The Grantville Gazette Volumn VI by Eric Flint
Kaballah
The greatest controversies sweeping through the Jewish world of 1632 centered on the Kaballah. The term "Kaballah" refers to the received mystical tradition that kabalists insist can be traced back to Moses. Skeptics trace large elements of this tradition to Moses de Leon who lived and wrote in thirteenth-century Spain. Whether Moses de Leon was inventing, creating a new synthesis or transmitting received wisdom, his book, the Zohar, played a central role in the development of Kaballah.
Traditional Judaism imposes strict limits on who may delve into the esoteric world of mysticism. A man was not to study mysticism or metaphysics until he reached age forty, until he was married, and until he had mastered Talmud. In addition, these subjects were never to be studied alone, but were to be studied under the direction of a wise teacher. These restrictions are found in the Talmud.
Rabbi Isaac ben Shlomo Luria Ashkenazi, the son of German Jews living in Jerusalem, changed much of this in the mid sixteenth century. In his early twenties, he studied the Zohar on his own while living in Egypt. While there, he had visions of meetings with the prophet Elijah. These meetings led him to move to Safed, in the Galilee, where he joined the community of Sephardic kabalists there.
Luria became a leader of this community and was hailed as the Ari or the Lion. The Lurianic Kaballah he taught spread like wildfire after his death in 1570 and its publication by Luria's student Chiam Vital. In short, the Lurianic Kaballah teaches an expanded version of the creation story, it gives reasons for prayer and piety, and it teaches that the coming of the Messiah is imminent.
Under Luria, the kabalists of Safed created new liturgy, weaving kabalistic elements into the service, notably the Kabalat Shabbat element of the Friday evening service, which receives the Sabbath with psalms and the beautiful hymn Lecha Dodi that uses imagery from the Song of Songs, likening the arrival of the Sabbath to the arrival of a bride at the wedding.
The kabalistic creation story begins before creation, when God was initially all that there was, indivisible, unchanging and free of all properties. Neither space nor time existed in this state, known as the Ayn Sof, meaning without end. In order to allow creation, God underwent a process of withdrawal, creating the void in which creation could occur, walled off from the divine light so that we in the created universe can have free will.
Kabalists hold that the sephiros were created to channel or contain the divine energy. The Zohar identified ten sephiros, and kabalistic imagery frequently arranges these into a pattern as the tree of life. The word sephiros, pronounced sephirot in Sephardic, has been translated as numbers, from Hebrew, or explained as a borrowing from the Greek for spheres.
The kabalistic creation story continues that the sephiros were smashed during God's first attempt at creation, scattering divine sparks or shards throughout the universe. The creation story in the book of Genesis must therefore describe God's second attempt. The kabalists go on to explain that the reason God created humanity was to create agents to aid in the repair of a fallen world, bringing about the original intent of creation by finding and liberating the divine sparks. We do this by performing the mitzvot or obeying God's commandments.
Kabalistic mysticism frequently focused on contemplation of the Ayn Sof, but unlike many streams of mystical thought, the emphasis was on action in this world, reaching up to bring the divine down instead of seeking to escape this world into the divine. Kabalists taught that, when a person perfors a mitzvah, a divine spark is released, and that the release is more effective if the person performs that mitzvah knowingly and in the right state of mind.
From this teaching, kabalists concluded that we personally can play a role in bringing the Messiah, redeeming the world and bringing about the final judgement. This new teaching found fertile soil in the world of European Judaism in the early seventeenth century. It is reasonable to describe the spread of Kaballah as a wave of pietist religious revival through a people who felt helpless in the face of an obviously broken world. By midcentury, kabalistic thought had become normative throughout the european Jewish world.
Resistance to the acceptance of the Lurianic Kaballah was based on some fairly obvious grounds. Opponents held that kabalists were violating Talmudic restrictions on the study of the esoteric and that kabalists were telling a creation story that could not be found in Torah or Talmud. Perhaps the most important objection, though, is that the mystical explanation of the reason for performing the mitzvos was wrong on at least three counts.
