Segal, Jacob ben Ezekiel. Shem Ya’akov

(KABBALAH).

Michael Gottschalk

Franfurt on der Oder

1716

Very rich title page: Tetragrammaton, cherubs, wreathed columns, and depiction of human migration within wings of eagle.

Vinograd, Frankfurt on the Oder 209; St. Cat. Bodl. 5551

Shem Ya’akov is an ethical tract with pronouncedly ascetic tendencies, based on the teachings of Kabbalah. The author, R. Jacob ben Ezekiel of Zlotowo, was rabbi of nearby Lobsenz, both towns in NW Poland. Gershom Scholem suspected the author of being a crypto-Sabbatian, which is to say a secret admirer of the false Messiah Shabbetai Zevi. Scholem writes: “there is evidence that not a few of the most influential moral preachers and authors of moral literature of a radical ascetic bent were secret Shabbateans of the moderate…wing.” In the list of influential “musar-books” of this period, Scholem includes Shem Ya’akov. Kabbalah (Jerusalem, 1974), p. 278. The case for positing that Segal was a Sabbatian rests on a quote from the known Sabbatian visionary Heshel Zoref and also a cryptic reference to the arousal of the planet Shabbetai (Saturn) in 1666, the year Shabbetai Zevi was crowned Messiah. Aside from that, the work is of decided historical value, describing the first Swedish invasion of Poland in 1655, and subsequently, Polish General Charnetzki’s butchery of the Jews in great Poland. See Bezalel Naor, Post-Sabbatian Sabbatianism (1999), pp. 69-71