BLACK SHEEP RISING

Entering the dark and stinky waters of historical blasphemy, I am presently turning my mind to the False-Messiah disease, which has had an ugly effect on Jewish history. It is understandable how the expectation of the Mashiach made so many Jews, living in misery and constant anticipation, become easily susceptible to outright fraud, so the blame for this unfortunate phenomenon rests by no means with the people, so eager to be duped, but with their unscrupulous manipulators, and them I am calling the black sheep of Israel.

Which brings me now to the seventeenth century of our era. History remembers several messianic Jewish leaders long before that time, such as the leaders of the last two great revolts against the Roman rule Simon Bar Kokhba (proclaimed as the Messiah by the great rabbi Akiva himself) and Lukuas Andreas. But in both these cases, as the Jews had been determined to fight to the death, not to believe in their leaders’ Messianic calling and status would have been tantamount to an outright acceptance of defeat.

The cases which I am talking about here, are totally different.

The abominable Shabbetai Tzvi was a self-serving scoundrel operating inside the Ottoman Empire, who, in 1648, proclaimed himself the Messiah, not on account of a worthy Jewish cause, but to make himself some clout from a few consenting scoundrels, like himself, but less inspirational, and therefore agreeing to play a supporting role to him, and naturally from the duped populace. In the course of his mounting fame, with all that generous and enthusiastic funding now assured him, he, however, had to face the cost of his Messianic, and therefore, martial, robes, becoming a security risk for Mehmed IV, the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, the latter finding an ingenious way to stem the surge of Jewish nationalism by discrediting its fetish. He demanded that this “Messiah” must now convert to Islam, showing them all whose religion had proved to be superior in that standoff. Shabbetai obliged, and that was the end of the threat to the Turkish power over the Jews. Dressed in outrageously resplendent robes, Shabbetai was paraded at the Sultan’s court as a jester for everybody to mock, and with him to mock the Jews as a humbled race and a fallen religion.

In the even uglier aftermath of Shabbetai’s apostasy, his sorely disappointed followers-- rather than cutting their losses-- chose to rationalize their Messiah’s betrayal, and started converting to Islam in large numbers.

Others, while refusing to convert, were seeking some mystical meaning in Shabbetai’s actions, creating a crooked perversion of the Lurianic Kabbalistic masterpiece, Tikkun Olam, now interpreting Shabbetai’s sin as a self-sacrifice of entering the evil qelippot in the quest for the scattered light. This abomination of post-Shabbetaianism would last for a whole century, as if waiting for another big-time scoundrel to make his splashy entrance, and of course the scoundrel obliged.

As if to prove that the ugliness of the Shabbetai Tzvi episode could be easily matched and raised, out of one of the eighteenth-century Poland’s shtetls came a certain Jacob Leibowitz, subsequently to be known as Jacob Frank, another scoundrel, claiming to be a reincarnation of the first one, Shabbetai. A shameless opportunist, he proclaimed himself the Mashiach, of course, and became the leader of a hideous Jewish sect which promoted freedom from morality, trashed the Talmud and the Jewish rabbinical tradition, and ended up as stooges for the Catholic Church, branding all other Jews with the blood libel, and next, converting to Catholicism, which of course was not a crime in itself, but became such on the strength of all other factors. Meantime Frank’s daughter Eva perpetuated the infamy declaring herself an incarnation of God’s Shehinah and a reincarnation of Virgin Mary, but despite such obvious blasphemy she was never persecuted for it, but, on the contrary, she would become the leader of an influential international sect that continued to worship her father and her, as she came to be known as the only female Messiah in Jewish (or anybody else’s) history. Curiously, both her father and she had become the darlings of Christian Europe, which probably gleefully misread their effect on the Jewish community as Judaism on its deathbed.

It is my belief that scoundrels, like Shabbetai and the Franks, the black sheep of the Jewish family, would become over time a big contributing factor in the accumulation and further aggravation of the already deep historical prejudice against the Jews in general. Rich, immoral, and shameless, they were a gift to the enemies of the Jews that just kept on giving.