by Paul Johnson
Much of the superstition in the ghetto was very old. Though the Bible itself was remarkably free, on the whole, of angel-devil material, it began to penetrate Judaism during the early rabbinic period and acquired official status in the aggadah. The miraculous tales told about Luria had circulated about the early sages too. Hillel, like Luria, could understand what the birds were saying to each other—and all the animals, and even the trees and clouds. The sages dealt in moral fables of all kinds. It was said that Hillel’s pupil, Johanan ben Zakkai, ‘knew the parables of laundrymen and fox fables’. The Rabbi Meir was reckoned to have known 300 fox fables. It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, that despite the Bible’s condemnation of sorcery (e.g. ‘Thou shalt not tolerate a sorceress’—Exodus 22:18), and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism, some relics of ancient black and white magic lingered on in the texts and were given a kind of inferred sanction. Thus the bells worn on the robes of the high-priest were designed to combat devils. So, it could be argued, were phylacteries, one of the most honoured devices of responsible Jewish piety. There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plague-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, Satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness.56 So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period 150 BC to 300 AD had some precedents. Needless to say, Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Isaac of Acre they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious. Some were evil or unclean spirits, called ru’ah tezazit in the Talmud. They entered an individual, possessed him, spoke through the mouth. Kabbalistic literature written by Luria’s disciples was full of stories about these disgusting creatures, which in the ghettos of Ashkenazi Jewry, especially in Poland, came to be known as dybbuks. The literature also taught how they could be exorcised by a learned, holy man, or ba’al shem, who redeemed the possessed soul by using one of Luria’s ‘sparks’. There were also poltergeist-devils, called kesilim or lezim, who threw things and, for instance, hit people who left holy books open. There were she-devils also, in addition to Lilith, one of them being the Queen of Sheba. Ghetto Jews believed it was dangerous to drink water at the change of the seasons because that was when devil-women dropped evil menstrual blood in wells and streams.
To combat these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had Biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combinations of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abracadabra; another was shabriri, after the devil of blindness.57 Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as ‘Practical Kabbalah’. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating ‘the unholy names’. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis. The fallen angels Azael and Aza taught it to sorcerers who journeyed to the Mountains of Darkness to study. Virtuous kabbalists had a right to acquire such arts but only for theoretical purposes. In practice, harmful spells were also cast in the ghetto.
The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba’al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formula. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms.58 However, talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any man of outstanding sanctity and kabbalistic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God’s secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok—thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales.
Devils, angels, golems and other mysterious figures constituted the basic population of ghetto folklore, leading to countless superstitious practices. They gave life in the ghetto an extraordinary density, which was at one and the same time frightening and comforting, and always vivid, rich, exciting. Some of the customs current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surfaced in a work published in London in 1738 called The Book of Religion, Ceremonies and Prayers of the Jews, supposedly by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur, actually written by an apostate, Abraham Mears. It related that evil spirits were to be found in whirls of dust and rubbish-heaps. Bad ghosts could harm a person in the dark but only if he was by himself. If two were present, the ghost could appear but do no harm; if three, it could do nothing. A torch had the same effect. Witches could do harm if they found discarded pottery or eggshells which had not been pounded into bits; or green vegetable tops tied together in a bunch. Much of the lore concerned funerals and weddings. Thus, if you wished to ask forgiveness of a dead man you had wronged, you stood at the foot of the coffin and took the man’s big toe in your hand while praying for his pardon; if the nose bled violently, pardon was refused. To break a glass at a wedding-feast was to ward off bad luck. ‘The Bachelors’, wrote the author, ‘generally strive to carry off a bit of the broken pipkin, believing it likely to promote their being married soon after.’ Superstition blended imperceptibly into folk-medicine:
There are some women among them that pretend to cure all Distempers, which they believe to proceed from an evil Eye, by the Sympathy of Fumigation: some part of the Garment worn by the Patient is sent to the said Doctoress, which she holds over some certain smoking stuff of her own Composure, muttering some few words over the Garment, under the Operation, and that Garment being return’d in a few minutes to the Patient, to wear immediately, never fails of giving Relief, unless their Ailment has been of too long Standing before the old Woman smoak’d them. The usual Price for smoaking of a Child’s Cap, is a shilling. A woman’s Petticoat, two shillings. A Man’s Pair of Breeches, half a crown. NB, the Spanish Jews pay more because the Smoakers are German.59
Ghetto folklore centred around devils and sin, especially the first sin, the transmigration of souls and, not least, the Messiah. Belief in the Messiah was the summation and climax of all the ghetto’s trust in the supernatural because it had the highest sanction of orthodox Jewish religion. The most learned and rational-minded rabbi and the worldliest merchant trusted in the Messiah’s coming as fervently as the semi-literate wife of a humble milkman. The Messiah was linked to tales of the Lost Tribes since it was widely assumed that, in order to achieve the restoration of a godly kingdom on earth, the Messiah would summon the tribes from their remote exile and they would march, a mighty army, to place him on King David’s throne. It was not a ghetto story-teller but the great Mishnah commentator Obadiah ben Abraham Yare of Bertinoro who described (1489), on the authority of ‘reliable Moslem merchants’, how a ‘fifty-day journey through the desert’ brought one to ‘the great Sambatyon River’. There ‘the children of Israel live like a thread…saintly and pure like angels: there are no sinners among them. On the outer side of the Sambatyon River there are Children of Israel as numerous as the sands of the seashore, kings and lords, but they are not as saintly or pure as those living on the inner side of th
e river.’60 These teeming millions would form the legions of the Messiah’s conquering host.
