Jewish History: The Apostates (Part 2/2: Modern)

The Modern Era

A disciple of his father Samuel Margoliot, Antonius Margarita (Anton Margaritha) (c. 1490/1500–1542 CE) was a native of Ratisbon (Regensburg, Germany). His surname is a corruption of Margalita or Margolit/Margoliot. He hailed from a rabbinical family; his grandfather and his father Jacob served successively as chief rabbi of his hometown. He studied Hebrew but never fully mastered the language, despite going on to earn his livelihood as a Hebrew teacher. Evidently, whatever traditional Jewish education he received he rejected: while still a Jew, he calumniated his local Jewish community to the governmental authorities. In 1522, he was baptized and converted to Roman Catholicism in neighboring Wasserburg (Wasserburg am Inn). He became a Hebrew instructor in a series of German locales: Augsburg, Meissen, Zell, and Leipzig. He indited Der Gantz Jüdisch Glaub…, a libelous anti-Jewish tract that ridiculed both Judaism and Jewry. The book accused Jews of usury, uncharitableness, impiety, and idleness; it also denounced the “Aleinu” prayer as anti-Christian, and implored the authorities to compel Jews to perform manual labor. Indignant, Jewish courtier Josel of Rosheim lodged a complaint with Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who appointed a committee to investigate the work’s sundry denunciations. In 1530, at the Diet of Augsburg and in the emperor’s presence, Antonius participated in the Disputation of Augsburg against Josel of Rosheim, who successfully refuted his spurious allegations; trounced and discredited, Antonius was incarcerated then expelled from Augsburg. Unrepentant and undeterred, he continued to defend the correctness of his positions. In 1537, he moved to Vienna, Austria, where he became a Hebrew instructor at University of Vienna. His writings were repeatedly republished, garnered a broad readership, and proved profoundly influential for Protestant reformer Martin Luther. Recalcitrant as ever, he ultimately forsook Catholicism and instead became a Lutheran. He died in Vienna.

Shabbtai ben Mordekhai Tzvi (AMIRAH/Aziz Mehmet Effendi) (1626–1676 CE) was a disciple of Isaac de Alba, Joseph Escapa, and David Habillo. A native of Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey), he was born (reportedly on Tisha B’Av) into a family whose origins were in Patras (Greece), and his father had been a poultry dealer in Morea (Peloponnese/Peloponnesus) before becoming the local broker in Smyrna of an English trading firm. He studied Talmud and kabbalah, and received rabbinical ordination (smikhah) at 18. He inclined to a life of asceticism and solitude but acceded to custom and married twice, consecutively, both unions ending because he refused to consummate them. At 22, he revealed himself as Messiah to a small circle of friends and brazenly pronounced the ineffable Tetragrammaton in Hebrew (a proscribed act reserved solely for the high priest in the Holy of Holies of the Temple in Jerusalem on Yom Kippur). He was excommunicated by the rabbinate of Smyrna and soon banished from his hometown in 1651/1654. In 1653/1658, he moved to neighboring Istanbul, where during one of his manic states he celebrated in a single week the three pilgrimage festivals of Sukkot (Booths/Tabernacles), Pesah (Passover), and Shavuot (Weeks/Pentecost). In Istanbul he encountered the reputable preacher (maggid) Abraham Yakhini, and soon identified as fertile ground for his pretensions and impostures the kabbalistic bastion of Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece), where he attracted numerous followers. In Salonika he celebrated a bizarre wedding ceremony wherein he married a Torah scroll, as a consequence of which he was banished from the city by the local rabbinate. Thereafter he wandered around the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean regions. In 1662, he migrated to Cairo, Egypt, where he garnered the support of the wealthy and influential head of Egyptian Jewry, Raphael Joseph, mint-master and tax-farmer of the Ottoman pasha (and may have first met Abraham Miguel Cardozo). That same year, he immigrated to the Land of Israel, where he settled in Jerusalem. By means of pious and ascetic acts he gradually ingratiated himself to credulous locals. In 1663, he returned to Cairo in his capacity as a fundraising envoy (meshulah) of Jerusalem Jewry, and obtained emergency funds from his benefactor Raphael Joseph to pay the extortionate taxes imposed by avaricious officials of the Ottoman Empire. In 1664, while in Cairo, he married an unlikely consort—an eccentric but charming Jewess named Sarah who had been orphaned during the Chmielnicki massacres and had since become a harlot in Leghorn (Livorno, Italy)—in the home of Raphael Joseph. In 1665, on his return journey to Jerusalem, he passed through Gaza, where he consulted the acclaimed young kabbalist Nathan of Gaza, who recognized Shabbtai as Messiah and professed to be his herald, the reincarnated Elijah the prophet. He joined Nathan on a pilgrimage to sacred sites in Hebron and in Jerusalem before returning with him to Gaza, where he again declared himself Messiah. He then returned to Jerusalem, where he encountered strong opposition from the majority of rabbis, who banished him from the city. After this turndown he returned via Tzfat and Aleppo, Syria to Smyrna, where in the synagogue he again declared himself Messiah, his proclamation this time accompanied by shofar blasts and greeted by delirious congregants shouting, “Long live our king, our Messiah!” He earned the epithet “AMIRAH”, an acronym for the Hebrew phrase “Adoneinu Malkeinu Yarum Hodo” (“Our lord and king, may his majesty be exalted”). Shabbtai’s status and fame disseminated throughout Europe and catalyzed much excitement and enthusiasm among Jews and Christians alike, especially in England, the Netherlands, Italy, Germany, Poland, and Lithuania. Remarkably, he managed to gain the allegiance of eminent sages, including Isaac Aboab (Simao) da Fonseca, Moses Raphael de Aguilar, Moses ben Jonathan Galante (Moses Galante the Younger), Moses Zacuto, and Hayyim Benveniste. He adjured world Jewry, through his trusty scribe Samuel Primo, to transform the fast day Assarah B’Teiveit into a feast day instead. That same year, he sailed for Istanbul, hoping for a miracle that would facilitate his fulfillment of Nathan of Gaza’s prediction that he would place the sultan’s crown upon his own head, but his voyage was delayed for several weeks by stormy weather; ultimately, his vessel was intercepted once it emerged from the Strait of Gallipoli (the Dardanelles/Hellespont) into the Sea of Marmara, and upon arrival he was arrested, shackled, and incarcerated. He was transferred to the state prison at the fortress of Gallipoli just prior to the Passover festival; on that day he slew a paschal lamb and ate it with its forbidden fat (heilev) in violation of the Torah, reportedly reciting over it the benison, “Blessed be God who has restored again that which was forbidden.” He advocated transforming the fast days Shiva-Assar B’Tammuz and Tisha B’Av into feast days. When he was informed that a prophetic kabbalist in Poland, Nehemiah Kohen, had announced the coming of Messiah, he summoned him to appear before him at Gallipoli; their acrimonious confrontation over the course of three days eventuated in mutual antipathy, and as a result he was denounced—as a specious impostor fomenting sedition—to Sultan Mehmet IV of the Ottoman Empire and soon brought under guard before him in neighboring Adrianople (Edirne). The sultan issued an ultimatum: conversion or death. Shabbtai donned a turban and embraced Islam. He accepted the new name Aziz Mehmet Effendi and was rewarded with the honorary royal title “Keeper of the Palace Gates” (Kapiči Bashi) and a generous royal pension of 150 aspers per day (w/no actual duties required). His wife Sarah also converted to Islam. In 1668, he claimed to have received a divine revelation during the Passover festival; he, or one of his followers, subsequently published a mystical tract justifying his apostasy. In 1672, he was arrested in Istanbul and perhaps even deprived of his pension by the Ottoman authorities, who tired of his antics. In 1673, he was exiled to Dulcigno (Ulcinj, Montenegro), where he all but vanished from public view. In 1674, his wife died; he remarried Yokheved (a.k.a. “Esther”, “Mikhal”, post-apostasy Aisha), daughter of Joseph Filosof, a respected rabbi of Salonika and one of his leading supporters, and sister of Jacob Querido. He died on Yom Kippur in Dulcigno, just two months after his 50^th birthday and almost exactly a decade post-apostasy, in isolation and obscurity. He had a son, Ishmael Mordekhai Tzvi, who died in childhood, as well as a daughter.

