Pawel Maciejko: Sabbateanism and the Roots of Secular Judaism

Transcripts are lightly edited—please excuse any imperfections.

David Bashevkin:
Hi friends, and welcome to the 18Forty Podcast, where each month we explore different topics, balancing modern sensibilities with traditional sensitivities to give you new approaches to timeless Jewish ideas. I’m your host, David Bashevkin, and today we have a special episode going back to our series on denominations, exploring Jewish secularism and Sabbateanism. This podcast is part of a larger exploration of those big juicy Jewish ideas, so be sure to check out 18forty.org. That’s 1-8-F-O-R-T-Y.org, where you can also find videos, articles, recommended readings, and weekly emails.

Right after Passover of this year, we did a series on denominations where we explored the reform movement, the conservative movement, orthodoxy. We obviously did not cover everything. We still hopefully are going to have episodes exploring most importantly Sephardic Jewry, which we did not spend at all nearly enough time about. And one aspect that we really didn’t discuss in depth is the notion of a secular Jew, a secular Jew, somebody who identifies as Jewish but does not identify in any way as religious. This is a growing segment of the Jewish people. Some may even call themselves atheists, but they have a deep Jewish identity. And where did this come from and how did this emerge that we have people who take their Jewish identity seriously, but do not practice anything of Judaism, have almost adopted the Western liberal values to replace in many ways traditional Jewish ritual and practice?

It’s something that has always fascinated me. There is an author, a scholar who actually recently passed away. His name is David Biale, and David Biale wrote a great deal about this. I was actually considering interviewing him. He passed away, I believe just a month or two ago, but he wrote quite a bit about this. He has one book called Not in the Heavens: The Tradition of Jewish Secular Thought, that’s in addition to… He has a larger work that he did not write, but I believe he contributed it, that Princeton University Press called Makers of Jewish Modernity, which is a fabulous volume. I have it right in front of me right now, and has basically just these little biographies along with all of the secondary literature. For a lot of the personalities that developed what we now associate with like secular Jewish identity, if such a thing can even be said to exist.

But what fascinates me most about secular Judaism is something that most non-Orthodox, secular Jews or Orthodox Jews, no matter what your affiliation is, most people are not aware of this, but there is a controversial thesis from the great scholar of Jewish mysticism named Gershom Scholem, who essentially says that what paved the way for the reforms to traditional Jewish life and what ultimately gave birth to the secular Jewish identity that we know today is none other than the Sabbatean movement, the Messianic movement that developed at its high point in the summer of 1666 when Sabbatai Zevi, there were earlier revelations, announced himself as the messiah. He, just a month or two later, converted to Islam and he died on Yom Kippur of 1676. He’s a fascinating figure. There’s so much to talk about and I just want to recommend from the outset, my friend, Nachi Weinstein of the SeforimChatter podcast has an entire series on Sabbateanism and hopefully, I still have a dream of partnering with him and going back and doing another series because there’s so much more to discuss about this and particularly its contemporary relevance.

But this episode was really inspired in many ways by our exploration of Jewish identity and the different Jewish denominations, and specifically this idea from Scholem that much of the enlightenment and the reform movement can be attributed, at least philosophically. He tried to even show historically the connection between Sabbateanism and later more secular formulations of Jewish identity. This is actually the words that Scholem writes, and he writes this, it’s in a few places, but you can read because it was published in Commentary in a famous article called “The Holiness of Sin,” which is an excerpt from his book, the biography, on Sabbatai Zevi, and this is what he writes regarding the connection between Sabbateanism and the Reform movement.

“I shall endeavor to show that the nihilism of the Sabbatean and Frankist movements with its doctrine so profoundly shocking to the Jewish conception of things that the violation of the Torah could become its true fulfillment. The words “bitulah shel Torah zeh hu kiyumah” was a dialectical outgrowth of the belief of the messiahship … of Sabbatai Zevi, and that this nihilism in turn helped pave the way for the Haskalah and the reform movement of the 19th century once its original religious impulse was exhausted.” That is the connection that Scholem endeavors to make, and essentially, as he discusses later on in the article, what he wants to show is that what Sabbateanism was, was this mystical doctrine of nihilism. Nihilism meaning the absurdity, the meaninglessness of everything, but it was wedding mysticism with nihilism. Again, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that right. I have a joke.

Nihilism is a form of philosophy, but some people pronounce it nihilism and I one-time joked to somebody because the whole philosophy is about how nothing really has any essential meaning. So is it pronounced nihilism or nihilism? I said, “Does it really even matter?” Obviously that is a philosophy where we argue over its very pronunciation and all sides, if you’re a real nihilist or nihilist, can be correct, but what he essentially posits, Gershom Scholem, is that there is a notion of emptying Judaism of its ritual and traditional practice and ideas and just being left, so to speak, with this mystical nihilism, just a Jewish identity. And he shows both historically and conceptually how this outgrowth of Sabbateanism, this antinomianism, which means the anti means against nomos, is the law. This overturning of Jewish law, so much of Sabbatai Zevi’s Messianic movement deliberately violated the law and is sometimes branded as being antinomianism.

I actually prefer the term used by Elliot Wolfson, which is hyper-nomianism, which is showing that even the nullification of the law can be a part of the law. Even the absence of law is a part of the law, which is a very minor but important distinction. And you can read… Wolfson has lectures on this and talks about this, but I don’t want to get into the weeds on that. What I really wanted to talk about was this concept of is there truth to this? Is this in fact the case? What did it mean to be a Sabbatean? One of the few documents that we actually have from Sabbatai Zevi that he wrote himself is a document that Pawel Maciejko, pronouncing his last name correctly, I’ll mess it up more than once, is the one who translated and we spoke about it, is a document called “Bury My Faith,” where Sabbatai Zevi essentially told his followers to bury deep down inside their belief in him.
It is not something that they should openly articulate, which is what led to so much of the hearsay hunters and people trying to figure out who is a Sabbatean and who is not a Sabbatean? And what Gershom Scholem did was really create a whole dialectical history of Jewish history itself that is contending with these ideas, with the mystical impulse, the Messianic impulse that at least according to Scholem’s understanding overturns and challenges our commitment to Jewish law, to the importance of the centrality, of following the laws of the Torah and halacha, and this traditional impulse which is all about preserving the law and halacha. And a lot of these battles we still see today, Scholem quite controversially, aside from attributing the Sabbatean influence on early Reform, even saw some hints of this in Zionism, in early secular Zionism, of a Zionism that promised sovereignty in a Jewish state, but absent of Jewish tradition. That caused quite a bit of outrage in Israel over that, but these are important ideas to explore, to understand the moment and the point in history that we are a part of.

