“Mitsvah ha-Ba’ah ba-Averah: la-Havanat ha-Shabta’ut” (Redemption Through Sin: Toward an Understanding of Sabbatianism)
“Mitsvah ha-Ba’ah ba-Averah: la-Havanat ha-Shabta’ut” (Redemption Through Sin: Toward an Understanding of Sabbatianism) is perhaps the most thrilling essay written by Gershom Scholem (1897–1982), a highly influential text that signaled a new approach to the study of the Sabbatian movement. It offered a firm rebuke to the Wissenschaft des Judentums and strove to identify an ongoing non-negative nihilistic impulse latent within the movement. Scholem sought to rescue Sabbatianism from existing research paradigms and in doing so provide a new assessment of Jewish history. He presented the ideological background of Sabbatianism, the movement’s transition from a mass revival to a hidden heresy, as well as the various phases and figures that accompanied this process from the days of Sabbatai Sevi to the phantasms of Jacob Frank. Above all else, he endeavored to show a clear dialectical development leading from the belief in Sabbatai Sevi to religious nihilism, and from religious nihilism to the new world of the Enlightenment. The essay, which contains Scholem’s central theses on Sabbatianism and the course of modern Jewish history, employs powerful rhetoric that both disturbs and enlivens the reader. The essay will no doubt cause a stir among contemporary readers, as much as it did when it first appeared.
“Mitsvah ha-Ba’ah ba-Averah: la-Havanat ha-Shabta’ut” (Redemption Through Sin: Toward an Understanding of Sabbatianism)
Sale price64 ₪
Regular price
Choose options