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This chapter highlights Jacob Emden, who crafted Jacob Sasportas in his own image as a heresy hunter in the middle of the eighteenth century. The transmission of anti-Sabbatian ideas from Jacob Sasportas to Jacob Emden constitutes a crucial period in the formation of the early modern Jewish zealot. As his battle with chief rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz continued to rage, Emden printed a new edition of Sasportas's Kitzur zizath novel zvi (The Fading Flower of the Zevi). This edition appeared at a particularly fraught time in Emden's life. He turned to Sasportas as a precedent in two of his primary battles: against the Eibeschütz party in Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek and against the Frankist movement in Poland. To these elective affinities with Sasportas—a common name, a common city, and a common enemy—one can add a few others: an acute sensitivity to the printed word, a pronounced sense of entitlement derived from a combination of lineage and learning, and a peripatetic lifestyle as a result of financial and communal difficulties.

By 1700 the Newtonian model, which included the heliocentric solar system, was being taught at Yale and Oxford, although Copernicanism was much slower to gain acceptance elsewhere. There was still considerable hesitation in religious circles about these changes, causing a tension between those with an intellectual openness to scientific ideas, and those with an affinity towards traditional religious beliefs. This chapter describes how the new astronomy found its way into the thoughts and writings of several of the most prominent rabbinic leaders of the time. These works demonstrate not only the tension between an openness to science and an allegiance to religious demands, but also the different conclusions that were drawn among those who grappled with the new astronomy. Included in the chapter are Raphael Levi of Hannover (1685), and Judah Hurwitz, as well as two of the most famous rabbis of the generation: Jonathan Eybeschuetz (1690-1764) rejected the heliocentric model while Jacob Emden (1697-1776) exhibited a changing approach to the model of the period of his lifetime. Finally we examine the writings of Moses Sofer (1762-1839, better known as Hatam Sofer) and his students on the whether a Jew may believe in the Copernican model.

This chapter assesses the struggle of the mitnagedim and the maskilim against hasidism. With its insularity, mysticism, and cult of the tsadik or spiritual leader, hasidism was seen by the maskilim as their chief enemy. The maskilim aimed to delegitimize hasidism in order to enhance their own standing. In this enterprise, they drew on their predecessors, the numerous rabbis who from the last third of the eighteenth century had opposed hasidism, prominent among whom was Jacob Emden. By showing how the Galician maskil Judah Leib Mieses selectively wove Emden's anti-hasidic polemic into his satires, the chapter reveals the literary strategies of the Haskalah and illustrates how the maskilim, in their attack on the hasidic enemy, exploited Emden as a religious authority. It demonstrates how well versed in talmudic and rabbinic texts the maskilim had to be in order to weave the associations and allusions of rabbinic polemics into the fabric of their own writings.

This coda details how Jacob Sasportas, as well as his three most intensive readers—Jacob Emden, Gershom Scholem, and Joel Teitelbaum—all perceived their worlds to be in crisis. For Sasportas, the crisis in the middle of the 1660s was one of order. This manifested itself as contempt for the law. Sasportas used all the resources of the textual tradition he called his own to make sense of the world around him, a world that a Messiah whom he had never met and who lived half a world away had turned upside down. He gestured toward a position that validated his own provisional skepticism as a better path to genuine repentance than the ardent and collective certainty of the Jewish crowd. A half century after Sasportas died, Jacob Emden reedited and reprinted Sasportas, thereby forging an image of Sasportas as a heresy hunter. A century and a half after Emden's death, Gershom Scholem turned to Sabbetai Zevi and the messianic movement around him, which enabled Scholem to tell a story about Jewish immanence without the law. Meanwhile, Joel Teitelbaum lived through the same geopolitical catastrophe as Scholem but reached a different conclusion about it. Just as Sasportas had the courage of his convictions to speak out against the Jews of his day, nearly all of whom had become believers in Sabbetai Zevi, Teitelbaum similarly rebuked the Jews of his own time, nearly all of whom had become Zionists.

This chapter recalls the encounter between Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz and the Frankist movement. This began when the Emden–Eibeschuetz controversy erupted in 1751. At the time, Rabbi Jacob Emden announced in his synagogue in Altona that an amulet ascribed to the Chief Rabbi, Eibeschuetz, could only have been written by a secret believer in Shabbetai Tsevi. The controversy between these two rabbinic titans continued unabated until Eibeschuetz’s death in 1764. At the height of the controversy, between 1755 and 1760, Jakub Frank revealed himself in Podolia. He assumed leadership of the Shabbatean movement in Ukraine, Galicia, Wielkopolska, and Hungary and presided over the Shabbatean teachings enunciated at the public disputations between the Frankists and the talmudists in Kamenets-Podolsk in 1757 and in Lviv in 1759.

This chapter considers how Abraham ben Asher intended readers to use the ʾOr ha-Sekhel. Its reception is considered in the light of the criticisms of certain contemporary commentators regarding the authenticity of ‘Rashi’s’ commentary on Genesis Rabba, the growing popularity of the Matnot Kehunah of Issachar Berman, and changing approaches to the exposition of midrash in early modern Sephardi communities. Although Abraham ben Asher’s own commentary was not reprinted in later editions of Midrash Rabba, his work nevertheless repays careful study as it sheds light on the development of this collection of midrashim and on the reception of rabbinic Bible interpretation. Furthermore, commentaries on midrash, including that of Pseudo-Rashi as it was edited by Abraham ben Asher, were regularly printed on the pages of later editions of Midrash Rabba. This attests to the enduring influence of the ʾOr ha-Sekhel, the first book to supplement Genesis Rabba with such exegetical resources.