Scholem did have an abiding belief that Israel will never be able to be fully secular. He writes, and this is the words of Scholem, “So long as the belief in God is a fundamental phenomenon among all beings created in His image, a faith that cannot be destroyed by any ideology, it appears to me that the absolute secularization of Israel is inconceivable. The continued wrestlings with this process, with both its positives and its limitations, seems to me to be creative and determining.” There was something inescapable about religious ideas that are in Israel. Scholem also articulated this to a letter to Franz Rosenzweig, I believe in 1926, where he wrote to Rosensweig about the use of modern Hebrew and how modern Hebrew relies on these words in secular ordinary conversation that have deep mystical meanings. The two most famous examples is the word chashmal for electricity. That is a word that appears in the famous maisa merkaba, the vision of the divine chariot, in the beginning of Ezekiel.

It is one of the most Kabbalistic visions that’s interpreted by later mystics of a vision of how divinity fills the entire world. And we take a word from that prophecy, chashmal, which literally, chash means to be silent, and mal means to speak and used it for electricity. And even the very term that we use to describe the vision of Ezekiel, which is called the maisa merkaba, it is called that in a Mishnah, in Tractate Chagigah, and we call it the maisa merkaba. The word merkaba is a divine chariot. That’s the word that we use for a military tank in the State of Israel, and Scholem expressed concern that we are using these deeply mystical tradition and language. We will never be able to be fully secular in the Land of Israel, and that is something I fully agree with Scholem on. You will never be able to empty out a Jewish identity of its religious significance and meaning. That is an impossibility.

But I did want to explore this further and I could think of nobody better than a scholar who is so phenomenal. He’s written several books and articles. I hope we’re able to link to all of them. One great book, it’s probably one of the better introductions to the history of Sabbateanism, it’s called Sabbatean Heresy: Writings on Mysticism, Messianism and the Origins of Jewish Modernity, and that was edited by our guest today, Pawel Maciejko. He also wrote a book on Frankism, called The Mixed Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement, 1755-1816. I was just going to talk to him about this thesis of Scholem and the connection between Sabbateanism and the heterodox, the heretical ideas that we see.
It’s an idea that I’ve always found incredibly interesting, and all the more so is that I found a contemporary non-Orthodox rabbi, somebody named Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who’s quite famous, has a massive following on social media and she writes a great deal. She wrote a book on reconciliation and apologies that I actually read and enjoyed quite a bit, but she had a guest post from somebody who I know personally, named Jericho Vincent. And Jericho wrote an article, a guest post on this Substack that Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg publishes, called “The Messianic Feminism of Shabbatai Zevi and Sarah Ashkenazi.” They’re basically not Orthodox, but Jericho, somebody who is extraordinarily progressive, egalitarian, obviously not Orthodox and does a lot of work in that space, but she writes an entire article where she contends with the history of Sabbatai Zevi and says, “I don’t really understand why he is so vilified. Why do we call him a false Messiah?”

So many of the tenants that he seemed to introduce, whether egalitarianism, whether being sexually progressive or so many of these ideas are ideas that he championed. Maybe we should be viewing ourselves as an outgrowth of Sabbateanism, which is really more or less in many ways the exact thesis of Gershom Scholem, and really to explore because I’m not assuming that a non-Orthodox or secular Jew self-identifies as Sabbatean in any way. Of course, that’s not the case, but is there some synergy or conceptual or even historical connection between these two movements is something I wanted to discuss with really somebody who I look up to a great deal, has so many articles. He has one article, it’s jaw-dropping, you’ll fall out of your chair. I gave a class on, it’s called “The Portrait of a Young Kabbalist.” It is one of the most fascinating articles I’ve ever read in my whole life. It’s about Casanova and this painting that Pawel Maciejko saw of this young gentleman who’s clearly holding a Zohar in his hand that has opened up very clearly to a passage in the Zohar in Chayei Sarah.

And he does incredible analysis of this portrait to figure out who is this person? Why is it open to that passage in the Zohar? And how of course, is this related to Sabbateanism? And you better believe, Wolf Eybeschutz, the famed Sabbatean son of Rav Jonathan Eybeschutz, makes a fabulous appearance in this article. It’s just jaw-dropping. Anything he writes is so fascinating and so well-researched and gets through a lot of the baloney and a lot of the conspiracy theories, which is why I was so excited to talk to him. We originally were supposed to speak on Tisha B’Av in the afternoon. I said, “Why don’t we speak on Sabbatai Zevi’s birthday?” Sabbatai Zevi was born on Tisha B’Av of 1626. He was born August 1st, 1626, which was on Tisha B’Av, and really to understand what the movement was after he had died. And there’s so much more to talk about, but we weren’t able to speak at the end on Tisha B’Av. We did not throw a Sabbatean birthday party, and instead, he was busy and we had to change the dates a few times.

But in the interim, when we were rescheduling, one idea came forward, which is just jaw-dropping, and that is Candace Owens, the political commentator and questionable antisemite, somebody who has been accused quite a bit. I don’t know her personally though. She actually reached out to me when I saw she developed this interest in Frankism and all these crazy conspiracy theories. I tweeted something related to her and she DM’d me and actually quoted me. She didn’t really pronounce my name correctly, but quoted me on her show. You could listen here.

Candace Owens:
By the way, I had a wonderful discussion yesterday with this Jewish PhD, a professor and a writer named Dovid Bashevkin on Twitter because he heard about my episode talking about Sabbateanism, and I guess he assumed that I was going to say, “This is what Jews worship,” and I was actually saying the exact opposite. So I messaged him privately on Twitter and we had this wonderful back forth, speaking about how Jewish people and Christians actually need to unite and to do the research and to root out these Satanic people that have infiltrated both of our faiths, including the Muslim, the Islamic faith as well. There has been an infiltration. And so we were having this back forth and I was talking to him, speaking to him about these Frankists and how they literally came to America, and the evidence of that is everywhere and particularly, yes, this is how the ADL was born.

David Bashevkin:
I was just fascinated by the entire thing. Most of what she says is from outer space, but I figured once I have Pawel Maciejko, who literally wrote the book on the Frankist movement called The Mixed Multitude, Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement from 1755-1816, I figured I would ask him about it. He had a little bit to say. It was very funny, and we got to talk about that as well. So without further ado, I am so excited to introduce our conversation with Professor Pawel Maciejko.

It is really my absolute privilege and pleasure to introduce a scholar who I don’t know if I could say I have read everything that he has published, but I have certainly read everything that is publicly available, either his books or his articles. I’ve searched for everything. I’ve read everything. I already started reading some of your students. I’ve reached out to some of their PhDs that have not been released. It is my absolute privilege to introduce our guest today, and I’m going to butcher your name, but you’re going to help me out afterwards, Pawel Maciejko. How did I do?

Pawel Maciejko:
Almost there. Maciejko.

David Bashevkin:
Maciejko. Okay. But Pawel is okay?

