Coitus Interruptus in and I Came This Da

Coitus interruptus in And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
Paweł Maciejko
— I am not talking of a God whose imperfection is the imperfection of the

ideas humans have about Him, but rather of one whose imperfection is
His own most crucial, immanent attribute. He is a God who is restricted in
his omniscience and omnipotence, who errs when predicting the future of
his own creations, who can get frightened by the consequences of his own
actions. He is a... crippled God, whose designs exceed His powers and
who does not understand it at first. A God who created clocks, but not the
time they measure. He created systems or structures that were meant to
serve specific purposes but have now overstepped and betrayed them.
And He created eternity, which was to have measured His power, and
which now measures His unending defeat.
— I don't know of any religion that fits this description. Such a religion has
never been... needed.
Stanisław Lem, Solaris
Sometime in late 1724, a traveler by the name of Moses Meir Kamenker set
out on a journey from his home town of Żółkiew in the Polish-Lithuanian
Commonwealth. Moses Meir was an itinerant peddler of books and
manuscripts, associated with the Żółkiew beit midrash – an important center of
Kabbalistic study that was one of the main loci for the dissemination of
Sabbatian esoteric lore in Europe. It was here that the notorious heretic
Hayyim Malakh had taught before his departure for the Land of Israel in 1700,
the year in which – together with Rabbi Yehudah Hasid – he became a leader
of a movement aimed at the establishment of a mystically inspired Askenazic
settlement in Jerusalem. This project failed and none of its leaders ever
returned to Poland; however, for the next quarter of a century Malakh’s
disciples (some of whom accompanied him to Israel and returned to their
ii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
homes after the failure of the enterprise) continued to maintain their presence
in Żółkiew. During the very same year in which Moses Meir Kamenker
departed on his journey, one of Malakh’s disciples, Feishel of Złoczów, caused
a furor by publicly confessing his faith in the messianism of Sabbatai Tsevi.
Feishel was a well-respected Torah scholar, famed for knowing the entire
Talmud by heart and for his extreme ascetic piety. He was also Kamenker’s
brother-in-law.1 And he was not the only Sabbatian in the family. Not long
after Moses Meir left his home town, his brother and partner in the book trade,
Leyb Buchbinder, celebrated the birth of a son, Jacob. Receiving the nickname
‘Frank’ or ‘Frenk,’ this son was to become the most famous Jewish heresiarch
of the 18th century and a messianic leader in his own right.2
Moses Meir Kamenker’s family connections to members of the Sabbatian
sect are well attested; the itinerary of his travels also reflects Sabbatian
affiliations. From Żółkiew, he travelled some 600 kilometers south-west to the
Moravian town of Prossnitz, whence he continued to Prague. The former was
the home of the Sabbatian prophet Leibele, the latter had a vibrant Sabbatian
community dating back to the mid-seventeenth century. After a brief sojourn in
the capital of Bohemia, Moses Meir travelled farther west, to Germany, to
arrive, in the spring of 1725, in Mannheim.3 His destination was the beit
midrash, established in that city around 1708 by another group of returnees
from the failed aliyah of Yehudah Hasid and Hayyim Malakh. This group was
led by Yehudah Hasid’s son-in-law, Isaiah Hasid,4 and several others: Eleazar
1 See Jacob Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, Lvov 1870, p. 70; idem, Edut be-Ya’akov, Altona
1756, fol. 50v.
2 The fact that Moses Meir was Frank’s uncle is attested by the printed text of the Prague
1726 herem; see below, n. 32.
3 For Moses Meir’s itinerary see Moses Hagiz, Lehishat Saraf, Hanau 1726, fol. 2r-v;
Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 74.
4 Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 75; idem, Megillat Sefer, ed. David Kahana, Warsaw
1897, p. 108. Kahana censored his edition of Megillat Sefer. I am using the personal
copy of the late Professor Chaim Wirszubski, including his marginalia, which
incorporate the censored fragments on the basis of the only extant manuscript of the
work, Oxford, Bodleian Library, Ms. Neubauer 590 #1723. For a discussion of the
manuscript and its censoring see J.J. Schacter, ‘Rabbi Jacob Emden: Life and Major
Works,’ Ph.D. dissertation, Harvard University, 1988, pp. 7-11; idem, ‘History and
Memory of Self: the Autobiography of Rabbi Jacob Emden,’ Jewish History and
Jewish Memory: Essays in Honor of Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, ed. E. Carlebach, J.
Efron and D. Meyers, Hanover and London 1988, pp. 428-452.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus iii
Konic, Zalman of Nikolsburg, and Nathan Neta of Hagenau. The Mannheim

beit midrash acquired the name Chassidim Schule and became a center of
pietistic religiosity; according to a Christian source its members ‘gathered
every day, fasted, lamented greatly, and made such great repentance that they
were shedding bloody tears’.5 The same source mentions that one day in the
second decade of the 18th century, the rabbi of the community stated that full
atonement might be achieved only through faith in the Father, the Son, and the
Holy Spirit. This, according to the source, angered other Jews in the
community and caused the downfall of the study hall; most of its members
were said to have left Mannheim for Poland.
The accuracy of the testimony regarding Trinitarian beliefs being
propounded in the Mannheim beit midrash cannot be verified; if it is true, it
might attest to the fact that some form of the Sabbatian doctrine of the triune
Godhead was taught there and was misunderstood or misrepresented by the
Christian observer. The news about the downfall of the institution is most
surely exaggerated; it is certain that Isaiah Hasid was still its leader during
Moses Meir’s visit to the city. I have not managed to reconstruct the exact
unfolding of events after the arrival of the visitor from Podolia. It appears that
at some point Kamenker approached the wrong person: instead of making
contact with a Sabbatian, he spoke to a wandering opponent of the sect. This
person, in turn, reported Moses Meir to a community official from Frankfurt
who happened to be in Mannheim at the time. Kamenker was lured to
Frankfurt and detained;6 his bags were searched and a number of manuscripts
5 Johann Christian Callenberg, Neunte Fortsetzung seines Berichts von einem Versuch
das arme jüdische Volck zur Erkäntniss der christlichen Wahrheit anzuleiten, Halle
1734, pp. 84-85. The place names in the printed version of Callenberg’s accounts are
coded; this one is referenced as ‘Aii’. According to the manuscript key housed in the
archives of the Frankesche Stiftung in Halle, Aii refers to Fürth; Scholem, who had no
access to the key, identified the place as Mannheim; see his ‘Yedi’ot al ha-Shabbeta’im
be-Sifrei ha-Missionerim ba-Me’ah ha-18’, in Mehkarei Shabbeta’ut, Tel Aviv 1991,
pp. 609-630, here 614-16. I believe that Scholem’s identification is correct; there seem
to be several other instances in Callenberg’s accounts in which testimonies from Fürth
and Mannheim got confused
6 For a description of Moses Meir’s entrapment see Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 74; for
an attempt to reconstruct the course of events in Frankfurt see Oskar Kwasnik-
Rabinowicz, ‘M. M. Kamenker. Aus einer größeren Studie: “Schabbatianer in Böhmen
und Mähren”’, in Die Juden und Judengemeinden Mährens in Vergangenhei und
Gegenwart, pp. 145-146.
iv And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
confiscated. The rabbinic courts in Frankfurt and Mannheim conducted

investigations and interrogated several members of the Mannheim community.
Under threat of excommunication, these people testified that Moses Meir had
brought Rabbi Isaiah Hasid a bunch of Sabbatian works; Rabbi Isaiah was said
to have studied these writings during the reading of the Torah in the synagogue
and to have made no effort to conceal his belief in Sabbatai Tsevi.
The rabbinic authorities finished collecting the testimonies on June 22,
1725 (11 Tammuz 5485).7 Several weeks later, on July 11 (1 Av), the
Ashkenazic beit din of Amsterdam delivered a public proclamation concerning
the matter. It issued a ban of excommunication on Moses Meir and the entire
Sabbatian sect (kat ha-ma’aminim). In early September, similar proclamations
were issued by the batei din of Frankfurt and the triple community of Altona,
Hamburg, and Wandsbeck. The three bans were printed and circulated in other
Jewish communities throughout Europe.8 Despite some minor discrepancies,
they all focused on the same central points. First, although the only person
mentioned by name in the texts of the bans was Moses Meir Kamenker, they
all emphasized that he had not acted alone, nor of his own initiative: he was
merely a messenger disseminating teachings of other Sabbatian Kabbalists, and
his case served to reveal the existence of a clandestine network connecting
sectarian communities in several countries. Second, the rabbinic
pronouncements took great pains to emphasize that Sabbatians should be
persecuted without any regard to high communal standing, fame, riches, Torah
scholarship, family pedigree, etc. This stipulation obviously did not refer to
Moses Meir, a man of modest origins and no particular learning, with no
standing in the Jewish world. The investigations must have revealed the
presence of heretics in the very midst of the religious or secular elites; the bans
targeted them – without, however, mentioning any names. Third, the
excommunications made very strict demands that any Sabbatian expressing a
willingness to leave the sect be treated with the utmost suspicion and be
required to obtain a written affidavit confirming their repentance signed by
7 Excerpts from the testimonies were printed by Emden in his Beit Yehonatan ha-Sofer,
Altona 1762, fol. 4v; the full text of the testimonies, letters, and proclamations
pertaining to the investigation can be found in [Josef Prager], Gahalei Esh, Oxford,
Bodleian Library. Ms. 2186, Vol. I, fols. 70r-129v.
8 The texts of the bans were reprinted, together with a commentary, by Scholem in
‘Khruzei “Hevyah de-Rabbannan” neged Kat Shabbatai Tsevi’, in his Mehkarei
Shabbeta’ut, pp. 600-608.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus v
three recognized rabbinic authorities (ga’onei erets). This point might have
been related specifically to the head of the Mannheim beit midrash, Isaiah
Hasid, who upon his return from Jerusalem had sworn that he had renounced
his faith in Sabbatai Tsevi, and yet continued to preach Sabbatianism.9 Yet it
would seem to have had a wider target: the rabbinic authorities had apparently
realized that some ostensibly orthodox Jews were, in fact, members of a pan-
European heretical underground, and that Sabbatians routinely dissimulated
when confronted with accusations of their heretical belief. The proposed
solution was the externalization of the anti-heretical campaign: instead of
confining it to the jurisdiction of just one rabbi or one beit din, the authorities
attempted to create a supracommunal front against the Sabbatians. The bans
were issued almost simultaneously by three important communities in three
different countries, and included the demand that every repentant Sabbatian
gain confirmation of his repentance from three different rabbis; clearly, the
issuers of the excommunications wanted to avoid situations in which a
particular community tried to sweep the heresy in its midst under the carpet, or
where a local rabbi supported Sabbatianism, thus enabling its dissemination in
his community.
Although they identified the thrust of Sabbatian activity as the
dissemination of heretical teachings, the rabbinic authorities did not want to
engage in polemics with the ideas expounded in the manuscripts distributed by
Moses Meir. The titles of these works or the names of their authors were not
mentioned in the bans, and the printed texts of the excommunications gave no
information concerning their content. The manuscript testimonies collected
during the Mannheim investigation, however, were richer in detail. Thus,
Moses Meir was said to have given Rabbi Isaiah Hasid letters and other
heretical writings he had received from Leibele Prossnitz and ‘Rabbi Jonathan
of Prague’; he was said to have lodged with these individuals during his
sojourns in Prossnitz and Prague respectively.10 Among the writings were a
commentary on the Song of Songs and some ‘exegetical tracts’ composed by
Rabbi Jonathan, as well as a letter by Leibele Prossnitz signed ‘Joseph son of
Jacob’, thus implying that the signatory claimed to be the messiah of the House
9 Emden, Edut be-Ya’akov, fol. 66r; see Me’ir Benayahu, “‘Ha-Havurah ha-Kedoshah”
shel Rabbi Yehudah Hasid ve-Aliyata le-Erets Yisra’el,’ Sefunot 3-4 (1960), pp. 131-
179, here 166-7.
10 Hagiz, Lehishat Saraf, fol. 3r.
vi And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
of Joseph.11 Leibele was known to be a Sabbatian already from the late

seventeenth century, and the fact that a satchel full of heretical material
contained some his writings was probably not that surprising. Much more
shocking must have been the discovery of Sabbatian texts attributed to ‘Rabbi
Jonathan of Prague’. The designation clearly referred to Rabbi Jonathan
Eibeschütz, the rabbinic prodigy who was garnering growing fame in the world
of Jewish learning at that time. In the early 1720s Eibeschütz did not yet hold
any official position, but his profound knowledge of both esoteric and exoteric
lore, as well as the charismatic style of his preaching, were said to draw
hundreds of students, who flocked to Prague from distant countries to study
with him. Until the time of Moses Meir’s trial, Eibeschütz had not published
anything and there were no known manuscript works circulating in his name.
Among the writings discovered in Moses Meir’s satchel was a letter signed by
Eibeschütz and addressed to Rabbi Isaiah Hasid; the writer of the letter
implored the addressee not to publicize the secrets transmitted by Kamenker.12
Other writings in the bag attributed to (but not signed by) Eibeschütz were
Kabbalistic in nature. Upon reading these writings, Rabbi Isaiah Hasid (who
either knew or surmised that they, too, had been composed by Eibeschütz)
made a statement to the effect that the Holy Spirit had rested upon Rabbi
Jonathan, who revealed mysteries deeper even than those revealed by Isaac
Luria.13
Most of the testimonies collected in Mannheim attributed the confiscated
works to Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz. Sources from a considerably later period
mention that Eibeschütz had composed a Kabbalistic-Sabbatian commentary
on the Song of Songs. It is likely that this was one of the manuscripts found in
Moses Meir’s satchel, but no known copies of the work are extant today and it
is impossible to say anything conclusive about its content. On September 11 (4
Tishrei) 1725, Rabbi Ezekiel Katzenellenbogen, the chief rabbi of the Triple
Community (and the main signatory of the anti-Sabbatian ban issued in that
community five days earlier) wrote a letter to the most ardent heresy hunter of
that time, Rabbi Moses Hagiz, to enlist his aid in the eradication of the
heretical texts found in Moses Meir’s possession. Among the texts intercepted
11 Leibele’s letter to Isaiah Hasid can be found in Emden, Beit Yehonatan ha-Sofer, fol.
4v; Isaiah’s letter to Leibele in idem, Sefer Hitabbkut, Lemberg 1877, fols. 22v-23r; see
Benayahu, “‘Ha-Havurah ha-Kedoshah”, p. 166.
12 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 67r.
13 Emden, Beit Yehonatan ha-Sofer, fol. 4v.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus vii
in Mannheim, he singled out one ‘which begins with the words “And I came
this day unto the fountain [Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin]” (Gen 24:42).’ He
stated that the author of the text was Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz and declared
that the all copies of the work that were in circulation should be immediately
burned.14 However, Katzenellenbogen was unwilling to attack Eibeschütz
publicly, mentioning stoically that ‘greater than him have fallen and crumbled’
and that ‘there is nothing we can do to him’.15 According to a much later
account by Rabbi Jacob Emden, the three batei din that issued the bans knew
very well that at least some of the manuscripts distributed by Moses Meir had
been composed by Eibeschütz, and the rabbis considered mentioning his name
in the texts of their bans; eventually they decided against it out of a reluctance
to offend his powerful family and a fear of rich supporters of his living in their
communities.16 At Katzenellenbogen’s request, the rabbi of Frankfurt, Jacob
Cohen Poppers, wrote to his brother in Prague asking that he clarify the matter
of Eibeschütz’s involvement in the Sabbatian movement. The latter inquired of
Eibeschütz and was told that Rabbi Jonathan had indeed gotten close to
Sabbatians in his city, but that he had done it ‘in order to inspect their schemes
and reveal their secrets’.17 For the time being, everyone was (or pretended to
be) satisfied with the answer.
Neither the printed excommunications nor the manuscripts of the
testimonies collected by the batei din mentioned Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin
by title. However, letters and other writings from the period allow us to
identify scattered allusions to this work in various witnesses’ accounts. Around
the time that the Mannheim and Frankfurt rabbinic courts were conducting
their investigations, Eibeschütz’s one-time student, Binyamin Hasid, sent a
copy of the ‘work titled Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin’ from Prague to his father,
Michael Hasid, the rabbi of Berlin.18 Rabbi Michael was also a former adherent
of Yehudah Hasid; by this point in time he had, however, cut his ties to other
members of the group and become a bitter foe of his erstwhile companions,
believing them all to be Sabbatians.19 In 1714 he composed a circular epistle,
calling upon rabbis in all countries to unite against the Sabbatian sect and to
14 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 54v.

