The Son of the Messiah : Ishmael Zevi and the Sabbatian Aqedah

D A V I D J . H A L P E R I N University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

The early Sabbatian exegetical text preserved in MS Budapest, Kaufmann 255,1s a commentary on Sabbatai Zevi's distinctive liturgy for the midnight vigil ( tiqqun hasot). The manuscript seems to be, as Gershom Scholem surmised, the writer's autograph. Irregularities in its handwriting may thus be used as indicators of the stages in which the author composed his work.

Close examination of this text's allusions to Sabbatai Zevi's son Ishmael, who was regarded for a time as his father's Messianic successor, will provide a solution to the long-standing mystery of what became of the boy. (It will be shown that he died as a child.)

The commentator's Messianic expectations for Ishmael Zevi, moreover, were bound up with his distinctive reading of the Aqedah story in Genesis, as well as with his perceptions of Islam. His fantasies about Ishmael Zevi thus reflect the powerful but ambiguous role of Islam in the imaginings of Sabbatai Zevi's followers. They pre-sent us also with a remarkable "Aqedah of Ishmaer— Ishmael son of Hagar as well

as Ishmael Zevi - which demands its place within the history of that ancient and pivotal motif of Jewish thought and experience that we call the Aqedah tradition.

1. I N T R O D U C T I O N

And so they [Sabbatai Zevi and Sarah] were married. Yet h e never made love to he r until after h e had set the pure turban o n his head, a n d then she bore h im a son and a daughter. But all this we shall relate presendy,

with God s help. _ Baruch of Arezzo, Memorial to the Children of Israel1

O n e of the more intriguing mysteries of the early Sabbatian movement sur-rounds the young son of the would-be Messiah. Ishmael Zevi was bo rn in 1667 o r 1668, within two years after his father had converted to Islam ("set the pure turban o n his head"). H e was raised, at least nominally, as a Muslim. After Sab-batai's death in 1676, Ishmael became a focus for the Messianic expectations of some a t least of Sabbatai's followers, and was elevated to a near-divine

( 1 ) Aharon Freimann, cInyanei Shabbetay Sevi: Sammelbund kleiner Schriften über Sabbatai Zebi und dessen Anhänger (Berlin, 1912), p. 46.

H S

[2] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 144

status equal to his father's. Yet, apart from a few obscure allusions, h e disap-pears entirely from the historical record after about 1680. Why?

Dönme tradition claims that Ishmael died at age six. Taken literally, this is impossible. All now agree, for reasons we will presently see to be compelling, that Ishmael survived his father. Yet his disappearance from the subsequent history of Sabbatianism has suggested to most historians that the tradition is essentially correct, that h e indeed died an early death. Gershom Scholem pointed out that h e played n o role whatever in the sectarian developments that followed the great apostasy at Salonika in 1683, and inferred from this that h e was dead by then. An allusion to Ishmael in a text written in 1681 ,which Scholem interpreted to mean that h e was still alive, allowed Scholem to fix his death between 1681 and 1683. But, when Meir Benayahu established that an-other allusion to Ishmael must be dated to 1688 or 1689, Scholem confessed himself baffled.2 And Benayahu went on to propound a marvellously inge-nious hypothesis according to which Ishmael Zevi did not die in childhood after all. Rather, h e returned to Judaism in the 1680s, changed his name in symbolically appropriate fashion to"Isaac Zevi,"and is to be identified with the man of that name who served as rabbi of Sarajevo from about 1690 onward.3

This article is a study of the figure of Ishmael Zevi, as h e appears in an early Sabbatian text which Scholem designated "Commentary on Psalms"(perush mizmorei tehillim) and attributed to one Israel Hazzan.In it, I undertake to re-solve the mystery of Ishmael Zevi's disappearance. Scholem was right : Ishmael indeed died as a child,al though afewyears earlier than Scholem believed.The "Commentary on Psalms," which Scholem recognized as a particularly rich source for the millenarian expectations that developed around the boy, must be understood as also bearing silent witness to his death and to the impact that event had on the writer's Messianic faith. To establish that this is so, we must subject the text, and its allusions to Ishmael Zevi, to a closer analysis than it has so far received.

Will we know more, when we are finished, about Ishmael Zevi as a human being? Hardly. This unfortunate child is barely allowed to exist — in our

(2) Scholem,"Perush mizmorei tehillim mi־hugo shel Shabbetai Sevi be-Adrinopol," in Alá Ayin: The Salman Schocken Jubilee Volume... (Jerusalem, 1948-52), pp. 157-211 ; reprinted in Re-searches in Sabbatianism (Hebrew; Yehuda Liebes [ed.] [Tel Aviv, 1991]), pp. 89-141. The 1991 edi-tion of the article includes marginal notes subsequently added by Scholem, plus important comments and references contributed by Liebes. In the following notes, I will cite the page num-bers of both editions, indicating the 1991 edition as "Liebes!'The discussion o f Ishmael Zevi is o n pp. 172-73 (Liebes, pp. 105-07); the Dönme tradition is cited in n. 54; Scholem's response to Benayahu is contained in a marginal note published in Liebes, p. 107.

(3) Benayahu, The Shabbatean Movement in Greece (Hebrew; Sefunot 14; Jerusalem, 1971-77), pp. 163-78.

145 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH

sources, at least — other than as a vessel for the desperate and often grotesque fantasies of the adults who surrounded him. We have access only to these fan-tasies. We can infer much from them about the needs that brought them into being, little about the person onto whom they were projected.

Three motifs will emerge from our study. The first is the familiar and mei-ancholy thence of Messianic expectation battered by repeated disappoint-ment, transforming itself again and again, but without ever being able to free itself of its fundamental addiction to illusion. The second is the powerful but ambiguous role of Islam in the imaginings of the Sabbatians, who, on this subject, perhaps expressed more or less openly feelings that were latent in many other Jews of their time.

The third is the Aqedah, as envisioned by at least one Sabbatian exegete. Its victim-hero is now an Ishmael instead of — or, as well as — an Isaac. Un-like his Biblical prototype, h e indeed perishes in his childhood, and is speed-ily forgotten by those who once venerated him. The story of Ishmael Zevi, as it emerges from the early Sabbatian sources, thus takes its place within the an-cient and perdurable tradition that marks one of the central themes of Jewish religious thought and experience.

The significance of the Aqedah theme — for Judaism, for religion, for the èntire human experience — has been the subject of much weighty medita-tionf In such meditations, the Aqedah of Ishmael Zevi deserves to be taken into account. No less than the other, more conventional, manifestations of the Aqedah tradition, it has its role to play in evoking and defining the mean-ing of the whole.

Our procedure will be as follows: We will begin by examining the evidence for Ishmael Zevi's life, down to 1680, provided by sources other than the "Com-mentary on Psalms'.'We will then turn to the commentary itself and consider its structure and purpose — we will see in this connection that Scholem's title is not altogether appropriate — and establish how the author's plan for his work changed in the course of writing. These changes of plan, as we will see, are closely linked to his expectations concerning Ishmael Zevi, and to the frustration of these expectations.

As we proceed, the author's perceptions of Islam and of the Aqedah will

(4) Kierkegaard's Fear and Trembling is of course the classic. Outstanding recent meditations, of a scholarly character, include Shalom Spiegel, The Last Trial ( Philadelphia, 1967 ; with an im-portant introduction byjudah Goldin); David Shulman, The Hungry God: Hindu Tales of Filidde and Devotion (Chicago, 1993); Jon D. Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son: The Transformation of Child Sacrifice inJudaism and Christianity (New Haven, 1994). I am grateful to my old friend, Professor Marc Bregman, for sharing with me the fruits of his many years of ponder-ing the Aqedah and its implications, and his plans for a teaching book that will represent his thinking o n the subject. !

[4] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 4 6

come into our view, and will become so tightly bound u p with his fantasy fig-ure of Ishmael Zevi that we will need to consider all of them together. This part of the argument will oblige us to undertake a particularly close analysis of the commentary's Aqedah exegesis.

I will then examine certain data that seem to contradict my view that Ish-mael Zevi was dead by 1680, and will offer alternative explanations for those data. We will consider what became of the Messianic faith of the author of the "Psalms Commentary,"once its focus was gone. And we will take a last look at the figure who stands at the center of the Sabbatian Aqedah, and reflect on what it means to be hero and victim of so dreadful and pathetic a drama.

2 . T H E L I F E O F I S H M A E L Z E V I

Our data about Ishmael Zevi are sparse and uncertain. Earlier historians of Sabbatianism — Scholem, Benayahu, Yehuda Liebes — have gathered and discussed the key testimonies? Let us examine them once again.

The earliest surviving hagiography of Sabbatai Zevi, written in the 1680s by one Baruch of Arezzof claims that h e first made love with his wife Sarah af-ter his conversion to Islam? and that "she bore him a son. He himself circum-cised him on the eighth day, reciting aloud the blessings over the wine in full view of the Turks. He named him Ishmael Mordecai. Afterwards she bore a daughter, and h e called her name"— and, where the daughter^ name ought to be, the text is unaccountably blank.8

Baruch's account of "Ishmael MordecaiV'circumcision, which is obviously intended to show that the rite took place according tojewish rather than Mus-lim practiceos contradicted by the more reliable contemporary narrative of Jacob Najara? Ishmael was circumcised, according to this account, in Adri-

( 5 ) Above, sec. 1, nn. 2 3־־ ; Scholem, Salata¿ Sevi: The Mystical Messiah ( Princeton, 1973 ), index, s.v. "Sevi, Ishmael Mordecai"; Liebes,"Yahaso shel Shabbetai Sevi le־hamarat dato?Sefunot n.s. ,î reprinted in OnSabbateaism audits Kabbalah: CollectedEssays (Hebrew; Jerusalem־־27374 (1983) 21995). PP· 277-78·

(6) Zikkaron Uvnei Yisra'el, published in Freimann,c/wyan« Shabbetay Sevi, pp. 43-78 . (7) Ibid., p.46. (8) Ibid., p. 63. The mysterious lacuna where the daughter's name ought to be is present in

all the manuscripts of Zikkaron livnei Yisra'el I have consulted (in the Institute of Microfilm He-brew Manuscripts, National and University Libraryjerusalem) :J TS Mie. 3590 ;Jerusalem, Ben-Zvi 2264; Cambridge Or. 804; London,British Museum 1061; Warsaw LIVand LV(formerly MSS Schwartz 141,21 and 141,21a of the Vienna Jewish community). I have n o idea how it might be explained. — Nathan of Gaza, writing early in 1672, mentions the birth of a daughter to Sab-batai in the preceding year : Abraham Amarillo,"Tecudot shabbeta'iyyot mi־ginzei Rabbi Sha'ul A m a r i l l o ? 5 ( 1 9 6 1 ) 2 6 2 ; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 851.

(9) The "Najara chroniclers published in Amarillo,"Tecudot shabbeta'iyyot," pp. 254-62;

[ 5 ] T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH 1 4 7

anople on 8 Nisan (9 March) 1671, the day after Sabbatai had gained custody of him from Sarah, whom h e had just divorced. (He remarried her not long after-ward.)10The boy was now three years old, Sabbatai remarked to Najara, and therefore must be circumcised in accord with Leviticus 19:23-24, three years shall it be uncircumäsed to you. . .but in the fourth year all its fruit shall be holiness of praise. Sabbatai found it significant that h e had gained custody of the child o n 7 Nisan, the day when Elishama prince of the tribe of Ephraim had made his offering to the tabernacle (Numbers 7:48-53); Elishama's name being an anagram for"Ishmae1rand his status an allusion to the Messiah ben Ephraim. Ishmael was given the Jewish name'TsraeFfor the occasion.11

It is evident from Najara's account that this eccentric ritual was carried out amid considerable Messianic excitement. We can only imagine its effect o n the three-year-old child, snatched from his mother and hustled off to a gath-ering of enthusiasts who pronounced over him prophecies and blessings un-intelligible to him, while they cut his penis.12

It will follow from Najara's chronology that Ishmael was born in Nisan 1668. This date entirely suits Baruch of Arezzo's story.13 There is, however, an importan t piece of evidence that can b e taken to suggest h e was born the previ-ous year.14 This is a letter written by Nathan of Gaza to Sabbatai Zevi's broth-ers, evidently early in 1667, which prophesies that "out of this business [the

summarized in Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp.846-51. The account of Ishmael's circumcision is o n pp. 256-57.

( 10) Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 851. (11) Najara: ve-niqra shem ha-mahul be-yisraelyisrael. (12) We may get some idea of the trauma inflicted by reading accounts of the circumcisions,

in traditional societies, of older boys who have the advantage of being prepared for the opera-tion and knowing why they are being made to endure it: Clifford Geertz, The Religion of Java, Chicago 8c London, i960, pp. 51-53 ; Nelson Mandela, LongWalk to Freedom: The Autobiography of Nelson Mandela, Boston, 1994, pp. 2 2 - 2 7. ( I owe the latter reference to my colleague Professor Ya-akov Ariel.) It is not clear from Najara's account how many people attended the circumcision. On 8 Nisan, h e says, Sabbatai sent invitations to the Muslim notables of Adrianople, knowing that they would falsely assume that the ritual was scheduled for the next day. (Clearly, pace Ba-ruch of Arezzo, Sabbatai was concerned that the Muslims not know just what was done at the circumcision.) Najara himself performed the circumcision — again contradicting Baruch of Arezzo — and Joseph Karillo acted as sandaq. But there were clearly other Jews, or at least Jew-ish apostates, present. One of them "had a ten-year-old son who had not yet been circumcised; h e had vowed, while AMI RAH was in the'tower of strength' [that is, when Sabbatai Zevi was being held in the fortress Gallipoli, in 1666],to circumcise him only in the presence of King Messiah. AM Ι RAH then commanded the afore-mentioned rabbi [Najara] that he circumcise him with the afore-mentioned blessings, and he called his name Ishmael."

( 13) The Dönme tradition similarly recalls that Ishmael was circumcised at age three : Moshe Attias and Gershom Scholem,Shirot ve-tushbahot shel ha-shabbetaim(Tel Aviv, 1947)» P4־^·

(14) Liebes (above, η. 5) summarizes the arguments for 1667 vs. 1668 as the year of Ishmael's birth. He inclines to the earlier date. ״

[ 6 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I N 1 4 8

apostasy, presumably] a son is to be born to Sabbatai Zevi, his name Ishmael. He will be born circumcised, and will undergo the rite of hatafat dam at age thirteen. Of him the Bible says ,Only let Ishmael live before you [Genesis 17:18], and he will be a wild ass of a manfhis hand in all and the hand of all in him [16:12 ])5

inasmuch as by his hand shall the Gentiles be sustained and preserved from annihilation, [God] not wishing the destruction of any creature!'16 It sounds very much as if Ishmael's birth is imminent. We need not assume, however, that the child Nathan anticipates is necessarily the same as the one who was actually born and given the name Ishmael. The expecting mother — who may or may not have been Sarah17— may have miscarried; the child may have died in infancy; it may have turned out to be a girl. Sabbatai's first son will then have been born the following spring.

Nathan's allusions to the Biblical Ishmael (to which we should add Gen 17:25, according to which Ishmael was circumcised at age thirteen) are ech-oed in a letter that Sabbatai himself wrote some months after his birth!8 The day of thepidyon ha-ben of "my first-born son Ishmael, who shall bcgreat [Gen 17:20] and shall live [17:18]',' is said to have taken place in the week of the To-rah portion containing Lev 25:26, Should a man have no redeemer; his hand shall yet attain that hefind the wherewithal for his redemption!9 "Surely this is an allusion to Job, the man of sufferings who well knows illness [Isaiah 53:3] — I mil concede to

(15) Translated in accord with Nathan's evident understanding of the passage. (16) Quoted byjacob Sasportas, Sisat navel Sevi ; Isaiah Tishby (ed.) ( Jerusalem, 1954),pp. 2 00-01. (17) Sasportas, writing to the Moroccan rabbis in the fall of 1668, speaks of Ishmael as the off-

spring of a Muslim wife or concubine of Sabbatai's (Sisat novel Sevi, p. 314; also p. 349, written in August 1669; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p.685). How seriously ought we to take this claim? Sas-portas was hardly an unbiased observer, and the Genesis typology invoked by Nathan might well have suggested to him that, like his Biblical model, Ishmael Zevi was the son of a concubine. Na-jara, moreover, explicitly represents Sarah as Ishmael Zevi's mother. But it is curious that, sev-eral years later, Sabbatai refers to Ishmael as the son of his new wife, Joseph Filosoff's daughter (see below). If Ishmael was in fact the son of a non-Jewish woman — who would have been, from the Jewish perspective, n o wife at all — we can easily imagine that Sabbatai and his followers might have adopted the convention of describing him as the "son" of whoever Sabbatai's current Jewish wife happened to be. A Dönme hymn speaks obscurely of Sabbatai having had "three other women" in addition to his four "official" wives, and says immediately afterward,"Ishmael came forth from him" (Attias and Scholem, Shirot ve-tushbahot, p. 205). All of this suggests the possi-bility that Ishmael's mother — and, if my reconstruction is correct, the woman whom Nathan falsely expected to become Ishmael's mother — may have been someone other than Sarah. Cf. Sisat novel Sevi, p. 327, where the Moroccan rabbi Ibn Sa'adun, writing to Sasportas at some time in 5429(1668—69), seems disposed to deny the authenticity of Nathan's prophecy of Ishmael's birth, as though there were something discreditable about it.

(18) Amarillo,"Tecudot shabbeta'iyyot," pp. 266-68; discussed at length in Liebes,"Yahasor pp. 267-307. The letter is itself undated, so the date we ascribe to it will depend o n whether we judge Ishmael to have been born in 1667 or 1668.

(19) Ve-ish hi lo yihyeh lo gó'el ve-hissigah y ado umasa kedei ge'ullato. I translate in accord with Sab-

T [ך] H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH 1 4 9

you that your right hand can save you [Job 40:14]." Through this fog of Biblical allusions, we can discern that Sabbatai(who regularly identified himself with the suffering job)20expects the first-born son whom h e has recently "re-deemed" to be his"right hand','and to turn out to be his own redeemer.

The sources quoted so far permit the speculation that Sabbatai and his fol-lowers saw Ish1\1ael as embodying in his small person the duality of Sabbatai's new life as simultaneously Muslim and Jew; and, through his very existence, as rescuing him and his followers from this insoluble contradiction. His names, as recorded by Baruch of Arezzo, may be understood as symbolizing and defining his intended role. As"Mordecai," h e is the Jew placed more or less against his will at the center of Gentile power;21 while, as "Ishmael," h e is the collective representation of that power.

It is the tip of Ishmael's penis, above all else, that bears this fantastic burden. The Sabbatians,it seems, could hardly mention him without talking about his circumcisionf2 which functions to unite Judaism and Islam in his person, but also to symbolize the choice that must be made between the two (since you cannot be circumcised as an infant of eight days and again as a young boy). Nathan finds an ingenious way to escape this choice: like Moses in the mid-rash, Ishmael will be born circumcised.23 In this respect, as in others, Ishmael Zevi disappointed his elders.

At the beginning of 1673, Sabbatai Zevi was banished to Dulcigno in Albania. Sarah and Ishmael went into exile with him; we shall presently see that a re-markable vignette has been preserved of their life together. Sarah died in their exile.24

batai's evident understanding of the verse, which hinges o n the association oîyado mùvyeminekha

in Job 40:14. (20) Cf. the index to Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, s.v. Job. (21) This will supplement, not exclude, Scholem's view that the child was named after his

grandfather Mordecai Zevi (<Sabbatai Sem, p. 826). (22) A statement that remains true of the Dönme hymns dedicated to Ishmael (Attias and

Scholem, Shirot ve-tushbahot, pp. 45-47)· (23) Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews, III, 468, V, 399 (cf. V, 273-74). I d o not know if

Nathan might also have been influenced by the Muslim tradition that Antichrist (Dajjal) would be born circumcised : David J. Halperin ,"The Ibn Sayyad Traditions and the Legend of al •־Dajjal, Journal of the American Oriental Society 96(1976)2 24 n. 100. The Sabbatian Abraham Cardozo,who was born to a Marrano family in Spain and resumed his Judaism upon fleeing to Italy at age 2 2, claimed to have been born circumcised, which seems to me tantamount to admitting his ene-mies'accusations that he was never circumcised at all: Isaac R.Molho and Abraham Amarillo, "Autobiographical Letters of Abraham Cardozo" [Hebrew], Sefunot 3-4(1960)220-21; Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to Italian Ghetto (New York, 1971), p. 202.

(24) Assuming, with Scholem, that the matronita whose death is mentioned in the "Com­

1 5 ° D A V I D J . H A L P E R I N [ 8 ]

Sabbatai then married (1675) the daughter of the Salonika scholar Joseph FilosofF. Several months before his death, h e wrote a letter to Filosofi in which

h e promises to visit him in the company of his wife,"and, with her, her two sons Ishmael and Abraham?25 Let us leave aside the mysterious "Abraham"; let us leave aside, also, the problem of why Sabbatai should have called Ishmael the son of his new wife.26 Benayahu's interpretation of the letter, that Sabbatai was bringing his sons to Salonika to pursue their education with FilosofF, is thoroughly plausible.27

O n Yom Kippur, 1676, Sabbatai died. His brother, Elijah Zevi,escorted the widow and children back to Adrianople ; we learn this from a letter of Samuel Gandoor, as quoted in a subsequent letter of Meir Rofe to Abraham Rovigo ( 2 5 October 1677 )*8 The widow apparendy returned at some later point to Sa-lonika, and Benayahu thinks it a fair assumption that Ishmael went with her. But there is n o evidence for this.

The widow seems still to have been in Adrianople in 1681. Abraham Car-dozo reports her to have travelled from there to Rodosto at the end of that year, seeking his hand in marriage. So, she told him, her late husband had di-

ree ted her; and the impending Messianic redemption would depend upon their union. Cardozo urged her to wait until after the redemption, which h e had predicted for Passover 1682,had taken place; whereupon she went back to Adrianople.29 Ishmael Zevi is wholly absent from this narrative. Cardozo mentions, as did Gandoor, that after Sabbatai's death Elijah Zevi "went to bring the widow to Adrianople!' But unlike Gandoor h e says nothing of any children having been present.

Why the silence about Ishmael? We must admit that Cardozo was writing some twenty years after the events, and that h e might well have neglected to mention any but the most important participants. Yet, given the intense Mes-sianic hopes that we shall see to have been attached to Ishmael not long

mentary o n Psalms" (below, sec.6) is Sabbatai's wife Sarah, and not the daughter of Aaron Majar, whom Sabbatai had planned to marry in 1671 and again in 1674 ( a n d whose name was also Sarah).

For Scholem's view, see Sabbatai Sevi, p.885;"Perush mizmorei Tehillim? p.170 (Liebes,p.103),cf. "Peraqim apoqaliptiyyim u-meshihiyyimcal Rabbi Mordekhai me-Eizenshtat"(in Liebes, p.551). Amarillo ("Tecudot shabbeta'iyyot," pp. 240-41 ) proposes the alternative identification of the matronita, which he seems to attribute to Scholem. Cf. Avner Falk,"The Messiah and the Qelip-poth: On the Mental Illness of Sabbatai Sevi," Journal of Psychology and Judaism 7(1982)19-23.

(25) In Baruch of Arezzo; Freimann finyanei Shabbetai Sevi, pp. 67-68 . (26) But see above, n. 17. (27) Sabbatean Movement in Greece, p. 167. (28) IsaiahTishby,"R.Meir Rofe's Letters of 1675-80 to R. Abraham Rovigo" [Hebrew],Sefunot

3-4(1960) 113-14; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 918-19. (29) Molho and Amarillo,"Autobiographical Letters,״ pp. 200-01. On the episode, cf. Bena-

yahu, Shabbatean Movement in Greece, pp.80,250.

1 5 1 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [9]

before 1681 ,it is hard to imagine that h e could have been less than a major ac-tor in any scheme of his stepmother's to fulfill her own Messianic destiny. The most natural inference is that by the end of 1681 Ishmael was n o longer o n the scene and had been, for all intents and purposes, forgotten - a strange amnesia which will become familiar to us before our study is ended.The widow therefore briefly looked to Cardozo as a fresh candidate for Messiah. (Not long afterward, she turned her attentions to her young brother Jacob Querido, who would prove a more satisfactory Messianic partner than either Ishmael or Cardozo.)30

We must defer to section 9 our examination of two important post-1680 ref-erences to Ishmael Zevi, by Abraham Yakhini and Abraham Cuenque; and,to an excursus, Benayahu's brilliant (but, in my opinion, mistaken) reconstruc-tion of Ishmael's long and successful post-Sabbatian career. For now, let us conclude this section with a slightly earlier bit of evidence : a Sabbatian text dealing with the Messianic role of Mordecai Eisenstadt, written evidently in 1679, which explains the necessity for Sabbatai Zevi and his offspring to be "profaned among the Gentiles. He needed to mend [letaqqen] that filth Ish-mael that had emerged from Abraham ; that was why he needed to beget the son called Ishmael Ishmael's [that is, Islam's] merit extended only to the year 5436 [1675-76, at the end of which Sabbatai Zevi died], [after which] they deserved to be wholly annihilated. That was why h e produced that son and called his name Ishmael, in order to mix with them and, by Abraham s merit, preserve that [Muslim] nation from annihilation!'31

This testimony rounds off the scanty data about Ishmael Zevi that we have already examined. He was born (probably) in Nisan 1668, a year and a half af-ter his father's conversion to Islam, and given a name that encapsulated the Islamic world as seen through Jewish eyes. He was brought u p nominally as a Muslim, and was still so regarded in 1679. Sabbatai saw him as his own future redeemer, and (at least by 1671) as the Messiah ben Ephraim. He was expected to emerge circumcised from the womb ; that anticipation having failed, h e was abrupdy made to undergo circumcision at age three. When h e was four, h e was exiled with his parents to remote Albania. The woman h e regarded as his mother died when h e was five or six. His father died when h e was eight. He seems still to be alive, still to be a Muslim, at age ten or eleven (1679). The letter of Nathan of Gaza, written before his birth, hints that great things were

(30) Ibid., pp. 84-101 ; Scholem "The Crypto-Jewish Sect of the Dönmeh (Sabbatians) in Tur-key," in The Messianic Idea in Judaism (New York, 1971)י PP· 14755־*

(31) Scholem,"Peraqim apoqaliptiyyim',' in Liebes, Researches in Sabbateanism, pp. 545-46; cf. Liebes's appendix o n pp. 562-63.

i

[ i o ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 5 2

expected of his thirteenth birthday. Yet, not long after that birthday, h e seems to have vanished from the Sabbatian collective memory.

With this background, let us turn to examine the source that most vividly expresses the greatness expected of the Messiah's small son, and that sheds the most light on his mysterious slide into oblivion.

3 · M S B U D A P E S T , K A U F M A N N 2 5 5 : A C O M M E N T A R Y

O N T H E S A B B A T I A N L I T U R G Y F O R T H E M I D N I G H T V I G I L

In 1940, Gershom Scholem discovered in the David Kaufmann collection (Budapest) a hitherto unknown Sabbatian text. It was a commentary o n what seemed to be a random assortment of Biblical Psalms, with a few other pas-sages mixed in, e.g., the story of the manna in Exodus 16, the Ten Command-ments, the Aqedah.Scholem published a detailed article on the text some ten years later, and printed a few extracts from it in an appendix.32 To my knowl-edge, it has not otherwise been published ; nor have further manuscripts of it come to light; nor has it been subjected to independent study, scholars nor-mally having been content to quote o r cite it via Scholem's article. I am grate-ful to the Library of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (and particularly to Dr. István Ormos, Keeper of the Kaufmann Collection) for having supplied m e with a set of excellent photographic prints of the manuscript.

