Hamadhn, Schadenfreude, and Salvation through Sin

Author(s): L. E. Goodman
Source: Journal of Arabic Literature, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Mar., 1988), pp. 27-39
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4183161
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 Journalof ArabicLiterature,
XIX

HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE, AND

SALVATION THROUGH SIN

To give up the gods for monotheism is also to give up the idea that
somewhere, between the interstices of events, or even at their roots some-
one or some thing is peering out at us and laughing. The God of
monotheism is earnest, sometimes deadly earnest, and the life that He
lays out for us is earnest too. It has a goal and purpose. Its events are
purposeful, even its tragedies have meaning, and its ironies all aim at
teaching us our frailty and mortality, redirecting our gaze beyond the
level of trivial, mortal concerns. It contains no room for the absurd. Yet
the element of the absurd is not lacking in life just because the com-
prehensiveness of an all synthetic world view declares the category (or
counter-category) to have been irrelevant. The ironies of disappointed
hopes, false expectations, specious pretensions and hypocritical
impostures are heightened, not negated by the homiletic claims of com-
prehensive earnestness. And for that reason, monotheism begets satire
every bit as much as paganism breeds cynicism. Indeed monotheism can
breed cynicism in the same way that it breeds skepticism, by the very lof-
tiness of its claims. For cynicism minimizes moral claims just as skep-
ticism minimizes claims of fact and understanding. Just as it is false to
say that there can be no Christian tragedy (since, as Faustus shows, the
deepest possibilities of tragedy lie open when the idea of eternal damna-
tion has been broached), so it is false to suppose that there is no Islamic
farce, or parody, or satire. In all popular, theatric, or balladic
literature-wherever the contrasting voices of high and low language
give liveliness to speech, there is room for mockery. And (as we learn
from ballads) the more earnest the expostulations of gravity become, the
more ludricruous or lugubrious they set themselves up to be when
mocked.
Badie al-Zaman al-Hamadhini was a mocker. Like all romantics he
drew upon urbanity to mock rusticity while almost simultaneously using
the naturalness of vulgar speech, exotic speech, street argot and slapstick
to mock urbanity itself. If there was serious purpose in his mockery-and
I do not doubt for a moment that there was-that purpose cannot be
found in the handbooks of kaldm or hadWihcurrent among his contem-
poraries and successors but must be found, as in all satiric writing in the
smiles between the lines. James Monroe 1 has shown us carefully how the
I James T. Monroe, The art of Badif az-Zamdn al-Hamadhdnf as picaresque narrative,
Beirut, 1983.
28 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

"Bishr Encounter", with which Hamadhani's collection climaxes, a

maqdmawhich omits all mention of Abfi I-Fath al-Iskandari, but which
preserves a formal unity with the rest by its attribution to the raconteur,
'Isa b. Hisham, forms a miniscule mock heroic anti-epic, violating in
turn each of the canons of the cAntar-type of heroic cycle. [See pp. 31-
37.] But from this sound conclusion, solidly grounded, Monroe goes on
to argue that Hamadhani intends in his maqamat to uphold moral
values-to reject the shallowness and "false teaching" of the narrator,
cIsa b. Hisham. This would make the all but transparent persona of 'Isa,
rather than his encounters with al-Iskandari, the subject of the work and
would open far more questions that it could begin to answer: Is the heroic
age yet alive for Hamadhani and do its values still function for him? Can
one descend to parody and burlesque yet still preserve the values one
lampoons? Can a Muslim author parody "hadzTh,s&raand the lyric" and
go on to mock the Qur'an and yet be held to take them and their values
absolutely seriously on the grounds that he mocks through a mouthpiece?
Hamadhani was an artist. His use of language constantly calls atten-
tion to itself. It would be as foolish to say that he wrote in an artful prose
and indeed devised a new genre simply to express his thoughts as it would
be to claim that his themes confined themselves to the display of linguistic
orotundity. Hamadhani does not simply deliver himself, because he does
not deliver himself simply. His theses are unstated. His art is no less
powerful for being one of indirection. But neither is he simply displaying
virtuosity and philologic erudition. That could be done in a dictionary.
Hamadhani uses language (it is not his subject), and he uses it to effect.
His praise is sincere when he says of Imru' al-Qays: "He gave us his
horse, point for point". That is a fact about Imrul al-Qays which cannot
be denied even though it comes from the mouth of the chameleon al-
Iskandarl. Setting al-Iskandari's thoughts about Imrul al-Qays in the
first of the maqdmait, the "Poesy Encounter" is not an accident but a
means of setting forth some of the literary values that the maqdmdtitself
seeks to exemplify, and of setting forth the trans-literary values as well:
originality in art, devilry in morals, verbal power and precision. The
Poesy Mdqama is a kind of homage, almost a dedication. But at the same
time it is a challenge and the expression of a melancholy admission-
Shaw addressing Shakespeare through a puppet play. One cannot rival
originality by emulation. New and more credible settings must be found
for the lyric voice. And the fluid, sinuous and mobile prose which was
the new creation of the Arabic secretarial class and urban environment
must provide that setting for the remnants of the desert voice of the lyric
or elegiac qaPida. New themes must be chosen as well. We have Imru' al-
Qays' horse, and his girls and hunts as well. There is not much more to
 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE 29

