(EMDEN, JACOB)

EXREMELY RARE ANTI-SABBATIAN WORK BY R. JACOB EMDEN The indegatigable foe of false Messiahs, Rabbi Jacob Emden, writes in his preface that he is publishing the work of the earlier Saadyah Gaon and the later Maimonides concerning the long-awaited arrival of the true Messiah to strengthen belief in a generation that has been spiritually devastated due to the manifestation of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbetai Zevi and his many followers. (Maamar Techiyath ha-Meitim was thrown in as sort of an afterthought because it appeared together with Maimonides’ Epistle to Yemen in the earlier print.) Historically, Emden’s Maaseh Nora be-Podolia, a report of the events leading up to the infamous disputation beween the rabbis and the Frankists (“counter-Talmudists”) in the cathedral of Lvov in 1759, is invaluable. The report begins with an alleged orgy that took place in the community of Sharogrod, Podolia, continues with the burning of the Talmud in Kamenets by order of the bishop of that city, Dembowski, immediately followed by the miraculous death of the bishop as heavenly retribution, and finales in the disputation at Lvov. Historians of hasidism will note that according to Emden’s informant, “R. Israel Mezhbiz B[aal] Sh[em]” was one of three disputants (together with R. Haim Rapaport of Lvov and R. Ber of Yazlowitz) representing Polish Jewry. The Frankists were represented by Jacob Frank, Leib Krisa and Elisha [Shor] of Rohatyn. (Ma’aseh Nora, f.29v.) Jacob Frank claimed to his devotees that he was the reincarnation of Berechiah of Salonika, who in turn was believed by the Sabbatians to be the reincarnation of Shabbetai Zevi himseld. In Emden’s narration of these events, it was through sorcery that Frank ensnared unsuspecting souls to believe in an antinomian and orgiastic Sabbatianism. The Maaseh Nora be-Podolia is the sequel to Emden’s earlier report of the Frankists’ intrigues, Sepher Shimush (1758). See EJ, Vol. VII, cols. 55-65. In the article “Frank, Jacob and the Frankists” in Encyclopedia Judaica, Vol. VII, the authoritative Professor Gershom Scholem writes: “The tradition which sprang up in popular accounts circulating years later that Israel b. Eliezer Ba’al Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism, was also a participant, has no historical foundation” (col. 63). Hardly! Jacob Emden was writing in the very year of the disputation-1759