Scholem found it easy enough to fix the approximate date when the text was composed. Almost from its beginning, it presupposes Sabbatai Zevi's death (discreedy called his "disappearance"), and represents it as a problem for the faithful.33On the other hand.it repeatedly refers to Nathan of Gaza as one who is still alive. It follows that the text must have been written after Sab-batai's death had become widely known, and before the author might be ex-pected to have learned of Nathan's. It cannot be earlier than 1677, o r later than 1680.34

The author was a loyal disciple and scribe of Nathan's, and it appears from one story h e tells (below) that h e lived at least for a time in Nathan's sometime headquarters of Kastoria in Macedonia. These data, combined with a strong hint in the text that his name was"Israel"(see below, n.52 ),encouraged Scho-lem to identify him with one"Israel Hazzan of Kastoria"mentioned by the Ital-ian Sabbatian Benjamin Kohen. Scholars have followed Scholem's lead, and

(32) See above, sec, 1, n. 2. (33) E.g., fol 16v( they do not budge from their faith. . . even after the disappearance [he-

clem]n), 20r ("the great objection that our opponents raise to us . . / h e is dead and buried,what more can you hope from him?' ").

(34) Meir Rofe s letters to Abraham Rovigo show that Sabbatai ,s followers were kept in the dark about his death until well into 1677 > Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 918—ig.

153 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [11]

it will be convenient for us to speak of the author as " Israel Hazzan'.' This iden-tification, however, does not contribute a great deal to our knowledge of the writer. We have n o other information on Israel Hazzan at this period of his life ; although Meir Benayahu and David Tamar have called attention to legal texts that suggest that from 1692 onward h e was treated by the Jewish com-munity of Kastoria as a respectable and indeed a leading citizen, and that h e was still alive in 1720?5 If Israel Hazzan was the author of our text, therefore, h e must have been a fairly young man at the time.

Now, Hazzan's commentary has a great deal to say about Ishmael Zevi and about his Messianic role. Scholem excerpts some of the relevant statements, and puts them in the context of what we know about Ishmael's life. He does not, however, attempt to evaluate them within the context of the commen-tary itself, or to trace the development of Hazzan's perceptions of Ishmael as an aspect of the evolution of his overall project. This seems to me a crucial omission. For it must be understood that the statements about Ishmael are by n o means evenly distributed through the commentary. O n the contrary, Ish-mael first makes his appearance more than two-thirds of the way through the text, dominates much of the next eleven folio pages, and then disappears as suddenly as h e came, never to be heard of again. If we are to make sense of this curious proceeding - which will be essential, if we are to understand what Ishmael Zevi meant to Israel Hazzan — it will behoove us to take a closer look at the structure and development of Hazzan's composition.

To this end, I will proceed to establish at least the probability of three as-sertions. First, Scholem was mistaken to believe that Hazzan selected his Bib-lical texts without any predetermined plan, guided only by his inspiration at each juncture. The sequence of texts Hazzan expounds is in fact based on the distinctive liturgy for the midnight vigil (tiqqun hasot) that Sabbatai Zevi formulated n o later than 1665.Where Hazzan diverges from the original se-quence — as h e does, in significant ways — we must seek some particular mo-tivation on his part. Second, Scholem was right to suspect that MS Kaufmann 2 55 is Hazzan's autograph.Third, the enormous variations in the manuscript's handwriting, to which Scholem called attention, may be used as markers of the stages in which the commentary was composed, and the points at which the author quite literally laid down Iiis pen. The bearing of these assertions on our examination of Ishmael Zevi will presently become clear.

In his widely circulated letter to Raphael Joseph (September 1665),Nathan of Gaza admonished that"the meditations (kawwanoth) which the great master

(35) Benayahu, Shabbatean Movement in Greece, pp. 2 4 1 2 4 5 ־ ־ 4 3 n׳ ׳ Tamar, Mehqarim be-toledot ha-Yehudim be-eres Yisraelu-ve-arsot ha-mizrah(Jerusalem, 1981),cited by Liebes, Researches in Sab-batianism, p. 139.1 have not seen Tamar,s book.

Í

[ 1 2 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 154

Isaac Luria had revealed are n o longer applicable in our days, since all the worlds are now [on a] different [mystical level],and it [that is, the meditation of the Lurianic devotions today] would be like performing actions appropriate to a weekday o n a Sabbath!'36 In particular, the Lurianic rite of tiqqun hasot was to be discarded — or, rather, drastically revamped. T h e purpose of the rite was to raise the divine Female (the Shechinah)from he r dust and to cou-pie her with the divine Male ;37and, according to Nathan, the Shechinah had by 1665 already begun her ascent."Hence,"he wrote in 1666,"one must no t perform the tiqqun and weep over the exile of the Shechinah as we used to do, bu t the tiqqun that AM1RAH38ordained, as it is well known to you!'39

What was"the tiqqun that A M I R A H ordained"? Scholem writes, in a foot-note to this passage, that it is n o longer extant. H e does no t seem to have ob-served that it is set forth in detail by the eighteenth-century Salonikan rabbi and preacher Abraham Miranda, in the course of a discussion of the con-temporary relevance of the Lurianic kavvanot.40

These kavvanot, says Miranda (echoing Nathan) are by and large obsolete, and the Lurianic tiqqun hasot is n o longer suitable."But one should recite the following tiqqun, preferably while standing;41 and should begin by reciting with a melodious voice, clear enunciation, and a sacred melody: Far the sake of the unity of the Blessed Holy One, etc. Our God and God of our fathers, reign over the entire world in your glory,e te." There follows a list of Biblical passages to be recited(see below),concluded by the statement :"Thus ends the tiqqun hasot arranged by AMIRAH."

T h e liturgies for tiqqun laylah, distributed by Nathan of Gaza and printed in numerous editions throughout 1666?2 preserve the tiqqun described by

(36) Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 271-72. The glosses are Scholem's, the translation is that of R.J. Zwi Werblowsky. The original text is in Sasportas, Sisat navel Sevi, p. 9.

(37) O n the development of the rite, see Scholem, On the Kabbalah and Its Symbolism (New York, 1965), pp. 146-50. The classic statement of its content, theory, and practice is in Hayyim Vital's Shacar ha-kawanot,Derushei ha-laylah, 4 and 11(Yehudah Zvi Brandwein [ed.] [Jerusalem, 1988], vol.1 [Sidrat kol kitvä ha-Αή, vol. 8], pp. 347-53,374-79) . A modern edition of the liturgy is published by Seraiah Dablitzky,Seder Tiqqun Hasot (Bnei Brak, 1972 [1958]).

(38) The standard Sabbatian designation for Sabbatai Zevi, comprised of the initials of the phrase adonenu meshihenu yarum hodo "our Lord and Messiah, may his majesty be exalted."

(39) Derush ha-tanninim, in Scholem, Be-iqvot mashiah ( Jerusalem, 1944), p. 15 ; cf. Sabbatai Sevi, p. 250.

(40) Inserted by Miranda into a bulky anthology of Sabbatian documents that he had copied out (MS Ben-Zvi, Amarillo 2 2 62 ).The relevant passage is published in Benayahu, Sabbatean Move-ment in Greece, pp. 4 0 5 - 0 8 ; on Miranda himself, see pp. 204-2 2.

(41 ) In opposition to the standard Lurianic practice of reciting tiqqun hasot while sitting o n the ground; cf. below, n.48.

(42) Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 290-92 , and the annotated bibliography of the editions on PP· 936-39· I have consulted four editions, the first three provided (on microfilm) by the library

155 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [ 1 3 ]

Miranda.There are, to be sure, somevariations.Two of the editions I have con-suited, for example, add Psalm 31 (which does not appear at all in Miranda's list) after Psalm 28,with the preface :"Psalm 31 is added here in the Safed text, and for that reason I have included it as well for the benefit of the reader who wants to recite it and be rewarded for it!'43 Miranda notes three additional psalms (45,15, 4 4( ! ן i n the margins or between the lines of his manuscript; none of these three appears in the printed editions. But the rule is that lee-tions that are missing from Miranda are in some way flagged as uncertain in the editions, and vi& versai5 There is n o lection listed in the body of Miranda's text that is not found in all of the editions I have consulted; nor is there any lection printed without prefatory reservations that fails to appear in Miranda. The order of readings is identical in all sources. O n the essential content of the Sabbatian liturgy for tiqqun hasot, in other words, Miranda and the 1666 editions are in complete agreement.

This liturgy turns out to be a very much expanded version of the Lurianic "rite of Leah" {tiqqun le ah).The Lurianic tiqqun hasot had been divided into a"rite of Rachel"and a"rite of Leah!' In this division,"Rachel" represents that aspect of the divine Female that has been exiled and degraded(and therefore requires rescue) "Leah" the aspect that is about to engage in the sacred cou-pling with the Male (and therefore requires preparation and assistance)?6

of the Hebrew Union College in Cincinnati, the fourth by the Princeton University Library. The Hebrew Union College editions are those printed 1."at the press and behest of David de Castro Tartazr Amsterdam (Scholem's no. 30), 2. "at the behest o f . . .Joshua Sarphati at the press of David de Castro Tartaz," Amsterdam (Scholem's no. 31), 3. "at the press and behest of Isaac ben David de Castro Tartaz," Amsterdam (evidently corresponds to Scholem's no. 32, but, unlike the book Scholem describes, has n o frontispiece). The volume loaned me by Princeton University Library is apparently a relatively recent reprint. It includes n o fewer than six title pages, one of them in Spanish (Scholem's no. 34, Plate IV), another corresponding to the frontispiece de-scribed by Scholem (and reproduced by him as Plate II I). The first two title pages both claim that

the book was published in Amsterdam,"at the press and behest of David de Castro Tartaz"; the second corresponds to Scholem's no. 30, the first is similar to nos. 31 and 32 but identical with neither. The liturgy itself, with its variants,closely corresponds to that printed by Isaac ben David de Castro Tartaz ( Scholem's no. 3 2 ).The pagination (85 leaves) does not correspond to any of the editions listed by Scholem,but it is fairly close to no. 31.The publication history of Nathan's tiqqun is clearly more complex even than Scholem's bibliography would suggest, and I do not have the library resources to pursue it further.

(43) Ed. Isaac ben David de Castro Tartaz, and the Princeton edition. (44) Psalm 4 5 after Psalm 40, Psalm 15 after Psalm 112, Psalm 71 after Psalm 51. (45) Miranda puts Psalm 126 at the very end of his list(after Prov 31:2 8-31 ),with the note,

"In other manuscripts I did not see this psalm? Two of the editions (cited in note 43, above) in-elude Psalm 126 — introduced, however, by the words,"Some recite this psalm after the tiqqun:Γ These editions thus agree with Miranda that Psalm 126 is a doubtful element of the liturgy. I have therefore omitted it from the list of tiqqun hasot readings that follows.

(46) The liturgy oí tiqqun rahel consists of Psalms 137 and 79, Lamentations 5, Isa 63:15-18,

[141 DAVID J . HALPE RI Ν 1 5 6

Once the Female has been raised from the dust — as had happened, accord-ing to Sabbatian theory, some years prior to Sabbatai Zevi's appearance47— tiqqun rahel loses its point. Tiqqun léah does not. It will not surprise us, there-fore, to find otherwise conservative people restricting, during the great Mes-sianic excitement, their recitation of tiqqun hasot partly or wholly to tiqqun ieahf8 It will surprise us still less to find the Messiah himself fashioning a new tiqqun hasot of his own, taking six of the seven tiqqun le'ah psalms (all but Psalm 67) as his starting point?9

Now, when we compare the sequence of Biblical passages in the Sabbatian tiqqun hasot with the sequence of passages expounded in Israel Hazzan's com-mentary, we will find their relationship beyond any doubt.

Tiqqun hasot MS Kaufmann 2 5 5 Tiqqun hasot MS Kaufmann 255

Psalms 21 21 26 26 27 27 28 28

88

Psalms 42 42 43 43 24 24 19 19 20 20

64:7-11,62:6-9. The liturgy of tiqqun léah consists of Psalms 24,42,43,20,67,111, and 51, plus a verse from the lamentation az be-hataenu harav miqdash ( Israel Davidson, Thesaurus of Medieval Hebrew Poetry [ Ktav reprint, 1970] ,vol. 1, p.98 ).The kawanot of all the" Leah"psalms except the last, according to Vital, relate to"Leah's coupling,her pregnancy, and her childbearing,in accord with the esoteric meaning of she rises while it is yet night [Prov 31:15 ]"(Shacar ha-kawanot, p. 356). From this and from other remarks mShacar ha-kawanot,it is clear that the" Leah" liturgy was structured with an eye toward the Zoharic myth of the hind, in which the Female's nocturnal excursion con-veys divine effluence ("food") to those bel0w(Z0har,II,52b,219b-220a,III,249a-b; the last two passages are translated in Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar [London and Washington, 1989], vol. 1, pp. 393-96, vol. 2, pp.738-40).It is thus no accident that Israel Hazzan's commentary on his opening psalm (42) is largely given over to detailed exposition of these Zoharic passages.

(47) Scholem/'Hadashot cal Rabbi David Yishaqi ha־shabbeta'i," in Liebes, Researches in Sab-bateanism, pp. 197-202.

(48) Moses Zacuto, for example,could never bring himself to accept Nathan's theory that the Lurianic kawanot were outdated. Yet, temporarily persuaded that an era of divine grace was dawning, he decided in 1666 no longer to perform tiqqun hasot "with lamentations and sitting on the ground, as I once d i d . . . . I recite at midnight the Psalm of Asaph [Psalm 79], the verses Look from heaven. . . [Isa 63:15-18], and the rest of the consoling verses and familiar sequence of psalms"— that is to say, tiqqun léah plus a few remnants of tiqqun rahel ( ScholemYahaso shel Rabbi Mosheh Zakut el ha-shabbeta'ut," in Liebes, Researches in Sabbateanism, pp. 510-29 ; cf. Sab-batai Sevi, pp. 501-04). We will presently see that one of these remnants, Isa 63:15-18, was sub-stantially to influence the thought of Israel Hazzan.

(49) Cf. n.46 with the list below; of the five opening psalms of Sabbatai Zevi's tiqqun hasot, four are from tiqqun Wah.

157 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [15]

Tiqqun hasot MS Kaufmann 255 Tiqqun hasot MS Kaufmann 255

51:9-11,43 8:8-10 31:28-29

34 37 (Ishmael) [40] [63] [111] 112 (Ishmael) 51 72 (Ishmael)

Aqedah (Ishmael) Job 28:3-11,Jer 31:6-10 [I Samuel 2:1-10]

142:1-2, Song 4:8 102

Daniel 2:19-23

142:3-8 143 17:1-7 5 17:7-15 86 90

Isaiah 51:9-11 Song of Songs 8:8-10

Proverbs 31:28-31

Psalms

77, 68 Psalms

Psalms

Psalms

34 37 40, 63

111 112 51 72

Aqedah (Gen 22:1-19) Manna (Exod 16:4-36) Manna

SZ's baqqashaÄ50

Job 28:12ff

Ten Commandments Ten Commandments (Exod 20:2-14)

Psalms 46 47

Deuteronomy 10:12-21 30:lff 30:1-10 10:12-22

7:18-20 118:5-21 21:17ff Psalms 80 Job 38f, Psalms 69

Micah 7:18-20 Psalms 118:5-25

Numbers 21:17-20

I have based my list of the texts expounded by Hazzan on that prepared by Scholemf1 but have altered it slightly on the basis of my own examination of the manuscript. Where two passages appear o n the same line, this indicates that Hazzan has wandered into an exposition of the second within the frame-work of his commentary o n the first. Where Ishmael Zevi appears in the com-mentary to a given passage, I have noted this fact in parentheses.

Four passages in my list are in brackets. Hazzan does not actually expound

(50) That is, the liturgical poem beginning le-macanekha ve-lo lanu u-le-shokhevei mecarah (David-son, Thesaurus,voL$,p.54),which Hazzan (fol 47 V) represents as having been a favorite of Sabbatai Zevi's, and which he expounds as though it were one of his Biblical texts.(Is there any signifi-cance to the fact that two of the sources Davidson gives for the poem are nineteenth-century editions of tiqqun hasot})

(51) "Perush mizmorei tehillim','pp. 158-60 (Liebes, pp. 90-91).

[ 1 6 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν ! 5 8

these texts, but only notes that either h e or Nathan of Gaza has elsewhere com־ mented o n them?2 Remarks of this sort are wholly inexplicable unless we as-sume that Hazzan was working with a fixed lectionary sequence that included these passages. He might add commentary on passages that did not figure in the liturgy, but h e did not want to omit comment on any part of the liturgy without explaining the omission.

It seems to m e entirely clear that Israel Hazzan had set himself to write a commentary on the Sabbatian tiqqun hasot. It is also clear that h e permitted himself significant liberties with his source. We might account for the addi-tion of one or two Biblical passages here and there — Psalms 88 and 77 after Psalm 2 8, Psalms 46 and 47 after the Ten Commandments — as deriving from a variant text of the tiqqun. But it is very unlikely that this will explain the dis-placement of the entire series of passages from Psalm 34 through the Aqe-dah to after Proverbs 31; or the introduction of a wholly new series of pas-sages, which have n o counterparts in the tiqqun, after the Aqedah.

Only one hypothesis will seem to me to make sense of these rearrange-ments. At some point prior to undertaking the exposition of Psalm 34, Israel Hazzan conceived the idea of making the Aqedah, and his interpretation of it, the climax of his composition. His commentaries on the sequence of lections preceding the Aqedah were to lead u p to this climax. He therefore saved this sequence for last and skipped over it for the time being, going straight from Psalm 2 8 to the manna story. All of the commentary's allusions tolshmael Zevi occur within, and dominate, this displaced sequence.

But something went wrong. At some point — and we shall presently seek to define that point — Hazzan realized that the Aqedah was not so fitting a conclusion after all. He therefore continued his composition beyond the bounds h e had originally set for it, to cover what appears to be some other liturgical sequence that I have not yet been able to identify ;53and h e ended

(52) Hazzan notes o n fol 98V that the yihudim of Psalms 4 0 and 6 3 have been explained by Na-than,"in the book of his holy writings that I copied from his holy exalted mouth? fols 4V and 2r respectively; while he has himself expounded Psalm 111 in his Emunei Yisrael, page 49. Fol 114V refers the reader to "page 85" for an interpretation of 1 Sam 2:1-10; I assume that this reference is also to the otherwise unknown Emunei Yisrael, since it does not correspond to our manuscript. The very low folio numbers of the lost "book^of Nathan's utterances (cf. Scholem,"Perush miz-morei tehillimrp. 160 and n. 6 ; Liebes, p. 92) tempts me to suspect that this "book"may have con-sisted of what were originally the first six folios of MS Kaufmann 255 ; which, as we now have it, begins with fol ητ (see below). But six folio pages seems very short for a"book"(sefer).

(53) Hazzan's cross-reference to his exposition of 1 Sam 2:1-10 (above,n.52)shows that he is working with some pre-existing sequence of texts, and not following his own inspiration.This se-quence bears n o resemblance whatever to the Sabbatian tiqqun ha-yom,the liturgy to be recited after the morning service, as this is represented in the 1666 editions. (The tiqqun ha-yom lec-tionsare Gen 1:1-2:3,Deut 5:6-18,32:1-43,the first twoparashiyyot of Lev [1:1-7:38]>Isa 2:1-5,

159 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH

on the melancholy strains of the Ninetieth Psalm?4

Scholem, as I have already remarked, was inclined to think that MS Kauf-mann 255 is Israel Hazzan's autograph. Its script, h e says, is seventeenth-century Sephardic, written"by a single scribe whose handwriting transforms itself on many pages from a precise and exacting script to one that is so rapid and careless that they look like two different scripts." He attributed these sudden changes to "the writer's level of weariness and concentration. It is very possible that the scribe was himself the author, and the manner in which corrections are made in a number of places will support this view.

Scholem gave n o examples to back u p his last assertion. Let me provide one. O n fol l igr -v Hazzan gives an interpretation, inspired by Nathan of Gaza's writings, of the words boded calgag in Ps 102:8. Its essential point is that Sab-batai Zevi has fused the two dalets of boded into the final closed mem, and thus closed off the structures of holiness against the profaning and destructive forces of chaos. Having made this point about verse 8, Hazzan proceeds to verse 9:"Let us return to our passage.The text goes on, All day long have they mocked me" But h e puts two dots - evidently a mark of erasure - over each of the last five words (amarcod kol ha-yom her funi \ and continues," We may also understand in this way another Biblical text, spoken by Micah with regard to

11:1-12:5, Jer 30:1-31:39,33:10-26, Prov 31:10-31.) Is it perhaps linked to the liturgies of the shommm la-boqer groups,who since the 1570s had made it their practice to gather before dawn for voluntary prayer rituals? (See Elliott Horowitz,"Coffee,Coffeehouses,and the Nocturnal Rituals of Early Modern Jewry," AJS Review 14U989] 17-46.) The fact that it begins with Job 28:3, He has put an end to darkness, might conceivably point in this direction. But I have so far been unable to consult any edition of these liturgies (e.g., Aaron Berechiah of Modena s Ashmoret ha-boqer),and must for the present leave this as speculation.

(54) I see n o reason to suspect, as Scholem does, that any pages have been lost at the end of the manuscript.The last page is in poor condition, but it carries the commentary to the very end of Psalm 90, and ends amen νe-amen. (It is not true that this page "was damaged by cutting," as Scholem claims.The even lines that appear to mutilate the last page, which do indeed give the impression of having been made by knife or scissors, are in fact the edges of tape used to bind, rather ineptly, the tattered sheet into the volume. The same is true of other pages of the manu-script, which seemed to Scholem to have been cut so that a few of the letters are missing , the letters were covered with tape, and can often be dimly made out.) Nor would there be any rea-son to suppose that the beginning of the text is missing, were it not for the odd fact that the He-brew numeration of the folio pages begins at 7· (It ends at 136 — not 137, as Scholem says.) In n. 52 ,above, I offered one possible explanation for this peculiarity, but I do not have much confi-dence in it. In citing the manuscript, I follow the Hebrew page numbers (which,of course, I write using Arabic numerals).There is also a sequence of Arabic numerals written o n the pages (be-ginning with folio 1, ending with 128), but it is useless : the same number is occasionally used for two different pages, and the sequence gives rise to a horrendous bit of confusion about two-thirds of the way through the manuscript, where a cluster of twelve folios is bound into the vol-urne upside-down so that the last page comes first. In preparing this article, I have ignored it.

(55) "Perush mizmorei tehillim? p. 158 ; Liebes,ק. go. i

[ 1 8 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 6 ο

the true Messiah, namely AMI RAH." The text in question is Mie 7:14, where the two dalets of h-vadad may similarly be explained in accord with Nathan's theory of the closed ram. Hazzan spends about five lines discussing this pas-sage. He then resumes his quotation of Ps 102:9, kol ha-yom ve-khu\ and goes on to explicate it.

It is difficult to imagine a scribal error, or series of scribal errors, that would have created this text. Assume that the manuscript is Hazzaris autograph, and all is clear. Hazzan, having applied Nathan's theory to Ps 102:8, proceeded to the next verse. Immediately after writing the lemma, however, it occurred to him that the theory will shed fresh light also on Mie 7:14. He left his writing for a time, presumably while h e thought this through. (The script becomes slightly smaller and neater after the words amar cod kol ha-yom herfuni, as it tends to after the writer has taken a break; see below.) Returning to his desk, h e made his point about the Micah passage, then resumed, in the most con-eise manner possible, his interrupted discussion of Ps 102:9.

A scribe, copying a text that originated in the way I have suggested, would surely either have deleted the words amar cod kol ha-yom herfuni or else omit-ted to mark them for erasure. The text as we have it best makes sense if we suppose it comes straight from its author's hand.

This assumption will allow us our best explanation of a peculiar feature of the manuscript. Of the forty-four units of content into which the text can be divided (above),no fewer than fifteen — that is, slightly over one-third of the total — begin at the very top of the page (more often a verso than a recto)?6

This tendency is particularly strong at the beginning of the manuscript: of the first ten units, seven begin at the top of the page. There is n o way this fea-ture can have come about by chance. A copyist could have created it only by leaving a blank space at the bottom of the preceding page, or by writing very large or very small on the preceding page; but the writer of the manuscript has done neither. Only an author, in full control of his or her prolixity, could have achieved this effect.57

It follows that Hazzan was not only the author of the text but also the writer of the manuscript, and that, for one reason or another — presumably aesthetic — h e was initially ready to take pains to insure that his units of con-tent corresponded to the tops of his pages. He eventually grew less inclined

( 5 6 ) P s a l m 4 2 ( f o l Psalm 2,(־241)Psalm43,(־71 4 ( 2 4 v ) , P s a l m 19(25v) ,Psa lm 2 6 Psalm 2,(־311) 7

( 3 3 v ) , P s a l m 8 8 ( 3 7 v ) , E x o d 16:4-36(41V) ,Psa lm46(541 ־ ) , D e u t 3 0 : 1 f f (59V),Psalm 3 0 ( 7 0 v ) , J 0 b

3 8 - 3 9 ( 7 2v), Psa lm 112 (991־),Ps 1 4 2 : 3 - 8 (124V), Psa lm 1 4 3 (125V). (57) This is perhaps what Scholem intended by his cryptic remark that "the manner of writ-

ing and the ordering [siddur] of the pages strengthen the impression that we have before us the author's own autograph" ("Perush mizmorei tehillim',' p. 158 ; Liebes, p. 90).

1 6 1 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH

to make this effort, which is why the feature fades away as the commentary progresses.

I d o not claim to have presented absolute proof that our manuscript is an autograph. I intend, however, to have created a presumption in favor of that view, and thereby to dispose the reader to accept the interpretation I am about to offer of another feature of the manuscript: the very considerable fluctu-ations, observed by Scholem, in the quality of its handwriting. This seemingly trivial detail will prove to have weighty implications for our understanding of the Sabbatian Aqedah, and of the fate of Ishmael Zevi.

There is a certain regularity in the fluctuations. The first page of the manu-script is written in a small, very neat, really beautiful script.The script gradu-ally slides downhill over the next dozen or so folio pages, becoming slightly larger and considerably more sloppy. And then a new feature begins to assert itself. The writer periodically gets hold of himself, as it were, and begins to write again with his original neatness. This happens over and over. Unfortu-nately for the reader, the script again degenerates fairly rapidly. It becomes, overall, more and more slovenly as the manuscript progresses, so that the con־ trasts between the writer's "fresh starts , ,and the scrawl into which they quickly decline become, in the second half of the manuscript, very striking.58

If we are prepared to grant the probability that Israel Hazzan is himself the writer of our manuscript, a very natural interpretation of these shifts will sug-gest itself. They reflect the tension between Hazzan's wish to write legibly, and his need to get on paper the ideas that bubbled u p from his mind. He nor-mally writes rapidly and carelessly because the force of his inspiration will not allow him to d o otherwise. He leaves his writing for a time, then returns. He begins the new session writing neatly and carefully. (These are the"fresh starts.") But literary inspiration soon wins out over scribal care ; soon h e is once again scribbling down his ideas as fast as they come to him.

If this is correct, it has a consequence. The"fresh starts"observable in the manuscript's handwriting will serve as markers of the stages in which Hazzan's commentary was composed — which d o not necessarily (or even normally) correspond to its units of content. We can distinguish at least some of the points at which Hazzan stood u p from his desk, to resume his work at some later time.

If we were to suppose that the stages of composition followed rapidly upon one another, this might b e a matter of small importance. There is evidence, however, that they were spaced widely enough that significant events might

( 5 8 ) T h e c l e a r e s t e x a m p l e s o f t h e " f r e s h s tarts"are o n f o l s 4 1 r - v , 69V, 73V, 78V, 8 6 r , 93V-941• ,

l ,־1041 i o v - i i i r , 112r, 1 1 6 v - 1 i 7 r , 123V, 1341־.

[ 2 0 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 6 2

happen between them. O n fol 18v, Hazzan cites an alphabetic/numerological tour de force,involving Sabbatai Zevi's name,which h e attributes to"the flaw-less sage, the excellent judge, the rabbi, the divine Kabbalist, our honored teacher Rabbijacob Ashkenazi, nr-vl,5gHe concludes the citation with :"These are his words, which I heard from his holy mouth? Hazzan's use of the formula nr-v (netareh rahmana ufarqeh? the Merciful One protect and save him o י,, r the like) shows clearly that h e believes Ashkenazi to be alive.

A second passage of this sort appears on fol 35v36־r. Hazzan introduces it, "I heard from the holy mouth of the divine rabbi, our honored teacher Rabbi Jacob Ashkenazi, nr-v" ; but concludes,"These are his holy words, z-l [zikhrono li-vrakhahl may his memory be a blessing It is strange that Ashkenazi should be spoken of as living (nr-v) at the beginning of the passage, and as dead (z-l) less than four lines later.

