Women are conspicuously absent from the Jewish mystical tradition.
Even if historically some Jewish women may have experienced
mystical revelations and led richly productive spiritual lives, the
tradition does not preserve any record of their experiences or
insights. Only the chance survival of scant evidence suggests that,
at various times and places, individual Jewish women did pursue the
path of mystical piety or prophetic spirituality, but it appears
that they were generally censured, and efforts were made to
suppress their activities. This contrasts sharply with the fully
acknowledged prominence of women in the mystical traditions of both
Christianity and Islam. It is against this background that the
mystical messianic movement centred on the personality of Sabbatai
Zevi (1626 - 76) stands out as a unique and remarkable exception.
Sabbatai Zevi addressed to women a highly original liberationist
message, proclaiming that he had come to make them 'as happy as
men' by releasing them from the pangs of childbirth and the
subjugation to their husbands that were ordained for women as a
consequence of the primordial sin. This unprecedented redemptive
vision became an integral part of Sabbatian eschatology, which the
messianists believed to be unfolding and experienced in the
present. Their New Law, superseding the Old with the dawning of the
messianic era, overturned the traditional halakhic norms that
distinguished and regulated relations between the sexes. This was
expressed not only in the outlandish ritual transgression of sexual
prohibitions, in which Sabbatian women were notoriously implicated,
but also in the apparent adoption of the idea - alien to rabbinic
Judaism - that virginity, celibacy, or sexual abstinence were
conducive to women's spiritual empowerment. Ada Rapoport-Albert
traces the diverse manifestations of this vision in every phase of
Sabbatianism and its offshoots. These include the early promotion
of women to centre-stage as messianic prophetesses; their
independent affiliation with the movement in their own right; their
initiation in the esoteric teachings of the kabbalah; and their
full incorporation, on a par with men, into the ritual and
devotional life of the messianic community. Their investment with
authority was such as to elevate the messiah's wife (a figure
mostly absent from traditional messianic speculations) to the rank
of full messianic consort, sharing in her husband's redemptive
mission as well as his divine dimension. By the late eighteenth
century, a syncretistic cult had developed that recognized in Eva -
the unmarried daughter of Jacob Frank, one of Sabbatai Zevi's
apostate messianic successors - an incarnate female aspect of the
kabbalistic godhead, worshipped by her father's devotees as 'Holy
Virgin' and female messiah. This was the culmination of the
Sabbatian endeavour to transcend the traditional gender paradigm
that had excluded women from the public arena of Jewish spiritual
life. This work is translated by Deborah Greniman.
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