A disciple of Saul Levi Morteira, Menasheh ben Israel, and Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, Barukh (Benedictus de) Spinoza (1632–1677 CE) was a native of Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He hailed from a Portuguese Sephardic family of Jewish converts to Christianity who secretly practiced Judaism (anusim); his parents, who had been arrested and tortured in Portugal, were forced to flee from the Portuguese Inquisition to the Netherlands in order to openly profess Judaism. He was known as Bento in Portuguese (and later as Benedictus in Latin), and his surname derives from the town of Espinosa in Spain. He studied Hebrew, Tanakh (Hebrew Bible), Talmud, Jewish philosophy (mahshavah), and some kabbalah at the Pereira academy of his hometown. He subsequently attended the freethinker and ex-Jesuit Franciscus van den Enden’s school, where he learned Latin, mathematics, physics, mechanics, astronomy, chemistry, and medicine. He also seems to have been exposed early on to Calvinist messianist and biblical critic Isaac La Peyrère’s Prae Adamitae, a sensational bombshell in the intellectual world (composed by a descendant of conversos). Still, he continued to observe an orthodox Jewish life until the decease of his father in 1654. Thereafter he became openly alienated from traditional Judaism and began espousing unorthodox views similar to those of the heretical philosopher Uriel da Costa, which generated controversy. He denied the immortality of the soul, repudiated the idea of a transcendent, providential God (the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob), and declared that the Torah’s commandments (mitzvot) were neither literally given by God nor any longer binding on Jews. He was summoned before the rabbinical court (beit din) of his hometown, and neither concealed his beliefs nor accepted the offer of funds in exchange for suppressing his opinions. In 1656, he was placed under a ban of excommunication (heirem)—as were his fellow travelers Juan de Prado and Daniel Ribera—and as an outcast had little contact with Dutch Jewry thenceforth. Around 1658, he studied philosophy at Leiden University. In 1661, prompted by a failed assassination attempt wherein someone tried to murder him with a knife as he emerged from a theatre, he moved to neighboring Rijnsburg, where he lived for two years in a modest cottage—the most productive intellectual and literary period of his life. He earned his livelihood teaching, grinding lenses, and crafting microscopes and telescopes, and received a small pension from his patron Johan de Witt (assassinated in 1672), as well as financial support from his Collegiant friend Simon de Vries and from his Protestant millenarian friend Peter Serrarius. In 1663, he moved to neighboring Voorburg, a suburb of The Hague. He never converted to Christianity, but lived in spiritual isolation from his fellow Jews, from whom he had been ostracized, and from his Christian disciples and admirers. He earned a reputation as a radical and original freethinker, an independent skeptic, a secular ideologue, and an authority on optics. He strongly opposed scriptural authority and revealed religion, denied the possibility of miracles, condemned religious superstition, and averred that “the goal of philosophy is nothing but the truth, the goal of faith is nothing but obedience”. Barukh believed that God is the one and only substance; that happiness was to be found in the intellectual love of God; and that the only freedom from enslavement to one’s emotions came from acting according to reason, although “only a few in proportion to the whole of humanity acquire a virtuous disposition under the guidance of reason alone”. He advocated monism (the oneness of reality) and complete freedom of thought and free speech—so long as these did not interfere with the state. His identification of God and nature—his belief in a pantheistic, impersonal God—invited accusations of atheism, which he denied. As a philosopher, he was profoundly influenced by Jewish sages Abraham ibn Ezra, Moses ben Maimon, Levi ben Gershom, Hasdai ben Abraham Cresques, and Judah (Leo Hebraeus) Abravanel, anti-religious Protestant philosopher Thomas Hobbes, and Roman Catholic philosophers René Descartes and Giordano Bruno; in turn, he proved profoundly influential for Lutheran philosophers Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. He indited his masterwork Ethica Ordine Geometrico Demonstrata (The Ethics), an abstract philosophical treatise; Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, a treatise featuring his political philosophy and critique of religion (premised upon a critique of Scripture); Tractatus de Intellectus Emendatione, a methodological presentation of his philosophical system; Korte verhandeling van God, de mensch en deszelfs welstand, a brief summary of his overall philosophy; Renati des Cartes Principiorum Philosophiae, on the philosophical tenets of René Descartes; Compendium Grammatices Linguae Hebraeae, a Hebrew grammar; Tractatus Politicus, an unfinished political treatise; Apologia para justificarse de su abdicacion de la sinagoga, a defense of his departure from traditional Judaism; and various epistles. He wore a signet ring, engraved with the Latin word “Caute” (“Caution”) and the image of a thorny rose, to mark his correspondence. In 1670, he moved to neighboring The Hague, where he was highly esteemed by distinguished professors, diplomats, and authors. He died of consumption (tuberculosis), probably aggravated by silicosis contracted from inhaling fine glass dust (crystalline particles) at his workbench, in The Hague, and was buried in the cemetery of the New Church on the Spuy; he remained unmarried and childless. His few possessions, including his library comprising about 160 books, were sold at auction. His collected works were posthumously published as Opera Posthuma. For almost a century after his decease, he was misconstrued, mischaracterized, and reviled as a notorious atheist and Enlightenment philosophers ridiculed his methods, but he was rescued from oblivion by the Romantics, who were attracted to his identification of the divine with nature. In the late 1700s, the Romantic poet Novalis perceptively recognized him as a “God-intoxicated man”. He is remembered today as one of the foremost exponents of rationalism in early modern philosophy and as a precursor of biblical criticism.

