Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz and Moravian Christianity

• In Event: Mysticism as Resistance

Abstract

This presentation explores a possible relationship between two contemporaneous religious phenomena. One is the extraordinary book of heretical (Sabbatian) Kabbalah called “I Came This Day to the Spring” (VA-AVO HA-YOM EL HA-'AYIN), which surfaced in manuscript in 1725 and was rumored—probably correctly—to be the work of Jonathan Eibeschuetz, then the rising star of the Prague yeshiva. The other is Moravian Christianity, its inception conventionally dated to 1722, when a band of Protestant refugees from Hapsburg-ruled Moravia settled on the estate of Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Saxony, and he and they together created a new understanding of their shared faith.

Our discussion focuses on a particularly strange passage of VA-AVO HA-YOM, describing the sexual wounds inflicted on the divine potentiality called “God of Israel” in his homoerotic encounters with the superior entity called “the Root.” This passage, which to my knowledge has no parallel in any Jewish source (Kabbalistic or otherwise), is sufficiently redolent of the Moravian veneration of the “wounds of Christ” as to suggest direct influence.

It is proposed that, in his early years, the young and impressionable Eibeschuetz had encounters with Moravian Christians, whose distinctive beliefs seem in fact to have antedated their association with Zinzendorf. In these encounters, he came to realize that Christianity was not a monolithic oppressor but had its own repressed minorities, with whom a sensitive Jewish adolescent—perhaps already attracted to the marginalized Sabbatians—could identify. This awareness found expression some years later in Va-avo ha-Yom, which can be read as a Kabbalistic theology of Christianity—depicted as in significant ways superior to Judaism—and as a charter for the world religion of the future, rooted in Kabbalistic Judaism but unlike any religion ever known. Eibeschuetz’s subsequent warm relations with Christian scholars, which led some contemporaries to claim him as a secret convert, are particularly intelligible against this background.

Author

• David Halperin, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill