Wednesday, July 13, 2005
SABBATIANISM
Earlier this week in connection with the Mystery School, the last website I linked in that blog was Donmeh West.
If you looked at that website, you noticed that not only are Sabbatai Zevi, Nathan of Gaza, and Jocob (Yakov Leib) Frank pictured, but also Sri Ramakrishna and Carl Gustav Jung as well. The website spells out the ideaology of the organization:
Donmeh West does not seek to convert Jews to other religions -- or, for that matter, to convert members of other religions to Judaism. It is, instead, a non-sectarian interfaith movement, growing out of the ancient teachings of Esoteric Judaism as radicalized and extended to the non-Jewish world in the 17th century by Sabbatai Zevi, and continued thereafter in a chain of successors now culminating, in the West, with Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain. Like Sabbatai Zevi and then Jacob Frank, Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain "entered" other realms of faith (i.e., Hinduism, Islam and Christianity) not to become a practicing Hindu, Muslim or Christian but, by doing so, to retrieve the Holy Sparks from those great religions and reunite them in his own person with those of Israel, in order to "repair the Face of God". He neither believes nor advocates that other Jews should do the same. Again, like Sabbatai Zevi before him, his multiple religious "conversions" were a sacrificial action performed by him on behalf of others in order to restore the unity of God.
Neo-Sabbatianism is interreligious/ecumenical--can make itself at home, at least temporarily, in any faith.
This branch of Judaism practices "Holy Sin" as Reb HaKohain explains:
The "Holy Sinner" -- he who sins, who lives beyond conventional morality, yet carries in himself the grace of God for others to receive -- is he on whom there rests the "Mark of Cain" -- the Holy Spirit -- bestowed on him by God for reasons only He alone can know. This "Mark of Cain," this indwelling of the Holy Spirit, is neither punishment nor rebuke, as commonly (and mistakenly) believed, but a protection of the Holy Sinner placed there by God "to prevent whoever might come across him from striking him down."
Reb HaKohain says that "we are told, 'Be still and know that I am God'", and indicates that in meditation we "observe our thoughts."
Meditation is the theology on which interreligious dialogue is basing a kind of syncretistic "unity." This is expressed well in the book PATHS TO THE HEART. This "stillness" of meditation can encompass quite a lot of territory.
The same page in the Donmeh-west website shows a diagram of the Lurianic Kabbalah. You can see it here as well where it is explained. I found the phrase "unity of differences" particularly interesting given the "unity in diversity" that has been going around the RCC in interreligious dialogue circles. The website indicated the word "tikkun" means "restoration, or universal correction." How close is that to "renewal", I wonder?
As interreligious dialogue spreads throughout the west, what will be made of Sabbatianism, particularly as those in Catholic parishes who know relatively little about Judaism and mysticism take up the interreligious mantra?
Apparently it has begun to happen already. Reb Yakov Leib HaKohain's bio indicates he has published an article titled "To Die for the People: A Jewish Interpretation of the Crucifixion" in The Priest: A Journal of Catholic Theology. Is that journal Roman Catholic or Gnostic Catholic? I was not able to find it on the web. Reb HaKohain has also published in "The Catholic Critic" and "The Library Journal of the C. G. Jung Institute of San Francisco" and other places. An endorsement of Reb HaKohain by the Past-President of the C. G. Jung Institute of Los Angeles can be read at the website as well.
Think about it. We have a serious sexual abuse scandal in the American Church, and evidence that a Jewish minister who endorses "holy sin" has been published in a "Catholic" journal of theology.
The bio also indicates Reb HaKohain's Orthodox Jewish family are hereditary Levitical priests. Were they Frankists under cover?
You can read more about "The Influence of Sabbateanism" at The Sabbatean Movement website. Here you will learn that Sabbatai Sevi's "Holy Apostasy to Islam" was "perhaps the most significant in Jewish history, and certainly in the development of Jewish Kabbalah. Gershom Scholem's study SABBATAI SEVI: THE MYSTICAL MESSIAH is the source cited.
