Introduction
In this article I want to show fascinating parallelism between the twelfth-century story of David Alro’i; the
seventeenth-century episode of Shabbatai Tzvi; and a modern event from a completely
different culture and context. By comparing these three stories, we might come
to a better understanding of modern messianism which is popular within the
Jewish world today. And, surprisingly, it may have a stronger component
relating to basic sociology and psychology than to spirituality.
David Alro’i
In a previous article, we
explored various accounts of the false messiah R. David Alro’i who was active
around the mid-1100s. [See Kotzk
Blog: 217) R. DAVID ALRO’I AND THE NIGHT OF THE FLIGHT:]
David Alro’i was born in Iraq
under the name Menachem ben Shlomo. He was a student of Chasdai the Exilarch as
well as of Ali the Gaon of Baghdad. He was well versed in
Talmud and Jewish mysticism. With time he built a reputation amongst the
masses as a kind of miracle worker.[1]
He claimed that he was the Messiah and many Jews around the world, not just
those in Baghdad believed him.
There are different accounts of
the story but the essential message is the same. According to R. Adin
Steinsaltz, Alro’i made the claim while he was still alive that the Jews were
to gather on a certain night and wait on the rooftops of Baghdad to ‘fly’ to Jerusalem.
To make the flying easier, the
Jews were told to hand over all their possessions which they wouldn’t need
anyway in the messianic time they were entering However, by morning’s light no
flying had taken place and some swindlers had run off with all their wealth. Alro’i’s
followers had waited up all night and even the Muslims:
“were so
amazed at what had happened that they refrained from opposing (the Jews) until
the result of their vain expectations had revealed itself (in the morning)”.[2]
It is what happened next that is
even more interesting. The followers of David Alro’i did not give up their
belief in their messiah and they became known as Menachemim.
David’s name was really Menachem but he had changed it to David to fit his
messianic aspirations. These followers perpetuated their belief in Alro’i’s
messianic claims for about a generation or more after his death.
Maimonides’ responds to such
endeavours
It is of significance to note
that Maimonides (1135-1204) the rationalist, had issues with the mysticism that
was practised in Baghdad at that time. We know that the Shmuel ben Ali, the
Gaon of Baghdad publicly accused Rambam of discarding a most fundamental
precept within Judaism, namely the notion of the Revival of the Dead. The Gaon
was the most outspoken critic of Rambam during his lifetime. This prompted
Rambam - in 1191 - to write his Essay on the Revival of the Dead, to
defend himself against this open charge of heresy. [See Rambam's View on the Revival of the Dead.]
In the Essay, Rambam writes quite
scathingly about his mystical adversary the Gaon of Baghdad:
“I received
a copy of the writing of the Gaon. I found it was a collection of homilies and
legends that he had gathered. Everyone knows that scholars are not expected to
rehearse the homilies and the curious tales, of the sort that women tell one
another in their condolence calls.”
This way Maimonides clearly
positions himself against the “curious tales” that seemed to be
commonplace in Baghdad at that time. Nevertheless, Maimonides’ opposition to
these mystical exploits fell largely on deaf ears.
Shabbatai Tzvi (1626-1676):
In the seventeenth century another false messiah, Shabbatai Tzvi, had the
majority of the Jewish world following him including respected rabbis. Eventually,
Shabbatai Tzvi converted to Islam. People sold their business and gave away
their possessions in anticipation of being taken to Jerusalem to partake in the
promised messianic revelations. Even after his death, his followers - called
the Ma’aminim or Believers - continued to wait for his imminent
return:
Matt Goldish[3]
(2020:113) writes that, surprisingly, there is little recorded opposition to
Shabbatai Tzvi:
“Popular works of Jewish history have often
portrayed the Sabbatean movement as all but disappearing after the apostasy of Sabbatai
Zevi in 1666.”
The ignorance of the enduring influence of Shabbatai Tzvi in the popular
psyche is indeed something worthy of further investigation.
Goldish draws our attention to the fact that a number of books on Jewish
history have been published[4]
that adopt the prevailing attitude that nothing really happened after Shabbatai
Tzvi’s death. The false Messiah was exposed and everything soon went back to
normal in the Jewish world. He then points out that all those books, in their
revised editions, post-dated Gershom Scholem’s classic, Sabbatai Sevi: The
Mystical Messiah[5],
whose Hebrew original appeared in 1956/7. Yet still, the continuation of the
movement in its various forms, somehow was not sufficiently noted or duly
recorded even by historians. Amazingly, this period of relatively recent Jewish
history was only documented and discussed by a handful of scholars while the
rest of us were exposed to what Goldish refers to as a “misleading picture”.