History shows repeatedly that what helps to spread a religious idea fastest is a clear and practical description of the mechanics of salvation. That is precisely what Lurianic kabbalah provided: a description of how ordinary Jews, by their prayers and piety, could precipitate the Messianic Age. It was among the generation born in the 1630s that Luria’s ideas spread most widely and rapidly, in both sophisticated and vulgar form. The great historian Gershom Scholem, who spent his life studying the impact of kabbalistic mysticism on Jewish society, stressed the universality of the belief among Jewish communities, around the mid-seventeenth century, that the world was on the brink of great events.61 The series of catastrophes which overtook Ashkenazi Jewry in eastern Europe from 1648 onwards, culminating in the Swedish War of the late 1650s, constituted a potent factor in raising messianic hopes. The greater the distress, the more urgently was deliverance awaited. In the 1650s and 1660s, there were many thousands of refugees to be accommodated in Jewish communities everywhere, and fund-raising activities for their support helped to generate the ferment of expectation. But messianic hopes, thanks to Lurianic doctrine, were high even in remote communities, like Morocco, where little was known of the Polish disasters. The wave of excitement mounted especially in Salonika and the Balkans, in Constantinople and throughout Turkey, in Palestine and Egypt; but it was felt too in hard-bitten trading centres like Leghorn, Amsterdam and Hamburg. It swept along rich and poor, learned and ignorant, communities which were in danger and those which felt themselves safe. By the 1660s, the feeling that the Lurianic process was virtually complete, and the Messiah waiting in the wings, united hundreds of Jewish communities scattered over two continents. On this point popular superstition and learned mysticism were at one.
On 31 May 1665, as if on cue, the Messiah appeared and was proclaimed as such in Gaza. He was called Shabbetai Zevi (1626-76). But the man behind his appearance, the master-mind, chief theorist and impresario of the whole phenomenon, was a local resident, one Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi, known as Nathan of Gaza (c. 1643-80). This young man was learned, brilliant, inventive and resourceful. He had been born in Jerusalem, son of a respected rabbinical scholar and kabbalist; had married the daughter of a wealthy Gaza merchant and gone to live there; and in 1664 he had taken up the intensive study of Lurianic kabbalah. He quickly mastered Lurianic techniques of meditation and ecstasy-inducement. By early 1665 he was experiencing prolonged visions. But it is significant that he was already modifying Lurianic concepts to suit the particular projection of the Messiah he was conceiving in his mind. Nathan was an outstanding example of a highly imaginative and dangerous Jewish archetype which was to become of world importance when the Jewish intellect became secularized. He could construct a system of explanations and predictions of phenomena which was both highly plausible and at the same time sufficiently imprecise and flexible to accommodate new—and often highly inconvenient—events when they occurred. And he had the gift of presenting his protean-type theory, with its built-in capacity to absorb phenomena by a process of osmosis, with tremendous conviction and aplomb. Marx and Freud were to exploit a similar capacity.
While still in Jerusalem, Nathan had come across Shabbetai Zevi, who was about eighteen years his senior, and a well-known eccentric. He had paid Zevi little attention. After he had absorbed Lurianic kabbalah, however, and developed—at any rate to his own satisfaction—visionary and prophetic powers, Nathan recalled the Zevi case and drew him into his system. Zevi was in every way Nathan’s inferior: less learned, less intelligent, less inventive; but he had the necessary ingredient for a Messiah-subject: self-absorption. He was born in Smyrna, now an expanding trading-centre, where his father was an agent for Dutch and English firms. Both his brothers became successful merchants. He was bookish, went through a rabbinic training, graduated at eighteen, and then studied the kabbalah. He had the characteristics of what would later be called a manic-depressive. Periods of exaltation and hyperactivity were abruptly succeeded by spasms of intense gloom. These are common enough among mystics of all religions, and are seen as God’s work—God ‘illuminates’, then ‘hides His face’. Thus the abrupt transformations do not necessarily detract from the subject’s reputation for sanctity. Unfortunately for Zevi, during his manic phases he had a tendency to break the law and blaspheme. He pronounced the forbidden name of God. He conflated three feasts and celebrated them simultaneously. He went through a mystic marriage with the Torah under a wedding canopy. The 1648 massacres inspired him to proclaim himself the Messiah. Like many mystics, he wanted to do and legitimize forbidden things. Thus he invoked a benediction to ‘Him who allows the forbidden’. During the 1650s he was expelled in turn from Smyrna, Salonika and Constantinople. At times his state of mind was placid and normal, and he even sought treatment for what he saw were diabolical fantasies. But then the bad urges would return. He had been married and divorced twice, neither union being consummated. In 1664, while in a manic state in Cairo, he contracted a third marriage with a girl called Sarah, a refugee from the massacres, whose reputation was dubious. But there was prophetic precedent for this too: had not Hosea married a whore? In the following winter, however, he again decided to seek help in exorcising his demons. Having heard that a young kabbalist called Nathan was experiencing remarkable visions, he went there in the spring of 1665.
