History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

  Throughout the winter of 1665-6, and for most of the following year, the Jewish world was in ferment. Responding to Nathan’s calls to penance—his exhortations were printed in vast numbers in Frankfurt, Prague, Mantua, Constantinople and Amsterdam—Jews prayed, fasted and took constant ritual baths. They lay down naked in the snow. They scourged themselves. Many sold all their possessions and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, hoping to see the Messiah there. Some believed they would be transported on clouds. Others bought passages. Abraham Pereira, reputedly the richest Jew in Amsterdam, left with his household for Palestine, though his ship got no further than Leghorn. Poems were written, books printed and dated ‘the first year of the renewal of the prophecy and the kingdom’. Public processions were organized. Some of the excitement was generated by Christian millenarians, who also believed that 1666 was a magic year. There were riots in various Polish cities, and in May the crown forbade any further Jewish demonstrations. The Jewish fervour also set off reactions, some sympathetic, some hostile, in the Islamic world, and the Turkish authorities became alarmed.

  Hence when Zevi’s ship reached Turkish waters in February 1666, it was promptly detained and the Messiah taken ashore in chains. He was held in honourable captivity, however, and allowed to receive visitors. Nathan, in the first of his rationalizations of events to fit his theory, explained that the Messiah’s imprisonment was no more than symbolic and outward and reflected his inward struggle with the evil forces which prevented the divine sparks from shining forth. Zevi maintained his pretensions in the fortress at Gallipoli, where he was held, and apparently sent away delegations of Jews quite happy. An inquiry from the community in Venice elicited a reassuring response from the Constantinople Jews, carefully disguised as a trade report: ‘We looked into the matter and examined the merchandise of Rabbi Israel, for his goods are displayed here under our very eyes. We have come to the conclusion that they are very valuable…but we must wait until the day of the great fair comes.’63 But the day, scheduled for the summer of 1666, passed. Early in September Zevi was visited by a Polish kabbalist Nehemiah ha-Cohen, who may have been a Turkish plant, or possibly a rival Messiah. He cross-questioned Zevi about his claims, found his answers unsatisfactory and denounced him to the Turks as an impostor. On 15 September Zevi was brought before the council, or divan, in Constantinople, in the presence of the sultan, who listened hidden in a latticed alcove. Zevi denied ever having made messianic claims. He was then given the choice between converting to Islam or death. At the urging of the sultan’s doctor, an apostate Jew, he took the turban, assumed the name of Aziz Mehmed Effendi and the title ‘Keeper of the Palace Gates’ and accepted a government pension of 150 piastres a day.

  What happened after the Messiah’s apostasy was almost as instructive as the mission itself. The euphoria in the Jewish world collapsed abruptly as the news got out, though many refused to believe it at first. Rabbis and communal leaders, both those who had accepted the claims and the few who had denied them, closed ranks to impose a total silence on the affair. It was argued that any post-mortem would be to challenge the divine, inscrutable wisdom which allowed the fiasco to happen. There was also grave concern that the Turks would start a witch-hunt against Jewish leaders who acquiesced in what, after all, would have been a revolt against Ottoman rule. So every official effort was made to rewrite, or unwrite, history and pretend the affair had never happened. Communal records referring to it were destroyed.

