Religion & Beliefs
Jewish Heretics
By Laurel Snyder / May 3, 2007
This story at American Jewish Life about Jacob Frank, the "greatest Jewish heretic of all time" (part of a regular feature on Jewish heretics!)is really worth a read. I don't know anything about Frank myself, but he sounds fascinating:
He rejected the Torah (once threatening to defecate on it if angry rabbis didn’t leave him alone). He converted to both Islam and Catholicism. He slept with his followers — and maybe even his daughter. He preached a nihilistic doctrine that saw this world as intrinsically corrupt, and believed that the best way to imitate God was to cross every boundary, transgress every taboo, and mix the sacred with the profane.
Now, I'm not advocating you sleep with your followers (I surely don't), but I'm always curious about true heretics… not to mention boundary-crossers, limit-pushers. Anyone who pisses a lot of people off.
What the story has me thinking about today is Jewish heresy in general. I want to know what it takes to be a Jewish heretic!Â
And it's pretty complicated. Because while Judaism recognizes that heretics have no place in the world to come, and will have to spend eternity in Gehinnom, deciding exactly WHO is a heretic seems to be left up to independent communities. Which is how Maimonides, something of an expert in what makes a good Jew a good Jew (and what makes a heretic a heretic) was also condemned as a heretic himself.
Despite that fact, a good rule of thumb is that if you're following the 13 principles (remember, from yesterday) you are probably NOT a heretic, though you might still be naughty.   Because one of the nice things about Judaism is that you don't have to be a GOOD Jew to be a Jew.
Though again, sleeping with your followers is a bad idea.
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Thanks for mentioning me and the Donmeh West website. Azis is right, the Jewish meditation list-serv Michael first “met” me on is long gone, but I’m still here with hundreds of hits on Google, almost 60 thousand visitors to my website and 1000 members of Donmeh West itself.
By the way, there are as many as 50+ thousand hereditary Ma’aminim (secret followers of Sabbatai Zevi) in Turkey today, most of them very prominent in politics, arts, commerce and the sciences.
As for whether or not Sabbatai actually converted, as Michael Nehora points out there is plenty of historical evidence that he did. (See, for example, Gershom Scholem’s detailed description of the same in Chapters 6-7 of his 1000 page opus, “Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah” published in the Bollingen Series of Princeton University Press.)
The question is WHAT KIND of shahadah (conversion) did Sabbatai make? It appears, according to Scholem, that he did not make the customary shahadah by reciting, “Ash-hadu anla ilaha illal-Lahu Wahdahu la Sharika Lahu wa-ash-hadu anna Muhammadan abduhu wa rasuluhu” (“I bear witness that there is none worthy of worship except Allah, the One, without any partner. And I bear witness that Muhammad is His servant and His Messenger”), but instead was only required to remove his Jewish turban and replace it with a Muslim one — an equally common but possibly less binding form of conversion.
For more about Sabbatai’s apostasy and what it meant then and now, see my essay, “A Critical Re-Assessment of Sabbatai Zevi” at http://www.donmeh-west.com/re-evaluation.shtml on the Donmeh West website.
Yalhak
Sorry but with those authority are you throwing around orders in CAPITAL LETTERS?
I was ordainded by the Jerusalem rabbinate.
And I have this to say to Yezevel or whatever your name is at the moment.
You are not a Ben Torah. You are an embarassment to any and every shomer mitzvot person.
You are guilty before G-d and the kahal of hillul HaShem.
I demand that you LEAVE THIS SITE IMMMEDIATELY and NEVER POST AGAIN.
As for the site administrators, REPORT ALL HIS IP’S TO ANY AND EVERY INTERNET COMPANY HE MAY BE USING, AND BE DONE WITH IT.
Nope, troll is someone who has decent arguments to make but opts for personal attacks instead.
Can't vouch for the truth of this, but this is how I heard it: Frank believed that the moshiakh would arrive once all the sparks had been brought down, rather than elevated. So in order to hasten the arrival of the tarrying One, he sought to violate halakhah as egregiously as possible and bring avalanches of sparks plummeting down.
His Xtreme technique: Sodomizing prepubescent boys while reciting the shma and wearing tefillin.
And by no means what we've been doing in your absence…
xoL http://jewishyirishy.com
That's crazy, yo!
 I'm off to check it out…
(And welcome back, you've been missed)
xoL http://jewishyirishy.com
There's a most interesting website and online community run by Yakov Leib HaKohain, a modern-day follower of Shabbetai and Frank, descended from a family of same. With the disclaimer that I don't subscribe to his beliefs in any way, here's the link:
http://www.donmeh-west.com/
Frank was a follower of Shabbatai Tzvi, a Jew who was proclaimed Messiah and then converted to Islam. Some estimate that one third of all Jews at the time thought Shabbatei was the Messiah.
What is it with Jews and false Messiahs? Jesus…Shabbatei…Schneerson…
Why can’t we just wait?
There’s a Jewish saying, if you are planting a tree and hear the Messiah is coming, finish planting the tree before you rush out…
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