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of the Polish Jewry, he “advised that the abominations [of the Sabbatians] should be publicly exposed in print, and their evil be proved on the basis of Christian writings, for ‘from the very forest itself comes the [handle of the] ax [that fells it].’”⁵⁷ He also mentioned that he had written an open letter to the council with the aim of “bridling the deceivers’ tongues.”

      Such a letter was indeed written. It was composed sometime in the early months of 1757 and published for the first time as an appendix to Emden’s edition of the midrash Seder olam rabbah ve-zuta (before July 1757). An expanded version appeared in Sefer shimush (1758–60). This expanded version was given the title Resen mateh (Bridle for the deceiver). The title is an allusion to the Hebrew translation of the New Testament’s Epistle of James 1:26: “If anyone thinks himself to be religious and yet does not bridle his tongue but deceives his own heart, this man’s religion is worthless.” It is one of the most extraordinary documents spurred by the Frankist affair.

      Emden’s Letter to the Council of Four Lands

      Even before Sabbatai’s conversion to Islam, some rabbis expressed concern that the messianic enthusiasm that he had aroused would provide grist for the mills of Christian missionaries. Indeed, the Jews’ naïveté in pinning their hopes on the “new impostor” immediately became a target of ridicule for anti-Jewish writers.⁵⁸ The fact that shortly thereafter “the messiah became a Turk” made things much worse: the story of Sabbatai’s conversion was told and retold by Christians convinced that the obvious failure of yet another pseudo-messiah would finally pave the way for the Jewish acceptance of Jesus.

      Sabbatian doctrines themselves offered Christian parallels as well. Many prominent Sabbatians, including the most important theologian of early Sabbatianism, Abraham Miguel Cardoso, were former Marranos who had been brought up as Christians and returned to Judaism only later in their lives. Cardoso’s opponents promptly pointed out that many of his ideas were, in fact, elaborations of Christian concepts that he had acquired in his youth, garbed in Jewish terminology and ornamented with references to Jewish sources. Although Cardoso vehemently attacked Christianity, his Jewish adversaries argued that he never truly freed himself from his Christian upbringing and that his tracts supplied ammunition for the missionaries. The task of purging Judaism of heretical elements thus became closely intertwined with anti-Christian polemics, as rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism routinely targeted the alleged and real links and parallels between Sabbatianism and Christianity.

      Sasportas was the only one to pursue this issue to its ultimate theological conclusions; others worried mainly about the practical influences of Christians and Christian ideas upon Jews and Judaism. Emden accepted many of Sasportas’s⁵⁹ theses and often employed the characteristic rhetoric of earlier anti-Sabbatians. Nevertheless, he departed from the previous anti-Sabbatian apologetics (of Sasportas and of other rabbis) in one crucial regard: he went to great lengths to break the link between anti-Sabbatian polemics and resistance to Christianity. The crux of the argument of his letter to Council of Four Lands was that, with regard to Sabbatianism, Jews and Christians were in the same boat.

      Emden’s letter to the leaders of the Council of Four Lands opened with praise for the rabbis of Poland, who had been divided on the issue of crypto-Sabbatianism, but after the Lanckoronie affair, they had finally taken a united and uncompromised stance against the heretics: they “excommunicated and cut off the mixed [multitude] from Israel, and gave their heretical writings to burning.”⁶⁰

      The Podolian Sabbatians countered the excommunication, however, by telling the bishop and the Kamieniec clergy that the real reason for their persecution by the Jews was the similarity of the tenets of their belief to those of the Christianity: they portrayed themselves as representatives of a pristine version of Judaism who rejected the Talmud and accepted the Trinity and incarnation. By doing so, they immediately won the hearts of the Catholic clergy. Restoring the astrological symbolism of Saturn/Sabbatai (already discussed above in the context of Sasportas), Emden attributed the temporary advantage won by the Sabbatians and the support they had gained from Bishop Dembowski to the fact that the September 1756 consistory investigation took place at a time particularly propitious for the followers of Sabbatai: the autumnal equinox of that year fell on the hour ruled by the planet Saturn. However, continued Emden, astrology could not guarantee the victory of Sabbatians: even if Saturn stood like the sun in the middle of the sky, true Jews would reject the false prophets and triumph over heretics.⁶¹

