The process was assisted by the drift of exiled Jews to Palestine and the growth of a school of kabbalistic studies at Safed in northern Galilee. Its first notable scholar was David ben Solomon ibn abi Zimra, who moved to Safed from Egypt, and was known as Radbaz. Moses ben Jacob Cordovero, or Remak (1522-70), provided the first complete and systematic theology of the kabbalah. But the real genius of the new movement was Isaac ben Solomon Luria (1534-72), known as ha-Ari, the Lion. His father was an Ashkenazi from east-central Europe who went to Jerusalem and married a Sephardi girl. So in the transmission of kabbalistic culture, Luria acted as a bridge between the two communities. He himself was brought up in Egypt by an uncle who was a tax-farmer. He went into trade, specializing in pepper and corn. Luria was a splendid example of the Jewish tradition that business is not incompatible with the intellectual life, or even the most intense mystical speculation. He traded and studied all his life. It was a sign of the democratization of the kabbalah that he absorbed its legends as a child. But as a young man he became expert in orthodox, non-mystic halakhah. One of his gifts was to reconcile and move easily between the two. He wrote very little. His only known book is a commentary on the ‘Book of Concealment’ in the Zohar. He only moved to Safed towards the end of his life, after spending the years 1569-70 pondering the Zohar on an island in the Nile. But once in Safed he had a mesmerizing effect on the wide circle of pupils he gathered round him. They memorized his teaching and later wrote it down (like the philosopher Wittgenstein’s pupils in the 1930s). He radiated not only holiness but power and authority. Some thought he might be the Messiah himself. He seemed to understand the language of birds. He often talked to the prophets. He would walk around Safed with his pupils, pointing out from intuitive knowledge the unidentified graves of holy men. Then he would get back to the export-import trade. He made up his last set of accounts only three days before he died. His early death produced tales that he had ascended to heaven, and miracle-stories quickly attached themselves to his name.51

Luria won his initial influence by teaching his pupils how to achieve intense states of meditation by concentrating entirely on the letters of the Divine Names. 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. It is a very potent brew once swallowed. However, Luria also had a cosmic theory which had an immediate direct bearing on belief in the Messiah, and which remains the most influential of all Jewish mystical ideas. The kabbalah listed the various layers of the cosmos. Luria postulated the thought that Jewish miseries were a symptom of the breakdown of the cosmos. Its shattered husks, or klippot, which are evil, none the less contain tiny sparks, tikkim, of the divine light. This imprisoned light is the Exile of the Jews. Even the divine Shekinah itself is part of the trapped light, subject to evil influences. The Jewish people have a dual significance in this broken cosmos, both as symbols and as active agents. As symbols, the injuries inflicted on them by the gentiles show how evil hurts the light. But 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. In antiquity they had fought the gentiles and evil–and lost. In the Middle Ages they had accepted passively the wrongs inflicted on them–and nothing had happened; their predicament had grown worse. Now they were told, in effect, that they were potent actors in a cosmic drama, for the greater the catastrophes which involved the Jews, the more certain they could be that the drama was reaching crisis. By their very piety, they could accelerate and resolve the crisis, generating a great wave of prayer and devotion on which the Messiah would sweep in to triumph.

All the same, the spread of kabbalistic messianism among the Jewish masses took more than a century. One of the reasons why Maimonides was so opposed to active speculation about the Messiah, and sought to present the Messianic Age itself in rational, almost humdrum terms as a time when all Jews would take to intense scholarship, was that he feared that what he termed ‘the rabble’52 would be swept by a wave of excitement into hailing a false Messiah, and then lapse into demoralized disillusionment. His apprehensions proved justified. The 1492 expulsions were seen as the birthpangs of the Messiah. In 1500-2 in north Italy Rabbi Asher Lemlein preached an imminent Coming. Messiahs of a sort duly appeared. In 1523 a plausible young man, probably a Falasha Jew from Ethiopia, arrived in Venice. One of his tales was that he was descended from King David. Another was that his father was a certain King Solomon, and his brother King Joseph, ruler of the Lost Tribes of Reuben, Gad and half-Manasseh. Hence he was known as David Reubeni. He took in many Jews and, for a time, some Christian princes. But he ended up in a Spanish prison. His tales inspired another claimant, Solomon Molcho, to proclaim himself the Messiah at Rome in 1530. He was burned alive two years later.⁵³

These fiascos–and there were others–discouraged learned men from using kabbalistic method to discern signs of Redemption. Joseph Caro, who went to Safed, deliberately ignored the kabbalah in both the academic and the popular versions of his code, and he did nothing to increase messianic speculation. But he also wrote a mystical diary, in which a miraculous mentor or maggid–the personified Mishnah–makes an appearance.54 Most rabbis were cool towards messianism, since it was not at all clear what part, if any, the rabbi would play in the Messianic Age. Luria’s greatest pupil, Hayyim Vital (1542-1620), certainly made no effort to bring his master’s theory to the masses. He spent the latter part of his long life concealing most of the lessons Luria taught him. However, in his Book of Visions, which he compiled 1610-12, an autobiographical work recording nearly half a century of dreams, he makes it clear that he believed Luria was worthy to have become the Messiah and that he himself might be called. One dream recounts: ‘I heard a voice saying out loud: “The Messiah is coming and the Messiah stands before me.” He blew the horn and thousands and tens of thousands from Israel were gathered to him. He said to us: “Come with me and you shall see the avenging of the destruction of the Temple.”’⁵⁵ Moreover, by the 1630s most of Luria’s teaching, as revised by Vital and the Master’s other leading pupil, Joseph ibn Tabul, was in print and widely read.

From Safed, Lurianic kabbalah spread gradually to Jewish communities in Turkey, the Balkans and eastern Europe. In Poland, where Jewish printing presses existed in Lublin and elsewhere, its impact was strong and wide. By the end of the sixteenth century, it was regarded there as a normative part of Judaism. Rabbi Joel Sirkes ruled in a responsum that ‘he who raises objections to the science of the kabbalah’ was ‘liable to excommunication’. 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.

Much of the superstition in the ghetto was very old. Though the Bible itself was remarkably free, on the whole, of angel-devil material, it began to penetrate Judaism during the early rabbinic period and acquired official status in the aggadah. The miraculous tales told about Luria had circulated about the early sages too. Hillel, like Luria, could understand what the birds were saying to each other–and all the animals, and even the trees and clouds. The sages dealt in moral fables of all kinds. It was said that Hillel’s pupil, Johanan ben Zakkai, ‘knew the parables of laundrymen and fox fables’. The Rabbi Meir was reckoned to have known 300 fox fables. It was the sages who let the devils into Judaism. The difficulty was, of course, that despite the Bible’s condemnation of sorcery (e.g. ‘Thou shalt not tolerate a sorceress’–Exodus 22:18), and despite the Judaic belief that all actions were willed by God alone, ruling out any kind of dualism, some relics of ancient black and white magic lingered on in the texts and were given a kind of inferred sanction. Thus the bells worn on the robes of the high-priest were designed to combat devils. So, it could be argued, were phylacteries, one of the most honoured devices of responsible Jewish piety. There were not many devils in the Bible, but they did exist: Mevet the death-god, Lilith the child-stealer (sometimes an owl), Reshev the plague-god, Dever, another sickness-god, Belial, a sort of devil-commander, Satan, leader of the anti-God forces, Azazel, the scapegoat-god of the wilderness.56 So the invasion of Judaism by devils over the period 150 BC to 300 AD had some precedents. Needless to say, Hillel could understand devil language too. Devils varied greatly, though according to Isaac of Acre they all lacked thumbs. Some, like Satan and Belial, were formidable, serious. Some were evil or unclean spirits, called ru’ah tezazit in the Talmud. They entered an individual, possessed him, spoke through the mouth. Kabbalistic literature written by Luria’s disciples was full of stories about these disgusting creatures, which in the ghettos of Ashkenazi Jewry, especially in Poland, came to be known as dybbuks. The literature also taught how they could be exorcised by a learned, holy man, or ba’al shem, who redeemed the possessed soul by using one of Luria’s ‘sparks’. There were also poltergeist-devils, called kesilim or lezim, who threw things and, for instance, hit people who left holy books open. There were she-devils also, in addition to Lilith, one of them being the Queen of Sheba. Ghetto Jews believed it was dangerous to drink water at the change of the seasons because that was when devil-women dropped evil menstrual blood in wells and streams.