In "A Brief History of Jewish Sects" by Joseif Yaron you can read that "Shabbatai Tzvi" (there are several spellings of the name) "proclaimed himself the Messiah in the seventeenth century." His conversion to Islam was forced, but his "most ardent followers, those who comprise the Sabbatians today, followed him in his conversion and became Muslims. While they outwardly converted to Islam, the Sabbatians maintained a level of Jewish practice secretly." "Donme" is another name for them, and is "similar to the word Marrano used for Sephardic crypto-Jews." The webpage also indicates they practice "ritual incest and spouse swapping."
Ted Daniels, Ph.D. says of Zevi's best-known follower Jacob Frank that he "was a 'truly corrupt and degenerate' religious leader, 'one of the most frightening figures' in Jewish history, a courageous 'strongman' who led his followers 'into the abyss'.
At Dia-pozytyw: DICTIONARY you can read about another follower of Zevi named Baruchya Ruse, who "identified himself with Jesus-Paraclete, the final Savior" Frank wrote his teachings in Polish. He and Baruchya produced a sort of hybrid JudoCatholicism, using some Catholic terminology with a different meaning. Frank also believed he was the Messiah, the third after Zevi and Baruchya Ruso. While imprisoned in the Czestochowa fortress Ruso "regarded the painting of the Madonna of Czestochowa as being that 'portrait' in which Shechina (the feminine aspect of God) was trapped. Frank's task, according to Ruso was to "liberate Shechina from the Czestochowa painting of the Virgin Mary and [serve] Her as a 'vessel'..." Frank emphasized that "Poland was to become the promised messianic kingdom."
T. Allen Greenfield, Bishop of the Gnostic Catholic Church, a part of the Ordo Templi Orientis, discusses the Frankists in an article published in "Agape" in February, 1998 titled "The Frankist Ecstatics of the Eighteenth Century." He writes:
This was a sect known as the Zoharists or Frankists, after Jacob Frank (1726-91 EV), originally named Jacob Leibowicz. Like the Chassidim, the Zoharists were deeply steeped in Qabala and magick and ecstatic religious expression. Like the followers of Tzvi, they were also messianic. Unique to the Frankists was a doctrine of salvation through sexual ecstasy that had not characterized these other tendencies. Indeed, the Zoharists anticipated the sexual magick that emerged a century and more later under the influence of such luminaries as P.B. Randolph, Max Theon and, ultimately, Aleister Crowley. There is a bare chance, in fact, that the Zoharists may have influenced these later exponents of sexual spirituality.
He indicates that "Ribbinical Judaism denounced the Zoharists as heretics," but that "The Frankists enjoyed some protection in Roman Catholic circles, ever hopeful of making conversions among the Jews....But the Frankists continued to practice sexual orgiastic ecstasy as a spiritual sacrement, and soon ran afoul of the Holy Inquisition....Baron Jacob Frank found himself imprisoned by the Inquisitors in 1760 EV, at the fortress of Czestochowa" where he remained for 13 years and was then freed by the Russian conquest. Relocating to Germany, taking the Zoharist movement with him, his movement was instrumental in the founding of the Hellfire Clubs of England and France, of the Elect Cohens, and later the Martinists of France, and "other communities with similar ideas and practices of sacred sexuality."
Greenfield continues the story:
Be it noted that later in the 19th century another enigmatic Polish Jew, the son of Rabbi Judes Lion Bimstein of Warsaw, came to teach an almost identical sacred sexuality as the Grand Master of the Hermetic Brotherhood of Light. This man was one Louis Maximilian Bimstein, better known as Aia Aziz, and better still as Max Theon. Based in North Africa and France, Theon taught a "fully Tantric" approach to spirituality...
Donmeh is described here as "a Turkish word for a religious convert." The website lists several branches including Ismirli formed in what is now Turkey; Jakubi founded by a successor to Zevi; Othman Baba led by Berechia, who taught Jacob Frank; and Lechli "who are of Polish descent but lived in exile."
The estimate as of 2,000 is that there were 15,000-50,000 members of the Donmeh in the East.
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn includes the Donmeh in their Index.
