literary work to the Frankist movement and to the figure—at once repulsive and fascinating—of Frank, in her magnificent novel Les Livres de Jakob ou Le grand voyage à travers sept frontières, cinq langues, trois grandes religions et d’autres moindres (The Books of Jacob, or A Great Journey Across Seven Borders, Five Languages, Three Great Religions, and Smaller Ones). Contrary to the very negative Jewish vision of the figure—in an Aaron Zeitlin for example, in his play Jacob Frank written in Yiddish in 1926-27—the writer, through her teeming imagination and her rigorous erudition, restores the complex world that gives birth to an atypical figure such as that of Frank; but one also understands that the model pre-exists in a certain bubbling concretion of Jewish life, innervated with popular mysticism and deprived of political representativity, in a context of violent conflicts both historical and social.
As for Hasidism, it occupies an important place in Jewish literature, of which the scale of this article does not allow us to give an account. But it should be remembered that modern Yiddish literature itself claims a double ancestry: the anti-Hasidic satires of the haskala, which never stop ridiculing the “devout,” members of the “infamous” sect, accused of all evils and of the retrograde “obscurantism” of Jewish society; but also the tales of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the privileged vehicle of his teaching, dispensed orally in Yiddish and restored in Hebrew by another Nathan—Nathan Sternharz, his devoted scribe.
Models of cryptic and unresolved narrativity, whose influence has not ceased to radiate, fertilising the captivating symbolism of a Peretz, of an Agnon, of a Der Nister, and even—it has been said—of a Kafka. The negative theology so characteristic of modernity might perhaps be only one of the ultimate avatars of this messianism on the confines between religion and politics, ferreting out intra-worldly illusions and colliding with nothingness, the touchstone of the mystical quest, whose nihilistic fallout can still be felt today.