Zionism/The Reformation
§4. The Reformation
The invention of printing, the establishment of the Spanish Inquisition, the translation of the Bible, and the Reformation were great events which acted and reacted on Jew and non-Jew alike. The work of the Reformers was furthered by the Rabbis, who helped and taught the Bible translators and Protestant Reformers. With the spread of the Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, religious enthusiasm, coupled with mysticism of an extravagant type, became increasingly prevalent in England, Holland, Denmark, and Germany.
The leading Protestant theologians were on terms of intimacy with Jewish scholars, and searched the Hebrew scriptures with great care and zeal. Sects such as the Anabaptists and Independents became more and more Jewish in their line of thought. ... Books were written with a view to reconcile the Jewish and Christian beliefs as to the Messiah. At the time of the return of the Jews to England (1655), several Christians declared themselves to be Messiahs of the Jewish nation and imagined a Jewish kingdom of which they were to be the King. Many kept the Jewish seventh day Sabbath, and we are told of certain Quakers called Sabbatharii, that they were so pious that they killed a cat for eating a mouse on Saturday. Tovey tells us that the Anti-Semites of the time declared that the Jews saw in Cromwell their Messiah.[1]
This Messianic extravagance had its counterpart among the Jews in a renewed belief in quite a series of pseudo-Messiahs; but these, instead of being merely unsuccessful leaders of Jewish rebels against their oppressors, were now men who numbered distinguished Gentiles among their friends or followers and had diplomatic relations with the princes of their time. Their resistless call to their adherents was the announcement that they would bring Israel back to the Promised Land. Nor was it only mystics or impostors that cherished this hope. Thus Joseph Nasi, Duke of Naxos, a Turkish statesman, originally a maranno fugitive from Portugal, persuaded Sultan Soliman II in 1563 to give him Tiberias and the neighbourhood for colonization by the Jews.[2] He introduced the mulberry and culture of silk into Palestine, and started a trade in cloth with Venice. He invited all persecuted Jews, especially in the Papal States, to become farmers or artisans in the new Jewish community. And, although his particular colony had no great success, it was undoubtedly the first practical step to the repopulation of Palestine by the Jew.
Side by side with those colonists, there came to northern Palestine a number of mystics and legists impelled by a religious craving, and seeking to forget the horrors of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal. Schechter, in his Studies in Judaism,[3] paints a vivid picture of these pilgrim fathers in a chapter entitled 'Safed in the Sixteenth Century'. He translates the words of one of the greatest of them, Rabbi Joseph Caro:
After nearly fifteen hundred years of living in the exile and persecution, God remembered unto his people his covenant with their fathers, and brought them back from their captivity, one of a city and two of a family, from the corners of the earth to the land of glory, and they settled in the city of Safed, the desire of all lands.
Safed was preferred to Jerusalem because both the Jews and the Turks of Jerusalem were at the time more exacting and even hostile to alien immigrants. The Jewish community in Safed soon grew to over a thousand families and exceeded that of Jerusalem; and its spiritual wealth—for it was famous for its Kabbalists—was a greater magnet than the importance of its wool trade. The distinction between the business or agricultural Jew and the scholar or saint, who cares nothing for material gain, and is satisfied with his share of the Halukah provided by the charitable Jews of Europe and America, has subsisted to this very day.