Still Running Off at the Keyboard

SABBATIANISM TO HASIDISM

Joseph Weiss, in the book Studies in East European Jewish Mysticism, Oxford University Press, 1985, makes a case for Hasidism being a development of Sabbatianism. He writes:

In an attempt at a historical understanding of the origins of Hasidism, research has had recourse to an accusation that was repeated again and again in anti-Hasidic polemics. This asserted that the followers of the new movement were in some undefined way akin to the Sabbatians, the heretical Jewish sectarians of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. This last major Jewish heresy had become, after a short period of spectacular success, a kind of religious underground movement and produced the most intricate theological doctrines in order to justify its continued existence.

Sabbatianism, it will be remembered, was a messianic movement that took its name from Shabbethai Sevi, who was proclaimed Messiah by his followers, not without some ready cooperation on his own part. After a sudden eclipse of the general excitement following the apostasy of the Messiah, isolated and often rival groups of Sabbatian heretics continued to exist for some 150 years. There remained many a secret cell dispersed throughout Europe.

Scholarly examination of the Hasidic movement's sources of inspiration has shown that the accusations made by anti-Hasidic polemists were not altogether without foundation. It has been convincingly argued that indeed there existed significant contacts between the nascent Hasidic movement and the declining Sabbatian heresy. Personal lines of contact between them as well as ideological affinities, the latter possibly unnoticed by the Hasidim themselves, have recently been discovered. There were some Sabbatian sympathies on the part of the first Hasidic leaders. It has been established that secretly copied manuscripts of Sabbatian theology, though never printed, remained in the possession of Hasidic circles for many generations right up to World War II.

Certain aspects of early hasidic teaching appear to have been derived from Sabbatian tenets. It has been suggested that the Hasidic doctrine of the descensus of the Saddik could well be a mitigated formulation of the Sabbatian thesis of the descent of the Messiahs into the "realm of impurity." Similarly, one of the central admonitions might have been modeled on the same Sabbatian doctrine. Naturally in both cases the originally Sabbatian ideas underwent a solid process of re-Judaization, since the positive role of actual sin central in Sabbatian theology was replaced in Hasidism by the positive role of sinful fantasy. All this gave an unexpectedly wide diffusion to religious ideas of a Sabbatian structure, though in a much-mitigated and hence more acceptable form. Nevertheless, the unconventional tone of some Hasidic teaching on the service of God in "wayward thoughts," i.e., in the fantasies of sin, is unmistakable, and was noticed as such by contemporary critics of the Hasidic camp. (p. 10-11)

A strain developed in the Jewish community between appointed rabbis and freelance preachers that consisted of professional rivalry and social and economic differences. The rabbi was schooled. The Hasidic preacher was a mystic. Weiss explains:

The awareness in early Hasidism of a tension between the two types of leadership is evident here and there in the collection of legends. The fame of Israel Baalshem [who founded the Hasidic movement] aroused the interest of the rabbis, who could not understand how...one "unlearned in the Torah," could possess Divine Spirit. Israel Baalshem was invited to the Great Synod of the four Eastern European countries to account for his activities. There he was reproached as follows: "By your whole behaviour one would think that the Holy Spirit is upon you, and yet there is the report that you are an ignoramus." (p. 14-15)

He was then questioned on a point of the law, and gave a response that evaded the question according to Weiss.

Gershom Scholem indicates that Zevi exhibited some characteristics of Hasidism 100 years before it became a full-fledged movement.

At the same time his behavior exhibited some of the traits usually associated with that of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbis: he would present his believers with a scarf, a morsel of food, or some other object which, by his very touch, had become a kind of holy relic. We know that Sabbatai continued this practice long after his apostasy, for example, when called to cure a sick believer in Adrianople. The narrative shows that the "Hasidic" style so often said to be specifically characteristic of Russian and Polish Jewry was perfectly possible a hundred years earlier in a completely different environment. (Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah 1626-1676, Princeton University Press, p. 626)

(Note to Joseph and to Mark if he checks in here--I have not read either book in its entirety.)