The Nehemiah Hayyun affair: the fifteen days that settled who governed

Nehemiah Hiyya Hayyun, a native of Sarajevo and a crypto-Sabbatean, published Oz le-Elohim at Berlin in 1713 with commentaries of his own. His doctrine of three partzufim in the Godhead — the Attiq Yomin, the Malka Qaddisha and the Shekhinah — his opponents read as a Jewish trinitarianism; what most alarmed Hakham Tzvi, though, was a First Cause detached from the revealed God of Israel.

In 1713 Hayyun came to Amsterdam and sought the approbation of R. Solomon Ayllon, hakham of the Portuguese community — who had a Sabbatean past of his own from his Salonica years, and that is the key to the whole affair.

On 23 July Hakham Tzvi, chief rabbi of the Ashkenazi community of Amsterdam, together with R. Moses Hagiz, pronounced a herem on Hayyun forbidding the printing and circulation of his books — without waiting for the Portuguese commission's verdict, and published it in pamphlets. Ayllon convened a commission which found the book kabbalistic but not heretical. On 7 August the Portuguese ma'amad publicly declared Hayyun guiltless — in the Esnoga, over the objection of two members of its own commission — and censured Hakham Tzvi and Hagiz for excommunicating a man outside their jurisdiction.

The ma'amad then went on the attack: it placed them under a Portuguese herem, forbade its members to deal with them, and applied to the Amsterdam magistrate, which compelled both Tzvi Ashkenazi and Hayyun to leave the city (1714). In 1714 the community published its defence in two versions — the Hebrew Koshț Imrei Emet and the Spanish Manifesto — while Hagiz and his allies answered with a torrent of pamphlets; Venice, Livorno, London, Germany and Poland were all drawn in.

Hakham Tzvi never returned and died at Lemberg in 1718. Hayyun was banned in many other places — Hamburg and Altona as late as 1726 — and died destitute in North Africa about 1730.

Four corrections. The quarrel was not theological but jurisdictional: the question whether the book was Sabbatean sank almost at once, and what decided things was that an Ashkenazi rabbi had issued a decree binding on a Sephardi, trespassing on the ma'amad's exclusive right to judge its own and license printing — and that the ma'amad chose to punish it. Carlebach shows that the Portuguese leadership was defending not Hayyun but its own authority. "Hakham Tzvi was expelled by gentiles out of hostility to Jews" — no: he was expelled because a Portuguese Jewish board asked the Amsterdam magistrate to do it, a Jewish body using Christian civil power against a Jewish chief rabbi — while forbidding its own members, on pain of herem, to appeal to gentile courts. And "after 1666 the community was united against Sabbateanism" — the reverse: Ayllon's own Sabbatean past, and the community's never having reckoned with the belief of Aboab, Pereyra and Naar in 1666, are the direct causes of 1713. Finally the chronology: herem on 23 July, exoneration on 7 August, expulsions and the pamphlet war in 1714 — the decisive phase took fifteen days.