The Sabbatean Prophets

74 The Sabbatean Prophets
Abraham, however, differed from these finds. The passage in Mandeville refers
to an odd relic in a distant church that would have been nothing more
than a curiosity to readers. Smith’s plates were not given out for the believers
to see and examine; they were written in a secret language and were
probably never intended to convince learned Christian scholars. In contrast,
Nathan’s document, in plain Hebrew, was placed before some of the greatest
rabbis of the day as visible evidence to support the reality of Shabbatai’s
mission.
How could such a blatant forgery have been accepted without comment
by everyone including many great scholars (except for Sasportas and his
friend Joseph ha-Levi, the most outspoken critics of the movement) 69 The
answer to this question necessarily addresses the larger problem of Jews and
pseudepigraphy. Jewish history abounds with pseudepigraphies and forgeries
from biblical to modern times. Unlike Western Christian scholarship,
however, it has only a very sparse critical tradition. So, while European forgers
and text critics have recently been described as opposite sides of the same
coin, Judaism appears to present a separate paradigm. 70
The ostensible pedigrees of pseudepigraphic Midrashim and kabbalistic
works would not last a moment under the scrutiny of any proficient philologist
or historian—and perhaps they were not meant to. In many cases the attribution
of authorship does not derive from the book itself, but is made by
later readers. Such works usually make only a superficial attempt to imitate
the historical or linguistic conditions of their alleged past. The Zohar, for example,
is replete with characters who lived later than the putative author, R.
Simeon bar Yohai (fl. 2nd century c.e.), and though it is composed in Aramaic
to imitate ancient Midrash, any experienced reader can immediately
see that the language is patently medieval. Perhaps the rabbinic tradition of
Oral Law, given at Mt. Sinai and passed down alongside the written Bible,
can help explain this attitude. The Oral Law in its final written form, the Talmud,
consists mainly of statements made by authorities of the Roman period
concerning their own times, and only occasionally speaks of some point
as “a law given to Moses at Sinai.” The obvious complexity of this tradition
may have made Judaism open to works whose substance was deemed valuable
and holy, whatever their alleged pedigree. In other words, specific authorship
may have been less important to Jews than it was to Christians.
Or perhaps Jews were simply uninterested in the challenges posed by textual
scholarship. 71 It is certainly true that humanistic pursuits were largely
marginalized in Judaism. Italian Jewish thinkers like Azariah de Rossi, Eli-