The Sabbatean Prophets

50 The Sabbatean Prophets
Messianism and the Kabbalah
The confluence of ideas on Sabbateanism also includes those from deep
within Jewish tradition. The most noted of these influences was Kabbalah,
Jewish mystical lore. 34 Ideas and imagery of both the Spanish Kabbalah,
such as the books Zohar and Kanah, and the Lurianic Kabbalah of the sixteenth
century were central to the thought of the learned Sabbatean prophets.
Although most of the ordinary Jews who became believers had little
contact with this literature, Kabbalah was quite familiar to the small group of
rabbis who became the original core of believers, and whose prestige carried
the movement out to the larger Jewish world. Moreover, while Kabbalah
texts were not well known in the broader Jewish community, the personalities
and legends of the Safed kabbalists were quite famous.
Following the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, Kabbalah began to overtake
philosophy and talmudic scholarship as the dominant mode of Jewish
spiritual thought. 35 Kabbalah slowly shifted from being the province of tiny,
secret circles of adepts to a body of public ideas. In the sixteenth century,
several developments facilitated this process. One was the printing of the
Zohar in Italy, which put it in the hands of any scholar with the money to
buy a copy. The purchasers included Christian savants, some of whom had
become interested in Jewish esotericism and the possibilities of its christological
interpretation. Another, more profound development was the explosion
of kabbalistic thought centered in Safed in the latter part of the century.
The most influential of the several schools among the Safed mystics
was that of Rabbi Isaac Luria (AR”I), who stressed man’s role in the restoration
of a pristine world, with related conceptions of exile, redemption, and
the revolutions of the human soul. While the general outlines of this mystical
philosophy undoubtedly found their way to the attention of many Jews,
far more famous were legends about the supernatural wisdom of Luria and
his students—a collection that was among the earliest bodies of hagiography
in Judaism. In these tales Luria is represented as both prophet and messiah.
The prestige accorded to Kabbalah and its adepts through this mystical
flowering helped fuel an already emerging crisis in the traditional authority
structure of Judaism. In the seventeenth century the cracks in the foundation
of rabbinic authority would widen to the limits of its viability, under the
impact of Sabbateanism on the one hand, and rationalist skepticism on the
other.
In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the rising prestige of Kab-