The amulet controversy: Emden against Eybeschutz

Eighty years after Shabbetai Tzvi the fear of hidden Sabbateanism had not gone: it was too well remembered how a secret heresy had lived inside communities for decades. On that fear the quarrel broke out.

In 1750 Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschutz—a scholar of the first rank, author of Urim veTumim and Kreti uPleti—took the rabbinate of the triple community of Altona, Hamburg and Wandsbek. In that same Altona lived Rabbi Jacob Emden, a sharp man who printed his books on his own press and spent his life hunting Sabbateans.

In 1751 Emden declared that the amulets Eybeschutz gave to women in childbirth concealed the name of Shabbetai Tzvi. Eybeschutz denied it.

What followed grew and went far beyond a scholars' quarrel. Partisans fought in the streets, and the town authorities were drawn in. The Hamburg senate took Eybeschutz's side; the king of Denmark—Altona was Danish—ordered an inquiry, and it came to nothing: the testimony conflicted. Emden had to flee the town, and went on fighting by pamphlet.

The rabbinic world split. Not everyone supported the charge; Rabbi Yechezkel Landau, the Noda bi-Yehudah, tried to reconcile the sides.

The matter was never settled. Eybeschutz's learning no one disputed, then or since: his books are studied to this day. Modern scholarship—Yehuda Liebes, Paweł Maciejko—reads the recovered notarised copies of the amulets as Sabbatean; in the traditional world that reading is not accepted.

What matters here besides the quarrel itself: it showed what a suspicion costs when it can neither be proved nor lifted. Two communities warred for thirteen years, went as far as gentile authorities—and were left with the same question they had begun with.