The first problem opponents would raise is that Judaism had long held that one should perform God's commandments for their own sake, not in order to influence God. Second, the idea that one could force God's hand by sufficient piety struck some as sacreligious. Finally, the idea that human piety could force the coming of the Messiah has a dark side, allowing believers to hold the community responsible if the Messiah does not come. Indeed, this led some kabalists, when they became community leaders, to take an extremely rigid attitude toward any lapses in personal piety within their communities.
Opponents would say that the downside of the Lurianic Kaballah was realized when Rabbi Nathan of Gaza proclaimed Shabbatai Zvi of Smyrna to be the Messiah, the fulfillment of the Messianic hopes of the kabalists. This story spread through Europe starting in 1665, and many communities were deeply divided between believers in Shabbati and scoffers. When Shabati Zvi confronted the Sultan and was forced to convert to Islam, the news embarrassed huge numbers of Jews throughout Europe and shattered the faith of many.
The Sephardic World
Sephardic Jews originally come from Sepharad, the Jewish name for Spain, or Al-Andalus, as it was known to Muslims of the time. During the four centuries before the Christian Reconquista, this community flourished as the intellectual center of the Jewish world, producing great poets such as Solomon Ibn Gabriol; renaissance men such as Judah Halevi, known both for his poetry and his theology, and Abraham ibn Ezra, physician, theologian and astronomer; Rambam—Maimonides—known for his philosophical and medical works as well as his theology; Ramban, also known as Nachmanides, renowned both as a physician and theologian; and Isaac Abravanel, who was court Jew to Alfonso V of Portugal and to Ferdinand and Isabella of Aragaon and Castile, as well as a theologian of note.
Prior the expulsion of 1492, Jewish life in Spain and Portugal varied from idyllic to terrible, with enough of the former to keep alive the dream of coexistence, but enough of the latter to keep this dream in doubt.
The Almohad, or Berber, dynasty of the twelfth century forced many Jews and Christians to chose between flight, conversion to Islam or death; at around the same time in Christian Spain, Jews were forbidden to hold public office, and royal debts to Jews were cancelled. Christians instigated pogroms in 1391 that led to widespread forced conversions and massacres of Jews throughout Christian Spain. The Spanish inquisition, begun in 1478, began to systematically hunt down Marannos, or secret Jews, who had publicly converted to Christianity to avoid persecution, and in 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella signed their order of expulsion.
After their expulsion from Spain, huge numbers of Jews fled to Portugal, where their refuge lasted just long enough to separate them from what money they had managed to bring out of Spain. Written accounts by refugees in this period suggest that the death rate among refugees was extremely high, with shiploads of Jews turned away from port after port as they sought food and shelter.
Large refugee communities made it to the Ottoman empire, settling from Ottoman Palestine to the Balkans. Salonika became the new commercial center of Jewish life, and Tzefat (Safed) in the Galilee became a new spiritual center. Sephardic refugees also came to dominate many of the old Jewish communities of northern Africa, notably those of Morocco and Algeria.
Converseros or Marannos were followed by the inquisition wherever they went within the Catholic world. Whatever degree of personal piety they preserved, they were forced to behave in public as more Christian than the Christians. Only in Protestant or Islamic lands could
With the Protestant Reformation and the Dutch rebellion, Marannos from Portugal found refuge in Amsterdam starting in 1593. It was a very rocky start; the first Jewish settlers were captured by English pirates before they finally made it to their destination. The first communal worship service in Amsterdam was held in 1595 at the home of the Moroccan ambassador, Don Samuel Palache. In the years that followed, a small Ashkenazic community also settled in Amsterdam, but these communities had little to do with each other.
