Zealot
Zealot
This chapter highlights Jacob Emden, who crafted Jacob Sasportas in his own image as a heresy hunter in the middle of the eighteenth century. The transmission of anti-Sabbatian ideas from Jacob Sasportas to Jacob Emden constitutes a crucial period in the formation of the early modern Jewish zealot. As his battle with chief rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz continued to rage, Emden printed a new edition of Sasportas's Kitzur zizath novel zvi (The Fading Flower of the Zevi). This edition appeared at a particularly fraught time in Emden's life. He turned to Sasportas as a precedent in two of his primary battles: against the Eibeschütz party in Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek and against the Frankist movement in Poland. To these elective affinities with Sasportas—a common name, a common city, and a common enemy—one can add a few others: an acute sensitivity to the printed word, a pronounced sense of entitlement derived from a combination of lineage and learning, and a peripatetic lifestyle as a result of financial and communal difficulties.
Keywords: Jacob Emden, Jacob Sasportas, Sabbatianism, Jewish zealot, Jonathan Eibeschütz, Frankist movement, lineage
Princeton Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us.
