The Mixed Multitude. Pawel Maciejko
Leyb of Międzybóż, Ber of Jazłowiec, and Joseph of Mohylew. The debate took place in the Kamieniec cathedral from 20 to 28 June 1757.44 First, the Contra-Talmudists presented each motion orally and endorsed it with their signatures in the official protocol. Then the rabbis had a chance to put forward their response in a similar fashion. The live disputation was conducted in Hebrew with simultaneous Polish translation for the audience; the translation was provided by Moliwda.45
The rabbis unconditionally accepted points one, two, and four. They accepted the first part of point three, rejecting at the same time its second part. As for points five to nine, they refused to enter into the disputation, referring only to their written answer to the earlier manifesto submitted via Herszkowicz. The debate in Kamieniec provoked great interest in both the Jewish and Christian public: the crowd was so large that the bishop had guards posted to manage access to the cathedral.46 Kuryer Polski, the most important Polish newspaper of the time, provided systematic coverage of the disputation. Some of the reports were also reprinted by foreign press.47
The paradigm of a public disputation between Christians and Jews was established in the thirteenth century with the great debates in Paris (1240) and Barcelona (1263). The Paris disputation centered on the status and the authority of the Talmud. Explicitly drawing upon the arguments of the Karaites, the apostate Nicolas Donin argued that the Talmud challenges the unique position of Scripture as the embodiment of the revelation given to Moses on Mount Sinai. He also maintained that it contains blasphemies against Jesus and Mary, as well as hostile remarks against Christians. The chief Christian protagonist of the Barcelona debate was also a convert from Judaism, Pablo Christiani. Christiani did not reject the Talmud outright; to the contrary, he claimed that the truth of Christianity can be proved on the basis of Jewish writings, including the Talmud. On the agenda of the debate were the thesis that the messiah had already come, the issue of his divinity, and the abolition of the “ceremonial law.” However, the disputation also touched upon other issues, in particular on the doctrine of Original Sin. A Christian account of the Barcelona debate (but not Jewish accounts) also mentions the introduction of the subject of the Trinity.
The period of great public ceremonial disputations ended with the debate in Tortosa in 1413–14. However, eighteenth-century Poland saw an endeavor to revive the tradition. In the early 1740s, Franciszek Antoni Kobielski, bishop of Łuck and Brzeńć, attempted to institute the practice of presenting missionary sermons in the synagogues of Poland to “demonstrate to the Jews the truth of the Catholic faith.”48 The practice existed in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, but in the early modern period it was carried out only in the Papal States and in some parts of the Habsburg monarchy; although the Polish bishops were specifically reprimanded by Popes Gregory XIII (1584) and Clement XI (1705), no attempts to implement it in the Commonwealth ensued. Kobielski delivered a series of sermons in the synagogues of his diocese, and in January 1743 he challenged the Jews of Brody to a disputation about five points concerning the Trinity, the coming of the messiah, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the destitute state of Israel after the rejection of Christ.49 The Jews of Brody prepared a written answer to Kobielski and complained to the owner of the town about the bishop’s encroachment upon their religious autonomy. They do not appear to have been particularly upset by his missionary efforts or even to have taken them seriously. As for the sermons in the synagogues, a Protestant (and hence admittedly biased) source described what really happened: “Bishop [Kobielski] was taken by religious zeal, and he resolved to bring to the Roman faith not only the Jews, but also the Protestants. . . . Once he went to a synagogue in Węgrów and started to preach a sermon. Since he was completely drunk, he fell asleep while talking. A vicar had to finish the sermon in his stead and the bishop was carried out of the synagogue. . . . While he spoke, his eyes constantly kept closing and it took him a quarter of an hour to complete one sentence. The Jews could not stop laughing during the entire spectacle.”50