Pawel Maciejko:
Yes, yes.

David Bashevkin:
I am so grateful and we have so much to talk about and so much to cover. The first big question that I want to talk about is a controversial, a tantalizing thesis from Gershom Scholem. Gershom Scholem, the great scholar of Jewish mysticism, connects the move towards this notion of secular Judaism, a Judaism devoid of halachic practice and ritual observance, connects that directly to the Sabbatean movement. And I want to explore the notion of what is the identity of someone who is a secular Jew? Most, I assume do not identify. They probably don’t even know much about Sabbateanism. So I want to explore that thesis. And in order to do so, I want to begin with you. We don’t have to cover the entire story of Sabbatai Zevi, but I want to begin the story with you, with the death of Sabbatai Zevi on Yom Kippur, 1676. He has now died as a converted Muslim. He has some writings and some essays, and the movement essentially evolves at this point.

And I was wondering if you could share with us. You’ve published some actual writings from Sabbatai Zevi himself. It’s a little bit of a scholarly debate about whether or not he wrote it, but there’s an essay that you published called “Kivru Emunati,” Bury My Faith!

Pawel Maciejko:
I published an English translation. The original was published by Avi Elqayam, but yes.

David Bashevkin:
Exactly. You did an English translation of it. It was the subject of my class that I gave on Shavuot night where we spoke about some of these issues. Almost every time I give over Torah, your articles are hovering beneath the surface, but begin with just the story. After Sabbatai Zevi dies, he’s already converted to Islam and now he’s dead. Why is this not the end of the movement?

Pawel Maciejko:
First of all, thank you very much for the invitation. It’s a pleasure to be here. First of all, you assumed that it’s obvious and accepted that he died. It isn’t. There is a great number of his followers who claim he never died. He went into occultation, he disappeared. So the testimonies about his death or his disappearance are conflicted. And from the very outset, you have a number of testimonies among his followers, which says that Sabbatai Zevi never died. He mysteriously disappeared, and then someone saw him some weeks after he disappeared, and there is a number of speculations as to where he went and what he’s doing after. And then you have a doctrine of the return, of the second coming, similar to Christianity.

Now, when historians are talking about Sabbatai Zevi’s dying on Yom Kippur and all this, this is based on a number of sources that are in themselves problematic, some of them, and there’s a number of conflicting testimonies. Very quickly, Sabbateans claim that death is not really death. Everything changed, right? Because Sabbatai Zevi is no longer among his followers. There’s no direct contact with him. You cannot go and visit him, which is what many of his followers did before, but it’s not really the end.

Secondly, the news about his death, even among those who indeed believe that he died, the news in the 17th century is not spreading that quickly. And again, by the time people in Italy or people in Poland, people in Amsterdam learned that Sabbatai Zevi died in what today is Montenegro, or what today is in Albania because there are also conflicting testimonies about where he died and where he’s buried, if he’s buried in Montenegro.

David Bashevkin:
Sure.

Pawel Maciejko:
So by the time the news reaches either Europe or the Land of Israel or other places in the Ottoman Empire, there is a lot of uncertainty. There is a lot of misinformation. So the movement for a while continues as it did before. Now, once Sabbateans learned that Sabbatai Zevi is no longer among us, then something changes. But it goes either in the direction of the doctrine of occultation, right? Since you mentioned my PhD students. My student, Noam Lefler my talmid chaver wrote a PhD thesis on the development of the doctrine of occultation of Sabbateans, or in the direction of some kind of reincarnation, return of Sabbatai Zevi, either as Sabbatai Zevi in some unspecified future or his soul reincarnating in other people. So the Muslim-Sabbateans believers in Salonika quite quickly come up with the idea that Sabbatai Zevi indeed died, but his soul incarnated in the body … in Salonika.

So the death of Sabbatai Zevi, again, already Scholem suggested all kinds of analogies to Christianity, and there are indeed analogies to Christianity, also in the most basic sense that just like the death of Jesus, was not the end of Christianity. In some sense, it was the beginning of Christianity. Death of Sabbatai is not really an end to the movement.

David Bashevkin:
Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but the way that most, at least yeshiva students are introduced to this story is with the very famous dispute between Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz and Rabbi Yaakov Emden. People have a way of understanding this story, assuming that Rabbi Yaakov Emden was incorrect, and that Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, given his corpus that he published of Torah scholarship, his commentary on Shulchan Aruch, the Ya’arot Devash, the Kereti u-Peleti. He was a jaw-dropping scholar of traditional Jewish thought, and we could understand and ascribe to a Rabbi Yaakov Emden, maybe a zealotry, a jealousness, and he pursued him. What people have a hard time understanding is what on earth would it mean for a Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz, which is the predominant scholarly view that he was a Sabbatean?

And it’s my impression that what it meant to be a Sabbatean, and maybe this is because we’re nearly a century after his death, maybe that what it meant to be a Sabbatean at that point had much less to do with the personality of Sabbatai Zevi. It was no longer wrapped up in a specific person, but the philosophy and the movement became almost detached from the figure of Sabbatai Zevi, and became much more of a general philosophy and outlook towards religious life. So I guess what I’m asking you is that in fact correct? And if it is in fact correct, at what point does Sabbateanism develop this strand that is no longer so wrapped up in a return of the actual figure Sabbatai Zevi, but is it about something else altogether?

Pawel Maciejko:
So there are several other elements here. Eybeschutz, as you know, is my main project. Right now, I’ve been working on a book on Eybeschutz for almost 10 years now, and I’m not even close to… It’ll take me another 10 years maybe. I don’t know.

David Bashevkin:
Can I give a spoiler to our listeners? Because you mentioned to me that you’re working on the Yale Jewish Live Series for a biography on Sabbatai Zevi also.

Pawel Maciejko:
Two projects on my desk right now. One is the Eybeschutz project on which I’ve been working for quite a while. Another one is a smaller project, paradoxically. It’s a book, it’s a biography of Sabbatai Zevi for the Jewish Lives—

David Bashevkin:
That’s so exciting. I love that whole series, and I’m so excited for. When you told me, I said, “Oh, that’s going to be a lot of fun.”

Pawel Maciejko:
And this one I started later, but I’m going to hopefully, bezrat Hashem, I’m going to finish sooner because it’s a smaller book. I’m hoping to finish it within the next year or so. But the main thing is Eybeschutz, and I have a few things to say about what you said about Eybeschutz and his being or not being Sabbatean and Sabbateanism changing shape. First of all, the first is about the controversy. The Emden-Eybeschutz controversy is a misnomer. It’s not between Emden and Eybeschutz. At some point, all the gadolim in Ashkenaz believed that there is a problem with Eybeschutz. Let’s put it in-

David Bashevkin:
Every major rabbi, Rabbi Joshua Falk.