Scholem calls attention to the anomaly, but does not try to explain it. The most reasonable explanation seems to m e that Hazzan received the news of Ashkénazes death between writing fol 18r and fols 35v36־r. (At least one"fresh start" intervenes between the two passages, on fol 1gr,and there is perhaps an-other on fol 21r.) As h e began the second passage, h e wrote nr-v after Ashke-nazi's name, out of habit. He did not erase this expression or mark it for era-sure, perhaps out of a feeling that a blessing ought not to be effaced. But at the end of the passage h e corrected it with the more appropriate blessing, z-l.

To be sure, this peculiarity will not by itself prove that MS Kaufmann 255 is Hazzan,s autograph. The shift in the blessing after Ashkenazi's name might well have originated as I have suggested in Hazzan's original composition,and

(59) Ashkenazi is the only Sabbatian ideologue, other than Nathan,whom Hazzan quotes by name. The obscurity that now surrounds the man is itself something of a mystery, since there is evidence that he was regarded in the 1670s as one of the movement's leading intellectuals. Writ-ing shortly after 1701, Cardozo relates a story that he supposedly heard ( in 1682 ) from a man who had visited Sabbatai Zevi two weeks before his death. Sabbatai allegedly represented Cardozo to his visitors as a man of stature comparable to Ashkenazi's, to Nathan's, even to Sabbatai's own (Molho and Amarillo,"Autobiographical Letters,"pp. 217-18).Obviously,Cardozo had a motive to invent this story. But what motive would he have had to introduce Ashkenazi's name in this context, if he had not at one point been regarded by Sabbatians as a thinker second only to Na-than himself? The story contains another detail that suggests its authenticity. Cardozo mentions "Mullah cAli"as Sabbatai's messenger from Dulcigno to Adrianople; and "Mullah cAli"appears also in Israel Hazzan's commentary (fol 107V), again in the role of messenger (see below). It seems best to assume that Cardozo's story, like Hazzan's commentary, preserves an accurate reflection of the Sabbatian world of the 1670s, as seen from the Balkans. Cardozo tells a remarkable story about his own encounter with Jacob Ashkenazi, which may perhaps provide a clue as to why the Sabbatians preferred to forget him :"When the rumor arrived that Sabbatai Zevi had died in Alkum [Dulcigno], I was in Edirne [Adrianople]. I went to the great scholar Rabbi Jacob Ashke־ nazi and I said to him, Sabbatai Zevi is dead; what says Your Worship to that? He replied, If Sabbatai Zevi is dead to you, go find another God" ("Autobiographical Letters," pp. 203-04).

[ 2 1 ] T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH 1 6 3

then been unthinkingly reproduced by a copyist. But it will make us sensitive to the possibility that the stages in the creation of the manuscript may at times mirror the changing events in Hazzan's environment, as well as the develop-ments of his own thought.

In particular, it will prepare us for the possibility that one particular "fresh start','within the tsection of the manuscript that deals with the Aqedah(fol 108r ) , marks a major crisis of faith for Israel Hazzan. This crisis, I will suggest, transformed his expectations for Ishmael Zevi and his understanding of the Aqedah itself. For, in the interval between Hazzan's leaving his writing desk and his returning to it, h e learned that his young Messiah was dead.

4 . A M E S S I A H I S B O R N

We have already seen that all of the text's allusions to Ishmael, without any exception, occur within its commentary o n what I have called the"displaced sequence": those nine Biblical passages,beginning with Psalm 34 and ending with the Aqedah, that Hazzan chose to shift f rom the middle to the end of the tiqqun hasot liturgy. He first appears in the commentary on the second of these passages, Psalm 37.

I have been a lad and have grown old, says 37:25 ;yeti have not seen the nghteous forsaken or his seed [zarco] seeking bread. The righteous, Hazzan interprets, may have left the Jewish people ; h e may be among the qelippot. Yet h e is never for-saken by the Shechinah, who has been with him always since his soul was ere-ated; that is, since before the creation of the world. He is, needless to say, Sabbatai Zevi.

Hazzan has made this point,or a similar one,a dozen times over. The notion that Sabbatai Zevi and the Shechinah are inseparable companions, together doomed to dress in alien garb and enter the "great abyss ,,of the qelippot, is one of the recurrent themes that bind his commentary together from its begin-ning to its end. (So is the idea of a trinity composed of the Blessed Holy One, the female Shechinah, and their "beloved son" Sabbatai Zevi.) But this time h e adds something new."His seed: this is our Lord Ishmael, may his majesty be exalted^0 Seeking bread : this means, seeking the T o r a h . . . h e does not seek it, for it is always with him, and never leaves him or his holy seed." When the next verse of the psalm adds that his seed [zarco]is a blessing, Hazzan takes this to mean that Ishmael will join his father in blessing those Jewish souls who had become ensnared in"the depths of the great abyss"(fol 97V).

Hazzan leaves Ishmael for the time being, and develops his familiar theme of holy souls being oppressed among the qelippot (fols 9 7 V - 9 8 V ) . But h e evi-

(60) Yr-h,yarum hodo; the familar Messianic blessing formula of the Sabbatians, normally ap-plied to Sabbatai himself. Hazzan's uses of this formula will engage our attention as we proceed.

[ 2 2 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 6 4

dently wants to get back to him as soon as possible. We have already seen that h e skips over the next three psalms of the liturgy (40,63,111),briefly noting that h e or Nathan has already dealt with these texts somewhere else (fol g8v). This allows him to move straight to Psalm 112, which contains the keyword zarco in its very second verse; and, in this context, to tell us more about the Messiah's son.

The true man who fears the Lord (Ps 112:1), Hazzan says, is Sabbatai Zevi "His seed shall be mighty on the earth [verse 2 ] : this is our Lord Ishmael, may his maj esty be exalted, who will sit on his throne on the earth. AMI RAH is to ascend to a rank that is beyond the comprehension of any created being; b u t t ò seed shall be mighty on earth and h e is our lord. AMI RAH called him thus; h e said to us, This is your lord" (fol ggr-v).

Hazzan seems to imply that, in the presence of him and other people, Sab-batai Zevi had declared Ishmael to be "your lord." He indeed seems to have known Sabbatai, at least f rom a distance?1 But the claim h e makes here is more than a litde doubtful. If Sabbatai had in fact formally announced to the be-lievers that his son was to be their lord (after his death, presumably), it is hard to believe that Hazzan — who has been wrestling throughout the commen-tary with the problem of the Messiah's death — should only now have thought to mention it. The notion of Ishmael as Sabbatai's successor and vicar on earth is evidently a novelty, to which Hazzan expects some resistance.

For h e anticipates a complaint :"Have we then labored in vain?. . .Our wish is to see our king !, ,That is, the believer's love and expectation is for Sabbatai Zevi himself, not his son. He therefore finds in the end of Ps 112:2 an assur-ance that it will be Sabbatai himself who will give us the perfect blessing. He is still superior to his son, but less immediately present to the believer. Even as h e recedes into incomprehensible exaltation, Ishmael is lord on earth.

Hazzan finds nothing more about Ishmael in this psalm, or in the psalm (51) that follows. But, when h e turns to Psalm 72, Ishmael appears through-out.This psalm announces at its beginning that it is "Solomon's!' We may guess that, as Hazzan understands the"David" who speaks in most of the psalms to be a"type"of Sabbatai Zevi, so h e imagines David's son to be a"type"of Sab-batai's son. The subject of Psalm 72 is therefore Ishmael Zevi.

He does not make this point explicidy. In standard Kabbalistic fashion, h e identifies the"Solomon"of the beginning of the psalm with the sefirah Tif'eret. We have not long to wait, however, before Ishmael makes his appearance. "Give your judgments to the king [verse 1] : this is AMI RAH. And your righteousness to the king's son : this is our Lord Ishmael, may his majesty be exalted. He shall judge your people in righteousness : this refers to the king's son. . . . He will not

(61) Scholem,"Perush mizmorei tehillim^pp. 162-75, especially the story quoted o n p. 165 from fol îor (Liebes, pp. 93-110, esp. p. 97).

1 6 5 THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [ 2 3 ]

need witnesses; for, thanks to his Creator's wisdom that h e possesses, h e is both witness and judge"(fol 1 0 2 r ) . Acting on God's behalf, h e will vindicate the oppressed and insulted "poor" (that is, the Sabbatian faithful )against the community leaders, and bring them forth into the light.

H e next appears in connection with the opening words of verse 7. "When the kingdom qf our Lord Ishmael,who is our Messiah, is revealed, in his days the righteous one — AM I RAH, that is — will blossom. H e will become visible to us, out of the concealment [heclem] into which h e disappeared from us. We shall see him with our own eyes" (fol 102v).Hazzan has previously explained the phrase dor denim, in verse 5, to mean that three generations will elapse from the proclamation of Sabbatai's kingdom (that is, 1665) to"the dawning of his true light','when h e will reappear to reveal the mysteries of God's divinity. Sab-batai will then make peace among the Jewish people; h e will bring effluence down from the uppersefirot to the lower; h e will rescue the fallen souls; h e will receive the obeisance of Gentile and demonic powers,"mending them even as h e dominates them (fols 1 0 2 v - 1 0 3 r ) .

Hazzan evidendy conceives Ishmael's Messianic rule as a transitional phase toward the final, full Messiahship of his father, which is now pushed several decades into the future. We are again assured that Sabbatai Zevi will reap-pear in person."Do not say that you have already seen, or heard people say-ing, that h e is dead. Do not be afraid ; h e himself will live" (fol 1 0 3 V ) .

Yet, even while assuring us that Ishmael will no t usurp his father's glory, Hazzan suggests that h e will d o just that — in these lower realms, at least. He understands the cryptic words pissat bar at the beginning of verse 16 to mean hand of the son? The" son" in question is " the beloved son, his firstborn sonΓ These phrases (from Jer 3 1 : 2 0 , Exod 4:22) are significant. Hazzan has again and again applied them to Sabbatai Zevi -"beloved son"of the Blessed Holy One and his Shechinah - but now transfers them to Sabbatai's own"beloved son" Ishmael "Thus shall [the power of the hand of]6 8 the son of Zevi be upon the earth, r u l i n g the whole world. A M I RAH, through his exaltation,shall be in the supernal realms, while his son is in the lower r e a lms . . . at the head of all the saints H e will make all the kingdoms t r emble . . . he will also resurrect the dead" (fol 1 0 3 ? / ) .

(62) In support of this interpretation,he calls attention to the phrase nashequ var in Ps 2:12 ; which, following the Zohar (Racya Mehemna,11,120b; cf. III, 191b),he understands to mean, te the son.

(63) The bracketed words (koahyad, in the original) are inserted between the lines of the text. They are obviously based on Hazzan's interpretation ofpissat bar. It is difficult to imagine how a copyist would have accidentally omitted them; easy to imagine that Hazzan himself, all afire with thoughts of the future glory of the son of Zevi, might have left them out and later returned to correct himself. i

[ 2 4 1 D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 6 6

And, in expounding 72:17, Hazzan seems to hint that Ishmael is actually superior to his father.

May his name endure for ever; before the swn.This means, in the lifetime of his father, and before him. [There follows a complicated gematria equat-ing ha-shemesh," the sun? with Sabbatai Zevi ; and Ishmael Zevi with with y ehi shemo lecolam,"may his name endure for ever." Hence :] Ishmael Zevi will be before his father, Sabbatai Zevi. May his name endure for ever, before the sun, his name is "yinnonwhich has the meaning "offspring." 64 This means,

the son shall be before the father [fols 103v104־־r].

What does Hazzan mean by saying that "the son shall be before the father" (lifnei ha-av yihyeh ha-ben)? Perhaps that h e is "before" his father in a fairly modest temporal sense, that his Messianic rule will precede his father's.This is supported by fol 102b, where ve-lifnä yareah dor dorim (72:5) is taken to mean that the believers "held to their faith before [lifnei] the rising of the supernal sun [Sabbatai Zevi] ,while [their] light was still that of the moon that comes before [lifnei] the sun."

But we must not forget that Hazzan is likely to have read Ps 72:17 through the lenses of the well-known Talmudic aggadot in Sanhédrin 98b and Pesa-him 54a.The former passage infers from yinnon shemo that the Messiah's name is actually "Yinnon'/ while the latter argues from lifnei shemesh that the Messi-ah's name existed before the creation. Hazzan has repeatedly claimed that Sabbatai Zevi's soul existed before the creation. (Cf. the beginning of this sec-tion.) Now, by equating yinnon with Sabbatai's offspring and shemesh with Sab-batai himself, h e elevates Ishmael to an even higher rank. If the father pre-existed the world, the son pre-existed the father.

To judge from the carelessness of the handwriting, Hazzan was in a state of high excitement as h e wrote his interpretation of Ps 72:17. Immediately af-terward(fol 104r),the script becomes severely neat; that is, as I have sug-gested above, h e left his composition for some time and then returned to it?5

The exposition of Psalm 72 concludes without further reference to Ishmael (fol 104r-v).

In the mean time, we have seen Ishmael's star, emerging from obscurity, ex-plode into something like supernova proportions. He is the Messiah. He is the divinely appointed and inspired judge, to whom the harassed and humil-iated community of believers may look for vindication. He will rule the saints

(64) Deriving yinnon from nin ve-nekhed (Isa 14:22). (65) The insertion of koah yad between the lines of fol 103V (above, n.63) may have been

done upon his return.

1 6 7 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [ 2 5 1

on earth as his father rules in heaven. He will terrorize the Gentiles (whom his father will later "mend"?). He will resurrect the dead; duplicating, in this re-spect, his father's prowess (see below). He has begun to usurp his father's ti-des of "beloved son','"first-born son'.'And,if I have correcdy interpreted the end of the passage, h e has trumped his father's pre-existence.

How mucl\ of this development did Hazzan have in mind when h e first made the decision to postpone the Psalm 34־ Aqedah sequence to the end of his commentary? It is impossible to say. His absolute silence about Ishmael in the fifty or so folio pages that contain his expositions of the passages from Exodus 16 through Proverbs 31 - which, according to my hypothesis, h e must have composed after h e made this decision - suggests that h e initially had n o idea of the importance that Ishmael was soon to assume. We might perhaps speculate that rumors from Adrianople, where Ishmael and his stepmother had apparentiy been living since shortly after Sabbatai's death (above), stim-ulated Hazzan's hopes and his imagination far beyond what h e had origi-nally anticipated.

These hopes,and the entire Messianic saga of Ishmael Zevi that Hazzan had constructed, were to reach their climax in the Aqedah.

5 . A Q E D A H , I S H M A E L , I S L A M ( I )

What did the Aqedah mean to Israel Hazzan? If we are to see this issue in perspective, we must first clarify what the Aqedah might have been expected to mean to any Jew, Sabbatian o r non-Sabbatian, toward the end of the sev-enteenth century. Given the Sabbatians' particular investment in Islam, we must clarify as well the role played by the Aqedah in the Muslim-Jewish con-troversy of the preceding thousand years.

Our answers to both questions must be provisional. Both topics cover vast amounts of territory; little systematic research has been devoted to either. Many scholars, to be sure, have written about the Aqedah and its traditions. But their concerns have normally been with aspects of the Aqedah other than those that now require our attention. Scholars of the Hebrew Bible have wanted to know about the implications of Genesis 22 for the religion of an-cient Israel, particularly with regard to child sacrifice; scholars of New Testa-ment and early Christianity have wanted to know what impact Jewish Aqedah traditions might have had on Pauline Christology - or the other way round?6

The role of the Aqedah in the Jewish martyrologies of the time of the Cru-

(66) These two topics are the focus of Jon D. Levenson's Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son.The literature o n the Aqedah and early Christianity is very extensive; the papers collected in Frédéric Manns, The Sacrifice of Isaac in the Three Monotheistic Religions (Jerusalem, 1995), en-lightening in themselves, are also useful bibliographic resources o n this subject. (I am grateful

[ 2 6 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 6 8

sades has attracted some attention ; this was, indeed, the starting point of Sha-lom Spiegel's classic The Last Trial?1 Students of modern Hebrew literature have explored the impact of the Aqedah theme on Israeli novels and poetry.68

But comparative interest in the role of the Aqedah in the Abrahamic tradi־ tions has normally been focussed on the periods in which those traditions di-verged from one another; that is, the early centuries of the Christian and the Islamic eras.69And n o one, to my knowledge, has systematically studied the shape of the Jewish Aqedah tradition in the period that most immediately concerns us: the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Before turning to Israel Hazzan's Aqedah, therefore,we must consider how the Aqedah figured in Jewish-Islamic polemics in the centuries that preceded him. We will then examine the Aqedah as it is represented by three early mod-ern Jewish authors: Isaac Abarbanel,Isaiah Horowitz,and Hayyim Kohen of Aleppo. Their portrayals of the Aqedah, as we will see, shade together into a common, picture. We have reason to suppose, moreover, that these authors are likely to have exercised direct or indirect influence on Hazzan. It there-fore seems a fair assumption that the common picture that emerges from their works is likely to have been the starting point of Hazzan's own thinking about the Aqedah; and that,by contemplating that picture, we will have a context and perspective in which to view Hazzan's highly original contributions.

The Qur'an, as is well known, tells the story of the Aqedah without specifying which of Abraham's two sons was the intended victim (Surah 37:99-113). Early Muslim traditionists debated the question of whether the honor be-longed to Isaac, as the Jews and the Christians claimed; or to Ishmael,whom the Arabs were coming to regard as their ancestor. By the ninth or the tenth century, the "Ishmael" school had won out (although it could never claim unanimous support)?0Muslims preferred to dismiss the claims on Isaac's be­

to Professor Marc Bregman,who contributed a particularly stimulating paper to this collection, for providing me with the reference to it.)

(67) Cf. Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (Seattle and Lon-don, 1982), pp. 37-39.

(68) Michael Brown,"Biblical Myth and Contemporary Experience: TheAkedah in Modern Jewish Literature^Judaism 31 (1982 )99-111; Edna Amir Coffin,"The Binding of Isaac in Modern Israeli Literature,"Michigan (Quarterly Review 22(1983)429-44; cf. Jo Milgrom, The Binding of Isaac: The Akedah — A Primary Symbol in Jewish Thought and Art (Berkeley, CA, 1988).

(69) Above, n.66 ; Reuven Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands: TheEvolution oftheAbraham-Ishmael Legends in Islamic Exegesis (Albany, 1990), pp. 105-51; "Merit, Mimesis, and Martydom: Shi'ite Identification with Abraham's Sacrifice in Light of Jewish, Christian, and Sunni Tradition','pa-per delivered at the 1995 meeting of the American Academy of Religion. I am grateful to Pro-fessor Firestone for having provided me with a copy of his so far unpublished paper.

(70) Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands; cf. William M.Brinner (tr.), The History of al-Tabari: Vol-urne II, Prophets and Patriarchs (Albany, 198 7 ), pp. 82-97; Gordon Darnell Newby, The Making of the

1 6 g T H E S O N O F T H E M E S S I A H [271

half as a Jewish fabrication, motivated by jealousy. An anonymous Jewish scholar,converted to Islam,was supposed to have told cUmar b.cAbd al־cAziz (caliph 717-20) : "The Jews know that [Ishmael was the intended victim], but they are envious of you, O Arabs, because it was your father who was named in God's command and to whom God ascribed such merit for his steadfastness in obeying God's command. They reject that and claim that it was Isaac be-cause Isaac was their father."71

The story of cUmar and the Jewish scholar would suggest that that the iden-tity of the Aqedah victim was a fairly significant issue between Jews and Mus-lims in the first century after t h e Hijrah,and that the"Ishmael" identification may have marked an important step in the process of Islam's defining itself over against the older Abrahamic traditions.The issue seems to have retained some importance for medieval Qur'an commentators and tellers of "tales of the prophets." It perhaps took o n fresh significance in the hands of non-Arab Shi'ites, who, if Reuven Firestone is right, may have tried to resurrect the "Isaac"identification as a tool in their controversy with Sunni Islam?2

For Muslim writers engaged in extramural controversy, by contrast, the question of whether Isaac o r Ishmael belongs in the Aqedah story seems to have lost whatever interest it once had. I have no t found a single Muslim po-lemicist against Judaism — or Christianity for that matter, although I cannot claim to have made any systematic examination of an ti-Christian polemic — who so much as mentions this issue, even where the context would seem to invite discussion of it.

Two examples : cAli Tabari's ninth-century treatise against Christianity de-votes an entire chapter to praising Ishmael and defending him against his de-tractors?3 Nowhere does the author think to mention that Ishmael, no t Isaac, was the intended sacrifice.(He quotes Gen 2 2:16-18, as" the saying of the Most High God to Abraham, when h e offered his son for sacrifice!'But h e shows n o interest in the question of which son was involved.) Similarly, a fourteenth-century Morisco polemic against Judaism includes a defense of Hagar and Ishmael against, e.g., the charge that Hagar was a mere concubine?4But (to judge from the summary provided by Miguel Asin Palacios) the writer makes n o mention in this context of Ishmael's having been intended for sacrifice?5

Last Prophet :AReconstruction oftheEarliest Biography of Muhammad (Columbia,SC,ígSg),pp.8ך-6ך. (71) Brinner, op. ät., p. 88. (72) Firestone "Merit, Mimesis, and Martydom" (above, n. 69). (73) Translated in A.Mingana,77^ Book ofReägion and Empire (Lahore, n.d.), pp. 77-84; the

passage quoted below is on p. 80. (74) Miguel Asin Palacios,"Un Tratado Morisco de Polémica Contra Los Judíos," in Obras Es-

cogidas, vo l . I I / I I I ( M a d r i d , 1948) , p p . 2 4 7 - 7 3 . (75) He does refer to the Aqedah, but in a very different context : in support of the abrogation

1 7 0 D A V I D J . H A L P E R I N [ 2 8 ]

It is evident that, for most Muslims in the Middle Ages and into modern times, the Aqedah had nothing at all comparable to its pivotal importance for Judaism!6 The virtues of Ishmael,as Arab progenitor and Muslim prophet, must be maintained. But Ishmael's near-sacrifice was in n o way remarkable among these virtues.The Aqedah was an interesting prophet-story, nothing more?7

Perhaps reflecting this Muslim indifference, the few medieval Jewish writ-ers who undertook to combat the claims of Islam seem to have been little con-cerned with the identity of the Aqedah victim. The best informed and most careful of them, Sacd ibn Mansur ibn Kammuna(1280)78d0es not mention the question at all?9Simeon b.Semah Duran, in his critique of Islam (142 3),touches upon it as lightly as might be imagined. At the end of a list of Islamic distor-tions of Biblical stories, h e notes that the Muslims "claim that the Aqedah was for Ishmael, that it took place in Mecca, and that [people] have seen there [in Mecca] the horn of the primordial ram !'80He adds,however :"They have diver-gent opinions o n this matter, some saying that it was Isaac who was bound."81

of the Torah, he invokes evidence from the Torah itself, including the fact that "Dios manda a Abraham sacrificar su hijo Isaac,y en seguida desiste de su mandato"(¿¿¿¿., p. 254).If the writer saw any significance in the intended victim's being Isaac instead of Ishmael, Asin Palacios does not convey it.

(76) Hava Lazarus-Yafeh, Intertwined Worlds: Medieval Islam and Bible Criticism (Princeton, 1992),mentions the Aqedah only in connection with the abrogation issue (see the preceding note), not the identity of the victim. The issue has perhaps regained some importance for Mus-lims in recent times, possibly sparked by the requirements of dialogue with both Jews and Chris-tians: cAmer Yunis,"The Sacrifice of Abraham in Islam? in Frédéric Manns ,The Sacrifice of Isaac (above , n . 6 6 ) , p p . 1 4 7 - 5 7 .

(77) Al־Rabghuzi, who wrote a book of prophet-stories in Eastern Turkish about the year 1300, takes for granted that Ishmael is the intended sacrifice. He remarks that the Jews say dif-ferently,"because the Jews and Christians are all Isaac's descendants." But he seems quite unex-cited about the issue, and at one point suggests that both Ishmael and Isaac were at different times intended for sacrifice : Al-Rabghuzi: The Stories of the Prophets, H.E.Boeschoten, M. Vandamme, and S.Tezcan,(ed./tr.) (Leiden, 1995),vol. 2, pp. 121-29.

(78) Moshe Perlmann, Ibn Kammunds Examination of the Three Faiths ( Berkeley, 1971 ). (79) Nor is there any reference to it in Moritz Steinschneider's exhaustive survey of the sources

and themes of Jewish anti-Islamic polemic : Polemische und apologetische Literatur in arabischer Sprache (originally published Leipzig, 1877 ; reprinted Hildesheim, 1966), pp. 244-388.

(80) Moshe ( Moritz) Steinschneider,"Setirat emunat ha־yishmacelim mi־sefer qeshet u-magen le-rabbi Shimcon ben Semah Duran? Ozar Tob :hebräische Beilage zumMagazinfürdieWissenschaftdes Judenthums 8(1881)6. The Muslim belief that the horns of Abraham's ram were once visible in the Kaaba is reflected in Brinner, op. dt., pp. 90,94.

(81) Loc. ät.; cf. Firestone, Journeys in Holy Lands, p. 241, which reports on Edward Wester-marck's authority that some Moroccan Muslims still believed in 1933 that Isaac was the intended sacrifice. Duran elsewhere makes the interesting remark that, among his borrowings from Ju-daism, Muhammad"retained the festival of Passover, asserting that it commemorates the Aqe-dah, and conflating all this with the Day of Memorial [Rosh Hashanah],which [really] commem-orates the Aqedah"(in Steinschneider, p. 14).! do not know Duran's basis for this claim, which

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A different tone is perhaps audible in Isaac Abarbanel's commentary on Genesis 22,written some eighty years later.82 The Bible's designation of Isaac as thine only son(yehidekha,verse 2 )83is peculiar, h e notes, since Isaac was Sarah's only son but obviously not Abraham's "It was o n this basis that the Ishmaelites stupidly advanced their claim that the one who was bound was Ishmael, since, before Isaac's birth, h e was the only son both of his father and of his mother."

There is nothing particularly implausible about Abarbanel's claim that Muslims used Gen 22:2 to prove that Ishmael was the intended sacrifice, though I have seen n o direct evidence to support it?4(Medieval Muslim po-lemicists made plentiful use of Biblical quotations when it served their pur-pose to d o so.) The very fact that h e goes out of his way to mention this point suggests that, in Jewish if not Muslim consciousness, the question of the Aqe-dah victim had begun to assume new importance as an issue dividing the two faiths.This is perhaps linked to Abarbanel's subsequent remark defending the particular care h e has devoted to the exegesis of Genesis 2 2 :"This chapter is the entire strength [qeren] of Israel, and their merit [zekhutam] before their Fa-ther in heaven.That is why we regularly use it in our prayer each day "(p. 265)?* It is at least thinkable that,for Abarbanel, the Muslim identification of the vie-tim as Ishmael had come to seem an assault, substantial enough to be worth rejecting, on the qeren and zekhut of the Jewish people.

Let us take Abarbanel's commentary as a starting point for exploring our next question : how did Jews view the Aqedah, and particularly its intended victim, during the nearly two hundred years that separate his commentary from that of Israel Hazzan?86

seems to reflect a remarkable recapitulation, within Islam, of tensions in early Judaism over whether the Aqedah was to be connected with Passover or with Rosh Hashanah (Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, pp. 173-83).

(82) Don Isaac Abarbanel, Perush cal ha-torah (Jerusalem,1964),vol ι,ρ.263. RNetanyahu dates Abarbanel's commentary on Genesis to the first half of 1505: Don Isaac Abravanel: Statesman & Philosopher (Philadelphia, 1953), p. 288 n. 16.

(83) In quoting passages from Genesis 22,in this and the next section, I use the 1917 trans-lation of the Jewish Publication Society.

(84) Prior, that is, to the twentieth century.cAmer Yunis's paper,cited in n.76 (above),does indeed invoke Gen 22:2 in support of the Muslim position.

(85) I assume Abarbanel is referring to the recitation of the Aqedah in the daily birkhot ha-shahar.

