Weekly Reader: Shabbetai Tsvi and Jewish Folk Magic
Published on August 04, 2024.
In the middle of the eighteenth century, a bitter controversy broke out between two of the most prominent rabbinical names in Europe. Ya’akov Emden, a distinguished talmudist in the city of Altona, accused Yonatan Eybeschutz, a rabbinical judge in Prague, of being a secret Sabbatian—that is, a follower of the seventeenth-century false messiah Shabbetai Tsvi. The accusation was based in part on Sabbatian amulets that Eybeschutz had supposedly written. These amulets, an important part of Jewish folk magic, were said to provide protection and healing to their users. The Emden-Eybeschutz controversy was just one chapter in the fascinating history of Sabbatianism, a subject that has long been of interest to Yiddish writers. On August 18, the Yiddish Book Center will be hosting a production of Shabbtai Tsvi, a poetic drama by Sholem Asch written in 1908 and translated and adapted by Weaver, Yiddish Book Center translation fellow (register here). For more on Ashkenazi folk magic, you can sign up for our online course starting September 9, taught by Rokhl Kafrissen. Oh, and by the way? Historians now agree that Emden was right. Eybeschutz was, in fact, a Sabbatian.
—Ezra Glinter, Senior Staff Writer and Editor
Courting Controversy
If it seems surprising that Sholem Asch wrote a play about Shabbetai Tsvi, it shouldn’t be. Asch seems to have gravitated toward such subjects, and he later returned to the theme of messianism in his highly controversial trilogy of Christological novels. When it comes to drama Asch was no less provocative, writing over twenty plays exploring themes such as interfaith love, the Jewish underworld, and class and power in the Jewish world. In this lecture series you can explore Asch’s remarkable body of dramatic work with three leading scholars of Yiddish theater: professor Joel Berkowitz of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee; Yiddish Book Center bibliographer David Mazower; and actor, translator, and author Caraid O’Brien.
Audience Favorite
Asch was far from the only Yiddish writer to use the story of Shabbetai Tsvi as material. Yiddish pulp fiction often took up historical themes, and Shabbetai Tsvi was too juicy a subject to resist. There are a few such novels in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library, including this one, titled The Turkish Messiah, by journalist, newspaper editor, and playwright D. M. Hermalin.
Read The Turkish Messiah in the Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library
Keeping Watch
The kind of amulets that Eybeschutz got in trouble for are less used in Judaism nowadays, but they haven’t disappeared completely and can sometimes take unexpected forms. Cesario Lavery, a self-taught artist from Montreal and one of the Yiddish Book Center’s zamlers, or collectors, came up with his own kind of amulet for the books he collected. Each box he has sent the Center is adorned with drawings of small animals, ranging from underwater seascapes to a yarmulke covered cat clutching a copy of I. L. Peretz. Cesario says that the artwork serves as a type of amulet for the books’ journey, providing them with a safe trip to the Center.
Satan in Goray
Like the Emden-Eybeschutz controversy, many of the most famous Sabbatian episodes didn’t involve Shabbetai Tsvi himself. And while there have been plenty of works written about the false messiah, there have been others that were more concerned with the effects of an antinomian messianic movement on Jewish communities, even the most remote or provincial among them. The most famous of these is undoubtedly Isaac Bashevis Singer’s novel Satan in Goray, which describes what happens when a small Jewish community falls under the spell of a wandering Sabbatian preacher. Singer’s first published novel, Satan in Goray has long been available in English, but you can also read the Yiddish original in our Steven Spielberg Digital Yiddish Library.
Folk Magic
While the story of Shabbetai Tsvi and his followers was a particularly fruitful subject for Yiddish writers, other approaches to Jewish folk magic were common as well. Rokhl Kafrissen’s course “Sacred Time and Liminal Space: Ashkenazi Folk Magic at the Threshold” will place a special emphasis on learning about such customs through short stories, particularly the work of Sarah Hamer Jacklyn. This story, “Aunt Taibele,” involves one such fascinating folk tradition: plague weddings, known as mageyfe khasenes or shvartse khasenes.
Read Sarah Hamer Jacklyn’s “Aunt Tabele,” translated by Miranda Cooper
Themes:
Register for Sacred Time and Liminal Space
Join Rokhl Kafrissen for our fall 2024 online culture course, “Sacred Time and Liminal Space: Ashkenazi Folk Magic at the Threshold.”