Emden’s argument had a deeper stratum, however. Besides providing the council with quotations from the Gospels and lines of reasoning for possible debate with priests, or even in addition to suggesting the general opportunistic strategy of having Sabbatianism eradicated by Christians, Emden wanted to convince the rabbis that the Christians should and could be their true allies in the fight against the Sabbatians. Whereas some fragments of the letter purported to defend Judaism from Christian charges and to demonstrate the legitimacy of the Jewish religion on the basis of Christian writings, others amounted to an apology for Christianity addressed to the Jews. For Emden, the advent of Sabbatianism fundamentally changed the relationship between Judaism and Christianity: the Sabbatian movement constituted a common enemy, in the face of which erstwhile quarrels between Jews and Christians should immediately be set aside. The Christian should accept the validity of Judaism within the theological framework of his religion, while the Jew should understand that there was no real contradiction between Judaism and Christianity and that the mutual animosities stemmed from a series of misunderstandings: some Christian theologians misinterpreted the Gospels, claiming that Jesus called for abolishing the Torah of Moses, whereas “crazy people among the Jews who do not know left from right nor do they understand the Written or Oral Torah”66 came to believe that Christianity was a bastardized, idolatrous faith.
The eradication of Sabbatianism required breaking the connection that the rabbis made between Sabbatianism and Christianity and concomitantly changing the stereotype of Christianity among the Jewish elite. Many arguments ostensibly aimed at Christians who disparaged Judaism were, in fact, aimed at the Jews, who mistook the existing Christian disparagement of Judaism for the true essence of Christianity:
And the writers of the Gospels did not claim that the Nazarene came to abolish the Jewish faith. Rather, he came to establish a faith for the Gentiles from that day onward. And even this faith was not new, but old: it was [based on] the Seven Noahide Commandments that had been forgotten and reinstated by the apostles. . . . And so Paul wrote in Chapter 5 of his Epistle to the Corinthians that everyone should remain in his own faith.67 . . . And so the Nazarene did double kindness to the world: on the one hand he sustained with all his powers the Torah of Moses . . . and on the other he reminded the Gentiles about the Seven Commandments.68
In rabbinic tradition, the Seven Commandments of the covenant between God and Noah (the prohibitions against idolatry, blasphemy, bloodshed, incest, theft, eating of flesh torn from a living animal, as well as the injunction to establish a legal system)69 were considered the minimal moral standards enjoined by the Bible upon all mankind. In the Middle Ages, Jewish thinkers universally maintained that the strictly monotheistic religion of Islam was in accord with the Noahide laws, while the status of Christianity was subject to debate; some rabbis argued that it violated the prohibition of idolatry. From the sixteenth century onward, it became more and more common to exclude Christians from the category of idolaters and therefore to consider the Christian religion, too, as compatible with the Seven Commandments.70
Yet Emden went much further than his predecessors. Not only did he claim that Christian doctrines were congruent with the Noahide Commandments; he also argued that the very essence of Jesus and the apostles’ mission was to establish a faith based on Noahidism for pagans. In his commentary on Pirke avot (published in 1751), Emden had already stated that the “assembly” (a pun on the Hebrew word knesi’ah, which means “assembly” but also “the Church”) of the contemporary peoples could be adequately termed an “assembly for the sake of heaven” (knesi’ah le-shem shamayyim): its aim was to spread monotheism among “those who otherwise worshiped wood and stone, did not believe in the reward in afterlife, and had no idea of good and evil.”71 In the letter to the Council of Four Lands, he advanced the same argument. The main line of division did not lie here between Jews and Christians (or, more broadly, non-Jews) but between members of legitimate religious groups on the one hand and heretics on the other. From this perspective, Sabbatianism was a kind of universal heresy, denying general human moral principles and embodying the idea of reversion to paganism or even—along the lines of the mythology of the mixed multitude—the primeval “waste and void” and immorality that preceded God’s covenant with Noah: “O generation!72 Jews, Christians, and Muslims! The chief peoples, who uphold the fundamentals of the Torah of Moses and facilitate their proliferation in the world! Open your eyes and see . . . that there is no worse sect than the sect of Sabbatai Tsevi. . . . They are worse than all the ancient idolaters . . ., worse even than the generation of the Flood . . ., for they want to turn the world back to the state of waste and void [tohu va-vohu] . . . and they call good evil and evil they call good, they call light darkness and the sweet they call bitter. And such things are called heresy [minut].”73
To the Jews, Rabbi Jacob Sasportas had argued that for their faith, the nascent Sabbatian movement constituted a danger akin to that of early Christianity rising around Jesus and the apostles: he had viewed both Sabbatianism and Christianity as new, cancerous growths on the body of Judaism. Emden accepted Sasportas’s idea that Sabbatianism was a new (and hence illegitimate and dangerous) faith but claimed that, from the Jewish perspective, Christianity had never been a new religion: early Christianity was not an illicit sectarian offshoot of Judaism; rather, Judaism and Christianity stemmed from the same roots and were equally legitimate, since they were intended for different people. Thus, in Emden’s view, Christianity and Islam were elaborations of the fundamental Mosaic revelation, parallel to Judaism and sharing Judaism’s moral principles and its redemptive goal.
Rabbi Jacob Emden’s letter to the Council of Four Lands elicited substantial scholarly discussion. Jewish as well as Christian scholars were amazed by the rabbi’s great familiarity with Christian texts, for in his account of Christianity, he did not use Jewish sources but went directly to the text of the New Testament.74 The extensive citations from the Gospels and the Epistles of Paul drew special attention. While there existed several Hebrew translations of Christian Scriptures, Emden’s renderings seemed original, and his consistent usage of Latinized personal names and titles of the books of the New Testament would suggest that he relied on a Latin or German text.
Some argued that the quotations might have been translated into Hebrew by Emden himself.75 Such a possibility cannot be dismissed out of hand: there is no doubt that Emden knew some German, Dutch, and Latin and read numerous books in these languages in order—as he put it—to “know the views of different peoples in matters concerning their religions and customs and to understand their ideas about us and our holy faith.”76 It is entirely feasible that he had some firsthand knowledge of the New Testament. Nevertheless, it is clear that his command of foreign languages was superficial,77 and it is unlikely that he would have been able to undertake a sophisticated exegesis of the Gospels solely on the basis of his own study.
I submit that Emden’s ostensibly unmediated account of the New Testament’s theology was based on an earlier Jewish source, a little-known manuscript titled Hoda’at ba’al din.78 The work was supposedly written in 1430 by David Nasi of Candia, brother of the duke of Naxos, Joseph Nasi, and a factor in the service of Cardinal Francisco Bentivoglio. According to David, the cardinal became convinced of the falsity of his Christian belief through independent philosophical investigations and undertook to ponder the truth of Judaism. He therefore asked, in great secrecy, to be supplied with Jewish anti-Christian works. David Nasi lent the cardinal several polemical books and composed a short tract, Hoda’at ba’al din, for him. The title (“admission of the litigant”) alludes to the talmudic principle according to which the admission of guilt by a person charged with crime takes precedence over witnesses’ testimonies.79 In this case, the principle metaphorically referred to the writers of the New Testament: the tract aimed to demonstrate that the authors of the Gospels and the Epistles unwittingly affirmed the principles of Judaism and contradicted the dogmas of