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This chapter surveys the last three decades of Jacob Sasportas's life, when he moved between Hamburg, Amsterdam, Livorno, and Amsterdam again. During this period, Sasportas continued to enter the fray of rabbinic controversy and rarely mentioned Sabbetai Zevi or Jewish messianism. The chapter then posits that for Sasportas, the problem posed by Sabbetai Zevi was actually symptomatic of a much larger issue: the rabbinate itself. Sabbetai Zevi and the Sabbatian movement provided Sasportas with the conditions of possibility to compose a book that both documented the course of events and articulated a viewpoint. Once articulated, however, many of the tenets Sasportas had expressed in an incisive formulation in response to Sabbetai Zevi reappeared in his other writings and in other writings about him. For Sasportas, the world of rabbinic learning was the point of departure for his thought. He approached Sabbetai Zevi and the question of his messianism from the point of view of rabbinic law. Indeed, the problem of rabbinic authority, and ancillary issues such as honor, respect, and jurisdiction, surfaced repeatedly in The Fading Flower of the Zevi.

This chapter traces the life of Jacob Sasportas prior to Sabbatianism. It places Sasportas in a series of different contexts: a member of a leading Sephardic family in Spanish Oran, a corrector in the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, and a minister to the fledgling congregation of Portuguese Jews in London. In each of these contexts, Sasportas emerges as “a man against,” challenging truisms and opposing received opinions, even as he sought patronage from wealthy Jews whom he scorned. Sasportas's response to the different centers in the western Sephardic Diaspora—Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Livorno—was conditioned by the fact that he experienced them as an outsider. Much of this was a rhetorical posture. Sasportas repeatedly placed himself on the margins of the places in which he lived, even as the Jews in these cities provided him and his family with material support. However, his marginality was not only rhetorical; or perhaps the rhetoric itself bears close scrutiny. What few accounts remain indicate that Sasportas was perceived by others, particularly other Jews, as an outsider as well. Occasionally, this led to comity and a meeting of the minds. More often, though, this posture of the outsider led to conflict, and these conflicts frequently left a long paper trail—a paper trail that offers a perspective, however partial, on the Sephardic Diaspora in western Europe in the seventeenth century.

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.

This chapter discusses Sabbatian messianism as an epistemological problem. How does one know whether or not someone is the Messiah? In the middle of the seventeenth century, prophecy was one way of obtaining such knowledge. Prophecy played a decisive role in the success of Sabbatianism. Adherents to the new movement emphasized the renewal of revelation both in the period of its rapid spread prior to Sabbetai Zevi's conversion as well as in the years that followed. Beginning with the leading Sabbatian propagandist, Nathan of Gaza, and continuing well into the eighteenth century, Sabbatians spoke and wrote about their activities as prophecy. Repeatedly they invoked their own capacity to communicate with the divine as a source for their own authority. Indeed, prophecy often served as the legitimating grounds for their suspension of legal norms and invention of new rituals. The chapter then looks at Jacob Sasportas's response to the Sabbatian renewal of prophecy as well as to other modes of knowing, such as dreams and astrology. For all of Sasportas's profound skepticism about the Sabbatian revival of prophecy, he refused to condemn the category outright. Just as he had continued to insist on his belief in the messianic idea but rejected Sabbetai Zevi as its fulfillment, he continued to hold open the possibility of prophecy while denying the legitimacy of Nathan of Gaza.