  Nathan of Gaza, on the other hand, merely enlarged his theory again to fit the new facts. The apostasy was transformed into a necessary paradox or dialectical contradiction. Far from being a betrayal, it was in fact the beginning of a new mission to release the Lurianic sparks which were distributed among the gentiles and in particular in Islam. While the Jews were restoring the sparks scattered among themselves—that was the easy part—the Messiah had the far more difficult task of gathering in the sparks in the alien world. Only he could do it, and it meant descending into the realm of evil. In appearance he was submitting to it, but in reality he was a Trojan Horse in the enemy’s camp. Warming to his task, Nathan pointed out that Zevi had always done strange things. This was merely the strangest—to embrace the shame of apostasy as the final sacrifice before revealing the full glory of his messianic triumph. The notion of hidden meanings was familiar to students of kabbalah. Once the idea of the pretend-apostasy was accepted, everything else—including Zevi’s subsequent actions under Turkish supervision—confirmed the new theory, for which Nathan quickly provided massive documentation in Biblical, talmudic and kabbalistic texts. Nathan visited Zevi several times and the two men were able to align Nathan’s explanations with Zevi’s behaviour. His manic phases recurred from time to time, and during them he sometimes reasserted his messianic claims. He also engaged in wild sexual antics, to the point where his enemies in Constantinople, both Jewish and Moslem, combined to persuade or bribe the sultan—who rather liked Zevi—to exile him to Albania, where he died in 1676. Even his death, however, did not stump Nathan, who declared it a mere ‘occultation’: Zevi had ascended into heaven and been absorbed into the ‘supernal lights.’

  Nathan himself died four years later in 1680. But by the time he too disappeared he had elaborated a flexible theory which accommodated not only all Zevi’s actions but any other disconcerting events which might occur in the future. There were not, he argued, one set of lights, as Luria and other kabbalists had believed, but two: a thoughtful set (good) and a thoughtless set (indifferent but liable to be bad). Creation proceeds by a dialectic between the two sets of lights, in which the Messiah-figure plays a unique part, quite different from that of ordinary souls, which often demands heroic sacrifices from him, including taking on to himself the appearance of evil to purify others. The theory made sense whether Zevi reappeared, sent a substitute or stayed silent and invisible. In this alternative or heretical system of kabbalah, Nathan worked out his dialectic in enormous detail and with copious imagery.

  As a result, the Shabbatean movement, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, not only survived the débâcle of the apostasy but continued in existence for over a century. Most rabbis came to hate it not only because Nathan’s theory in its final form was plainly heretical but also because when predicted reappearances of Zevi failed to happen—as in 1700 and 1706—many disappointed Shabbateans converted to Christianity or Islam. But some rabbis were occult Shabbateans themselves, and there were few people in the non-rationalist stream of Judaism to whom Nathan’s rubbery ideas did not exercise some appeal. The movement survived splits, nonconformist deviations of its own and eventually produced a breakaway religion founded by a reincarnation of Zevi called Jacob Frank (1726-91).

  Frank was born Jacob ben Judah Leib, the son of a Polish merchant and part-time rabbi. He himself became a cloth-dealer. He had little learning and called himself a prostak or simple man. None the less, while trading in the Balkans, he was initiated into secret Shabbatean rites, by followers of the extreme wing of the movement. He became a prophet and eventually claimed quasi-divine status as the possessor of Zevi’s soul. When he returned to Poland, while posing as an orthodox Sephardi Jew—hence his name Frank, the Ashkenazi Yiddish term for a Sephardi—he secretly conducted Shabbatean services as head of an underground movement within Judaism. He and his followers also indulged in sexual practices forbidden by the Torah. Indeed, following the convenient dialectic established by Nathan of Gaza, they distinguished between the ordinary Torah of halakhah, which they ignored, and claimed the right to follow only the ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual’ Torah forms, the ‘Torah of Emanation’.

  In 1756 Frank was excommunicated by a rabbinical court at Brody, and to escape arrest he fled to Turkey where he found it useful to embrace Islam. The Orthodox Jews then appealed to the Polish Catholic authorities for help in dispersing the sect. But the Frankists also turned to the Catholics, on the grounds that they rejected the Talmud and therefore had more in common with Rome. The bishops, delighted, organiz
ed a public disputation and forced the rabbis as well as the Frankists to attend. It took place in June 1757 and the presiding prelate, Bishop Dembowski, pronounced in favour of the Frankists and ordered copies of the Talmud to be burned in the city square of Kamieniec. Alas for the bishop, he died suddenly during the conflagration. The rabbis took this as a divine sign of approval, and resumed their persecution of the Frankists with new fervour. In retaliation, Frank took his following into Catholicism, being baptized in 1759. He even assisted the Catholics in investigating blood libels. But he also collected twelve ‘sisters’, who served as his concubines, practised various enormities, and found himself in prison. He then turned to the Russian Orthodox Church.