Jacob Querido Filosof (Jacob Tzvi/Abdullah Yacoub) (c. 1650–1690 CE) was the son of Joseph Filosof and the brother of Yokheved (a.k.a. “Esther”, “Mikhal”, post-apostasy Aisha), final wife of Shabbtai Tzvi. A native of Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece), he became a successor to Shabbtai. After Shabbtai’s decease in 1676, Yokheved returned to Salonika and purportedly asserted that her brother had received her late husband’s soul. His father and another rabbi, Solomon Florentin, supported his aspirations, which engendered the mass apostasy of a large group of Jewish families in Salonika in 1683 and/or 1686; these converts to Islam, along with the previous proselytes among Shabbtai’s followers, constituted the core of the Dönmeh sect. Jacob assumed the Muslim name Abdullah Yacoub and became the most prominent leader of the Shabbateans, although his leadership style and innovations provoked dissension within the group due to the dissatisfaction of the previous proselytes, who soon opposed his leadership. In 1688, he went on pilgrimage to Mecca with one of his foremost followers, Mustapha Effendi, but died along the return journey in Alexandria, Egypt. Thereafter the schism deepened among his adherents, and some 43 families formed a new subsect, the Jacobites. His principal acolytes controlled the group’s affairs, preserved several relics of him and of Shabbtai, and administered the personal fortune left by the pseudo-messiah. The Jacobites comprised mostly merchants and lower officials, and their subsect survived until the 20^th century.

A native of Kraków, Poland, Moses ben Aaron HaKohen of Kraków (Johann Christian Jacob Kemper) (1670–1716 CE) studied Talmud and kabbalah. He became attracted to Shabbateanism early on and was active among the holy society (havurah kdoshah) of Judah HeHasid. In 1694, he was among those heartened by the prediction of a Shabbatean itinerant preacher (maggid), the former brandy distiller Tzadok ben Shmaryah of Grodno, that Shabbtai Tzvi’s second coming would occur the following year; when in 1695 this prediction proved false, he was deeply disappointed. He soon abandoned his Shabbatean messianic expectations and instead became increasingly receptive to Christian influences. In 1696, he converted to Lutheranism in Schweinfurt (Germany), where he assumed his Christian name. That same year, he moved to neighboring Altdorf, where he became lecturer of Hebrew at University of Altdorf. Between 1696 and 1698 he also worked as a research assistant to the Christian Hebraist Johann Christoph Wagenseil, with whom he resided for a short time and for whom he copied or composed a play for the Purim festival. Around 1698, he migrated to Uppsala (Sweden), where he became lecturer of Hebrew at University of Uppsala. In 1701, he married Anna Strömer. He indited the tripartite Matteh Mosheh, a treatise wherein he attempted to demonstrate the inherent trinitarian doctrine of the Zohar; a Hebrew translation of Matthew; and Me’irat Einayim, a kabbalistic commentary on Matthew (later translated into Latin as Illuminatio oculorum). The central aim of his oeuvre was to prove the veracity of Christianity on the basis of traditional Jewish sources, and to render esoteric allusions exoteric for missionary purposes. He is remembered today as a Christian kabbalist and polemicist.