15 Ibid.
16 Emden, Sefer Hitabbkut, fos. 1v-2r.
17 Ibid., fol. 1v.
18 Ibid., fol. 1r.
19 See Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 72.
viii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
embark upon a public campaign against the heretics.20 Three years before the
eruption of the Mannheim affair he wrote another letter, in which he argued
that the Sabbatians were not merely innocents who held erroneous beliefs
(similarly, for instance, to Rabbi Akiva when he believed Bar Kochba to be the
messiah), but rather full-blown heretics upholding teachings that they knew
perfectly well constituted a denial of the Torah, such as the doctrine of the
holiness of sin. In this letter he reiterated his earlier demand that public action
be taken against them.21 Upon receiving the manuscript of Va-Avo ha-Yom
from his son, Rabbi Michael again attempted to create a united front against
the sectarians and to obtain public condemnation of Eibeschütz. Similarly to
Katzenellenbogen, he alerted Moses Hagiz of the matter.22 Hagiz was entirely
on his side and desired nothing more than the launching of a broad campaign
against the Sabbatians. He wrote to the Council of the Four Lands of Poland,
arguably the most important authority in the Jewish world of the period,
exclaiming that the Sabbatian sect was worse than ‘Pharaoh, Goliath the
Philistine, Sennacherib, Nebuchadnezzar, Haman, and Titus… nay, worse than
the snake in the Garden of Eden, for they deny the God of Israel, whom even
the snake had not dared to deny’.23 He did not mention Rabbi Jonathan,
pointing to Moses Meir Kamenker, Nehemiah Hayon, Leibele Prossnitz and
Moses Hayyim Luzatto as the recognized leaders of the sect. Yet he stressed
that the heretics also hid among ostensibly orthodox members of the rabbinic
establishment and that they should be hounded without regard to their honor,
position, or scholarship.24
To Hagiz’s great dismay, the rabbis of the Council failed to respond to his
letter. Shortly thereafter, he wrote to the chief rabbi of Prague, David
Oppenheim, to call for actions directed specifically against Eibeschütz. Like
the rabbis of the Council of Four Lands, the latter ignored Hagiz’s letter.
Worse was to come: a rumor now began to circulate that Oppenheim had
threatened to place under the ban, fine, and report to the Christian authorities
any Jew who besmirched the good name of Rabbi Jonathan. The chief rabbi of
Prague was even said to have contacted Jewish communities in other countries
20 Max Freudenthal, ‘R[abbi] Michel Chasid und die Sabbatianer’, Monatsschrift für
Geschichte und Wissenschaft des Judenthums 40 (1932), pp. 370-385, here 383.
21 Ibid., p. 382.
22 See Hagiz’s letter to Michael Hasid in [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 60v.
23 [Prager], Gahelei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 79v.
24 Ibidem, Vol. I, fol. 81r.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus ix
demanding that they defend his protégé; should they fail to come to
Eibeschütz’s defense out of their own free will, he threatened, they would be
forced to do so by the priests.25 Among the rabbinic authorities of the period,
Hagiz and Michael Hasid were the only ones who advocated the public
exposure of clandestine Sabbatians in general and an attack on a prominent
rabbinic figure such as Rabbi Jonathan in particular. Even Rabbi Jacob Emden
– Eibeschütz’s future arch-enemy – related the following reaction to seeing a
copy of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin:
And I took the aforementioned manuscript from him [Moses Harif of
Pressburg], and looked at it, and studied it. After reading two or three
paragraphs the hair of my flesh stood up (Job 4:15), for it contained many
curses and blasphemies against the word of the Living God and it turned
Kabbalistic mysteries upside down. Nothing like this was ever seen or known
from any heretic or disbeliever of this world. So I said to the rabbi that the
book is the work of heresy and sacrilege and it certainly deserves to be burned,
but I advised him not to make his objections public, because nothing good
would come out of it and it would likely only cause damage.26
The excommunications issued by Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and the Triple
Community must have reached Prague shortly after they were issued.27 There
is no direct testimony as to their effect. Moses Hagiz, in the same letter in
which he recounts Oppenheim’s alleged reaction to the call to excommunicate
Eibeschütz, recounts that in June, when the Frankfurt ban arrived in Prague,
Eibeschütz was ‘almost stoned to death’28 by the crowd in the synagogue.
However, Rabbi Jonathan’s supporters quickly spread the rumor that the
documents arrived from Frankfurt were forgeries, executed and disseminated
by the community’s scribe without its rabbi’s knowledge. Eibeschütz’s father-
in-law, the wealthy Isaac Spira,29 wrote letters to distant communities alerting
them to the alleged forgery and calling for stringent steps to be taken against
25 Ibidem, Vol. I, fol. 129v.

26 Emden, Megillat Sefer, p. 89, with Wirszubski’s amendments. See also idem, Torat ha-
Kena’ot, pp. 87-88.
27 For an overview of the developments in Prague at that time see Alexandr Putík, ‘The
Prague Sojourn of Rabbi Jacob Emden as Depicted in his Autobiography Megillat
Sefer’, Judaica Bohemiae 42 (2006), pp. 53-124, especially 72-75.
29 For Spira, see Emden, Petah Eynayyim, Altona 1757, fol. 16v; Putík, “The Prague
Sojourn”, passim.
x And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
his son-in-law’s detractors. Eibeschütz himself publicly appeared on the

platform of the Prague synagogue, where he cursed the Sabbatians, declared
his innocence, and claimed that the people who had attacked him had done it
out of personal spite. The community was swayed by these explanations and
turned against those who had attacked the rabbi.30
Hagiz equivocates as to whether Spira was the perpetrator of this
fabrication or its victim. The story recounted in his letter does not appear in
any other source and cannot be verified. It is certain, however, that during the
summer of 1725 some anti-Sabbatian sentiment began to be sensed in Prague.
On September 16, 172531 Eibeschütz, together with several rabbinic scholars
and community officials, issued a formal ban of excommunication against the
Sabbatians. The ban expressed
great distress at hearing the news that there have arisen some inciters who…
walk in darkness and tempt the children of Israel to accept the deceitful faith
that causes discord between Israel and their father in heaven. This is the faith
of Sabbatai Tsevi, may his bones be crushed, who raised his hand against the
Law of Moses, became a Muslim, took upon himself everlasting infamy, and
undoubtedly descended into the abyss of the Sheol.32
The signatories of the ban described a scandal in Frankfurt, wherein ‘false
writings’ containing blasphemies against the Lord and His Torah were found in
the possession of one Moses Meir Kamenker; after the discovery of the
writings the ‘sages of the generation proclaimed in the camp of the Hebrews
that anyone who calls himself an Israelite should distance himself from the said
Moses Meir, his associates, and the entire sect of believers in the Muslim
apostate Sabbatai Tsevi, my his name be blotted out’.33 Furthermore, the

31 Under the German version of the signatures in Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, 122v there is a date:
20 August 1725. This seems to be a mistake of the scribe, but it might also suggest that
the Prague ban was drafted already in August, parallel to the excommunications of
Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and the AHU.
32 Ibid., fol. 121v. For the full text of the ban see Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, 121v-122v. The ban
was printed as a broadside in Prague in autumn 1800, in connection with the polemic
against the Frankists in that city. There are some additions and discrepancies between
the manuscript and the printed version. A copy of the broadside is housed at the
National Library of Israel in Jerusalem, a facsimile edition in Václav Žáček, ‘Zwei
Beiträge zur Geschichte des Frankismus in den böhmischen Ländern’, Jahrbuch für
Geschichte der Juden in der Czechoslovakischen Republik 9 (1938), 375.
33 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, fol. 121v.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xi
signatories expressed their anxiety that in their land as well ‘there might be an
individual who will listen to the voices of evil and sinful people and be
deceived by their smooth tongues, which [falsely] attribute [evil] things to
rabbinic scholars.’34 They called Sabbatai ‘a broken gazelle and a dead dog’35
and expressed their agreement with the sages of Frankfurt in declaring that
‘faith in the evildoer Sabbatai Tsevi is false and wrong… and that everyone
who believes in him denies the God of Israel and His Torah.’36 Thus, they
concluded, ‘everyone who has believed in Sabbatai Tsevi is cursed and should
be separated from the community of Israel until he repents for the past.’37
The immediate result of the September 1725 ban was the total vindication
of Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz in Prague and in other central Jewish
communities throughout Europe. Most rabbis accepted his condemnation of
Sabbatianism at face value and the voices openly accusing him of heresy were
silenced for twenty five years – to return, with a vengeance, during the amulet
controversy of the 1750s. Yet there were several peculiarities about the Prague
excommunication. Herem is a highly formulaic genre and most of its
specimens tend to repeat standardized phrases and expressions. As I have
already noted, the Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Triple Community bans
contained the same text with only minor variations. Instead of using the
standard formulas or simply adding their names to this existing text,
Eibeschütz and his co-signers chose to formulate an entirely new version of the
excommunication. This version did not mention the three central themes of the
West European bans: clandestine Sabbatians hiding themselves behind the veil
of ostensible orthodoxy, the call to hound heretics also among the members of
the rabbinic establishment, and the special demands placed upon sectarians
who wished to atone for their past. The first element was replaced with a
general condemnation of known Sabbatians and the last one – with an equally
general call for the repentance of sinners. The second theme did not appear at
all. As in the case of the Frankfurt, Amsterdam, and Triple Community
excommunications, the only person mentioned by name in the Prague writ was
Moses Meir Kamenker, in whose bags the ‘false writings’ had been found. But
the formulation of this point by the Prague document was ambiguous: it might
have been read as the condemnation of the writings and the messenger who
34 Ibid., fol. 122r.

35 Ibid.
36 Ibid.
37 Ibid.
xii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
distributed them, but it might also have been understood as referring to the
unspecified forgers who falsified the writings discovered in Frankfurt. Even
more ambiguous was another point: the signatories repeated the call of the
Frankfurt rabbis to distance themselves from Kamenker, but they emphasized
that the main cause of their own concern were ‘evil and sinful people, [who]
[falsely] attributed [evil] things to rabbinic scholars.’38 This did not refer to
Moses Meir or to any other Sabbatians involved in the Mannheim or Frankfurt
controversy, none of whom was a rabbinic scholar, had attributed anything to
rabbinic scholars, or had himself faced contentious accusations. In the entire
affair, the only rabbinic scholar to whom ‘evil things’ were attributed was…
Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz. Thus, while at the first glance the ban seemed to
be an unequivocal condemnation of Sabbatianism, a closer look suggested that
it in fact targeted those who had slandered the purported author of Va-Avo ha-
Yom el ha-Ayyin. And furthermore: even the condemnation of Sabbatianism in
the Prague writ of excommunication was less unequivocal than it might have
seemed. While the Amsterdam, Frankfurt, and Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbeck
bans attacked Sabbatianism in most general terms, without giving any
description of the history and nature of the sect, the Prague ban went into
particulars: it stated, for instance, that Sabbatai Tsevi has ‘raised his hand
against the Torah of Moses’, ‘descended into the abyss of the Sheol’ or ‘took
upon himself everlasting infamy’. For an external observer, these phrases must
have sounded like definite expressions of the forceful condemnation of the
false messiah. Yet the odd thing is that none of these statements would have
been denied by an ardent Sabbatian. Indeed, all Sabbatians did hold the belief
that their messiah had abolished the Law of Moses, descended into the
kelippot, and consciously taken infamy upon himself; they interpreted all these
elements as essential parts of his mission. Even the statement that ‘everyone
who believes in Sabbatai Tsevi denies the God of Israel and His Torah’ is not
intrinsically objectionable from the Sabbatian point of view, especially if one
treats the expression ‘God of Israel’ as a terminus technicus of the wider
theological discourse, one of the special modes of divinity which is being
juxtaposed and counterpoised to its other modes (I shall have much more to
say about this particular mode of Deity below). Likewise, the dysphemisms
predicated upon Sabbatai Tsevi in the Prague ban happened to be the very
same designations that many Sabbatian writings interpreted favorably. Thus,
38 Ibid.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xiii
for example, the signatories of the Prague writ called Sabbatai Tsevi a ‘dead
dog’. It so happened that Nathan of Gaza and Abraham Miguel Cardoso, the
very first Sabbatian theologians, invoked a fragment of the Zohar Ra’ya
Mehemna in which ‘the Faithful Shepherd’ (Moses) mentions the messiah’s
being ‘like a dead dog’39 and argued that the true messiah, Sabbatai Tsevi,
must also bear this appellation.40
If the content of the Prague ban was peculiar, so was the list of its
signatories. To begin with, several signatures were conspicuously absent from
the document. The ban was signed by eleven ‘elders and vice-elders’ of the
community and by six ‘rabbis and rabbinic judges’. As far as the first category
was concerned, the list was headed by the president of the community (the
Primator or ‘prime elder’), Isaac Simon Lowotitz. Yet the signatures of two
(out of four) other elders, Simon Wolf Frankel (future president of the
community) and Bendet Gumpertz, were missing from the writ of the
excommunication. The rabbinic side was even more startling: the chief rabbi of
Prague, David Oppenheim, did not sign the anti-Sabbatian proclamation.
Instead, the ban was signed by the rabbi of Töplitz, Simhah Poppers, himself a
well-known Sabbatian.41 Another rabbinic signatory, Abraham Fesselburg, was
reported to have declared that if Rabbi Jonathan were indeed found to be a
believer in Sabbatai Tsevi, so would he be.42 Yet another, Rabbi Jacob
Hamburger, ardently supported Eibeschütz during the amulet controversy of
the 1750s.43 Rabbi Mendel (Hirsh) Bunzl, an additional signatory, appears on
the list of Prague Sabbatians published by Emden.44 The same list contains the
name of the elder Moses Ginsburg, one of the eleven elders who lent their
signature to the ban.45 The signatory Aharon Beer Wehle46 did not hold any
39 Zohar III, 125b.

