Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991), who was born in what we know today as Poland and passed away in the United States, is one of the most respected modern writers in the Yiddish language. Yiddish, for those who don’t know, is the language of the Ashkenazi Jews.
Ashkenazi, plural Ashkenazim, from Hebrew Ashkenaz (“Germany”), member of the Jews who lived in the Rhineland valley and in neighbouring France before their migration eastward to Slavic lands (e.g., Poland, Lithuania, Russia) after the Crusades (11th–13th century) and their descendants.
Singer was eventually awarded the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature.
He has been appreciated mainly for showcasing the traditional Yiddish culture which was, later, practically wiped out during WWII.
Some of his most famous novels include The Magician of Lublin (1960) and Shosha (1978). Here, however, we’ll be taking a look at some of his other works—those that allude towards more obscure Jewish ideas and practices.
He was, himself, the son of a Hasidic rabbi. As we had highlighted in an earlier article, Hasidism is basically a “popularization” of Kabbalah. As per Gershom Scholem (1897-1982), the most respected Jewish authority on Kabbalah, there was a “Messianic crisis” within the Jewish communities of the early modern era. As such, they started to embrace Kabbalah, in a way, to basically make sense of and come to terms with the terrible conditions they found themselves in.
There was a group that popularized Kabbalah but still respected the parameters of traditional Judaism. This became Hasidic Judaism, with its mystical tendencies influencing much of what had later on became Orthodox Judaism (the only group that really resisted the rise of Kabbalistic Hasidism were the Misnagdim, a minority community mainly concentrated in Lithuania who later became known as Litvaks).
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But there was another group that also adopted the Kabbalah, albeit with a different conclusion: the Sabbateans-Frankists and their apocalyptic idea of “redemption through sin,” i.e., the notion that, in order to fasten the Messianic era, you must commit as many sins as you possibly can.
Having grown up in a Hasidic environment, Singer naturally includes mention of these movements in both his novel Satan in Goray (1933) and the short story Destruction of Kreshev. Both of these works basically present a peaceful Jewish community which witnesses the arrival of some evil Sabbatean-Frankist magician who leads them into pure decadence—and always by means of a woman (more on this later).
I will reproduce, here, a few passages from these works, so that the reader may catch a little glimpse of what is to come later on.
Please note that these are my own personal translations, from French to English, so please do excuse any errors that may have arisen on my part.
From Satan in Goray:
On the great Shabbat before Passover, after Levi had spoken, Reb Degaliya delivered a sermon full of advice and words of consolation. He reminded the congregation that the days of exile were numbered, and he warned that the last souls to come into the world were waiting on the Throne of Glory. He deplored the fact that so many boys and girls were still single. Such neglect of the fertility principle would delay their redemption. Referring to the Kabbalah, he demonstrated that all the laws of the Torah and the Shulchan Arukh referred to the commandment to be fruitful and multiply. When the End of Days arrived, he said, not only would Rabbi Gershom’s anathema against polygamy be null and void, but so would all the stern “Thou shalt nots.” Every pious woman would become as pure as Abigail and would no longer menstruate, for impure blood comes from the Evil One. Men would have the right to know other women. Perhaps such couplings would be considered a religious duty. For whenever a man and a woman unite, they form a mystical union and promote the encounter between the Holy One—blessed be He—and the Divine Presence.
[…]
In Goray, life was like a dream. Every few days, a new wedding was celebrated. Twelve-year-old brides strolled the streets with rounded bellies, as the pious matrons ensured that their daughters and sons-in-law often slept together. In addition, Reb Gedaliya and Levi had emancipated women that had been abandoned by their husbands of all ties, and they wasted no time in finding a new one. According to Reb Gedaliya’s calculations, the ram’s horn would announce the coming of the Messiah midway through the month of Elul, and three days before Rosh Hashanah, a cloud would descend from the sky. All pious Jews would take their places therein and depart for the Land of Israel. Every day, between afternoon and evening prayers, Reb Gedaliya would inform the congregation about the miracles that were about to take place.
From The Destruction of Kreshev:
Shloimele began to reveal to Lise the powers possessed by evil spirits. They are not only demons, goblins, ghosts, or harpies, he said, they also reign in celestial spheres, such as Nogah, a mixture of holiness and impurity. Shloimele put forward so-called proofs that the Evil One is related to the world of emanations and, from this, one could deduce that God and Satan are of equal strength; and that they engage in an perpetual battle from which neither can emerge victorious. He also claimed that sin does not exist, since a sin can be small or great, even considerable. He told Lise that it’s better to sin fervently than to do a good deed half-heartedly. Besides, yes and no, darkness and light, right and left, heaven and hell, sanctity and decay are all images of the divinity, and no matter where we fall, we always remain in the shadow of the Almighty, for outside His radiance, nothing exists.
