From the Donmeh Mail list
28 Oct 1999
Dear Chaverim,
At the conclusion of his recent post on the reasons for Baruch Spinoza's excommunication from Judaism, Prof. Matthew Goldish wrote:
"For the interests of this list, Spinoza was also aware of Shabbatai Zvi. Henry Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, wrote Spinoza to ask his opinion about the news from Turkey."
For the reasons I'll mention at the end of this post, Prof. Goldish's observation here is very pertinent. Gershom Scholem writes:
"Echoes of the [Sabbatian] movement penetrated even the cloistered seclusion of Baruch Spinoza's study. Since his excommunication in 1656, Spinoza had had no contacts whatever with the Jewish Community, but one of his correspondents, Henry Oldenburg, a native of Bremen in Germany, who lived in London where he had become secretary of the Royal Society, showed great interest in the Sabbatian movement. Many letters are extant in which Oldenburg inquires of friends and acquaintences regarding the movement that had arisen among the Jews. Oldenburg was interested mainly in the political aspect of the possibility of a restoration of the Jews. Early in December, 1665, immediately after arrival of the first sensational reports, he wrote to Spinoza: 'As for politics, there is a rumor everywhere here concerning the return of the Jews, who have been dispersed for more than two thousand years, to their native country. Only a few here believe in this, yet there are many hoping for it. May it please you to communicate to a friend what you have heard regarding this matter and what you think of it. . .Unfortunately, Spinoza's reply to Oldenburg is lost, though elsewhere he expressed his opinion that a restoration of temporal rule by the Jews should by no means be considered an impossibility. . .In any event, Oldenburg seems to have taken a positive view of the messianic movement [of Sabbatai Zevi] among the Jews, about which he continued to keep himself informed."
Equal in importance to Spinoza's awareness of the Sabbatian advent, touched on in this passage, is the keen interest it describes from no less a personage than the Secretary of the Royal Society of London. I point this out as yet another example of the enormous impact Sabbatai Zevi had world wide, on both Jews and Non-Jews alike.
Over the course of the three hundred years since his Holy Apostasy to Islam, and the subsequent collapse of his movement it caused, "common knowledge" and "conventional wisdom" have reduced his advent to a blip on the radar screen of Jewish history. But Scholem and other scholars (some even on our Donmeh) have been correcting this misconception.
Contrary to popular belief, the Sabbatian Advent was an enormous world-shaking event, the aftershocks of which have continued to influence religious and even political history up to and including the present time. What is beginning to become clear is that the Jewish world misunderstood (and, in large part, continues to misunderstand) Sabbatai's conversion to Islam as a "cowardly" act of "betrayal," rather than the necessary act of messianic tikkun it was intended to be. I discuss this premise in great detail in my series of lectures, "The Kapici-Bashi Hypothesis of Sabbatai Zevi's Holy Apostasy to Islam; Chaverim who have not read them are welcome to request backcopies.
Aaron's Blessings,
Yakov Leib
Thu, 28 Oct 1999
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