Barukhiah Russo (Osman Baba) (1676/1677–1720/1721 CE) was apparently of Jewish birth and the son of one of Shabbtai Tzvi’s earliest adherents, Joseph Russo. He assumed the Muslim-Turkish name Osman Baba upon joining the Dönmeh in Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece). Around 1700, he emerged among the Izmirlis (Izmirim) subsect of the Dönmeh and his acolytes proclaimed him the reincarnation of Shabbtai Tzvi. In 1716, his acolytes declared him the divine incarnation. His group, whose members were called Konyosos (in Ladino) or Karakashlar (in Turkish), was deemed the most extreme subsect of the Dönmeh (and thus of the Shabbateans as a whole) and became notorious for its religious nihilism. Barukhiah taught that in the new Torah, the 36 proscriptions punished by spiritual excision (khareit) were now prescriptions. He and his followers were deemed syncretists who desired to amalgamate discrete elements of various world religions. Between 1720 and 1726, his followers embarked upon a missionary campaign to major Jewish communities in Poland, Germany, and Austria, where they provoked a tremendous stir. Branches of Barukhiah’s subsect, from which the Frankists later emerged, were established in several loci. He proved profoundly influential for Jacob Frank, who conceived of Shabbtai as the first Messiah, Barukhiah as the second, and himself as the third and last in the cycle. He died relatively young and his grave became a pilgrimage site for subsect members until recent times. His son succeeded him as leader and died in 1781. Several Dönmeh members participated in the Young Turks’ political reform movement, which originated in Salonika. In 1909, the initial administration that came to power after the Young Turks’ revolution included several ministers of Dönmeh origin, such as the finance minister Mehmet Cavid, a descendant of Barukhiah’s family and one of the subsect’s leaders.

A native of either Buczacz (Buchach, Ukraine) or neighboring Korołówka (Korolivka), Jacob Joseph Frank (Jacob Lejbowicz) (1726–1791 CE) was raised in a family of Shabbateans. In 1730, he moved as a child with his family to neighboring Czernowitz (Chernivtsi). As a schoolboy he was averse to Talmud study and became a traveling merchant dealing in gems and textiles. In this capacity he frequented territories of the Ottoman Empire, where he encountered radical Shabbateans in Smyrna (Izmir, Turkey) and in Salonika (Thessaloniki, Greece) and where he received the moniker “Frank” (commonly applied in the East to Europeans). Around 1740, he joined the Dönmeh sect in Salonika. Around 1752, he proclaimed himself Messiah. That same year, he married in Nicopolis (Nikopol, Bulgaria); a pair of disciples of Barukhiah Russo served as witnesses at his wedding. Sometime between 1752 and 1755, he made pilgrimage to the tomb of Nathan of Gaza in Üsküb/Uskup (Skopje, North Macedonia). In 1755, he returned to Ukraine and founded a sect that inclined to antinomianism and declared certain elect persons exempt from Judaism’s moral law; the sect abjured traditional Judaism in favor of a supposed higher law premised upon the Zohar, and its members referred to themselves as Frankists or Zoharists. They professed an extreme form of kabbalah with a trinitarian conception of the divine, engaged in sexually promiscuous and orgiastic rites, and asserted that the Talmud should be discarded as blasphemous. In 1756, he and his adherents were discovered performing one of their secret rites in Landskron/Lanckorona (Zarichanka, Ukraine), which scandalized the Jewish community, whose leaders denounced them to the local authorities. Jacob and his fellow participants were arrested; as a subject of the Ottoman Empire, however, he was released the following day. He soon converted to Islam and fled to Istanbul (Turkey), and received an estate in Chocim (Khotyn, Ukraine). That same year, his sect was condemned by the rabbinical court (beit din) of neighboring Satanov/Satanów (Sataniv) and excommunicated by a rabbinical assembly in neighboring Brody; the ban was confirmed and extended throughout Podolia (southwestern Ukraine) during a session of the Va’ad Arba Artzot (Committee of Four Lands) in Konstantin (Konstantynow nad Bugiem, Poland). In 1757, the bishop of Kamenetz-Podolsk (Kamianets-Podilskyi, Ukraine), Mikołaj Dembowski, who had taken the Frankists under his protection, seized the opportunity to meddle in internal Jewish affairs and arranged in his see a medieval-style religious disputation between the Frankists and the rabbis, who were reluctant to offend the church dignitaries present and thus offered only a mild reply to the Frankists’ theses. The bishop decided in favor of the Frankists, ordered the rabbis to pay them a heavy indemnity, and further ordered all copies of the Talmud in the bishopric of Podolia to be burned in the city square. In 1758, King Augustus III of Poland issued an edict guaranteeing the safety of the Frankists and granted them a haven in Iwanie (Ivane-Zolote, Ukraine). Jacob promoted himself as the direct successor of Shabbtai Tzvi and Barukhiah Russo, and assured his adherents that he had received new divine revelations, which called for their collective conversion to Christianity. He further portrayed himself as the reincarnation of Shabbtai and even of King David. In 1759, the Frankists secured from the Christian authorities a second disputation with the rabbis, which occurred that summer in neighboring Lemberg (Lviv) under the auspices of the local bishop, De Mikulski; this time around, the rabbis refuted and defeated the Frankists. In the aftermath of the disputation, Jacob and the Frankists were challenged to demonstrate their allegiance to Christianity. That same year, he publicly committed his sectarians to mass baptism and led them into the ranks of Christianity: Jacob was baptized twice, first in Lemberg then in Warsaw, Poland, with King Augustus serving as his godfather. Within a year, more than 500 Frankists had converted to Christianity in Lemberg, and ultimately about 3,000 sectarians converted in Lemberg, Lublin (Poland), and Warsaw. Nevertheless, fellow Christians remained suspicious of the Frankists and their unconventional doctrines. The Frankists continued to practice endogamy, and revered Jacob as their “holy master”. His attempt to pass as a Muslim in Anatolia (Turkey) was discovered and exacerbated suspicions. In 1760, he was arrested on charges of heresy, tried and convicted by a church tribunal, and incarcerated in the monastery within the fortress of Chenstochov (Częstochowa, Poland). During his durance, he developed an aura of martyrdom that enhanced his stature among his adherents. In 1772, following the First Partition of Poland, he was liberated from captivity by the Russian general Aleksandr Ilyich Bibikov and subsequently migrated to Brünn (Brno, Czech Republic), where he lived until 1786, surrounded by his retinue of devotees and pilgrims. He traveled frequently to Vienna, Austria, where he made a favorable impression at the royal court of Queen Maria Theresa of Hungary, Croatia, and Bohemia, who deemed him a disseminator of Christianity among the Jews. Eventually he outlived his welcome and with his hangers-on migrated to Offenbach (Germany), where he occupied a princely palace and dubbed himself “Baron of Offenbach”, and where his sycophants catered to him in a manner befitting a wealthy nobleman. In 1788 and 1789, he suffered attacks of apoplexy but recovered, only to succumb to a final stroke late in 1791. He was succeeded by his beautiful daughter Eva/Eve, known as the “holy mistress”, a prodigal who lived in luxury but whose fortunes dwindled in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815); she was placed under house arrest for bankruptcy and died destitute in 1816. He is remembered today as the most notorious of Judaism’s pseudo-messiahs.