[…]
It was becoming clear that Shloimele was a secret disciple of Sabbatai Zvi. For even though this false Messiah had long since died, his followers secretly perpetuated his cult throughout many regions. They met in markets and fairs, and they recognized each other by signs known only to them, thus escaping the wrath of other Jews who would have excommunicated them immediately. Numerous rabbis, schoolmasters, and priests, all seemingly respectable characters, belonged to this sect. Some passed themselves off as miracle workers, going from town to town, distributing amulets in which they had inserted not the holy name of God but also that of a dog or an evil spirit, Lilith, Asmodeus, or even that of Sabbatai Zvi himself.
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A Messianic-Apocalyptic Sect
Shabbetai Tzevi (1626-1676), born in modern-day Türkiye, was an average Jew who was fascinated by Kabbalah. He had a particular fascination for Lurianic Kabbalah, named after Isaac Luria (1534-1572), which can be considered a more systematic and metaphysical approach to medieval Kabbalah. It can also be said to have been the main exposition of Kabbalah for centuries prior to the rise of Hasidism.
Lurianic Kabbalah had a Messianic-Apocalyptic component that later influenced the Sabbateans-Frankists: the idea that the Shekhinah or (feminine) Divine presence is “in exile” and that Jews should “repair the world” (the expression tikkun olam, which is heard even from secularized Jews, has its roots in this mystical approach).
Scholem argued that this messianism-apocalypticism was grounded in the Spanish exile, the trauma of a near-genocide that impulsed desires for world redemption.
Tzevi’s early claims for Messianism have their roots in such an environment. However, his later meeting with Nathan of Gaza, a Kabbalist, further transformed this Messianism into a sort of evil Apocalypticism. Tzevi and his followers took the traditional idea that the Messianic era will be actualized in a situation of sin, and they reversed the equation into the more you sin, the more you hasten the coming of the Messianic era.
Tzevi’s supposed conversion to Islam, which happened in 1666 for obvious numerological reasons, was also a part of this “redemption through sin” philosophy. He viewed such a betrayal as part of his overall evil plan, and it is well known that his followers, the Dönmeh, played a negative role in the modern history of Türkiye (refer to Marc Baer’s book, The Dönme Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks).
Scholem wrote regarding the underlying rationale behind such ideas:
As long as the last divine sparks (nitzotzot) of holiness and good which fell at the time of Adam’s primordial sin into the impure realm of the kelipot (the hylic forces of evil whose hold in the world is particularly strong among the Gentiles) have not been gathered back again to their source—so the explanation ran—the process of redemption is incomplete. It is therefore left to the Redeemer, the holiest of men, to accomplish what not even the most righteous souls in the past have been able to do: to descend through the gates of impurity into the realm of the kelipot and to rescue the divine sparks still imprisoned there. As soon as this task is performed the Kingdom of Evil will collapse of itself, for its existence is made possible only by the divine sparks in its midst. The Messiah is constrained to commit “strange acts” (ma’asim zarim; a concept hereafter to occupy a central place in Sabbatian theology), of which his apostasy is the most startling; all of these, however, are necessary for the fulfillment of his mission. In the formulation of Cardozo: “It is ordained that the King Messiah don the garments of a Marrano and so go unrecognized by his fellow Jews. In a word, it is ordained that he become a Marrano like me.”
[…]
The psychological factors at work were particularly various in regard to the doctrine of the holiness of sin, which though restricted at first by some of the “believers” to the performance of certain specified acts alone, tended by virtue of its own inner logic to embrace more and more of the Mosaic Law, especially the biblical prohibitions. Among the leaders of the Dönmeh the antinomian blessing composed by Sabbatai Zevi, “Blessed art Thou O Lord our God, King of the universe, who permittest the forbidden [mattir isurim] ,” became a byword. In fact, two somewhat contradictory rationalizations of antinomian behavior existed side by side. On the one hand there were those who said: in the world of redemption there can be no such thing as sin, therefore all is holy and everything is permitted. To this it was retorted: not at all! what is needed rather is totally to deny the beriah, “Creation” (a word that had by now come to denote every aspect of the old life and its institutions), to trample its values underfoot, for only by casting off the last vestiges of these can we truly become free. To state the matter in Kabbalistic terms, the one side proposed to withhold the sparks of holiness from the kelipot until they perished from lack of nourishment, whereas the other insisted that the kelipot be positively filled with holiness until they disintegrated from the pressure. But in either case, and despite the many psychological nuances which entered into the “transgression committed for its own sake” and the sacred sin, all the “radicals” were united in their belief in the sanctifying power of sin itself “that dwelleth with them in the midst of their uncleannesses,” as they interpreted the phrase in Leviticus 16:6.
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A century or so later, in modern-day Poland, Jacob Frank (1726-1791) continued Tzevi’s teachings (which is why we speak of Sabbatean-Frankism) but by radicalizing him somehow, and the excerpts from Singer quoted towards the beginning of this article more precisely refer, in fact, to the Frankist sub-group.
