The most interesting information I gleaned from The Mixed Multitude is how connected and adversarial contemporaries Jacob Frank and Rabbi Jacob Emden were. I first came across R. Emden some years back and had been thrilled to read such high praise for Christianity coming from such a well regarded rabbi. The book contextualized Emden’s strategy of détente revealing, for me, a profoundly disappointing but illuminating approach to Jewish Christian “reconciliation.”
It was Frank’s incorporation of Christian sacramentals—such as crucifixes and Marian shrines—into Jewish rituals that provoked the Rabbis to attempt the unprecedented excommunication of the Frankists from Judaism. What the book exposes in R. Emden’s polemic against Frank and adjacent gushing about Christianity is a strategy to treat these inextricably linked halves of a singular religion as two distinct, disconnected and autonomous systems.
Jacob Frank’s chaotic and unorthodox bridge making attempt between Judaism and Christianity was portrayed by Embden and other rabbis of the 1750s as scandalous to both religions. Certainly if everything said about Frank was actually true and not slander what he was doing should rightly have been put down. One could argue it was correctly managed by the Frankist conversion to Catholicism and their subsequent repentance. I wrote about this in my book report.
The problem with Emden’s respect for Christianity is that he built an enduring wall of separation where each side feels little need to grapple with the claims of the other. He cleverly devised a way, still in psychological effect today, where the two traditions are now culturally allied without much meaningful inter-religious connection.
From a Christian perspective this is a problem because (Temple) Judaism is the bedrock of Christianity. You can’t have a building without the bedrock. It is disorienting for Christians that the original builders have left the building and seem to have little interest in how it is administrated. The separation is an unconscious problem for Jews because Christianity, particularly Catholicism, fulfills all the Messianic expectations intrinsic to serious Judaism.
Here’s a good summary of Emden’s favorable approach to Christianity in his own words:
“The writers of the Gospels never meant to say that the Nazarene came to abolish Judaism, but only that he came to establish a religion for the Gentiles from that time onward. Nor was it new, but actually ancient; they being the Seven Commandments of the Sons of Noah, which were forgotten. The Apostles of the Nazarene then established them anew. However, those born as Jews, or circumcised as converts to Judaism are obligated to observe all commandments of the Torah without exception.”
Read more on what I’d call the deceptively positive aspect of Emden’s approach.
Certainly there is much truth here, but it is in the subtle details where deceit lies. Jesus came to redeem the world, Jew and Gentile, as the Messiah who is God incarnate. Supposedly Emden was well read in the New Testament. If that is the case he is engaging in serious distortion by reducing Jesus’ mission to the evangelization of the Noahide Laws to Gentiles implying Jesus had nothing for the Jews. One can also see his priority is to keep Jews Jewish by suggesting the Jews are still obliged to observe all the Mitzvot, even over and above salvation. This is ludicrous because without the Temple no (non-Catholic) Jew could ever keep all the Mitzvot, as only 369 of the 613 are still keepable.
Those unkeepable 244 Mitzvot are the Temple ceremonials. They are now eternally kept by Jesus AND every Christian who assists at mass. The irony of the Emden criticism is that it is precisely the Catholic Jew who could fulfill the Emden standard of being a Jew.
And what Jews may have met the high bar of the Emden Jewish standard? His arch nemesis, Jacob Frank and the Catholic Frankist Jews. They deliberately kept themselves separate from both Jews and Christians so they could practice their hybrid of Jewish and Catholic rituals which they believed would bring about the rectification of the world.
Frank, for all his sordid history, eccentricity and apparent megalomania, gleaned the spiritual essentiality of (re)connecting Judaism and Christianity in a total way. It was Emden who devised a successful strategy to prevent this unification from happening. The legacy of Emden’s respectful separation lives on to this day. Many Jews and Christians remain timid about bringing lived Catholicism and Judaism into close proximity.
