UNKNOWN

“After reading two or three paragraphs the hair of my head stood up. Nothing like this was ever seen or known from any heretic or disbeliever of this world . . . and it certainly deserves to be burned.”

The Hebrew Kabbalistic text called I Came This Day to the Spring (Va-avo ha-Yom el ha-‘Ayin) created a scandal among the Jewish communities of Central Europe when it surfaced, in manuscript, in 1725. It was obviously linked to the cult of Sabbatai Zevi, the would-be Messiah who drove the Jewish world wild with excitement in 1665 and converted to Islam the following year. Its author was the brilliant young rabbi Jonathan Eibeschuetz (1695–1764), soon to become one of the foremost preachers and rabbinic authorities of the era.

Now, for the first time, Eibeschuetz’s extraordinary book—a charter for the world religion of the future, rooted in Kabbalistic Judaism but unlike any religion ever known—is available in English translation, by a leading scholar of Judaism and its Kabbalah. It is not easy reading. But David Halperin’s full annotations will give readers the guiding thread they need to follow Eibeschuetz on his amazing journey “to the spring of wisdom”—and beyond.

David J. Halperin is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He is the author of Seeking Ezekiel (1993), Sabbatai Zevi (2007), and four other books on Jewish mysticism, messianism, and the human phenomenon of religion. He has also written the coming-of-age novel Journal of a UFO Investigator (2011). He maintains a blog at www.davidhalperin.net.