40 Avraham Miguel Cardoso, ‘Iggeret le-Dayyanei Izmir’, in Scholem, Mehkarim u-
Mekorot le-Toledot ha-Shabbeta’ut ve-Gilgulehah, Jerusalem 1974, pp. 298-331, here
305; for Nathan see Scholem Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, trans.
R. J. Z. Werblowski, London 1973, p. 741.
41 Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 121; idem, Shevirat Luhot ha-Aven, Żółkiew 1756, 12r,
36v; Me’irat Eynayyim, Altona 1751, 1v; idem, Beit Yehonatan ha-Sofer, 1v, 2r, 3r,
passim.
42 Emden, Beit Yehonatan ha-Sofer, 3r.
43 Idem, Shevirat Luhot, 39v-40r; comp. Eibeschütz, Luhot Edut, Altona 1755, 11v.
44 Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 121.
45 Ibid.
xiv And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
official function in the community in the 1720s; he, too, was a known
Sabbatian and the head of the family that would become prominent in the
history of the Prague Frankists later in the century. To sum up: there were
seventeen signatories to the 1725 excommunication. We have additional
historical information, beyond the mere fact that they signed the ban and some
similar official documents of the same period, regarding eight of them
(including Eibeschütz). Of these eight, seven were alleged in other
contemporary sources to be Sabbatian sympathizers; the only signatory about
whom we have some background data and against whom no suspicions of
Sabbatianism were ever raised was the president of the community, Lowotitz.
In his discussion of Rabbi Jonathan’s response to the charges of
Sabbatianism during the amulet controversy, Moshe Aryeh Perlmuter has
argued that the rabbi’s defense, published in 1755 under the title Luhot Edut,
hinted at his true faith in Sabbatai Tsevi and that his statements ostensibly
condemning Sabbatians were thinly veiled jabs at his detractors.47 I believe that
all of Eibeschütz’s pronouncements on Sabbatianism, from the ban of 1725 to
Luhot Edut in 1755, reveal a similar pattern: what appears at first glance to be a
vociferous condemnation of Sabbatianism turns out, upon closer examination,
to be a neutral and competent description of Sabbatianism interwoven with a
vociferous condemnation of those who attack Rabbi Jonathan, that is – the
anti-Sabbatians. The Prague ban was phrased in a deliberately ambiguous way.
Anyone who wished to take the text as an outright condemnation of heresy and
wanted to satisfy himself that Eibeschütz was a paragon of orthodoxy could
have done so without twisting the literal meaning of the text. On the other
hand, the ban was sufficiently unusual and abstruse to raise serious questions
about the true intentions of its signatories – if someone desired to raise such
questions, that is.
And questions came. Ten days after the Prague herem was issued, a clearly
vexed Hagiz wrote to Aryeh Leyb Löwenstamm, then serving as the rabbi of
Rzeszów in Poland, and remarked sarcastically: ‘perhaps he [Eibeschütz] tells
the truth when he swears that he does not believe in Sabbatai Tsevi… for he
46 His name does not appear in the manuscript of Gahalei Esh and is present only in the
printed version of 1800. I cannot tell whether it was omitted by Prager or added to the
list at a later date.
47 Moshe Aryeh Perlmuter, Rabbi Yehonatan Aybeshits ve-Yahaso el ha-Shabbeta’ut,
Jerusalem 1947, pp. 149-170.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xv
holds himself to be [a new] Sabbatai Tsevi’.48 Others recalled that a witness

testifying in Frankfurt had revealed that when the members of the sect curse
‘Sabbatai Tsevi, may his name be blotted out [Shabbetai Tsevi yimah shmo]’
by the word YiMaH [will be blotted], they refer to the acronym of the three
messianic names Yinnon, Menahem, Hezekiah,49 thus saying “Sabbatai Tsevi,
messiah is his name”’.50
As Hagiz was well aware, the apparent condemnation of heresy by Rabbi
Jonathan and the ambiguous nature of the Prague ban changed the parameters
of the polemic against Sabbatianism. The confusion created by Eibeschütz’s
statements made it nearly impossible to pronounce a clear judgment, not only
regarding his specific case, but also in other contemporaneous and later cases
of suspected heretics denying the beliefs attributed to them. The earlier
polemicists were aware of the phenomenon of false repentance, whereby
condemned Sabbatians acknowledged their sins and promised to mend their
ways, only to return to their earlier beliefs and actions as soon as the specter of
rabbinic persecution diminished. Yet no accused Sabbatian had allowed
himself to lie to the faces of the authorities while simultaneously winking at his
supporters – and this is precisely what Eibeschütz was doing, at least according
to the anti-Sabbatians. In his letter to Aryeh Leyb, Hagiz called on Polish
rabbis to excommunicate rabbinic students from their country who travelled to
Prague to study under Eibeschütz. Since, he argued, Eibeschütz denied
Sabbatian leanings and was believed by his community, and since the
community’s leader, David Oppenheim, remained silent on the issue, one
could not hope to have him publicly condemned. The anti-Sabbatian camp
therefore needed to adopt roundabout tactics and to undermine Rabbi Jonathan
by placing his prospective disciples under the ban.51 No such ban was ever
pronounced. In fact, the course of action actually undertaken by the rabbinic
authorities was exactly the opposite of the one avowed by their own
excommunications. While the rabbinic pronouncements called for a hounding
of heretics regardless of their social standing and family connections, they
explicitly mentioned only Moses Meir Kamenker and suppressed any reference
to Rabbi Jonathan and his works. The messenger who distributed the heterodox
tracts was fed to the lions; their author did not suffer any adverse consequences

49 Cf. BT Sanhedrin 98b.
50 Emden, Edut be-Ya’akov, 50r.
xvi And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
and was allowed to get away with a public statement that constituted, at best,
lip service to anti-Sabbatian sentiments and, at worst, only a confirmation of
his heretical beliefs.
The Prague ban essentially closed the early discussion on the nature of Va-
Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin. This early discussion touched upon the character of
the tract, but did not take up the question of its authorship. All the testimonies
from the 1720s that do attribute the work to a concrete author, without a single
exception, identify this author as Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz. Some of the
testimonies allow us to trace the paths of dissemination of concrete copies of
the manuscript that originated from Eibeschütz’s yeshivah in Prague and were
brought to Mannheim (by Moses Meir Kamenker), Berlin (by Binyamin
Hasid), or Lissa (by an anonymous former student of Rabbi Jonathan).52
Doubts concerning the attribution of Va-Avo to Jonathan Eibeschütz arose for
the first time only during the amulet controversy of the 1750s, when the
purported author made a halfhearted and highly ambiguous statement which
was interpreted by some as a denial of his authorship.53 Yet even then, the
question was not seriously debated and no attempt to attribute the book to
someone else was made.54 Some confusion regarding the authorship of the tract
emerged in the 19th century, when several writers attributed Va-Avo ha-Yom el
ha-Ayyin to Jacob Frank.55 While plainly absurd (during the eruption of the
controversy spurred by the discovery of Moses Meir’s manuscripts Frank was
approximately one year old), this attribution is interesting in the context of the
possible impact of Va-Avo upon Frank’s teachings – an issue I shall briefly
touch upon, but not systematically discuss below. Explicit attempts to
challenge the notion of that the treatise was indeed composed by Rabbi
Jonathan appeared only towards the end of the 19th century, and were tied to
efforts to present Eibeschütz as a kind of proto-modern Orthodox rabbi. To the
best of my knowledge, none of the proponents of this position ever made any
52 For Mannheim and Berlin see above; for the Lissa manuscript see ibid., Vol. I, fol.
128r.
53 Eibeschütz, Luhot Edut, Altona 1755, fos. 3r-4v.
54 The point regarding no attempts being made to attribute Va-Avo to someone else was
first made by Moshe Aryeh Perlmuter, see Rabbi Yehonatan Aybeshits, p. 131.
55 See for instance, Peter Beer, Geschichte, Lehren und Meinungen aller bestandenen und
noch heute bestehenden religiösen Sekten der Juden und der Geheimlehre oder
Kabbalah, Brünn 1822-23, Vol. II, p. 333; Hippolit Skimborowicz, ywot, skon i nauka
Jakóba Józefa Franka ze spółczesnych i dawnych ródeł oraz z 2 rękopisów, Warsaw
1866, p. 83.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xvii
historical or philological argument save the plain statement that such a

heretical work could not possibly have been written by the author of the
halakhic masterpiece Kereti u-Feleti. Modern academic scholarship
unanimously agrees that Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is indeed the creation of
Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz; the most comprehensive argument for this
attribution has been made by Moshe Aryeh Perlmuter,56 some additional
evidence was adduced by Yehudah Liebes.57
The scandal that erupted after the discovery of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin
in Moses Meir Kamenker’s satchel had few further repercussions. For the
purpose of an analysis of the content of the tract the most important aspects of
this scandal are the testimonies concerning the early reception of Eibeschütz’s
work. Before any serious debate concerning its content even began, a dozen or
so people who saw manuscripts of Va-Avo noted their first reactions to their
encounter with its text. Although often emotional and of little analytical value,
these early testimonies offer an inkling into the characteristics of the tract that
were most striking to its first readers. The sentiments that stand out are
perplexity, astonishment and shock. Thus, the rabbi of Pressburg, Moses Harif,
claimed that he found the text ‘bizarre and appalling’.58 Upon skimming the
tract, Rabbi Jacob Emden exclaimed that the hair on his entire body stood up.59
In another place, he mentioned that when he began reading it, he became very
frightened and his heart reeled60 at seeing such obscenity.61 The conviction that
the work was radical and novel in nature was shared by the Sabbatians
themselves. One of them praised the writings of Rabbi Jonathan as ‘containing
things that no eye has ever seen and no ear has ever heard’;62 several others
noted that Va-Avo revealed mysteries not to be found in the Zohar, Lurianic
writings, or any other Kabbalistic text. 63
The first responses to Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin were markedly different
from the reactions to the emergence of manuscripts or publication in print of
56 Perlmuter, Rabbi Yehonatan Aybeshits, pp. 131-146.

57 Liebes muses that some sections of Va-Avo might have been composed by Liebele
Prossnitz or that Prossnitz and Eibeschütz collaborated on the tract; see Sod ha-Emunah
ha-Shabbeta’it, Jerusalem 1995, p. 344 n. 85.
58 Emden, Megillat Sefer, p. 89, with Wirszubski’s amendments.
59 Ibid; see also idem, Torat ha-Kena’ot, pp. 87-88.
60 Is. 21:4
61 Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 85.
62 Ibid., p. 86.
xviii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
earlier Sabbatian writings, such as the treatises of Nathan of Gaza, Abraham

Miguel Cardoso, or Nehemiah Hayon. In these earlier cases, the ideas
expounded in the written works had entered the world of discourse well before
the texts themselves had become publicly available. Nathan and Cardoso were
unabashed Sabbatians and public figures whose oral teachings were widely (if
not always accurately) disseminated before their written treatises became the
subject of debate. In Hayon’s case, the outrage was directed first and foremost
at the fact that he had dared to disseminate in print Kabbalistic lore known to
be Sabbatian (and believed to have originated from Sabbatai Tsevi himself);64
nobody claimed that his book contained radically novel concepts. This time,
however, the situation was different: regardless of whether the readers of Va-
Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin were zealous anti-Sabbatians, professed impartial
observers or ardent believers in Sabbatai Tsevi, they all seemed to grapple with
a profound sense of puzzlement: for most of its readers, the book was unlike
anything they – for the most part very learned people – had ever seen. And
more: it was unlike anything they had ever thought possible. Emden declared
that ‘nothing like this has ever been seen or known or written by any heretic or
unbeliever in the world’.65 Similarly, Hagiz noted that ‘the book that begins
with the words “And I came this day upon the fountain” is full of falsity and
lewdness that did not come to the mind of any thinker or philosopher, not even
from among the Gentiles, and not even the ancient idolaters.’66 He also
declared that Eibeschütz was ‘one of the unbelievers and heretics who rejected
the very essence [of religion] [kafru be-ikkar].67 The most comprehensive
expression of this line of thought is found in a letter by Rabbi Ezekiel Landau:
This book is that of a complete heretic, who does not merely deny a particular
tenet of belief [kotsets be-neti’ot], but who uproots and destroys the very
fundaments of Jewish faith… I did not find such heresy even among all the
religions of the Gentiles that ever existed… the tract that begins ‘And I came
this day to the fountain’ [is composed by] one who plotted evil against the
Lord, and counseled villainy68 and denied the providence of the Ein Sof. This
is a heresy worse than the heresy of Aristotle and his school, who denied
64 See Liebes, ‘Ha-Yesod ha-Ideologi she-be-Fulmus Hayon’, in Sod ha-Emunah ha-

Shabbeta’it, pp. 49-52.
65 Emden, Megillat Sefer, 89, with Wirszubski’s amendments.
67 Ibid
68 Nahum 1:11
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xix
God’s greatness, saying that He does not influence the events in the sublunar
world,69 but the writer of this tracts denies the providence by saying that [God]
has grown feeble [like a female];70 such a heresy was not professed even by
the ancient pagans. Woe upon the eyes that see it and the ears that hear it and
those who keep silent… he denied the entire faith of Judaism and turned the
plate upside down.71
While the rabbinic accounts quoted here are replete with standard formulas and
Biblical phrases expressing indignation at religious deviance, they also
articulate an acute sense that an invisible line had been crossed. To begin with,
Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is not just un peu vive; it is blatantly pornographic
(in fact, it is possibly the only truly pornographic text ever written in the
rabbinic idiom).72 Furthermore, the ideas expounded in the tract did not seem
to these first readers merely obscene, strange or transgressive; – they seemed
unimaginable. While the book employs a lexicon and conceptual framework
that would be familiar to any student of the Zohar and Lurianic Kabbalah, its
author ventured into areas into which no Kabbalist, Sabbatian or otherwise,
had ever dared to venture. To my mind, it is highly significant that most of the
early commentators on the text (whether friendly or hostile) did not even
mention Sabbatianism in their accounts: in the first testimonies, Va-Avo ha-
Yom el ha-Ayyin was not attacked (or praised) for being an exposition of
Sabbatian theology; as one observer has reported ‘there is no mention [in the
text] of the name of Sabbatai Tsevi, or the expressions such as “Our Lord” or
“AMIR"A” that they commonly use, but it contains an extremely bizarre form
of Kabbalah which undermines the notion of the unity of God.’73 Instead of
treating the work as yet another specimen of Sabbatian theology, Hagiz,
Landau, and several others suggested analogies with pagan philosophy or
ancient idolatry (another anonymous early reader of the tract remarked that it
resembled the teachings of the Sadducees).74 It seems that its first readers saw
69 Probably a reference to the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Mundo, as discussed in the

third part of Maimonides’s Guide for the Perplexed.
70 After BT Berakhot 32a.
71 Emden, Petah Eynayyim, 8v.
72 For the pornographic character of the tract, see Liebes, ‘Ketavim Hadashim be-
Kabbalah ha-Shabbeta’it mi-Hugo shel Rabbi Yehonatan Eybeschits’ in: Sod ha-
Emunah, pp. 103-237, here 107.
73 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, fol. 67v.
74 Ibid., fol. 58v.
xx And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin not an exposition of Sabbatian doctrines but