Pawel Maciejko:
Exactly … Shmuel Hillman, Aryeh Leib of Amsterdam, the list is very long. All the prominent rabbis in Ashkenaz are the Gra who is very young at that point, but he’s already somehow involved. So pretty much everyone believes that there is an issue. There is something heretical about Eybeschutz. The big question is what to do with this, and there are different strategies. There are people who believe that it should be exposed and publicized. There are people who believe that it should be suppressed, or-

David Bashevkin:
Exactly.

Pawel Maciejko:
Should be censored in some ways, and Emden is just one of many people involved in this controversy against Eybeschutz. He’s the best known because he published books against him, including the primary sources and what people read and what scholars read afterwards and basing themselves in the research is Emden and not … but in real time … is much more important in this debate. So it’s not really Emden-Eybeschutz. Right?

David Bashevkin:
Exactly, 100%, but a contemporary reader says, “Why isn’t it an open and shut case?” He clearly knew halacha. He wrote on halacha. It’s that very simplistic question. How could somebody who’s so involved in traditional Jewish life, not just involved in it, but a scholar of it, what would it even mean for him to be a Sabbatean?

Pawel Maciejko:
Exactly. Right? So this is the second. Now, the second point is there is an issue. First of all, Eybeschutz wrote an awful lot, but published very little. For us, it’s not only the yeshiva students. As the contemporaries. Eybeschutz is Urim ve-Tummim, Kereti u-Peleti, Ya’arot Devash, all these things. The only book that Eybeschutz published in his lifetime is Urim, and he published it only because he had to pay the debts of his son. When he was known during his time, he was known as a preacher. He was known as rosh yeshiva. This is his fate. It’s not the halachic writings. The halachic writings, his writing for the drawer, he never publishes them. They’re all published by either his students or his descendants. And the issue of the mastery of halacha is not really on the table, and Eybeschutz’s Kabbalistic writings are not published. So they are in circulation, but they are not known, and some of them are not published to this day.

I published Va-Avo Hayom El Ha-Ayin almost 10 years ago. There is a running commentary on the Zohar on which I am working together with Noam Lefler, whom I mentioned. There are some smaller texts, some of them were published by … and so on and so forth, but this is not really known. So the Kabbalistic side of Eybeschutz is not known, and this is where whatever non-normative stuff you may find is most explicit. Now, once you know this side of Eybeschutz and you go back to the material that is known, you will find Sabbatean allusions in the sermons. If you read Ya’arot Devash, after reading Va-Avo Hayom El Ha-Ayin, you will find allusions to esoteric teachings of Eybeschutz in his sermons, but it’s not explicit.

David Bashevkin:
Can you give an example? Are you saying that you could find allusions for Sabbatean mysticism or just general mysticism?

Pawel Maciejko:
No, for heretical mysticism, I consciously don’t want to use the word Sabbateanism just yet.

David Bashevkin:
Okay.

Pawel Maciejko:
But stuff that is not normative in the eyes of most Jews.

David Bashevkin:
Perfect.

Pawel Maciejko:
Both in the 18th century and today. Okay? So it is quite explicitly in Kabbalistic material. And in the published material, you can find it if you know what you’re looking. Okay?

David Bashevkin:
Got you.

Pawel Maciejko:
That’s point number two. Now, point number three is about Sabbateanism and why I am not using the word Sabbateanism. Essentially, the argument I am making in the book that I’m writing today is that Jonathan Eybeschutz is a member of a sect that has one member, Jonathan Eybeschutz, history directs. The staff he’s clearly referring to Sabbatai Zevi as a very important personality, who plays some kind of positive role in the process of redemption. But he does not necessarily mean that he’s a Sabbatean, just like he’s referring to Jesus as a personality who has somehow positive role in the process of redemption, and it doesn’t make him Christian. Right? It’s just that he’s referring to Sabbatai Zevi or to Jesus for that matter, or to, “Negative characters,” within the Jewish tradition and reading them in positive light, but it doesn’t necessarily makes him a believer that Sabbatai Zevi was the true messiah.

I personally think that if I understand anything from Eybeschutz, this is unlike anything else. It’s as problematic from the perspective of the, “Sabbatean mainstream,” as it is from the perspective of Orthodox Judaism. Right?

David Bashevkin:
He was a double heretic. He was a heretic from the heretics.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah. If Nathan of Gaza read Va-Avo Hayom El Ha-Ayin, he would be as outraged as Orthodox Jews today, or as outraged as Emden, for different reasons.

David Bashevkin:
Exactly.

Pawel Maciejko:
So in this sense, I find claiming that Eybeschutz was a Sabbatean is somehow misleading, right? Eybeschutz is certainly beyond what is considered mainstream or normative Judaism, both of the time and today, but whether it’s Sabbateanism, it’s a complicated question. Right?

David Bashevkin:
Might be semantics, how you define Sabbateanism.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
So you sketch this out, but we haven’t really gotten to the heart of the views, and there are so many, and Scholem has a certain way, but the main reason why I wanted to talk about this is to understand Scholem’s thesis, and that is that he draws… I don’t know if I’d call it a straight line, but at least a dotted line from the post–Sabbatai Zevi Sabbateanism, what happens in the aftermath after his death, and he draws a dotted line between that and the beginning of reform Judaism and eventually almost secular Judaism, the notion of being a secular Jew. “I am a Jew, but only in name, but not through ritual.” How do you set up Scholem’s thesis? Do we have enough information just to explain what his thesis even is?

Pawel Maciejko:
Okay, first of all, Scholem, and I also worked on Scholem.

David Bashevkin:
That’s a phenomenal article, and that is on the dialectic of history. It’s a beautiful article, but please continue. I’m just trying to recommend as much as your writings as possible to our listeners.

Pawel Maciejko:
Thank you. Look, Scholem doesn’t seem… It is a thing that he wants to say, but doesn’t quite say, and he says, and then he issues all kinds of disclaimers and he’s qualifying it. So I don’t think that Scholem is fully convinced of the truth of his own claim. Right? He made it. Also, if you read his lectures that were written down by his students and later published, he clearly said it explicitly when he was teaching at the Hebrew University, but then he’s sometimes qualifying it and sometimes withdrawing from what he said. So he’s clearly not fully comfortable with his own claim as a strongly formulated claim. He needs it in the sense that the joint problem of reading Scholem is that it’s a grand narrative. Right?

David Bashevkin:
Yes.

Pawel Maciejko:
It’s a very big picture. It’s a scheme of the entire Jewish history from at least the beginnings of Kabbalah in the Middle Ages, to contemporary Zionism or to his contemporary Zionism, and he’s trying to draw a straight line. Now, if he wants to draw a straight line, he needs this transition. Right? You cannot have a missing link in the chain, and this is the link he would like to establish in order to have the continuity.

