Revisiting a Sabbatian Controversy: Moses Ḥayim Luzzatto and a Multiplicity of Rabbinates in the Eighteenth Century

Abstract

Abstract:News that Moses @Hayim Luzzatto (ca. 1707–ca. 1746) was the recipient of heavenly revelations touched off a controversy that engulfed European rabbinic networks for several years. Led by Moses Hagiz, Jewish religious leaders far and wide condemned Luzzatto and his mystical messianic group as heretical. However, the Luzzatto controversy was far more complicated than merely a case of the rabbinic establishment suppressing a heretical thinker. Responses varied in enthusiasm, denunciation, and ambivalence, reflecting a rabbinic culture impacted by age, ethnicity, family, geography, ideology, and social networks. Opinions and alliances shifted, criticism levied at Luzzatto and his group in Padua proved idiosyncratic, and Luzzatto began and ended his short but prodigious career as a celebrated rabbinic author. The broad spectrum of responses to Luzzatto indicates a need to reassess notions of the rabbinate, heresy, and spiritual leadership and consider the interplay between local and pan-Jewish identities. This essay discusses how intercommunal relationships and rabbinic autonomy played a role in the developments, and how variegated responses to the controversy revealed a wide range of social and religious emphases in early modern Jewish culture.