Zealot

This chapter highlights Jacob Emden, who crafted Jacob Sasportas in his own image as a heresy hunter in the middle of the eighteenth century. The transmission of anti-Sabbatian ideas from Jacob Sasportas to Jacob Emden constitutes a crucial period in the formation of the early modern Jewish zealot. As his battle with chief rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz continued to rage, Emden printed a new edition of Sasportas's Kitzur zizath novel zvi (The Fading Flower of the Zevi). This edition appeared at a particularly fraught time in Emden's life. He turned to Sasportas as a precedent in two of his primary battles: against the Eibeschütz party in Altona-Hamburg-Wandsbek and against the Frankist movement in Poland. To these elective affinities with Sasportas—a common name, a common city, and a common enemy—one can add a few others: an acute sensitivity to the printed word, a pronounced sense of entitlement derived from a combination of lineage and learning, and a peripatetic lifestyle as a result of financial and communal difficulties.