rather a cosmogonic (or perhaps theogonic) treatise touching upon – and
denying or undermining – three of the classic attributes of God discussed by
rationalistically oriented theology: unity, omnipotence, and providence. I
consider this intuition extremely fruitful as a point of departure for further
reading.
The opening of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is structured as an exegetical
exposition of a fragment of the Zohar. It centers on the Zohar on Parashat
Shemot (Zohar, 2:9a) and reads as follows:
He [Rabbi Shimon] too rose and said: “O YHVH Our God! Lords other than
You possessed us, but only by You will we utter Your name” (Is 26:13). This
verse has been established, but this verse contains a supernal mystery within
faith. YHVH Elohenu, YHVH Our God – beginning of supernal mysteries,
source of all radiant lamps, all kindling. Upon this depends the whole mystery
of faith; this name reigns over all. “Lords other than You possessed us”. For no
one but this supernal name rules over the people of Israel, yet now in exile
another rules over them.75
The fragment from the Zohar is an elucidation of a verse from the Book of
Isaiah – one of the Biblical verses most often invoked and interpreted by the
Sabbatians. The quotation introduces the triad of concepts around which
revolves the entire thesis of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin: the mystery of faith,
the beginning of mysteries, and exile. The avowed goal of the tract is an
inquiry into the ‘mystery of faith’. This Zoharic term was employed by
Sabbatai Tsevi in highly idiosyncratic fashion and came to designate the
personal theophany during which the ‘God of His Faith’ had made Himself
known to the messiah.76 The revelation was a complete novelty, in the sense
that it was not a part of the Torah given on Sinai, was not disclosed to anyone
prior to the messiah, and could therefore not have been attained through the
study of Scripture or through other forms of transmission of the religious
tradition. It was bestowed solely upon Sabbatai Tsevi, who passed it (if indeed
he passed it on to anyone) only to selected disciples. Nathan of Gaza,
Sabbatai’s prophet and chief exegete, was not even sure if he himself was
75 The Zohar: Pritzker Edition, trans. Daniel C. Matt, Stanford 2007, Vol. IV, p. 35. I
have slightly modified Matt’s translation.
76 See Liebes, ‘Yahaso shel Shabbatai Tsevi le-Hamarat Dato’, Sod ha-Emunah ha-
Shabbeta’it, pp. 20-34.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxi
taught it. Later Sabbatian schools vied with each other over competing claims
to have had exclusive possession of the mystery and argued about its meaning;
for now, suffice it to say that, no matter what the exact content of the mystery,
it certainly referred to the identity of the true God. While the Sabbatians never
debated the existence of God, their theological effort was grounded in the
conviction that ‘in exile’ (I shall return to this concept below) His identity had
become fundamentally blurred: those who did not know the mystery of faith
might have confused – or might have been bound to confuse – the true God
with pseudo-deities.
Sabbatian theology presented the knowledge of God’s true identity as a
conditio sine qua non for achieving redemption (or simply as redemption
itself). One of the most important Sabbatian texts preceding Va-Avo ha-Yom el
ha-Ayyin was a small tract titled Raza de-Mehemenuta, the Mystery of Faith.
Contemporaries ascribed it to Sabbatai Tsevi, but current scholarship believes
its author to be Abraham Miguel Cardoso.77 Cardoso claimed to have
possessed the mystery of faith and discussed the concept in his numerous
writings. Since I myself have not received the original mystery of faith taught
by Sabbatai Tsevi to his direct disciples, I cannot be certain whether the
mystery expounded by Cardoso was indeed the same mystery, yet there
appears to be at least one crucial difference – for Cardoso, the mystery of faith
was not a revealed truth that could be learned only through direct transmission,
and the messiah was not the necessary mediator for obtaining it; anyone – at
least theoretically – could discover the secret on his own.
Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin follows the line of thought initiated by
Cardoso: the mystery of faith is a matter of speculative investigation rather
than of transmitted revelation. What is the focus of this speculation? As the
text points out on the very first page, the exposition of the mystery of faith
hinges upon an exposition of the beginning of mysteries. For the purpose of the
present essay, I shall rephrase this as follows: an inquiry into the mystery of
redemption hinges upon an inquiry into the mystery of creation. In order to
learn the identity of the God who may redeem us, we must learn about the God
who created the world. It is important to note that Va-Avo does not simply
presume the identity of the two: the Redeemer may be identical with the
77 See Yehudah Liebes, ‘Mikhael Kardozo – Mehabbero shel ha-Sefer “Raza de-
Mehemenuta” ha-Meyuhas le Shabbatai Tsevi, ve-ha-Ta’ut be-Yihusah shel “Iggeret
Magen Avraham” le-Kardozo’, in his Sod ha-Emunah ha-Shabbeta’it, Jerusalem 1995,
pp. 35-48.
xxii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
Creator, but this is not necessarily so. The claim is structured in epistemic
categories: knowledge of the Creator necessarily leads to knowledge of the
Redeemer, regardless of whether the latter is the same God as the former or
not. Now, since creation is by its very definition accidental, finite, and
dependent on the Creator, aspiring to know the Creator means aspiring to know
a being that is necessary, infinite, and independent. Following the Kabbalistic
tradition, Va-Avo calls such a being the Ein Sof, the one who has no end. The
argument developed in the treatise begins with the question: since the Ein Sof
is infinite, without any end or beginning whatsoever, why does Kabbalah insist
on calling Him the Ein Sof, and not the Ein Reshit, the one who has no
beginning? The answer lies in the idea that the ordo cognoscendi is the exact
inversion of the ordo essendi: the Ein Sof is the beginning of creation, yet we –
who are its conclusion – cognize Him ‘from the end’, ‘from the opposite side’,
as it were. Our vantage point is exactly the opposite of God’s: for Himself, He
has no beginning; for us, He has no end. This line of reasoning is not
particularly original, but its ramification is one of the most remarkable features
of the theology developed in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin: the treatise takes the
idea that knowledge begins where creation ends in its most literal sense: one
who wishes to embark on the path of knowing God must begin from the lowest
aspect of the created world.
Studying creation means studying the actions of God, as opposed to God’s
essence or His attributes. In other words, it means studying God’s will. Yet the
difficulty in understanding the divine will is that it is an infinite will in a
twofold sense. First, God’s will is infinite in the sense that – in contrast to
human will – it bears no subject-object distinction; it is impossible to
distinguish between what is willed and the one who is willing. Second, God’s
will is immutable: there are no things that God once wanted and no longer
wants or things that He did not want at an earlier point and suddenly began to
want. Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin conceptualizes the problem of the infinite
character of the divine will not as an epistemological issue – i.e. the inability of
finite beings to comprehend the infinite – but rather as an ontological question
regarding the relationship between will and thought within the Absolute. In
order to explore this relationship, Eibeschütz borrows from earlier Sabbatian
thought a pair of concepts: the Light that Carries Thought (or she yesh bo
mahshavah) and the Thoughtless Light (or she ein bo mahshavah).
The dichotomy of the two lights was first introduced by Nathan of Gaza in
his Sefer ha-Beri’ah (Treatise on Creation). Nathan’s reasoning is roughly as
follows: Since it is inconceivable that the infinite God exhausts himself in
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxiii
making finite beings, there must be aspects of the Creator which do not, so to
speak, participate in the process of creation. The creation of the world can be
conceived of as a concentration (Nathan is invoking here the Lurianic
metaphor of simsum) of all of God’s thoughts that pertain to the issue of
creation; simultaneously there must also exist thoughts of God that concern
entirely different issues. Indeed, given the infinite character of the Divine
mind, there are an infinite number of divine thoughts that have absolutely
nothing to do with the world and its making. The first aspect of God, the aspect
that is ‘interested’ in creation, is termed ‘the Light that Carries Thought’; the
other, ‘indifferent’, aspect – the ‘Thoughtless Light’. Obviously, it is only the
former that is – to a limited extent – accessible to His creations; we can
cognize God only insofar as He participates in the creation of the world
(another way of saying this would be to say that creation is already a revelation
of some sort and that it might be the only revelation ever given to the created
beings). The Thoughtless Light in Nathan’s writings is similar to the Kantian
regulative idea: it is the horizon of thought which humans can never cross, and
of which we can only say that infinite things extend beyond it. More
importantly, since the creation is tantamount to the concentration of all of
God’s thoughts pertaining to it, all other thoughts of God that fall into the
category of the Thoughtless Light do not contain any inkling of creation. An
infinite part of the Divine mind knows nothing of the fact that His other part is
creating the world; since the creation demands only a minor part of the divine
attention, God in His entirety might not even notice that it is taking place.
Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin builds upon Nathan’s scheme of the two lights,
but combines it with the conviction that our (scil. the creations’) vantage point
is opposite to that of God. This allows Eibeschütz to explore three deeply
paradoxical ideas.
First, since the idea of creation is just one of the infinite number of different
ideas in the divine mind, the creation cannot be thought of as something
primarily important or privileged. To the contrary: in the larger scheme of
things the creation of our reality is so marginal and irrelevant that one might
say that the created world has no purpose or value in and of itself. The imagery
employed in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin to convey this idea is at times openly
scatological (and outrageously blasphemous for mainstream religious
sensitivities): while for us it might seem great and important, from God’s
perspective the process of creating the world resembles defecation; within the
framework of the Creator’s ‘physiology’, it is nothing more than a basic
purification need. Kafka, whose sensibility Scholem considered uncannily
xxiv And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
close to that of the Sabbatians,78 remarked once that we are ‘nihilistic, suicidal
thoughts’ that came to the mind of God when ‘He happened to have had a bad
day’.79 For Eibeschütz, we are God’s excrement.
Second, as noted before, the Thoughtless Light knows nothing of creation –
it is a part of the Divine mind that is indifferent to the world and its making.
This is true for God; for us, the modality of the Divinity that is not involved in
creation is not merely indifferent, but openly hostile. The Thoughtless Light is
not simply devoid of thought: it is a repository of God’s ‘other thoughts’,
thoughts that are not only infinitely alien to our understanding, but that are –
from our vantage point – fixed on the destruction of every created being.80
Seen ‘from beneath’, the creation of the world is a theomachy, in which the
Creator battles His alter egos – aspects of His will that oppose His will to
create. And, given that the Light that Carries Thought is, relatively speaking, a
marginal part of the Absolute, this battle is not an open confrontation between
equal forces, but rather a war of attrition, full of deceptions, tactical retreats,
short-time alliances, and betrayals. In order to create the world, God has to
outwit Himself. Human beings (and especially the people of Israel) have an
important role to play in this subterfuge, and Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is
simultaneously the history of this warfare and a combat manual.
Third, although the Light that Carries Thought is, from God’s perspective,
an infinitely small part of the infinitely great Ein Sof, for us it is still infinite in
comparison to the finiteness of the created world. Seen from beneath, the
creation, the transition from infinity to finitude, is a self-restriction, a kenosis,
of the infinite God. To invoke the equation once formulated by Simone Weil,
the Creator plus the created word is less than the Creator Himself. Or, to phrase
it in the categories employed by the text of Va-Avo itself, the creation of the
world is the exile of the Creator. Sabbatian thought – and perhaps all Kabbalah
and all Jewish theology – is exceedingly preoccupied with the concept of exile:
the idea that the political exile of Israel among the nations is merely an earthly
reflection of the exile of the Shekhinah from the heavenly realms is elaborated
in countless treatises and commentaries. Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin projects
this exilic theme onto the very beginning of all being: exile is not an episode
that occurred at some point of (divine and human) history, but is co-existent
with this very history; there is no (divine or human) history but the story of
78 See Scholem, ‘Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah’, thesis 10.

79 See Max Brod, Franz Kafka: A Biography, trans. R. Winston, New York 1995, p. 75.
80 For a discussion of this point see Perlmuter, Rabbi Yehonatan Aybeshits, pp. 117-8.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxv
exile. In order to create the world, the omnipotent God had to give up his
omnipotence. More exactly, in order to create the world, the omnipotent God
had to become impotent. Quite literally.
Brazen sexual symbolism has been an integral part of the Kabbalistic
repertoire of images since the very inception of Kabbalah. The subject has
attracted extensive scholarship – from the pioneering (often misguided, but full
of interesting insights) book by Jiřzi Langer81 to the recent scholarly studies of
Yehudah Liebes, Moshe Idel and Elliot Wolfson.82 According to scholars, the
sexual symbolism in Kabbalah is based on the general idea of the exact
parallelism of the worlds on high and the material world, in conjunction with
the specific Biblical idea of human beings’ creation ‘in the image, after the
likeness’ of God. Being an image of God, man can study his own anatomy and
physiology in order to understand the fundamental structures of the Divine and
the functional links between them. Combined with the (neo)platonic conviction
of the pan-erotic nature of reality, this idea gave rise to detailed discussions of
God’s sexual organs in the Shi’ur Komah literature and to Lurianic
descriptions of dynamic relationships between different modi of the Godhead
using the terminology of different types of sexual intercourse. While the
Kabbalists were certainly not shy, they were also pious Jews – for the most
part, they preferred not to inquire into the possible Divine equivalents of less
conventional, transgressive or deviant aspects of human sexuality.83 Although
Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin employs the standard Lurianic lexicon, it explores
precisely those aspects of sexuality that mainstream Kabbalah preferred to let
alone or to allude to only through the vaguest of hints: the text discusses anal
intercourse (both homo- and heterosexual), oral stimulation, masturbation
(including mutual masturbation), vaginal penetration from the rear, sex with a
sleeping or comatose partner, penetration with a non-erected penis; it mentions
such aspects of the physiology of sex as, for instance, post-coital loss of
81 Jiřzi Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Prague 1923.

82 The full list of relevant contributions of these scholars would be too long to give here.
See especially Liebes, ‘Zohar ve-Eros’, Alpayim 9 (1994), pp. 67-119; Idel, Kabbalah
and Eros, New Haven and London 2005, Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies in the
Use of Gender in Kabbalistic Symbolism, Albany 1995.
83 The most important exceptions to this tendency are very detailed discussions of incest
in mainstream Kabbalah; see Moshe Idel, ‘The Kabbalistic Interpretation of the Secret
of “Arayot” in Early Kabbalah’, Kabbalah 12 (2004), pp. 157-85; Ruth Kara-Ivanov
Kaniel, ‘Lot’s Daughters and the Mothers of Davidic Dynasty in the Zohar: the Enigma
of the Term “Tiqla”, English Language Notes, 50/2 2012, pp. 113-126.
xxvi And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
consciousness, periodic male impotence, or the distinction between the

lubrication of the vagina [mayim nukbin] and female ejaculation [mayim
zedonim]. Needless to say, all this happens within the Godhead.
Eibeschütz admits that ‘we are not allowed to think about sex between man
and woman, for such thoughts cause arousal’.84 Yet, he continues, ‘everything
that is prohibited in the lower worlds… is the force of unification and
construction in the upper realms.’85 Accordingly, not only does Va-Avo present
the various stages of creation as a series of sexual acts, but it argues that the
exploration (in thought and deed) of various aspects of sexuality is in itself a
redemptive act of mending the world (tikkun olam). The intensity
(obsessiveness?) with which the text delves into sexual themes gives the reader
the feeling that at least some of them were introduced pour épater le bourgeois
(or maybe pour épater les rabbins). Yet the myth formulated in Va-Avo ha-
Yom el ha-Ayyin has its inner discursive logic; I shall try to sketch the main
junctures of its unfolding.
The fundamental principle, as formulated by the tract, is that ‘everything
that is done to create worlds is done only through male and female’.86 Even
though the Ein Sof is, itself, undifferentiated and therefore not gendered,
functionally (that is, for us) it has five masculine and five feminine aspects.
The former reflect the attribute of Grace, the latter those of Judgment. They
constitute together the essence of the Ein Sof, its ‘ranks’ [behinot], which are
‘not yet sefirot’;87 gradually they expand into the wholeness of the sefirotic
Tree. This gradual expansion is both the unfolding of the Divine in the higher
realms (emanation) and the making of the material world (creation).
The awakening of the will to create, the Light that Carries Thought, is
described in terms of sexual arousal (himmum), which is initially stirred by the
female powers of Judgment and then strengthened during an autoerotic act
alluded to by the Talmudic dictum ‘Love squeezes the flesh’.88 The first act of
making the worlds is thus the act of divine masturbation; it is intercourse by-
and-within the Godhead, zivvug mineh u-veh.89 From our vantage point,
84 Va-Avo, 5r.
85 Ibid.
86 5v.
87 5v.
88 BT Bava Metzia 84a.
89 For the idea that the world was created through God’s act of masturbation see Liebes,
‘Zohar and Eros’, p. 81 n. 88 and references therein.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxvii
different feminine and masculine aspects of God stimulate and eventually