David Bashevkin:
Explain the link a little clearer for our listeners?

Pawel Maciejko:
The link is basically saying Zionism as a both spiritual and political project, and for Scholem, the spiritual aspect is at least as important, if not more important than the political project. Right? The spiritual aspect of Zionism cannot fulfill itself without the political. Right? You need the real state on the ground, but the state is not just a state. Right? It is some kind of spiritual project, which involves getting out of the exile, also in the deeper sense, in the spiritual sense, and Scholem is trying to establish this movement. Zionism is such understood, not as a radical breach with everything that was before, but as a kind of continuity. So he’s looking for similar movements for Jewish emancipation that are simultaneously movements towards political emancipation and spiritual emancipation, and he’s arguing that the most important such movement in earlier Jewish history is the Messianic movement around Sabbatai Zevi.

David Bashevkin:
The way I understand it is he does even something beyond that, where he talks about how Sabbateanism essentially reformulated a Jewish philosophy, a philosophy of almost a mystical nihilism that allowed people to access divinity without the, almost permission or without the traditional channels of ritual and halacha.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yes, that’s absolutely correct. This is exactly what he’s saying, but his problem is how to establish a historical link, how to show what you just said as a historical process, and the link is very weak. It’s not non-existent. It is there, but it’s very weak. Essentially, what Scholem is doing, he’s taking the writings of late Sabbateans, right? Not Sabbatai Zevi, not this period, but people in the very late 18th century, the early 19th century, primarily in Prague, who are descendants of Sabbatean families and who are reconstructing their own family background as a story of emancipation in exactly the sense that you described. Right? Great Justice Louis Brandeis is a perfect example of such a person. Right?

David Bashevkin:
We’ll get to him more, yeah, when we talk about Frankism, but sure. He published a will. Gershom Scholem published a Sabbatean will from the early 1900s that clearly wasn’t written by somebody who was deeply immersed in Kabbalistic writing, but had a family tradition that we were a part of a Sabbatean circle, so to speak.

Pawel Maciejko:
So you have those people who are acculturated, very learned, usually quite wealthy, enlightened, secular Jews. They come from Sabbatean families, and they are trying to establish a link between their own worldview and the worldview of their great-grandparents, grandparents. They essentially say, “Oh, okay, here we have the kind of religious enlightenment within Judaism already in the 17th century, and by the way, these were our families. So Scholem is looking back into the 19th century and is looking back at 19th century descendants of Sabbateans, right? Because they’re not even Sabbateans in the religious sense, but people from Sabbatean families who are looking back at their own family history. So the entire construction is built post-factum. Right? It’s Scholem looking back at people who are already themselves looking back-

David Bashevkin:
Looking back, exactly.

Pawel Maciejko:
Into the 17th century. They are reading Sabbateanism.

David Bashevkin:
Into their current activities, but he is able to show how some early reformers were descendants of these Sabbatean families.

Pawel Maciejko:
Well, very few. The only strong case is Hungary. If you want to think about it historically, you have to nuance it somehow, and the only strong case is Hungary. In Hungary, it really seems to work, the connection between Sabbateanism and the Neolog movement. In other places, the connection, the real connection is very weak.

David Bashevkin:
But what do you think? There’s a world-famous non-Orthodox rabbi named Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg, who has a Substack called Life is a Sacred Text, and she had a guest post by somebody named Jericho Vincent, who I happen to know personally, who wrote a guest post called “The Messianic Feminism of Shabbatai Zevi and Sarah Ashkenazi.” And this is a contemporary non-Orthodox rabbi who is revisiting the story of Sabbatai Zevi and says, “I don’t know what our issue is with him.” So many of the things that he tried to forward and critique tradition, egalitarianism, maybe a little bit more progressiveness when it comes to sexual identity, these are many of the causes that we champion within the non-Orthodox movement. So I was really fascinated to find a contemporary and doesn’t really get into all of the scholarship we’re talking about. It’s just someone’s own reaction, reading, “What was Sabbatai Zevi got in trouble for, and what am I doing today?” And finds and says, “Maybe we have this person misunderstood.” Do you understand why somebody who understands the philosophy of non-Orthodox Judaism, why they would actually find a kinship in Sabbateanism?

Pawel Maciejko:
Yes, I can understand it very well. This is one of the reasons why I’m writing this biography of Sabbatai Zevi, that I think that he’s relevant to the contemporary world, beyond his obvious historical relevance.

David Bashevkin:
Yes.

Pawel Maciejko:
It’s not a coincidence that today, people find inspiration in Sabbatai Zevi. Having said that, I am a historian and I have to say that it’s one thing to find inspiration in this, or one or another action of Sabbatai Zevi. It’s another thing to establish what he really was and what he really did. So all his proto-feminism is based on… I need to count, but I think three testimonies to the effect that one is that he went up to the ezrat nashim and he preached to women in Izmir. Another is precisely about his relationship with his third wife, but this is highly problematic. We know very little about her. It’s all second-hand, third-hand. So as a historian, let me put it in this way, when I’m dealing with it, I’m a little bit torn because on the one hand, I understand very well, and I sympathize with people who see Sabbatai Zevi as an inspiration for certain developments that are happening today.

On the other hand, as a historian, I have to say it’s based on a very tenuous basis. People are reading a lot into sources that say very little or into sources that are highly problematic, that have their own agenda. For instance, the oldest thing about Sabbatai Zevi preaching to women in a shul is based on one Christian source. It’s written by a Dutch minister, which says many different things. Some of them contradictory, some of them obviously false, and so on and so forth. It doesn’t mean it’s not true, but it just means that as a historian, I am working with material that is extremely limited and a lot of which is problematic.

David Bashevkin:
There’s no question, and I think we would both be in agreement to this, that if you were to ask the average non-Orthodox Jew, “Do you feel a connection or some… Are you continuing the legacy of Sabbatai Zevi?” My guess is they would be offended because he is always depicted as a false messiah. Leaving your introduction aside, which I thought was so fascinating, you said, “As a historian, I don’t want to be making any truth claims of the falseness or reality of his messianism.” We could talk about his ideas, but is that a correct reaction? Were there non-Orthodox leaders or Jews at the time who were offended by Scholem’s equating of the two? I know when it came to Zionism and making Zionism a part of the story, that sparked a great deal of outrage and that I know about. I’m curious if anybody in the non-Orthodox community felt hurt or besmirched by the equation that Gershom Scholem was making, or the influence of Sabbateanism on non-Orthodox Judaism, at least the origins of it?

Pawel Maciejko:
No, I don’t know of anything of that kind. When Sabbatai Sevi the book, right? … when it appears in Israel, it’s a huge event, 900 pages long, scholarly book with footnotes as well, and the entire country reads it.

David Bashevkin:
It’s a page-turner. It is kind of fascinating.