To combat these devils, an army of angels came into existence. These too had Biblical sanction in some cases. Angels like Michael, Gabriel, Raphael and Metatron had special alphabets, derived from ancient cuneiform writing or obsolete Hebraic scripts, the letters often containing small circles which looked like eyes. These letters were put on amulets and other charms to magic away devils. Or they could be driven off by pronouncing special combinations of letters. One such was the name of the devil in Aramaic, which was given as abracadabra; another was shabriri, after the devil of blindness.⁵⁷ Letter combination magic, performed by using the secret names of God and the angels in special formulae, was known as ‘Practical Kabbalah’. In theory only men of great sanctity could, let alone should, exercise this white magic. In practice, protective charms were mass produced and circulated freely in the ghetto. There was also black magic, invoked by manipulating ‘the unholy names’. According to the Zohar, the sources of this forbidden magic were the leaves of the Tree of Knowledge in the Book of Genesis. The fallen angels Azael and Aza taught it to sorcerers who journeyed to the Mountains of Darkness to study. Virtuous kabbalists had a right to acquire such arts but only for theoretical purposes. In practice, harmful spells were also cast in the ghetto.

The most stupendous piece of magic was the creation of a golem, an artificial man into which a ba’al shem, or Master of the Name, could breathe life by pronouncing one of the secret divine names according to a special formula. The idea derives from the creation story of Adam, but the actual word occurs only once in the Bible, in a mysterious passage in the Psalms.58 However, talmudic legends accumulated around the golem. Jeremiah was said to have made one. Another was made by Ben Sira. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries the notion gathered force, so that the ability to make a golem was attributed to any man of outstanding sanctity and kabbalistic knowledge. The golem was brought to life to perform a variety of tasks, including defending Jews from their gentile enemies. In theory, a golem came to life when God’s secret name, with the letters arranged in the correct order, was put into its mouth; it was deactivated by reversing the name. But a golem occasionally got out of hand and ran amok–thereby generating a new layer of terror-tales.

Devils, angels, golems and other mysterious figures constituted the basic population of ghetto folklore, leading to countless superstitious practices. They gave life in the ghetto an extraordinary density, which was at one and the same time frightening and comforting, and always vivid, rich, exciting. Some of the customs current in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries surfaced in a work published in London in 1738 called The Book of Religion, Ceremonies and Prayers of the Jews, supposedly by Gamaliel ben Pedahzur, actually written by an apostate, Abraham Mears. It related that evil spirits were to be found in whirls of dust and rubbish-heaps. Bad ghosts could harm a person in the dark but only if he was by himself. If two were present, the ghost could appear but do no harm; if three, it could do nothing. A torch had the same effect. Witches could do harm if they found discarded pottery or eggshells which had not been pounded into bits; or green vegetable tops tied together in a bunch. Much of the lore concerned funerals and weddings. Thus, if you wished to ask forgiveness of a dead man you had wronged, you stood at the foot of the coffin and took the man’s big toe in your hand while praying for his pardon; if the nose bled violently, pardon was refused. To break a glass at a wedding-feast was to ward off bad luck. ‘The Bachelors’, wrote the author, ‘generally strive to carry off a bit of the broken pipkin, believing it likely to promote their being married soon after.’ Superstition blended imperceptibly into folk-medicine:

There are some women among them that pretend to cure all Distempers, which they believe to proceed from an evil Eye, by the Sympathy of Fumigation: some part of the Garment worn by the Patient is sent to the said Doctoress, which she holds over some certain smoking stuff of her own Composure, muttering some few words over the Garment, under the Operation, and that Garment being return’d in a few minutes to the Patient, to wear immediately, never fails of giving Relief, unless their Ailment has been of too long Standing before the old Woman smoak’d them. The usual Price for smoaking of a Child’s Cap, is a shilling. A woman’s Petticoat, two shillings. A Man’s Pair of Breeches, half a crown. NB, the Spanish Jews pay more because the Smoakers are German.59

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. The most learned and rational-minded rabbi and the worldliest merchant trusted in the Messiah’s coming as fervently as the semi-literate wife of a humble milkman. The Messiah was linked to tales of the Lost Tribes since it was widely assumed that, in order to achieve the restoration of a godly kingdom on earth, the Messiah would summon the tribes from their remote exile and they would march, a mighty army, to place him on King David’s throne. It was not a ghetto story-teller but the great Mishnah commentator Obadiah ben Abraham Yare of Bertinoro who described (1489), on the authority of ‘reliable Moslem merchants’, how a ‘fifty-day journey through the desert’ brought one to ‘the great Sambatyon River’. There ‘the children of Israel live like a thread…saintly and pure like angels: there are no sinners among them. On the outer side of the Sambatyon River there are Children of Israel as numerous as the sands of the seashore, kings and lords, but they are not as saintly or pure as those living on the inner side of the river.’⁶⁰ These teeming millions would form the legions of the Messiah’s conquering host.

History shows repeatedly that what helps to spread a religious idea fastest is a clear and practical description of the mechanics of salvation. That is precisely 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 great historian Gershom Scholem, who spent his life studying the impact of kabbalistic mysticism on Jewish society, stressed the universality of the belief among Jewish communities, around the mid-seventeenth century, that the world was on the brink of great events.61 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. In the 1650s and 1660s, there were many thousands of refugees to be accommodated in Jewish communities everywhere, and fund-raising activities for their support helped to generate the ferment of expectation. But messianic hopes, thanks to Lurianic doctrine, were high even in remote communities, like Morocco, where little was known of the Polish disasters. The wave of excitement mounted especially in Salonika and the Balkans, in Constantinople and throughout Turkey, in Palestine and Egypt; but it was felt too in hard-bitten trading centres like Leghorn, Amsterdam and Hamburg. It swept along rich and poor, learned and ignorant, communities which were in danger and those which felt themselves safe. 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 Ashkenazi, known as Nathan of Gaza (c. 1643-80). This young man was learned, brilliant, inventive and resourceful. He had been born in Jerusalem, son of a respected rabbinical scholar and kabbalist; had married the daughter of a wealthy Gaza merchant and gone to live there; and in 1664 he had taken up the intensive study of Lurianic kabbalah. He quickly mastered Lurianic techniques of meditation and ecstasy-inducement. By early 1665 he was experiencing prolonged visions. But it is significant that he was already modifying Lurianic concepts to suit the particular projection of the Messiah he was conceiving in his mind. Nathan was an outstanding example of a highly imaginative and dangerous Jewish archetype which was to become of world importance when the Jewish intellect became secularized. He could construct a system of explanations and predictions of phenomena which was both highly plausible and at the same time sufficiently imprecise and flexible to accommodate new–and often highly inconvenient–events when they occurred. And he had the gift of presenting his protean-type theory, with its built-in capacity to absorb phenomena by a process of osmosis, with tremendous conviction and aplomb. Marx and Freud were to exploit a similar capacity.

While still in Jerusalem, Nathan had come across Shabbetai Zevi, who was about eighteen years his senior, and a well-known eccentric. He had paid Zevi little attention. After he had absorbed Lurianic kabbalah, however, and developed–at any rate to his own satisfaction–visionary and prophetic powers, Nathan recalled the Zevi case and drew him into his system. Zevi was in every way Nathan’s inferior: less learned, less intelligent, less inventive; but he had the necessary ingredient for a Messiah-subject: self-absorption. He was born in Smyrna, now an expanding trading-centre, where his father was an agent for Dutch and English firms. Both his brothers became successful merchants. He was bookish, went through a rabbinic training, graduated at eighteen, and then studied the kabbalah. He had the characteristics of what would later be called a manic-depressive. Periods of exaltation and hyperactivity were abruptly succeeded by spasms of intense gloom. These are common enough among mystics of all religions, and are seen as God’s work–God ‘illuminates’, then ‘hides His face’. Thus the abrupt transformations do not necessarily detract from the subject’s reputation for sanctity. Unfortunately for Zevi, during his manic phases he had a tendency to break the law and blaspheme. He pronounced the forbidden name of God. He conflated three feasts and celebrated them simultaneously. He went through a mystic marriage with the Torah under a wedding canopy. The 1648 massacres inspired him to proclaim himself the Messiah. Like many mystics, he wanted to do and legitimize forbidden things. Thus he invoked a benediction to ‘Him who allows the forbidden’. During the 1650s he was expelled in turn from Smyrna, Salonika and Constantinople. At times his state of mind was placid and normal, and he even sought treatment for what he saw were diabolical fantasies. But then the bad urges would return. He had been married and divorced twice, neither union being consummated. In 1664, while in a manic state in Cairo, he contracted a third marriage with a girl called Sarah, a refugee from the massacres, whose reputation was dubious. But there was prophetic precedent for this too: had not Hosea married a whore? In the following winter, however, he again decided to seek help in exorcising his demons. Having heard that a young kabbalist called Nathan was experiencing remarkable visions, he went there in the spring of 1665.