copulate with each other; from His own perspective, the aspects are not
distinguished – God arouses and copulates with Himself. The standard
Kabbalistic notion of tsimtsum is described by Eibeschütz as a sexual climax in
which all ten aspects of the Godhead momentarily contract in one place and get
discharged in an act of ejaculation. The contraction takes place at a location
‘where there is something like the root [ketsat shoresh]’ and the discharge is
directed onto one specific point called the ‘spot’ [nekudah].90 From this stage
onward, Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin supplements the set of metaphors based
on different types of sex acts with analogies drawing upon the different stages
of pregnancy. God’s act of masturbation is not a wasteful emission [zera le-
vattalah], as it leads to the fertilization and implantation of the embryo; since
everything happens within the most internal part of the Ein Sof, where each
element is ultimately consubstantial with any other element, the ‘root’ and the
‘spot’ represent both the male and female sexual organs, as well as the embryo
and the section of the uterus to which it adheres.
The author of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin goes to great length to emphasize
that from God’s own perspective the creation is essentially passive; the
indivisibility of thought and will within the Godhead means that it is
impossible to distinguish between God’s conceiving of creation and God’s
making the decision to create. Consequently, many metaphors invoked to
describe the creation are meant to emphasize this passivity: God creates (and
God has sex) by merely gazing, focusing His look. However, from our
perspective, the creation is an act: a transition from the potential to the actual.
Crucially for the understanding of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, this transition
is initiated by the feminine forces of Judgment. Indeed, Eibeschütz explicitly
inverts the classic schematization of the roles of the sexes and declares that ‘as
is well known, the potentiality is considered male, while the actuality –
female’.91 In accordance with this scheme, the autoerotic act of the Ein Sof’s
self-impregnation is initiated by the female aspect of God. Its fruit is also a
female embryo – although the act takes place within the ungendered Ein Sof,
the spot, being ‘more actualized’92 than the undeveloped pre-sefirotic attributes
of Grace and Judgment, ‘can rightly be called a female [nukba]’.93 And, as a
90 4v.
91 3v.
92 Needless to say, ‘more actualized’ from the perspective of creation.
93 3r.
xxviii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
true embryo, from the very outset the spot holds in itself the entire ‘mystery of
the human being’ [raza de-adam]94 and ‘is already a complete countenance or
configuration [partsuf]’:95 it contains the rudimentary forms of all the elements
that will unfold in the process of making of the world. The first, initial
configuration recognizable within the spot is the tripartite configuration of rosh
[head], lev [heart], and yesod [sexual organs].
In order to expound the configuration of the elements within the spot,
Eibeschütz introduces the figures of the Holy Ancient One [Atika Kadisha],
God of Israel [Elohei Yisrael], and Divine Presence [Shekhinah]. Although all
these emblems were used in earlier Kabbalah to depict different modi of the
Godhead,96 their use in Va-Avo is distinctive and requires additional
exposition. The Holy Ancient One is the highest part of the countenance that
takes shape within the spot, its ‘head’. As such, He cannot be cognized or
described; we learn about Him only from the relationships into which he enters
with other parts of the configuration. Atika Kadisha is the hypostasis that is so
close to the root that it is functionally indistinguishable from it.97 Otherwise
put, He is the root as seen from the perspective of the lower levels; at times, the
text of Va-Avo simply calls Him the ‘root’.98 Within the gestational system of
images, the Holy Ancient One is the place where the placenta attaches to the
uterine wall; within the sexual system He is the mouth of the divine phallus
whence the effluence [shefa] flows downwards. He is pure Mercy, above and
beyond the division of Graces and Judgments.
The second level, the vital part of the countenance which emerged in the
wake of the first contraction, its ‘heart’, is called the God of Israel. In the
permanent movement of systole and diastole, He gives ‘measure, tempo, and
nurturance’ to the entire configuration; He ‘assigns and actualizes Graces and
Judgments, mixes them, checks their regularity’.99 If the Atika Kadisha and
Elohei Yisrael emerged from the Ein Sof’s engaging in intercourse with
Himself, their own relationship is also a form of sexual congress; in the words
of Eibeschütz, it is a ‘full intercourse’, yet, since every region of the spot is
94 5v.
95 6r.
96 Especially in the Idra Rabbah, Zohar III, 127b-145a.
97 8r.
98 Ibidem.
99 8r-v.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxix
equivalent to every other region, it is not restricted to the genital area.100 Its
analogue in the lower realms is ‘as if [not] touching a woman with a little
finger’101 – the first allusion to Sabbatai Tsevi in the text of Va-Avo ha-Yom el
ha-Ayyin (I shall return to this motif below).
The intercourse between the Holy Ancient One and the God of Israel may
be initiated by either of the parties, yet, no matter which party initiates the
coupling, the God of Israel always plays the role of the active (that is to say the
female!) partner. It is femininity that makes the creation of the world possible
and gives it its shape (Eibeschütz mentions the theoretical possibility of The
Holy Ancient One attempting to create the world without a female partner, but
classifies it as a ‘wasteful emission’102). Accordingly, although the process of
making worlds began in the innermost part of the Ein Sof, from the vantage
point of those created (the only perspective available to us), the God of Israel is
the Creator.
The position typically assumed in the intercourse between the Holy Ancient
One (the root) and the God of Israel is one in which the former descends upon
the latter; this position is called ‘deep sleep’ [tardemah] or ‘dormition’
[dormitio]. The inverted position, whereby the God of Israel ascends to the
Holy Ancient One, is called ‘burial’.103 If I understand these emblems
correctly, they are both intended to emphasize that the God of Israel is
unconscious throughout the act of intercourse – He is not aware of what
transpires even when He Himself initiates the coupling. The text of Va-Avo is
not entirely clear here; it might be that the God of Israel loses His
consciousness only in the wake of the congress, experiencing a kind of divine
petite mort. Be that as it may, God’s lack (or loss) of consciousness during the
process of creating the world is precisely the reason the creation needs
mending (tikkun); the task of both the Jewish people and of humanity as a
whole is to wake up the Creator.
The fruit of the coupling between the Holy Ancient One (the head) and the
God of Israel (the heart) is the third, lowest aspect of the configuration that
emerges after the first contraction – the Upper Presence (Shekhinah Illa’ah). If
the God of Israel is female vis-à-vis the Holy Ancient One, in relation to the
Shekhinah He is male. More precisely, the God of Israel, whose gender is not
100 8v.
101 8v.
102 10r.
103 9r.
xxx And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
fixed, becomes male during and as a result of intercourse with the Shekhinah,
who is always feminine. The Upper Presence is the ‘tool of creation’,104 for it
is through Her that God gains His definitive identity: following the congress
between the Shekhinah and the God of Israel, the latter becomes a man, ‘the
son of the Shekhinah’.105 The embryo becomes a fetus.
Within the mythological system of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the God of
Israel’s male identity means that He is literally equated with the Ein Sof’s
penis; within the sefirotic system He represents the Sefirah Yesod.106 The
identification of the modality of the Divinity which revealed itself to the
Israelites at Sinai with the Yesod is by no means new: in exploring this
identification, the tract makes the most of elements already in play in earlier
Kabbalah. Yet, as in other cases in which he draws upon earlier Kabbalistic
motifs, Eibeschütz pushes the valence of the symbols to their utmost extreme.
First, the ‘dormition’ that descended upon the God of Israel during (or after)
intercourse with the Holy Ancient One means that the divine phallus is
permanently flaccid. The Creator completely exhausted Himself during the
first act of making the world, the congress with the upper levels of the
Godhead. During His coupling with the feminine Shekhinah, the God of Israel
became fully male, yet He immediately ‘grew feeble like a female’. This
expression, which so troubled Rabbi Ezekiel Landau, does not refer merely to
the claim that Providence does not exercise force in the lower realms. Within
the sexualized mythology of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin it means that God has
become impotent: the world and humanity are created in a sexual act
performed by a Deity suffering from erectile dysfunction. Second, Va-Avo
explores not only the physiology of the divine phallus, but also its anatomy.
Already the medieval Kabbalist Joseph of Hamadan posited that the Yesod has
‘the pipe of purity that impregnates the Shekhinah, and the pipe of impurity
that impregnates the forces of impurity’.107 Eibeschütz would not have been
himself if he did not add a peculiar twist to this symbolism: indeed, God’s
organ contains both the vas deferens [nekev ha-zera] and the ureter [nekev ha-
sheten].108 However, since the divine impotence caused a stoppage in the flow
of the effluence through the former, the mending of the world and the final
104 10r.
105 10v-11r.
106 10v.
107 See Idel, Kabbalah and Eros, p. 114.
108 11r.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxxi
redemption will take place through the latter: the messiah who will come to
redeem the world will be born from the ‘other seed’, God’s urine.109
The first tsimtsum produced the triune countenance of The Holy Ancient
One, the God of Israel, and the Upper Presence. This configuration is fully
differentiated (i.e. it already contains all the elements of the unfolding
creation), but it is unstable and cannot sustain itself. In Lurianic Kabbalah, the
instability of the first stage of creation is presented by the mythos of the
Shattering of the Vessels; its equivalent in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is the
act of the self-folding [hitkappelut] of the countenance.110 Invoking the
Talmudic dictum that the fetus is ‘folded like the writing tablets’,111 Eibeschütz
argues that the initial countenance reconfigured itself as the body of fetus (the
God of Israel) folded around the head (the Holy Ancient One), with the
Shekhinah surrounding Him ‘like the amniotic sac [shalyah]’.112
Within the wider progression of genesis, the folding of the first countenance
around the head is the second tsimtsum. The space freed in its wake is termed,
in accordance with the Lurianic paradigm appropriated by Nathan of Gaza, the
tehiru.113 This space encircles the God of Israel (called, as noted above, the
‘son’), who retreats into Himself and becomes enveloped in the Upper
Presence (called in this context the ‘mother’); the subsequent drama of
emanation and creation takes place therein. Yet, in contrast to the Lurianic
scheme (especially as found in Hayyim Vital’s version), which considered the
tehiru an ‘empty space’, a vacuum, Eibeschütz’s thought is characterized by
the acute horror vacui.114 The space created by the withdrawal of God into
Himself is immediately filled with the ‘malicious waters’ [mayim zedonim].115
From God’s own perspective, these serve as the amniotic fluid, which
surrounds and protects the God of Israel in His fetal slumber. However, from
our bottom-up vantage point, they are identical with the Mindless Light: they
109 55r.
110 The motif of self-folding seems to derive from the Kabbalistic system of Israel Sarug;
comp. also Liebes, ‘Li-Demuto Ketavav ve-Kabbalato shel Ba’al Emek ha-Melekh’,
Jerusalem Studies in Jewish Thought, 11, 1993, pp. 117-120.
111 BT Niddah 30b.
112 7v-8r. In modern Hebrew, shalyah would mean placenta, but it is clear from the context
that Eibeschütz is referring to the amniotic sac.
113 See Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, pp. 299-311.
114 Compare Ya’arot Devash, Vol. I, sermon 4.
115 After Ps 124:5.
xxxii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
sustain God’s insentience and are a reservoir of waste; they are the main force
that opposes the further progression of creation.
Following His intercourse with the Upper Shekhinah in Her motherly
aspect, Her son, the God of Israel, turned permanently comatose. The Holy
Ancient One, in turn, withdrew into Himself and became inaccessible to the
external world. The only active party within the tehiru is the Lower Presence
[Shekhinah Tata’ah] (also called the ‘daughter’ in this context). Since She
operates in the hostile environment of the malicious waters, the Lower
Shekhinah must be protected from penetration by the mayim zedonim. She
must be – and must remain – a virgin.116 The forms of intercourse between the
Lower Presence and the God of Israel commended in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-
Ayyin are therefore the forms of sexual activity that do not violate her hymen:
mutual masturbation, partial penetration with the flaccid penis, anal
penetration, and an arcane sexual position called ‘copulation in the mystery of
leaning to the left’ [zivvug be-sod hatayah le-smol] by Eibeschütz (I am forced
to confess that I have not the faintest idea what this last one might be).
The aim of the Shekhinah’s activity is to dry the malicious waters by
heating them.117 This is accomplished through a series of sexual acts
(Eibeschütz’s definition of a sexual act: a contraction or spasm [tsimtsum or
hitkavtsut] caused by arousal or heating up [himmum]).118 Since the God of
Israel had experienced what Stendhal would call the fiasco in love, the
feminine Presence must revive Him. The first congress between the Lower
Shekhinah and the God of Israel (in the wider scheme of emanation this is the
third tsimtsum, and it leads to the forming of the second configuration
[partsuf])119 is not true coupling, but rather ‘copulation only in thought’120 – a
shared sexual fantasy during which the partners stimulate each other without
attempting penetration. The fruit of this fantasy is a phantasm lacking proper
substance and independent existence, Adam Kadmon di-Veriah, the Primordial
Man of Creation. Adam Kadmon is a peculiar liminal being who is a mediation
116 50v, 51v.

