new certainties and new mysticism 413
It is a testimony to the power of Luzzatto’s ethical insights that, despite
the justified doubts about his Sabbatian sympathies, for students two
centuries later in the Lithuanian yeshivot of the Musar movement,
which emphasized the teaching of ethics (see Chapter 19), the writings
of Luzzatto were compulsory reading.^49
Whether Hagiz’s attack on Eybeschütz was equally justified is less
certain. Yonatan Eybeschütz was a talmudic prodigy from Cracow. He
headed yeshivot in Prague, Metz and Altona and was widely celebrated
for his commentaries on halakhic codes, but he was suspected of Sab-
batian tendencies in his kabbalistic practices. His prime opponent was
not Hagiz but the local rabbi Yaakov Emden, son of the rabbi of the
Ashkenazi community in Amsterdam who had objected so strongly to
Nehemiah Hayon earlier in the century. In 1751 Emden accused Eybe-
schütz of being a secret follower of Sabbetai Zevi, citing the evidence of
some amulets written by Eybeschütz which contained Sabbatian formu-
las. The charge came to the attention of the secular authorities, including
the Danish monarch, and a host of rabbis were drawn into supporting
one side or the other. In 1753 Eybeschütz was exonerated by the Coun-
cil of the Four Lands in Poland, and his halakhic works remain in use
today – despite the strong suspicions of modern historians that Emden’s
accusation may have been justified.^50
Jewish life was never to be the same again after the crisis of Sabbetai
Zevi, but passions eventually died down, as proclaimed messiahs came
and went. One abiding legacy was the popularization of the language of
the Lurianic kabbalah in common liturgy which we have already seen.
That in turn was to shape the most lasting movement of the early mod-
ern period, Hasidism.
Hasidism
Towards the end of the eighteenth century, Solomon Maimon, a Polish
Jew who had abandoned his Judaism to become an idealist philosopher
in Berlin in the intellectual footsteps of Immanuel Kant, described with
a sceptical eye the experience of a Sabbath he had attended as a youth a
few decades earlier in the court of Dov Ber of Mezeritch, known as the
Maggid, in the early 1770s, just before the death of the master:
At last I arrived at M——, and after having rested from my journey I went
to the house of the superior under the idea that I could be introduced to