Paweł Maciejko, ed. Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism & the Origins of Jewish Modernity. Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. 206 pp.

Field: Arts and Humanities (Social Sciences)

Reviewed by: Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism & the Origins of Jewish Modernity ed. by Paweł Maciejko Shaul Magid Paweł Maciejko, ed. Sabbatian Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism & the Origins of Jewish Modernity Waltham, MA: Brandeis University Press, 2017. 206 pp. doi:10.1017/S0364009418000648 It is safe to say that most college courses on modern Jewish thought, history, or culture do not begin with the mystical messiah Sabbatai Ẓvi. And it is even safer to say that most courses on modern religion in Europe do not include Sabbatai Ẓvi and the movement that arose in his wake. Some reasons are obvious: for example, the scant but growing material available in English. But other reasons are a bit more perplexing, especially if we consider the tremendous impact the movement had on the development of modern Judaism and beyond. Most work on Ẓvi is done by scholars of Kabbalah and/or Jewish heresiology, and much of it is still done in Israel. Paweł Maciejko's Sabbatian Heresy seeks to change all that. Published in a Brandeis University Press series that makes classical Jewish texts available in English for the first time, Sabbatian Heresy functions in some ways as an anthology that will enable students to more easily access Sabbatianism from its primary texts. But Maciejko's book is no anthology, or not only that; it is also a serious intervention into the study of the Sabbatian movement and a bold attempt to redirect its trajectory away from the works of Gershom Scholem and many of his students, who have dominated the field for the past seventy years. While other scholars of note wrote about Ẓvi before Scholem, Scholem's magisterial biography Sabbatai Zevi: The Mystical Messiah (first published in two Hebrew volumes in 1957 and then in English in 1973) and his many Hebrew studies on various Sabbatian figures set the stage for the next three generations of scholarship. Yaacob Dweck's excellent new introduction to the 2016 reprinting of Scholem's study exhibits how the book itself, even beyond its author, has become a historical document worthy of investigation. Scholem's basic thesis is that Ẓvi was likely a mentally unstable, moderately educated figure who experienced visions and messianic fantasies, which were largely ignored by his contemporaries until he came across a talented young kabbalist, Nathan Benjamin Ashkenazi, also known as Nathan of Gaza, who deemed Ẓvi the messiah and began constructing an entire metaphysical edifice drawn from Zoharic and Lurianic kabbalistic sources to prove it. This all took on new meaning after Ẓvi converted to Islam to save his own skin, an act that on the one hand exacerbated the messianic fervor through Nathan's mystical lens, and on the other led many to give up hope or return to the normative Jewish fold [End Page 463] while still quietly holding a belief in Ẓvi's messianic status. Some of the former converted to Islam with Ẓvi, and many of the latter produced important works that influenced everything from Hasidism to, as Scholem speculated somewhat erroneously, modern Jewish reform. Scholem went even further to suggest, although never quite make the case, that this event had an important impact on modernity more generally. This was all part of Schoelm's larger grand narrative that Jewish heresy stands at the center of Western civilization. This is all well known to those who have read Scholem. Maciejko's critical intervention comes in three parts. First, he argues that Scholem distorted the complexity of the movement because he was wed to viewing it as part of a grand Jewish narrative through the metaphysical perspective of Nathan of Gaza. In line with Zionist historiography, Scholem viewed the Sabbatian movement as the great expression of authentic Jewish spiritual anarchism that flowed beneath the surface of Jewish history. Second, and related, Maciejko argues that Scholem acknowledged but deflected the influences of Islam and, more importantly, Christianity from the movement, and claimed that the religious syncretism that existed in the movement was "not an organic development of Sabbatianism" (xxii) but the product of simple encounters with other religions. And third, while Scholem gestured toward the more expansive influence of Sabbatianism beyond the boundaries of Judaism, he never...