  While embracing Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Frank continued to follow Nathan’s expanded religious theories. He created a new Trinity, of the ‘Good God’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘She’, the last an amalgam of the Shekinah and the Virgin Mary, and eventually propounded the notion that the messianic idea could be pursued equally well in all the main religions or, for that matter, in the secular enlightenment or freemasonry. Thus the kabbalah, which began in unspecific, formless gnosticism in late antiquity, returned to unspecific, formless gnosticism in the late eighteenth century.

  It is significant that Frank, in order to achieve some kind of legal cover for his sect, had to affect adherence to both Christianity and Islam. The contrast with the activities of his contemporary, Samuel Jacob Hayyim Falk (c. 1710-82), is instructive. Falk, born in Galicia, was another kabbalist and adventurer, though far more learned than Frank. He too came in conflict with the law. In Westphalia he narrowly escaped burning as a wizard. The Archbishop of Cologne expelled him from his territories. In 1742 he came to England, and there he seems to have pursued his religious destiny without hindrance. He ran a private synagogue from a house in Wellclose Square, London. On old London Bridge he maintained a kabbalistic laboratory, where he practised alchemy. He was said to have saved the Great Synagogue from fire by putting magical inscriptions on the doorposts. In his time he was known as ‘the Ba’al Shem of London’.64

  That a Jew like Falk could live his life in freedom under English law was a fact of immense importance in Jewish history. It meant that, for the first time since the days of the liberal Roman empire, there was one country where Jews could enjoy something approximating to normal citizenship. How did this come about? To understand this great turning-point, we must return again to the fateful year 1648. The great slaughter of Jews which took place then, beginning eight years of desperate troubles for the Jews of eastern Europe, was by far the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism since the First Crusade. Hitherto, the trend of Jewish emigration had been eastward, for hundreds of years. Now the trend was reversed. Though the teeming Ashkenazi community in eastern Europe continued to grow in numbers, and to a limited extent in prosperity, it never looked really safe again. For security, the more enterprising Jews began to turn their gaze to the West. Thus 1648 was a sombre milestone on the long road which led eventually to the Holocaust. But 1648, with its slaughter and distress, was also—thanks to a series of coincidences which some might call providential—the first in a remarkable chain of events which led to the creation of an independent Jewish state.

  The agent in this new development was a distinguished Jewish scholar from Amsterdam, Manasseh ben Israel (1604-57). He had been born a marrano in Madeira and baptized Manoel Dias Soeiro. But after his father escaped from an auto-da-fé in Lisbon and came to the Netherlands, the family resumed its Jewish identity and Manasseh became a talmudic prodigy, writing his first book at seventeen.65 He was concerned throughout his life to present a favourable image of Judaism to the gentile world and win acceptance. Many of his books were written for Christian readers. He tried to demonstrate that Christianity and Judaism had more in common than most people supposed, and he achieved a high reputation among Christian fundamentalists. When the first refugees from the 1648 massacres began to reach western Europe, Manasseh and other Amsterdam Jews feared the consequences for the community of a large influx of distressed Ashkenazis. Their own position in Holland was ambiguous. They had no rights of citizenship. They were not admitted to the guilds. The Dutch government did not interfere with the practice of their faith, provided it was done quietly, and in fact the community, especially in Amsterdam, was thriving. But all this could be jeopardized by the refugees. Indeed in Hamburg the arrival of large numbers led to a temporary expulsion of all Jews in 1649. Manasseh therefore proposed a radical solution: why should not English be opened up as a country of refuge for Jewish immigrants?

  Since Edward I had expelled the English Jews in 1290, it was widely believed there was an absolute legal ban on Jews residing there. In fact a few Jews lived there throughout the centuries of supposed exclusion, especially as doctors and traders.66 One Jew, Sir Edward Brampton, alias Duarte Brandão, was Governor of Guernsey under Richard III. Another, Dr Roderigo Lopez, had been Elizabeth I’s doctor and the victim of a notorious anti-Semitic witch-hunt and treason trial in 1593-4.67 At the time when the Ukrainian massacres took place, one of the five merchants contracted to supply corn to the English army was a Jew, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, who had come to London in 1630, and was said to import £100,000 of silver annually. All the same, Jews were not officially admitted.

