Other testimonies described the breaking of the prohibition of incest,54 having sexual relations with menstruating women,55 masturbation (also in public),56 as well as the practice of “sexual hospitality,” whereby a host offered his wife or daughter to a stranger coming as a guest to his house. This custom was known to the Hebrew Bible, as attested by the episodes with Lot’s daughters (Gen. 19) and the Levite and his concubine (Judg. 19:22–30); it had been widespread in the ancient Middle East and Central Asia and was known to survive in tribal societies until modern times.57 The Dönmeh branch led by Frank’s putative father-in-law, Yehudah Levi Tova, also was rumored to practice sexual hospitality,58 and it seems that the custom filtered down to the Podolian Sabbatians as well. Thus, the women interrogated by the Satanów bet din reported that they slept with strangers “upon the wish of the[ir] husband[s],”59 who “told [them] it was a positive commandment.”60 One deposition dealt with a woman who had had intercourse with a stranger without her husband’s permission and thereby provoked his ire, “for such a deed is not considered by them a commandment.”61 Another mentioned a complaint voiced by a Sabbatian who came to a house of a fellow believer: “Why did we come here? He would not honor us with his wife.”62
After completing the proceedings, the Satanów bet din imposed penalties. Joseph of Rohatyn made a public confession of sins and described his deeds in front of the entire congregation (a matter uncommon in Jewish tradition, which normally forbade public description of one’s sin). Then he received thirty-nine lashes and prostrated himself on the threshold of the synagogue so that those coming and going would tread upon his body. He divorced his wife (because she had had sexual relations with others)63 and declared his children bastards. He was banished from the Rohatyn community and was prohibited ever to make any contacts with other Jews. He was supposed to wander alone for the rest of his days.64
Herem
The humiliating ceremony undergone by Joseph of Rohatyn in his hometown synagogue—public confession followed by thirty-nine lashes with the congregation treading upon the penitent—is not unknown in early modern Judaism: Uriel da Costa underwent exactly the same ordeal in Amsterdam in 1639.65 In da Costa’s case, the ceremony was expiation preceding the annulment of a ban of excommunication previously imposed upon him. In the case of Joseph, the Satanów documents make no explicit reference to such a ban, but the banishment and prohibition of communicatio civilis were typical sanctions associated with excommunication.
Jewish sources describing the Lanckoronie incident mention that the participants in the rite were placed under a ban; we also know that on 26 May 1756, a week or so before the launching of the proceedings of the Satanów bet din, the rabbinic assembly of Brody pronounced a herem on the Sabbatians. “The wicked men” belonging to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi were to be “excluded and repudiated by the community of Israel; their wives and daughters were to be regarded as harlots, their offspring as bastards.” Other Jews were forbidden to have any dealings with them or to assist them in any way. The ban restricted the study of printed kabbalistic works, which had an official rabbinic approval, to those over the age of thirty, and manuscript works (including Lurianic writings) to the age of forty.66 It is highly interesting that on the very same day, the very same assembly also issued a pro-Eibeschütz proclamation.67 The “Sabbatian” and “anti-Sabbatian” camps, often depicted as monolithic, had much more fluid boundaries: the same rabbis simultaneously exonerated the alleged Sabbatian Eibeschütz and vigorously condemned the Frankists, thereby drawing a clear line between the two cases.68
Herem (the Jewish ban of excommunication) developed from the biblical anathema and became one of the chief means of social control and coercion available to the leadership of medieval and early modern Jewry. Technically, the herem could have been imposed by an individual Jew (especially in matters relating to debt settlement), but it was normally used by rabbinic tribunals as a judicial measure for certain prescribed offenses. The Talmud lists twenty-four such offenses (the list ranges from speaking ill of a learned man to failure on the part of a ritual slaughterer to show his knife to the rabbi for examination), but common practice substantially extended the applicability of the herem. The scope of its authority also increased over time: initially, the ban was applicable only in the area under the direct jurisdiction of a given bet din; but later times increasingly saw instances of pronouncing a herem on foreigners. As with Christian excommunication, a procedure developed for informing other communities that a herem had been imposed so that it could be repeated and enforced in other localities.69
There were several levels of severity of the ban (with some forms specifying the duration of the punishment from the outset and limiting the harshness of the sanctions imposed) as well as different levels of formality in its imposition. The most rigorous form, called “the great herem,” “the solemn herem,” or “the herem of Joshua son of Nun,” encompassed an elaborate ritual that demanded the presence of the entire congregation and included sounding the ram’s horn, extinguishing black candles, and blowing hoses made of animal intestines until they burst with a bang; such a herem was imposed for an indefinite period. The sanctions of the great herem amounted to the civil death of the excommunicated: other Jews were prohibited to associate with him or to benefit him or benefit from him in any way; he was not be counted among the ten men necessary for the performance of a public religious function; his sons were not to be circumcised; his bread and wine were to be considered nonkosher; and after his death, he was not to be accorded any honor due to the dead.
In the words of the most comprehensive study of the herem in premodern Poland, “from the historical point of view, excommunication formed the very basis of communal organization of Old Poland’s Jewry.”70 In addition to its function as a punitive measure in cases concerning both religious and secular matters, herem (or the threat of a herem) was invoked in guaranteeing contracts and in the execution of judicial verdicts, and it was tantamount to an oath in legal proceedings.
From the sixteenth century onward, the kings of Poland recognized in the herem the prime means for implementing the tax regime among the Jews and therefore granted the rabbinic authorities an unparalleled measure of bracchium saeculare: only one month after the pronouncement of the ban, the delinquent who failed to repent was to be delivered to secular authorities and executed, and all his property was to be confiscated (in the case of Christian excommunication, similar measures were to be implemented only after a year).71 This ultimate step was virtually never applied; however, rabbinic courts often called on Polish secular authorities to enforce their bans, and excommunication remained the most powerful tool of social control accessible to the Jewish establishment. Writing in 1797, the maskil Jacob Calmanson still described the use of the herem as “the most efficacious measure used by the rabbis [doktorowie żydowscy] to keep the people in slavish subjection and to reinforce the command they had usurped over the people’s minds.”72
Most rabbinic bans of excommunication did not target religious dissenters, but instead targeted those who violated community ordinances, those considered disruptive to communal discipline, or even common criminals. The first herem against the Sabbatians in Poland was issued in 1670. In September of the following year, the Council of Four Lands announced that “a great herem with sounding of the ram’s horn and extinguishing the candles” was pronounced upon the “criminals and reckless people belonging to the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi.” The council ordered—on pain of a heavy fine—the reading of the text of the ban in all the synagogues of Podolia and gave the leaders of the provinces and individual communities the authority to persecute the Sabbatians and to punish them with “infamy, fines, jail, and even to deliver them to the justice of the Gentiles [afilu ba-dine amim].” The delinquents should be expelled from every community and every province for all their days, they should not be assisted in danger, and all the curses of the Torah should fall upon them.73
In 1671, the council forbade the dissemination of manuscripts said to contain Sabbatian secret lore;74 in 1687 or slightly earlier, it placed restrictions on the printing