The Story of the Jews Volume 2: When Words Fail: 1492--Present

by Simon Schama

Gershom Scholem argues that because Kabbalah had become the normative Judaism of its day, the Jewish world was ripe for a phenomenon like Shabbetai. But from Leone Modena on, through to the rabbi Jacob Sasportas in Hamburg, some of the most articulate voices were also the most vigilantly guarded, if not actually antagonistic to the wizardry of Kabbalah, which they believed flirted with heresy. Leone Modena’s appeal had been to a rational engagement with the Torah rather than the uncertainties of the trance. God was to be worshipped as the source of reasoning intelligence, as had been taught by Maimonides, and by Saadia before him in ninth-century Mesopotamia in his great work Beliefs and Opinions.8 His laws were the way to a concretely realised earthly life rather than an illumination of primordial cosmology. But Nathan was himself steeped in Maimonides and knew that in the Guide for the Perplexed, metaphysical meditation kept company with reasoning. In any case, there was no putting the Kabbalistic genie back into the bottle. After all, the Talmud was an empire of inference, and the authority of an oral law received at the same time as the written one had to be taken on trust. So why not make the assumption that the apparent meaning of the Bible was just a membrane covering a body of far deeper knowledge which could be apprehended through the intense, disciplined contemplation of the hierarchy of signs? Words, and the letters which made them, conveyed the lighter meaning ...