Sabbatai Zevi: The Greatest Religious Scandal You've Never Heard Of

[00:00:09][Music] hmm [Music] dr price we have a question from jason heath again could you ask dr price and by the way he's a patron so thank you jason for being a patron my friend you uh rock could you ask dr price about the most popular jewish messiahs we have had in the past mainly sabotage and his later supposed reincarnation jacob franks another messiah i know that more than half the jews in the world followed sabotage according to encyclopedia judaica and it utterly amazes me i had the pleasure of attending a lecture given by a jewish rabbi who explained that they practiced an inversion of the law they thought god would only intervene if the world was completely righteous or com or completely corrupt since they thought it would be easier to corrupt everyone that is the path they chose first by sabotage then by jacob franks after sabotage forced conversion to islam in which many of his followers converted thinking this was part of the messiah's plan also if the best that's the the uh baal shem tov yeah bel shem tom he has that in quotations as well uh wasn't a messiah what exactly was he was he just another prophet a man who learned the sh the shem ha methorish so he could do great wonders or was he just a reformer that brought the jews in the old country together i love hearing the folk tales about him reminds me of tom bombad bombadil yeah and from uh the lord of the rings okay with all the singing he did thanks as always jason he's thanks for the question jason dr price uh what was the oh yeah yeah uh the let me just start with the the baal shem tov or the baal shem tov i don't know i don't know hebrew uh the master of the good name is what that means i think his actual name was uh israel of moldavia and uh he was the greatest of the saddiks the righteous ones jewish saints who might be considered sinlessly perfect etc they were living incarnations of the torah and each one would incarnate a different virtue and uh the the this was the original hasidic movement and uh they believed in the torah and and strove to follow it but the the real authority was the the charismatic rebbes uh and um israel of moldavia was the greatest of them and all kinds of miracle stories attached to him in bart ehrman's fascinating book i think it's jesus before christianity he has a section on the balchemtov which is really interesting because he was sort of a jesus-like figure and the the big deal with this sort of haseedum hasidism was that you had to experience the joy of the torah and there was charismatic judaism and in a way kind of like sufism in islam and uh it's um interesting that in later years though they were in trouble to begin with with uh the rabbis who thought they were given short shrift to the torah no i don't again i don't think they were infamous for violating it or anything but they looked to the living example of these satikim these righteous ones more and uh but eventually the uh hasidics uh which means uh the the the uh what's uh has said in hebrew uh i think it means loving kindness or some such thing the love of god and all that they became super orthodox zealots for the torah as they are today and you have uh still charismatic sadikim like rabbi menachem mendel schneerson who many of his disciples they they believed firmly that he was the coming messiah about to reveal himself he never said so but he didn't deny it either and when he died they believed he would shortly rise from the dead some did and some believed he was god incarnate and they didn't borrow this from christianity it was just the the logic of the messianic enthusiasm and the these uh the the laboratory hasidum uh because uh this sect flourished in the village of uh lubavitch in eastern europe somewhere and uh the chabad movements uh c-h-a-b-a-d is an evangelistic movement trying to get lapsed jews back into charismatic but also no mystic or legalistic judaism uh they're a very impressive group and so they're still going uh now sabotage cevi who lived in the 17th century in the 1660s his ministry was was going on and he was apparently what we would call manic depressive or bipolar because we know enough about this guy being a more recent figure uh to uh know that he would go into the depths of depression followed by elation and in the uh elated periods he believed he came to believe that he was chosen to be the messiah and uh there was a mystic named nathan of gaza who apparently had psychic abilities and he had a dream in which he was told that sabotage if he is the messiah of israel and so he was sort of like the john the baptist and apostle paul for this messiah and he was apparently a genius and a scholar and he's he warned that israel would have to believe in the messiah without benefit of miracles now that's interesting because almost immediately uh once the enthusiasm for sabotage seville became widespread there were miracle stories all over the place about the miracles sabotaged supposedly it's just like in the gospels when they say oh we would like to see a sign from you and he says yeah it's an evil generation that seeks a sign and you're not going to get one and yet look at the gospel filled with miracle stories right same sort of thing and uh so what was the great messianic activity of of sabotage he was a kabbalistic jew he he had studied the kabbalah of isaac luria who was a galilean um i guess sonic and he had a a cosmology and soteriology that it was strikingly like that of basilides the gnostic uh it could just it's an interesting question whether he was influenced by this because basilide agnosticism was no longer alive as far as we know but these ideas tend to trickle down the ages or did he just reinvent the wheel because often theological parallels come up because people deal far apart with the same range of issues and come up with the same range of solutions and so the idea was that that in the process of creation this is elaborate and i could get into it but that'll take us a long time but basically the idea was that the cosmic atom the adam cadmon the heavenly adam he had been instrumental in the creation but which was to have been a great structure of divine light but he screwed it up somehow so that the the the divine light the shekinah glory was scattered amid the wrecked shards of what would have been the world of light kind of like the emerald city i guess and uh he was charged with regathering all of them and that remains the uh the mission of uh kabbalistic jews they are to save themselves and god rescuing the divine sparks from the fallen world because when they do through acts of purification meditation and so on called tikkun purification that then the messiah will come and well this is what isaac luria taught in in distortedly oversimplified versions uh and um it's sabotage seville was a lorianic cabalist he had his own spin on it and