117 13v.
118 10r.
119 The third tsimtsum is also called a contraction of the circle into the square, see 13v-14r,
cf Wolfson, Circle in the Square.
120 17r-18r.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxxii
i
(in the sense of the Hegelian Vermittlung) between emanation and creation;121
Eibeschütz discusses his nature by invoking a series of Biblical images, the
most important being those of Cain, Esau, and Job. I shall concentrate here on
the first two.
The Primordial Man of Creation, the first son born of the God of Israel and
the Lower Presence, is the image and likeness of his grandfather, the Holy
Ancient One. He shares the quality of belonging entirely to the realm of
Holiness, of Mercy without any admixture of Graces and Judgments, with
Atika Kadisha. He is a puer aeternus, and, being a child, he does not know the
Torah and does not fulfill its commandments.122 In order to support this point
exegetically, Eibeschüetz invokes the Talmudic aggadah about God wearing
phylacteries123 and interprets it as referring specifically to the lower rank of
Divinity, the God of Israel. The higher rank, the Holy Ancient One and his
simulacrum the Primordial Adam, do not wear the teffilin. Instead, they wear a
turban.124
The Primordial Man of Creation is a Siamese twin named after the Biblical
figures of Cain and Abel. Cain, the first hypostasis within Adam Kadmon di-
Veriah, draws his substance (‘soul’) directly from Atika; he represents Adam’s
resemblance to the higher regions of the Godhead. Abel (whose name is
etymologically linked to waste or emptiness) has no soul of his own and must
‘borrow’ his essence from the God of Israel and the Shekhinah Tata’ah – he is
Adam’s link with the lower aspects of Divinity125 (within the gestational
scheme of images the birth of Cain/Abel is equated with the formation of the
placenta, which simultaneously separates and connects the fetus – that is the
God of Israel – with the upper part of the womb/tehiru).126
Abel’s deficit of soul is in fact an advantage: thanks to his communion with
the lower ranks of the Godhead, he has a connection with God’s feminine side
(it is not entirely clear from the text if Abel’s female is the Lower Presence –
his mother – or yet another, third hypostasis of the Shekhinah). Cain, in turn,
121 18v. Va-Avo sometimes describes him as simultaneously emanated from and created,
and sometimes as neither fully created nor fully emanated.
122 30v. For this motif see Jonathan Benarroch, Saba ve-Yanuka, ‘Treyn de-inun hada’:
Alegoriah, Semel u-Mitos ba-Sifrut ha-Zoharit, PhD thesis, The Hebrew University of
Jerusalem, 331-352.
123 BT Berakhot 6a.
124 30r.
125 21r.
126 31r.
xxxiv And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
‘has no woman of his own and there is nobody who could take in his seed’;127
not only is he a phantom created during the shared sexual phantasy of the God
of Israel and the Lower Presence, but his own sex life also has the destructive
quality of wasteful emission, zera le-vattala.128 Cain’s jealousy of Abel’s
congress with the feminine is the root of the original sin (which is
simultaneously the sin of the Primordial Man and the sin of Cain).129 In an
attempt to take away his brother’s woman, Cain descends upon Abel130 (in his
reading of sections of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, Yehudah Liebes suggested
that this picture hints at a homosexual rape).131 Abel’s death is caused by the
excess of effluence which suddenly flows to him directly from the higher
regions of the Godhead (The Holy Ancient One, the Root) and indirectly from
his brother.132 Following Abel’s death, Cain is obliged to perform a yibbum
(levirate marriage) for his childless brother.133 His union with the Divine
Presence would allow for the continuous flow of the effluence downward, the
subsequent unfolding of the Divinity, and the continuation of the progress of
emanation and creation. However, aware of his brother’s fate and knowing that
he might die in a similar manner, Cain is afraid to descend to the lower
realms.134 He refuses to perform either yibbum or halitsah; when he does enter
into congress with the Shekhinah, he makes sure that his seed does not reach
her. He practices coitus interruptus.
Most great cosmogonies and anthropogonies in human history contain the
myth of a cosmic catastrophe that interrupted the process of making the world,
destroyed the intended harmony of creation and necessitated future
redemption. The most important Kabbalistic version of this myth is, of course,
the Lurianic doctrine of the Shattering of the Vessels and the mending of the
world (tikkun). Eibeschütz draws upon the Lurianic teachings, yet he strips the
myth of all of its pathos and grandeur. The magnitude of the image of the
divine splendor overflowing and shattering the receptacles of creation is
127 21v, 29r-v.

128 Ibid.
129 33v.
130 24v. In the sefirotic scheme, he descends below the navel (between the sefirot Tiferet
and Yesod).
131 Liebes, ‘Ketavim Hadashim be-Kabbalah ha-Shabbeta’it mi-Hugo shel Rabbi
Yehonatan Eybeschits’ in: Sod ha-Emunah, pp. 103-237, here 110.
132 28r-v.
133 28r.
134 28r.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxxv
replaced by the emblems of God’s infantile regression, impotence, and the fear
of death brought on by love. The Holy Ancient One, Eibeschütz’s deus
absconditus, the highest modus of the Absolute, has removed himself from the
lower worlds and folded into himself. The God of Israel, deus otiosus, loses
both his virile powers and any interest in his creations. The Primordial Man,
God’s image and likeness and the intended channel of transmission between
the upper and lower realms, develops the paralyzing dread of dying in the wake
of sexual fulfillment. The purported father of humanity does not want to have
any children. The coitus interruptus practiced by Adam is therefore not merely
one of many sexual techniques expounded in the tract; it is the organizing
metaphor of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the central thesis, according to which
the process of creation did not so much suffer from a cosmic catastrophe as
entered into neutral gear.
The fall of the Primordial Man is the effect of God’s gnawing fear that
completing the process of making the world will lead to His demise. Exile, the
most central theme of Sabbatian thought, is presented in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-
Ayyin as the alienation of the Creator from His creations. Yet the duality of
vantage points which permeates the entire tract leaves its print at this level of
the argument as well. From God’s own perspective, He forgot about – or
maybe lost interest in – His creations. From the human point of view, we
forgot about God, or perhaps never received adequate knowledge about Him.
The motif of the mutual alienation of creations and Creator and the
conceptualization of the Exile in epistemic categories, as the mutual ignorance
of Jews – and more generally, humans – and the true God, are centerpieces of
the teachings of Abraham Miguel Cardoso. Cardoso’s entire theological project
is founded on the notion that God ‘forgot’ about his people and the people of
Israel ‘forgot’ their God; his soteriology is the quest for recalling God’s name
and reminding Him of His identity. Eibeschütz takes up this Cardosian motif:
having refused to perform the halitsah, Cain lost his designation as Adam
Kadmon di-Veriah and became nameless [peloni almoni].135 The condition of
exile is the condition in which we must worship a nameless God – that is to
say, we must worship a God whose name is not mentioned in the Torah.136 All
Sabbatian systems of theology, from Sabbatai Tsevi’s own letters through
Nathan of Gaza, Cardoso, Hayon, and a plethora of minor thinkers, claimed
135 36v. This harks back to the Sabbatian reading of the Book of Ruth. See especially
Leibele Prossnitz’s Tsaddik Yesod Olam.
136 38v.
xxxvi And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
that the God of the Mosaic revelation and of the Jewish people, who is also the
creator of this world, is a lower God, a derivative of a higher Deity; they also
agreed that although this higher Deity is ontologically superior, its existence
and actions are – for human and, in particular, Jewish religious life – virtually
irrelevant.137 Within the conceptual scheme of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the
higher, nameless or unknown God, who remains outside or above the creation
and revelation, is Atika Kadisha, The Holy Ancient One. Yet – and this
theological move is unprecedented in earlier Sabbatian thought – for
Eibeschütz, the Holy Ancient One is not simply an abstract Absolute akin to
Cardoso’s and Hayon’s concepts of the First Cause. He is the God of
Christianity.
Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz’s notion of Christianity is one of the most
difficult and pivotal themes of his entire oeuvre; I can discuss it here only in
the most cursory manner. Already Eibeschütz’s contemporaries noted his
extensive contact with Christians and intense preoccupation with Christian
ideas. By praising his prowess in debating Jesuit clerics and outsmarting
Christian scholars or, conversely, by accusing him of collaborating with
Christian bishops or even of being a crypto-Christian himself, his supporters
and opponents alike strove to find an appropriate conceptual framework in
which to discuss this complex issue. I am convinced that none of the
frameworks suggested by his contemporaries (and, later, by modern scholars)
is fully satisfying; none of the proposed labels fits Rabbi Jonathan fully. His
rapport with Christianity cannot be pigeonholed within the simple and
simplistic dichotomies of polemics versus admiration, rejection versus
embracement. I intend to discuss this topic in a separate publication; for now,
however, it is crucial to understand that Eibeschütz was not merely
preoccupied with the Christian Church or Churches, Christian tenets of belief,
Christianity as a political power, or the relations (practical and theoretical,
historical and contemporaneous) between Christians and Jews. His
preoccupation with Christianity was of the most serious kind: it was the
preoccupation with the Christian God.
The presence of the Christian concept of Deity (or: the Christian Deity) in
Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is subtle yet ubiquitous. To name but a few of the
central examples, the ‘head’ of the first configuration was the Holy Ancient
One; His structural equivalent in the second configuration is Esau, ‘whose head
137 The Gnostic parallels to this mode of thought are obvious and have been discussed by
Scholem, among others.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxxv
ii
fully belonged to the holiness… for Isaac had felt that the head of Esau was
holy… and therefore the head of Esau was buried with Jacob at the Cave of
Makhpelah’.138 (I should probably note, in passing, that this is the only
fragment of Va-Avo that is quoted verbatim in an exoteric work of
Eibeschütz’s, Ya’arot Devash).139 In the second tripartite partsuf – perhaps this
time I should use the term ‘Trinity’ after all – Esau performs the function of
the ‘father’, in accordance with the Biblical verse ‘Esau the father of Edom
[Gen 36:9]’.140 Edom, the name of the Biblical kingdom of Esau, is further
interpreted as alluding to the first hypostasis’s attributes (or, rather, the lack
thereof):
Atika is called ‘Edom’, because we are not allowed to discuss His attributes the
way we can expound [the attributes of] the other aspects [of the Godhead], and
He is thus called ‘Edom’ in the sense of dummah [Aramaic: silence], as it is
written ‘keeping silent [eddom] and not going outdoors’ [Job 31:34]. Thus He
is like a child in the waters of his mother, with his mouth shut. And, as we
already said, the Root is called ‘Seir’ [the Biblical territory of the Edomites]
and also ‘Esau’, for the master-builder gives orders saying: ‘Do [asu] this or
that!’141
The place occupied in the first configuration by the God of Israel, the position
of the ‘son’,142 is empty in the second countenance. Yet this is not a simple
vacuum. As I have noted, following the sexual congress with the Root, the God
of Israel experienced the post-coital loss of consciousness, petite mort –
Eibeschütz described it by invoking the emblems of dormition and burial.
Accordingly, the middle position of the second partsuf is the position of the
son of God (or: God the Son), who had died and was buried; He is still present
in the divine economy, but His presence is the presence of an absent God, a
recollection of a missing Deity. Significantly, a reference to Edom appears also
at this level of the second configuration: after the withdrawal (or death) of the
God of Israel, the tehiru comes to be ‘called the “field of Edom” [Gen
32:3]’.143 Thus, the subsequent creation progresses without the God of Israel
138 12r.
139 See Eibeschütz, Ya’arot Devash, Vol. I, sermons 7, 10, Vol. II, sermon 15.
140 20v.
141 20v.
142 For the notion of the sonship, see 40r.
143 41r.
xxxviii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
(or, more precisely, with the God of Israel present as absent from creation).144
It takes place under the auspices of Esau, within his realm.
The third hypostasis of this partsuf occupies the position taken in the
previous configuration by the Upper Shekhinah; in this alignment of the
Godhead, She is called ‘Miriam’145 and is typified by an array of symbols
emphasizing her virginity. Not only is She a virgin at the beginning of the
unfolding of the partsuf, but She is a perennial virgin who preserves her
virginity throughout the advancement of emanation and creation. More than
that: her hymen is not violated, not only during the intercourses into which she
enters with other modi of divinity, but also when she gives birth. Whose birth
is this? Miriam’s vagina (or maybe her cervix – the text is not entirely clear
here) is identified in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin as the ‘Gate of Rome’,146
where, according to the Talmudic account, the redeemer had concealed
himself.147 The female hypostasis of God in her aspect of Miriam is the virgin-
mother of the messiah.
Esau and Edom are traditional emblems of Christianity and Eibeschütz’s
construction of the second triune configuration is clearly modeled on the
structure of the Christian Trinity, with The Holy Ancient One fulfilling the
function of God the Father, the God of Israel – that of God the Son, and the
third hypostasis combining the characteristic of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin
Mary. God the Father, Atika Kadisha, is a God of undifferentiated Mercy who
gives His love equally to everyone and does not choose any people over
another. He does not know the distinction between Israel and the Nations of the
World,148 is not bound by the commandments of the Torah149 and ‘does not
punish even those who do not heed them’;150 He is the God of the entirety of
humanity, of the Patriarchs, especially of Abraham, and not the God of
144 The similarities of this idea to the God of Jansenists’ ‘tragic vision,’ as depicted by
Lucien Goldmann, are striking and deserve to be elaborated further. See Goldmann, Le
dieu caché; étude sur la vision tragique dans les Pensées de Pascal et dans le théâtre
de Racine, Paris 1955, pp. 60-62, 185-216. I am planning to explore similarities and
dissimilarities between Sabbatianism and Jansenism in a separate publication.
145 42r-v.
146 56r.
147 BT Sanhedrin 98a.
148 11v.
149 28v-29r.
150 24v.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xxxi
Moses.151 In turn, God the Son, Elohei Yisrael, is the God of the Jews and of
Mosaic revelation. He observes the commandments himself and – balancing
Mercy and Judgment – expects His people to observe them; He also punishes
those who fail to do so. As the God of creation and revelation, He is supposed
to be the God in and of this world, thus fulfilling the function of Divine
Providence. Yet Elohei Yisrael turned impotent (and lost consciousness or
died) and absented himself from the creation. In exile (that is to say following
the God of Israel’s withdrawal from this world) Atika Kadisha, the God of
universal religion and of the religion claiming to be most universal,
Christianity, is the only God. However, the God of Christianity is only
seemingly accessible to the lower beings. While our prayers do not reach the
God of Israel in His comatose state of ‘burial’, they do not affect The Holy
Ancient One. Being the God of unrestrained Mercy, He gives his Grace
unprompted, indiscriminately, and to everyone. Alas, as Leszek Kołakowski
has observed in his discussion of the Jesuit concept of God, a God who gives
His Grace equally to everyone resembles a man who claims that he equally
loves all women; the concepts of Universal Grace or Universal Love strip the
notions of ‘grace’ and ‘love’ of any meaning. Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin
conveys a similar idea by saying that the effluence emanating from the
Christian God, Atika Kadisha, is all-encompassing, but not fecund. Within the
symbolic language of the tract, the Grace granted by The Holy Ancient One is
represented by ‘dew’, as opposed to the ‘rain’ bestowed by the God of Israel
(on a different level of symbolism it is compared to the preseminal fluid, as
opposed to sperm): ‘rain [is the fruit] of the copulation between a man and a
woman… and is the mystery of the mixing of male and female waters… but
the dew… does not cause procreation, for there is no copulation between male
and female… and the dew is made by the male only, without intercourse
between the male and female’.152
The ‘dew’ given by The Holy Ancient One bestows only a ‘modicum of
life’: it cannot give the ‘fullness of blessing’, for it ‘has no capacity to
fertilize’.153 Its constant drift allows for the basic sustenance of the world:
without it, the living body of creation would become a ‘corpse’.154 However,
sustaining the world in this fashion means merely sustaining it: the process of
151 31v.
152 36r.
153 71v.
154 Ibid.
xl And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
making of the universe does move forward, it stagnates and reaches an