By the time the two men came together, in April, Nathan had already experienced his vision in which the Messiah-claimant he remembered from Jerusalem figured prominently. So when Zevi actually turned up in his house, seeking help, Nathan judged the event providential. Far from exorcising Zevi’s demons, Nathan concentrated his formidable powers of argument and invention on persuading Zevi that his messianic claims were authentic and must be pursued. Then and thereafter Nathan proved extraordinarily adept at fitting Zevi’s biography and characteristics into the patterns of canonical and apocryphal texts, and Lurianic theory–especially as amended by himself. So he hailed Zevi as the Messiah, and Zevi, convinced again, promptly went into another manic phase. With the zealous Nathan at his side, he made his claim public, and this time it was accepted. He was soon riding around Gaza on horseback, in kingly state, and appointing ambassadors to summon all the tribes of Israel.

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. The time was right; the intellectual mood was right. Nathan the Prophet, the ‘holy lamp’, burned with conviction and radiated exact knowledge. Zevi the Messiah dispensed charm and regal condescension. The combination worked brilliantly in Gaza, where the rabbis joined in the acclamation. It was less successful in Jerusalem, where many rabbis (including Nathan’s old teacher) rejected the claims and eventually had the new messiah expelled. But the Jerusalem authorities were none the less anxious to hedge their bets. They did not send out letters to Jewish communities warning them about an imposture. There and elsewhere sceptical rabbis usually judged it best to hold their peace. The majority of rabbis everywhere were taken in. Later, after the bubble had burst, many insisted they had opposed Zevi’s pretensions. But, as Scholem has shown, the documents tell a different story.

Hence in 1665 and for most of 1666 there was no authoritative pronouncement against the new Messiah. The skilfully worded letters announcing the events, which Nathan wrote or drafted, and which were dispatched to Jewish communities over the world, went unanswered. Of course, most Jews expected the coming of the Messiah to be attended by miracles. But there was good authority–Maimonides no less–to say that this would not happen. Moreover, Nathan anticipated an absence of miracles by cleverly adapting Lurianic theory. Since, he argued, the Messiah had been summoned by Jewish prayers and piety, it followed logically that pure, trusting faith was alone requisite to sustain his mission. So neither he nor his prophet was required to perform miracles. In fact Nathan’s precaution was unnecessary. Miracles were duly performed–though always somewhere else. This followed spontaneously from the Jewish custom of spreading news of disaster and triumph in long, excited letters, often based on rumours. Thus Constantinople wrote to Leghorn recounting wonders occurring in Cairo. News of miracles in Salonika was passed from Rome to Hamburg, and then on to Poland. The first announcement most western Jews received did not concern Zevi at all but the Ten Lost Tribes, who were variously said to be assembling in Persia or the Sahara, and marching on Mecca–or Constantinople.

In September 1665 Nathan sent out a long letter outlining the Messiah’s programme. His work, said Nathan, had now superseded the Lurianic system and opened a new phase in history. He had the power to justify all sinners himself. First he would take the crown of Turkey, and make the sultan his servant. Next he would go to the River Sambatyon to gather the tribes and marry Rebecca, the thirteen-year-old daughter of Moses, who had come back to life again. During his absence the Turks might rebel and cause tribulations for Jews. Hence it was necessary for all Jews to do penance immediately. Meanwhile Zevi himself had begun a triumphal northwards progress, first to Aleppo, then to Smyrna and on to Constantinople, and it was now that mass hysteria began to break out. Zevi increased it by reverting to his old manic habits. He ‘pronounced the Ineffable Name, are [forbidden] fats and did other things against the Lord and his Law, even pressing others to do likewise’, according to a contemporary account.62 If a rabbi protested, the vast crowd which now accompanied Zevi everywhere was liable to attack the critic’s house. In Smyrna, Zevi himself took an axe to the door of the Sephardi synagogue, which refused to recognize him, and forced his way in. Once inside, he denounced the unbelieving rabbis as unclean animals, took a holy scroll into his arms and sang a Spanish love-song, announced the date of the Redemption for 18 June 1666, proclaimed the imminent deposition of the Turkish sultan, and distributed the kingdoms of the world among his immediate followers. When one of the critical rabbis present asked him for proofs, Zevi excommunicated him on the spot, and led the mob in pronouncing the forbidden name as proof of their faith in him. He then ‘liberated’ Jewish womenfolk by freeing them from the curse of Eva, and dispatched messengers to Constantinople to prepare for his arrival, leaving for the city by boat on 30 December 1665.

Throughout the winter of 1665-6, and for most of the following year, the Jewish world was in ferment. Responding to Nathan’s calls to penance–his exhortations were printed in vast numbers in Frankfurt, Prague, Mantua, Constantinople and Amsterdam–Jews prayed, fasted and took constant ritual baths. They lay down naked in the snow. They scourged themselves. Many sold all their possessions and went on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, hoping to see the Messiah there. Some believed they would be transported on clouds. Others bought passages. Abraham Pereira, reputedly the richest Jew in Amsterdam, left with his household for Palestine, though his ship got no further than Leghorn. Poems were written, books printed and dated ‘the first year of the renewal of the prophecy and the kingdom’. Public processions were organized. Some of the excitement was generated by Christian millenarians, who also believed that 1666 was a magic year. There were riots in various Polish cities, and in May the crown forbade any further Jewish demonstrations. The Jewish fervour also set off reactions, some sympathetic, some hostile, in the Islamic world, and the Turkish authorities became alarmed.

Hence when Zevi’s ship reached Turkish waters in February 1666, it was promptly detained and the Messiah taken ashore in chains. He was held in honourable captivity, however, and allowed to receive visitors. Nathan, in the first of his rationalizations of events to fit his theory, explained that the Messiah’s imprisonment was no more than symbolic and outward and reflected his inward struggle with the evil forces which prevented the divine sparks from shining forth. Zevi maintained his pretensions in the fortress at Gallipoli, where he was held, and apparently sent away delegations of Jews quite happy. An inquiry from the community in Venice elicited a reassuring response from the Constantinople Jews, carefully disguised as a trade report: ‘We looked into the matter and examined the merchandise of Rabbi Israel, for his goods are displayed here under our very eyes. We have come to the conclusion that they are very valuable…but we must wait until the day of the great fair comes.’63 But the day, scheduled for the summer of 1666, passed. Early in September Zevi was visited by a Polish kabbalist Nehemiah ha-Cohen, who may have been a Turkish plant, or possibly a rival Messiah. He cross-questioned Zevi about his claims, found his answers unsatisfactory and denounced him to the Turks as an impostor. On 15 September Zevi was brought before the council, or divan, in Constantinople, in the presence of the sultan, who listened hidden in a latticed alcove. Zevi denied ever having made messianic claims. He was then given the choice between converting to Islam or death. At the urging of the sultan’s doctor, an apostate Jew, he took the turban, assumed the name of Aziz Mehmed Effendi and the title ‘Keeper of the Palace Gates’ and accepted a government pension of 150 piastres a day.

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, though many refused to believe it at first. Rabbis and communal leaders, both those who had accepted the claims and the few who had denied them, closed ranks to impose a total silence on the affair. It was argued that any post-mortem would be to challenge the divine, inscrutable wisdom which allowed the fiasco to happen. There was also grave concern that the Turks would start a witch-hunt against Jewish leaders who acquiesced in what, after all, would have been a revolt against Ottoman rule. So every official effort was made to rewrite, or unwrite, history and pretend the affair had never happened. Communal records referring to it were destroyed.