(86) We may gauge the impact Abarbanel's exegesis is likely to have had on subsequent gen-erations,not only from its obvious influence on Hayyim Kohen of Aleppo (below),but also from the substantial presence of his Pentateuch commentary on the bookshelves of Mantuan Jews at the end of the sixteenth century. Of 430 Jewish families living in Mantua in 1595,39 owned copies of Abarbanel's commentary (Shifra Baruchson, Books and Readers: The Reading Interests of Italian fews at the Close of the Renaissance [Hebrew; Ramat-G^n, 1993], pp. 12529־־).This hardly compares

D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 7 2

For Abarbanel, Isaac's sacrifice represents the sacrifice of his bodily, nat-ural aspect. This, despite the impression God initially gave Abraham, was the only sacrifice that was really intended; and it was successfully carried out.

The result of Adam's sin had been that humans were given over to their de-sires, particularly the sexual. Now, by "coming to the gates of death"at God's command and thus vanquishing his corporeal being, Isaac has redeemed his offspring from bondage to this primordial sin, as well as from the astral pow-ers that control natural activity.87The ass that Abraham saddles (literally, "binds"va-yahavosh) is figuratively to be understood, not as hamor, but as ho-mer: by that act of "binding," Abraham subdues his materiality.

It is in this sense, says Abarbanel, that we are to understand the midrash88

that claims Abraham's ass to have been the very same beast that Moses rode (Exod4:20)and that the Messiah will someday ride(Zechariahg:9).In receiv-ing the Torah, Moses took the next step in the process of subduing our ma-teriality ; and the Messiah will bring this process to its completion?9 The equa-tion of Abraham's ass with the Messianic beast, which Hazzan was later to take literally, is thus allegorized to make the Aqedah the opening act of a process of Messianic salvation. Given Isaac's pivotal role in this process, it makes ex־ cellent sense that Abarbanel should have perceived his replacement by Ish-mael as a threat to be warded off.

A similar metaphysical exaltation is credited to Isaac in Isaiah Horowitz's widely influential Shenei luhot ha-berit (completed in 1623, r s t published in 1648)?0Isaac here becomes a second Adam, replicating Adam's state before the sin and providing a" mending "for his prototype's failing.91 This" mending"

with the Pentateuch commentaries of the ever-popular Rashi (owned by 118 families) or Bahya ben Asher (owned by 91 ).But, in an age of expensive books, it seems a more than respectable distribution.

(87) Abarbanel, Perush cal ha-torah, vol. 1, pp. 265-78. To express this liberation from what Christians would have called "original sin','Abarbanel uses such expressions bo[be-yishaq]yifdehelo-him et zarco min yeser lev adam rac mi-necurav, and she-tusar mimmennu zuhamat ha-nahash she-hittil cal havvah. . . bacavur tocelet kelal ummatenu (p. 266). The expression "gates of death"occurs on p. 276,where Abraham is the actor: be-haggico oto cad shcfarei mavet be-misvat ha-elohim.

(88) In Pirqei de-RabbiEliezer, ch. 31. (89) Abarbanel, pp. 269-70: ve-zakheru [hazaljelleh ha-sheloshah avraham u-mosheh u-mashiah

lihyotam rosh emsafi ve-takhlit ä-shelemut emunato. (90) Commentary onparashat vayyera ; in Sefer shenei luhot ha-berit ha-shalem (Jerusalem, 1993),

vol. 4, pp. 73-90. The popularity and influence of Shenei luhot ha-berit is not in dispute. It is most powerfully attested, for the end of the seventeenth century, by Glückel of Hameln's moving ac-count of her husband's last hours, much of which is spent in perusing "the works of the learned Rabbi Isaiah Hurwitz": Marvin Lowenthal (tr.),The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln (New York, 1977), p.!51.

(91) Ve-yishaq hu be-cerekh adam ha-rishon qodem she-hata. . . be-hasarat ha-orlah she-hi ha-qelippah

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is bound u p with Isaac's circumcision92— we think back to the importance the Sabbatians attached to the circumcision of Ishmael Zevi — but more pro-foundly with his sacrifice at the Aqedah.

Following the venerable Jewish tradition that has Isaac actually die and come back to life in the course of the Aqedah?3 Horowitz represents Isaac's soul as having left him and "the holy spirit from on high" having taken its place. Isaac is thus a new creation (beri 'ah hadashah), bearer of a new and holier life-essence (hayyut he-hadash or ha-sheni), the first being since Adam that was not created from sperm (she-lo nosar mi-tipp ah)9.4 "His soul ascended on high and returned to him other than it had been. . . . Thus the bodily life of that Isaac who had been born of sperm ceased to be [nitbattel], and h e now had holy flesh."95In this sacrifice, Isaac had"become holy of holies, a pure burnt-offering, a pleasant smell for the Lord"; and had become,in his lifetime,what other saints could be only after their deaths — a sacrifice offered to God by the celestial high priest Michael.96

All of this is very redolent of Christianity. So is the further step taken by Horowitz : of linking the Aqedah with the meal that, according to Genesis 18, Abraham prepared for his three visitors. Abraham's meal, says Horowitz,fore-shadows the eschatological feast that God will prepare for the saints "when h e restores the world to the pristine state that it would have had if Adam had not sinned, and when materiality [homer] becomes purified. . . . This is why Isaac's birth was announced at this feast [of Abraham's]: h e [Isaac] is the cause of this [eschatological feast]."97One can hardly avoid thinking of the Last Supper, and of the eschatological overtones given it in such passages as Luke 22:15-18.

Let us follow Horowitz's argument yet one step further. Immediately after the passage I have just quoted, Horowitz invokes a marvellous Talmudic mid-

tiqqen le-adam she-hata sWz-l[she-ameru rabbotenu zikhronam U-verakhah]moshekhcorlato hayah (p. 81 ). Horowitz's reference is to BT Sanhédrin 38b.

(92) See the previous note, and p.82,where Horowitz finds it significant that Abraham be-got Isaac after he had himself been circumcised.

(93) Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, pp. 192-99; following Spiegel, The Last Trial.

(94) Horowitz, pp. 81-82. Horowitz represents Isaac as parallel in this respect to the ram sac-rificed in his place, which was a special creation formed in the twilight of the first Sabbath (Avot 5:6).

(95)/ta¿., p.87. (96) Ibid., pp.85-86.The phrase"pure burnt-offering"{colah temimah)is not Biblical; its use as

a designation for Isaac goes back to Gen.R. 64:3, and occurs in Rashi to Gen 25:26, 26:2.Cf. Martin A.Cohen (tr.), Samuel Usque's Consolations for the Tribulations of Israel ( Philadelphia, 1965), p. 51 : . . my father Isaac, who was a sacrifice without blemish."

(97) Horowitz, p. 81.

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rash (BT Shabbat 89b) which represents Isaac, and no t his father o r his son, as the zealous and effective defender of the Jewish people against God,s harsh judgment. We will look at this midrash more closely in section 8, below, when we consider what Israel Hazzan does with it. Here we may note that Horo-witz picks u p o n the incongruity, f rom the Kabbalistic viewpoint, of the Tal-mud's representing the benevolent patriarch as Isaac (Gevurah, the attribute of strict judgment) and no t Abraham (Hesed, the attribute of grace). T h e ex-planation, h e says, is that the world's eschatological purification, and its re-turn to the state it was in before Adam's sin, depends o n strict judgment — which thus proves to be the greatest mercy. Hence the paradox that Isaac/ justice is effectively the begetter of Abraham/ mercy, and that the son's power i s t h e r e f o r e g r e a t e r t h a n t h e f a t h e r ' s . Yafeh koah ha-ben mi-koah ha-av ki middat ha-din ha-zeh gorem be-esem ha-rahimim.

We perhaps hear an echo of this formulation in Hazzan's claim, which I discussed at the end of section 4, that "the son [Ishmael Zevi] shall b e before the father"(tifnei ha-av yihyeh ha-ben).When we take u p Hazzan's Aqedah,we shall find there a parallel to the observation with which Horowitz concludes his argument: that the name"Isaac,"currently indicative of judgment, will in the eschaton manifest its more genial overtones of "laugh ter "and "joy."

T h e third writer we shall consider, the Kabbalist Hayyim Kohen of Aleppo, in-eludes his Aqedah exegesis within a homily for Rosh Hashanah, published in 1654 as part of his Torat ÄaMöra?8 Kohen's homily shows affinities with both Abarbanel (whom h e occasionally cites explicitly,"and obviously used as a re-source) and the Shenei luhot ha-beHt.This author seems to have been regarded as something of a n authority in Sabbatian circles : Nathan of Gaza quotes him in his letter to Joseph Zevi,100and Cardozo claims to have studied with him while in Egyptî01 We may therefore presume, at least as a working hypothesis, that Israel Hazzan may have been familiar with Kohen's exegesis of the Aqedah.

T h e homily is extremely prolix and diffuse, and it is impossible to give a clear summary of its argument. Its overall theme — which was a few years later

(98) Venice, 1654; reprinted Brooklyn, 1992. The derush le-rosh ha-shanah is in vol.1, cols. 37c~50b (on parashat vayyera).

(99) In col.42a(with reference,however, to I Sam 3:19).Cf. vol.1,col. 16d,where Kohen crit-icizes Abarbanel's interpretation of Isaiah 53. Kohen's classification of the three conceivable beneficiaries of the Aqedah (the one testing, the one being tested, those viewing the testing), at the top of col. 43c, seems to be drawn directly from Abarbanel (Perush cal ha-torah, pp. 261-62).

(100) In Sasportas,Swaf novel Sem, pp. 261-62. (101) In his treatise An¿ ha-mekhunneh; Carlo Bernheimer,"Some New Contributions to Abra-

ham Cardoso's Biography,"JQR N.S. 18(1927-28) 114-15.

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to become a favorite of Sabbatian ideologues — is the vicarious and redemp-tive sufferings of the righteous man (saddiq), of which the Aqedah is one ex-ample.102 In the tortuous course of developing this theme, Kohen puts for-ward a host of subordinate propositions,103several of which are relevant to our study of the Aqedah.

One of these is that theMgreat feast , ,mentioned in Gen 21:8 is a foreshadow-ing of the great eschatological feast (cols. 38c-d).To be sure, Kohen can in-vokeTalmudic authority for this claim: BT Pesahim ligb, which interprets Gen 21:8 to mean that the Lord will make a feast for the righteous on that future date when"he shows his kindness to the seed of Isaac'.' But h e carries the Talmud's hints to extreme lengths. The Jews, h e says, are properly called "the seed of Isaac" inasmuch as Isaac, through his Aqedah, is their savior and defender. They have survived in this world thanks to the merit of the Aqedah, "the ashes of Isaac that are heaped upon the altar"(col.38d,cf.3gd, 48b)!04

Isaac's name points to their future joy, as represented by the eschatological feast(col.39d).Isaac even performs a"harrowing of helF'on their behalf : those Jewish souls whom Abraham could not prevent from entering hell, Isaac de-scends there to rescue.105

Kohen's linking of the Aqedah to a special meal, that takes place in the

(102) He announces the theme by beginning his homily with Gen. R. 55:2, apetihah that takes its starting point from Ps 11:5, adonay saddiq yivhan. In cols. 48a-b, he makes what is perhaps his most explicit statement that the saddiqim stand ready to offer themselves as atoning sacrifices on the world's behalf, and that the Aqedah is to be put in this category. (And note his reference to Metatron offering the souls of the saddiqim on the celestial altar, which echoes a remark I have earlier quoted from Horowitz.) At the bottom of col. 46b, moreover, Kohen applies Isa 53:5 (a favorite verse of the Sabbatians) to the atoning sufferings of the righteous: yissurin. .. ha-nim-sa'im ba-saddiqim kedei le-khappercal cadat yisrael.

( 103 ) E .g., that the saddiq often does things that seem bizarre or immoral to outsiders (David with Bathsheba, cols. 38b, 39c, 46c; Abraham and Sarah, cols. 3gd, 40d~41a). Kohen's formula-tion in c01.40d is particularly striking: kol macasav shel avraham af calgav she-hayu nirHm lecenei basar shehem darkhei ish. .. ve-enam mehugganim lifnei ha-qadosh barukh hu be-zeh eno ken afillu dark-hei ish zeh avraham left shehu ish casato hem resuyim lifnei ha-qadosh barukh hu. All of this must have been music to Sabbatian ears; and we might conjecture that Kohen's repeated invocation of Hos 8:12, kemo zar nehshavu (cols. 40d,41b), foreshadows Sabbatai Zevi's maFasim zarìm.

(104) For the rabbinic sources of this expression, see Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, pp. 194-98 ; Spiegel, The Last Trial, pp. 28-44.

(105) Col. 39a, bottom. Kohen claims to have seen this in "our sages'comments on the verse Far you are ourfather [Isa 63:16]? but I have not been able to locate any rabbinic source for it. The opening of Kohen's alleged quotation,ve-yishaq le-hekha azal, is very suggestive of Gen.R.67:7,but its continuation bears no resemblance whatever to the midrashic text. The conclusion to Mid-rash Vayyoshacquotes Isa 63:16 in the context of God's redeeming the Jews from hell (in Adolf Jellinek, Bet ha-Midrash [reprinted Jerusalem, 1967],vol.1, p. 57); but Isaac here plays no part whatever. Isa 63:16 is, as we will see, the key text in BT Shabbat 89b.

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distant past but foreshadows the eschatological feast, is very suggestive of Horowitz (and, of course, of the Last Supper). His shift of the meal, from Genesis 18 to Genesis 21, n o doubt results from his intent to prepare a homily for Rosh Hashanah!06Again like Horowitz, h e quotes BT Shabbat 89b in sup־ port of Isaac's role as savior par excellence of the Jewish people (cols.38d,3gd).

Marks of Abarbanel's exegesis are also evident in Kohen's homily. Like Abarbanel, Kohen quotes Pirqei de-Rabbi Eliezer 's assertion that Abraham's ha׳ mor was also the one ridden by Moses and the Messiah, and interprets it much as Abarbanel did. Hamor is to be understood as homer ; the riding of the ass represents the subjugation of materiality; the lesson is that"Israel's materi-ality will in the future be as pure as in the time of creation. He shall swallow up death forever?101

But Kohen spells out the eschatological implications of this reading of the Aqedah,in considerably more detail than did Abarbanel. W h e n d e - R a b b i Eliezer goes on to say that Abraham's two young men (whom it identifies as Ish-mael and Eliezer) quarreled over Abraham's inheritance, Kohen spells out what may have been implicit in the original midrash : these are Christendom and Islam, who quarrel over the land that properly belongs to the Jews and build their sanctuaries in it. ("The community of Ishmael," Kohen remarks, "have built the Temple for themselves.") Hence Abraham tells them ,abide ye here (Gen 22:5), thereby permitting them to remain in the Holy Land till such time as the Messiah comes riding his ass (Zech 9:9). When that happens,then we will come back to you (Gen 2 2:5), to execute judgments upon them. Follow-ing BT Sanhédrin 98a, Kohen professes uncertainty whether this redemp-tion will take place in a generation that is wholly virtuous or one that is wholly guilty (col. 47c).

One seemingly minor feature of Kohen's Aqedah exegesis will take on considerable importance in connection with Israel Hazzan's Aqedah. In that relatively brief section of the homily that deals specifically with Genesis 22 (cols.47a~48d) — and not, as far as I can see, elsewhere in the long homily — Kohen makes very heavy use of the midrashic technique of ή bbuy 'inclusion.' What this means is that the word et, which properly functions in Hebrew as a marker of the accusative,can be midrashically understood to imply the près-enee of some additional, unstated object of the verb that precedes.108 To give

(106) Genesis 21 is the Torah reading for the first day of Rosh Hashanah, Genesis 22 for the second.

(107) Col. 47b; quoting Isa 25:8, a favorite catch-phrase of Kabbalistic eschatology. (108) Gam and flecan function in the same way: etim gamim ribbuyim ' the words et and gam are

terms indicating inclusion[of that which is unstated]'(Gen.R. 1:14; Theodor-Albeck[ed.]p. 12); ha-ribbuy be-shalosh leshonot et gam w-a/'there are three terms for inclusion [of the unstated], gam, and af (Midrash ha-Gadol, preface to Genesis; Margaliot[ed.] p. 23). Cf. H.G.Enelow, The

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one example of this technique : the phrase et YHVHelohekha tira, in Deut 6:13, would normally be understood to mean ,you shallfear the Lord your God. But the Talmud represents Rabbi Akiba,with whom the principle of ribbuy is normally associated, as expounding the et to mean that scholars are to be included along with God as objects of reverence.109

Kohen resorts to this principle again and again in interpreting the Aqedah. In 22:2, et binekha'[take] thy son; is understood to include (le-rabbot)Isaac's mother along with Isaac (col. 47a; Kohen's point is neither Isaac no r Sarah p u t obstacles in Abraham's way). In verse4., et ha-maqom' [he saw] the place,' in-eludes no t only the"place"in a literal sense bu t God as well (col. 47c).110 When Abraham bound Isaac his son (verse 9), the et of et yishaq beno comes to include Abraham himself : "as if Abraham had bound himself." (Or, alternatively, it in-eludes the heavenly princes, who were bound at the Aqedah along with Isaac ; col. 48b.) Kohen finds n o fewer than two such inclusions in verse 10, And Abra-ham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son. T h e et t h a t p r e c e d e s y ado (his hand) is there to convey that Abraham tested the knife's evenness against his fingernail and his finger;111 while the et that precedes beno'his son'conveys that Abraham saw himself as killing, no t Isaac alone, bu t all the future offspring God had promised him."For [Isaac] was his single, solitary, unique son; Ishmael was no t called his son,inasmuch as h e was the offspring of a Gentile slave woman. That was why God had called [Isaac, in verse 2] thy son, thine only son" (co l . 48b).1 1 2

Of the twenty-seven occurrences of the word et (or ve-et)in Gen 22:1—19, Kohen thus interprets five as nbbuyim.This seems an extraordinarily high per-centage, and suggests that, for reasons about which I cannot speculate, Ko-h e n had come to regard this mode of exegesis as peculiarly appropriate for the Aqedah!13 We shall see in section 8 that Israel Hazzan followed in Kohen's

Mishnah of Rabbi Eliezer; or, TheMidrash of Thirty-two Hermeneutic Rules (New York, 1933), pp. 11-13 ׳ H. L. Strack and G. Sternberger, Introduction to the Talmud and Midrash (Minneapolis, 1991 ), p. 26.

(109) BT Pesahim 22b; quoted,with two other examples,in Midrash ha-Gadol (preceding note). (110) Rabbinic texts habitually refer to God as ha-maqom. (111) In accord with BT Hullini7b. (112) Abarbanel had given a similar explanation of why Isaac was called yehidekha : "The one

[son],Ishmael,was no longer, since he had been driven from [Abraham's] house and was as though he had never been. Isaac thus remained his father's only son and his mother's only son"(Perush cal ha-torah, p. 268). This is Abarbanel's answer to what he represents (above) as the Muslim argu-ment,from Gen 22:2, that the intended sacrifice was Ishmael.

(113) I am not aware of any precedent. One Zoharic exegesis of nissah et avraham (22:1) ap-pears at first sight to involve a Hbbuy, the et understood to signify that Isaac is being tested along with Abraham (Zohar, 1,119b). But, as Cordovero points out (in Abraham Azulay, Or ha-hammah [Jerusalem, 1876; reprinted in Israel, n.d.],vol. 1, col. 99c), an altogether different principle is in-volved : et, normally used in the Zohar for the sefirah Malkhut, is here applied to Isaac inasmuch as

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footsteps; and, in this connection, the last of Kohen's rìbbuyim will prove of very special interest.

O n the basis of these authors, I would offer the following sketch of the Aqe-dah as it was perceived in seventeenth-centuryJudaism.The more important actor i n t h e Aqedah is Isaac, n o t Abraham. (Yafeh koah ha-ben mi-koah ha-av, as Horowitz puts it.) Not only is h e a willing victim in the sacrifice — a point Levenson has made in connection with the Aqedah tradition of Jewish antiq-uity114— but h e has become a superhuman savior figure who seems in large measure modelled after the Savior of Christianity. His sacrifice is actually ac-complished. In the course of that sacrifice, h e is transformed into a new and qualitatively different sort of creature. As an effect of that sacrifice, h e has the power not only to defend his offspring against God's wrath and to redeem them from the torments of hell, but even to transform his offspring, and in-deed the entire creation, into something qualitatively different from what they had been.

This transformation is bound u p with the eschatological future. These themes are most obviously linked by Abraham's donkey, which foreshadows the ass to be ridden by the Messianic king (Zech 9:9) ; more subtly, by the feast for which Isaac is the effective cause, and which foreshadows the eschatologi-cal feast of the righteous.

We may note,finally, that both Abarbanel and Kohen show some resistance toward "Ishmael's"encroachments upon their savior's prerogatives. Abarba-nel records,and repudiates,Muslim claims that the only son of 22:2 must have been Ishmael rather than Isaac. Kohen notes that the Ishmaelites have rebuilt the Jerusalem Temple, but for their own religious use; h e promises that they will be judged and ejected ; h e rejects the possibility that Ishmael might prop-erly be called Abraham's son at all.115

Thus far the legacy that Hazzan received. What does h e himself d o with the Aqedah? And what role is played in it by Ishmael Zevi?

6 . A Q E D A H , I S H M A E L , I S L A M ( I I )

Let us begin by observing that Hazzan expounds the Aqedah not once but twice. His first exegetical essay on the subject lies near the beginning of his work (fol 14V),in the course of a detailed exposition of the Zoharic myth of the

he is currently resident in thatsefirah and not in his own proper sefirah (that is to say, Gevurah). (114) The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, pp. 187-92. (115) It seems possible, though by no means certain, that Horowitz's disparaging reference to

the seemingly "insane" Arab practice of prostrating oneself to the dust on one's feet (Shenei luhot ha-berit, vol. 4, p. 75; following BT Bava Me si 3a 86b) is an indirect jab at Islam. Cf. below n. 219.

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hind.116 This initial treatment of the topic bears almost n o resemblance to what h e was subsequently to write, once h e had discovered the significance of Ishmael Zevi.

In the earlier passage, Hazzan had focused his attention o n Gen 2 2 : 3 - 4 : And Abraham rose early in the morning and saddled his ass, and took two of his young men with him, aqd Isaac his son; and he cleaved the wood for the burnt-offering, and rose up, and went unto the place of which God had told him. On the third day Abra-ham lifted up his eyes, and saw the place afar off. T h e morning, a s h e u n d e r s t o o d it, represents the eschaton.(This equation,which recurs throughout his com-mentary, is practically the only element of his original interpretation to sur-vive into his subsequent discussion of the Aqedah.)The figure of Abraham stands for the Kabbalistic sefirah of Hesed 'Grace.' "Isaac" is the sefirah Gevurah 'stern judgment^ to b e exercised against the Gentiles.The third day alludes to the resurrection (in accord with Hos 6:2); the ass, to the beast that the Mes-siah will ride ( Zech 9:9) ; the cleaving of the wood, to the sinners — the Gentile nations, to judge f rom Hazzan's citation of Isa 33:12 — who are destined for burning.

Abraham's two young men (necarav)31c Metatron117and Sabbatai Zevi. T h e latter is indicated, no t by name, bu t by successive citations of Isa 9:5 (a child [yeled] is born unto us, a son [ben] is given to us) a n d H o s 11:1 ( when Israel was a lad [nacar] )!18 What is significant here is that Sabbatai, the center of Hazzan's at-tention, plays a secondary and perhaps even marginal role in the eschatolog-ical drama of the Aqedah. Hazzan regularly speaks of him as'son J o r as 4be-loved son' (ben yaqir, fol gv and frequently)!19 But, remarkably, h e does no t think to equate him with the beloved son of Gen 22:2, still less with the fa-ther who is going to sacrifice him. H e remains essentially faithful to the Zo-har's reading of the Aqedah (I,119a-120־b),in which the sefirotic symbolism predominates; bu t h e overlays it with eschatology.120

Turning f rom here to Hazzan's formal exposition of the Aqedah,which be-gins o n fol 104V, we at first imagine that h e is resuming the sefirotic line of interpretation. H e prefaces his Aqedah exegesis with a heavily glossed and

(116) In his commentary on Psalm 42 ; see above, n.46. (117) Whose standing designation is nacar 'youth! (118) Hazzan marks the word Israel with a double slash, to indicate that he is attributing a spe-

cial significance to it. He uses Israel and son throughout the commentary to designate Sabbatai Zevi; e.g., fols gv, 10v-11r.

(119) FollowingJer 31:19. (120) We recall from Abarbanel and Kohen the association of Abraham's donkey with that of

the Messiah.We recall, also, that the sefirotic symbolism of "Abraham"and "Isaac" was practically absent from the writers we considered in the preceding section ; only Horowitz made any use of it at all.

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expanded version of the prayer zokhrenu be-zikkaron tov,m in which h e begs God to "remember," to the benefit of the Jewish people, various sefirotic en-tities. God is to remember, also, the Aqedah by which Abraham (whom Hazzan has just equated with the sefirah Hesed)" bound his son Isaac upon the altar, the hidden reference being to the dinim [that is, the punitive aspects of divin-ity] that h e is going to sweeten and to mend."

But n o sooner does h e begin to expound the Genesis text itself than h e takes an altogether different tack. Abraham, h e now declares, is both the 4ex-alted father'( at׳ ha-ram) and the'bitter father'(¿«; ha-mar).That is, h e is Sabba-tai Zevi, most supremely exalted and yet"made bitter through all the bitter-nesses of the children of Israel." (This is an allusion to Sabbatai's entrance into the profane realm of Islam.)122And the"Isaac"of the Biblical story is none other than

our Lord Ishmael. He is called"Isaac"in that h e was born in a time in which the dinim had the upper hand over the hasadim)2*in the epoch of the turban1.24 H e came into the world turban-wearing [that is, a Muslim], for the dinim were powerful at that time. He is "Isaac,"moreover, in that Israel will have all its laughter125 and joy through him [fols 104v-105r].

This transformation of "Isaac" into "Ishmael"־־ which at once brings to mind the Muslim reading of the Aqedah — is remarkable enough. Its immediate sequel is yet more remarkable. Hazzan goes o n to make clear that the religion symbolized for him by the" turban"is near the center of his own understand-ing of the Aqedah; and not merely in the negative sense (which we saw in his earlier treatment of Genesis 2 2 )that the Muslims are Gentiles to be punished

(121) Derived originally from the zikkronot of the Rosh Hashanah musaf, but functioning as liturgical introduction to the reading of the Aqedah in the daily birkhot ha-shahar : Philip Birn-baum, Daily Prayer Book (New York, 1949), pp. 19-20; A.Z. Idelsohn ,Jewish Liturgy and Its Develop-ment{New York, i960), p. 78.

(122) She-kol merirut beneiyisra'el nitmarer bahem[\] be-sod ve-hu mehullal mi-peshacenu.Hazzan's citation of Isa 53:5 guarantees that he is referring to Sabbatai's apostasy, for Sabbatian expositors from Nathan of Gaza onward regularly understood the Biblical verse to refer to the" profanation" entailed by that action (see, for example, Nathan as quoted by Sasportas,5wa£ novel Sevi, pp. 261-62). Hayyim Kohen applies the same verse to the suffering saddiq; above, n.102.

(123) That is, the punitive aspects of divinity, represented in Kabbalistic symbolism by the fig-ure of Isaac, had gotten the upper hand over its gracious aspects.

(124) Be-hemshekh zeman ha-misnefet. The use of the word misnefet for'turban'is rare in this text. Senif, used in the next sentence, is Hazzan's normal designation.

(125) Sehoq, from the same root as the η ame "Isaac Γ Cf. Horowitz's reflections on Isaac's name, summarized in the preceding section.

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in the eschaton. Rather, h e reads the Biblical command of lekh lekha (4get thee into the land of Moriah; Gen 22:2) as though it were lekh indicating a doubled 4going.'Abraham and Isaac - that is,Sabbatai and Ishmael -־"must go by two paths, the path of Truth [Judaism] and the path of Grace [Islam].126

This is what Scripture means when it says that Grace and Truth have met together [Ps 85:11]Γ

This last observation leads Hazzan into a long excursus on Psalm 85 (fols 105r-107r).The central theme of this excursus is the combination of Judaism with Islam — or, more accurately, the penetration of Islam by Judaism — and justification and praise of those "pious ones" who have undertaken this pen-etration.(They are called God's'pious ones' hasidav, because they have en-tered torat hesed, which is Islam; fol 106r.)B0th these Jewish-Muslim pioneers, and those Jews who have remained within their Judaism, are equally recipi-ents of the divineshalom(Ps 85:g).But, says Hazzan, the psalm must go on to assure the"pious"apostates that they shall not return to folly. They shall not re-main within Islam, that "path of fools and lunatics"- good only for a provi-sional act of "mending"that is unfortunately necessary for the establishment of God's throne (fol 106v, following Isa 16:5).

