Friday, November 23, 2007
INTERESTING QUOTES
Moreover, as is well known, there was a certain historical-terminological-ideological continuity between Sabbateanism and Hasidim.
--Yehuda Liebes, STUDIES IN JEWISH MYTH AND JEWISH MESSIANISM, p. 134
At approximately the same time that Chassidic Judaism was developing, another trend which for many years was almost lost to history was bubbling up in the Ghettoes of Eastern Europe in the wake of the Tzvi messianic expectations. Indeed, most older English-language sources relegate this rather substantial movement to a footnote, usually couched in the most unflattering terms. This was a sect known as the Zoharists or Frankists, after Jacob Frank (1726-91 EV), originally named Jacob Leibowicz [1]. 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.
--T. Allen Greenfield, "The Frankist Ecstatics of the Eighteenth Century"
In diametrical and irreconcilable opposition to all such attempts to relieve the tension between mysticism and religious authority stands the extreme case of mystical nihilism, in which all authority is rejected in the name of mystical experience or illumination. ...it seems to me that we possess no more impressive record of an unmistakably nihilistic mysticism than the Polish Book of the Words of the Lord, in which the disciples of Jacob Frank (1726-91) set down their master's teachings after his own spoken words....
For Frank, anarchic destruction represented all the Luciferian radiance, all the positive tones and overtones, of the word "Life."...It goes without saying that from the standpoint of the community and its institutions, such mysticism should have been regarded as demonic possession. And it is indicative of one of the enormous tensions that run through the history of Judaism that this most destructive of all visions should have been formulated in its most unrestrained form by one who rebelled against the Jewish law and broke away from Judaism.
--Gershom Scholem, ON THE KABBALAH AND ITS SYMBOLISM, pp 27-29
