Matt Goldish
Ohio State University
The Sermons of Hakham Solomon Aailion and Clerical Heresy in Late 17th Century England
The Jewish messianic movement surrounding Shabbatai Zvi in 1665-6 ended its public phase when Shabbatai converted to Islam. The Jewish world was generally embarrassed by its massive error and sought nothing more than to bury the entire episode. But numerous Sabbateans were unable to relinquish their belief in the mission of Shabbatai, and underground cells of these outlawed believers remained active for over a century. Astonishingly, a significant number of important rabbis in Europe and the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were active Sabbateans. This was the case with Hakham Solomon Aailion, who was rabbi of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews' congregation in London during the decade following the Glorious Revolution, and afterward in the great community of Amsterdam.
In this talk I will discuss several manuscripts of sermons left by Aailion, mainly from his tenure in London, to see what they reveal about his continued Sabbatean belief. I will also talk about what it meant to be a heretic in the Jewish world of the period, and compare Aailion's case with certain contemporary Latitudinarian divines of the Church of England who might also have technically been heretics. In the late seventeenth century it became increasingly common for Anglican clergy to doubt or even reject some of the Thirty-nine Articles and other formal doctrines of the English Church. The coincidence of heretical clergy in the Jewish and Christian English context at this specific juncture suggests the need for a careful evaluation of the very meaning of heresy in that period of rapid change.