Israel (Anton) Zoller (Eugenio Pio/Maria Zolli) (1881–1956 CE), a native of Brod (Brody, Ukraine), was born into an affluent Jewish family whose living standard declined after the Russian imperial authorities confiscated the family’s textile factory. In 1904, he migrated to Vienna, Austria. Thereafter he migrated to Florence, Italy, where he earned his doctorate in philosophy from University of Florence and also graduated from the local rabbinical seminary. He married Adele (Eidel), daughter of Mosheh Litwak, but she died young in 1917. In 1918, he became chief rabbi of neighboring Trieste, a position in which he served for over 20 years. In 1920, he remarried Emma Miriam (Eva) Maionica, daughter of Enrico Maionica. From 1927, he began commuting to neighboring Padua, where he became professor of Hebrew at University of Padua, a position in which he served for 11 years. While in Padua he wrote an admiring book about Jesus of Nazareth. In 1932, he assumed the additional name Anton in honor of the 700^th anniversary of the consecration of Saint Anthony of Padua—for an orthodox Jew and a chief rabbi, an exceedingly bizarre act deemed politically motivated, opportunistic, and plainly inappropriate by Paduan Jewry. In 1933, he was compelled to Italianize his name to Italo Zolli and joined the National Fascist Party in order to retain his teaching position. In 1938, his teaching qualification was revoked due to Italy’s fascist racial laws. In 1939, he became chief rabbi of neighboring Rome, a position in which he served for five years. Regrettably, he was at odds with Roman Jewry from the outset: he appeared preoccupied with scholarly inquiry rather than pastoral care or communal leadership, and there were disputes over job expectations and salary. He attempted to convince the president of Roman Jewry and the president of the Union of Italian Jewish Communities that the Nazis posed a serious threat to Roman Jewry, and counseled them to cease public functions, shutter administrative offices, eliminate the rosters, disperse community members, distribute financial aid, and reduce the community treasury. In 1943, after the fall of fascist dictator Benito Mussolini, the Nazis occupied Rome; under pressure from friends, Israel deserted the Jewish community, sought refuge in the Vatican under the auspices of Pope Pius XII, and ultimately hid in a number of places in Rome and in Vatican City. While in hiding he satisfied, with timely contributions from Roman Catholic organizations and parish priests (and from the pontiff, whose assistance ultimately proved superfluous), the ransom—50 kg (110 pounds) of gold in 24 hours, under penalty of deportation to Germany—that the Nazis had demanded from Roman Jewry. However, Roman Jewry believed he had received advance warning of the Nazis’ imminent Aktion (act of expulsion and mass murder), which he failed to warn others about and which occurred in October 1943, eventuating in the deportation and extermination of more than 1,000 Jews. In 1944, after hostilities had subsided, he emerged from hiding to reassume his role, but was severely rebuffed by the Jewish community because of his unbecoming conduct at the peak of its peril. That same year, while presiding over synagogal services on Yom Kippur, he reportedly experienced a religious epiphany—a vision of Jesus of Nazareth, clad in a white mantle, in a meadow with bright grass—and discovered within his heart the words, “You are here for the last time”, to which his heart replied, “So it is, so it shall be, so it must be.” A few days later he resigned from the rabbinate without explanation and declined to be appointed director of Rome’s rabbinical seminary. In 1945, he was baptized at the Pontifical Gregorian University and converted to Roman Catholicism (along with his wife), assumed his Christian name (in tribute to Pope Pius XII, born Eugenio Maria Giuseppe Giovanni Pacelli), and returned to the Vatican (his daughter Miriam converted in 1946). Following his conversion, which scandalized the Jewish community, some 4,000 Jews gathered in the Great Synagogue of Rome (Tempio Maggiore di Roma) to reaffirm their faith in Judaism in a demonstration intended to reject his actions; speakers denounced the “traitors who sometimes arise in our midst”. His former coreligionists ascribed base motives to his apostasy and conversion, which caused a sensation and elicited global interest. When asked during an interview why he had exchanged Judaism for Christianity, he replied: “But I have not given it up. Christianity is the completion or crown of the Synagogue. For, the Synagogue was a promise, and Christianity is the fulfillment of that promise. The Synagogue pointed to Christianity: Christianity presupposes the Synagogue. So you see, one cannot exist without the other. What I converted to was the living Christianity.” After WWII, he was accused of relinquishing to the Nazis the list of Roman Jews and of thereby being directly responsible for their extermination; others absolved him of surrendering the list but blamed him for not destroying it. In 1945/1949, he became professor of Hebrew and Semitic epigraphy at University of Rome (Sapienza) and at the Pontifical Biblical Institute (Biblicum). He indited Israel: Historical-Religious Studies; The Nazarene; Antisemitism; Christus; The Psalter: New Translation and Commentary; Judaism; From Eve to Mary; The Psalms; Guide to the Old and New Testaments; The Confession and the Drama of Peter; and Before the Dawn: Autobiographical Reflections. He also composed a translation of Talmud tractate Brakhot, which was published by a Catholic publishing house. Israel believed that: “Conversion consists in responding to a call from God. A man is not converted at the time he chooses, but at the hour when he receives God’s call. When the call is heard, he who receives it has only one thing to do: obey.” In 1953, he organized a conference in Rome on “The Messiah in the Old Testament”; that same year, as a Fulbright Fellow, he delivered a series of lectures at University of Notre Dame in Notre Dame (Indiana). In 1956, he contracted pneumonia and became severely ill before being admitted to hospital, where he reportedly intimated to a nun that he would expire precisely at three in the afternoon on the first Friday of the month; on Friday, March 2, 1956, he received Holy Communion, slipped into a coma, and passed away at 3pm. He died and was buried in Rome in the Campo Verano cemetery. All three of his brothers were murdered by the Nazis during the Holocaust. He had two daughters, Dora and Miriam; his daughter Dora migrated to and died in Brazil, and his daughter Miriam became a psychoanalyst in Rome. He is remembered today as a defector who forsook his flock during its darkest hour, and whose conversion remains a black stain in the lengthy history of Roman Jewry (whose custom is to never mention his name).