Pawel Maciejko:
It’s really something quite amazing. I think the only people who feel offended are the Orthodox Jews. But again, for the Orthodox Jews, to go back to what we started with, the claim that Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz was a Sabbatean is much more problematic than any claim about Sabbatai Zevi himself. Right? Sabbatai Zevi is a false Messiah, period. We don’t need to deal with.

David Bashevkin:
Yeah, exactly. But maybe you could add a little bit more because you wear two hats. I think they’re the same. You’re a historian, but you also are a history not only of the people at events, but of the ideas and how the ideas matriculated in. So maybe in your own words, you could articulate, what do you think is the continued relevance of Sabbateanism is, and how does it differ from Scholem’s formulation?

Pawel Maciejko:
Well, I would be much more cautious than Scholem, and Scholem was cautious, as I mentioned, in formulating a direct continuity between Sabbateanism and Zionism. That’s the first point. Now, the kernel, right? What Sabbateanism offers is a kind of religiosity that is based on the direct individual connection with God, but also with the scriptures. And this is very, very strong in Sabbateanism, not only in… Right when ha-Yom publishes in Amsterdam ‘Oz le-Elokim, which is the only Sabbatean book that was printed by Sabbateans themselves in 1713. It’s a very simple claim. Everyone can study Kabbalah on themselves, individually. You are not doing it with a rabbi. Essentially, what you do, you study Kabbalah on your own from a printed book. If you make mistakes, God is happy. The errors are necessary elements of progress in search of God. This is Sabbateanism without Sabbatai Zevi.

This is Sabbateanism, which essentially says every individual constructs their own religious identity on their own, from elements pieced together from different places. Now, I think that this is contemporary work. I think that even the Orthodox Jews today are not completely isolated from the external world.

David Bashevkin:
There’s a lot more individual agencies.

Pawel Maciejko:
There’s much more individualism. There is much more emphasis on this that once was. So this liberation of the individual, emphasis on the identity building rather than inheriting it from your tradition, of questioning the authorities, of even more than questioning authorities. Right? Disregarding authorities, if you want to disregard them, is something that is felt very strongly in Sabbateanism. And I think it talks to contemporary people. I think this is what’s happening there.

David Bashevkin:
That’s absolutely fascinating. And the way that we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been talking about Sabbateanism and it’s influence on other forms, non-Orthodox Judaism, Zionism, Orthodox Judaism. It did have a role. Some of the ideas trickled in, and that doesn’t make a person who is individualistic a Sabbatean, right? We’re not accusing-

Pawel Maciejko:
No, no, no. Absolutely.

David Bashevkin:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. But there’s a way that ideas that a certain zeitgeist trickles in and kind of shapes, but I wanted to shift. I didn’t plan on talking to you about this, but if you have the time, I was wondering if we could at least touch on it? Over the last two weeks, there has been an international attention to probably your expertise. I think it could be fair to say, I don’t want to embarrass you, you might be the world’s expert on Frankism. You wrote the book on it, and in the last two weeks, there’s been a great deal of attention, not from people who we want attention from, from a lot of antisemites. It was brought forth by someone named Candace Owens, who has portrayed Frankism as a contemporary threat in politics of running a ring of pedophilia and sexual transgressions.

Before we get into the contemporary concerns that are being fueled by antisemites, can you just lay the ground? What is Frankism? How does it relate to Sabbateanism? Can you do it really quickly? Chik chak.

Pawel Maciejko:
Sure.

David Bashevkin:
And then I want to hear your thoughts on what’s been bubbling up over the last two weeks, because once I have you, it’d be crazy not to ask.

Pawel Maciejko:
Okay. So Frankism, standing on one leg, is a religious movement that developed in 18th century … which is why it’s called Frankism. It begins as an offshoot of Sabbateanism. So we are more or less 100 years after Sabbatai Zevi. Sabbatai Zevi is the mid-17th century, we’re in the mid-18th century, we are in Eastern Europe, not in the Ottoman Empire. And there is a group of Sabbateans that gathers around Frank in Poland. For various reasons, it’s considered more radical than some other Sabbatean groups, which is why it is attacked by the Jewish authorities in the ways in which other Sabbatean groups are not being attacked, which ultimately leads to the conversion of the majority of the Frankists into Roman Catholicism, and just like Sabbateanism or certain strands of Sabbateans within Islam … after the conversion of Frank and his followers. Now, one of the arguments I’m making in the book that you mentioned in my first monograph-

David Bashevkin:
The mixed multitude.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah, is that Frank’s original teachings are no longer Sabbatean. So it has a Sabbatean genealogy. It begins as an offshoot of Sabbateanism, but then it becomes something else. So this is Frankism in a nutshell.

David Bashevkin:
There aren’t that many people who have spent their entire career, who have published that much on Frankism. Did people reach out to you, and what was your reaction when you heard Candace Owens connected it to Leo Frank and to the ADL and to contemporary pedophile rings? You’re more interested in history and probably most of your studies stop in the 19th century, but what was your reaction when you heard about this in the news?

Pawel Maciejko:
Okay. So I started getting WhatsApp messages from friends. Honestly, I didn’t know who she was, which-

David Bashevkin:
Better off.

Pawel Maciejko:
Probably. I live in America now. I lived in Israel most of my adult life, but I live in America now. And despite, it shows how out of the loop I am, but I didn’t know who she was. But I started getting messages and eventually I watched the YouTube. Let me tell you this. First of all, most of it is not new or original. In fact, I have a friend and a colleague, Professor Nan Goodman at University of Colorado, who is writing right now a book on Frankism in America, on the reception of Frankism in America. Right? Not the Frankists in America, but the way Frankism played itself out in American culture. And a lot of it is about … conspiracy theories connect the Frankists to Freemasonry and Rosicrucians on the one hand, and to ritual murder on the other. And stuff like that was around in the 1950s, 1960s, then somehow disappeared, and now it reappeared.

David Bashevkin:
Was it true?

Pawel Maciejko:
Which part?

David Bashevkin:
It’s not the answer I was hoping for. The ritual murders, were there Frankists who were committing ritual murders?

Pawel Maciejko:
No, no, no. The Frankists were not committing ritual murders. What the Frankists did during the disputations with the rabbis, they confirmed the truth of the ritual murder. And this is again, another claim of the book. Using the blood libel as a weapon in internal Jewish conflicts is extremely rare.

David Bashevkin:
To attack the traditional Jewish community.

Pawel Maciejko:
Jews attacking other Jews, let’s put it-

David Bashevkin:
Exactly.

Pawel Maciejko:
In whatever configuration, more traditional, less traditional, but this is extremely rare. This is one of the things we don’t do. It’s not completely unprecedented, but it’s extremely, extremely rare. And this is what the Frankists did. At some point in their fight against the rabbinate, they come up with the claim not only that the Jews killed Christian babies for ritual purposes, but that this is a tenet of Judaism. Right? That you can show on the basis of rabbinic sources that this is what the Jews should be doing. That is a mitzvah.