Goldish (2020:114) explains:
“A significant number of Jews, especially
scholars, remained fully committed to Sabbatai and Sabbatean theology through
both the apostasy and the expiration of their Messiah.”
For some time after the apostacy, prominent rabbis, judges and communal
leaders still believed in Shabbatai Tzvi as the Messiah. Entire communities
retained their Sabbatian beliefs. The little rabbinic opposition that did come
was mainly from the Istanbul rabbinate.
Goldish (2020:116) refers to various Sabbatian events that took place in
the aftermath of Shabbatai Tzvi, such as R. Yehuda Chasid’s Sabbatian aliya to
Palestine in 1700, the incident with Nechemya Hayon and many others:
“If rabbinic leaders had really been
searching out and exposing Sabbateans, each of these situations should have
occasioned an investigation which would quickly have exposed its Sabbatean
nature”.
A possible reason why so many rabbis and learned elite still continued to
follow Sabbatian ideology, was because they were so invested in the ideology.
They understood the intricacies of the theology better than the masses who had
a superficial connection to populist notions of the movement. Goldish shows how
Sabbatianism started as a rabbinic movement. All the key players were scholars
and Kabbalists. All the participants in Nathan of Gaza’s prophetic
episode on Shavuot in 1665 which launched the movement, were rabbis. Most of
the leaders of the movement during its height between 1665-1666 were rabbis.
Elisheva Carlebach[6] (1990) has collected
testimonies from rabbis of the time who acknowledge that they knew exactly what
was going on but they turned a blind eye. For example, R. Netanel haLevi of
Pesaro admitted he knew about the Sabbatian connection regarding R. Nechemya
Hayon:
“I had known about these matters since my
youth, but I had kept the words guarded in my heart”.
Even the great Sabbatian hunter, R. Yakov Emden, wrote with regard to the
work VaAvo haYom el haAyin compiled by R. Yonatan Eibeschuetz who was suspected
an being a secret Sabbatian, that:
“The book is the work of heresy and sacrilege
and it certainly deserves to be burned, but I advised…not to make…objections
public, because nothing good would come out of it and it would likely only
cause damage.”
[See: Kotzk
Blog: 298) UNIMAGINABLE WRITINGS OF R. YONATAN EIBESCHUETZ :]
Goldish (2020:120) writes that:
“…the leading anti-Sabbatean activists
struggled to obtain any support from establishment rabbis or leaders…
Sometimes they were openly opposed and often
they found themselves marginalized or even exiled as a result of their
anti-Sabbatean efforts.”
Thus, we see that just like the
messianism of David Alro’i, the messianism of Shabbatai Tzvi certainly did not
disappear even after his conversion to Islam and his death ten years later. It
just went underground but it continued to thrive.
Let us now jump ahead some
centuries, to a different world and a vastly different culture:
Dorothy Martin
During the Second World War, a
young statistician by the name of Leon Festinger was hired by the Army Air Forces.
His job was to select candidates for pilot training. The problem was that from
a statistics perspective, many of those pilots would be sent to almost certain
death and, worse, they would be court-martialled if they did not complete their
missions.[7]
Festinger was to become one of
the great social psychologists of his time. After the war, he conducted a study
of a cult operating from Chicago called the Seekers. The Seekers were
led by Dorothy Martin who claimed to be in contact with a group of aliens. She
called these aliens, the Guardians. Dorothy Martin informed her
followers that the Guardians had told her in their communications that
the world was going to be destroyed by a flood on December 21, 1954. The Guardians
had a plan to save Dorothy Martin’s followers a few days before the
apocalypse by sending a flying saucer, which would land in her backyard, to
rescue them. Festinger approached the Seekers for permission to observe
and study the anticipated event.
The Seekers left their
families and resigned from their jobs and they gave away all their possessions.
They gathered at Dorothy Martin’s house in Oak Park, on the 17 of December at 4
pm in preparation for the flight. But the aliens did not arrive. At midnight,
Dorothy announced that a new message had come through and that the aliens were
on their way. They waited but still, the aliens did not come. Then Dorothy said that there had been a
change in the itinerary and that the spaceship was to arrive at midnight on
December 21. Again, the Seekers gathered a few days later at her home
and again the aliens did not arrive.