A native of Breslau (Wrocław, Poland), Edith Stein (1891–1942 CE) was born on Yom Kippur into an orthodox Jewish family as the youngest of seven surviving children (four of her siblings had died before her birth). Her father Siegfried Stein, owner of a lumber business, died when she was still a toddler. She was sent to the Victoria School in her hometown, became an avid reader, and developed a love of learning. In 1904, despite her traditional upbringing and admiration of her mother Auguste Courant Stein’s devout faith and religiosity, she became an atheist. She studied first at Silesian Friedrich Wilhelm University in her hometown, then in Göttingen (Germany) at Georg August University of Göttingen. In 1915, during WWI, she trained to become a volunteer Red Cross nurse’s aide and worked in the typhoid ward of a hospital for infectious diseases in Mährisch Weisskirchen (Hranice, Czech Republic). In 1916, she moved to Freiburg im Breisgau (Germany), where she completed her doctoral dissertation Das Einfühlungsproblem in seiner historischen Entwicklung und in phänomenologischer Betrachtung (The Empathy Problem as It Developed Historically and Considered Phenomenologically) and graduated with a doctorate in philosophy from Albert Ludwig University of Freiburg. There she also joined the faculty as a teaching assistant to Jewish philosopher Edmund Husserl, founder of the philosophical school of phenomenology, and helped edit his manuscripts. In 1917, her dissertation was published as Zum Problem der Einfühlung (On the Problem of Empathy). In 1919, her postdoctoral aspirations were obstructed because she was a woman. As a philosopher, she was categorized as a realistic phenomenologist. Perhaps ironically, her philosophical studies led her to second-guess her atheism. In 1921, while visiting a Lutheran friend in the summer, she became drawn to Christianity after reading overnight The Book of Her Life, the spiritual autobiography of Carmelite nun and mystic Teresa of Ávila. In 1922, she was baptized into the Roman Catholic Church; her elderly mother was quite disturbed and felt betrayed by her apostasy. From 1923–1931, she taught at the Dominican training institute for women teachers, St. Magdalena, in neighboring Speyer. In 1932, she became a lecturer at the German Institute for Scientific Pedagogy in neighboring Münster, but was compelled to resign when the Nazis passed anti-Semitic legislation requiring civil servants to possess Aryan certificates in 1933. That same year, she attempted to influence Pope Pius XI to issue a special encyclical against anti-Semitism and to openly denounce the Nazi regime; in her private letter to the pontiff, she besought him to speak out and “put a stop to this abuse of Christ’s name.” Her appeal received no response, but the pope did send her a papal blessing for herself and her family. She soon entered the Discalced Carmelite monastery St. Maria vom Frieden (Our Lady of Peace) in neighboring Cologne. In 1934, she received the religious habit as a novice and assumed the Carmelite monastic name Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Teresia Benedicta a Cruce). She indited Endliches und ewiges Sein (Finite and Eternal Being), a metaphysical work that sought to synthesize the discrete philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and Edmund Husserl; Kreuzewissenschaft: Studie über Joannes a Cruce (The Science of the Cross: A Study of Saint John of the Cross), a phenomenological treatise on Spanish mystic St. John of the Cross; and Aus dem Leben einer Jüdischen Familie (Life in a Jewish Family), an (incomplete) autobiography. She also translated from Latin into German Thomas Aquinas’ De Veritate (On Truth). Just prior to the Kristallnacht (Night of Broken Glass) pogrom, she wrote in a letter that “I cannot help thinking again and again of Queen Esther, who was taken from her people for the express purpose of standing before the King for her people. I am a very poor and helpless little Esther, but the King who chose me is infinitely great and merciful.” In 1938, she and her older sister Rosa (also a Catholic convert, and an extern sister) were secretly transferred for their safety to the Carmelite monastery in Echt, the Netherlands, where she taught Latin and philosophy to fellow sisters and to students within the community. She became convinced she would not survive WWII, requested permission from her prioress to offer herself to Jesus as “a sacrifice of atonement for true peace”, and even trained herself for life in a concentration camp by enduring cold and hunger following the Nazi invasion of the Netherlands in 1940. Nevertheless, she urgently applied for a Swiss visa to transfer to a convent in Switzerland, but refused to leave without her sister, who was unable to make similar arrangements. In 1942, after the Dutch Bishops’ Conference had a condemnation of the occupying Nazis’ anti-Semitic measures read publicly in all churches across the nation, all Catholics of Jewish origin in the Netherlands (some 244 persons, previously exempted from persecution) were arrested by the Gestapo. Stein reportedly told her sister, “Come. We are going for our people.” The siblings were imprisoned at the concentration camps in neighboring Amersfoort and Westerbork (where she refused the escape plan offered by a sympathetic Dutch official) before being deported to the death camp in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland), where she and Rosa were murdered in the gas chambers of Birkenau. Auschwitz survivors later testified that she aided her fellow inmates with much compassion. In 1955, the Edith Stein Guild for assisting converts was founded in America. The Archivum Carmelitanum Edith Stein was established in Leuven (Belgium) for the study and publication of her works. In 1987, she was beatified (in honor of which she appeared on a German postage stamp in 1988) by Pope John Paul II, who canonized her as a saint and a martyr of the Catholic Church in 1998, referring to her as “an eminent daughter of Israel and a faithful daughter of the Church.” In 1999, he further declared her one of six patron saints of Europe (the only 20^th-century saint to be so honored). In 2009, her bust was installed at the Walhalla Memorial near Regensburg (Germany). That same year, the International Association for the Study of the Philosophy of Edith Stein (IASPES) was founded, and held its first international conference at Maynooth University in Maynooth (Ireland), to advance the study of her philosophical oeuvre. Edith Stein House in her hometown, Edith Stein Museum in Lubliniec (Poland), the Edith-Stein-Haus in Vienna, Austria, and schools in Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, and Canada are named in her honor. She is the subject of James Hopkin’s novel Winter Under Water and of the feature film A Rose in Winter by director Joshua Sinclair. She is remembered today as a brilliant and original thinker and a sincere convert to Christianity, whose worldly leadership failed and forsook both her and the Jewish people during their darkest hours.

