History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 1 [of 3]: From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)Dubnow, Simon
History
History of the Jews in Russia and Poland, Volume 1 [of 3]: From the Beginning until the Death of Alexander I (1825)
Dubnow, Simon
Jews -- Poland -- History; Jews -- Russia -- History; Poland -- History; Russia -- History
Beginning with the seventeenth century, the old Theoretic Cabala is
gradually superseded in Poland by the Practical Cabala,[110] taught by
the new school of ARI[111] and Vital.[112] The Cabalist Isaiah Horowitz,
author of the famous work on ascetic morals called SHeLoH,[113] had been
trained in the yeshibahs of Cracow and Lemberg, and for several years
(1600-1606) occupied the post of rabbi in Volhynia. His son, Sheftel
Horowitz, who was rabbi in Posen (1641-1658), published the mystical
work of his father, adding from his own pen a moralist treatise under
the title _Vave ha-`Amudim_.[114] Nathan Spira, preacher and rector of
the Talmudic academy in Cracow (1585-1633), made a specialty of the
Practical Cabala. His more ingenious than thoughtful book, "Discovering
Deep Things"[115] (_Megalle `Amukoth_, Cracow, 1637), contains an
exposition in two hundred and fifty-two different ways of Moses' plea
before God for permission to enter the Promised Land (Deuteronomy iii.
23). It consists of an endless chain of Cabalistic word-combinations and
obscure symbolic allusions, yielding some inconceivable deductions, such
as that Moses prayed to God concerning the appearance of the two
Messiahs of the house of Joseph and David, or that Moses endeavored to
eliminate the power of evil and to expiate in advance all the sins that
would ever be committed by the Jewish people. Nathan Spira applied to
the Cabala the method of the Rabbinical pilpul, and created a new
variety of dialectic mysticism, which was just as far removed from sound
theology as the scholastic speculations of the pilpulists were from
scientific thinking.
More wholesome and more closely related to life was the trend of the
Jewish apologetic literature which sprang up in Poland in the last
quarter of the sixteenth century. The religious unrest which had been
engendered by the Reformation gave rise to several rationalistic sects
with radical, anti-ecclesiastic tendencies. Nearest of all to the tenets
of Judaism was the sect of the Anti-Trinitarians (called Unitarians,
Arians, or Socinians[116]), who denied the dogma of the Trinity and the
divine nature of Jesus, but recognized the religious and moral teachings
of the Gospels. Among the Anti-Trinitarian leaders were the theologian
Simon Budny, of Vilna, and Martin Chekhovich, of Lublin. Stung by the
fact that the Catholic clergy applied to them the contemptuous
appellation of "Judaizers," or semi-Jews, the sectarians were anxious to
demonstrate to the world that their doctrine had nothing in common with
Judaism. For this purpose they carried on oral disputes with the rabbis,
and tried to expose the "Jewish falsehoods" in their works.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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