Nathan of Gaza, on the other hand, merely enlarged his theory again to fit the new facts. The apostasy was transformed into a necessary paradox or dialectical contradiction. Far from being a betrayal, it was in fact the beginning of a new mission to release the Lurianic sparks which were distributed among the gentiles and in particular in Islam. While the Jews were restoring the sparks scattered among themselves–that was the easy part–the Messiah had the far more difficult task of gathering in the sparks in the alien world. Only he could do it, and it meant descending into the realm of evil. In appearance he was submitting to it, but in reality he was a Trojan Horse in the enemy’s camp. Warming to his task, Nathan pointed out that Zevi had always done strange things. This was merely the strangest–to embrace the shame of apostasy as the final sacrifice before revealing the full glory of his messianic triumph. The notion of hidden meanings was familiar to students of kabbalah. Once the idea of the pretend-apostasy was accepted, everything else–including Zevi’s subsequent actions under Turkish supervision–confirmed the new theory, for which Nathan quickly provided massive documentation in Biblical, talmudic and kabbalistic texts. Nathan visited Zevi several times and the two men were able to align Nathan’s explanations with Zevi’s behaviour. His manic phases recurred from time to time, and during them he sometimes reasserted his messianic claims. He also engaged in wild sexual antics, to the point where his enemies in Constantinople, both Jewish and Moslem, combined to persuade or bribe the sultan–who rather liked Zevi–to exile him to Albania, where he died in 1676. Even his death, however, did not stump Nathan, who declared it a mere ‘occultation’: Zevi had ascended into heaven and been absorbed into the ‘supernal lights.’

Nathan himself died four years later in 1680. But by the time he too disappeared he had elaborated a flexible theory which accommodated not only all Zevi’s actions but any other disconcerting events which might occur in the future. There were not, he argued, one set of lights, as Luria and other kabbalists had believed, but two: a thoughtful set (good) and a thoughtless set (indifferent but liable to be bad). Creation proceeds by a dialectic between the two sets of lights, in which the Messiah-figure plays a unique part, quite different from that of ordinary souls, which often demands heroic sacrifices from him, including taking on to himself the appearance of evil to purify others. The theory made sense whether Zevi reappeared, sent a substitute or stayed silent and invisible. In this alternative or heretical system of kabbalah, Nathan worked out his dialectic in enormous detail and with copious imagery.

As a result, the Shabbatean movement, sometimes openly, sometimes in secret, not only survived the débâcle of the apostasy but continued in existence for over a century. Most rabbis came to hate it not only because Nathan’s theory in its final form was plainly heretical but also because when predicted reappearances of Zevi failed to happen–as in 1700 and 1706–many disappointed Shabbateans converted to Christianity or Islam. But some rabbis were occult Shabbateans themselves, and there were few people in the non-rationalist stream of Judaism to whom Nathan’s rubbery ideas did not exercise some appeal. The movement survived splits, nonconformist deviations of its own and eventually produced a breakaway religion founded by a reincarnation of Zevi called Jacob Frank (1726-91).

Frank was born Jacob ben Judah Leib, the son of a Polish merchant and part-time rabbi. He himself became a cloth-dealer. He had little learning and called himself a prostak or simple man. None the less, while trading in the Balkans, he was initiated into secret Shabbatean rites, by followers of the extreme wing of the movement. He became a prophet and eventually claimed quasi-divine status as the possessor of Zevi’s soul. When he returned to Poland, while posing as an orthodox Sephardi Jew–hence his name Frank, the Ashkenazi Yiddish term for a Sephardi–he secretly conducted Shabbatean services as head of an underground movement within Judaism. He and his followers also indulged in sexual practices forbidden by the Torah. Indeed, following the convenient dialectic established by Nathan of Gaza, they distinguished between the ordinary Torah of halakhah, which they ignored, and claimed the right to follow only the ‘higher’ or ‘spiritual’ Torah forms, the ‘Torah of Emanation’.

In 1756 Frank was excommunicated by a rabbinical court at Brody, and to escape arrest he fled to Turkey where he found it useful to embrace Islam. The Orthodox Jews then appealed to the Polish Catholic authorities for help in dispersing the sect. But the Frankists also turned to the Catholics, on the grounds that they rejected the Talmud and therefore had more in common with Rome. The bishops, delighted, organized a public disputation and forced the rabbis as well as the Frankists to attend. It took place in June 1757 and the presiding prelate, Bishop Dembowski, pronounced in favour of the Frankists and ordered copies of the Talmud to be burned in the city square of Kamieniec. Alas for the bishop, he died suddenly during the conflagration. The rabbis took this as a divine sign of approval, and resumed their persecution of the Frankists with new fervour. In retaliation, Frank took his following into Catholicism, being baptized in 1759. He even assisted the Catholics in investigating blood libels. But he also collected twelve ‘sisters’, who served as his concubines, practised various enormities, and found himself in prison. He then turned to the Russian Orthodox Church.

While embracing Judaism, Islam, Roman Catholicism and Orthodoxy, Frank continued to follow Nathan’s expanded religious theories. He created a new Trinity, of the ‘Good God’, ‘Big Brother’ and ‘She’, the last an amalgam of the Shekinah and the Virgin Mary, and eventually propounded the notion that the messianic idea could be pursued equally well in all the main religions or, for that matter, in the secular enlightenment or freemasonry. Thus the kabbalah, which began in unspecific, formless gnosticism in late antiquity, returned to unspecific, formless gnosticism in the late eighteenth century.

It is significant that Frank, in order to achieve some kind of legal cover for his sect, had to affect adherence to both Christianity and Islam. The contrast with the activities of his contemporary, Samuel Jacob Hayyim Falk (c. 1710-82), is instructive. Falk, born in Galicia, was another kabbalist and adventurer, though far more learned than Frank. He too came in conflict with the law. In Westphalia he narrowly escaped burning as a wizard. The Archbishop of Cologne expelled him from his territories. In 1742 he came to England, and there he seems to have pursued his religious destiny without hindrance. He ran a private synagogue from a house in Wellclose Square, London. On old London Bridge he maintained a kabbalistic laboratory, where he practised alchemy. He was said to have saved the Great Synagogue from fire by putting magical inscriptions on the doorposts. In his time he was known as ‘the Ba’al Shem of London’.64

That a Jew like Falk could live his life in freedom under English law was a fact of immense importance in Jewish history. It meant that, for the first time since the days of the liberal Roman empire, there was one country where Jews could enjoy something approximating to normal citizenship. How did this come about? To understand this great turning-point, we must return again to 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. Thus 1648 was a sombre milestone on the long road which led eventually to the Holocaust. But 1648, with its slaughter and distress, was also–thanks to a series of coincidences which some might call providential–the first in a remarkable chain of events which led to the creation of an independent Jewish state.

The agent in this new development was a distinguished Jewish scholar from Amsterdam, Manasseh ben Israel (1604-57). He had been born a marrano in Madeira and baptized Manoel Dias Soeiro. But after his father escaped from an auto-da-fé in Lisbon and came to the Netherlands, the family resumed its Jewish identity and Manasseh became a talmudic prodigy, writing his first book at seventeen.⁶⁵ He was concerned throughout his life to present a favourable image of Judaism to the gentile world and win acceptance. Many of his books were written for Christian readers. He tried to demonstrate that Christianity and Judaism had more in common than most people supposed, and he achieved a high reputation among Christian fundamentalists. When the first refugees from the 1648 massacres began to reach western Europe, Manasseh and other Amsterdam Jews feared the consequences for the community of a large influx of distressed Ashkenazis. Their own position in Holland was ambiguous. They had no rights of citizenship. They were not admitted to the guilds. The Dutch government did not interfere with the practice of their faith, provided it was done quietly, and in fact the community, especially in Amsterdam, was thriving. But all this could be jeopardized by the refugees. Indeed in Hamburg the arrival of large numbers led to a temporary expulsion of all Jews in 1649. Manasseh therefore proposed a radical solution: why should not English be opened up as a country of refuge for Jewish immigrants?

Since Edward I had expelled the English Jews in 1290, it was widely believed there was an absolute legal ban on Jews residing there. In fact a few Jews lived there throughout the centuries of supposed exclusion, especially as doctors and traders.66 One Jew, Sir Edward Brampton, alias Duarte Brandão, was Governor of Guernsey under Richard III. Another, Dr Roderigo Lopez, had been Elizabeth I’s doctor and the victim of a notorious anti-Semitic witch-hunt and treason trial in 1593-4.⁶⁷ At the time when the Ukrainian massacres took place, one of the five merchants contracted to supply corn to the English army was a Jew, Antonio Fernandez Carvajal, who had come to London in 1630, and was said to import £100,000 of silver annually. All the same, Jews were not officially admitted.