The Beit Yaakov (house of Jacob) synagogue was founded in 1596 in rented space, and in 1608, a second synagogue was founded, Nevi Shalom (prophet of peace). The latter was not a peaceful synagogue; it was torn by internal dissent under Rabbi Isaac Uzziel of Fez; in 1622, Uzziel's student, Menasseh ben Israel succeeded him. The controversy under Rabbi Uzziel led to the founding of the Beit Yisrael (House of Israel) synagogue in 1618 by Abraham Farrar, a man known as a freethinker. Beit Yisrael was headed by another student of Isaac Uzziel, Rabbi Isaac Aboab de Fonseca from about 1626 to 1638. Rabbi Uzziel and his students were all kabalists.
Jewish worship in Amsterdam was not formally legalized until 1615, when laws were passed allowing Jewish worship and forbidding Jews to speak publicly or publish anything against the Christian religion or to intermarry with Christians. From 1615 to 1638, the Jews of Amsterdam were governed by a community council that included representatives of all three synagogues. The three congregations merged in 1638, with the Beit Yisrael building converted to a school while Nevi Shalom, with city approval, became the Sephardic synagogue.
Menasseh ben Israel printed the first Hebrew book in Amsterdam in 1627, and the Amsterdam printers set new standards for the quality of their Hebrew typography, eclipsing the printers of Venice, who had set the standard up to this time.
In the 1580's, Sephardic Jews began to settle in Hamburg, where they were welcome and treated as if they were Christians. Among them were a spice merchant, a trader with Brazil and a sugar importer. In 1603, the community was first recognized as Jewish, with an immediate demand for their expulsion. This demand was repeated by the clergy in the following decades. By 1612, the community had grown to 125, and the Senate of Hamburg issued a residence permit good for a period of five years for a cost of 1000 Marks, simultaneously forbidding the practice of Judaism. The fee was converted to an annual tax, and restrictions against the practice of Judaism began to lift gradually. In 1611, the Jewish community was allowed to appoint a rabbi; in 1623, kosher slaughter was permitted, and in 1628, they were granted a prayer hall. Jews were not permitted to live in the inner city, but were allowed to live freely in the developed area outside that. There were only a few Ashkenazi Jews, with that community growing to fifteen families between 1600 and 1649 when the Ashkenazi Jews were expelled. This is one of the rare cases where the Christian government authorities made distinctions between the Sephardic and Ashkenazic communities.
The Ashkenazic World
Ashkenazic Jews come from Ashkenaz, the Jewish name for the Rhineland. Jewish settlement of Ashkenaz dates back to the late Roman era, but we know that there was a major influx from northern Italy between the eighth and the twelfth centuries. By the time of the Crusades, the Ashkenazic community was vibrant, spreading from Paris to Prague.
The Crusades were the first of a series of great disasters to befall this community, killing a sizable fraction of the entire Ashkenazic community. The seventeenth century was an equally severe disaster, and between the Crusades and the seventeenth century, stories of massacre and expulsion were an everpresent element of Ashkenazic life. Most towns in Ashkenaz appear to have suffered a major massacre or expulsion about once per century. The Rindfleisch massacres of 1298 swept a large part of the Rhineland, as did the persecutions of the fourteenth century surrounding the Black Death. The Protestant Reformation brought yet another wave of expulsions from newly Protestant cities in the sixteenth century.
The Ashkenazic community of the seventeenth century was well connected to the larger Jewish world. For example, the false messiah David Reuveni from Yemin and his disciple Solomon Molcho from Portugal came to Regensburg to see Emperor Charles V, and emissaries of the Sephardic community of Safed, in the Galilee, came to many Ashkenazic communities to spread the teachings of the Kaballah. Jewish merchants frequently crossed the Alps from Italy, and there were also open commercial routes between Salonika in the Ottoman empire and Prague to the north. There is ample evidence of rabbis trained in Poland serving French or German communities as well as the reverse. Not too many years after the Thirty Years' war, news of the false messiah Shabatai Zvi swept north from the Ottoman world to attract attention throughout the Ashkenazic world.