the main one was that uh the uh as the messiah he felt that he was beyond the standard strictures of the law apparently what he did in his libertine practice was stuff that we wouldn't really think of as all that big a deal like eating non-kosher food and changing the dates of of certain festivals uh only the messiah would have the the authority either to change the law or to disobey it it was a kind of prophetic blasphemy uh he he wasn't going against it he was transcending it very much like the tantra in in hinduism and buddhism well he really bit the bullet on transgression when he boasted he was living in uh i guess the mediterranean seaboard there in asia minor he claimed that this is the time of the ottoman empire the muslim turks and he said that he would go to the capital of the empire and convert the ottoman sultan to judaism and he apparently really thought this would happen so he gets an audience with the sultan who says i'm here to get you to convert to judaism and and the sultan said well you're half right there is going to be a conversion here today but it's not gonna be me uh you have two choices you could don the turban and become a muslim or you could get your head chopped off which is it gonna be and sabotage answer was he converted to judaism from judaism to islam that's apostasy well and he went into retirement as uh as a uh as a muslim uh devout muslim and what did his disciples make of this well they had to rationalize it a bunch of them said well okay to hell with this we've been had but a lot of them didn't nathan of gaza came up with a theory that is saying that well you know he had predicted this which he hadn't it was like the passion predictions and the gospels others said well he had to plunge into the depths of sin in order to defeat it from within and so he's going to return as the messiah and everything will be fine others said well he didn't really commit apostasy it was docetic it was like a hallucination he went to heaven and it was some kind of hologram people thought he had etc and so you see just what was happening in early christianity there was no reason to think they copied it off uh christianity uh and uh so it was an interesting parallel now his disciples a lot of them figured well i guess we ought to follow in the way of the cross so to speak we should do what he did and renounce judaism and outwardly become muslims or possibly catholics or orthodox jews or different options and uh and and it was said that when sabotage died that his some disciples were present at his tomb and there was a dragon guarding him in it and i think they said that he he ascended into heaven well here's where jacob frank comes in he uh was a really weird and sinister character he said that oh yeah i sabotaged if he claimed to be god he would sign his epistles which had no great content he wasn't much of a teacher uh he would sign them your lord and god sabotage okay he's out of the picture jacob frank i guess you would have said or frank we would say he said sabotage savi was god and he was the messiah but uh he's back as me and i am the second person of the trinity so this they must have borrowed from christianity he says sabotage seville was like the unmoved mover uh i am like god the father and you can expect a third female messiah uh who will be i guess sophia wisdom and uh and so he said here's what so was was sabotage wrong about the coming of the kingdom of god no he was right it did come but in a secret form like in the gospel of mark the mystery of the kingdom of god it already had begun but invisibly one day soon everyone will see it you know the mustard seed will grow into the big tree and so forth but in the meantime the just as the kingdom is in secret visible to those of the eye of faith living the kingdom way is going to have to be kept secret outsiders won't understand so what would that mean well the as as in later judaism of various kinds they said with a new world the messianic kingdom you won't need the old torah anymore because most of it's thou shalt not well sin will be gone so all of the the negative commandments will become positive and had various theories that a hitherto invisible letter in the text would become visible and change the meaning of everything and so what this meant was everything that was forbidden in the old age of the pre-messianic age the fallen age everything that was forbidden there is now permitted or even commanded and so they had uh secret meetings and gershom sholem makes it out that they were orgies i've read another a treatment of this since then that implies it wasn't that bad that they they had a naked woman uh in the front of the thing and that people came up and touched her but that's really kind of like what goes on in the oto and philema rituals where some woman is naked at the front of the thing as i guess the the earth mother or whatever uh it apparently i mean that was forbidden too though now it was it was kosher uh but we don't know i don't know who to trust because i'm certainly not familiar with the primary documents but they did stuff that was considered by other jews who eventually found out to be licentiousness and this brought persecution on them and jacob frank said okay we we are gonna feign conversion uh and uh he became a catholic and others did too but again some muslims some orthodox jews and this guy actually sicked christian authorities on other jews fomenting persecution and pogroms and so on he had a lot of clout somehow and managed to get rich and be treated as a noble by non-jews uh some kind of schtick he had uh and they'd go around in golden robes and all that stuff but he was a a huge uh successful messiah i think he eventually just died of natural causes and neither he nor sabotaged seville were martyred and i don't believe the female messiah ever showed up though i wouldn't be surprised i've never read that she did but they were instrumental in secularizing modern turkey a group of them called the mayer who who were secretly muslims and lived in turkey they wanted to secularize the government it pretty much did with uh ataturk and these these guys had started to say it's a pretty amazing feat secularizing the uh the uh turkey when the ottoman empire was over and it's thought that there may still be francis still around sholem says that they were over by the 19th century but that's not completely certain they they may be surviving just like the mandiants and the druze survive as tiny minority religions and uh so it's it's an endlessly fascinating story uh in its own right and because of the parallels to both jesus and the crucifixion and the rationalizations and to this pauline idea that the kingdom of god has come but not outwardly yet uh though he opposed libertinism right all things are lawful granted but not everything is expedient so just so interesting a neglected chapter of of biblical messianic history