tell here-but so much more to the complexity of life and its twists,
encounters, and surprises, so much more to the delicately situated con-
flicts of emotion, between embarrassed honor and angry impatience,
between chastened frivolity and astonished discovery, between foolish
generosity and sagacious connoisseurship. All of these and many more
colorations and nuances of sense and emotion-as vivid as the parti-
colored silks of the young lIsa's dandy friends-are variations on the
single universal theme of Imru' al-Qays, the classic dandy's theme, the
passage of time, the conflict between reality and appearance, and the vic-
tory which nature gives to time but which art awards to appearances.
Time, as in Imru' al-Qays, remains the enemy, destroying
appearances and pleasures. Yet art can conquer time and laugh at it.
This Aba I-Fath does repeatedly with his disguises, spurious stories of his
origin, present circumstances, or future plans. He tells us repeatedly,
explicitly, that his pretenses are a kind of revenge against time for the
tricks it has played on him. His changes of role, premise and language
pass him through all the classes of men and all the locales familiar and
exotic to Hamadhini 's world, as a satiric imp who becomes in turn the
type of every earnest, over serious or outrageous figure, from the imam
in the mosque and preacher in the rostrum, to the vagabond beggar,
highwayman, ghazi, doomsayer, catchpenny beggar and extravagant
con-man. All of his changes bespeak the instability of time, which here
means fate and fortune, social circumstance, mores and conventions.
The political and social revolutions of Islamic history are not the sole
model but are clearly a paradigm of that instability. What al-Iskandari
retorts in one of the many moments in which he is discovered and found
out is true of many of Hamadhini's contemporaries:

By night they are Arabs

Clear of birth and of blood;
By day they become Nabataean (see the "Balkh Encounter")
The maqdmatof Hamadhini are a sensuous genre. But the sensuous is
part of-essential to-the values of the dandy. It is the source and root
of aestheticism. But more: as Richard Ellmann remarks a propos of
Oscar Wilde:
Partly because he was himself leading a secret life as a homosexual, Wilde
was keenly alive to the disparity between semblance and reality. He saw
hypocrisy in various forms around him, as well as in himself, and particu-
larly scorned those who pretended to pity and morality out of a desire to
conform. One had, he thought, a duty to oneself as well as to others: the
duty of self-discovery and self-expression. This duty made necessary,
among other things, the loss of innocence, for innocence too long main-
tained could be as dangerous as guilt.
30 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