Kobielski’s sermonizing and his missionary ventures were more than a little pathetic and did not present a serious danger for the Jews. Still, they revived the memory of medieval public Jewish-Christian debates and set a precedent for such a disputation in Poland. The Brody precedent was almost certainly known to Bishop Mikołaj Dembowski of Kamieniec Podolski, especially since his brother (also a bishop) Antoni was also involved in Kobielski’s campaign.51
The Brody debate of 1743 might be seen as a prelude to the disputation of Kamieniec in 1757 (much more sophisticated and much more dangerous from the Jewish perspective). During the ensuing fourteen years, Kobielski’s rather primitive arguments became substantially refined. This process of refinement drew directly upon material from the medieval disputations. In 1681, the great Hebraist Johann Christian Wagenseil published a compilation of Jewish anti-Christian writings, Tela Ignea Satanae. Among other texts, the publication brought the Hebrew and Latin versions of the most important Jewish account of the Barcelona disputation, Nahmanides’ Sefer ha-viku’ah (Wagenseil’s Hebrew edition contained many interpolations, including some from the accounts of the earlier Paris debate).52 There is direct evidence that Wagenseil’s publication was known to some of the priests who became involved in the Frankist affair in 1759.53 I suggest that in 1757, it was already known to Moliwda or some of the priests from the Kamieniec consistory. Five out of six controversial items on the Kamieniec agenda (the Trinity, the earlier coming of the messiah, the messiah’s nature both divine and human, Original Sin, and the cessation of Jewish self-rule after the advent of the messiah) had also been raised in Barcelona. It is certain that Christians not only translated the manifestos of the Contra-Talmudists but also influenced their content. The Frankist theses reveal substantial knowledge of Christian Scriptures and employ very specific technical theological terminology, unlikely to be known to the Jews. For instance, thesis two uses the technical notion of łaska Boska osobliwa (the standard Polish rendering of gratia efficax, efficacious grace) and alludes to the Epistle to the Romans; thesis four is a loose paraphrase of the Nicene Creed.
The Barcelona disputation had marked the beginning of a completely new strategy of Christian anti-Jewish polemics, whereby the Jews were to be convinced that their own texts recognized fundamental truths of Christianity.54 Kobielski’s ventures show that five hundred years later, he was entirely unable to deploy this strategy: he merely repeated the pre-Barcelona apologetics, in which the arguments aimed at convincing the Jews of the truth of Christianity were drawn from typological exegesis of the Old Testament or based on scholastic logic. The few references to Jewish texts that appeared in his sermons had a clearly ornamental character: the bishop was not even able to get the names of the authors and the titles of the books right.55
However, Kobielski’s primitive technique had one advantage over the more sophisticated counterpart first employed in Barcelona by Pablo Christiani. The apostate’s strategy was laden with inner tension: Jewish canonical texts were condemned for their alleged absurdity and offensiveness to Christianity, yet they were to serve as the basis for the Christian anti-Jewish argument. Rhetoric, if not logic, demanded that some theory reconcile these two elements. Hyam Maccoby has argued that such a theory was provided by the “two-tier conception of the Talmud”: the Christian position in Barcelona was based on the claim that the Talmud was “evil in its final redaction but the earliest strata, dating from the time of Jesus and before, contain material as yet undefiled by rabbinism.”56 This broad structure of medieval argumentation recurred during the Kamieniec disputation of 1757. The argument, however, underwent an important modification. The tension between attacking Jewish texts and simultaneously using them in a missionary effort was resolved not by reference to the “two-tier theory of the Talmud” but to the idea of a dichotomy of the Talmud and kabbalah: the former was entirely rejected for its supposed blasphemies and absurdities, while the latter was said to contain—albeit in a distorted form—the basic truths of Christianity.
The Kabbalisshten
Strong emphasis on kabbalah and its study characterized Sabbatianism from the very outset: Nathan of Gaza already called upon the believers “not to dabble any more in halakhah, but rather to study the Zohar, tikkunim, and midrashim.”57 He also stressed the prime role of kabbalah in determining halakhah, arguing that in matters not explicitly mentioned in the Talmud, the Zohar should be used as the basis for