Manasseh perceived that the defeat of the English royalists and the execution of the king in 1649 offered a unique opportunity for the Jews to gain entry to England. The king’s Puritan opponents, now effectively running the country, had always represented the philosemitic tradition there. The Bible was their guide to current events. They invoked the Prophet Amos to condemn Star Chamber. They adduced the case of Naboth’s Vineyard as a prefiguration of Ship Money. The Puritan common lawyer, Sir Henry Finch, had published in 1621 The World’s Great Restauration, or Calling of the Jews–a work the crown had condemned for lèse-majésté.⁶⁸ Many believed that the Second Coming was imminent. But both Deuteronomy 28:64 and Daniel 12:7 suggested this could not happen until the scattering of the Jews was complete, ‘from the one end of the earth even unto the other’. Hence, until Jews were scattered in England too, the millenium would be delayed. This was a notion Manasseh shared with English fundamentalists, since Kezeh ha-Arez, the ‘end of the earth’, was the medieval Hebrew term for England, and he believed the acceptance of Jews in England would hasten the Messiah’s coming. He opened his campaign in the winter of 1648-9 with a book entitled An Apology for the Honourable Nation of the Jews, which he signed ‘Edward Nicholas’. He followed this in 1650 with a far more important work, Spes Israelis, translated as The Hope of Israel, in which he advanced the millenarian argument. The first Anglo-Dutch War postponed more practical measures, but in September 1655 Manasseh came to London himself. He presented a petition to Oliver Cromwell, the Lord Protector, requesting that the laws forbidding the Jews entry be repealed and that they be granted admission on terms to be laid down by the government.⁶⁹

What followed was a characteristic English muddle, which is worth examining in detail because it proved of such critical importance in the whole of Jewish history. Cromwell received Manasseh’s petition favourably and referred it to the Council. On 12 November 1655 the Council appointed a sub-committee to examine the matter and seek expert legal advice. On 4 December a conference was held in Whitehall attended by twenty-five lawyers, including the Chief Justice, Sir John Glynne, and the Chief Baron of the Exchequer, William Steele. To the surprise of the politicians they announced that there was no law whatever which prevented Jews coming to England. Edward’s 1290 expulsion was an act of royal prerogative which affected only the individuals concerned. Somewhat illogically, the sub-committee then got down to discussing the conditions on which Jews were to be admitted. But it could not agree. The Jews had enemies among the Commonwealth men, as well as friends. After four sessions, Cromwell dismissed it on 18 December. Manasseh, bitterly disappointed, went back to Amsterdam the following year, believing he had failed.

But he had, in fact, misunderstood the way the English did things. They preferred a pragmatic to a clear-cut ideological solution. If an agreement had been drawn up, giving a special legal status to Jewish immigrants, they would necessarily have been branded as second-class citizens. When the monarchy was restored in 1660, Charles II would quite possibly have repudiated the deal, or renegotiated it with harsher terms. In either case the Jewish question would have become a public issue, raising anti-Semitic hackles. As it was, the matter was resolved pragmatically, without a specific treaty. While Manasseh was still in London, a man called Antonio Rodrigues Robles, a marrano legally, though in fact a Jew, was being proceeded against in court as a Spanish alien, England and Spain being at war. Some twenty marrano families decided, in March 1656, to resolve the matter by openly confessing their Judaism, declaring themselves refugees from the Spanish Inquisition, and petitioning the Council for the right to practise their religion in private. On 16 May the Council ordered the proceedings against Robles quashed, and at a further meeting on 25 June it seemingly granted the petition, though the minutes for that day were later mysteriously removed. At any rate, on 4 August there arrived from Amsterdam ‘a scroll of the Law of fine parchment, with its binder and mantle of yellow velvet, a red damask cloth for the reading desk and a spice-box lined with red taffeta’, and the London Jews went ahead with leasing a building in Creechurch Lane for their first synagogue.

Hence, by a sort of tacit conspiracy, the question of the special status for the Jews was dropped. As there was no statute stopping them from coming, they came. As the Council said they could practise their religion, they practised it. When the Conventical Act, aimed at Nonconformists, was passed in 1664, the Jews, led by their new rabbi, Jacob Sasportas, took their anxieties to Charles II, who told them, ‘laughing and spitting’, not to worry; and later the Privy Council put it in writing that Jews could ‘promise themselves the effects of the same favour as formerly they have had, so long as they demean themselves peaceably and quietly, with due obedience to His Majesty’s laws and without scandal to his government’.

Thus the English Jews, by an act of omission, as it were, became full citizens, subject to no more disabilities than those inherent in their own unwillingness, like Catholics and Nonconformists, to belong to the Church of England or, in their particular case, to swear Christian oaths. Over the next generation, various judicial rulings established the right of Jews to plead and give evidence in the courts, and to have their religious susceptibilities recognized for this purpose. It is true that, like other non-Anglicans, they were barred from many offices and from parliament. But there were no legal restraints, as such, on their economic activities. Indeed discrimination arose chiefly within the Jewish community. Its dominant Sephardi element still felt insecure and deplored any influx of poor Ashkenazi Jews, especially if the community had to support them. It ruled in 1678-9 that German Jews could not be allowed to hold office, vote at meetings or read the scrolls. But this ruling was found to be against Jewish law and had to be modified. So far as the English courts were concerned, the Jews seem to have received justice and protection from the start, English judges in general being well disposed to hard-working, law-abiding citizens who did not disturb the king’s peace. Indeed in 1732 a judgment gave Jews, in effect, legal protection against generic libels which might endanger life. Hence almost by accident England became the first place in which it was possible for a modern Jewish community to emerge.

The consequences in America were still more important. In 1654 the French privateer St Catherine brought twenty-three Jewish refugees from Recife in Brazil to the Dutch colonial town of New Amsterdam. As in Amsterdam itself, the position of Jews under Dutch colonial rule was uncertain: Calvinists, though better disposed than Lutherans, could also be oppressive and anti-Semitic. The Governor of New Amsterdam, Peter Stuyvesant, protested to the Dutch West India Company against this settlement of what he termed ‘a deceitful race’ whose ‘abominable religion’ worshipped ‘the feet of Mammon’. The Jews were allowed to stay but they were not accorded any rights and company and governor united to forbid them to build a synagogue. But any ambiguities were resolved in 1664 when the town fell to the English and became New York. Thereafter the Jews enjoyed not only the advantages of English citizenship but the additional religious freedoms the colonists in the New World had taken for themselves.

Richard Nicholls, New York’s first English governor, stressed the right to freedom of worship when he proclaimed in 1665: ‘No person shall be molested, fined or imprisoned for differing in judgment in matters of religion, who profess Christianity.’ The omission of any reference to Judaism seems to have been an oversight. The English wanted colonists, especially those with mercantile skills and good trading contacts. The next governor, Edmund Andros, made no reference to Christianity when he promised equal treatment and protection to law-abiding persons ‘of what religion soever’. As in England, the issue of Jewishness was not raised. Jews simply came, built houses, enjoyed equal rights and, it seems, voted in the earliest elections; they held offices too.70

They began to settle in other areas, notably the Delaware Valley and Rhode Island, which Roger Williams had founded as a libertarian colony where no religious bars whatever applied. Some difficulties arose when Jews wished to have their own cemetery in New York. But in 1677 one was opened in Newport, RI–later the subject of one of Longfellow’s finest poems–and New York got its own five years later. In 1730 the Shearith Israel Congregation in New York consecrated its first synagogue, and a particularly fine new one was built at Newport in 1763, today a national shrine. Under the English Navigation Acts, trade within colonies and the mother country was limited to English citizens; and when the imperial parliament enacted the Naturalization Act for the North American colonies, the Jews were allowed to acquire citizenship on a par with Christian settlers, two provisions being dropped to allow for Jewish scruples. Hence the Swede Peter Kalm, visiting New York in 1740, recorded that Jews ‘enjoy all the privileges common to the other inhabitants of this town and province’.⁷¹ It was the same in Philadelphia, where an important Jewish colony began to grow up from the 1730s onwards.

Thus was born American Jewry. It was, from the start, unlike any Jewry elsewhere. In Europe and Afro-Asia, where religious barriers were universal in some form, the Jews always had to negotiate or have imposed upon them a special status. This obliged them to form specific and usually legally defined communities, wherever they settled. To a greater or lesser extent, all these Jewish communities were self-governing, even though the actual condition of the Jews might be miserable and perilous. In Poland, under the monarchy, the Jews enjoyed a kind of home rule, governing themselves through the Councils of the Lands, which their wealthier members elected. They were taxed more heavily than the surrounding Poles and had no real right of self-defence, but otherwise they ran their own affairs. To a less pronounced extent this was true of every Jewish settlement in Continental Europe. The Jews always ran their own schools, courts, hospitals and social services. They appointed and paid their own officials, rabbis, judges, slaughterers, circumcisers, schoolteachers, bakers and cleaners. They had their own shops. Wherever they were, the Jews formed tiny states within states. This was the ghetto system, and it applied even in places like Amsterdam where no legal ghettoing existed.