impasse. Worse still, the constant but uncontrolled flow of effluence in the
form of dew from Atika Kadisha is potentially fraught with danger:
‘…the floods of great waters shall not come near him [Ps 32:6]’. He must not
again suffer the Flood and the Shattering of the Vessels which is [symbolized
by] the great waters coming near him. For when [the effluence of Atika
Kadisha] takes the form of the wasteful emission [zera le-vattalah], it is
flooding like the great waters… This is what we should learn from the [mythos
of] the Shattering of the Vessels: they received the effluence in the form of the
wasteful emission, and therefore were shattered … Hence we must not pray to
the Ancient One, or even to the God of Israel, when he is not coupling with his
Shekhinah, for it leads to the wasteful emission and the destruction of the
worlds.155
In the anti-Sabbatian polemics of Rabbi Moses Hagiz, composed in the same
year as Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the Biblical verse ‘the floods of great
waters shall [not] come near him [Ps 32:6]’ is invoked as a metaphor depicting
the Christian baptism.156 Eibeschütz may also be playing on this simile, thus
adding one more element to the Christian symbolism associated with the Holy
Ancient One. In the theological system of Va-Avo, Christianity, the religion
that worships Atika Kadisha, while in some sense loftier than Judaism, the
religion of the God of Israel, is simultaneously not enough and too much. It is
not enough, for the effluence flowing from Atika Kadisha in the form of the
dew is unfecund (in order for the fertilization to occur the male element of
Mercy must be complemented by the ‘female waters’ of Judgment). It is too
much, for it is too potent for the lower worlds. Pure Mercy ‘makes the act of
creation impossible; indeed – it is responsible for the Shattering’.157 While the
‘dew’ sent by the Holy Ancient One nourishes the created beings, it also keeps
them in the permanent state of being almost overflown by the excess of divine
energy. The God of Christianity – unlike the God of Israel – ‘is not “perfect in
every way”: He lacks the quality of balance’.158 For this reason, ‘we must not
pray to the Ancient One’. I suggest that this statement should be understood
both in the narrow sense – as a call not to convert to Christianity – and in the
155 72r-v.
156 Hagiz, Lehishat Saraf, 3r-v.
157 23r.
158 Ibidem.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xli
wider sense, as an expression of the conviction that, since the world under the
rule of the Christian God is always in the state of imbalance, bringing to it even
more Christian mercy may too easily plunge it into the abyss.
The state of exile is thus a state in which the middle hypostasis of the
Godhead, the God of Israel, does not play any role in the process of building
the world and in the economy of redemption. One could probably say that the
world is being governed solely by the highest aspect of the Deity, Atika
Kadisha, yet the word ‘governed’ does not really do justice to the situation
whereby the divine influx flows without any direction and endangers the
creation. The third persona of the partsuf, Miriam, cannot alone direct the
unfolding of emanation and creation. Within the duality of viewpoints that
characterizes Eibeschütz’s thinking, what from the immanent perspective is
designated as Miriam’s virginity, from our vantage point means that she is
barren: the same condition that protects the female hypostasis of God from the
penetration by the ‘malicious waters’ of the tehiru prevents the descent of
effluence to the lower worlds.
The bulk of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin is devoted to the description of the
exile and the creation and emanation’s coming to the standstill. The tract’s
final pages sketch Eibeschütz’s doctrine of the Messiah and of redemption. The
Messiah is the son of the God of Israel. Yet his conception is rather peculiar. In
His comatose state of dormition, Elohei Yisrael is incapable of fathering
children and no offspring can be conceived out of His seed. However, even the
sleeping God urinates; thus the Messiah is born ‘purely in the manner of
“falling”’ through the ‘flow of urine that falls through the penis in the absence
of erection’159 (Eibeschütz is playing here on the Talmudic description of the
Messiah as ‘the son of the fallen’, also invoked by other Sabbatians).160 Having
‘fallen’ into the tehiru in this fashion, the Messiah takes over the functions that
were supposed to be fulfilled by his father, the God of Israel. His task is
twofold: with regards to the highest level of the configuration, the Holy
Ancient One, the Messiah is to serve as a receptacle for the excess of the divine
effluence that may flood the lower realms; vis-a-vis the lower hypostasis, the
Divine Presence, he is to be an active sexual partner, who will succeed where
his impotent father had failed and will inseminate the feminine aspect of God.
Thus, by interposing himself between the Atika Kadisha and the Shekhinah, the
Messiah is to become a channel through which the effluence can flow from the
159 65v.
160 BT Sanhderin 96b-97a.
xlii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
highest to the lowest regions and, simultaneously, a vessel in which the

feminine and the masculine elements can mingle.
The first task of the Messiah is depicted in the following fragment of Va-Avo
ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin:
And thus David, ‘when he came to the Head [2 Sam 15:32]’161 – which, as we
established, refers to the Ancient One – ‘where he used to worship God [lit. “to
prostrate himself for God”]’ [ibid.]’ – which refers to the sexual intercourse –
‘wished to worship idols’,162 in accordance with the verse ‘He also loves the
nations [Deut. 33:3]’.163
The fragment quoted here is the very last sentence of Eibeschütz’s tract, its
conclusion. ‘David’ obviously refers to the Messiah, in accordance with the
wider Kabbalistic and in particular Sabbatian usage. Although several pages
earlier Eibeschütz warned that ‘we must not pray to the Ancient One’, it
appears that the Messiah is not only allowed, but maybe even obligated to do
so. The reference to the idol worship is based on the Talmudic interpretation of
the verse from the Book of Samuel about David coming to the summit of
Mount of Olives; in the narrower context of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin it
should be understood in light of the previous discussion of the worship of the
Holy Ancient One as a veneration of the God of Christianity. It would seem
that the Messiah (but not his followers!) is to acknowledge the Christian God
or even convert to Christianity. Whereas I do not think that the text of
Eibeschütz’s tract on its own would allow to put forward such a theological
position, I should note that such an idea does appear in later works whose
authors were clearly inspired by Va-Avo, most notably in the Frankist Book of
the Words of the Lord. Be that as it may, it is clear that the Messiah is to
establish some kind of special connection with the Holy Ancient One. The
nature of this connection is alluded to in the statement that ‘worshipping’ – or,
more literally, ‘prostrating oneself before’ – the God hints at a sexual
intercourse. In a fascinating essay, David Halperin has argued that what
Eibeschütz suggests here is that ‘“David” prostrates himself, offering his
161 In the Biblical text the word rosh (head) refers to the summit of the Mount of Olives,
but Eibeschütz reads it hyperliterally as referring to the ‘Head’, the highest hypostasis,
of the countenance of the Godhead. This hyperliteral reading of the word appears
already in BT Sanhedrin 107b; see the continuation of the passage.
162 BT Sanhderin 107b.
163 73v.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xliii
buttocks for the Deity’s anal penetration.’164 Halperin interprets “David” not as
a general appellation of the Messiah but as a specific reference to Sabbatai
Tsevi and links it with the ‘feminization’ of King David and the Messiah in
general in Eibeschütz’s tract.165 While I am not sure if David can be
unequivocally identified as the figure of Sabbatai, I believe that Halperin’s
understanding of the figure of the Messiah coupling with the Ancient One and
that the general tenor of his reading are correct. In fact, his reading might be
strengthened by invoking again the Words of the Lord: according to Frank,
many Sabbatians believed that both David and Sabbatai Tsevi ‘were secretly of
female sex’ (I don’t know if Frank is referring here to Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-
Ayyin or is drawing upon some independent Sabbatian tradition). Just as the
sex of the God of Israel is in itself undetermined and becomes defined only
during His coupling with the Shekhinah, so the Messiah becomes female vis-à-
vis the masculine Atika Kadisha. This feminization of the Messiah is achieved
through his being a receiving partner in the anal intercourse with the male God:
since the world is threatened by the uncontained flow of the effluence from the
Holy Ancient One, the Messiah must offer himself as the container for the
latter’s semen.166 However, with regard to the lower aspects of creation, the
feminine Shekhinah, the Messiah must assume a more masculine function. His
second task is thus to transmit the effluence he receives from the Atika Kadisha
to the lower worlds.
The second task of the messiah consists in streamlining the flow of creation
by impregnating Miriam. Along the lines of earlier Sabbatian – and ultimately
Lurianic – Kabbalah, the messiah is simultaneously the lover of the Divine
Presence and Her son; he will substitute the God of Israel, who has failed in his
task of inseminating the Shekhinah, and will also be the offspring of this very
union. However, the malicious waters of the tehiru are a real danger: while
having sex with Miriam, and thus enabling his own coming into the world, the
messiah must be careful not to violate her virginity. Here is a description of the
coupling between Miriam and the Messiah:
164 54r.
165 For more on this idea see Elliot Wolfson, ‘The Engenderment of Messianic Politics:
Symbolic Significance of Sabbatai Sevi’s Coronation’, in Peter Schaefer and Mark
Cohen, Towards the Millennium: Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco,
Leiden and Boston 1998, pp. 203-258.
166 Halperin’s formulation. See ‘Some themes’, p. 5.
xliv And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
If you want to understand how the Shekhinah can enter into a sexual congress
and remain a virgin, you must see what is written in the Gemara about Samuel
who was skilled in moving sidewise,167 knew how to incline towards the
left,168 and could engage in repeated intercourses169 [with a woman] who
remained a virgin. As it is written: ‘He lowered heaven and came down [Ps
18:10]’. That is: he first ‘lowered’ [himself] sidewise and then ‘came down’ to
copulate. From this you will understand that the penis is like a rod. For the
God of Israel is Himself like a rod, he makes Himself into the rod in order to
copulate, and His penis becomes hard like a stick. This is [possible] when the
[power of] Judgment does not prevail in the lower worlds, for when the [power
of] Judgment does prevail, the God of Israel cannot slant towards the left, for it
would increase the power of Judgment even more and could lead, God forbid,
to the destruction and breaking of the entire universe. How can He copulate
then? He as it were stands still in one place, without slanting sideways at all,
and only through the unification He bends [his penis] in a crooked and
rounded way, so it points diagonally, and in this way He copulates with the
Shekhinah. This is the mystery of the serpent. And from this you will
understand the secret meaning of the verse ‘the way of a man with a young
woman [Prov 30:19]’, who is a virgin. However, when he is not like a man,
then [he must copulate] ‘the way of a serpent on a rock [Prov 30:19]’, that is,
as already mentioned, the penis bends and enters into the rock [tsor], which
refers to virginity, as it is written: ‘bind up [tsor] the testimony and seal [the
Torah; cf. Is 8:16]’. Thus you will understand why the sexual organ is called,
depending on its state, a ‘rod’ or a ‘serpent’.170
The situation of the prevalence of the power of Judgment is precisely the
situation of exile: the element of pure Mercy, Atika Kadisha, does not have any
bearing upon the lower realms; the hypostasis that is responsible for balancing
the elements of Mercy and Judgment, the God of Israel, has become impotent
and dysfunctional; and the feminine element of Judgment is barren and closed
in Her virginity. In such a situation, the first possible union between the
messiah and the Shekhinah is described as the penetration by a flaccid penis,
represented by the emblem of the snake – a symbol fraught with messianic
associations – as opposed to the erected penis represented by the rod.
Eibeschütz expounds the idea of such intercourse by combining a phrase from
167 BT Kettubot 6b.

168 Or: ‘towards the North’.
169 BT Hagigah 15r.
170 66v-67r.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xlv
tractate Kettubot 6b, referring to the Babylonians, who were skilled at having
sex while leaning sidewise, and a statement from tractate Hagiga 15a which
speaks of Samuel, who could have repeated sexual connections with a virgin
without disrupting her hymen. While this form of congress allows for
sustaining the world that has been created so far, it does not allow for any
progress of creation, let alone for the bringing forth of the ultimate redemption.
Redemption, the true messianic tikkun, will require a different form of
intercourse:
You should know that sometimes He [the God of Israel] engages in anal
sex.171 This is the secret meaning of the verse ‘When Israel was a boy, I loved
him [Hos. 11:1]’. And know that in the future, when the malicious waters are
drained from the earth and the tehiru is purified, the Shechinah in the lower
worlds will [also] practice anal intercourse. This is alluded to in the Gemara:
‘Woman is destined to bear every day, [for it is said, the woman conceived and
beareth simultaneously],’ and ‘he showed him a fowl,’172 which gives birth
through its rear… And this is the esoteric meaning of bringing the Torah
scroll into the outhouse, [which is the tikkun that he performed].173
The fragments I just quoted describe the sexual acts of the messiah. Read
within the wider Sabbatian context, they also hint at his identity. Although – as
already noted by Rabbi Jacob Cohen Poppers – the name of Sabbatai Tsevi
does not appear in the text of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, most readers of the
tract would be sufficiently familiar with Sabbatian lore to immediately notice
that the work contains numerous allusions to concrete episodes from Sabbatai’s
life or to deeds attributed to him. For instance, Abraham Yakhini reported a
story about a great tikkun performed by Sabbatai Tsevi after his apostasy.
According to this account, the messiah locked himself in a room with the
betrothed of one of his followers. When the future husband protested that
Sabbatai had taken his bride, the latter ‘swore on the God of his faith that… he
did not even touch her little finger’.174 The child born to the woman was the
spitting image of her husband, yet he was universally thought to be the son of
Sabbatai Tsevi. Yakhini (and, if we are to believe him, also the husband)
171 As a passive partner.

172 BT Shabbat 30b; the showing of a fowl is a response to Rabban Gamaliel’s students
doubting the plausibility of this claim.
173 49r. The bracketed part of the sentence appears only in Ms Oxford.
174 A[braham] Epstein, ‘Une letter d’Abraham ha-Yakhini a Nathan Gazati’, Revue des
Études Juives 26 (1892), pp. 209-19, here 212; see also Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, p. 879.
xlvi And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
regarded the whole event as a ‘miracle’.175 Now, what is truly interesting is

that, if I understand him correctly, Yakhini did not consider the miracle the fact
that the child resembled the bridegroom (and not his supposed physical father,
Sabbatai Tsevi), but that he indeed was the son of Sabbatai despite the fact that
the latter ‘did not touch the woman’s little finger’. Apparently, the Sabbatians
believed that there was a special form of mystical coupling ‘without touching
the little finger’. This characteristic turn of the phrase – although based on
expressions from the Talmud176 – also appears in Va-Avo,177 and in the tract it
signifies precisely such a mystical form of intercourse.
Another support for this theory can be found in the writings of Rabbi Elijah
Mojajon, who brings the same quotation from tractate Hagiga 15a about
Samuel being skilled at having sex with virgins without causing bleeding
which is quoted by Eibeschütz in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin. Mojajon
amended the Talmudic livol kama be’ilot, ‘to have repeated sexual
connections’, into livol kama betulot, ‘to have intercourses with several
virgins’ and expanded on it, testifying that Sabbatai Tsevi had prided himself
on being able to engage in repeated intercourse with virgins without
deflowering them.178 Indeed, several other accounts attest that Sabbatai
divorced his first three wives, leaving them virgins.179 Whereas the anti-
Sabbatians saw in this convincing proof of the false messiah’s impotence, his
followers interpreted it as a special, mystical mark, testifying that his sexual
activities belonged to another, higher order. Within the framework of the
theology developed by Eibeschütz, Sabbatai’s impotence (real or alleged) can
even be read as a special form of imitatio Dei or as a sign of his particular
closeness to the impotent Deity.
Sections of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin discussing sexual intercourse with
virgins without violating their hymen clearly allude to the actual exploits of
Sabbatai Tsevi, or at least to the acts believed by his followers to have been
performed by him. The same may be said about the rite mentioned in the last
175 Ibid., 213.