To understand what this means for Hazzan, we must digress to ask what Islam has meant for him u p to this point.

Let us make n o mistake. His talk of "Grace"notw1thstanding, Hazzan s at-titude toward Islam is hardly one of ecumenical acceptance. Nearly every reference to Islam, u p to this point in the text, has been unequivocally

(126) Hazzan, like other Sabbatian writers,regularly uses the expression torat hesed ("Torah of Grace") to refer to Islam,as opposed to torat emet ("Torahof Truth"),which isJudaism.He explains (fol. 31V) that "the Ishmaelite religion is called torat hesed. . . inasmuch as the Ishmaelites have only that which their ancestors transmitted to them . . . they walk after vanity, yet do not aban־ don the practice of their ancestors."He implies that this loyalty of theirs,blind as it is,is nonethe-less counted to them as a virtue (fused),which casts particular discredit on the Jews'correspond-ing disloyalty to their own sacred tradition.(This interpretation is partly inspired by a midrashic interpretation of Prov 14;34, hesed le'ummiin hattat, found in Tanhuma Ki Tissa #5.) Given Haz-zan's generally contemptuous attitude toward Islam, expressed in this and other passages (be-low),Scholem seems justified in refusing to infer from the torat hesed terminology that the Sab-batian writers perceive Islam as a"religion of grace? superior to Judaism: Sabbatai Sem, pp.813, 863-64;"Perush mizmorei tehillim;׳pp. 181-83(Liebes,pp. 115-18) ; cf. the discussion in Liebes, "Yahaso shel Shabbetai Sevi le־hamarat dato׳;pp. 301-05(OnSabbateaism and its Kabbalah, pp. 3 2 -33).Yet we shall see that Hazzan evidently felt envy as well as scorn for Islam; and that,in his own crisis of faith, he found himself wondering if God and Abraham(the Kabbalistic embodiment of hesed) did not in fact prefer the Muslims over the Jews. The phrase torat hesed may indeed have contained within it some implication of Muslim superiority, which Hazzan and other Sabbat-ian writers normally preferred to keep out of their conscious awareness.

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hostile. Islam is a"twisted"religion1,27a "vain"religion1,28a religion whose es-sential blackness is belied by the white turban that serves as its symbol.129 It is prefigured by the unclean reptiles of Lev 11:29-30; especially by the lizard, whose name {sav) is numerically equal to the name of "that lunatic of theirs . . . who became a heretic and fell into evil practices?130 Its mad enthusiasts (ha-mishtaggecim be-datam) spout empty utterances which Samael and Lilith use to build firmaments of chaosî31As Christendom has the demon Samael for its patron, so Islam has the demon Rahab.132 Muslims are the"wild asses" of Ps 104:11, who think to quench their spiritual thirst with the "holy spring" (Sabbatai Zevi) that has gone forth from the house of the Lord, but whose blood will instead become drink for the birds.133

At first glance, this seems a picture of pure hatred and contempt. But it is occasionally possible to detect another tone, of envy and longing, in Haz-zan's allusions to Islam."W%0 set the wild assfree? [Job 39:5]. Who can bring out Ishmael, whom Scripture calls a wild ass of a man [Gen 16:12], and set him free? And who has opened the bonds of the wild ass? [Job 39:5] — of those whose flesh is like asses'flesh [Ezek 23:20] — who is able to open and release their bonds; for they are forbidden to us, and who can make them permitted? . . . Their entire religion and legislation is like a desert and a wasteland, and they have n o foundation upon which to ground them!' Yet (following Job 3g:7~8)"they mock and ridicule us1?4.. they bear n o yoke, have not

(127) Torah ha-caqummah, fol 48a. (128) Dai ha-hevel, fol 33V; cf. 31V, quoted in n.126, above. (129) Dot shehorah, fol 50V. (130) Fol 50V: ha-meshuggacshellahem. .. she-nehefakh le-minutve-yasa le-tarbutracah.Meshuggac

is a familiar designation for Muhammad among Jewish polemicists (Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur,; pp. 302-03; cf. p. 359 for a medieval antecedent to the polemic use of Leviticus's list of unclean reptiles). Sav and Muhammad both have the gematria value of 92.( Is Hazzan aware that Muslim writers often called attention to the numerical value of Muhammad's name, equating it thereby with bi-me'od me'od in Gen 17:20, which predicts Ishmael's future great-ness [ibid., p. 327, cf. p. 364; Perlmann, Ibn Kammunas Examination of the Three Faiths, p. 139] ? It is impossible to say.) In the same passage, Hazzan explains Leviticus's "mouse" (cakhbar) as "this Turkish king, for so he is explicitly called among the Jews in all regions of Constantinople."( Per-haps a play on Arabic akbar ?) He was soon to speak more respectfully of the sultan, as we will see.

(131 ) Fol 31 ν, following Zohar, 1,5a. On Islamic religious practices, including the fast of Ra-madan, cf. fols 74r-7 5V.

(132) Fols 94r, 107V (discussed below); cf. fol 21r-v, which gives a partial quotation from the Zoharic passage that is the source of these identifications (III, 246b, Racya Mehemna).Cf. also Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur, p. 318.

(133) Fol 57r-v; Hazzan linksperaHm (Ps 104:11) with the well-known Biblical description of Ishmael aspereadam (Gen 16:12 ; see below). With Hazzan's representation of Muslims as beasts, we might compare the tendency of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century polemical writers to apply to them the phrase of Ps 50:10, behemot be-harerei alef (Steinschneider, pp. 371,382).

( 134) Cf. fol 71a, expounding Ps 80:7 : "our neighbors? who are also "our enemies? ridicule us ;

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gone into exile With every mouth h e [Job's wild ass, representing the col-lectivity of the Muslims] devours Israel, and slanders . . . the righteous . . . to graze upon them and to devour their money . . . .He seeks after the 4green' gold . . . [demanding] that it be measured out and brought!'135

Even as Hazzan scorns what h e perceives as the aridity and baselessness of the Muslim religion, h e envies its potency — expressed in an image that, given the context of Ezek 23:20,is blatantly sexual — and its worldly good fortune. It represents to him a world of security and power from which h e remains banned, not so much by the Muslims themselves as by his own reli-gious convictions."They are forbidden to us, and who can make them per-mitted?"His implied answer seems to be: Sabbatai Zevi.

A few pages before Ishmael first appeared on the scene, Hazzan had sketched a fantasy of how Sabbatai might bridge the worlds of Judaism and Islam, entirely to Judaism's benefit. Isa 49:2 2-23, which promises that the Gentile kings and their princes will become nurses to the Jews, refers — says Hazzan — to the mighty works of Sabbatai Zevi. Isaiah's "princes" are "the celestial princes that are in charge of [the Gentiles], like Samael and Rahab; they will turn to you in great love and will nurse you." This is the hidden sig-nificance of the mysterious "man" who, according to Gen 32:24-3 2, wrestled by night with the patriarch Jacob. The"man" is Samael, here conceived as pa-tron of the Muslims. The victorious "Jacob" is Sabbatai Zevi "And he said, Send me off136 [Gen 32:26] ; meaning, I am your slave and in your power, and I am your emissary"(fol g4r-v).

This is, of course, fantasy. But not absolutely so. We learn from Cardozo, and from Hazzan himself, that Sabbatai had at least one Muslim devotee, a certain"MullahcAli," whom h e in fact used as his emissary from town to town. In his commentary on the Aqedah, in connection with Abraham's cleaving the wood far the burnt-offenng (Gen 2 2:3),Hazzan records a remarkable vignette of Sabbatai's life in his Albanian exile. In 1674, evidently,137Sabbatai had sent MullahcAli as his messenger to the believers in Kastoria (Hazzan among them) en route to his prospective father-in-law (Aaron Majar) in Sofia."He told us about the passing of the Lady [matronita; that is, Sabbatai's wife

they declare that they are in the right,for (they say)"Surely they have entered into our religion!" (135) Fol 82a.Hazzan's zahav yeraqraq, based on Ps 68:14, expounds ve-ahar kolyaroq yidrosh

(Job 39:8).Medod ve-have is taken from the exegesis of Isa 14:4 in BT Shabbat 149b-150a. His overall portrait is somewhat suggestive of the very hostile account of Islam given byjudah del Bene, Kisse'ot le-vet David — published in Verona some thirty years before Hazzan wrote — as this is summarized in Steinschneider, Polemische und apologetische Literatur; pp. 384—85.(1 have not had access to Del Bene's book itself.)

(136) ShaUeheni, more usually taken to mean "let me go." (137) Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 885.

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Sarah],138 and about how h e had brought a dead person back to life. And among the things h e told us was that h e [Sabbatai] would chop large pieces of wood, and give the small pieces to our Lord Ishmael to chop" (fol 107V).

The details of this sketch, and the interpretation that Hazzan goes on to of-fer of Sabbatai's behavior — h e was training his son, the future Messiah, to "shatter and subdue the qelippot" in the form of pieces of wood — are (for now) less important to us than the role ascribed to Mullah cAli. A story transmitted by Cardozo confirms Hazzan's depiction of this role: in 1676, shortly before his death, Sabbatai sent Mullah cAli from Dulcigno to Edirne ( Adrianople) to summon two of his followers into his presence.139

The mythic act that Hazzan attributes to Sabbatai, of turning the once-mighty angelic patron of Islam into his subservient messenger, thus reflects the actual role of Mullah cAli within Sabbatai's inner circle. We cannot be sure whether Hazzan built his myth upon his observations of Mullah cAli's behavior; or whether, as often tended to happen — the tragic story of Ish-mael Zevi is an obvious example — Sabbatai had managed to turn his im-mediate surroundings into a mirror of his Messianic fantasies. Either way, the rhetorical question that Hazzan had asked, in connection with Job 39:5, is now answered. The once"forbidden"Muslims have now become"permitted." Thanks to Sabbatai, they can be part of a new (and largely imaginary) "Jewish-Muslim symbiosis,"140 in which the power relationships of the real Jewish-Muslim symbiosis have become reversed.

(138) Following Scholem, against Amarillo (above, η. 24). The distinguished title matronita, long hallowed by the Zoharic practice of using it for the divine Female, would be entirely appro-priate for Sabbatai's wife of many years. It is far less suitable for Majar's daughter, whom Sab-batai twice planned to marry but who remained"his betrothed''(:>arasai0)at the time of her death (Tishby,"R. Meir Rofe's Letters," p. 97).

(139) Molho and Amarillo,"Autobiographical Letters','pp. 217-18. Scholem quotes and dis-cusses the text from Hazzan in'Terush mizmorei tehillim',' pp. 169-71 (Liebes, pp. 101-03). Ap־ parently, however, he did not notice that Hazzan gives the Mullah's name. (The initial letter cayin is clearly visible; the lamed and yod, though covered by the tape used to bind the manu-script, can be read with certainty.) He therefore omits "cAli"from his quotation ; and this is why, as far as I am aware, subsequent scholars have failed to observe the important correlation be־ tween Hazzan's account and Cardozo's.The reference to Sabbatai's having "brought a dead per-son back to life" is baffling. A letter written in the summer of 1675 quotes Sabbatai as having promised "soon" to bring his deceased ex-fiancee (Majar's daughter) back to life, and Isaiah Tishby suggests that the mullah now reports the promise as having been fulfilled : "R. Meir Rofe's Letters," pp. 96-97. This hypothesis, which requires us to date the episode a year or two later than Scholem did and to interpret its significance differently, does not seem to me compelling. Sabbatai's followers believed him to have resurrected many dead people (Isaiah Sonne,"New Material on Sabbatai Zevi from a Notebook of R. Abraham Rovigo" [Hebrew], Sefiinot 31960]4[־ 55), and we have seen that Hazzan expected Ishmael Zevi to d o the same. On the role of the mul-Iah, cf. also ibid., p. 62.

(140) I use the familiar phrase of S.D.Goitein.

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Jacob/Sabbatai's triumph over his nocturnal antagonist, says Hazzan,rep-resents a stage beyond his earlier achievement of "blessing and birthright." These latter were won by 'deceit' (mirmah) ; specifically, by the act of donning the turban. Now, however, Samael proclaims Jacob /Sabbatai's victory of his own free will, without compulsion.That is why, according to Gen 3 2 : 2 8 , the victor is n o lopger "Jacob" but "Israel" (fol 94V).

Hazzan reiterates much of this argument when h e comes to expound Psalm 85, and thereby to define and describe the dual Jewish-Islamic path that Sabbatai and Ishmael have been obliged (by the command of Gen 22:2) to tread. He explains that the psalmist speaks of Sabbatai as "Jacob"141 because of the 4ruse9 (coqvah) and 'deceit' (rammaut ) with which h e has tricked the an-gelic patrons of the Gentiles, as his Biblical prototype once tricked Esau. As Prov 25:21-22 instructs us to give our enemy food and drink in order to de-stroy him; as God once ordered the Israelites to provide a goat for the de-mon Azazel as a ruse to deceive him ;142so" the Light of Israel was obliged to enter into this testing," in the profane realms of Islam (fol 105r-v).

We are given one particularly striking example of what this dual path in-volves. Hazzan quotes Prov 31:26 — She opens her mouth in xvisdom, and torat hesed is on her tongue — which h e takes as referring to Sabbatai.143 "He would often reveal, through his astounding wisdom, the mystery of [God's] divin-ity, which had not been revealed even to the Prince of the Presence; and, concurrently, chant torat hesed — that is to say, the Qur'an of the Ishmaelite nat ion. . . two Torahs together" (fol 107Γ)!44 "Grace" and "Truth"- torat hesed and torat emet, Islam and Judaism — have thus met together,; as Ps 85:11 says. The effect is that righteousness and peace have kissed ; which Hazzan under-stands, in Kabbalistic terms, to mean that the female and male aspects of di-vinity have coupled. Thereupon "Truth" (Judaism), which has hitherto been

(141) Ps 85:2 reads (according to the Qere) shavtashevityacaqov.Hazzan points out thatshevit is an anagram for shabbetai, and interprets: she-ha-el be-rahamav yashiv et shabbetai ycfaqot;."Sab-batai"and "Jacob" are thus equated.

(142) So the Zohar's interpretation of the rite of Leviticus 16 (Isaiah Tishby, The Wisdom of the Zohar: An Anthology of Texts [London and Washington, 1989], vol. 2, pp. 453,521-23). Hazzan had used this illustration, as well as the citation of Prov 25:21-22, as part of his argument o n fol 94V. The thought processes underlying fols 94V and 105r-v are plainly very much the same.

(143) Since he is, as Hazzan often tells us, the inseparable companion of the Shechinah, to which standard Kabbalistic exegesis applies this verse.

( 144) Najara reports much the same : One Sabbath morning in Adar 1671, Sabbatai preached a sermon in a synagogue in which he "made known that many difficulties in our holy Torah and in the sayings of our sages are entirely unintelligible and insoluble without the preliminaries that he set forth He extended this sermon for about two hours; and, at its conclusion, read from the Qur'an, in order to show that the whole ppint of his sermon was to bring them into this faith [Islam]"(Amarillo,"Tecudot Shabbeta'iyyot,"p.256).

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wan ting,1455x^7/ spring from the earth; and "Righteousness,,י in the person of Sab-batai Zevi, mil look forth from heaven (Ps 8 5 : 1 2 ) in a glorious"second coming" ( f o l 107!·).

The triumphalist quality of Hazzan's expectation is evident. Plainly enough, the Jewish-Islamic synthesis embodied by Sabbatai is n o experiment in inter-faith harmony, but rather a necessary trick used against a repellent and de-spicable enemy. But here Hazzan finds himself cauglit in a paradox. For the trick to work — for "Jacob"eventually to vanquish the demonic patron of Is-lam, so that the latter freely confesses his victory — Sabbatai must mold his Judaism in accord with the enemy faith. So must his son : his partner and vie-tim in the new Aqedah.

So must Hazzan himself In the act of reshaping the Aqedah, he opens it to the Islamic encroacher. The Jewish ancestor Isaac has practically vanished from Hazzan's reading of Genesis 22, leaving behind him little more than the symbolic implications of his name. In his place stands a"turban-wearing" Muslim Ishmael.

Not, of course, the Muslim Ishmael. The Ishmael Zevi of Hazzan's Messi-anic fantasy is still fundamentally identified with the Jewish people; h e will emerge, n o less than in the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers we considered in the preceding section,as Israel's advocate and savior; the Mus-lims will be targets, rather than beneficiaries, of the salvation h e will bring. So Hazzan anticipated.

But, midway through the Aqedah, Hazzan must change course. Ishmael Zevi will himself vanish. He will be replaced — not by the Jewish Isaac, nor even by the sefirah Gevurah — but by the figure that Hazzan and his contem-poraries regarded as the embodiment of Islam: Ishmael son of Hagar. Torat hesed and torat emet will thus have met, on the former's terms; and the Aqe-dahì46 n o less than Sabbatai Zevi himself ,will have entered the realms of Islam.

We shall examine this impending development in sections 7 and 8. Let us conclude the present section by comparing the Aqedah exegesis with which Hazzan began his midnight-vigil commentary (fol 14V; see above) with the new line of interpretation which, carried away by enthusiasm for the Messiah-ship of Ishmael Zevi, h e now unfolds.

A few details have remained the same. The morning of Gen 22:3 is still the eschaton; the third day still alludes to the future resurrection. Abraham's ass is still, as in Abarbanel and Kohen, the beast to be ridden by the Messiah (Zech 9:9). But now it is further interpreted as"the prince of the nation"—

(145) Following Mishnah Sotah 9:15. ( 146) Which Abarbanel (above) had described as "the entire strength of Israel, and their merit

before their Father in heaven'.'

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the Muslim nation, presumably — and the Messiah's riding it as represent-ing his triumph!47 The wood that Abraham cleaves n o longer represents the sinners readied for punishment, but (perhaps along the same lines) the qe-lippot that the Messiah must shatter and subdue.(See above, o n the story of Mullah cAli.)

But the* most important elements have shifted entirely. "Abraham" and "Isaac"earlier the sefirot Hesed and Gevurah, now have become Sabbatai and Ishmael Zevi. Sabbatai has thus changed, as we saw at the beginning of this section, from"beloved son" to "exalted father" (or, perhaps,"bitter father"). The two young men, earlier Metatron and Sabbatai himself, now have become the"two high princes" who are to serve the Messiah as their Biblical proto-types served Abraham. (They are later explicitly identified as Rahab prince of Ishmael and Samael prince of Esau; that is, the angelic/demonic patrons of Islam and Christendom.)

There are some new details. Commenting o n 22:2, Hazzan writes :"The land ofMoriah is the 4Holy Land' [that is, the sefirah Malkhut ],148 with whom you

(147) "And he saddled his ass. This is the ass that he rode upon and triumphed over, in accord with the hidden meaning of poor; riding on an ass [Zech 9:9] ; this is the prince of the nation, as is explained in the Zohar, Kx Tese, in Racya Mehemna, in connection with the hidden meaning of I have an ox and an ass [Gen 32:5] "(fol 107V). I have not been able to locate the precise Zoharic passage to which Hazzan refers. Several passages understand the ox and ass to refer to demonic entities that Jacob had in his power (1,166b, 11,64b); or — a slight variation — take the ox to be the divine power of harsh judgment (the sefirah Gevurah) and the ass its demonic counterpart (I I, 6a, III, 86b-87a). Ill , 207a, identifies the ass with the totality of the demonic sefirot, and quotes Zech 9:9 to show that "King Messiah is destined to rule over it." The tenth of the additional Uqqunim,printed as an appendix to the Zhitomir edition of Tiqqunä Zohar{ 1863, p. 147b; re־ printed Jerusalem, 1974), identifies the ox and the ass with "the patrons of Esau and Ishmael, whom the two Messiahs will ride and dominate . . . that is why Jacob said, I have an ox and an ass, for he dominated them. . . ."All of these passages are plainly relevant to Hazzan's purpose; the last particularly so, since it seems to warrant an equation of the ass with the patron of Ishmael. (This last interpretation of Gen 32:5 is followed by Israel Sarug, Sefer limmudei asilut [Lemberg, 1850; reprinted Jerusalem, 1972], cols. 8c-d: Jacob intended to convey that Esau [ox] and Ish-mael [ass] were subject to his power.) None of them, however, occurs in Racya Mehemna on Ki Tese. (Zech 9:9 is twice quoted in this section — III, 276a and 279a — but neither of these pas-sages suits Hazzan's allusion here, although the second shows considerable affinity with his Mes-sianic thought in other parts of the commentary.) It is striking that many of the Zoharic texts that expound Gen 32:5 also expound Deut 2 2:10 (the prohibition of plowing with an ox and an ass together) in the same context; Racya Mehemna on Ki Tese (Deut 21:10-25:19) would there-fore be a logical place to look for a discussion of the ox and the ass. But Racya Mehemna on Ki Tese is evidently incompletely preserved, for it begins only with Deut 2 2:19. Did Hazzan have a fuller text at his disposal? Or did he regard the passage in 111,86a-87a as having originally been a part of Racya Mehemna on Ki Tese, as the printer's note on III, 275b of the Mantua edition might indicate?

(148) This symbolic use of "Holy Land"occurs throughout Hazzan's commentary. (Indeed, I have found only one passage where Hazzan! seems to take an interest in the actual land of

[ 4 6 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 8 8

["Abraham"־ Sabbatai Zevi] will ascend. And cause him to ascend there:149 h e will cause his son Ishmael, who is our Lord, may his mzyesty be exalted, to ascend upon one of the mountains which I mill tell thee of, referring to the lofty rank that God will give him"(fol 107r-v).

Hazzan's inspiration here is perhaps the Pentateuch commentary of Bahya ben Asher, which interprets le-olah in 2 2:2 to mean that Abraham was to of-fer Isaac to"the tenth sefirah, which ascends" {la-middah ha-asint hd-mitcalleh), to offer him, that is, to Malkhut}00 If so, Hazzan has given the idea a signifi-cant new twist. It is n o longer Isaac who is to be offered (or, perhaps,"raised") to Malkhut, but Abraham/Sabbatai who will ascend with that sefirah)01 The reference is surely to Sabbatai's "disappearance',י and his consequent exalta-tion. Isaac/Ishmael, by contrast, is to receive an unspecified"lofty rank" {ma-calah ha-celyonah) ; which, in the light of what we have already learned of his dawning Messianic glory (above, sec. 4), must be understood as bound u p with his future as savior, judge, and ruler on this earth.

Writing these words, Hazzan n o doubt intended the details of Ishmael's Messianic elevation to unfold, on paper, as h e brought his commentary on the midnight-vigil liturgy to its triumphant conclusion in the Aqedah. He expected them, n o doubt, to unfold in reality not long afterward.

7 . A M E S S I A H D I S A P P E A R S

This denouement was never to arrive, even in the commentary's own fantasy-world. Instead, Ishmael Zevi was to vanish from its pages (and presumably from its author's hopes), and the commentary was to extend itself well be-yond the Aqedah. Why?

A "fresh start" is evident in the handwriting, in the tenth line of fol 108r. The content also changes at this point, more subtly but still perceptibly. Haz-

Palestine : fol 86v.) The goal of raising Malkhut to the higher sefirot — first to her "husband? Tif-eret, with whom she couples; then with him to realms higher yet ־־ is a Kabbalistic commonplace.

(149) This is a thinkable understanding of ve-hacalehu sham le-colah, inspired by such Zoharic passages as II, 2$8b-239a (Tishby, Wisdom of the Zohar, vol. 3, pp. 923-27).The more usual trans-lation is of course "offer him there for a burnt-offering."

( 150) Bahya ben Asher, Midrash Rabbenu Bahya (Jerusalem, 1988), pp. 108-09. Bahya goes on to find allusions to Malkhut in the altar of verse 9 and the ram of verse 13 (yesh bo remez li-keneset yisra'el she-niqret ayyelet ha-shahar, p. 110). Shifra Baruchson's research suggests that, at the end of the sixteenth century, Bahya's Pentateuch commentary was second only to Rashi's in popularity (above, n. 86).It is therefore plausible to imagine that Hazzan is likely to have been acquainted with it.

(151) Hazzan is emphatic that it is Sabbatai alone who will ascend with Malkhut: eres ha-moriy-yah hi eres ha-qedoshah attah titcalleh Hmmah.

189 T H E S O N O F T H E M E S S I A H

zan backtracks, goes over ground h e has just finished covering, making slight but significant alterations. He is uncharacteristically halting and unsure of himself. For the first time in his commentary, h e shows respect and defer-enee for Islam and the Turkish sultan; not on the ground that they are wor-thier of respect than h e once believed, but on the ground that they are plainly recipients of Gqd's and Sabbatai's favor. Ishmael Zevi is still present after the "fresh start!'Indeed, his elevation proceeds apace. But this elevation has the effect of declaring him equivalent to his dead father, and of dispatching him to the heights of the Kabbalistic pleroma; in which rarified atmosphere h e disappears.

My hypothesis is that, during the break in his composition marked by the "fresh start',' Hazzan learned that Ishmael Zevi was dead. The shifts in what follows are consequences of this unwelcome intelligence.

The text itself is the best argument for this hypothesis. I translate the perti-nent text, before and after the "fresh s tart','calling attention to some particu-lar features; and trusting that the reader will be struck, as I have been,by how much more naturally it reads once my hypothesis is granted.

I begin with Hazzan's exegesis of Gen 2 2:5 (fol 108a).

Then Abraham said unto his young men,who have been mentioned above,152

Abide ye here mth the ass. Our sages have interpreted this to mean, a peo-pie resembling the ass;153 which corresponds to what I have said about the esoteric meaning of [the Messiah's being, according to Zech 9:9]poor, riding on an ass.154

And I and the lad xvill go yonder [cad £0/&].This is the sefirah Malkhut, which is called koh.155

(152) And identified as the supernatural patrons of Christendom and Islam. (153) cAm ha-domim la-hamor; drawing upon a widespread midrash that reads cim ha-hamor as

though it were cam ha-hamor, and consequently disparages Abraham's servants as "ass-people" (e.g., Gen. Rab. 56:2, Levi. Rab. 20:2, BT Yevamot 62a; cf. Yosef Heinemann, Aggadah and Its De-velopment [ Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1974], pp. 122-29). the light of the common aggadic identifi-cation of the two "young men" as Eliezer and Ishmael (e.g., Levi. Rab. 20:2 ; Pirqe de-Rabbi Eliezer ch. 31, cited by Hayyim Kohen), it is possible to see in Hazzan's commentary a rehabilitation for Ishmael, which raises him from the company of the "ass-people "to the central role in the Aqedah.

(154) That is to say, the Messiah is to dominate (ride upon) the"ass־like"patrons of the Gen-tiles. The triumphalist quality of Hazzan's exegesis — prior to the"fresh start"— remains very marked. Cf. above, n. 147.

(155) Cf. Bahya ben Asher's identification of ha-mizbeah, in verse 9, with Malkhut (above, n. 150). Both koh and mizbeah are familiar Kabbalistic representations for the tenth sefirah: Moses Cordovero, Pardes rìmmonim (Munkacz, 1906; reprinted Jerusalem, 1962), Shacar cerkhd ha-kinnuyim; Eliyahu Peretz, Macalot ha-Zohar: mafteah shemot ha-sefirot (Jerusalem, 1987).

i

[ 4 8 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν ι go

And we will prostrate ourselves. This alludes to the hidden meaning of [the Talmudic definition, according to which] "prostration"means the stretching out of the arms and the legs.156

And we will come back to you. This is the hidden meaning of the passage, Israel prostrated himself upon the head of the bed [Gen 47:31].157

And Abraham took the wood of the burnt-offering, and laid it upon Isaac his son[ Gen 22:6].Thatis,he gave him some of the pieces ofwood that have earlier been described,158 and set them upon him so that h e might chop [the qelippot] and subdue them.