The grandson and namesake of Aaron Lustiger, a rabbi in Silesia (southwestern Poland), Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger (1926–2007 CE) was a native of Paris, France. He was born to Jewish parents who had migrated from Bendin (Będzin, Poland) discretely before and after WWI. He was given no religious instruction and had a secular upbringing. He attended the Lycée Montaigne in Paris, where he first experienced anti-Semitism. In 1937, he was dispatched to Germany to stay with an anti-Nazi Protestant family whose son was among the Hitler Youth; believing that their guest was a gentile, the son showed Aron a dagger and confided that the Hitler Youth intended to kill “all the Jews in Germany during the summer solstice”. In 1939, he was sent with his sister Arlette by their parents to neighboring Orléans as the Nazis were approaching northern France. In 1940, during Holy Week, he was baptized and converted to Roman Catholicism in Orléans, and sought refuge in several Catholic institutions while France was under German occupation. During the Holocaust, the Nazis deported his parents from France: his mother was murdered in the death camp in Auschwitz (Oświęcim, Poland), though his father and his sister survived. He studied literature at University of Paris (the Sorbonne) then entered the Carmelite seminary in Paris and later the Catholic Institute of Paris. In 1951, he visited the State of Israel for the first time. In 1954, he was ordained as a priest and became head of a university parish catering to the Parisian student population. In 1959, he became head of the Centre Richelieu, a position in which he served for 10 years. There he oversaw the training of university chaplains. In 1968, he was appalled by the anarchic, nihilistic student rebellion movement that troubled France and threatened its government. In 1969, he became pastor of the Sainte-Jeanne-de-Chantal parish in the wealthy 16^th borough of Paris, a position in which he served for 10 years. There his renown as a preacher spread, and his sincerity, humor, and intelligence rapidly expanded congregational attendance at Sunday services. In the late 1970s, however, he studied Hebrew and considered leaving France and immigrating to the State of Israel. From 1978, he indited about 20 books, including the autobiography Le choix de Dieu. In 1979, he was appointed bishop of Orléans by Pope John Paul II, a position in which he served for two years. In 1981, he became archbishop of Paris, a position in which he served for 24 years. That same year, he founded Radio Notre-Dame, the French-language Catholic radio station. Thereafter he famously stated, “I have always considered myself Jewish, even if the rabbis do not agree with me. I was born Jewish, and Jewish I’ll remain.” His apparently paradoxical confession generated controversy among those who did not distinguish between ethnicity and religion. In 1983, he was incardinated cardinal-priest of Santi Marcellino e Pietro by Pope John Paul II. He earned a reputation as a champion of interfaith dialogue between Jews and Christians and of ecumenism among Christian denominations, as an outspoken opponent of racism and anti-Semitism, and as a stern critic of capitalism. He cofounded the Yahad-In Unum association, which promotes Jewish-Catholic cooperation, joint social welfare initiatives, and common moral values throughout Europe. He inveighed against the materialism and consumerism that substituted for social cohesion, and dreaded a world wherein money and technology exerted excessive influence over the patterns of daily life. Aron believed that cult lay at the heart of culture—that religion had a meaningful public role to play in society. In Paris he had seven new churches constructed and ordained 200 priests. In the late 1980s, he played a key part in resolving the crisis between the Polish Church and Jewish organizations regarding the Carmelite convent at Auschwitz; he solicited the intervention of Pope John Paul II, who ordered the Carmelites to move in 1993. In 1994, he was named cardinal-priest of San Luigi dei Francesi. In 1995, he was elected a member of the Académie française. That same year, during another visit to Israel, he was publicly denounced by Israel Meir Lau, Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel and a Holocaust survivor, who accused him of betraying “his people and his faith during the most difficult and darkest of periods”; he responded that, “To say that I am no longer a Jew is like denying my father and mother, my grandfathers and grandmothers. I am as Jewish as all the other members of my family who were butchered in Auschwitz or in the other camps.” René Samuel Sirat, former chief rabbi of France, attested that he personally witnessed Aron entering a synagogue to recite the “Kaddish” prayer for his mother. In 1997, he organized a World Youth Day in Paris that attracted more than a million attendees, including the pontiff. In 1998, he was awarded the Nostra Aetate Prize (along with René Samuel Sirat) from the Center for Christian-Jewish Understanding at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield (Connecticut). In 1999, he founded KTO, the French-language Catholic television channel. In 2000, he accompanied the pontiff on his landmark trip to the Holy Land. In the 2000s, he visited New York City and received a blessing from the Bobover Rebbe. In 2005, he resigned as archbishop of Paris (and became archbishop emeritus of Paris). In 2006, he visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, where he encountered Jewish and Christian interfaith leaders and delivered a public lecture. He died of bone and lung cancer in a Parisian hospice after a period of illness and was buried in the vault of the archbishops at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. His funeral was attended by some 5,000 people; when his remains were raised prior to entering the portal of the Cathedral, soil from the Land of Israel was placed upon his coffin and his cousin, the historian Arno Lustiger, led the recital of the “Kaddish” prayer on his behalf. His epitaph, viewable in the Cathedral’s crypt, includes the assertion: “I have remained Jewish as did the apostles”. Upon his decease, the World Jewish Congress lauded him as “a shining example to those who want to foster mutual respect and understanding between religions and cultures.” The Petit-Pont-Cardinal-Lustiger bridge near Notre-Dame Cathedral, the Aron Jean-Marie Lustiger Garden at the Abbey of Saint Mary of the Resurrection in Abu Ghosh, and the new “Jean-Marie” bell of Notre-Dame Cathedral were named in his honor. In 2013, a biopic of him, Le métis de Dieu (The Jewish Cardinal), was posthumously released. He is remembered today as a remarkable bridgebuilder who embraced his dual identity and refused to relinquish his Jewish heritage, and as a conservative traditionalist who led France’s 45 million Catholics for almost a quarter of a century.