176 BT Shabbat 13b, 64b.
177 8v.
178 Isaac Tishby, ‘Iggeret Rabbi Meir Rofe le-Rabbi Avraham Rovigo’, Sefunot 3/4 (1960),
p. 89; cf. also Scholem, Sabbatai Tsevi, p. 671.
179 See The History of Vardapet Aṛakʽel of Tabriz, trans. George A. Bournoutian, Costa
Mesa 2006, Vol. II, p. 538; cf. Abraham Galante, Nouveaux documents sur Sabbetai
Sevi: Organisation et us et coutumes de ses adeptes, Istanbul 1935, p. 85; Scholem,
Sabbatai Tsevi, p. 124 and the sources quoted therein.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xlvii
fragment I quoted. The statement about bringing the Torah scroll into the
outhouse being a tikkun performed by ‘him’ appears in only one of the extant
manuscripts of the tract; in the Jerusalem 2491 manuscript – the manuscript
that constitutes the basis of this edition – this sentence was physically hacked
out with a sharp object. However, Yehudah Liebes has convincingly argued
that this is, in fact, the accurate recension of the text and that most of the
manuscripts censored the correct reading.180 Liebes has also argued – against
Scholem – that the fragment does indeed allude to Sabbatai Tsevi himself and
not to one of his followers particularly notorious for antinomian behavior,
Berukhiah of Saloniki.181 What would be the tikkun performed by Sabbatai
Tsevi? According to the testimony of a repentant Sabbatian brought by Rabbi
Jacob Emden, Sabbatai had ‘copulated with a boy while wearing teffilin on his
head, and claimed that it was a great tikkun’.182 I believe that the ‘bringing of
the Torah scroll into the outhouse’ is an euphemistic description of this act,
whereby the teffilin serve as a synecdoche for the Torah scroll that is being
‘brought’ into the outhouse through the anal intercourse between the messiah
and the boy.183
The descriptions of the sexuality of the messiah in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-
Ayyin clearly draw upon episodes from the (real or imagined) sex life of
Sabbatai Tsevi. The treatise also contains some other allusions to Sabbatian
messianism. Thus, in the fragment discussing the idea that the messiah will be
born of God’s urine, Eibeschütz uses the phrase mashiah ha-am[i]ti, a
grammatically incorrect locution that was coined and routinely used by the
Sabbatians to achieve the numerical equivalency between the expression ‘the
true messiah’ and the name of Sabbatai Tsevi.184 Similarly, the motifs of the
180 Most manuscripts substitute hakhnassat sefer Torah la-bet ha-knesset for hakhnassat
Sefer Torah la-bet ha-kisse. Already Scholem suggested that the latter might be the
correct reading, see Scholem, ‘Berukhiah – Rosh ha-Shabbeat’im be-Saloniki’, p. 351;
Liebes, ‘Ketavim Hadashim be-Kabbalah Shabbeta’it mi-Hugo shel Rabbi Yehonatan
Ayybeshits’, Sod ha-Emnuah, pp. 117-8.
181 Scholem believed it referred to Berukhiah, see ‘Berukhiah’, p. 315 n. 100; Liebes
‘Ketavim’, p. 119.
182 Emden, Torat ha-Kena’ot, p. 54. Scholem mentioned this testimony, but never quoted it
in full. He also argued that ‘it should be treated with reserve’, see Sabbatai Sevi, p. 671
n. 227.
183 Comp. Liebes, ‘Ketavim Hadashim’, pp. 117-8.
184 The correct phrase should be ‘ha-mashiah ha-amiti’; mashiah ha-am[i]ti =
40+300+10+8+5+1+40+400+10=814 Shabbatai Sevi = 300+2+400+10+90+2+10=814.
xlviii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
messiah’s identification with or substitution of Elohei Yisrael and his

identification with Cain are themes that appear both in Va-Avo and in earlier
Sabbatian literature, as well as in anti-Sabbatian polemical works. Thus,
Sabbatai signed several of his letters ‘I am the Lord, the God of Israel, Sabbatai
Tsevi.’185 Some of his followers reported that
he had proclaimed himself God and stated that the Holy One Blessed be He
ascended to the higher realms and left the governance of this world in
Sabbatai’s hands. He claimed this on the basis of a discussion of the section of
Zohar Hadash expounding the verse “And again, she bore his brother Abel
[Gen: 4:2]”. And he interpreted it as referring to him as Cain and to the Holy
One Blessed be He – as Abel.186
Most contemporary readers of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin must have
immediately recognized at least some of the allusions to Sabbatai in the text of
the tract, and accordingly assumed that Eibeschütz’s messiah was Sabbatai
Tsevi. Yet the matter is more complex than this. While the image of the
messiah as presented in the treatise bears some unmistakable features linking
him to Sabbatai Tsevi, some of his other features allude, equally unmistakably,
to Jesus. To start with, the messiah of Va-Avo is simultaneously God and the
sole son of God (as far as we know, Sabbatai never claimed the latter title for
himself). His mother is Miriam, who is characterized in Eibeschütz’s text as a
‘woman who whored, betrayed her husband, and engaged in sex with that
Egyptian’.187 This is a clear reference to the Talmudic descriptions of the
adulteries of Miriam the mother of Jesus,188 which simultaneously links her
with the Jesus-like figure of ‘that Egyptian’, who claimed to be a prophet, led
his followers to the Mount of Olives, and was routed there by the Procurator
For the use of this expression by the Sabbatians see a letter from Rabbi Joel of Berlin,
in Emden, Bet Yehonatan ha-Sofer, 5v; see Perlmuter, p. 77; Liebes, p. 65, 163, passim.
185 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 361. See also his letter to ‘all the men of faith in Sofia’, the
signature of which can be read, depending on the punctuation, which is lacking in the
manuscript, as ‘messiah of the God of Israel’ or ‘Messiah, the God of Israel’. The letter
was published by Zalman Rubashov (Shazar) in Zion 6 (1934), pp. 54-58. Both Shazar
and Scholem, Sabbatai Tsevi, p. 916, preferred the latter reading.
186 Joseph Prager, Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 26r.
187 51v-52r.
188 TB Sanhedrin 67a; Shabbat 104b.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus xlix
Felix.189 In the same fragment of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, Miriam is being

defended from the charge of adultery by her son, the ‘blasphemer’.190 Jonathan
Benarroch and Shay Gerberg have independently identified this as a reference
to the description of Jesus in Toledot Yeshu; given the latter text’s wide
circulation it is certain that the allusion would have been grasped by most of
Eibeschütz’s readers. Finally, the messiah of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the
son of Miriam, enters the world through a virgin birth. This birth, which does
not violate Miriam’s hymen, is understood in the tract as a birth which takes
place through her anus. While this would be outrageously sacrilegious for most
Christians, for many Jews it would serve as a further association of the child
with Jesus, whose eternal punishment, according to the Talmud, consists in
being placed in boiling excrement. Pre-modern Jewish anti-Christian folklore
produced countless jokes and derogatory customs associating Jesus with
defecation, feces, and cloacae.
The imagery employed in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin to depict the messiah
is dual – one group of images points to Sabbatai Tsevi and the other – to Jesus.
Two interpretative paths may be taken from here. One, weaker, interpretation
would read the parallelism between Sabbatai and Jesus as preexisting within
earlier Sabbatian traditions. Already Nathan of Gaza in his earliest works
identified the root of Sabbatai’s soul with the root of the soul of Jesus and
argued that the final redemption would demand the salvation of the founder of
Christianity.191 One could argue that the true messiah of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-
Ayyin is essentially Sabbatai Tsevi, who somehow incorporates some Jesus-
like features into his messianic persona, or whose soul is, on the deepest level,
consubstantial192 with that of Jesus. An alternative, stronger interpretation
would hold that the author of Va-Avo stepped beyond the bounds of earlier
Sabbatian thought and claimed that Sabbatai Tsevi and Jesus were both avatars
of the same true messiah. According to this reading, Jesus would not be
redeemed by Sabbatai Tsevi, nor would their souls be conceived to derive from
189 Cf. Acts XXI 38, Josephus, Ant. XX, 8, 6; the identification (or confusion) of ‘that
Egyptian’ with Jesus might already exist in the Talmud.
190 51v.
191 For more on this idea see Chaim Wirszubski, ‘Ha-Teologia ha-Shabbetait shel Natan
ha-Azzati’, in his Bein ha-shittin, Jerusalem 1990, pp. 177-178; cf. Scholem, Sabbatai
Sevi, p. 306.
192 This is the terminology employed by Chaim Wirszubski in his reading of the figure of
Jesus in the writings of Nathan of Gaza.
l And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
the same root, but rather they would each be understood as fully developed
messianic personalities in their own right. It is the latter interpretation that I
wish to pursue here. I submit that the duality of the messianic figures in
Eibeschütz’s tract is predicated upon the duality of the functions of the messiah
as the lover and the son of the Shekhinah. Sabbatai Tsevi is the lover of the
Shekhinah who impregnates her while preserving her virginity. The virgin-born
Jesus is the offspring of this union. ‘Bringing the Torah scroll into the
outhouse’ is, in a nutshell, the passing of the Torah from Sabbatai Tsevi to
Jesus.193
On the final page of the Jerusalem 2491 manuscript of Va-Avo ha-Yom el
ha-Ayyin there appears a schematic drawing of what Christian iconography
calls the Calvary or Graded Cross – a shape of the Latin cross set upon three
steps representing the mound of Calvary, the place of the Crucifixion, or, in
descending order, Faith, based upon Hope, based upon Love.194 None of these
concepts appear in Eibeschütz’s tract and it is difficult to speculate what
exactly the anonymous scribe had in mind when he decided to end his work in
such a fashion. Yet the drawing feels oddly in place. If being in exile means
living in the world ruled by the Christian God and the redemptive act of
Sabbatai Tsevi consists in giving the Torah to Jesus, it seems fitting that Va-
Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, the summa of Sabbatian theology, would be sealed
with the image of the cross. Indeed, we have evidence that the symbol of the
cross was appropriated by later Sabbatians: amulets distributed by Moses
David of Podhajce, a Sabbatian ba’al shem who studied with Rabbi Jonathan
Eibeschütz in Altona, contained drawings of the cross.195 So, reportedly, did
amulets ascribed to the Frankists.196 Elsewhere, I have argued that the cross in
later Sabbatian thought was not so much a symbol of Christianity as of the
193 Just in passing, I should note that Jacob Frank’s messianic project begins from the
passing of the Torah from Jesus to Jacob Frank; see dictum 504 of the Books of the
Word of the Lord: ‘In a dream I saw Jesus sitting with his priests next to the well of
clear, living water. And this well abandoned them and came to me’. For the
interpretation of this dictum see Maciejko, Jacob Frank and Jesus Christ, p. 126.
194 Following 1 Cor 13:13.
195 Wirszubski, ‘Ha-mekkubal ha-Shabbeta’i Moshe David mi-Podhayyts’, Bein ha-Shittin,
p. 191
196 Majer Bałaban reportedly had such an amulet; see his ‘Studien und Quellen zur
Geschichte der Frankistischen Bewegung in Polen‘, in Livre d’hommage à la memoire
du Dr. Samuel Poznański, Warsaw, 1927, p. 29. Unfortunately, Bałaban gives a very
sketchy description of the amulet and it is impossible to say much regarding its content.
Maciejko: Coitus Interruptus li
unity of all faiths and peoples; for Jacob Frank, the four arms of the cross
represented the merging of religions and of peoples coming from the four
corners of the world.197 If we wanted to push this theme a little further, we
could probably notice that the very last sentence of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin
is the verse from Deuteronomy 33:3: ‘He also loves the nations.’ We could,
maybe, read this as a hint at the hope for universal redemption.
Yet it is not more than a hint. Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin devotes almost
all its attention to the depiction of the present, not to speculation about the
future. The underlying theme of Eibeschütz’s text is the fall and exile;
redemption, if it appears at all in the tract, is something hoped for, not
positively defined or described. The only suggestion in the text that would
allow us to say a little of how the redeemed world might look like is a
enigmatic sentence on the final page of the manuscript suggesting that ‘in the
future the Upper Shekhinah will be above the God of Israel, in the mystery of
the verse “A virtuous woman is a crown to her husband [Prov 12:4]”’.198 In
itself, this is an astonishing statement. Giving up on the traditional Kabbalistic
preference for the missionary position (in the Lurianic scheme the ideal state of
things is depicted as a situation whereby the Blessed Holy One is above the
Divine Presence and they are facing each other), Eibeschütz seems to believe
that in messianic times the feminine aspect of God will be on top of the
masculine. The possible theological (and political) implications of this idea are
astounding. However, Va-Avo is silent about these implications: the tract
expresses a weak messianic hope,199 the light of redemption flashes once, to be
covered again at once. For now, the world is sealed with the seal of the cross.
To make it absolutely clear, I do not think that Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin
– or Sabbatianism in general – constitutes an apotheosis of Christianity.
Neither do I believe that Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz or other Sabbatians were
‘crypto-Christians’. I believe that the main theme of the tract is the exile into
the world governed by the masculine, Christian God, Atika Kadisha. We must
not pray to Him, recognize Him as our God, yet we must recognize that He is,
in fact, the ruling Deity of this world. The reign of Esau – the rule of
Christianity – is not only a stage in the process of creation and emanation, but
the existential, religious, and historical diagnosis of the current world as an
197 See KSP 946, 2121.

198 73v.
199 After the famous formulation of Walter Benjamin in his Über den Begriff der
Geschichte, thesis no 2.
lii And I Came this Day unto the Fountain
essentially unredeemed world. The political hegemony of Christianity is, in

this scheme, merely a byproduct, an epiphenomenon of this state. The rule of
Esau is not – it should be emphasized – the rule of the demonic. It took me
several re-readings of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin to understand that one of the
most striking features of the mythology expounded in the tract is the utter lack
of the demonic principle in Eibeschütz’s thought. Evil (the word itself does not
appear in the text) is the ontological weakness of the God of Israel, who, in an
attempt to create the world, took upon Himself a task way above his
capabilities and overextended himself. Despite his frailty and his weakness (or
maybe because of them), He is our true God, present as absent in our worldly
exile. Eibeschütz investigated the theme of the exile deeper than any other
early modern – and possibly also modern – Jewish thinker. He understood that
the Jewish people must live in the Christian world, which they cannot either
join or escape. The creation is unfinished, not in the sense of creatio continua
but in the sense that nothing in this world is truly accomplished and truly
completed. There is no Fall but God’s organ going limp. There is no
redemption but through the outhouse.

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Coitus interruptus in And I Came this Day unto the Fountain

— I am not talking of a God whose imperfection is the imperfection of the

Konic, Zalman of Nikolsburg, and Nathan Neta of Hagenau. The Mannheim

confiscated. The rabbinic courts in Frankfurt and Mannheim conducted

of Joseph.11 Leibele was known to be a Sabbatian already from the late

14 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 54v.

25 Ibidem, Vol. I, fol. 129v.

his son-in-law’s detractors. Eibeschütz himself publicly appeared on the

30 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 126v.

34 Ibid., fol. 122r.

39 Zohar III, 125b.

holds himself to be [a new] Sabbatai Tsevi’.48 Others recalled that a witness

48 [Prager], Gahalei Esh, Vol. I, fol. 61r.

historical or philological argument save the plain statement that such a

56 Perlmuter, Rabbi Yehonatan Aybeshits, pp. 131-146.

earlier Sabbatian writings, such as the treatises of Nathan of Gaza, Abraham

64 See Liebes, ‘Ha-Yesod ha-Ideologi she-be-Fulmus Hayon’, in Sod ha-Emunah ha-

69 Probably a reference to the pseudo-Aristotelian treatise De Mundo, as discussed in the

in Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin not an exposition of Sabbatian doctrines but

78 See Scholem, ‘Zehn unhistorische Sätze über Kabbalah’, thesis 10.

81 Jiřzi Langer, Die Erotik der Kabbala, Prague 1923.

consciousness, periodic male impotence, or the distinction between the

different feminine and masculine aspects of God stimulate and eventually

116 50v, 51v.

127 21v, 29r-v.

making of the universe does move forward, it stagnates and reaches an

highest to the lowest regions and, simultaneously, a vessel in which the

167 BT Kettubot 6b.

171 As a passive partner.

regarded the whole event as a ‘miracle’.175 Now, what is truly interesting is

175 Ibid., 213.

messiah’s identification with or substitution of Elohei Yisrael and his

Felix.189 In the same fragment of Va-Avo ha-Yom el ha-Ayyin, Miriam is being

197 See KSP 946, 2121.

essentially unredeemed world. The political hegemony of Christianity is, in

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