And he took in his hand the fire. This refers to the harsh Gevurah [the se-firah of judgment], which h e needed at that time.159 So it is written, The

( 156) BT Berakhot 34b, Megillah 2 2b, Shevu'ot 16b, Horayot 4a. The significance of the com-ment is very unclear; see the following note. Does Hazzan intend some allusion to the prostra-tions characteristic of Muslim worship, performed by Sabbatai and Ishmael Zevi? He remarks on fol 126r, apropos of Ps 143:6, that Muslims typically spread their hands when they pray; but the verb used is paras, as opposed to pishshut here.

(157) It is very unclear what Hazzan has in mind. We may say with some confidence that, as often in his commentary, he intends "Israel" to be understood as Sabbatai Zevi. (He marks the word with two dots, showing he attaches some special significance to it.) It further seems likely that he understands the bed (ha-mittah) as Malkhut; see Cordovero, Shacar cerkhei ha-kinnuyim, and Jacob Jolies, Sefer qehillat yacaqm> (Lemberg, 1870), s.v. This comment, and the two that precede, therefore belong together and must be interpreted together. Shall we suppose Hazzan is aliud-ing to the Zohar's exegesis of Gen 47:31 (1,225b, 226b), which understands the bed to be the sefi-rah Malkhut, the head of the bed to be Yesod, and upon the head of the bed to be Tiferei}" Israel״-Sabbatai Zevi, in Hazzan's reading — thus prostrates himself to himself (le-dideh qa saged ), in that "Israelis a designation for Tiferei ( that is, he worships the sefirah of which he himself is manifes-tation). But then why is the comment attached to ve-nashuvah calekhem, and not to the preceding ve-nishtahaveh ? Alternatively, Hayyim Kohen's exegesis of ve-nashuvah ( above, sec. 5) might lead us to suspect an allusion to an eschatological "return? We might link this to the citation of Gen 47:31 in BT Megillah 16b, which assumes that Jacob was prostrating himself to Joseph{ cf. Bahya ben Asher, ad 10c.׳. kedei lahaloq kavod la-malkhut). The "hidden meaning "of the passage will then be: Sabbatai and Ishmael go to Malkhut, where Sabbatai transfers his authority to Ish-mael; and the two of them thus return, in the living person of Ishmael, to redeem the Jews and execute judgment upon the Gentiles and the qelippot. This makes good sense, but still leaves un-explained Hazzan's allusion to the Talmudic definition of "prostration? I can only speculate, without any confirming evidence, that Hazzan is covertly alluding to Gen 4Q'׳<$$,va-ye'esof [yaca-qov] raglav el ha-mittah, which seems to describe Jacob's death. The "stretching out of the arms and the legs"will then mark a reversal of this process, that is, a resurrection.( We recall that Haz-zan credits both Sabbatai and Ishmael with the ability to resurrect the dead; Mullah cAli has de-scribed a feat of this sort on the immediately preceding page.) This posture is rather suggestive of the position the prophet Elisha assumes while resurrecting a dead child (II Kgs 4:34); and Elisha was at least once proposed as a "type" of Sabbatai Zevi: Yitshak R.Molkho,"A Sabbatian Commentary on Lekh-Lekha (Genesis 12—17)" [Hebrew],Sefunot 35—453(°^19)4־^· Hazzan s in-tent presumably lies somewhere within this network of allusions; precisely where, I cannot say.

(158) In Mullah cAli's story (above). (159) Presumably, the time of the destruction of the qelippot.

T H E S O N O F T H E M E S S I A H [ 4 9 ]

Lard shall go forth like a mighty man [gibbor], like a man of war; and so forth [Isa43:13].160

And the knife: alluding to the hidden meaning of the passage, My sword shall devourflesh[T>cuX. 32:42].

And they went both of them together: meaning that h e [Ishmael] too shall be elevated to a rank equal to his father's.161

And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father [Gen 22:7] . . .

["FRESH START": Hazzan has received the news of IshmaeFs death]

. . . This means that Isaaç has now become equivalent in rank to his fa-ther Abraham ;162 these being AM I R AH and his son. That is why the text puts them o n the same footing: And Isaac spoke unto Abraham his father.

And he said, My father. This means: I already perceive myself to be my father [ani margish be-asmi she-ani avi ]. His father answered the very same thing : He said, Here am 1, my son — my rank is yours, my level of ele-vation is yours. For it seems to m e that, a t the time of the revelation^63 the rank of our Lord Ishmael will b e equivalent to AMIRAH'S rank at the time h e was anointed.164 May the Lord show us marvellous matters out of his holy Torah! This is what I said in my analysis of the passage, And they went both of them together.

(But it is no t precisely what Hazzan had said in his analysis of the passage, And they went both of them together. There h e had represented IshmaeFs elevation as a future event. Now it is a n accomplished fact. Why? Because Ishmael, like his father, is dead. Like his father, h e is marvellously exalted in the next world; but, also like his father, singularly unhelpful in this one.)

It is also possible to say as follows: And Abraham said unto his young men [Hazzan backtracks to 22:5]: these are Rahab prince of Ishmael and Samael prince of Esau, as I have already explained. Abide ye here xvith the ass: άpeople indeed resembling the ass, as explained above; in accord with the hidden meaning of ox and ass}65 And I and the lad, both of us together,

(160) Hazzan presumably understands the conclusion of the verse,"he shall triumph over his enemies [cal oyvav yitgabbarY, to refer to Sabbatai Zevi's victory over the qelippot.

(161) She-yitcallehgam ken be-macalah ha-shavah le-aviv. Note the tense: the elevation is to take place in the future.

(162) She-Cattah hay ah shaveh be-macalah yishaq el avraham aviv. The elevation is now aw accom-pUshed fact.

(163) Ha-gittuy ; presumably the coming revelation of Sabbatai Zevi in his full glory and power. (164) On the "anointing"of Sabbatai Zevi, which the commentary places in the year 5418

(1657-58),see Scholem,"Perush mizmorei tehillim''p. 163 (Liebes, pp.94-95)· (165) That is, the ox and ass of Gen 32:6 are demonic entities, patrons of Christendom and

D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 g 2

will go yonder [cad koh] : we shall ascend in the mystery of Malkhut, which is called koh; just as I have explained all this above.

(But this is not quite as h e had explained it above. He had said that Sabbatai would ascend with Malkhut, and that h e and Ishmael would journey together to that sefirah.^ut that the two of them would together ascend along with Mai-khut is something new.)

The hidden meaning of the passage, And we mil prostrate ourselves and we mil come back to you, is that we will come back to you a second time. This means that they will yet again be obliged to enter their domain1.66 Hence we will come back to you, until the time and the dominion167decreed by God's wisdom has elapsed.

(The point seems to be that Sabbatai and Ishmael ־־ now inseparably paired ! — will reappear as Gentiles even at their "second coming." This doleful pre-diction contrasts sharply with Hazzan's earlier confidence that Sabbatai's Is־ lam is merely a temporary expedient, part of the process of "mending.")

For, in my own opinion, the Turkish king — or someone else from the spark of Ishmael son of Abraham - will have a high rank with AM I RAH even after the Revelation [that is, the second coming]. Perhaps h e will attend him and minister to him; blessed is h e who knows! For we have ourselves heard that AMI RAH did not like for anyone to curse [the sul-tan] ; and, at all events, it appears that the Ishmaelites [Muslims] will have some measure of rank with AMI RAH. . . . [fol 108r]

For the time being, at least, Hazzan has forgotten that h e had once repre-sented Islam as organized lunacy, that h e had gleefully repeated the Con-stan tinople Jews' derogation of the sultan as the unclean" mouse ,,of Leviticus (above, n . 130). He now seems disposed to regard Islam as a divinely favored religion; favored, indeed, above Judaism. For h e goes o n to expound Deut 21:17 to mean that Ishmael, Abraham's first-born son by the hated Hagar, de-serves the double portion - not only in this world, but even "at the revela-tion of A M I RAH'S kingdom, inasmuch as the Light of Israel and its Holy One

Islam, of whom Jacob/Sabbatai has made himself master. See above, n. 147. (166) "They" is presumably Sabbatai and Ishmael, while "their" must refer back to the "young

men" the patrons of Christendom and Islam. (167) Ha-zeman ve-ha-memshalah; which I take to mean the appointed duration of Muslim (or

Gentile) dominion.

1 93 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [ δ ! ]

entered and abided by his religion, honoring its prohibitions and its per-missions. . . . This is the meaning of and we will come back to you, as I have ex-plained above: h e is going to exalt their power even after the Occultation II ha-hitcallemut\, in accord with that which the Lord of the World wishes to grant them"(fol 108v) .

The reference to "Occultation"— the normal Sabbatian euphemism for Sabbatai's death — is strange. Surely Hazzan meant to write gilluy "Revela-tion',' as h e did earlier. His Freudian slip reflects his painful new awareness that Ishmael Zevi, too, has"disappeared."

Only now is Hazzan able to return to the point from which he backtracked after his "fresh start," and to take u p the rest of Gen 22:7. Behold the fire and the wood; but where is the lamb for a burnt-offering? The fire, in Hazzan's reading, is still the sefirah Gevurah. But the wood is n o longer the qelippot that little Ish-mael had been learning to chop up, but the Gentiles. It appears that, Ishmael now disappearing from the picture, Hazzan is beginning to revert to the in-terpretation of 22:3 h e had given near the beginning of his commentary (fol 14V; above, sec. 6). As in his earlier exegesis, h e calls the victims of the burning"dried-up trees"{cesim yeveshim), and quotes Isa 33:12 in reference to them.

As for the lamb for a burnt-offering (colah, the root meaning of which implies "ascent"), it is the Jewish people, who d o not seem to have any visible merit by which they might be raised to the appropriate rank. God, therefore, will provide for it (Gen 2 2 : 8 ) . The sefirah Binah, now appropriately "mended" by Sabbatai Zevi's powers, will be willing to redeem Israel on account of the Messiah's deeds and not their own.

This is the meaning of the lamb for colah my son [22:8]. The lamb, which is Israel, will be raised on my account and yours; this is the meaning of my son. (Similarly, Rabbi Simeon ben Yohai said [to his son Eleazar] : You and I are sufficient to maintain the world.)168 So they went both of them together; mean-ing that Israel will be redeemed by the merits of both.

And they came to the place [2 2:9] : the two of them, fused together [yahad be-yihudam],czme to that place that is covertly indicated in the passage Blessed be the glory of the Lord from his place [Ezek 3 :12 ] . [fol 1 0 8 v ]

Hazzan expounds the rest of verse 9 to refer to Binah's crowning of Sabbatai Zevi, his building u p the structure of Malkhut {altar), his deciding which of the Gentiles {wood) deserve to be burnt u p and which may survive as Israel's servants (fols 1 0 8 v - 1 0 g r ) .

(168) BT Shabbat 33b.

i

[ 5 2 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 1 9 4

And he bound [va-y acaqod] Isaac his son, in order that he might rise to the inexpressible heights of the well-known World of cAqudim\mAnd he placed him upon the altar; meaning that h e was exalted yet higher, above the wood [fol îogr].

These words are Hazzan's valediction to Ishmael Zevi. Equal to his father in merit, inseparably fused with him — which is to say, dead like him — Ishmael is honorably dismissed to the inexpressible heights of the sefirotic domain. He still exists as a supernatural entity, and if h e could be in some way distin-guished from his father (which h e cannot) h e might still be of some interest. As a human being, h e is of n o interest whatever. Even while describing Ish-mael's last and loftiest exaltation, Hazzan does not call him by name. He will not mention him again.

8 . T H E R E D E M P T I O N O F I S H M A E L

Who, then, is the little boy on Abraham's altar? Hazzan proceeds to explain.

And Abraham stretched forth his hand, and took the knife to slay his son [et beno; Gen 22:10]. [The word] et designates a Hbbuy of beno [that is, that some-thing else is intended, along with beno, as object of the verb lishhot]; the reference being to Ishmael, who is Isaac's ribbuy [which we might render, freely, as "Isaac's double"or "Isaac's shadow"].170

His [Abraham's] intention was to say, [Ishmael] has already completely consumed his world, now let him perish from the world. And the angel of the Lord called unto him out of heaven and said, Abraham, Abraham [22:11], twice; meaning, You are father to both of them!. . . And he said, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, neither do thou any thing [me'umah] unto him [22:12]. Do not inflict a blemish [mum]171 on the kingdom of the house of David, which must rule over all the nations and all seventy of their princes,172

(169) Isaiah Tishby provides a concise discussion of the colam ha-aqudim and its place within the complexities of Lurianic Kabbalah : Torat ha-rac ve-ha-qelippah be-qabbalat ha-Ari (2d ed. ; Jer-usalem,1984),pp.28-2g.These details do not affect Hazzan's essential point, that the"binding of Isaac"really signifies the dispatch of Ishmael Zevi to the heights of the sefirotic realm.

( 170) Et leshon ribbuy shel beno ha-kavvanah calyishmac:>elshe-hu ribbuyo shelyishaq. On the princi-pie of ribbuy, see sec. 5, above. (BT Pesahim 2 2b,which I offered as an example of ribbuy in sec. 5,

n. 109, is actùally quoted by Hazzan on fol 63a.) In Gen 22:10, according to Hazzan, the unstated object of lishhot is Ishmael, Isaac's ribbuy ; that is to say, the one whose inclusion along with Isaac is signaled by the word et.

(171) Based on Gen.R. 56:7 (The0d0r־Albeck[ed.],p.603). (172) And which would therefore be blemished if Ishmael (the Muslims) were n o longer in

existence.

1 9 5 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [53]

in order that all may acknowledge the supernal unification and the God of [Sabbatai Zevi's] faith be made ruler over all creation.

For now I know that thou art a God-fearing man ,seeing thou hast not withheld thy son Ishmael, thine only son (for h e is Isaac's ribbuy)from me, for h e has now been perfectly mended by Isaac, who is AMI RAH. Both of them are to be called your sons, and your name is to be united173 with them . . . [fol ioga].

One stands in awe at the extraordinary boldness of this exegetical move. Hay-yim Kohen, as we have seen, had made heavy use of the ribbuy technique in interpreting Genesis 22. Like Hazzan, h e had included lishhot et beno among the chapter's ribbuyim. But Kohen had turned this"inclusion"into an indirect exclusion of the encroacher Ishmael [Isaac] was [Abraham's] single, solitary, unique son ; Ishmael was not called his son, inasmuch as h e was the offspring of a Gentile slave woman!'Any Muslim claim on the Aqedah was thereby re-pelled. Now, in what can be read only as a stunning and unprecedented ca-pitulation to Islam, Hazzan draws precisely the opposite inference from this ribbuy :"You are father to both of them !. . . Both of them are to b e called your sons, and your name is to be united with them'.'

We may presume that "Abraham's" initial intent, to annihilate the Muslims once they had completed their enjoyment of their worldly prosperity (kevar hishlim le'ekhol colamo), corresponds roughly to Kohen's expectations of the fi-nal judgment. It corresponds fairly exactly to the more extreme revenge fan-tasies of Hazzan's own triumphalist eschatology.174Now this intent is repudi-ated. Ishmael son of Hagar, in whom the world of Islam is represented, has become the hero and focus of Hazzan's Aqedah.

The"Isaac"of Genesis 22 thus undergoes a series of dazzling transforma-tions. U p to this point, h e has been understood to stand for Ishmael Zevi. He very briefly (in the passage just quoted) represents Sabbatai Zevi, by whom Ishmael / Islam is"perfectly mended"(nitqan tiqqun shalem)1.75 Later on, h e will come to stand for the Jewish people, an equation that seems natural and ap-propriate for a Jewish commentator. And, in several crucial passages of Haz-zan's Aqedah commentary, he is transformed into his brother Ishmael.

(173) Yityahed, a play on the text's yehidekha. (174) Fol 57r-v; above, n. 133. Hazzan subsequently comments that Sabbatai Zevi became

like the Gentile desert and its qelippot that he had wanted to destroy (fol 118v, apropos of Ps 102:7); t h i s confirms that Hazzan assumed Sabbatai's original purpose was to destroy "Ish-mael."(The comparison of the Gentiles to dry trees links Hazzan's exegesis of Psalm 102 [fol 118v

top] to that of the Aqedah [fols 14V, 108v].) (175) The equation of Sabbatai with Abraham, however, remains in place throughout Haz-

zan's Aqedah commentary.

1 9 6 DAVID J. H A L P E R I N [ 5 4 ]

We recall that, in Isaiah Horowitz's reading of the Aqedah, Isaac "ceased to be"(nitbattel ) in the course of the sacrifice, and was in effect replaced by a new and holier creature from on high. We may set Hazzan's Aqedah parallel to this. Ishmael Zevi similarly "ceases to be"— so we may regard his unexplained and permanent disappearance — and is replaced by the prototypical Mus-lim Ishmael.

It is clear, in any case, that the climax of Hazzan's Aqedah is the redemp־ tion of Ishmael ; who is normally (though not always)176 put o n terms of equal-ity with Isaac. Abraham/Sabbatai, who had initially planned to annihilate him, instead slaughters and burns u p a harsh and persecuting people (the Ukrainian Cossacks, evidently) who are represented by the"ram!,17? By this act, Ishmael is redeemed (padah bo etyishmac'el).

Because thou hast done (meaning, you have mended . . . )178this thing, and hast not withheld (meaning, you have not allowed to walk in darkness)179

thy son, thine only son (the ribbuy of your son, the ribbuy of your only son, this being Ishmael) — as reward for this, with a blessing I ·will bless thee: two blessings, one for the one [Isaac, the Jews], one for the other [Ishmael, the Muslims]. And in multiplying I will multiply — two times — thy seed, whichever seed of yours it may happen to be, both of them being equally good. As the stars of the heaven and as the sand which is upon the seashore : the holy seed will be as the stars of the heaven ; and the second, which has entered beneath the Shechinah's wings, will be as the sand which is upon

(176) In the passage quoted above, Hazzan represents Ishmael as one of the seventy nations to be ruled by the house of David.

(177) Hazzan does not name this"harsh nation? although he later refers to it symbolically as "Amalek"(fol îogv). His allusions to the Bible ( Dan 8:5-8) and the midrash {Gen. R. 2:4 and par-allels, especially Pesiqt. R. 33:11) suggest that he equates it with the Greeks. He cannot thereby intend Christendom as a whole ; since both Edom and Ishmael (represented by Abraham's two "young men") later find their redemption. Contemporary sources, however, use yevanim to des-ignate Greek Orthodox Christians; that is to say, the Ukrainians who perpetrated the horrors of 1648 (Jacob Katz,"Beyn tatnu le-tah-tat," in Halakhah and Kabbalah: Studies in the History of Jew-ish Religion, its Various Faces and Social Relevance [Jerusalem, 1984], pp. 311-30, esp. pp. 322-24). This would suit Hazzan's description of the "harsh nation" as persecuting and indeed proscrib-ingJudaism; as well as Nathan of Gaza's influential prophecy that, at Sabbatai's glorious advent, "there will be no slaughter among the uncircumcised" except in "the lands of Ashkenaz,"by which Poland and Russia are evidently meant (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 273,287-88, quoting Nathan's 1665 letter to Raphael Joseph; cf. Joseph Halevi's reference [February 1667; in Sas-portas, Sisat nobel Sem, p. 248] to nevuat satan ashkenazi she-be-azzah she-amar she-huyinqom niqmat harugei polony a).

(178) Hazzan supports his interpretation of casita by citing Gen 12:5, ha-nefesh asher casu, which the midrash had explained as referring to the"souls"converted to Judaism by Abraham and Sarah (e.g., Gen. Rab. 39:14).

(179) Playing on hasakhta 'withheld' and hoshekh 'darkness.'

197 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH [55]

the seashore. . . . And in thy seed shall all the nations of the earth be blessed : this is what I said earlier, that all the rest of the nations, the cursed Ama-

lek [Ukrainians] excepted, shall be mended and shall enter in [to the true faith] on account of A M I R A H and his acts of mending. . . .It was then that Abraham returned unto his young men, meaning that h e restored his young men¡, who have earlier been discussed [and identified as the patrons of Christendom and Islam] to their Father in heaven. And they rose up and went together; all of them as one, to Beersheba... [fol îogv, ex-pounding Gen 22:16-19].

The modern reader can hardly fail to be moved by this glowing vision of near-universal salvation and harmony, with Isaac and Ishmael full partners in the divine blessing. For Hazzan himself, however, the vision seems to have brought little but pain and grief. Never had h e wished for or expected so mar-vellous a prospect for Islam ־־־ that "twisted," "vain? mad, unclean religion, whose adherents "mock and ridicule us . . . devour Israel" and its wealth.180

He expresses his bitterness in an intense prayer, an appeal to the divine mercy, with which h e closes his commentary on the Aqedah (fols îogv-iior).

The prayer in question is a glossed and expanded version of two texts com-bined : the nbbono shel colam prayer, recited in the daily liturgy immediately af-ter the Aqedah!81 and Isa 63:15-16. It will be recalled that the latter passage was a part of the Lurianic tiqqun rahely and one which the more conservative Sabbatian believers continued to recite even at the height of the Messianic enthusiasm of 1666.182 In his more somber moments, it would appear, Israel Hazzan might turn for inspiration to the sorrowful liturgy of the suppos-edly outmoded tiqqun rahel.

As the prayer unfolds, Hazzan reminds the deity that h e has justly pun-ished the Jews by making them jealous with a non-people ... a vile nation (Deut 32:21 ),whom h e has brought near to himself and into whose religion h e has compelled the Jews to enter. ( They deserve to be destroyed for this apostasy, Hazzan says — divinely appointed though it is, tiqqun though it is.) This goy naval 4vile nation' is the goy lavan'white nation¡ so named for the white tur-ban that is its marker.183 Now, h e implores, let the divine attribute of Mercy

(180) Above, sec. 6. (181) Birnbaum, Daily Prayer Book, pp. 21-24. Hazzan's Aqedah commentary is thus intro-

duced and concluded by the two prayers (zokhrenu be-zikkaron tov and ribbono shel colam) that frame the liturgical recitation of the Genesis passage; see above, n. 121.

(182) Above, n n . 4 6 , 4 8 . ( 183) Interpreting this passage in accord with fol 50V (above, sec. 6). Lavan is of course naval

spelled backwards. .

[ 5 6 ] DAVID J . HALPE RI Ν

launch an attack upon that turban!84 God surely cannot have lost his zeal for his great name; which, with the Messiah's conversion, has become profaned among the nations?185 H e surely cannot have reined in his yearning love for his people?

For God — says Hazzan, quoting Isa 63:16 — is the only merciful father left to the Jews."Abraham does not know us: h e offered prayer after prayer on Ishmael's behalf, till [or, perhaps,"while"] our spirits had sunk to the dust186

through the painful trials inflicted o n us by all Deuteronomy's curses.The Bib-lical text of course does not mention Isaac, h e being the sefirah of Gevurah — but even Abraham the merciful does not know us. And Israel, who knows the pain of bringing u p children, does not recognize us." Only God remains.

"Israel," as often in Hazzan's commentary, n o doubt represents Sabbatai Zevi.187 "Abraham" is perhaps also Sabbatai (as throughout the Aqedah); per-haps the sefirah Hesed (which is the focus of Hazzan's prayer) ; perhaps the Bib-lical patriarch himself. Most likely, h e is an amalgam of the three. As Hazzan realizes to his sorrow — as many Jewish observers about the year 1680 may have realized to their sorrow ־־־ this "Abraham" seems oblivious to the an-guish of his faithful. His thoughts and prayers are for Ishmael alone.188

( 184) Ve-attah yagollu pe[rush] ha-senif ha-megulgal ke-galgal yitgolel calav middat ha-rahamim ve-zehuyagollu rahamekha cal middotekha — a brilliant and nearly untranslatable series of plays on the root gli.(Hazzan's starting point, the words yagollu rahamekha cal middotekha, are quoted from the rìbbono shel colam prayer.) I understand yitgolel cal in accord with Gen 43:18; cf. Eliezer Ben Ye-huda, A Complete Dictionary ofAndent and Modern Hebrew ( Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1948 ),vol. 2, p.783.

( 185) Following Isa 63:15, and indicating Sabbatai's conversion with abrief allusion to Isa 53:5. (186) Following Ps 44:26. (187) The remark that "he knows the pain of bringing up children" (yadac be-sacar giddul

banim), though taken almost verbatim from the Talmudic passage that plainly served as Hazzan's inspiration (BT Shabbat 89b; see below), may be an oblique allusion to Ishmael Zevi. Cf. Gen.R.

55:1, which commends Abraham for his willingness to sacrifice his son ahar hoi ha-sacar ha-zeh; that is, the pain of begetting a child at age one hundred.(I quote the text of the standard edi-tion, which is the text Hazzan is likely to have known, in preference to that of Theodor and Al-beck.) But it is worth remembering that, according to Jacob Najara, Ishmael Zevi was given the name"Israerat his circumcision (above,sec. 2).

(188) There is perhaps an anticipation of this point in Hayyim Kohen's Torat hakham (vol.1, col. 39b), which seems to maintain that it is Abraham's prayers that bear the responsibility for Islam's triumphs. Kohen starts from BT Pesahim 119b, which represents Abraham as refusing to say the blessing at the eschatological feast, on the ground that "Ishmael came forth from me." He explains this by misquoting BT Shabbat 89b, to the effect that the Jews do not want to turn to Abraham "who prayed O that Ishmael might live before you! [Gen 17:18]. . . .You told God that I should not say the blessing because I prayed for Ishmael. . . it was [thus] on account of me that the nature of Ishmael [tivco shelyishmac:>el\ the Muslim religion, presumably] went forth into the world: on account of that prayer of mine . . . it was written, I have blessed him and multiplied him very greatly [bi-meod meod; 17:20]. So how can I say the blessing now [at the eschatological feast] ?" (All this is original with Kohen; the passage he invokes from Shabbat 89b represents the Jews as avoiding Abraham for entirely different reasons.) We may note in this connection that Sab-

199 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [57]

And what of Isaac? Isa 63:16 speaks only of "Abraham" and "Israel," leaving Isaac out. If we are to appreciate Hazzan's treatment of this peculiarity, we must read it against the midrash on this verse in BT Shabbat 89b:

Rabbi Samuel bar Nahmani said in the name of Rabbi Johanan : What is the meaning of the text ,For you are our father. For Abraham does not know us and Israel doeh not recognize us. You, Lord, are our father and redeemer; your name has existed eternally.

God is going to say to Abraham,"Your children have sinned against me." And [Abraham] answers him,"Master of the universe, let them be wiped out for the sake of your name's holiness."

[God] says,"Let me speak to Jacob, who has had the pain of bringing u p children. Perhaps h e will seek mercy for them'.' And h e says to Jacob, "Your children have sinned." And [Jacob] answers him,"Master of the uni־ verse, let them be wiped out for the sake of your name's holiness."

[God] says,"Old men have n o sense ; little ones have n o wisdom'.' So he says to Isaac,"Your children have sinned against me."

"Master of the universe!" [Isaac] answers."Are they my children and not yours? When they gave precedence to we will obey over we will hear [Exod 24:7], you called them my firstborn son [Exod4:22]. And now they are my children and not yours ? How much sinning have they done, more־ over? How long does a person live ? Seventy years. Subtract the first twenty years, for which one is not punished, and fifty remain. Subtract twenty־ five years for night-times, and twenty-five remain. Subtract twelve and a half years for time spent praying and eating and sitting on the toilet, and twelve and a half remain. Will you yourself bear all [those years of sin] ? Splendid! If not, then give me half and you take half. And if you want me to bear all of them — I sacrificed my very life to you."

[The Jews] burst out, You [Isaac] are our father! Isaac says to them,"In-stead of praising me, praise God." And Isaac indicates God to them with his eyes.189 Whereupon they lift their eyes to heaven and say, You, Lord}

are our father and redeemer ;your name has existed eternally.

batai Zevi's followers attached particular significance to the blessing of Ishmael in Gen 17:20. Jacob Najara represents Sabbatai as twice quoting it in the sultan's presence, in the context of in־ ducingjews to convert to Islam ( Amarillo,"Tecudot shabbeta' iyyot mi-ginzei Rabbi Sha'ul Amar-ilio," pp. 255,259-60). Abraham Cuenque, writing about 1690, tells a fantastic story of how the sultan puts his finger on that verse in Sabbatai's copy of the Bible, and begs Sabbatai to explain it to him."That','says Sabbatai,"represents your power of survival. It is on the strength of that verse that you [plural] have obtained dominion'' Sabbatai explains the verse at length, whereat the sultan bursts into tears (Jacob Emden, Torat ha-qenaot [Amsterdam, 1752; reprinted Jerusalem, 1971], p. 20a). Muslim controversialists had in fact made substantial use of Gen 17:20, pointing out that its words bi-me'od me'od have the gematria value of Muhammad; see above, n. 130.