  Manasseh perceived that the defeat of the English royalists and the execution of the king in 1649 offered a unique opportunity for the Jews to gain entry to England. The king’s Puritan opponents, now effectively running the country, had always represented the philosemitic tradition there. The Bible was their guide to current events. They invoked the Prophet Amos to condemn Star Chamber. They adduced the case of Naboth’s Vineyard as a prefiguration of Ship Money. The Puritan common lawyer, Sir Henry Finch, had published in 1621 The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews—a work the crown had condemned for lèse-majésté.68 Many believed that the Second Coming was imminent. But both Deuteronomy 28:64 and Daniel 12:7 suggested this could not happen until the scattering of the Jews was complete, ‘from the one end of the earth even unto the other’. Hence, until Jews were scattered in England too, the millenium would be delayed. This was a notion Manasseh shared with English fundamentalists, since Kezeh ha-Arez, the ‘end of the earth’, was the medieval Hebrew term for England, and he believed the acceptance of Jews in England would hasten the Messiah’s coming. He opened his campaign in the winter of 1648-9 with a book entitled An Apology for the Honourable Nation of the Jews, which he signed ‘Edward Nicholas’. He followed this in 1650 with a far more important work, Spes Israelis, translated as The Hope of Israel, in which he advanced the millenarian argument. The first Anglo-Dutch War postponed more practical measures, but in September 1655 Manasseh came to London himself. He presented a petition to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, requesting that the laws forbidding the Jews entry be repealed and that they be granted admission on terms to be laid down by the government.69

  What followed was a characteristic English muddle, which is worth examining in detail because it proved of such critical importance in the whole of Jewish history. Cromwell received Manasseh’s petition favourably and referred it to the Council. On 12 November 1655 the Council appointed a sub-committee to examine the matter and seek expert legal advice. On 4 December a conference was held in Whitehall attended by twenty-five lawyers, including the Chief Justice, Sir John Glynne, and the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, William Steele. To the surprise of the politicians they announced that there was no law whatever which prevented Jews coming to England. Edward’s 1290 expulsion was an act of royal prerogative which affected only the individuals concerned. Somewhat illogically, the sub-committee then got down to discussing the conditions on which Jews were to be admitted. But it could not agree. The Jews had enemies among the Commonwealth men, as well as friends. After four sessions, Cromwell dismissed it on 18 December. Manasseh, bitterly disappointed, went back to Amsterdam the following year, believing he had failed.


  But he had, in fact, misunderstood the way the English did things. They preferred a pragmatic to a clear-cut ideological solution. If an agreement had been drawn up, giving a special legal status to Jewish immigrants, they would necessarily have been branded as second-class citizens. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II would quite possibly have repudiated the deal, or renegotiated it with harsher terms. In either case the Jewish question would have become a public issue, raising anti-Semitic hackles. As it was, the matter was resolved pragmatically, without a specific treaty. While Manasseh was still in London, a man called Antonio Rodrigues Robles, a marrano legally, though in fact a Jew, was being proceeded against in court as a Spanish alien, England and Spain being at war. Some twenty marrano families decided, in March 1656, to resolve the matter by openly confessing their Judaism, declaring themselves refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and petitioning the Council for the right to practise their religion in private. On 16 May the Council ordered the proceedings against Robles quashed, and at a further meeting on 25 June it seemingly granted the petition, though the minutes for that day were later mysteriously removed. At any rate, on 4 August there arrived from Amsterdam ‘a scroll of the Law of fine parchment, with its binder and mantle of yellow velvet, a red damask cloth for the reading desk and a spice-box lined with red taffeta’, and the London Jews went ahead with leasing a building in Creechurch Lane for their first synagogue.