All the time Festinger was
observing. He was quite sure that the prediction was false but he wanted to
study what happens to followers who have their core beliefs shattered by
reality taking a different path to the one they expected. Festinger and two
colleagues (cited by Gladwell 2012:111-112) wrote up their studies in a book
called When Prophecy Fails:
“Suppose an individual
believes something with his whole heart; suppose further that he has a
commitment to this belief, that he has taken irrevocable actions because of it;
finally, suppose that he is presented with evidence, unequivocal and undeniable
evidence, that his belief is wrong: what will happen?”
Festinger sat with the Seekers as they waited for the
midnight hour:
“The clock chimed twelve, each
stroke painfully clear in the expectant hush. The believers sat motionless.
One might have expected some
visible reaction. Midnight had passed and nothing had happened… There was no
talking, no sound. People sat stock still, their faces seemingly frozen and
expressionless.”
It was expected that the ‘disconfirmation’ of their beliefs
might cause them to abandon those same beliefs. But that was far from what happened.
At 4:45 that morning, Dorothy Martin informed her followers that she had
received another message. The aliens had reported that because of the
unwavering faith of the Seekers, God had decided no longer to destroy
the world.
Analysis
Dorothy Martin’s ‘explanatory’ response
resonates in so many different ways with similar reactions and responses that
we are so familiar with and have heard in relation to so many events of the
past and even the present when expected supernatural events did not transpire.
But what is most interesting is
the psychological discovery that Festinger made: The more one utterly invests
in an idea (especially a spiritual or religious concept or construct) and the
more one is prepared to sacrifice for that same notion – the more resilient and
steadfast one becomes in the face of any and all real evidence to the contrary.
No hard data in the world will change the mind of one who has undergone such a
process. In fact, instead of abandoning the original set of beliefs, in the
face of visible evidence to the contrary, one often doubles down and holds them
to be even stronger and truer.
“it may even be less painful to tolerate the dissonance than to discard the belief and admit one had been wrong.”
It appears that these messianic ideas (and I’m not referring to the legitimate Jewish belief in the concept of a messiah[8]) do not go away even after the supposed messiah is proved to be false or dies. The number of false messiahs in Jewish history is staggering and these messianic aspirations do not disappear but they continue to manifest and even perpetuate in some form or another. There is no real difference in the mindset of the twelfth-century Menachemim, the seventeenth-century Ma’aminim, the twentieth-century Seekers, and modern Meshichist movements. These, and other messianic responses are not always ‘spiritual’ responses, but may instead be indications of the psychological anomaly and counterintuitive natural human response of doubling down after investing totally in a belief system that fails empirically. For these types of apocalyptic movements, failure sometimes explains their success.
[1] From
a lecture by R. Adin Steinsaltz on David Alro'i.
[2] Moshe
Perlman, Samau’al al-Maghrebi, Ifham al-Yahud — Silencing of the Jews (Proceedings
of the American Academy of Jewish Research 32, 1964).
[3] Goldish, M., 2020, ‘The Open Secret of
Sabbatean Communal Leadership After 1666’, Jewish Thought, vol.2,
113-131.
[4] These
include: Solomon Grayzel, A History of the Jews, revised ed. (Philadelphia:
JPS, 1968), 447; Cecil Roth, A History of the Jews, revised ed. (New York:
Schocken, 1970, 312–13); Robert M. Seltzer, Jewish People, Jewish Thought (New
York: Macmillan, 1980), 471–72.
[5] Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973.
[6] Carlebach,
E., 1990, The Pursuit of Heresy: Rabbi Moses Hagiz and the Sabbatian
Controversies, Columbia University Press.
[7]
Gladwell, M., 2021, The Bomber Mafia. A Story set in War, Allen Lane,
109-113.
[8]
Although there are very different models as to what the nature of the messianic
belief actually is and whether it will be supernatural or a distillation of
natural events. The messiah concept is far more complicated than the perceptions
popularised by outreach movements and the like. [See Kotzk Blog: 226) MASHIACH - A NATURAL OR
SUPERNATURAL EVENT?]
After the Death of Chabad’s Messiah
ReplyDeletehttps://bulletin.hds.harvard.edu/after-the-death-of-chabads-messiah/
Thank you for your fascinating article.
ReplyDeleteChabad? Who said anything about Chabad? Maybe you have a guilty conscience... Reminds me of the story in the introduction to Rabbi Hamberger's משיחי שקר ומתנגדיהם.
ReplyDelete