It was Wilde, as Ellmann reminds us, who put in the mouth of Miss
Prism (misprision) the description of her lost novel: "The good ended
happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." And to
the innocent Cecily Cardew he assigned the lines: "I hope you have not
been leading a double life, pretending to be wicked and being really good
all the time. That would be hypocrisy."
Sensualism is connected to the dandy's love of discovery and expose,
wit, surface, and the play of appearances with realities and display of
appearances as realities-by aestheticism and by the deliciousness of
wickedness in the mouth of the innocent or the naif.
When (Isa describes the making of halva it is Hamadhani's intention
to make our mouths water, literally, just as much as the mouth of al-
Iskandari's rustic dupe. When he buggers a burglar or stabs a caravan
robber, again we are expected to participate. The power to elicit a
response-visceral or intellectual-is as much a measure of
Hamadhani's claim to success as an artist as are his dual claims to
originality and lastingness of expression. Innovative, arcane and exotic
language, unexpected turns of usage, rhyme, inversion, anagram,
pointedness of wit and pertinence of meter are as central to Hamadhani's
art as is its matter. If we survey the values celebrated in that art, beyond
the pungency of the sensate elicited in the reader or hearer of the
maqamdt, central among them we find the celebration of the power of the
artist to elicit those emotions and sensations by an objective correlative
which is striking for its deftness-the use of few words, if intricately
disposed, and of highly specific situations briefly limned, to accomplish
an emotive purpose. Clearly art is high up on the list of Hamadhani's
treasures; and the devices of language-words and their figures in syn-
tax, prosody and pattern-are the jewels and patterns of his art. But they
are not its message.
Like other celebrants of art Hamadhdni himself is a dandy. He revels
in language just as his young men revel in their colorful (and disapproved
of) silks. And, like his fictive speaker cIsa, he would travel far "to snare
the rare and wild elusive word". But like other dandies, like other
literary dandies in particular, Hamadhani's art of expression betokens
something further than itself. Like all satirists Hamadhani is a critic.
Like all parodists he is something of a cynic.2 But his criticism is rather
larger in its scope than the disapproval of objects already (even officially)
disapproved. There would be no novelty or innovation in that. Rather

2 See Martin Green, The Childrenof the Sun, New York, 1976 on the subject of
uproarious, uncontrollable laughter and the practice of his subject figures in hoax, prac-
tical joking, fancy dress, costumes, disguises-and, of course, parodies.
 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE 31

what Hamadhani is about is a transvaluation of values (or should we say,

a making explicit of what everyone already knew but had not the words
or face to say-what oft was thought, but ne'er so openly expressed?).
Hamadhini's transvaluation is not of all values at once, of course. To
achieve that literally would be impossible. There must always be a stand-
point, a fulcrum, a moral ground to push off from: one can criticize this
only in terms of that. But Hamadharni has learned the cynics' and the
skeptics' trick of shifting ground, of shifting weight from one foot to the
other, lampooning this in terms of that, and that in terms of the other.
Only formal virtues like candor are relatively resistant to this acid pro-
cess, and even they are not proof against it.
Hypocrisy is the most vulnerable of all targets, since it contains its own
denunciation and awaits only exposure. As for candor, that presents a
very slender target, since it claims only to be what it is, say what it
sees-and acquires verisimilitude (sometimes taken for realism) in part
simply from the shock value of saying what polite convention leaves
unsaid or even has no words to say. But the true cynic, while he uses can-
dor, has no use for it when his work is done, and like the mystic who pulls
up his ladder after him, or like the skeptic who renounces skeptic
dogmatism, he would be glad to find a way of blowing up his final
charge, since candor is uncomfortably close to earnestness, which he lam-
poons, and to hypocrisy, which doth protest too much. Hamadhani has
provided himself with just the escape that the cynic requires. For he
writes in fictions and through the words of a persona about what that
other professes to have seen and heard. The witness proves himself
repeatedly to be unreliable, and so the tissue of his fictions falls,
leaving-not the unquestioned sanctity of Qur'an and hadUth,of course,
but the bittersweet taste of impostures exposed, the clean feeling that no
new imposition has been set up in their place, and the freedom to choose
sensate and expressive values arbitrarily, alongside their chaste and
ascetic rivals without apology to authority and without guilt.
Hamadhani's work is liberating in a way. Like Freud's work it involves
purgation of built up anxieties, the products and byproducts of conflicts
among values. But Hamadhani's role is more like Nietzsche's than like
Freud's. His role is more to diagnose than to cure, and more to laugh
than treat at all, although laughter is a kind of treatment.
Hamadhani presses further than Freud the conflicts among values in
the civilization he surveys. But his necessary drawing back from
earnestness saves him from the madness that overtook Nietzsche and the
most earnest of his disciples. Like Nietzsche's linguistic task,
Hamadhani's is not easy. One cannot simply tell people that good is not
as good as they suppose, or that bad can have a goodness to it. One can
32 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