In North America it was quite different, even before the United States attained independence. With the virtual absence of religious-determined law, there was no reason why Jews should operate a separate legal system, except on matters which could be seen as merely internal religious discipline. Since all religious groups had virtually equal rights, there was no point in any constituting itself into a separate community. All could participate in a common society. Hence from the start, the Jews in America were not organized on communal but on congregational lines, like the other churches. In Europe, the synagogue was merely one organ of the all-embracing Jewish community. In North America it was the only governing body in Jewish life. American Jews did not belong to ‘the Jewish community’, as they did in Europe. They belonged to a particular synagogue. It might be Sephardi or Ashkenazi; or, of the latter, it might be German, English, Holland, Polish, all of them differing on small ritual points. Protestant groups were divided on comparable lines. Hence a Jew went to ‘his’ synagogue, just as a Protestant went to ‘his’ church. In other respects, both Jew and Protestant were part of the general citizenry, in which they merged as secular units. Thus for the first time Jews, without in any way renouncing their religion, began to achieve integration.

This was of enormous long-term consequence when the Jewish population of North America began to expand rapidly.72 For it meant that Jewry was no longer a dualism: Erez Israel and the diaspora. The Jewish presence in the world formed, rather, a tripod of forces: Israel, the diaspora, American Jewry, which was quite different in kind to any other diaspora settlement and proved, in the end, the Third Force which enabled the Zionist state to come into existence.

This was in the future, but even in the early modern period the acceptance of the Jews in the Anglo-Saxon area of power began to have a growing impact on the role Jews played in the economy, giving it a permanency and stability it had never possessed before. At various times, in antiquity, in the Dark and early Middle Ages, in the seventeenth century, the Jews had been brilliant traders and entrepreneurs, and often extremely successful ones. But Jewish economic power was ultra-vulnerable, with little security in law. In both Christendom and Islam Jewish fortunes were liable to arbitrary seizure at any time. One might say that the Nazi assault on Jewish business, 1933-9, or the confiscations of Jewish property by Arab states in 1948-50, were merely the last and most comprehensive of such economic attacks on the Jews. As a result, during the period up to the mid-seventeenth century, Jewish fortunes were transitory or at best migratory, and the Jewish contribution to the growth of an international, entrepreneurial economy was correspondingly restricted. The Jews had always been skilful at using and transferring capital. But once they were established in Anglo-Saxon society, the security they then enjoyed in law enabled them to accumulate it too. Confidence in their rights led Jews to expand the scope of their activities. Trading, especially in articles of small volume and high value, such as jewels, easily concealed and whisked from place to place, no longer constituted almost the sole economic occupation in which Jews found it safe to engage.

The pattern can be seen changing in eighteenth-century America. At the beginning of the century, the Jews there were almost entirely concentrated in the overseas trading sector, dealing in jewels, coral, textiles, slaves, cocoa and ginger. In 1701 in New York, though only 1 per cent of the population, they formed 12 per cent of the overseas trading community. By 1776, this proportion had fallen to only 1 per cent, as the Jews, feeling increasingly settled, secure and accepted, turned their backs on the sea–their traditional escape-route–and began to look inland, to developing the continent. They became settlers themselves, and sold guns, rum, wine, ironware, glass, furs and provisions.

In Europe, the financial means which held together the great coalition against Louis XIV, and eventually broke his military dominance of Europe–as it was to do Napoleon’s–was largely assembled by Jews. William of Orange, later William III of England, who led the coalition from 1672 to 1702, was financed and provisioned by a group of Dutch Sephardi Jews operating chiefly from The Hague. The two leading providiteurs general, as William had them called, were Antonio Alvarez Machado and Jacob Pereira. As we have seen, such men, however useful they might be to Continental princes, had to operate in a climate of financial and personal insecurity. It required intense pressure from William and the Austrian emperor, for instance, to secure Machado or his agents admission into a city like Cologne. England, by contrast, was a far more secure base from which to operate. In 1688 the Lopez Suasso family advanced William two million gulden to finance his invasion of England, Suasso telling him: ‘If you are fortunate, I know you will pay me back. If you are unlucky, I agree to lose them.’73 Once William was safely installed many Jewish financiers moved to London, led by Pereira’s son Isaac, who became commissary-general there, being paid the enormous sum of £95,000 for shipping and supplies during the year September 1690 to August 1691.⁷⁴

In London the Jews became a founding element in the financial market of the City which grew up in William’s day. The element of anti-Jewish blackmail, which dominated Jewish-state relations on the Continent, was not wholly absent to begin with. The Earl of Shrewsbury, as secretary of state, wrote to the Lord Mayor in February 1690: ‘Taking into consideration that the Jews residing in London carry on, under favour of the government, so advantageous a trade’, their ‘offer only of £12,000’ was ‘below what His Majesty expected of them’; it ought, he added, to be doubled to £20,000 or even raised to £30,000; and ‘His Majesty believes that, upon second thoughts’, they will ‘come to new resolutions’.⁷⁵ But the English government did not confiscate Jewish fortunes or rob Jews by oppressive lawsuits. Solomon de Medina, chief London agent for the Hague consortium, was never brought to book for his many misdeeds–he admitted he bribed the Duke of Marlborough, the allied captain-general, £6,000 a year during the years 1707-11. William III had dined with him in Richmond in 1699 and knighted him the following year, and if Solomon ended up practically bankrupt, that was due to his own miscalculations, not to anti-Semitic fury.⁷⁶

Whereas in central Europe the pillaging of an Oppenheimer could produce financial crisis, the London Jews, secure in their property, were able to help the state to avoid them. The Menasseh Lopes family under Queen Anne, the Gideons and the Salvadors under the first three Georges, played notable roles in maintaining the stability of London financial markets. They avoided the South Sea Bubble. When the Jacobite rising of 1745 panicked the City, Samson Gideon (1699-1762) raised £1,700,000 to help the government restore calm. At his death he left over £500,000, which went to his heir, not the government–though the Gideons moved into the House of Lords and out of Judaism.77

It was the unconscious collective instinct of the Jews both to depersonalize finance and to rationalize the general economic process. Any property known to be Jewish, or clearly identifiable as such, was always at risk in medieval and early modern times, especially in the Mediterranean, which was then the chief international trading area. As the Spanish navy and the Knights of Malta treated Jewish-chartered ships and goods as legitimate booty, fictitious Christian names were used in the paperwork of international transactions, including marine insurance. These developed into impersonal formulae. As well as developing letters of credit, the Jews invented bearer-bonds, another impersonal way of moving money. For an underprivileged community whose property was always under threat, and who might be forced to move at short notice, the emergence of reliable, impersonal paper money, whether bills of exchange or, above all, valid banknotes, was an enormous blessing.

Hence the whole thrust of Jewish activity in the early modern period was to refine these devices and bring them into universal use. They strongly supported the emergence of the institutions which promoted paper values: the central banks, led by the Bank of England (1694) with its statutory right to issue notes, and the stock exchanges. Jews dominated the Amsterdam stock exchange, where they held large quantities of stock from both the West and East India Companies, and were the first to run a large-scale trade in securities. In London they set the same pattern a generation later in the 1690s. Joseph de la Vega, an Amsterdam Jew (though a nominal Protestant) wrote the earliest account of stock exchange business in 1688, and Jews were probably the first professional stock jobbers and brokers in England: in 1697, out of one hundred brokers on the London exchange, twenty were Jews or aliens. In due course, Jews helped to create the New York stock exchange in 1792.

Next to the development of credit itself, the invention and still more the popularization of paper securities were probably the biggest single contribution the Jews made to the wealth-creation process. Jews hastened the use of securities just as much in areas where they felt safe as in areas where they were vulnerable, for they saw the entire world as a single market. Here, too, the global perspective which the diaspora gave them turned them into pioneers. For a race without a country, the world was a home. The further the market stretched, the greater were the opportunities. For people who had been trading regularly from Cairo to China in the tenth century, the opening up of the Atlantic, Indian and Pacific oceans to commerce in the eighteenth century was no great challenge. The first wholesale trader in Australia was a Montefiore. The Sassoons built the first textile mills and factories in Bombay. Benjamin Norden and Samuel Marks started up industry in Cape Colony. The Jews were in the whaling trade at both poles. More important than these specific pioneering efforts was the Jewish drive to create world markets for the staple articles of modern commerce–wheat, wool, flax, textiles, spirits, sugar, tobacco. The Jews went into new areas. They took big risks. They dealt in a wide variety of goods. They held big stocks.

