History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

was a tragic victim when the duke died

His body was publicly exhibited in an iron cage. The rise and fall of Oppenheimer, also known as Süss or ‘Jud’ (Jew) Süss, acted as a warning to Jews who put their trust in gentiles and was later the subject of a famous novel by Leon Feuchtwanger.

The Ukrainian peasants finally rose in the late spring of 1648, led by a petty aristocrat called Bogdan Chmielnicki,

We do not know exactly how many Jews died. The Jewish chronicles say 100,000 were killed and 300 communities destroyed.

As in earlier periods, the effect of calamity was to reinforce the irrational and apocalyptic elements in Judaism and in particular to make Jews hypersensitive to signs of a messianic deliverance. The rationalist optimism of the twelfth century reflected in the works of Maimonides had largely disappeared by the end of the fourteenth century,

Among the Jewish upper classes, kabbalistic mysticism strengthened its grip.

The destruction and scattering of the great S...

democratized the ...

The rise of the Jewish press had a loudspeaker effect.

the kabbalah mixed with the folk-superstitions and vulgarized aggadic tales which had always constituted a great part of the everyday religion of ordinary Jews. After a generation or two, it was impossible to separate one tradition from the other: they merged in a glutinous mass of magic-mystic lore.

Secondly, the Spanish expulsions made the kabbalah itself dynamic by adding an eschatological element concentrated on the notion of Zion and the coming of the Messiah.

It moved to the very centre of Judaistic belief and took on some of the characteristics of a mass movement.

growth of a school of kabbalistic studies at Safed in northern Galilee.

Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-72),

Like most kabbalists, he believed that the actual letters of the Torah, and the numbers which they symbolized, offered means of direct access to God.

Luria postulated the thought that Jewish miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos.

as agents they have the task of restoring the cosmos. By the strictest observance of the Law, they can release the sparks of light trapped in the cosmic husks. When this restitution has been made, the Exile of the Light will end, the Messiah will come and Redemption will take place. The attractiveness of this theory to ordinary Jews was that it enabled them to believe they had some hand in their destiny.

The 1492 expulsions were seen as the birthpangs of the Messiah.

Messiahs of a sort duly appeared.

David Reubeni.

Solomon Molcho,

Lurianic kabbalah

in Lublin and elsewhere,

By the end of the sixteenth century, it was regarded there as a normative part of Judaism.

During the first half of the seventeenth century, in the teeming Jewish shtetls and ghetto-quarters of Poland, Lithuania and the Ukraine, this form of Judaism, ranging from highbrow mysticism and ascetic piety at one end of the spectrum, to idiot superstition at the other, became the essential religion of the community.

angel-devil material,

Letter combination magic,

‘Practical Kabbalah’.

golem,

countless superstitious practices.

Ghetto folklore centred around devils and sin, especially the first sin, the transmigration of souls and, not least, the Messiah.

Belief in the Messiah was the summation and climax of all the ghetto’s trust in the supernatural because it had the highest sanction of orthodox Jewish religion.

what Lurianic kabbalah provided: a description of how ordinary Jews, by their prayers and piety, could precipitate the Messianic Age.

It was among the generation born in the 1630s that Luria’s ideas spread most widely and rapidly, in both sophisticated and vulgar form.

The series of catastrophes which overtook Ashkenazi Jewry in eastern Europe from 1648 onwards, culminating in the Swedish War of the late 1650s, constituted a potent factor in raising messianic hopes. The greater the distress, the more urgently was deliverance awaited.

By the 1660s, the feeling that the Lurianic process was virtually complete, and the Messiah waiting in the wings, united hundreds of Jewish communities scattered over two continents. On this point popular superstition and learned mysticism were at one.

On 31 May 1665, as if on cue, the Messiah appeared and was proclaimed as such in Gaza. He was called Shabbetai Zevi (1626-76).

But the man behind his appearance, the master-mind, chief theorist and impresario of the whole phenomenon, was a local resident, one Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim As...

The difference between Zevi and previous, sixteenth-century Messiahs was that his candidature was conceived and presented not only against a background of Orthodox learning, which both he and his impresario possessed, but also in specific terms of Lurianic science with which the whole of Jewry was now familiar.

sceptical rabbis usually judged it best to hold their peace. The majority of rabbis everywhere were taken in.

What happened after the Messiah’s apostasy was almost as instructive as the mission itself. The euphoria in the Jewish world collapsed abruptly as the news got out,

closed ranks to impose a total silence on the affair.

Nathan of Gaza, on the other hand, merely enlarged his theory again to fit the new facts.

reincarnation of Zevi called Jacob Frank (1726-91).

the fateful year 1648. The great slaughter of Jews which took place then, beginning eight years of desperate troubles for the Jews of eastern Europe, was by far the worst outbreak of anti-Semitism since the First Crusade. Hitherto, the trend of Jewish emigration had been eastward, for hundreds of years. Now the trend was reversed. Though the teeming Ashkenazi community in eastern Europe continued to grow in numbers, and to a limited extent in prosperity, it never looked really safe again. For security, the more enterprising Jews began to turn their gaze to the West.

Manasseh ben Israel (1604-57).

proposed a radical solution: why should not English be opened up as a country of refuge for Jewish immigrants?

almost by accident England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge.

America

The English wanted colonists, especially those with mercantile skills and good trading contacts.