reverse the words, of course, keeping connotations as denotations and

making denotations connotations. But confusions are hard to avoid when
this is done, and specificity is impossible to sustain. One cannot simply
preach a sermon on the beauty and nobility of evil or the dullness and
stupidity of good. One cannot be doctrinaire about rejecting dogmatism
or invite disciples to emulate one's moral or intellectual audacity. If one
intends to challenge or transform moral or linguistic usage, explode
cliches and render freedom canonical, one must resort to poetry, as
Baudelaire does-and to dramatic writing, where all pretense of
argumentative persuasion is discarded and rhetoric slips off its clothes
and slips under the covers to persuade by means of more immediacy than
argument.
In Jacques Tati's film Mon Oncle we meet a little boy whose ultra-
modern house with its aluminum fountain and stainless steel gate typify
the rigidity and sterility of his family's life. Only an eccentric uncle who
lives in a cockeyed garret perched precariously high above the roofs of
Paris offers the child glimpses of another kind of existence. The boy is
fed in an antiseptic kitchen. His mother wears surgical gloves to prepare
his toast and autoclaves his utensils as the child sits down to eat alone.
But occasionally the boy takes his bicycle and rides to the edge of town
or accompanies his uncle on mad jaunts. His great joy is to spend his
pocket change on enormous pastries, covered with sugar and horrid red
jam, purchased from a greasy pastryman who is constantly rubbing his
hands on his filthy apron. After eating his pastry on a hillside overlooking
the suburban street, the little boy conceals himself carefully and with
equal gusto catapults good sized rocks on passersby, skillfully ricocheting
the projectiles so as to disguise their line of origination but still give a
good klonk to the pedestrians whose bowlers are unfailingly knocked off.
The climax of the movie comes when the little boy's father agrees to
accompany him on one of his jaunts, .and the film ends with the two, child
and industrialist, joyously practicing the devilry of the catapult on the
unsuspecting respectable people who pass below. I can think of no more
perfect paradigm of Schadenffrede. Its types are Till Eulenspiegel and
Mullah Nasruddin, the Trickster figures of myth and fable-Loki and
his ilk-the confidence men of The Sting and the vast body of popular
literature it leaves behind it.
Ulysses is a trickster. His deception of Achilles and his conspiracy of
a hollow horse are reflexes of the delight audiences take in watching a
well turned scheme (or plot) unfold, twist and drive to its conclusion.
Also a trickster is Diomedes, Ulysses' comrade in the theft of the
Palladium. Hearing how Diomedes deceived his younger combatant
Glaukos in the name of honor and half remembered bonds of family
 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE 33

hospitality to exchange his precious armor for a battle weary veteran's

set is a source of delight to Homer's audience, and Homer himself cannot
resist telling at length of the two men's feeling overtures to one another3
and joining in with the punchline:

So they spoke, and both springing down from behind their horses
Gripped each other's hands and exchanged the promise of friendship.
But Zeus the son of Kronos stole away the wits of Glaukos
Who exchanged with Diomedes the son of Tydeus armor
Of gold for bronze, for nine oxen's worth, the worth of a hundred.
Northrup Frye counts force and fraud as the two principal springs of
action and sources of delight in secular literature. Notably, both lie more
towards the side of evil than of good in the scales of instituted morality
and moralism. Both are found in good measure in Hamadhani-force as
an element of the sensate which Hamadhini evokes-fraud, in greater
measure, because its vehicle is wit and linguistic virtuosity and because
its message of deception, falsity of appearances and shock of recognition,
where truth is recognized only through the violation of pretenses and
-exposure of impostures, lies close to the heart of Hamadhani's theme-a
theme which is never obtusely mentioned but repeatedly stated in the
protective wraps of referential opacity, and led to subtly but
unmistakably by implication and indirection.
Al-Iskandari enjoys deceiving others. He delights in the mockery of the
stuffy and puffed up, and he delights in the gullibillity of his dupes. C'sa
b. Hisha.n is indeed his disciple, not so much by way of his parodistic
sermons-to attempt to emulate these would be to parody a parody and
land back in the realm of the deadly serious and seriously deadly-but
rather as the retailer of his exploits, and occasionally their imitator-for
it is cIsa, not Abui l-Fath, who traps the country visitor into paying for
his dinner-and being slapped around for the privilege; and in juggling
the mathematics of exponential expansion against a loaf or two of bread,
cIsa bests Abu l-Fath, with the counterpart of the verbal skill that has
been used on him repeatedly. Hamadhani's audience enjoys the same
thrill that the simple man feels when he witnesses the outwitting of the
Devil in folktales or in the fabular movies of George Burns (Oh God, You
Devil) or Ingmar Bergman (The Devil's Eye).
Is al-Iskandari the devil? Not by a long shot. His vices and his virtues
are all too human. Rather he is the type of one who would master the
human condition before allowing himself to be mastered by it. His feel-

-'Iliad 6: 119-236.
4 See Northrup Frye, The secular scipture: a study of the structureof romance, Cambridge,
Mass., London, 1976.
34 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

ings run from hunger and exhaustion with travel (which is painted as a
kind of addiction in the maqdm&t and so becomes a metaphor of the
unyielding grip of time-Iskandari must devour the road before the road
devours him), to terror at death, to delighted guile, to silly wantonness
and innocent deceit-deceit made innocent by the gullibility of the
deceived or their cupidity, or insensate piety (as in Isfahan), or their will-
ingness to be bilked (out of youthful extravagance, aestheticism and
nobility of spirit). Al-Iskandari's attractiveness is not the attractiveness
(heightened in Blake's eyes) of Milton's Satan-nobility in defeat,
vengefulness worthy of a cosmic theater in which its action can be played
out, the lordly arrogance of frustrated spite and spleen, renouncing
vassalage yet clinging to its appanages. Rather al-Iskandarl's is an impu-
dent irreverence, which mocks at Fate, but winks at God, as much as to
expect that He would understand.
What then is there to celebrate in impishness? The answer, I suspect,
lies in the fact that where arrogance enslaves, impudence can liberate.
Hamadhani's mood is one of impatience with sobriety and all that is
dour. When the young revellers return from their drinking bout in
Ahwaz it is an appropriate irony that they are halted in their tracks by
an ominous figure bearing a bier-but still more appropriate that this
sour admonisher should prove a fraud-the fraud, al-Iskandari, who
wants only to kick up his heels and whose real message is to pay no atten-
tion to all that he has said. The adventurer turned medicine man
encountered in Sijistan is the same fraud again, and his conversion is a
sham, another dodge or device, which pays tribute to al-Iskandari's
imagination and resource. For Abual-Fath is never a mere tufayli, unless
by lufayl1 is meant not a mere beggar but an artful dodger, whose devices
are constantly changing, whose language and tricks are as unpredictable
as his disguises, whose pranks give color to what our journalists today are
pleased to call street life. What Hamadhani celebrates in the maqdimdtis
freedom.
The radical changes in al-Iskandari's outward appearance and
apparent condition are signs of that freedom. Just as the incongruities in
his age in diverse encounters are symbols of that freedom and marks of
its battle with the one condition his antics can better only by belying it-
the condition of time. Wives can be invented by the tufaylf as easily as
pasts and origins. Infants can be rented for a day's begging or cadging.5
Front money can be gulled from one pigeon to be used on another. Al-
Iskandari is rootless and unconnected, unstable of thought and mind.

