Messianic Mysticism

Moses Hayim Luzzatto (1707–1746) gathered around him an inner circle of devout Jews who shared his belief in the imminent arrival of the messianic age and who privately identified members of their circle as divinely ordained to usher in the Redemption. To the rabbis of Venice and Frankfurt, however, Luzzatto was a heretic, whose claims to have written works at the dictation of a messenger from heaven could not be genuine. Under pressure from them he was obliged to withdraw a number of such works, and the manuscripts were either lost or destroyed. Yet his known works came to earn him admiration: as a literary figure among the adherents of the Enlightenment, as a great kabbalist and profound mystic by hasidim and even by some of their leading opponents, and as a great ethical teacher by all religious streams. The author of this book spent many years in the study of Luzzatto and his group, and succeeded in tracing a number of the lost manuscripts. In the essays translated in this volume, the author described and annotated the manuscripts which he found, giving the full text of some of the prose works and of all the poems. He was able to correct and add detail to the incomplete picture of Luzzatto and his mystical world. One of the most illuminating documents reproduced here is Luzzatto's version of his ketubah or marriage contract. A second key document is the personal, mystical diary which Luzzatto's second-in-command, Rabbi Moses David Valle, wrote in the margins of his own commentary on the Bible.