Jewish financial and trading activities in the eighteenth century became so widely diffused that economic historians have sometimes been tempted to regard them as the primary force in creating the modern capitalist system. In 1911 the German sociologist Werner Sombart published a remarkable book, Die Juden und das Wirt-schlaftsleben, in which he argued that Jewish traders and manufacturers, excluded from the guilds, developed a destructive antipathy to the fundamentals of medieval commerce. These were primitive and unprogressive: the desire for ‘just’ (and fixed) wages and prices, for an equitable system in which shares of the market were agreed and unchanging, profits and livelihoods modest but guaranteed, and limits placed on production. Excluded from the system, Sombart argued, the Jews broke it up and replaced it with modern capitalism, in which competition was unlimited and pleasing the customer was the only law.78 Sombart’s work was later discredited because it was used by the Nazis to justify their distinction between Jewish commercial cosmopolitanism and German national culture; and Sombart himself, in Deutscher Sozialismus (1934), endorsed the Nazi policy of excluding Jews from German economic life. Sombart’s thesis contained an element of truth but the conclusions he reached were exaggerated. Like Max Weber’s attempt to attribute the spirit of capitalism to Calvinist ethics, it left out inconvenient facts. Sombart ignored the powerful mystical element in Judaism. He refused to recognize, as did Weber, that wherever these religious systems, including Judaism, were at their most powerful and authoritarian, commerce did not flourish. Jewish businessmen, like Calvinist ones, tended to operate most successfully when they had left their traditional religious environment and had moved to fresh pastures.

But if Jews formed only one of the elements in creating the modern commercial system, it was certainly an influential one. They rationalized what had previously been a comfortable, traditional and often obscurantist process. Their influence was exercised in five principal ways. First they favoured innovation. The stock market was a case in point. This was an efficient and rational way of raising capital and allocating it to the most productive purposes. Traditional mercantile interests, unable to distinguish between the market’s occasional excesses and its fundamental validity, objected. In 1733, Sir John Barnard MP introduced, with all-party support, a Bill to make illegal ‘the infamous practice of stockjobbing’. Postlethwayt’s Universal Dictionary of Trade and Commerce (1757) condemns ‘those mountebanks we very properly call stockbrokers’. Stockjobbing was ‘a public grievance’, ‘scandalous to the nation’. Many of these accusations were dealt with by the Portuguese Jew Joseph de Pinto in his Traité du crédit et de la circulation (1771). In general, financial innovations which Jews pioneered in the eighteenth century, and which aroused much criticism then, became acceptable in the nineteenth.

Secondly, Jews were in the vanguard in stressing the importance of the selling function. Here again, there was much traditional opposition. Daniel Defoe’s Complete English Tradesman (fifth edition 1745), for instance, condemned elaborate window-dressing as immoral. Postlethwayt’s Dictionary commented on the ‘recent innovation’ of advertising (1751): ‘however mean and disgraceful it was looked upon a few years since, by people of reputation in trade, to apply to the public by advertisements in the papers, at present it seems to be esteemed quite otherwise, persons of great credit in trade experiencing it to be the best…method of conveying whatever they have to offer to knowledge of the whole kingdom’. A Paris ordinance of 1761 actually forbade traders ‘to run after one another trying to find customers’ or ‘distribute handbills calling attention to their wares’. Jews were among the leaders in display, advertising and promotion.

Thirdly, they aimed for the widest possible market. They appreciated the importance of economies of scale. As in banking and moneylending during the Middle Ages, they were willing to accept much smaller profits in return for a larger turnover. They accordingly–and this was their fourth main contribution–strove hard to reduce prices. They were much more willing than established traders to make an inferior, cheaper product and sell to a popular market. They were not alone in this. Sir Josiah Child, in his Discourse on Trade (fourth edition 1752) pointed out: ‘If we intend to have the trade of the world, we must imitate the Dutch, who make the worst as well as the best of all manufactures, that we may be in a capacity of serving all markets and all humours.’ The ability of Jews to undercut aroused much comment, fury and accusations that they cheated or traded in smuggled or confiscated goods. In fact it was usually another case of rationalization. Jews were prepared to trade in remnants. They found uses for waste-products. They accepted cheaper raw materials, or devised substitutes and synthetics. They sold inferior goods to the poor because that was all the poor could afford. They effected further economies of scale by opening general stores selling a wide variety of products under the same roof. This angered traditional traders, who specialized, particularly when Jews attracted custom through what we would now call ‘loss leaders’. Above all, Jews were more inclined than others in commerce to accept that the consumer was the ultimate arbiter of trade, and that businesses flourished by serving consumer interests rather than guild interests. The customer was always right. The market was the final judge. These axioms were not necessarily coined by Jews or exclusively observed by Jews, but Jews were quicker than most to apply them.

Finally, Jews were exceptionally adept at gathering and making use of commercial intelligence. As the market became the dominant factor in all kinds of trading, and as it expanded into a series of global systems, news became of prime importance. This was perhaps the biggest single factor in Jewish trading and financial success. By the time of the Industrial Revolution, they had been operating family trading networks, over a growing area, for the best part of two millennia. They had always been passionate letter-writers. From Leghorn, Prague, Vienna, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Amsterdam, and later from Bordeaux, London, New York and Philadelphia–and between all these centres–they ran sensitive and speedy information systems which enabled them to respond rapidly to political and military events and to the changing demands of regional, national and world markets. Such families as the Lopez or Mendes of Bordeaux, the Carceres of Hamburg, the Sassoons of Baghdad, the Pereiras, the D’Acostas, the Coneglianos and the Alhadibs, operating from branches in many cities, were among the best-informed people in the world, long before the Rothschilds set up their own commercial diaspora. Traditional, medieval-style commerce tended to suffer from what has been termed the ‘physical fallacy’, that goods and commodities have a fixed and absolute value. In fact value varies in space and time. The larger the market, the longer the distances, the greater the variations. Getting the right goods in the right place at the right time is the essence of commercial success. It always had been. But in the eighteenth century, the increasing size and scale of the market made it of paramount importance. It enhanced the significance of strategic decision-making in business. Decisions, naturally, reflect the quality of the information available in reaching them. That was where the Jewish networks scored.

For all these reasons, then, Jews made a contribution to the creation of modern capitalism quite disproportionate to their numbers. It would have occurred without them. In some areas they were weak or absent. They played very little direct part, for instance, in the early stages of the Industrial Revolution in Britain. In some fields–raising large-scale capital–they were notably strong. In general, they brought to the eighteenth-century economic system a powerful spirit of rationalization, a belief that existing ways of doing things were never good enough, and that better, easier, cheaper and quicker ways could and must be found. There was nothing mysterious about Jewish commerce; nothing dishonest either; simply reason.

The rationalizing process was at work within Jewish society too, though at first more diffidently and fearfully. There is a paradox that, at one and the same time, the ghetto bred mercantile innovation and religious conservatism. The Jews in the early modern period were curiously dualistic. They often saw the world outside with clearer eyes than it saw itself; but when the Jews turned inward, on themselves, their eyes misted over, their vision became opaque. In the twelfth century Maimonides had tried hard to align Judaism with natural reason. That effort faltered and went underground in the fourteenth century. The ghetto helped to keep it there. It strengthened traditional authority. It discouraged speculation. It made the penalities of communal disapproval much more severe, since a Jew could not leave the ghetto without sacrificing his faith entirely. But of course it could not kill the rationalizing spirit altogether because that was inherent in Judaism and in the halakhic method. Even in the ghetto, Judaism remained a cathedocracy, a society ruled by learned men. Where scholars exist, controversies will erupt and ideas circulate.

