The relevance of Jonas’s exploration of Gnosticism to Jewish history was demonstrated by his friend Gershom Scholem in his seminal essay of 1937, “Mitzvah habaah ba’averah” (later translated as “Redemption through Sin”), about the seventeenth-century Jewish false messiah, Sabbatai Zevi (the English spelling varies), and his eighteenth- century successor, Jacob Frank. Under pressure from the Ottoman authorities, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam, while Frank ultimately converted to Catholicism in Poland. In each case, their followers developed intricate theological rationales to explain the unanticipated fate of their messiah. And they engaged in deliberately transgressive behavior, on the grounds that the coming of the messiah liberated his followers from the yoke of the law, and that the world could only be redeemed from evil by exhausting the evil within it through acts of sacrilege. Following Jonas’s lead, Scholem pointed out the connection between their sense of spiritual election and nihilism:

To the pneumatic, the spiritual universe which he inhabits is of an entirely different order from the world of ordinary flesh and blood, whose opinion of the new laws he has chosen to live by is therefore irrelevant; insofar as he is above sin . . . he may do as the spirit dictates without needing to take into account the moral standards of the society around him. Indeed he is, if anything, duty-bound to violate and subvert this “ordinary” morality in the name of the higher principles that have been revealed to him.

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Several of Scholem’s writings are of par tic u lar importance for his relationship with Jacob Taubes. We have already noted his pathbreaking article on “Redemption through Sin” published in the Hebrew journal, Knesset, in 1937, which explored the ideas and influence of the seventeenth- century putative Messiah, Sabbatai Zevi, and a century  later, of Jacob Frank, who once again proclaimed himself the redeemer before becoming an apostate by converting to Christianity, together with his followers. Frank developed a theology that proclaimed the need to violate Jewish law and to descend to the depths of sin inorder to liberate the divine sparks from a fallen world, and he and his followers engaged in libertine practices.

The Sabbatian and Frankist movements had echoed across generations. But by the twentieth  century, they  were largely forgotten by most Jews, and regarded by historians of the Wissenschaft des Judentums as an aberration and an embarrassment. Scholem’s approach was entirely different. For him, Sabbatianism was central to understanding Jewish history. It represented undercurrents of vitality and resistance to the unredeemed world of the Exile, and Zionism made it possible to sympathetically unpack its real significance.109 Scholem insisted that

we owe much to the experience of Zionism for enabling us to detect in Sabbatianism’s throes those gropings toward a healthier national existence which must have seemed an undiluted nightmare to the peaceable Jewish bourgeois of the nineteenth  century. . . . The desire for total liberation which played so tragic a role in the development of Sabbatian nihilism was by no means a purely self-destructive force; on the contrary, beneath the surface of lawlessness, antinomianism, and catastrophic negation, powerful constructive impulses  were at work. . . .  [For] this nihilism, in turn, helped pave the way for the Haskalah [Jewish Enlightenment] and the reform movement of the nineteenth  century, once its original religious impulse was exhausted.

Scholem drew a fleeting parallel between Sabbatianism and early Christianity. In each case, the putative messiah had met a scandalous fate: crucifixion in the case of Jesus, apostasy in the case of Sabbatai Zevi. He also pointed to the revival of Gnostic motifs among the more radical Sabbatians, and the belief that the proper response to an evil world was to destroy it from within through descending into the abyss of impurity. For Scholem, the libidinal antinomianism of the Frankists recalled the Gnostic pneumatics that Jonas had explored. And he thought that the pattern of inspired heresy eroding the inner core of orthodox religion and leading to revolutionary developments was by no means confined to Judaism. In a theme that Jacob Taubes seized upon, Scholem noted that within Christianity, the conflict between ecstatic, pneumatic spiritualists in the Middle Ages led to internal conflicts, and “the spiritualist sects which it produced went on to play important roles in the development of new social and religious institutions, often giving birth, albeit in religious guise, to the most revolutionary ideas. 

Jerry Z. Muller, Jacob Taubes: Professor of Apocalypse