5 See C. E. Bosworth, Themedieval

Islamicunderworld.
theBangS&sinin Arabicsocietyand
literature, Leiden 1976.
 HAMADHANI. SCHADENFREUDE 35

But the conditions of his weakness are the source of his strength. He is
the living exemplar of the aesthete's creed: one who lives for art not in
any monkish fashion but rather who makes his every act and pronounce-
ment a piece of art (or trickery), who exists only in language, device and
disguise and has no solid, answerable frame or substrate of identity and
fixed character, who has created complete independence out of perfect
dependence.
In creating Abui l-Fath, Hamadhani has set up an alternative to the
Islamic ideals of piety, gravity, sobriety, earnestness, responsibility,
patriarchal, filial and fraternal duty, dignity, bearing, stability,
reliability, trustworthiness, truthfulness, directness, reverence and
respectability. Abui l-Fath is none of these. But he is free, and he is gay
with a kind of mad gaiety that is wholly foreign to veneration or
venerability. He has no modesty or humility in his abjectness and no
dignity of bearing in his pride. He is a rival figure, a rival vision of
human possibility, centered on a freedom which defines itself in insou-
ciance. Yet curiously he has a function vis-a-vis the more sober and
somber values and colorations of Islam. He is a corrective against excess,
a secular release from the absoluteness of piety.
In puncturing pretensions Abui 1-Fath does service to the cardinal
values of Islam, because such values are worth nothing in any culture if
they are merely mummed by figure-heads. But beyond satiric exposure
of false piety, false bravado, false hospitality (as in the "Ma4ira
Encounter") Abui I-Fath performs another service to Islam by voicing a
kind of criticism of its values which it could never voice internally, within
the language and categories of those values themselves. Hamadhani
preserves, enshrines and redefines in the maqamdtsecular values recast
from the tribal and heroic age and joined with literary and urbane values
(the values of the secretarial/administrative class)-all values which
antedate Islam in their earliest forms, yet which are redefined by
Hamadhanri's sense of modernity-to form, not a rejection but a
counterweight to Islam. The worth of such a counterweight-the levity
that balances gravity and the insousiance and irresponsibility that leaven
earnestness and responsibility-was recognized by the scholars who pre-
served the pre-Islamic poetry of Arabia intact. For I am convinced that
the scholars preserved and commented on the ancient Arab poems not
merely out of philologic interest subordinated to the study of the Qur'dn
(although, to be sure, no better rationale and apologetic could be
afforded for the protection of such studies) but also out of aestheticism
and romanticism (urban nostalgia for the desert life and its many fondly
recalled freedoms, passions and pleasures) and not in impiety but in a
sense that life offers more than piety-that piety itself is not whole if piety
36 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

is all it offers. Even cAbduh, who edited the maqamdt and bowdlerized
them somewhat, removing the most scabrous bits, but not effacing their
viewpoint or their values, must have had some sense of the need for the
balance that works like Hamadhani's can provide, treating the work as
a classic (just as Hamadhani hoped it would be) because it adds a
catholicity of its own to a vision of the world already claiming to be
catholic.
Hamadhani's comparisons, then, would be Chaucer and Bocaccio,
and yes, Cervantes and the author of Lazarillo de Tormes, Apuleius, Swift
and the Defoe of Moll Flandersand Roxana. But the comparison I want to
draw today is with another sort of thought entirely, a radical mode of
thought arising within the Kabbalah and described by Gershom Scholem
as the pursuit of salvation or "redemption through sin."6 The paradox
parallels that of Hamadhani's own paradox-the irreverent and unstated
thesis that certain kinds of badness can be good. And there is reason why
this should be so. For, like Hamadhani, the Kabbalists with whom
Scholem was concerned in his famous essay on Kabbalistic perversity
were engaged not in bald rebellion but in an intellectual effort toward the
transvaluation and thus redefinition of values.
Beneath the tendency "to idealize religious life in the ghetto at the
expense of completely ignoring the deep inner conflicts and divisions to
which not even the rabbis were necessarily immune" (p. 80), Scholem
finds a deep restiveness with the legalism and indeed the intellectualism
of official or established Jewry, a restiveness which led to "actual licen-
tiousness, in the most unlikely places" (p. 80). Scholem's findings, and
indeed the methodological concerns which they enliven, are crucial to an
understanding of the Middle Ages and of traditional religious life. For
just as we cannot idly accept the stereotype of the Middle Ages as an "age
of faith" when it contained figures like Hamadhani (or Razi, for that
matter, orJabir ibn Hayyan, or Duns Scotus, Abelard, or Occam) so we
cannot accept the idealization of the religious life of traditional Jews as
a passive placidity, whereas in fact its doubts, passions, frustrations, anx-
ieties and inchoate yearnings seethed, violently, sometimes internally,
sometimes dangerously at the surface of overt expression and action.
Speaking of the charges of libertinage made against the Sabbatians-the
followers of the seventeenth century false messiah Shabtai Zvi, Scholem
records: "Many of the accusations made against the 'believers' by their
opponents can now be weighed (and more often than not confirmed!) on
the basis of a number of the 'believers' own books which were not
allowed to perish" (p. 82).
6
In The messianic idea inJudaismand otheressays on Jewish spirituality,New York 1971,
78-141.
 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE 37

