In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Reviewed by:
  • The Sabbatean Prophets
  • J. H. Chajes
Matt Goldish . The Sabbatean Prophets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Pp. xii + 221.

Matt Goldish, an early modernist whose first book explored Judaism in the theology of Sir Isaac Newton, makes the case in this new work for an embedded seventeenth-century reading of Sabbateanism. In the spirit of one of his mentors, Richard H. Popkin (to whom the The Sabbatean Prophets is dedicated), Goldish places Sabbateanism squarely in the context of contemporary Christian millennial phenomena, in all its remarkably eclectic varieties. Catholics and Protestants, scholars and commoners, clerics and scientists all shared a sense of millennial immanence and broadcast this conviction with increasing frequency through the medium of prophecy. Goldish also adduces parallels in the Ottoman-Islamic world, arguing that the continuity between European and Ottoman cultures facilitated the spread of Sabbateanism (p. 36).

While scholars of Jewish mysticism have provided us with profound explorations of Sabbatean thought, these studies, Goldish asserts, have not settled the basic historical conundrum: how to explain the rapid spread of the movement in 1665-66. Goldish's answer is that the "spectacle of prophecy rather than any mystical theology was clearly the main catalyst" to the success of the movement (p. 7). The overall seventeenth-century environment is credited with disposing people to accept the authority of such prophecy. This general environment shared by Christians, Moslems, and Jews notwithstanding, Goldish regards the Jewish "vulnerability" to Sabbateanism as a consequence of a "serious change in the authority structure of Jewish communities" in this period (p. 51). The antinomian features of Sabbateanism, he maintains, were already latent in earlier Kabbalah (p. 54), and with the ascent of the kabbalistic leader in place of the soberly learned rabbi, the soil was readied for the growth of this new movement: "Once the kabbalists displaced legal reasoning, philosophy, and homiletics with texts and ideas that came through revelation, the possibility of transgressing Torah laws by appeal to the mystical supersession of tradition became more plausible" (p. 54). Humanism and the converso influx are also credited with making the Jewish world "susceptible to the radical ideas and prophecies of the Sabbateans" (p. 145). Indeed, the leading Sabbateans, from Sabbatai himself to Nathan of Gaza and Abraham Miguel Cardoso, "were clearly in the throes of a Jewish version of the skeptical crisis in religion" (p. 145). [End Page 453]

Despite Goldish's attention to the centrality of prophecy in the seventeenth-century environment, he attaches great significance to the first prophecy of Nathan from early 1665 in particular, as well as to a subsequent maggid-ic possession of Nathan on Shavuot of that year. Because of the similarities between reports of subsequent Sabbatean possession outbreaks and these first "formative" episodes, Goldish argues that the latter served as their inspiration. Indeed, as Jews were well acquainted with Lurianic hagiography by this period, Goldish believes that the reports of Nathan's possession fell on receptive ears: "Wherever Jews heard of Nathan's prophetic experiences, therefore, they understood the meaning clearly: the prophetic messianism of the great kabbalists had returned" (p. 71; emphasis in the original).

In what would appear to be something of a retreat from the larger thesis of the grounding of Sabbatean prophecy in a broader cultural context brewing with millennial prophetic enthusiasm, Goldish develops a theory of mimesis to account for the rapid spread of Sabbatean prophecy. On the basis of common elements—for example, the vision of a pillar of fire—Goldish suggests that statements, visions, and behaviors were diffused in a rapid "trickle-down" (my term) from the top. Thus a story "fashioned by the upper echelon of believers" was immediately "imitated by common people"; "the same vision now appears among the common people as theme and variations" (p. 104). Because of the imitative nature of these prophetic-possession outbreaks, Goldish concludes that they must not be considered spontaneous outbreaks but "a mass mimesis" (p. 110). Of course, it is difficult to know when the imitation ends, if ever; Nathan's own imitated possession is said to be "itself mimetic—Nathan mimed the possession of R. Joseph Karo" (p. 110). Karo, in turn, imitated Spanish and "ultimately . . . Sufi...

pdf

Share