By the time the two men came together, in April, Nathan had already experienced his vision in which the Messiah-claimant he remembered from Jerusalem figured prominently. So when Zevi actually turned up in his house, seeking help, Nathan judged the event providential. Far from exorcising Zevi’s demons, Nathan concentrated his formidable powers of argument and invention on persuading Zevi that his messianic claims were authentic and must be pursued. Then and thereafter Nathan proved extraordinarily adept at fitting Zevi’s biography and characteristics into the patterns of canonical and apocryphal texts, and Lurianic theory—especially as amended by himself. So he hailed Zevi as the Messiah, and Zevi, convinced again, promptly went into another manic phase. With the zealous Nathan at his side, he made his claim public, and this time it was accepted. He was soon riding around Gaza on horseback, in kingly state, and appointing ambassadors to summon all the tribes of Israel.
The difference between Zevi and previous, sixteenth-century Messiahs was that his candidature was conceived and presented not only against a background of Orthodox learning, which both he and his impresario possessed, but also in specific terms of Lurianic science with which the whole of Jewry was now familiar. The time was right; the intellectual mood was right. Nathan the Prophet, the ‘holy lamp’, burned with conviction and radiated exact knowledge. Zevi the Messiah dispensed charm and regal condescension. The combination worked brilliantly in Gaza, where the rabbis joined in the acclamation. It was less successful in Jerusalem, where many rabbis (including Nathan’s old teacher) rejected the claims and eventually had the new messiah expelled. But the Jerusalem authorities were none the less anxious to hedge their bets. They did not send out letters to Jewish communities warning them about an imposture. There and elsewhere sceptical rabbis usually judged it best to hold their peace. The majority of rabbis everywhere were taken in. Later, after the bubble had burst, many insisted they had opposed Zevi’s pretensions. But, as Scholem has shown, the documents tell a different story.
Hence in 1665 and for most of 1666 there was no authoritative pronouncement against the new Messiah. The skilfully worded letters announcing the events, which Nathan wrote or drafted, and which were dispatched to Jewish communities over the world, went unanswered. Of course, most Jews expected the coming of the Messiah to be attended by miracles. But there was good authority—Maimonides no less—to say that this would not happen. Moreover, Nathan anticipated an absence of miracles by cleverly adapting Lurianic theory. Since, he argued, the Messiah had been summoned by Jewish prayers and piety, it followed logically that pure, trusting fait
h was alone requisite to sustain his mission. So neither he nor his prophet was required to perform miracles. In fact Nathan’s precaution was unnecessary. Miracles were duly performed—though always somewhere else. This followed spontaneously from the Jewish custom of spreading news of disaster and triumph in long, excited letters, often based on rumours. Thus Constantinople wrote to Leghorn recounting wonders occurring in Cairo. News of miracles in Salonika was passed from Rome to Hamburg, and then on to Poland. The first announcement most western Jews received did not concern Zevi at all but the Ten Lost Tribes, who were variously said to be assembling in Persia or the Sahara, and marching on Mecca—or Constantinople.
In September 1665 Nathan sent out a long letter outlining the Messiah’s programme. His work, said Nathan, had now superseded the Lurianic system and opened a new phase in history. He had the power to justify all sinners himself. First he would take the crown of Turkey, and make the sultan his servant. Next he would go to the River Sambatyon to gather the tribes and marry Rebecca, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Moses, who had come back to life again. During his absence the Turks might rebel and cause tribulations for Jews. Hence it was necessary for all Jews to do penance immediately. Meanwhile Zevi himself had begun a triumphal northwards progress, first to Aleppo, then to Smyrna and on to Constantinople, and it was now that mass hysteria began to break out. Zevi increased it by reverting to his old manic habits. He ‘pronounced the Ineffable Name, are [forbidden] fats and did other things against the Lord and his Law, even pressing others to do likewise’, according to a contemporary account.62 If a rabbi protested, the vast crowd which now accompanied Zevi everywhere was liable to attack the critic’s house. In Smyrna, Zevi himself took an axe to the door of the Sephardi synagogue, which refused to recognize him, and forced his way in. Once inside, he denounced the unbelieving rabbis as unclean animals, took a holy scroll into his arms and sang a Spanish love-song, announced the date of the Redemption for 18 June 1666, proclaimed the imminent deposition of the Turkish sultan, and distributed the kingdoms of the world among his immediate followers. When one of the critical rabbis present asked him for proofs, Zevi excommunicated him on the spot, and led the mob in pronouncing the forbidden name as proof of their faith in him. He then ‘liberated’ Jewish womenfolk by freeing them from the curse of Eva, and dispatched messengers to Constantinople to prepare for his arrival, leaving for the city by boat on 30 December 1665.