      The link between Sabbatianism and Christianity, seen so far in rabbinic attacks on Sabbatianism intended for an internal Jewish audience, immediately became a pressing theme of Jewish-Christian debate. The outer layer of Emden’s writing provided Polish rabbis with handy arguments for confronting Catholic theologians. If the priests challenged the council about the Frankists’ claim that their belief was similar to Christianity or about their accusations against the Talmud, the rabbis would be able to argue on the basis of Christian writings that rabbinic Judaism had long been recognized by the Christians, while Sabbatianism—despite its apparent similarities with Christianity—actually contradicted the fundamentals of the Christian faith. Large parts of Emden’s letter were thus written in the second person, directly addressing a Christian straw man and providing the potential Jewish disputant with useful quotations and lines of argument. As some priests might have been tempted to regard Sabbatianism as a “more progressive” version of Judaism entailing the abolishment of the “ceremonial law,” Emden argued that Christianity’s own principles demanded something very different:

      And it is known that also the Nazarene and his disciples, especially Paul, warned that all those circumcised are bound to keep the entire Torah of the Israelites. And you, the Christians, should accept this teaching and not the teachings of the new false messiah Sabbatai Tsevi. For truly, the Gospels do not permit the Jew to forsake the Torah. As Paul said in the Epistle to Galatians 5:3, “I testify again to every man who accepts circumcision that he is obligated to keep the whole law” and in the First Epistle to Corinthians 7:18, “Was anyone at the time of his call already circumcised? Let him not seek to remove the marks of circumcision. Was anyone at the time of his call uncircumcised? Let him not seek circumcision.” And the Acts of Apostles 16:1 also mentioned that he circumcised his disciple Timothy. And they [Christian theologians] did not know how to interpret it, because this act contradicted his own statement that circumcision is a temporary commandment that will be abolished in the times of the messiah, and this happened in the times of the Nazarene. But from this, we know that the Nazarene and his apostles did not come to abolish the Torah of Israel. It is written in Matthew 10:17–18,⁶² “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them. For truly, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not an iota, not a dot, will pass from the Law until all is accomplished.” And the episode with Timothy proves that, as he was the son of a Jewish woman and a Greek man, and Paul, who was a learned man and a disciple of Rabban Gamaliel the Elder, knew that the son of a Jewish woman and a non-Jew is a Jew and therefore he should be circumcised and observe all the commandments.⁶³

      In Emden’s view, the involvement of the Catholic authorities in the Lanckoronie affair was almost providential. Publicizing the deeds of the Sabbatians forced the hand of the rabbis and provided an incentive for using the Gentiles to quash the movement. While it put the Jewish community in temporary danger stemming from the Christian interference in an internal Jewish matter, it also opened an avenue for the ultimate eradication of Sabbatianism. What was needed was to demonstrate that, whereas rabbinic Judaism was legitimate according to Christian categories, Sabbatianism constituted a dangerous and heretical religious novelty: it not only contradicted strict Jewish precepts, but the teachings of the Church as well. Sabbatians were heretics, and Jewish heretics should be treated exactly the same way that the Church treated their Christian counterparts.

      According to Emden, if the Christians became convinced that the self-proclaimed pro-Christian Jews deviated from the accepted forms of normative religiosity, “they would condemn them to burning, for they created a new faith that should not be allowed to be professed openly anywhere, even in the free countries where all old faiths are allowed, as it is the case in Muslim countries, or in Holland, or in England: nowhere is it allowed to invent a new faith.”⁶⁴ As I mentioned

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