Now, the Frankists did it for their own reasons and their own purposes, and I’m trying to explain how and why it happened in the 18th century, but the fact is that in the longer history, this provided ammo for antisemites up until today. Right? So the points formulated by the Frankists in the Lwow disputation in 1759, the stuff later gets translated into many different languages. It’s published and republished and repurposed by antisemites. It’s used during the Beilis trial in Russia. It’s used by the Nazis. It’s used all over because the claim is much stronger than earlier blood libels. Earlier blood libels are specific. The Jews killed a Christian baby during Passover. The Frankists claim it’s not certain Jews in a certain place at a certain time. Judaism is a religion in which you have human sacrifice.

David Bashevkin:
And what about the accusation, and Candace Owens is getting this probably third hand, but that the early start of Frankism definitely had a sexually deviant component to it? There certainly was that component. Do we have a record that the sexual deviance was continuing in America among Frankists? Now, when Louis Brandeis, who you mentioned, he said himself, he’s from a Frankist family. Does that mean that we should be assuming that he was involved in these kinds of deviant behaviors?

Pawel Maciejko:
No, no. What do I know? But there’s no trace of evidence of anything of that kind. And again, even within the Frankism, it is something small and limited. So there are two points here. There are sexual rituals, general, but within the wider movement, it’s a rather marginal thing. It got blown out of proportion because people are getting excited about this kind of stuff, whether you like heretics or you don’t like heretics, in their own worldview, it’s not really that central. It’s just that people are emphasizing this particular element.

Secondly, precisely for that reason, right? When you get to people like Brandeis or Mautner or whoever, there’s absolutely nothing.

David Bashevkin:
And Leo Frank from the founding of the ADL, was he a Frankist even?

Pawel Maciejko:
No, no, no, no. His name was Frank, therefore he was a Frankist, as simple as that. No, no, no, no, no, no.

David Bashevkin:
It’s like thinking a hot dog, a frankfurter is a frankfurter.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah. No, exactly. Right? So no, no connection to Leo Frank. No connection to the Rothschild. No, all this-

David Bashevkin:
It’s a hard no. Okay, that’s good. We settled it because so much of your scholarship has animated and inspired so much of my own studies. I really am enamored with your work and your grasp-

Pawel Maciejko:
Thank you.

David Bashevkin:
Of both traditional sources, mystical sources. It’s jaw-dropping. I want to ask you a question that I have no doubt you probably don’t want to talk about, but allow me to ask for my own curiosity. You have spent so much time immersed in Sabbatean sources, in traditional sources, understanding the very heart of belief. What is belief? I’ve always been curious. There’s a lot of speculation as it relates to Scholem, but I’m curious about you. How did your studies and scholarship, how does that affect or animate your own personal religious belief? I’m so curious to hear more. Is this to you just like fascinating stories?

Pawel Maciejko:
No.

David Bashevkin:
Be blunt. I don’t even know if you’re Jewish. I have no idea. I’ve never asked. I’m coming from respect and admiration for your work, which is why I ask.

Pawel Maciejko:
Let me put it in this way. I feel so uncomfortable about it that I’m not really asking this question to myself. In other words, it’s certainly not just a topic. I have a deep personal connection to what I am doing. I do share the shoresh neshama with some of the people on whom I am working, but precisely for this reason, I’m trying not to expound it too much. It’s not that I am avoiding that I want to avoid answering question. I’m saying I really avoid answering this question to myself. I’m consciously not trying to leave it on the level of deep affinity, which gives me energy to do what I’m doing. And yes, I care about the stuff I’m working on and about people on whom I am working.

David Bashevkin:
But when you read this mysticism and you’re reading all these battles, do you just think it’s just like someone just like, “It’s all narishkeit and it’s all nonsense and they’re just fighting about nonsense?”

Pawel Maciejko:
No.

David Bashevkin:
Or do you think there’s real energy in history and in the narrative of the way… Scholem tells this cataclysmic story, which is so enchanting and it’s eye-opening. Do you also have that connection that these are real forces in the world?

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah. No, first of all, even if I didn’t have a personal connection, I would say that these are real forces. Purely as an academic historian, people do kill and die for religious ideas. It’s a fact. So these are real forces even if you claim not to have any personal connection. On top of it, I’m saying yes, I have a personal connection, and I don’t think it’s all narishkeit. In fact, I think there’s no narishkeit in Sabbateanism at all. All these texts make deep sense.

David Bashevkin:
I understand why you wouldn’t want to talk about your own emunah. A real ma’amin would not want to talk about formulating their own emunah, their own sense of faith and belief. But I really find your articles and your worldview to be a grasp of the entirety of Jewish history, but really animated all of the tension and the cosmic drama that have come out that I think in many ways, we are dealing with in this very moment. So much of the questions of Zionism, what does it mean to be a non-Orthodox Jew in this moment, as a lot of the non-Orthodox institutional structures are starting to erode or lose a little bit of their strength? There’s so many people wondering, “What does Jewish identity even mean? What does it mean to be Jewish? What does this identity do for me?” The tripartite Reform, Conservative, Orthodox, for a lot of the younger generation is not enough. They’re trying to figure out, “What is this?”

And I guess I’ll end with this question, which is the heaviest question of all, but if a secular Jew who has no education, they’ve been assimilated, come from assimilated family, they don’t have any of this narrative, and they came to you and they say, “I know I’m Jewish and I don’t know what to do with it. Where should I go?” Given your studies about the contentiousness and the burden of Jewish identity itself, what would you tell them?

Pawel Maciejko:
I would tell them that for many people, history of Kabbalah and history of Sabbateanism in particular was an entry point for deeper connection with Judaism. This I think I can tell about myself, but also about this. I also can tell as a historian. There are numerous, very prominent cases. The problem with this, when I was teaching at the Hebrew University, my best students were datlashim. Right? Were datim le-she-‘avar.

David Bashevkin:
Many people who grew up in religious homes that were no longer affiliated.

Pawel Maciejko:
I think my best students at the Hebrew University, many of my friends, not myself by the way, come from this kind of background, and I think that you can build a very deep Jewish identity. The problem is that this is not the kind of identity you can transfer. So a friend of mine once told me, Kol datlash rotze she haben shelo gam yihye datlash.

David Bashevkin:
Translate that. That’s so good. Everybody who goes off, they also want their children to have that identity, but you can’t have children with an identity unless you-

Pawel Maciejko:
Right. You cannot transform non-conformity. If you come from the Orthodox background and then become secular, you cannot do it to your children.

David Bashevkin:
Brilliant, brilliant. You can’t recreate that same exit if you never had the entrance, if you never had the affiliation. And that’s something I’ve heard from a lot of people who in America, they sometimes self-identify as OTD, off the derech. They’re no longer on the path, so to speak. It’s not a term I like to use, but it’s sometimes used. And very often they will raise their children, obviously outside of the traditional community, and it’s interesting, I’ve heard this from people who they’re almost disappointed in their children because it’s so… They’re assimilated from the fact that they’re even assimilated. They don’t even know that they’re rebelling against something. Part of the beauty and the depth is beginning and being anchored in tradition and knowing and having an informed, at least rebellion or informed articulation of what you on an individual level are going to do with that tradition.

So what would you tell them? So you’re not going to tell them to become a Sabbatean. This happens all the time now. There’s been an awakening with all this antisemitism. You study it. When antisemitism comes, Jews wake up, and they want to understand their identity. I know you’re not a rabbi. You’re a historian, but I’m curious, this is at the heart of your work, the awakening, the grain of the essential immutable Jewish identity and what it awakens us towards. If you had a student who was fully secular, who genuinely comes to you after class and says, “Look, I know I’m Jewish. I want to know what this identity should mean for me?” What would you tell them?

Pawel Maciejko:
I think that studying this stuff doesn’t give you an answer, but it helps you to ask questions. It teaches you how to ask questions. This is pretty much the only thing I can tell.

David Bashevkin:
I appreciate it. Pawel, thank you so much. It is such a privilege that we speak together. I always wrap up my interviews with more rapid-fire questions. We’ll do these chik chak, one, two, three. My first question is can you recommend outside… We’re going to link to all of your articles. They are phenomenal. Most of them you could find online through JSTOR, and the books that you’ve published. Who is your favorite, aside from Scholem, who we’ve been talking about, who is your favorite contemporary Sabbatean scholar? Do you have an article or a book that is your favorite?

Pawel Maciejko:
My student, Noam Lefler.

David Bashevkin:
Noam Lefler. Do you know the name of it? He’s the one who’s taking his peachy and turning it into a book right now, correct?

Pawel Maciejko:
Correct. That’s on the occultation, occultation doctrine. And he has a number of articles and they’re all… Actually, no, two of my four students. One is Noam Lefler, the other one is Hadar Feldman Samet, whose book on the Turkish Sabbateans, on the poems and songs of the Donmeh, coming out next week in Hebrew.

David Bashevkin:
Oh, that’s exciting.

Pawel Maciejko:
Yeah.

David Bashevkin:
Okay, my next question. If somebody gave you a great deal of money and allowed you to take a sabbatical with no responsibilities whatsoever, to study a different area of Jewish thought, what would you want to study?

Pawel Maciejko:
Sefer Yetzirah and early Kabbalah? I taught a seminar on Sefer Yetzirah last year. I want to go back to it. I want to go back to pre-Lurianic, even pre-Zoharic Kabbalah.

David Bashevkin:
Absolutely fascinating. My final question, I’m always curious about people’s sleep schedules. What time do you go to sleep at night and what time do you wake up in the morning?

Pawel Maciejko:
I have a very regular sleep pattern. My ideal sleep pattern is to go to sleep around 11:00 and wake up around 7:00, but it never happens or seldom happens. Very irregular sleep patterns.

David Bashevkin:
Professor Maciejko, I hope I did that so-so, it has been an absolute privilege and pleasure speaking and I hope I have the opportunity soon to thank you in person. Thank you again for spending time today.

Pawel Maciejko:
Thank you very much. It was a pleasure.

David Bashevkin:
At the very end of our conversation, I thought Pawel mentioned something that was incredibly profound. I just want to reiterate it because I think it’s something that’s important for this moment that we are in and that he said his students who identify as datlash, which is an acronym, a Hebrew acronym that stands for dati le-she-‘avar “I used to be religious,” people who grew up religious that no longer affiliate religious. He said that very often, I don’t know, maybe it was in jest, but they say they want their kids to identify as datlash as well. They want their children to identify as formerly observant as well. Of course, that is impossible. Somebody who leaves traditional community and the traditional confines of the Jewish community, their children are not going to grow up with a tradition to rebel against. And very often the rebellion of the next generation, instead of rebelling from tradition, they often rebel towards tradition.

And I think in many ways, that capture some of the moment that we are in now, American Judaism has been really the most successful of any movement in all of Jewish history, in really assimilating into mainstream culture. And while we possess a very strong sense of affiliation with Judaism, no matter what denomination or movement you may belong to, there is a sense when you raise the next generation, every generation wants their children to be the same, but they never can be because they are not reacting to the same set of principles that they were raised with. And now that we have a generation now who are experiencing antisemitism likely for the first time in their life and they’re being awakened to their own Jewish identity, they’re asking themselves, “Well, what does it in fact mean to me?” And it’s not enough to say, “Okay, well, we rebelled from the tradition.” Okay, great, you rebelled from the tradition, but what now? What is going to be passed on to the next generation?

This really highlights the phrase that I’ve said over and over and over again, which is that the purpose of Judaism is not to fight antisemitism, but we fight antisemitism in order to focus on the purpose of Judaism. And now we have a generation who is waking up and saying, “Well, we’ve been fighting tradition for 100 plus years on American soil, so what now? What do we fight for? What do we move towards? Is this a move and maybe a moment to at least rediscover tradition?” Not that everybody’s going to wake up and become traditional Jews or Orthodox Jews, but at least understand the ideas and the history from which your Jewish practice and your own Jewish identity emerged.

And I don’t think there is a way to understand contemporary Jewish identity with at least exploring some of the debates and the ideas that emerged during the Sabbatean movement and the aftermath, which was really a struggle, in many ways, as the professor explained to find individual agency within Judaism, a Judaism that is not mediated from the establishment and from institutions and from the elite, but a Judaism that is in our hands, which is both a blessing and a curse. When we are the ones holding and fashioning our own Judaism, it is a lot easier to mismanage, to ignore, to become distracted, to forget. But in another sense, it can be a blessing giving us the agency to fashion our own individual Jewish story.

So thank you so much for listening, and I just want to thank our sponsors at Nishmat, the Jeanie Schottenstein Center for Advanced Torah Study for Women. It is back with a new semester of online beit medrash Learning, all starting September 8th. You can study Talmud, Tanach, halacha, and so much more, with some of the best Torah teachers in all of Jerusalem, all from the comfort of your home. Classes are open to women of all learning backgrounds. For a full schedule and registration, go to nishmat.net/online-beit, B-E-I-T-midrash, nishmat.net. The link is also in the show notes. They do such incredible work. Immerse yourself in real text-based, serious study, all from the comfort of your own home. The online Nishmat beis medrash. The fall 2024 semester is starting September 8th. You don’t want to miss it.

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