Jewish apostasy is complicated by the dualistic nature—racial and religious—of Jewishness. When a (hereditary, non-converted) Jew apostatizes, he or she forsakes the faith yet remains a member of the Jewish race and thereby part of Jewry, even though not a practitioner of Judaism; i.e., although the Judaic identity has been renounced, the Jewish identity is retained. Jewish tradition also maintains that a Jew possesses a Jewish soul (nefesh/n’shamah), which outward conversion cannot alter. Per halakhah, an apostate remains a Jew, with his or her apostasy deemed a grievous sin; the offspring of an apostate mother is a Jew and a marriage between a pair of apostates or an apostate and a Jew is halakhically valid.

The individual’s motivation and attitude also factor into the Jewish perception of apostates, whose intentions and ambitions are always questionable. When it comes to an apostate’s sincerity, the litmus test is whether he or she goes on to denigrate Jewry. Those apostates who renounced then denounced thereby betrayed their own religious insecurity and very likely the impure motives for their desertion and/or conversion. Those secure in their new faith are highly unlikely to expend energy, effort, and time nursing grudges and grievances against their old one.

Apostasy is most troubling to Jews for pragmatic reasons, since it entails two key perils: the physical threat typically posed by aggrieved and influential apostates post-apostasy, and the spiritual threat posed by apostates whose example can dispirit their former coreligionists.

In the classical era, the apostates were elites eager for power and position, excepting the sincere convert Saul of Tarsus. In the medieval era, it was perhaps the prevalence of philosophy and logic that engendered hatred of the Talmud, with its myriad debates over picayune minutiae and its aggadic legends; Moses Sephardi’s model of anti-Talmudism was iterated and further developed by those who followed him, and as a wayward chief rabbi Abner of Burgos set a dangerous precedent for other Jewish leaders who, like him, should have never occupied leadership positions in the first place. The Iberian Peninsula—owing to the proximity and mutual familiarity of its rival faith communities (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam)—proved to be a religious crucible that continually engendered polemics and, much too often, malicious hatemongering. The medieval apostates’ continual and fanatical anti-Talmudism—and the dreadful persecutions that ensued—contributed to Jewry’s alternative emphasis on mysticism, which served as the fecund undercurrent for the kabbalists, the Shabbateans, the Dönmeh, the Frankists, and the Hassidim. In the modern era, Shabbatean mysticism and messianism expedited conversion to Islam or Christianity; in parallel, rationalism, science, and secularism were also salient factors that stimulated apostasy.

Had they lived in another time and place, Moses ben Aaron HaKohen of Kraków would have been performing priestly duties in the Temple in Jerusalem, with Levitical assistance from the likes of Solomon HaLevi and Aron Lustiger (a Levite as well, per his Jewish father). Some apostates, like Elisha ben Avuyah, Nicholas Donin, Jacob Filosof, and Barukhiah Russo, were misled by sectarianism. Some converted late in life, others early on: Abraham Senior may have been as old as 80; Abner of Burgos was perhaps 60; Moses Sephardi 44; Aron Lustiger just 14. Some apostatized after reportedly beholding visions—Abner of Burgos and Israel Zoller. Some, like Nicholas Donin, Antonius Margarita, and Jacob Frank, were so refractory by nature that they proved disloyal even to their adopted religion.

Jewish apostasy arose under two fundamentally disadvantageous paradigms: when Jews were conquered and occupied in their ancestral homeland, and when they became diasporic minorities. In the final analysis, there can be no denying apostasy’s direct connection to oppression and persecution on the one hand, and to opportunism and ambition on the other: the less anti-Semitism there is in any given society, the less fear and resorting to expediency among its Jews and, consequently, the fewer apostates. When Jews are protected or in the majority (as in the State of Israel), the phenomenon of apostasy is all but unknown.

* For the prior article on this topic, please visit Jewish History: The Apostates (Part 1/2: Classical & Medieval).