The ghettos were depositories of books too. The Jews set up presses everywhere. Despite frequent raids by hostile religious authorities, they accumulated impressive libraries. One member of the Oppenheimer family, David, who was Chief Rabbi of Prague 1702-36, set out to acquire all the Hebrew books ever printed. Having inherited a fortune from his uncle Samuel, he was a very rich man; certainly no radical. Christians accused him of using his powers of excommunication to get choice treasures. In fact he had to keep his library in Hamburg to escape the Inquisition in Catholic Bohemia. His collection, which now forms the basis of the Bodleian hebraica in Oxford, once encompassed over 7,000 volumes and 1,000 manuscripts. Rabbi Oppenheimer got a ruling from the Emperor Charles VI in 1722 giving him sole control over Jewish studies in Prague. But the library he spent his life assembling was itself an inevitable breeding-ground for intellectual subversion.79

All the same, the spirit of rationalism within the Judaic world was slow to develop, partly because Jews with new ideas hesitated to challenge tradition, partly because such challenges were liable to meet crushing disapproval. Experience suggests that the most effective way to change conservative religious modes is to adopt the historical approach. Maimonides, while adumbrating modern techniques of Biblical criticism, never used historical criteria as such. It was one of his few intellectual weaknesses that he regarded non-messianic history as ‘of no practical benefit but purely a waste of time’.⁸⁰ His disapproval was no doubt a collateral reason why the Jews were so slow to return to historical writing. But they did come to it again in the end, in the second half of the sixteenth century. After Ibn Verga’s pioneer if naïve book, Azariah dei Rossi (c. 1511-78), a Mantuan, at last produced a genuine book of Jewish history, the Me’or Eynayim (Light of the Eyes) in 1573. Using gentile sources and critical techniques developed by Christians during the Renaissance, he subjected the writings of the sages to rational analysis. His manner was apologetic and diffident and he clearly took no pleasure in pointing out where the wise old men had erred. But his work on the Hebrew calendar none the less destroyed the traditional basis of messianic calculations and cast doubt on much else.⁸¹

Rossi’s work aroused intense resentment among Orthodox learned Jews. The great codifier Joseph Caro, the most influential scholar of his time, died just before he could sign a decree ordering the book to be burned. The Rabbi Judah Loew, the famous Maharal of Prague, the dominant figure in the next generation, was just as critical of Rossi’s book. He thought that Rossi’s sceptical investigations into talmudic legends and Jewish history would undermine authority and destroy belief. Rossi, in his view, had failed to distinguish between two totally different forms of intellectual process, the divine and the natural. It was absurd to use methods suitable for investigation of the natural world to try to understand the workings of divine providence. Now this was to repudiate Maimonides completely, in one sense. Yet the Maharal was not really an obscurantist and irrationalist; he straddled many trends in Judaism.⁸² His opposition to Rossi, whose book was banned to Jewish students without special rabbinical permission, indicates the strength of the opposition any intellectual innovator had to face.

This power of orthodoxy was dramatically demonstrated in the tragic case of Baruch (or Benedict) de Spinoza (1632-77) of Amsterdam. Spinoza is usually approached as a central figure in the history of philosophy, as indeed he was. But his importance in Jewish (and Christian) history is still more crucial, and in some ways baneful: he set in motion chains of events which still influence us today. By birth he was the son of a Sephardi refugee who became a successful Dutch merchant. By trade he was a scholar (he probably studied under Manasseh ben Israel) and a grinder of optical lenses. By temperament he was a melancholic and ascetic. He was slender, swarthy, with long, curling hair and large, dark, lustrous eyes. He ate practically nothing except porridge with a little butter and gruel mixed with raisins: ‘It is incredible’, wrote his early biographer, the Lutheran pastor Colerus who lodged in the same house, ‘with how little in the shape of meat or drink he appears to have been satisfied.’83

By intellectual descent, Spinoza was a follower of Maimonides. But some of his views on the origins of the Pentateuch seem to have derived from veiled hints in the writings of the older rationalist Abraham ibn Ezra (1089-1164). He was a precocious youth in what was then (the 1650s) perhaps the most intellectually radical city in the world, and at an early age he became part of a circle of free thinkers from various religions: the ex-Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden, a former marrano, Juan de Prado, a notorious schoolteacher, Daniel de Ribera, and various Socinians, anti-Trinitarians and anti-clericals. A generation earlier, the Jew Uriel da Costa had been expelled from the Amsterdam community not once but twice for denying the immortality of the soul. In 1655, when Spinoza was twenty-three, Praedamnitiae, a sensational book by an ex-Calvinist, Isaac La Peyrère, which had been banned everywhere, was published in Amsterdam, and Spinoza undoubtedly read it. La Peyrère was certainly not an atheist; he was, rather, a marrano messianist, an enthusiastic kabbalist, part of the wave that was to carry Shabbetai Zevi to fame a decade later. But his work had the tendency to treat the Bible not as revelation but as a secular history to be critically examined. It seems to have reinforced in Spinoza’s mind doubts already aroused by Ibn Ezra and Maimonides. At all events, the year after it appeared Spinoza and De Prado were hauled before the Jewish authorities. De Prado apologized; Spinoza was excommunicated publicly.

The actual rabbinical pronouncement, dated 27 July 1656 and signed by Rabbi Saul Levi Morteira and others, has survived. It reads:

The chiefs of the council make known to you that, having long known of evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Spinoza, they have endeavoured by various means and promises to turn him from evil ways. Not being able to find any remedy, but on the contrary receiving every day more information about the abominable heresies practised and taught by him and about the monstrous acts committed by him, having this from many trustworthy witnesses who have deposed and borne witness on all this in the presence of the said Spinoza, who has been convicted; all this having been examined in the presence of the rabbis, the council decided, with the advice of the rabbis, that the said Spinoza should be excommunicated and cut off from the Nation of Israel.

Then followed the anathema and cursing:

With the judgment of the angels, and the sentence of the saints, we anathematize, execrate, curse and cast out Baruch de Spinoza…pronouncing against him the anathema wherewith Joshua anathematized Jericho, the malediction wherewith Elisha cursed the children, and all the maledictions written in the book of the Law. Let him be accursed by day and accursed by night; accursed in his lying down and his rising up, in going out and in coming in. May the Lord never more pardon or acknowledge him! May the wrath and displeasure of the Lord burn against this man henceforth, load him with all the curses written in the book of the Law, and raze out his name from under the sky…. Hereby, then, are all admonished that none hold converse with him by word of mouth, or communication by writing, that no one do him any service, abide under the same roof with him, approach within four cubits’ length of him, or read any document dictated by him or written by his hand.84

During the reading of this curse, ‘the wailing and protracted note of a great horn was heard to fall in from time to time; the lights, seen burning brightly at the beginning of the ceremony, were extinguished one by one as it proceeded, till at the end the last went out, symbolizing the extinction of the spiritual life of the excommunicated man, and the congregation was left in total darkness’.⁸⁵

Spinoza, aged twenty-four, was then expelled from his father’s house, and shortly after from Amsterdam too. He claimed that an attempt to kill him had been made one night when he was returning from the theatre: he used to show the coat with the dagger-hole. When his father died, his rapacious sisters tried to deprive him of his inheritance. He went to law to establish his rights but, having done so, withdrew all claims except to one bed with its hangings. He finally settled in The Hague, where he lived by his lens-work. He had a small pension from the state, and an annuity left by a friend. He turned down other offers of help and refused a professorship at Heidelberg. He lived the austere life of a poor scholar, as he probably would have done had he remained orthodox; but he did not marry. He was the reverse of a Bohemian, dressing with great sobriety, and insisting: ‘It is not a disorderly and slovenly carriage which makes us sages; rather, affected indifference to personal appearance is evidence of a poor spirit in which true wisdom could find no fit dwelling place and science only meet with disorder and disarray.’86 He died, aged forty-four, of a form of tuberculosis, and his estate was so small that his sister Rebecca refused to administer it.

The origin and substance of Spinoza’s quarrel with the Jewish authorities is not entirely clear. He was accused of denying the existence of angels, the immortality of the soul and the divine inspiration of the Torah. But an apologia for his views, which he wrote in Spanish soon after the herem, has not survived. However, in 1670 he published, unsigned, his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, in which he set out his principles of Biblical criticism. Therein lay his essential heterodoxy. He argued that the Bible should be approached in a scientific spirit and investigated like any natural phenomenon. In the case of the Bible, the approach had to be historical. One began by analysing the Hebrew language. Then one proceeded to analyse and classify the expression in each of the books of the Bible. The next stage was to examine the historical context:

the life, the conduct, and the pursuits of the author of each book, who he was, what was the occasion and the epoch of his writing, whom did he write for and in what language…[then] the history of each book: how it was first received, into whose hands it fell, how many different versions there were of it, by whose advice was it received into the Canon, and lastly how all the books now universally accepted as sacred were united into a single whole.