This chapter studies Jacob Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi within the context of Jewish responses to Christianity. Unlike the overwhelming majority of Sephardim in northwestern Europe, Sasportas had little to say about Christianity for much of his life. This changed dramatically in 1665–1666 when he made a pointed analogy between the followers of Sabbetai Zevi and the early followers of Jesus. Sabbetai Zevi and the Sabbatian movement forced Sasportas to confront Christianity. The emergence of a contemporary Jewish heresy—for no actual social distinctions divided “believers” from “unbelievers” in the early stages of the movement—propelled him to reimagine Christianity, which he now described as a heretical or ideological offshoot of ancient Judaism. Sasportas's turn to Christianity was not at all directed at learned Protestant readers in contemporary Hamburg or Amsterdam. Rather, it was an attempt to convince his fellow Jews that the figure they had embraced as the Messiah was closer to Jesus than to the redeemer envisioned in the final chapters of Maimonides's Code. Religious belief threatened the inviolate status of the law and, therefore, undermined the social authority of the one who determined the law: the rabbi.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jacob Sasportas. Around 1610, Sasportas was born in Oran, a garrison town at the edge of the Iberian Empire on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in present day Algeria. The scion of a rabbinic family, Sasportas served the Jews of Oran and nearby Tlemcen as a rabbinic judge for several decades. In his early forties, he was exiled from North Africa for reasons that remain unknown, and fled to Amsterdam. For almost half a century, Sasportas lived among the Portuguese Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora. In 1665, he emerged as one of the few opponents to the provocative persona of Sabbetai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah who became the center of a mass movement. From his temporary home in Hamburg, he conducted a vigorous campaign first to challenge and later to undermine the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, keeping a meticulous record of Sabbatianism as it was occurring. This book asks why Sasportas would oppose a messianic movement and what the substance of this opposition is. In other words, it explores the truth-value of doubt within the rabbinic tradition as it was expressed by one man living in the midst of a maelstrom.

This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.

This chapter focuses on Gershom Scholem and Joel Teitelbaum as readers of Jacob Sasportas. Both Scholem and Teitelbaum considered the middle of the twentieth century as a period of crisis, and each, in his own way, turned to Sasportas's The Fading Flower of the Zevi as part of a larger response to that crisis. If Scholem and his student Isaiah Tishby had engaged in something akin to lower criticism in their editing and analysis of Sasportas, Teitelbaum employed analysis similar to higher criticism in his use of Sasportas. If Scholem saw Sabbatianism as generative of a crisis and fundamental rupture in Jewish history and turned to Sasportas as a witness to this crisis, Teitelbaum experienced the middle decades of the twentieth century as a crisis in and of itself. To him, Sasportas was not an intellectual instrument with which to reconstruct the past; rather, he functioned as a moral resource that served as a guide for the proper rabbinic response to religious messianism in the present. Ultimately, Scholem's and Teitelbaum's readings of The Fading Flower of the Zevi placed Sasportas squarely at the heart of a central debate in modern Jewish life: Zionism.

This chapter situates the polemic over Sabbatianism as a problem of authority. It casts Jacob Sasportas versus the Sabbatians, particularly Nathan of Gaza. If Sabbatian prophets and their followers drew on their ecstatic physical experience of redemption as the source of legitimacy for their suspension of the law and their introduction of new rituals, Sasportas turned to the bookshelf in order to reinstitute textual discipline. Against the authenticity of their revelations, Sasportas upheld written norms as the sole source of authority. Trained in a tradition that placed emphasis on erudition at the expense of local custom or individual experience, Sasportas took pride in his mastery over the entirety of Jewish law from the Mishnah and the Talmud of antiquity through the codes and commentaries of the Middle Ages up through the most recent responsa. The chapter then examines the debate over messianic authority as it transformed into one of text versus text.

This chapter focuses on Jacob Sasportas and Jewish Messianism. A rabbi in the Western Sephardic diaspora, Sasportas emerged in 1665 as one of the few opponents to the Jewish Messiah named Sabbetai Zevi. In his response to Sabbatianism, Sasportas held up a series of texts as sources of authority to counter the immediate religious experience of the Sabbatians. He repeatedly emphasized an imperative to doubt and beseeched the recipients of his letters to question the certainty of their messianic sensibility. Documents, not enthusiasm, were what counted to him, and, according to the Jewish textual tradition, Sabbetai Zevi was not behaving as a messiah should. When the Sabbatians answered back citing sources of their own, Sasportas took a closer, critical look and proved them fabricated.

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.