Jonathan Eybeschutz - Sabbatian Controversy

Sabbatian Controversy

Eybeschütz again became suspected of harboring secret Sabbatean beliefs because of a dispute that arose concerning the amulets which he was suspected of issuing. It was alleged that these amulets recognized the Messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi.Once the controversy started when Emden found serious connections between the Kabbalistic and homiletic writings of Eybeschutz with those of the known Sabbatean Judah Leib Prossnitz, whom Eybeschütz knew from his days in Prossnitz. Rabbi Jacob Emden accused him of heresy; see The Emden-Eybeschutz Controversy. The majority of the rabbis in Poland, Moravia, and Bohemia, as well as the leaders of the Three Communities supported Eybeschütz: the accusation was "utterly incredible" - in 1725, Eybeschütz was among the Prague rabbis who excommunicated the Sabbateans. Others suggest that the Rabbis issued this ruling because they feared the repercussions if their leading figure, Eybeschütz, was found to be a Sabbatean. Recent evidence has produced the actual amulets and their alleged connection to Sabbatean amulets.

In 1752, the controversy between Emden and Eybeschütz raged. In December of that year, the Hamburg government banned any more discussion of the amulets, the Senate of Hamburg suspended Eybeschütz, and many members of that congregation demanded that he should submit his case to rabbinical authorities. At this point he was defended by Carl Anton, a convert to Christianity, but a former disciple of Eybeschütz. "Kurze Nachricht von dem Falschen Messias Sabbathai Zebhi," etc. (Wolfenbüttel, 1752).

The controversy was a momentous incident in Jewish history of the period — involving both Yechezkel Landau and the Vilna Gaon — and may be credited with having crushed the lingering belief in Sabbatai current even in some Orthodox circles. Professor Sid Z. Leiman claims that the mentioned great Rabbis exonerated Eybeschutz from Sabbatianism only in order that the controversy should die down.

In 1760, the quarrel broke out once more when some Shabbatean elements were discovered among the students of Eybeschütz' yeshivah. At the same time his younger son, Wolf Jonas Eybeschutz, presented himself as a Shabbatean prophet, and was close to several Frankists, with the result that the yeshivah was closed.

Jonathan Eybeschütz's grandson became Baron Thomas von Schoenfeld, an apostate Jew who inherited his grandfather's collection of Sabbatean kabbalistic works. He eventually left the Sabbatean movement and founded a Masonic lodge called the Asiatische Bruder, one of four Illuminati lodges in Vienna. After his uncle's death on August 10, 1791, he was offered the leadership of the Frankist movement which he refused. According to Gershom Scholem, the ideology of the Asiatic Brethren mixed Kabbalistic and Sabbatean ideas jumbled together with Christian theosophic doctrines.