(189) Translating beceneh in place of becenayho; cf. the reading of ms Munich 95.

[ 5 8 ] D A V I D J . H A L P E R I Ν 2 0 0

Hazzan was certainly familiar with the Talmudic midrash. His reference toja-cob's "pain of bringing u p children'all but guarantees his awareness of it.190

His predecessors, Isaiah Horowitz and Hayyim Kohen,had drawn upon it for their own homiletics (above, sec. 5). They had been prepared to accept the Talmud's assurance that Isaac is not indifferent to his children's fate; that, when the Jews are threatened by God's just anger, h e will shield them with an audacious and witty defense that rests ultimately upon his own self-sacrifice at theAqedah.

But Hazzan will have none of this. The contrast between the sprightly op-timism of the Talmudic aggadah,and the forlorn melancholy of his own mid-rash, could not be sharper. For Hazzan, Isaac is absent from the Biblical text because there is not even a shadow of hope that this representative of harsh Gevurah might show mercy.

We recall that an earlier "Isaac"of Hazzan's imagination, Ishmael Zevi,was said to have been called "Isaac" because"he was born in a time in which the dinim had the upper hand over the hasadim" and therefore "came into the world turban-wearing." Is it too much to imagine that Hazzan's reflection, o n the disappearance of Isaac from the Isaiah verse, may be his last look back at his vanished child-Messiah — the unredeemed and now forgotten victim of the Sabbatian Aqedah?

9 . T H E E V I D E N C E O F Y A K H I N I A N D C U E N Q U E

I am aware that my interpretation of the"fresh start "on fol 108a, as I have laid it out in the past two sections, has involved considerable speculation. Some readers may therefore hesitate to accept it. But I would remind those readers that it is not speculation that Ishmael Zevi appears unexpectedly in Hazzan's commentary, rapidly swells in importance until h e becomes a Messianic fig-ure overshadowing Sabbatai Zevi himself, and then abruptly vanishes, never to be mentioned again. (Approximately one-fifth of the commentary remains after the Aqedah is finished.) To account for this phenomenon, we have n o choice but to posit that Ishmael disappointed Hazzan's expectations in some manner so drastic and terrible that Hazzan could find n o way to speak of it, and therefore chose silence.191 An adult, perhaps, might have accomplished

(190) He may also,of course,have been aware of Gen.R.6j׳^ (Theodor-Albeck [ed.],pp. 7 6 2 -73); which,unlike the Talmud,represents Isaac's absence from sa 63:16 in a very unsympathetic light. The fact that he preferred a negative understanding of Isaac's absence, over the positive interpretation with which he was certainly familiar, continues to demand explanation.

(191) We may compare the Sabbatians' initial reaction to the news of Sabbatai's death: Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 918-19.

2 0 1 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [59]

this by publicly and vehemently repudiating the role that had been thrust upon him. But what could a ten- or eleven-year-old boy have done that would have had such an effect, other than to die?

Once one grants that Hazzan must have learned of Ishmael's death in the course of writing his commentary, one can hardly balk at the idea that even slight irregularities in Hazzan's writing — by which I mean his handwriting as well as his discourse — may be clues to the momentous impact this discov-ery must have had on his thinking.

This proposition, of course, can be easily disconfirmed. If anyone should discover a single unambiguousand reliable reference to Ishmael's being alive after 1680, my entire reconstruction will collapse; and we will be left rack-ing our brains for some other solution to the puzzle presented by Hazzan's commentary.

If Meir Benayahu is right that Ishmael Zevi and the Sarajevan rabbi Isaac Zevi are one and the same, my view at once stands refuted; since Benayahu has shown that Isaac Zevi lived at least until 1716. But Benayahu could find n o direct evidence for his identification; and, alluring as it unquestionably is, it suffers from a number of implausibili ties that make it nearly impossible to accept. (See the Excursus.) The longevity of Isaac Zevi is therefore of n o relevance to us.

There remain two pieces of post-1680 evidence: an allusion to Ishmael Zevi in Abraham Yakhini's Vavd ha-amudim{ 1681 )]92which Scholem and Bena-yahu understood to mean that Ishmael was still alive; and the references to Ishmael at the end of Abraham Cuenque's hagiography of Sabbatai Zevi. These data now demand our attention.

Vavei ha-amudim survives in only one manuscript: the author's autograph, MS Oxford Bodley Heb. c.2 (no. 2761 in Neubauer's catalog)?93 It has never been published, little studied. I cannot claim to have read more than a frac-tion of this sprawling text, and therefore must be somewhat tentative in my interpretation of the passage that concerns us. I think it clear, however, that the passage does not imply that Ishmael Zevi is still alive. It suggests, if any-thing, the opposite.

(192) Scholem argues for the date of the text as follows: On fol lir, col. 2, Yakhini gives the current year as [5J44-1 (be-shatta da de-saleq hushban purqanah [פררקנה] ); and, on fol ιόν, col. 2, re-cords a dream which he dates to 25 Nisan. Hence the terminus a quo. The terminus ad quern is the beginning of 5442 (autumn 1681),when Yakhini died. See Scholem,"Perush mizmorei tehillim," p. 208, n.58 (Liebes, p. 106, misrepresents Scholem's citation of the manuscript); cf. Scholem, "Two New Theological Texts by Abraham Cardozo" [Hebrew],Sefunot 3-4(1960)248.

(193) I am grateful to the Bodleian Library (and particularly to Ms. Doris Nicholson, Senior Library Assistant) for providing me with an electrostatic copy of the manuscript.

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[ 6 ο ] DAVID J. HALPE RI Ν 2 0 2

The central theme of Yakhini's book is the peculiarity that Exod 35:8-9, which seems at first glance a verbatim repetition of 25:6-7, in fact contains three occurrences of the letter vav that are absent from the earlier passage.194

This slight variation takes o n weighty significance when one recalls a rabbinic midrash on Exod 2 5 :3 -6 ( Yakhini attributes it to marei de-aggadta), according to which the oilfor the light oí verse 6 is a prophetic reference to the Messiah!95

Yakhini infers that, following the sin of the golden calf, Moses chose to add three vavs to this text foreshadowing the true Messiah; and h e proceeds to explore every conceivable Biblical and Kabbalistic association that might shed light o n the mystery of the triple vav.

Among his myriads of possible associations, Yakhini proposes a linking with the three vav s of Gen 16:15: And Hagar bore a son to Abram, and Abram called the name of his son, whom Hagar had borne to him, Ishmael.196

There is a precious mystery here. For it is written, And Abraham gave all he had [et kol asher 10] to Isaac [Gen 25:5].The hidden referent of Isaac is the Messiah, inasmuch as laughter for all the world is [to be found] there. He gave to him [that is, to Sabbatai Zevi] et kol (the numerical value of Ish-mael ) asher 10 (536, [the numerical value of ]Zevi [obtained by the tech-nique] of milluy)197 [That is, et kol asher 10=Ishmael Zevi. ] The Messiah was thus given a son whose name was Ishmael ; and h e [Sabbatai] wished that h e [Ishmael] be mended through a supernal mystery, as we saw with our own eyes the mystery of the Mending of the son of our master Sabbatai Zevi through the light of Supernal Wisdom.

This is the mystery of those three vav s in the vers e,And oil for the light [Exod 35:8], mystery of the true Messiah. For anyone who has the eyes of the lofty faith of our master, the mystery of the three νavs of the verse, And Hagar bore [Gen 16:15], will be well illumined by the verse of the Messiah [that is,Exod 35:8].

This is why the years of the life of Ishmael [Gen 25:17] are written in the Torah. And in the aggadah h e is called his fruit mil he yield in its time}98

while Isaac is called his leaf[ Ps 1:3] ; for h e [Ishmael? or Isaac?] is the mys-

( 194) Ve-shemen in place of shemen, u-vesamim in place of besamim, ve-avnei shoham in place of av-nei shoham{ fol 31״, col. 2 ).La-ma'or and la-efod are spelled defectively in 25:6-7,piene in 35:8-9,

but Yakhini apparently does not count these vav s as significant. ( 195) Tanhuma, Terumah #7 ; Tanh. Buber, Terumah #6. ( 196) The three vav s are the opening letters of va-teled and va-yiqra, and the final letter of beno. (197) That is, counting the total numerical value of the names of the three Hebrew letters

(saddei, bet,yod) that make up the name Zevi. Yakhini's gematrìa is imperfect: asher 10 has the value 537, not 536.

(198) That is, Ishmael is Abraham's timely fruit; following Gen. R. 61:1.

2 0 3 THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [61 ]

tery of light from the flame [s?] of Gevurah™ But this is not the place to speak at length [fol 551־, col. 1].

Scholem quotes most of the first paragraph of this passage (from the Biblical verse on), and provides a reading of it very different from the one I have as-sumed in my translation?00 The last sentence of that paragraph reads, as I vo-ca l i ze i t : ha la-mashiah ityehiv bar shemehyishmcfe[ïive-ïhu savei [ י ב צ ] de-yittaqqan be-raza cilia ah ki-de-hazinan le-aynin raza de-tiqquna di-bereh de-maran sh[abbe-tai] s [evi] bi-nehiru de-hokhmeta Hlla'ah. The key word here is צבי. Scholem reads it, naturally enough, asm׳¿, andglosses it to mean that "his full name is Ishmael Zevi." He would presumably have translated the passage into English : "The Messiah was thus given a son whose name was Ishmael, and h e was Zevi."

Scholem's reading has the obvious advantage that it is natural to assume that, in an explicidy Sabbatian text, the word צבי is apt to be Zevi. But it has some formidable disadvantages. Bar shemeh yishmacel ve-ihu sevi seems a need-lessly verbose and awkward way of making the point that Ishmael's name was Zevi. Why not just say,"a son whose name was Ishmael Zevi"? And why would Yakhini, writing when Ishmael either was alive or had been dead for only a year or two, need to make this point at all? The de׳ of de-yittaqan is, on Scho-lem's reading of the text, very difficult to understand. Surely we would expect ve-yittaqan o r ve-ihu yittaqan.

All of these problems disappear if we vocalize savei, and understand this as the masculine singular participle of the verb meaning "to wish!'201 The "mending"— or perhaps we should understand,"perfection"— of Ishmael

( 199) De-ihu raza de-or me-reshef [מרשם] gevurah. I am not certain whether the fourth word is to be read as singular or plural.The use of the medial/ra does not exclude the reading me-reshefy since Yakhini often (though not uniformly) uses medial/rc at the end of words. On the other hand, he often writes final yod as an unobtrusive hook attached to the preceding letter, so me-nshpei is also possible, although I confess that in this case the yod is so unobtrusive as to be undetectable. The plural reading better suits the content of the passage, since the phrase is best understood as alluding to Song 8:6 (reshafeha rishpei esh) and the Zoharic passages that expound it (1,244b-245a; 11,114a; Tiqqunei Zohar 1 [Zhitomir, [ed.] p. 18a] ). Assume the familiar Kabbalistic identifi-cation of esh with the sefirah Gevurah, and the equation rishpei esh=reshef/rishpei gevurah yields it-self naturally.

(200) "Perush mizmorei tehillim" p. 173 (Liebes, p. 106); followed by Benayahu, Shabbatean Movement in Greece, p. 167.

(201) As in the Zoharic phrase savei ie-memar (used several times in 1,213a-215b),and savei le-ishtaddela be-khulla (11,75b). On the use of the participle to convey a past-tense meaning, in savei and in the following ki-de-hazinan, cf. Menahem Zevi Kaddari, The Grammar of the Aramaic of the "ZoÄar" (Hebrew; Jerusalem, 1957), pp. 85-86.(Note that, as in the example Kaddari quotes from II, 109a, Yakhini begins his sentence with perfect ityehiv) On the use of ve-ihu to resume an earlier subject,cf.fol 8r,col. 2:. . . de-olef mosheh le-gaUa'ah razin temirin. .. ve-khuUa dehila[!]de-qfudsha] b[erikh] h[u] de-galle leh razin illen ve-ihu oleflon le-yisra'el. ...

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[ 6 2 ] DAVID J. HALPE RI Ν 2 0 4

Zevi will then n o longer be a future event anticipated by Yakhini(as Scholem seems to have understood the passage ),but something that Sabbatai Zevi had wished far during his lifetime. He had perhaps performed some sort of tiqqun rit-ual, witnessed by Yakhini and others, in order to "mend" or "perfect" his son "through the light of Supernal Wisdom!' (By this,Yakhini presumably means the light that shines into this world through the holy "oil" that, in accord with his understanding of Exod 35:8,1s Sabbatai himself.)202

What shall we make of the allusions in Yakhini's last paragraph? Without a clear understanding of Yakhini's Kabbalistic system, which I d o not at pre-sent possess, any interpretation is bound to be uncertain. Yet it is striking that Gen 25:17, with which the paragraph begins, speaks of the death of the Bibli-cal Ishmael ; and that Song 8:6, to which to which Yakhini surely alludes when h e speaks of "the flame[s?]of <^wraÄ"(above,n.199),is saturated with death imagery. This will permit the conjecture that, when Yakhini cites the mid-rashic exegesis of piryo yitten be-itto as referring to Ishmael, h e is reflecting that the Messiah yielded up the fruit of his body to death, in its proper time?05

What prompted Yakhini to introduce this reference to the deceased Ish-mael Zeyi? Recall that, according to our best evidence, Ishmael was born in Nisan 1668 (above, sec. 2) ; recall that the Biblical Ishmael was circumcised at age thirteen (Gen 17:25) ; recall that this typological precedent was important enough to Nathan of Gaza that h e prophesied Sabbatai's son Ishmael would undergo a symbolic blood-drawing at that age. We may guess that some at least of the Sabbatian faithful had great expectations — bound u p with the ever-fascinating subject of Ishmael's penis — of what would happen when the son of their Messiah turned thirteen. That momentous birthday will have fallen in Nisan 1681, perhaps n o more than a month or so before Yakhini wrote the pas-sage we have been considering.204 Only, the hero of the occasion was dead.

The calendar's reminder, of how the believers' hopes had once again met with ironic frustration, may well have evoked sad reflections in Yakhini. His thoughts may well have turned to the one whom Sabbatai Zevi had wished to be perfected through the sefirotic light that streamed through him ; but who, like the fruit of Ps 1:3, had to be yielded u p in his season.

(202) Cf. fol $r, col. 1 : Ve-shemen la-maor da mashiah ben david shemen nehiru de-hokhmah Hlla'ah. It seems reasonably clear from the context of fol 3r that Yakhini uses hokhmah cilia ah in the tech־ nical Kabbalistic sense of the sefirah Hokhmah.l am unable to say whether he makes any distinc־ tion between hokhmah cilia ah and hokhmeta Hila'ah. Scholem's gloss on the passage referring to Ishmael, (she-hayah mehunnan) be-or ha-hokhmah ha-celyonah, seems unwarranted.

(203) Cf. the use of be-itto in Job 5:26. (204) Above, n. 192.1 see no reason why Yakhini could not have written the forty-five folio pages

that separate the date "2 5 Nisan" from the Ishmael passage in two or three weeks. The writing has a hasty, ill-planned, stream-of־consciousness quality that suggests it was done very rapidly.

2 0 5 THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [63]

This leaves the testimony of Abraham Cuenque. The crucial passage occurs at the very end of his account of the life of Sabbatai Zevi.205After a string of fanciful stories about Sabbatai's death, and about the wonders and the won-drous death of Nathan of Gaza, Cuenque reverts to Sarah (sic) and Ishmael :

Sarah,Sabbatai Zevi's wife,dwelt in the king's palace,bringing u p her son Ishmael. The lad grew, and took his father's place, associating with all the dignitaries of the kingdom, a young man like a cedar-tree.2061 have heard from reliable sources that Ishmael is expert, beyond belief, in all wisdom and knowledge. If the scholars are in doubt about any matter, they seek out his opinion and h e responds to everyone who asks [yidreshu etpiv u-meshiv le-khol sho'el].

I saw with my very own eyes, while I was in the city of Ostrog and vis-iting the gaon Rabbi Naphtali, nr-v (who currently holds the rabbinic position in Posen)f07that there was an important scholar there named Rabbi Ephraim who had been born in Ostrog but had gone to study To-rah in the Jewish metropolis of Salonika; and h e showed m e a query of Ishmael Zevi's and his lofty reply, matters exceedingly deep. This I saw with my own eyes; and there are many similar things.

There seems n o doubt that Cuenque, writing about 1690,represents Ishmael Zevi as still alive, hobnobbing with Ottoman dignitaries in the sultan's palace, and answering scholars' inquiries on the basis of his incredible erudition. (The verbs yidreshu and meshiv might conceivably describe habitual action in the past, but they are far more naturally rendered in the present tense.) Apropos of Ishmael's erudition, Cuenque describes an encounter with one "Rabbi Ephraim"; who produced a document,evidently emanating from Sal-onika, which purported to be a"query "of Ishmael's and his own reply to it (sheelah mi-yishmac:>el sevi u-teshuvato ha-ramah). B e n a y a h u h a s d a t e d t h i s e n -counter to 1688 o r 1689,and has identified the man Cuenque met as Ephraim Kohen of Ostrog, whose biography Benayahu describes in some detail.208

What are we to make of this? It will not d o to suppose,as Scholem does, that Ishmael had died years before but that Cuenque was unaware of this because

(205) Preserved in Emden, Torat ha-qenaot, pp. 16a-21b. The passage quoted is on p. 21b. (206) Using the language of Song 5:15. (207) That is,Naphtali b. Isaac Katz( 1645-1719),who served as rabbi in Ostrog from 1680 to

1689,in Posen from 1690 to i704(Yeh0shua Horowitz, in Encyclopedia Judaica [Jerusalem, 1972], vol. 10, col. 826).

(208) Shabbatean Movement in Greece, pp.117-36.On the context of the encounter — Cuenque's ten years of travel through Europe, raising money for his community in Hebron — see Bena-yahu,"Iggerot Rabbi Avraham Cuenque le־Rabbi Yehudah Briel ך Sinai 32(1953)300-19.

i

[ 6 4 ] DAVID J. HALPERI Ν 2 0 6

h e had never visited the Balkan regions?09 Surely it cannot have taken ten years for momentous news like Ishmael's death to circulate through the Sab-batian grapevines.

Now, the reader will have already noted one glaring inaccuracy in Cuen-que's account. Sarah, who in reality died years before Sabbatai,210is repre-sen ted as having oudived him. This is only one of a string of distortions. Writ-ing only a few years earlier, Baruch of Arezzo had been perfectly well aware that Sabbatai's journey to Albania at the beginning of 1673 was an exile im-posed by the sultan; although, naturally, h e tried to put the best face on it h e could.211 Not so Cuenque. It was Sabbatai, h e assures us, who demanded to strike out on his own,far away from the great cities of Islam; and h e sternly held to this purpose, despite the grovelling pleas of his royal devotee.212 He insists, moreover, that Sabbatai left Sarah and Ishmael behind in the sultan's palace, where they rèmained after his death.

Yet h e must have known better. Meir Rofe had learned in 1677 (from Gan-door) that Elijah Zevi had brought Sabbatai's widow and his children from Al-bania to Adrianople after Sabbatai's death?13 Rofe and Cuenque were col-leagues in Hebron at the beginning of 1682?14 Surely it would have been easy

(209) "Barukhyah rosh ha־shabbeta'im be-Saloniqi," in Liebes, Researches in Sabbateanism, p. 364 η. 144.

(210) Whether one accepts Scholem's or Amarillo's reconstruction of the chronology of Sab-batai's marriages ( above, η. 24).

(211) Freimannflnyanei Shabbetai Sevi, p. 66. Baruch is also aware that Sarah died and that Sab-batai remarried; although he seems to date her death to the last months before Sabbatai's exile, and to connect it with Sabbatai's suit of Aaron Majar's daughter and with the death of the latter woman.(He reports the event immediately after quoting a letter dated 18 Av 5432 = 11 August 1672.) Since I follow Scholem's identification of Hazzan's matronita with Sarah (above, n. 138), I am obliged to see this as an error on Baruch's part, and I believe the error arose as follows: Baruch knew, 1. that Sabbatai had originally sought to marry Majar's daughter while he was in Adrianople; 2. that he was not married to Sarah at the time; and 3. that Sarah had died not only before Sabbatai, but also before any subsequent marriage of his and before the death of Majar's daughter. What Baruch did not know was that Sabbatai and Sarah had briefly been di-vorced in 1671, and that this was when Sabbatai had made his first advances to Majar (following Jacob Najara). He therefore conflated Sabbatai's original suit of Majar's daughter (1671) with his resumption of it (1674), and drew the conclusion that Sarah and Majar's daughter had both died while Sabbatai was still in Adrianople. This very natural and reasonable error is of an en-tirely different order of magnitude from the gross distortions perpetrated by Cuenque.

(212) "He said to the king, I want to leave this place. The king was very upset, and said to him, Won't you tell me what you are lacking in my palace? Whatever you wish mil be done for you. Sabbatai Zevi replied :Ido not lack anything, but I must tell you in aU truth that I can no longer endure this irk-some inactivity. Let me be on my own!"etc. {Torat ha-Qena'ot, p. 20b).

(213) Above, n.28. (214) When they appear together as signatories on a document authorizing one Jacob ha-

Levi to act as emissary collecting funds for the support of the Hebron community: Tishby,

2 0 7 THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [ 6 5 ]

enough for Cuenque to have obtained from Rofe — if from n o one else — some account of Sabbatai's last years that was closer to the truth than the ab-surd tales of his hagiography. In retailing these stories, he cannot have been acting in good faith?15

We may assume, therefore, that h e was writing deliberately to mislead when h e wrote of Ishmael Zevi. He never says unambiguously that Ishmael is alive ; h e does not add after his name any formula like nr-v (as he does for Naph-tali Katz, his host in Ostrog) or yr-h; h e expresses n o hope or prophecy that Ishmael will step into his father ,s place as savior. He is trying to have it both ways. The less well-informed among his readers, who have not heard of Ish-mael's death, will naturally assume that the Messianic line is still thriving in the Turkish court, and will take heart from that. Yet Cuenque's language is vague enough that those who know Ishmael is dead will not be able to con-vict him of a lie.

What of the document h e allegedly saw in Ostrog? Even if we assume he is telling the truth, it is striking that h e says nothing about the contents of this "query of Ishmael Zevi's and his lofty reply, matters exceedingly deep!'He ev-idently cannot remember what the query and reply were about, or else does not think it is worth communicating. Whatever it was — perhaps some school-boy exercise, dating from Ishmael's brief stay in Salonika as a pupil of Joseph Filosofi, which Ephraim Kohen had kept as a memento? — it does not seem to have made any great impression on Cuenque at the time h e saw it. In ret-rospect,of course, h e is eager to play u p its importance. We are not obliged to follow him. Nor are we obliged to take this supposed document as proof that Ishmael had become a great talmid hakhamim, o r that h e lived much past his eleventh birthday.

We have thus weighed the two bits of evidence that have been adduced to show that Ishmael Zevi lived into the 1680s, and have found both of them wanting.The first has been misinterpreted by modern scholars; the second is a deliberate falsehood.

The Sabbatians had remained silent about Sabbatai's death for as long as they possibly could?16 When Ishmael died, their silence remained unbroken. We find his death explicitly mentioned more than seventy years after the event, in one of a long series of hostile glosses that Jacob Emden attached to Cuenque's hagiography when he published it in his Torat ha-qena'ot (175 2 ).217

"R. Meir Rofe's Letters of 1675-80 to R.Abraham Rovigo" [Hebrew], Sefunot 3-4(1960) 127-28. (215) Even if we suppose that Cuenque innocently misidentified Sabbatai's widow as Sarah,

he cannot possibly have stated without duplicity that she had never left the sultan's court. (216) Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 918-19. (217) Scholem (ibid., p. 935) attributes these glosses to Moses Hagiz. But I believe this rests on a

misreading of Emden's statement,in his preface to Cuenque's narrative, that Hagiz had"noted a

[ 6 6 ] DAVID J. H A L P E R I N 2 0 8

Emden cannot let stand Cuenque's glowing portrait of young Ishmael Zevi. N o t s o , h e te l l s u s ; r a t h e r , S a b b a t a i ' s offspring turned out just like himself; the im-pure birth died an Ishmaelite; and Sabbatai Zevi and his worthless lineage were cut off without any survivor (p. 21 b ). Emden extends this observation with a malicious jingle, patched together from several Biblical verses (e.g., Job 18:19), i ts point the utter and exemplary extermination of all Sabbatai Zevi's offspring.

This is, as far as I know, the earliest specific reference to Ishmael Zevi's death. The child-savior's enthusiasts having left him wordlessly to slide into oblivion, it remained for his enemies to write his epitaph.

1 0 . A F T E R T H E A Q E D A H

And what will become of Israel Hazzan, now that Ishmael Zevi is gone? Im-mediately after the end of the prayer that concludes Hazzan's Aqedah (above, sec. 8),the handwriting marks a"fresh start"(fol 110r).The Aqedah,which Haz-zan had evidently planned to be the climactic ending of his commentary on the Sabbatian tiqqun hasot, is past; Hazzan has been cheated of whatever sal-vation h e had anticipated. After a hiatus of unknown length, h e returns to his composition, taking u p a fresh series of Biblical passages that did not form p a r t o f t h e tiqqun hasot.

Were it not for the fact that this portion of the commentary contains a cross-reference to an interpretation of 1 Sam 2:1-10 (fol 114V) — which shows that Hazzan felt obliged to say something about this text, but excused him-self on the ground that it had already been expounded elsewhere — I would have assumed that these additional passages were of his own choosing. As it is, I can only suppose that they are drawn from some other liturgical sequence which I cannot now identify (above, n . 53). The series certainly begins appro-priately enough with Job 28:3, the context of which Hazzan takes as refer-ring to Israel's times of exile : He has put an end to darkness.

Hazzan's Messianic hope revives, though Ishmael Zevi is of course n o longer any part of it. Islam gradually slides from the amazing grace that, in the depth of his despair, Hazzan had attributed to it. Not long after beginning this sec-tion of the commentary, h e sets forth a remarkable theory, based on what seems to be a misinterpretation of Nathan of Gaza, to the effect that the Mus-lims' purpose in washing their hands ánd feet before prayer is to use the wa-ter to knead the dust of their feet into a golem. They use this golem" to make a

few items" in the margins of the text,"and we have presented his statements, in his name, each in its proper place" (Torat ha-Qenaot, p. 16a).Sure enough, a few of the glosses are introduced by Hagiz's initials (e.g., p. 18a, where Emden quotes a suggestion of Hagiz's and then offers a long response to it, introduced by the words amar ha-rrieqanne) .Where these initials are absent, as is normally the case, we must assume that the gloss is Emden's own.