Unlike Tzevi, Frank also left behind a collection of sayings, translated into English as Book of the Words of the Lord.
It goes without saying that spiritual groupings such as these, which favor sin and make it into something holy, would have had no problem with modernity and its individualistic hedonism, and we’ll delve a little into how this is precisely the case.
From the French Revolution to Feminism
In an earlier article, entitled How Modernity Aborted Human Fertility (November 19, 2022), we argued against a purely materialistic reading as to why fertility rates are declining worldwide, instead, shining the light firmly on the socioeconomic mechanisms of urbanization, and, among the cultural factors that have had an impact, we had underscored the French revolution of 1789, which put into practice, through civil war and state-terror, the so-called Enlightenment ideals.
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And it seems that, at this defining moment in time, a Sabbatean-Frankist (Jacob Frank’s cousin in fact) played a significant role. This was Moses Dobruška (1753-1794), who went by different names and aliases, including Junius Frey, the name under which he published his Philosophie sociale (Social Philosophy) in 1793. (He was, of course, executed by guillotine a year later for treason, mainly due to personal rivalries, as was the case with many actors of the revolution, including his own brother-in-law, François Chabot.
In 2022, Silvana Greco published the first book-length study of this work by “Frey,” Moses Dobruska and the Invention of Social Philosophy: Utopia, Judaism, and Heresy Under the French Revolution.
She highlights the underestimated influence of his work among European intellectuals, including the likes of Auguste Comte and Immanuel Kant.
Another important component of modernism is, of course, feminism.
I had mentioned in relation to Singer’s works, towards the beginning, that there’s always a woman involved, playing a significant role. This is because, in the Sabbatean-Frankist view of the world, if sin accelerates redemption, what better objective could there be than to make the very root of society, i.e., the woman, sinful in her capacity as wife and mother?
They also looked symbolically upon a few Biblical figures, such as Eve, in their quest to challenge and invert traditional readings of the scriptures.
The founders of these movements were known to have themselves entertained ambiguous relationships with their wives. The relationships between Tzevi and Sarah; and Jacob with Eve (notice the symbolism of these names), for example, involved potential sexual degeneracy as was the case with other women in these groups (refer once again to the excerpts from Singer towards the beginning).
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Someone who examined closely the proto-feminism within Sabbatean-Frankism was the late Ada Rapoport-Albert (1945-2020) in her book, Women and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi, 1666-1816 (she also wrote about gender dynamics in Hasidism).
One of the appendixes in the book is a chapter she co-authored earlier, one with a not-so-subtle title: ‘Something for the Female Sex’: A Call for the Liberation of Women, and the Release of the Female Libido from the ‘Shackles of Shame’, in an Anonymous Frankist Manuscript from Prague c. 1800.
We thus read:
Scholem acknowledges the fact that ‘already Sabbatai Zwi had made a speech in the synagogue of Izmir in December 1665, announcing the forthcoming… liberation of women from masculine domination and its burden of sufferings’, a fact which may now be firmly placed in the context of Sabbatianism’s egalitarian tendencies and its promotion of women to positions of prophetic and even messianic-divine authority. This was a unique feature of the movement, underpinned by certain kabbalistic traditions on the reversal of gender hierarchies at the time of the Redemption. It emerged at the very inception of Sabbatianism and persisted in one form or another throughout its history, culminating in the veneration in Frankist circles of Eva Frank as the female Messiah and the living incarnation of the divine sefirah Malkhut. In von Hönigsberg’s manuscript treatise, this kabbalistic legacy of sectarian ‘feminism’ is fused together with some of the pioneering calls for the liberation and equal rights of women that were beginning to be heard in Europe in the course of the 18th century.
It is not surprising that this sort of supposed spirituality, which fetishizes sin, has been influential in modernist movements such as the French revolution and feminism. Even beyond just movements, we can actually speak too of particular individuals. For instance, in his book on Jacob Frank, French author Charles Novak (who is himself Jewish) says that among the descendants of the Frankists who became crypto-Christians (similar to how the disciples of Tzevi became crypto-Muslims), we find Brzeziński, one of the most influential American geopoliticians (for those who may be interested, French-Moroccan analyst Youssef Hindi has dedicated entire books, in French, to the role of Kabbalah in the “Clash of Civilization” narrative).
That is a lot to digest!
There’s an interesting lectue op YT that links to the latter part of this article…might want to give it a look.
“Feminism is Feminist Gnosticism” by New Discourses.
So is it fair to say that the conspiracy theorists were right to say that feminism and “women’s rights” and the French Revolution was invented and caused by the juice?
well here we are and its all coming together
Disgusting filth. We need to geniunely advocate for the revival of the Khilafah.