The Ramchal affair: the Padua circle, the maggid and five years of proceedings

The picture usually left out: in those years R. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto is a clean-shaven, unmarried young man writing plays in Hebrew, Italian and Latin, in a circle attached to the medical faculty of the University of Padua, nearly all of whose members were medical students. In 1727, aged twenty, he announced that he was receiving instruction from a maggid. The circle, the Mevakshei Hashem, had a written constitution with signatures; by Isaiah Tishby's reconstruction from the manuscripts the roles were assigned outright: Luzzatto himself as Moses, guiding both messiahs; R. Moses David Valle as Messiah son of David; and Sabbatai Zevi assigned the role of Messiah son of Joseph — that is, the role that fails.

In 1729 the enthusiastic letters of his pupil Yekutiel Gordon, a Lithuanian medical student, reached Vienna and from there R. Moses Hagiz at Altona, the veteran hunter of Sabbateans who fifteen years earlier had destroyed Nehemiah Hayyun. Hagiz alerted the Venetian rabbinate.

On 18 Shevat 5490 — 5 February 1730 — Luzzatto signed the Padua undertaking. It is precisely an undertaking, brokered by his own teacher R. Isaiah Bassan: not to write down the maggid's revelations any further, to deposit what was written with Bassan, not to teach Kabbalah. He admitted no heresy, did not call the maggid false, and was not placed under a ban.

In 1734 the case was reopened, and then came the bans — Altona, Berlin, Breslau, Brody, Fürth, Lemberg, Nikolsburg. In 1735, under the ruling of R. Jacob ha-Kohen Poppers at Frankfurt, the manuscripts were surrendered: a portion burned, the rest buried "so that they would soon moulder," and the circle barred from studying Kabbalah before the age of forty. In the same year Luzzatto signed at Frankfurt a renunciation of the revelations — and left.

In February 1735 he is in Amsterdam. The Portuguese community did not recognise the bans and took him in: from February he draws relief, then a monthly stipend from the Abodad a Hesed confraternity and from Ets Haim, and he is admitted to study at Ets Haim — an exceptional concession to a non-Portuguese Italian. Here he wrote more than anywhere else; from here come Mesillat Yesharim (1740) and the drama Layesharim Tehillah (1743). In 1743 he left for the Land of Israel and died at Acre in a plague on 26 Iyar 5506.

Five corrections. He was not excommunicated in Italy — 1730 produced a negotiated undertaking, not a ban. The manuscripts were not simply "burned": a portion was burned, the greater part buried, and the suppression failed, which is why Kelah Pithei Hokhmah, Da'at Tevunot and the Zohar Tinyana exist at all. Mesillat Yesharim is not the book he was persecuted for: it was written in Amsterdam after the affair and is deliberately free of Kabbalah. In Amsterdam he was not shunned but supported. And the year of death is 5506, that is 16 May 1746; the common "1747" comes of assigning 26 Iyar to 5507.