2 0 g THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [ 6 7 ]

connection"— with supernal entities, evidently.218 This, Hazzan quotes Na-than as saying, was Abraham's purpose in wanting to wash the dust from the feet of his Arab visitors :"so that they could recline under the tree [Gen 18:4], the Tree of Life, our holy Torah"( fols. 110v111־־v).219In this passage, the Mus-

(218) Fol 11 ir: ke-ìhe-hem rohasim yedehem ve-raglehem le-sorekh ha-namaz shellahem histakkel ve-tir'eh she-adayinyedehem sheruyim be-mayim ve-hem mcfavirim otam calgabbei mincalehem kedei U-gabbel ka-avaq she-al raglehem she-ha-nir'eh be-vadday ha-gamur she-kavvanatam ligbol et ha-avaq ha-hu kedei lacasoto golem le-hitqassher bo. (On the use of namaz for Muslim prayer, see Amarillo,"Tecudot shabbeta'iyyot,"p. 255.) He goes on to quote Nathan as follows: gam pere hu efer ha-metammeah et ha-tehorim kavvanatah hi lihyot golem resonah le-hitqassher cim neshamot aherot she-yesh bahem mi-qav hayosher aharshe-modiaclahem koah celyon[koah ketercelyon, i.e. Sabbatai Zevi?]elohuto shelha-melekh shelomoh u-gedullat cillat ha-ilht lihyot hitcorerut le-taqqen ha-shevarìm u-le-hacalotam mi-shamkikol cod she-hem sham has ve-shalom en tequmah le-yisra'el ligga'el. Nathan seems to use golem as he usually does, for the chaotic and formless materials that dominate the lower half of the tehiru (the space left by the contraction of the En Sof), where the light ray (qav ha-yosher) emitted by the £72 Sof has not penetrated.(See Scholem,Saôèa£a¿ Sevi, pp.299-312 ; Chaim Wirszubski,"Ha־te'ologiyah ha-shabbeta'it shel Natan ha-cAzati,"Keneset 8[1944] 2 27-30.) It is this golem itself,which Nathan ap-pears here to equate with Islam, that seeks connection with souls (in the upper part of the tehiru?) that have been illuminated by the qav ha-yosher. Hazzan, by contrast,seems to use golem in its more familiar sense of an artificial anthropoid. The verb gaval or gibbel (which, admittedly, occurs in another of Hazzan's quotations from Nathan)is significant in this connection : for it derives from a midrash that describes the creation of Adam as a golem (Lev.R. 29:1) and recurs in medieval texts that speak of the making of an artificial man (Moshe Idei, Golem: Jewish Magical and Mysti-cal Traditions On the Artificial Anthropoid [Albany, 1990], pp. 34-38). The Muslims construct this golem for the purpose of making a connection (le-hitqasher); unlike Nathan, Hazzan does not make clear with whom or what the connection is to be made. (It may be necessary to modify, on the basis of this passage, Idel's tentative judgment that "the anthropomorphic aspect of the Golem and the relation between the combination of letters and the emergence of the Supernal anthropos is not central in this [Sabbatian] version of Kabbalistic theosophy"; ibid.f p. 154. The passage may also suggest a direction in which one might develop Yehuda Liebes's intriguing remarks on Islam as golem, in Sabbatian thought :"Golem be־gematria hokhmah" Kiryat Sefer

(219) U-mi-zeh tedacsodniflamahhayetahkawanatha-araviyyimshe-hayumishtahavimle-avaqra-glehem ve-avraham avinu hay ah mekhawen lirhos otam ha-raglayim le-hasir oto ha-avaq kedei she-yukhelu le-hisshacen tahat ha-es ces ha-hayyim toratenu ha-qedoshah.The belief that underlies all this, that the Arabs prostrate themselves to the dust of their feet, is taken from BT Bava Mesia 86b. Isaiah Horowitz, interpreting this seemingly "mad" practice (shiggacon — the word regularly used in connection with Islam), makes a suggestion that eerily foreshadows Nathan's theology of the apostasy. Water, like Abraham himself, represents the sefirah Hesed ; the mecat mayim of Gen 18:4 is that aspect of the sefirah that seeks to destroy the qelippot. Hesed is properly mayim rabbim (Song 8:7); yet at times mecat mayim needs to be taken from it,"in order to clothe itself in the qelippah and [thus] to subdue [it]" (avalpecamim be-hekhreah yuqqah na mecat mayim le-hitlabbesh ba-qelippah u-le-hakhniac. . . casmut ha-middah hi sod mayim rabbim umecat mayim hu sod hitlabbeshut ba-qelippah le-hakhnicah).See Horowitz,Sefer shenei luhot ha-berìt, vol.4,pp.75,77. From here to Nathan's ex-egesis of Gen 18:4, and his explanation of the need for the apostasy, seems only a step — particularly if we recall the Sabbatian use of torat hesed Çor Islam.

[ 6 8 ] DAVID J. HALPE RI Ν 2 1 0

lims are still the objects of benevolent concern. So they are again o n fol 114r, where we are told that Sabbatai Zevi "entered their religion in order to re-store them and m e n d them and bring them into holiness under the She-chinaos wings!'220

But,by fol 126v,Hazzan's tone has changed. Islam is back to its pre-Aqedah status as organized lunacy, rooted in"that madman" Muhammad, whose ad־ herents"bring into themselves a n evil spiritwhen they go mad."Fol 12gr:"Be-cause I did your will, and entered into this testing . . . let n o t the fools think that you are favorably disposed toward [Islam]. For thou art not a God who de-sires wickedness, the bad shall not dwell with thee; a n d this en t i re na t ion of luna-tics [and] boasters shall not stand before thine eyes [Ps 5 : 5 - 6 ] . " In a passage near the very e n d of the commentary — which is bound to seem, in the context of our discussion, sadly ironic — Hazzan represents Sabbatai as praying with the words of Ps 8 6 : 1 6 : "Rescue the son of thy maid-servant ; for I am now called, God forbid, as though [I were] son of the maid-servantp1 Ishmael" (fol 1 3 3 V ) .

Did h e manage to find a substitute Messiah? His final reference to Na-than of Gaza, o n fol 12 8v, suggests that h e did. Citing a bit of exegesis by Na-than, h e attaches to his name the Messianic formulayr-h?may his majesty b e

(220) Hazzan's remarks on the preceding page (fol 113V) are extremely strange, and suggest that he is hinting at something he does not want to talk about. If the kingdom of Ishmael is a clay vessel, as Hazzan has already said on the authority of Nathan of Gaza (fol liir), then Sabbatai's entering into it is comparable to the ritual of the sotah, which involves putting holy water into an earthenware vessel (Num 5:17).This,says Hazzan,is"the cruelest testing that the Light and Holy One of Israel entered into.. . .The Supernal King decreed this testing of the sotah, of the bit־ ter waters; to bring the mystery of King Messiah, who is the husband of Torah . . . into the daughter of Ishmael [!] who [masc.] is an earthenware vessel." Hazzan then cites "Zohar, Naso, page 12 5," as applying Num 5:17 to "the mystery of the qelippotand concludes, mysteriously: "This is the King's decree, and one cannot criticize his ways, and let this be enoughrin at least two other passages (fols 31r and îogr-v, cf. 48V) Hazzan alludes darkly to the Zohar's interpre-tation (III, 124b-125a) of the sotah ritual. The context of the Zoharic passage, and Hazzan's refer-enee to the Messiah as "the husband of Torah," suggest that the reading bevat yishmac,el (for the more usual bedat yishmac,el) is correct, and that Hazzan is hinting at a particularly scandalous aspect of Sabbatai's apostasy: his having made love with one or more Muslim women. (Cf. above, n.17.1 must acknowledge that Hazzan sometimes writes dalet so that it looks very much like bet׳, e.g., datant on fol 126r, line 3.) Joseph ha־Levi presumably also refers to this when he dates the letter in which he reports Sabbatai's apostasy to"the year 5427, week of the Torah portion Esau went to Ishmael, and took Mahalath to xmfe [Gerr 28:9]"; that is, November 21-27» 1666 (Sasportas, Sisat navel Sevi, p. 174).Gen 28:9 describes Mahalath as bat yishmac'el — the phrase occurs else-where only in Gen 36:3 — and it seems possible that Hazzan, like ha־Levi, alludes to this pas-sage. Cf. the remarks of Rivkah Shatz-Uffenheimer,"Portrait of a Sabbatian Sect" [Hebrew], Se-flinot 3 - 4 ( 1 9 6 0 ) 4 1 0 .

(221) From Gen 16:10 {ben ha-amah) ; but, in place of ben, Hazzan writes a final nun followed by a slash, which is presumably to be read ibn. He surely thinks it a mark of additional degradation that Sabbatai is not merely called "son of the maid-servant," but is called thus in Arabic.

211 THE SON OF THE MESSIAH [691

exalted." (We have already seen that Hazzan used this formula for Ishmael, the very first time h e mentioned him.) Scholem assures us that this is "doubt-less a slip of the pen for nr-v"222 But I think we need to take it with full seri-ousness. Hazzan needed a present Messiah, here o n earth. If it could not be Sabbatai Zevi, if it could not be the now-discarded Ishmael ־־ then perhaps Nathan might suit? But Nathan also was mortal. He died in January 1680; as Hazzan perhaps learned shordy after h e had promoted him to Messiahship, for h e never mentions him again.

This conjecture, that Hazzan's hopes had begun to explode nearly as soon as h e constructed them,will explain the extraordinary melancholy of his final section.This is his exposition of Psalm go,which seems to have been written when h e was literally as well as figuratively running out of ink.

H e begins boldly e n o u g h : "A prayer of Moses the man of God. Lord, thou art a refuge . . ., ,(Ps 9 0 : 1 ) . But then h e stops; and resumes again, in the last "fresh start" of the manuscript (fol 1341·). H e begins, as usual, writing more neatly than h e did before the hiatus. But the ink is fainter than before, and pro-gressively grows so faint that by the end of the manuscript it is all but impossi-ble to read.

This last section of the commentary is the only one that is not dominated by the figure of Sabbatai Zevi. He is, in fact, mentioned explicitly only at the beginning, where Hazzan manages to find a numerical equivalence of tashev (verse 3) with "Sabbatai."223 He explains that the Messiah Sabbatai is to be"re-turned"at"the crushing of the soulf24at the end of all souls . . . when all hu-mans return to their dust and the earth returns to be renewed."

The earth then shall be made new and comforting. In it,we shall ourselves be renewed. Each day there will be a thousand years; all will be day; night will turn into dawn. Sinless saints will enjoy this; also those whose souls have been perfecdy mended and built anew. Their death will be a sleep,from which they will awaken with renewed strength (fol 134V). At the end of each millenium will come their "evening," from which they will be renewed again and again like the phoenix. But they will no t die, for God has swallowed u p death for ever (fol 135r).

(It is here that we have what may be one last reference to Sabbatai Zevi. "These are the ones who believed in the Primordial Unique One [yahid ha-qadmon], whose faith in him was like a powerful love, who gave u p their lives

(222) "Perush mizmorei tehillim,"p.i74; Liebes,p. 108. (223) The three letters of tashev,when spelled out,have nine letters among them. Add this to

the numerical value of tashev itself, then add 1 for the word itself, and you get the value of "Sab-batai״(g+702 +1 = 712).

(224) Following the midrash of dakkain PT Hagigah 2:1,Ruth R.6.4, Eccl.R. 7:16.

DAVID J. HALPE RI Ν 2 1 2

for him!' God will reward them accordingly, turning the torments they suf־ fpred into pleasures in the next world. It is possible that, by the "Primordial Unique One','Hazzan intends Sabbatai. Yet n o one died in torment for Sab-batai; and it is at least as likely that Hazzan is speaking of God, and perhaps has in mind the martyrs of 1648.)

Hazzan continues to develop these ideas over the next page and a half, as his writing declines into illegible faintness. His essential theme is that our pre-sent life is brief and toilsome, our present world an abode of sadness and pain. "All our hope must be for those future days, when the Lord will make wings for us , ,and we will fly (fol 13 5V). In this world, we who are God's beloved friends are the targets of his rage. In the next, we will have our reward: when we see God ( ?) face to face, when the earth is filled with the knowledge of the Lord, when the Lord is king over all the earth.

Writing with a melancholy lyricism that is profoundly affecting, Hazzan uses his last psalm commentary to develop a wistful fantasy of a future world in which all dreams come true and all pains are healed.The vindictiveness that has marked Hazzan's Messianic expectations, throughout his commentary, fades entirely away into the rosy glow of this final dream. The Messiah himself fades away. After the first ten lines, with the exception of one doubtful pas-sage (above), h e is not mentioned at all. And the hope of a Messianic king-dom on this earth, which has animated the commentary until now, has been allowed to vanish.

Was this the swan song of Hazzan's Sabbatian faith? Perhaps. It certainly was not the swan song of Hazzan himself.225 Benayahu and Tamar have shown that h e lived for at least forty years more (at least until 17 20) ; and that, at least from 1692 onward, h e played a respectable and indeed prominent role in the life of the Jewish community of Kastoria (above, sec. 3).

We need not infer from this last datum that Hazzan had given u p his alle-giance to Sabbatai Zevi. A person's holding Sabbatian beliefs, at the end of the seventeenth century,did not in the least exclude that person's having con-siderable respect and influence among supposedly "normative"Jews; the ex-amples of Samuel Primo and Judah Hasid sufficiently demonstrate this. Yet there is some tension between the commentary's recurrent complaints of rid-icule and harassment at the hands of the "opponents,"and the respectability its author seems to have enjoyed a dozen or so years later. Something seems to have changed for Hazzan between 1680 and 1692. Perhaps h e abandoned

(225)1 continue to assume, as I have throughout this article, that Scholem was right in identi-fying Israel Hazzan as the commentary's author. If we should ever discover that he was wrong, this paragraph and the next will turn out to be baseless. Everything else I have written about the author will be unaffected, other than that we must stop calling him "Hazzan."

2 1 3 T H E SON OF T H E MESSIAH

his Sabbatian commitments; perhaps h e modified them; perhaps h e only learned to be discreet about them.

In some such way Hazzan may have risen, like the phoenix of his eschato-logical fantasy, from the disillusionment and despair evident in his commen-tary's closing pages.

11. C O N C L U D I N G R E F L E C T I O N S

The beloved son is marked for both exaltation and for humiliation. In his life the two are seldom far apart. ^ Levenson226

The story of Ishmael Zevi,as I have reconstructed it in the preceding sections, is overwhelmingly tragic. Its tragedy does not lie in his having died, or even in his having died young. We all must die ; and,in the world of the seventeenth century, the death of a young child was an event hardly to be remarked. But we hope that while we live others will at least in some measure recognize our presence ; we hope that they will at least for a little while preserve our mem-ory after we die. Ishmael Zevi was deprived of both.

He was, to be sure, a celebrity. From his birth, and perhaps even before his conception^27 h e had been anointed savior of his elders. He would redeem the humiliation and betrayal of his father's apostasy. He would integrate and re-solve the contradictory identities Jewish and Muslim, of his father and his fa-ther's believers. He would heal the dreadful incongruity that Jews everywhere could see all around them : that God had given his promise to Isaac, yet had given to Ishmael (and to Esau) the fulfillment of every promise worth having. All these wondrous and impossible acts of resolution and integration would be done by and through the small person of Ishmael Mordecai Zevi. Who that person might happen to be in reality was a matter of n o importance.

If we are to grasp the full impossibility of the task laid upon this child, we must recognize a curious and paradoxical fact. The Muslim identity of Sabba-tai Zevi, and of those Jews who followed him into apostasy, was (as far as we can tell) almost entirely devoid of Islamic content. The contrast between Chris-tianity and Islam is in this respect very striking. Christianity actually left a sub-stantial imprint on Sabbatian doctrine, in such tenets as the necessity of faith in a suffering and rejected Messiah. Islam, considered as a religious system, had n o comparable impact o n Sabbatian thought;228 indeed, seems to have

(226) The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son, p. 59. (227) Nathan's letter of early 1667; above, n. 16. (228) We may point to a few possible traces of Shi'ite influence on Sabbatianism.The Sab-

batians'insistence on speaking of his death as a"disappearance" is reminiscent of the "occulta-tion'of the Shi'ite imam, and the religious duplicity practiced by Sabbatian converts to Islam

DAVID J [2ך] . H A L P E R I N 214

held for the Sabbatians only the smallest and most incidental interest. Yet it was Islam that was the significant"Other"to Judaism, as far as the Sabbatians were concerned.

Israel Hazzan, as we have seen, writes movingly of the Messianic task of bringing the "path of Truth" and the "path of Grace" into consonance. But what does h e actually know of the Muslim path? He knows that they have a "Qur'an','which Sabbatai Zevi is capable of chanting (fol 107r).He knows that they wash their hands and feet before prayer, and proposes a highly eccen-trie explanation for this practice (fol l iov-i i iv; see the preceding section). He knows that they spread their hands when they pray (fol 126r). He knows "the well-known fast" (obviously Ramadan ),and the Sufi practices of wearing wool and repeating God's name a fixed number of times during prayer (fol 74v75־־r).He knows, above all, the ever-fascinating symbolic turban. That is all h e seems to know; all, apparently, that h e cares to know.

This indifference cannot mean that the Islamic path was unimportant to Hazzan and to like-minded individuals.lt was plainly very important indeed. But its significance lay, not in what it actually was, but in the fact of its being the path that was not theirs. It was most especially significant in that it was a path that dominated much of the world, whereas their own Jewish way was everywhere subservient.

It will follow that Ishmael Zevi was not expected to champion some rap-prochement between Judaism and Islam — the faith, that is, that Muslims ac-tually believed and practiced — nor yet to invent a new religious system that might incorporate both. Such an expectation h e might conceivably have sat-isfied.His task was to make it possible for a Jew such as Hazzan simultane-ously to be himself and the "Other"; himself and someone who was not him-self.229Obviously, n o human being could accomplish such a task. Ishmael Zevi must therefore cease to exist as a human being (not to mention, as a ten-year-old boy !)and become a mythic figure, acting out an archetypal drama that Hazzan found scripted in the Bible.

In this sense, Ishmael Zevi does indeed perish in the Sabbatian Aqedah.By this, I d o not mean that the fantasies that Hazzan (and others, presumably)

suggests the radical Shi'ite doctrine of takiye (Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi,p.314; "The Crypto-Jewish Sect of the Dönmeh [Sabbatians] in Turkey," in The Messianic Idea in Judaism And Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality [New York, 1971], pp. 150-51,154). Both of these features may, as Scholem is in-clined to believe, represent independent developments within Sabbatianism.

(229) I have elsewhere made the case that the essential appeal of Sabbatai Zevi's Messianic claims lay in his ability to offer an emotionally satisfying mythic resolution to the insoluble his-torical dilemma that confronted seventeenth־centuryJews,of how they might be themselves and at the same time something other than themselves :"Sabbatai Zevi, Metatron, and Mehmed: Myth and History in Seventeenth-Century Judaism? in S.Daniel Breslauer (ed.), The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response 3 (Albany, 1997) pp. 271-308.

2!5 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [73]

projected upon the child actually caused his death. We have 110 reason to be-lieve this was so, although it is easy enough to imagine ways his life might have been shortened by the fantastic expectations heaped upon him. But the refusal to recognize the reality of one's human existence, and still more so the obliteration of the memory that one ever existed, is in its own way an act of killing. 4

While Hazzan believed that Ishmael Zevi was still alive, h e turned him into an impossible synthesis of Isaac and Ishmael. In order to achieve the impos־ sible merger of the paths of "Truth"and of "Grace," h e bound this wonder-child to his imagination's altar. When h e learned the child was dead, h e made a whole-offering of his memory, and let the mythical figures of Isaac and Ish-mael join in imaginary partnership in the empty space where the child had been. He later returned to Messianic-fantasy-as-usual, seemingly forgetting there ever had been an Ishmael Zevi.

". . . the ancient, protean, and strangely resilient story of the death and res-urrection of the beloved son!' So Jon Levenson calls it, in the very last sen-tence of his study of the Aqedah?30 A theme so protean and so resilient must reflect some enduring feature, normally latent and unconscious, of the cui-ture that creates and transmits it. Any manifestation of the theme is likely to shed light on some aspect of the theme's essential meaning.

Levenson, working from the manifestations that surface in the Hebrew Bi-ble itself, stresses that the beloved son is marked both by "his exalted status and the precariousness of his very life . . . marked for both exaltation and humiliation'.'231 He may b e betrayed to death by the parent who professes to love himf32and who at bottom prefers the blessing of faceless"progeny"over the real child h e is in the process of sacrificing.233 His sufferings may turn out to be very much like those of the un-beloved child. Levenson argues persua-sively that the Hebrew Bible gives Ishmael an Aqedah of his own, whose fea-tures r u n parallel to those of Isaac's Aqedah?34The children of the beloved Isaac, too, re-enact the sufferings of Hagar and Ishmael."The exaltation of the

(230) Death and Resurrection, p. 232. (231) Ibid., p. 59. Levenson returns repeatedly to the themeof humiliation: pp.87,96,128,152. (232) Ibid., pp. 148-50. (233) Ibid., p. 161.1 am not sure that Levenson would be prepared to state the implication of

his observations as bluntly as I do. Cf. pp. 201-02 :"The application to Jesus of the two not dis-similar Jewish traditions of Isaac and the suffering servant sounds an ominous note,easily missed by those who interpret God's love in sentimental fashion : like Isaac, the paschal lamb, and the suffering servant, Jesus will provide his father in heaven complete pleasure only when he has endured a brutal confrontation with nothing short of death itself." I do not think one has to be a sentimentalist to regard this as a perverse and dreadful mode of parental "love."

(234) Ibid., pp. 82-110,124,132.

[74] D A V I D J . H A L P E RI Ν 2 1 6

chosen brother . . . has its costs: it entails the chosen's experience of the bit-ter reality of the unchosen's life. Such is the humiliation that attends the ex-altation of the beloved son!'235

If an "Aqedah of Ishmael"is latent in the Bible, as Levenson supposes, it is made manifest in the pages of Israel Hazzan. In Hazzan's hopes and disillu-sionments, as recorded in his commentary, something of the dark uncon-scious of the ancient Aqedah complex acts itself out. Its victim, seemingly ex-alted, is worse than humiliated: h e is abandoned and consumed. His voice is ignored, his reality unseen, his existence forgotten. No parent or angel or de-ity intervenes to save him. The cruelty and delusional folly that are the Aqe-dah's worst and most archaic elements are re-enacted, late in the seventeenth century, upon the forlorn person of the Messiah^ child.

Adored for what h e was not, unknown for what h e was, Ishmael Zevi was made into a vessel for elaborate illusions that h e may never have begun to understand. The illusions endured, as illusions will. The vessel shattered, and was abandoned to silence.

E X C U R S U S : I S H M A E L Z E V I A N D I S A A C Z E V I

In his collection of studies, The Shabbatean Movement in Greece (pp. 163-78), Meir Benayahu proposed an ingenious and original solution to the mystery of Ishmael Zevi's disappearance. Emden and the Dönme were wrong : h e did not die in childhood, nor was h e a Muslim at the time of his death. Rather, h e returned from Adrianople to Salonika after 1677t o pursue his Jewish ed-ucation, and there returned to Judaism at some time in the 1680s. Upon his reconversion, h e changed his name from Ishmael to Isaac. He is to be identi-fied with Isaac Zevi, who served as rabbi of Sarajevo from about 1690 at least until 1716.

What we know about Ishmael Zevi before 1690, and what we know about Isaac Zevi after that year, fits together well enough. Their ages seem at least roughly to correspond. So d o their names. Even if the Sabbatians had not identified Ishmael Zevi with the Biblical Isaac (as Hazzan, at least, did), one could hardly imagine anything more suitable than the Muslim Ishmael's taking the name Isaac upon his return to Judaism. What we know about Isaac Zevi, moreover, suggests a close link with Salonika and its scholars, and it seems an inescapable conclusion that h e studied there. The document that Cuenque claims to have seen in Ostrog in 1688 or 1689 presumably de-rived from Salonika, and Cuenque's enthusiastic description of it — which

(235) Ibid., p. 96.

2 1 7 T H E SON OF THE MESSIAH [75]

Benayahu endorses as reliable beyond the smallest suspicion of doubt (p. 166) — suggests that Ishmael Zevi had become by age twenty a Jewish scholar of some stature.236

As for the Dönme tradition that Ishmael died as a child, this can be ex-plained easily enough on Benayahu's hypothesis. By returning to Judaism, their youthful Messiah turned his back o n his father's example, and so be-trayed the expectations of his most devoted followers. He"died" to them, and they got their revenge by declaring him literally to have died. (One is tempted to imagine them"sitting shiva"for him.) The vindictive anti-Sabbatians, Em-den among them, were only too happy to believe them.

The circumstantial evidence, combined with Benayahu's having provided a neat solution to what otherwise might seem an intractable problem, con-stitute the strengths of his hypothesis. But it has very substantial weaknesses as well.

To begin with, Benayahu offers practically n o evidence that is not circum-stantial. He points out that Isaac Zevi's son, Shem Τον Zevi (who died some time before 1748),"invariably includes his father's name in his signature, while his father invariably signs with his name only. Surely this is indicative!" (p. 178). It is indeed interesting. But it is the only datum about Isaac Zevi, in־ voked by Benayahu, that even begins to make better sense if we assume he was Sabbatai Zevi's son than if we assume h e was not.

This assumption, moreover, creates very formidable problems of its own. It would not seem, o n Benayahu^ hypothesis, that Isaac Zevi was particularly concerned to hide his original identity. If h e were, surely he would have changed his name more drastically, to efface all trace of his link with the most infamousjewish figure of his time.But,without some serious effort o n his part to conceal his origins, how could they have failed to become widely known? It cannot possibly have been a matter of indifference to his Jewish contempo-raries that the son of the false Messiah,who had spent at least the first ten years

of his life as a Muslim, was now functioning as a leader and teacher in Israel. Even if the now-Jewish Ishmael/Isaac had tried to hide his background, it

is not clear h e could have succeeded. The Dönme could easily have revenged themselves on their "apostate" Messiah, making his life miserable by trailing him and denouncing him to Jewish communities wherever h e went — much as some Sabbatian radicals, posing as orthodox heresy-hunters, took advan-

(236) We must remember, however, that Benayahu could produce no direct evidence for his assumption that Ishmael returned to Salonika sifter 1677. Nor does he observe that, if he is right, then Cuenque must be wrong about Ishmael having grown up in the sultan's court after Sabbatai's death. If Cuenque is unreliable on this point, why should we trust (as Benayahu does) his account of the Ostrog document?

Í

2 1 8 DAVID J. H A L P E R I N [ 7 6 ]

tage of their status within their communities to persecute such "moderates״ as Cardozo.237But it seems that Isaac Zevi did not even try to conceal who h e was. The Jewish world cannot possibly have remained unaware that the son of the great deceiver was now Sarajevo's rabbi. Can we imagine that his parent-age, Muslim upbringing, and former Messianic status never became issues of controversy in his rabbinic career?

For Isaac Zevi, as Benayahu depicts him, was n o stranger to controversy or criticism. His contract as marbis torah in Sarajevo came u p for renewal every three years; and, some time early in 1714, the community leaders refused to renew it. O n 17 Iyyar 5474(2 May 1714) his former teacher, Solomon Amarillo of Salonika,wrote o n his behalf. The rank and file of Sarejevanjewry, Amarillo claimed, had wanted to reappoint Isaac Zevi. But the moneyed elite,"without any grounds whatsoever beyond malice and hatred," had tried to dismiss an upright rabbi "in whom there was not the smallest blemish!'This was, more-over, not the first time Amarillo had had to intervene in the quarrel.238

What was the quarrel about? Beyond the class tensions involved (if we are to trust Amarillo), we have n o clue. The date, however, is important. The controversy surrounding Nehemiah Hiya Hayon had erupted the preceding summer. By 1714, crypto-Sabbatianism had become a hot issue in Jewish com-munities throughout Europe.239 This might at first sight seem to support Be-nayahu's hypothesis. Perhaps the opposition to Isaac Zevi was really directed against his notorious father, and the supposedly groundless "malice and ha-tred"denounced by Amarillo was in fact motivated by the suspicion that h e had continued to nourish heretical beliefs behind an orthodox mask?

Given the anxieties about covert heresy that prevailed in 1714,1t is quite in-conceivable that any attack on Sabbatai Zevi's son, whatever its original moti-vation, should not have transformed itself into accusations that h e was his father's true heir. Yet (at least as far as Benayahu was able to discover) we hear nothing of this. Amarillos letter suggests an effort to unseat a preacher who has made himself a bit too popular with the ordinary folk; nothing more.

An argument from silence, indeed. But we can make it even sharper. Sara-jevo was very much in the background of the Hayon controversy. Hayon's fam-ily came from Sarajevo; his enemies claimed h e had been born there; h e was married there in the 1670s. Of his two archenemies in the controversy, Moses Hagiz and Hakham Zevi Ashkenazi, the latter had been a predecessor of Isaac Zevi in the Sarajevo rabbinate. Hakham Zevi was forced to leave Sarajevo in 1688, as the result of a quarrel with two men closely linked to Hayon (one of

(237) Elisheva Carlebach, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and theSabbatian Controver-sies ( New York, 1990), p. 77.

(238) Shabbatean Movement in Greece, pp. 176-77. (239) Carlebach, pp. 75-159.

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