4. Ibid., especially 15–66. ‘Lurianic’ Kabbalism does indeed have a strong purchase on the diaspora and the Jewish yeshivot of Palestine and Egypt in this period, but there was also fierce resistance to it in the Rabbinate, both Sephardi and Ashkenazi, and the masses of Jews who became Shebbatians were certainly not all adepts of its rarefied cosmology and metaphysics. It seems to me that it was precisely when, in its Hasidic incarnation in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it found a simplified vernacular that a dilute Kabbalism morphed into a genuinely popular mass movement.