Ashkenazic Communities of the Seventeenth Century
In response to persecution over past centuries, many Jews had already fled east into Poland, and by the last quarter of the sixteenth century, a unique new living arrangement had emerged there. The Polish government granted a degree of autonomous self-government to the Jews that they had not seen since the Romans destroyed Jerusalem. The "Council of Four Lands," as it was called, met at Lubin between Purim and Passover in the spring, and in Yaroslav during the month of Av or Elul, and was composed of representatives of each Jewish community in Poland, Lithuania, Podolia (Polish Russia), Volhynia and Galicia. Polish documents refer to this as the Congressus Judaicus or Seim (Diet) of the Jews. The governing structure included a supreme rabbinical court, with jurisdiction over all civil cases between Jews, as well as the congress, which had control over taxation within the Jewish community and budgetary responsibility for supporting schools and other community institutions.
With each new hardship for the Jews of the various German states, new waves of Jews moved east, but the Ashkenazic heartland was still fairly populous until the Thirty Years' War. Outside of the heartland, there were healthy Ashkenazic communities in France, Austria and Hungary, and the Alsatian community spread south into northern Switzerland. The following brief descriptions focus on the Jewish communities within a few weeks travel from the Thueringerwald:
The Ashkenazic Heartland
Worms had a Jewish community before the year 1000, and suffered the usual massacres and expulsions, with the most recent expulsion in 1615. By imperial order, Jews were readmitted to Worms in late January 1616. The winters of 1632 and 1635 brought "pestilence," probably plague, and the taxes imposed on the community drove it into extreme poverty. Many Jews were imprisoned for nonpayment of taxes until an imperial order in 1636 cancelled the taxes and ordered their release.
Mainz or Mayence had a Jewish community in the early tenth century, but the usual expulsions and massacres ended with the massacre of 1349. A new Jewish community was not started there until 1583. This community grew by the addition of refugees from Frankfurt-am-Main in 1614 and from Worms after the expulsion there in 1620. In November 1620, Pappenheim stormed Mainz and gave no quarter to its residents, but the Jewish community continued, and in 1630, a rabbi was officially appointed.
Speyer had a walled Jewish quarter by the end of the eleventh century, but after the usual atrocities, there were fewer than ten Jewish families in Speyer during the early seventeenth century.
Metz had a Jewish community as far back as the first century, and this was one of the most secure Jewish communities in the region. By 1614, there were 500 Jews, and in 1624, 120 families and 600 individuals under the leadership of Rabbi Moses Cohen of Prague. At that time, the Jews had considerable freedom under letters patent granted by Henry IV in 1605, and Louis XIII enlarged these freedoms in 1632.
Ashkenazic Communities along the Main
Frankfurt am Main may have had a Jewish community in 1175, and after the usual ups and downs, this grew between 1543 and 1612 from 43 to 454 Jewish families. In August 1614, Fettmilch, the leader of the town's guilds, instigated riots that slaughtered a good fraction of the Jews of Frankfurt and led to the expulsion of the survivors. Fettmilch was tried, convicted and hange
Hanau saw its first Jewish settlement in the thirteenth century, with the atrocities leading up to expulsion in 1592. Count Philipp Ludwig II reopened the town to Jews in 1603 and permitted the construction of a synagogue on the Judengasse. Initially, there were only ten families, but by 1707, the number had grown to 111, with a significant number being refugees from the Fettmilch riot in Frankfurt. A Christian printer in Hanau, Hans Jacob Hene, produced about thirty Jewish works in Hebrew between 1610 and 1630; he must have cut his own type, because the letter shin in his typography was distinctive. He published a Jewish prayerbook in 1628, a number of works on theology and Jewish and popular works in Judische Deutsch. Among his typesetters, we know he employed the Günzburg family, and Mordecai ben Jacob of Prossnitz. Rabbi Menachem ben Elhanon was a noteworthy scholar in town, until his death in 1636; his school was the foundation of the yeshivah of Hanau.
Aschaffenburg, or Aschaff on some maps of the era, was home to a considerable Jewish community in the seventeenth century, but by the end of the century, only twenty members or twenty families remained. Rabbi Meïr Grotwohl is the only name I can find from the seventeenth century. In addition to the town Jews of Aschaffenburg, there were Shutzjuden in many of the surrounding towns.