The heterodox beliefs of the Sabbatians and the particularly antino-

mian and even orgiastic excesses of the Donmeh and Frankist sects which
clung to Sabbatian doctrines in the wake of Shabtai Zvi's traumatic
apostasy, Scholem has shown, were in part dialectical responses to the
spiritual and (in a sublimated sense) even political needs of the
"believers". In his extended and detailed historical treatment Scholem
shows that "the nihilism of the Sabbatian and Frankist movements, with
its doctrine so profoundly shocking to the Jewish conception of things
that the violation of the Torah could become its true fulfillment (bittulah
shel torahzehu kiyyumah), was a dialectical outgrowth of the belief in the
Messiahship of Sabbatai Zevi, and that this nihilism, in turn, helped
pave the way for the Haskalah and the reform movement of the nine-
teenth century, once its original religious impulse was exhausted" (p.
84). The Sabbatians, Scholem argues, like their gnostic predecessors in
the third century, analyzed in the philosophic work of Hans Jonas, found
themselves as "pneumatics"-spiritual beings-alienated from a world
whose material and historical dimensions conflicted violently with the
requirements of their moral and spiritual ideals. The traditional medieval
avenues for the resolution of such conflicts lay in the disciplines of
mysticism and asceticism-efforts to negate the material in favor of the
spiritual. But medieval magic, arising out of its Hellenistic precursors in
theurgy-numerology, alchemy, and astrology, for example-often
sought (using the physical means at man's disposal) to invoke (or indeed
to harness) spiritual powers, to assert their dominance over materiality
or history and so to achieve ends which were ambiguously
spiritual/worldly. The great work of alchemy, the making of a golem or
homunculus, is a paradigm case. It was in this tradition that activist Kab-
balah sought the keys to the mystery of creation and the passageway
between the spiritual and the material realms, and in particular, that
Lurianic mysticism sought not merely "the flight of the alone to the
Alone" but the liberation of the divine sparks from their imprisonment
in the alien shells of the kelipot. The gnostic dualism of the Lurianic Kab-
balah, preserved in the world view of Sabbatianism, was the cosmic pro-
jection of the alienation of the frustrated spirit, a spirit which could not
recognize in the world of nature the intentional product of a wise and
benevolent, all-encom passing Divinity. As Jacob Frank argued-a
"tyrannical soul", as Scholem describes him, of primitive and frighten-
ing ferocity, "living in the middle of the eighteenth century, and yet
immersed entirely in a mythological world of its own making"-If the
world were the creation of the Good God, it would be eternal and there
would be no death (pp. 128-9).
Shabtai Zvi had sought to negate the stranglehold of temporality and
38 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE

history by personal achievement of the Messianic promises. The inten-

sity of commitment which this effort elicited was such that for some
adherents it was easier to admit the utter wrongness of the world-or
even God, the God of history and creation-than to accept the conclusion
that the promises had failed. Shabtai Zvi's apostasy was a tragic
necessity, as first interpreted, the result of coercion, then the freely
chosen outcome of self sacrifice, the sui generis harrowing of the kelipot,
the descent of a hero saint through the Gates of Impurity to rescue and
redeem the sparks by whose escape alone the kelipot could be collapsed
into their intrinsic nullity-or, in the radical teachings of the most
antinomian, his apostasy was the exemplary attainment of holiness
through sin by which alone redemption could be achieved, since the
alternative of redemption through obedience had been tried and failed
inasmuchas no man could live without transgression.
The Law itself was in need of rescue and redemption. Moses, it was
argued, had led the spiritual Torah captive, forcing her to dwell within
the prison cell of the material Torah, the Torah of Creation. Only by
systematic violation of the outward Law could the inner, spiritual law,
the Torah of Emanation, be released (pp. 118 ff.). The forbidden was to
be made permitted, and either the category of sin to be abolished
altogether or the opposition between holy and profane to be reversed,
allowing holiness to be achieved only via profanation in the world of
redemption (p. 113). Libidinal and autonomously antinomian forces
joined hands with such spiritualizing rationales as these in orgiastic
rituals like the "extinguishing of the lights" celebrated among the
Donmeh of Salonika at the "festival of the Lamb" in which Scholem
discerns explicit survivals of the pagan cult of Cybele, the Magna Mater,
long kept secret at Izmir under the regime of Islam (p. 1 4). The orient-
ing value, which anchored to the normative tradition the Sabbatians'
ritual violations of the Torah, concealment of their faith and practice,
and reversal of the Torah's values (e.g. pp. 116-117), was the hope or
expectation that somehow by these means humanity and the world could
be liberated and redeemed. Thus even Frank, in whose very proximity,
Scholem argues, the last dregs of holiness or insight that might have
lingered in the notion of a sacred sin was turned to mockery, a nihilist
whose "nihilism possessed a rare authenticity" (p. 127), in struggling to
teach each of his followers "to free oneself of all laws, conventions, and
religions, to adopt every conceivable attitude and to reject it, and to
follow one's leader step for step into the abyss" (p. 130), through the
subtle ironies of history, and (Scholem seems to imply, of history's God),
was unwittingly doing the work of history and that God (who was not his)
in preparing the ground for the Haskalah, Enlightenment, Assimilation,
 HAMADHANI, SCHADENFREUDE 39

and their dialectical responses in Zionism and renewal. Frank's proto-

Nietzschean remark that one must descend before one can climb the
heights, that a throwing off of all constraints was the necessary prelude
to any more authentic acceptance of a new law seems indeed, as
Scholem's analysis makes clear, to have touched a nerve in the Talmudic
idea that authentic appropriation rather than mere outward conformity
imparts holiness to moral choices and ritual acts. Perhaps this was the
Jacob's nerve which some Sabbatians thought to be permitted now that
the time of redemption had come. Clearly this notion of authenticity was
and remains an idea too much taken for granted in merely traditional
circles. It is a nerve that needs to be touched from time to time-as it
was again by Kant and by his pietist sources, which parallel the work of
his contemporaries among the Hasidim. Both strands of pietism, Chris-
tian and Jewish, interpret the idea of the centrality of intention to
appropriation in a civil and a civilizing fashion, as compared with the
notion that holiness of intention creates the holy will and is its sufficient
condition, the notion which subverted the morals of Nietzsche, the
existentialist successors of Kant, and the Sabbatian antinomian
predecessors of Hasidism.
Where Kant had argued that freedom is the necessary condition of
moral praise or blame, Nietzsche and the existentialists tend to make of
freedom the sufficient condition of moral praiseworthiness. Where
Hasidism makes intention and moral appropriation the necessary condi-
tions of piety, the antinomian Sabbatians seemed to say that authenticity
in an act could be apprehended only insofar as that act violated the
explicit requirements of externally determined duty and institutionally
defined obligation. Excess in both cases is rationalized by the same
instructive fallacy: the fallacy of proceeding from freedom as necessary
to freedom as sufficient for morality. I call this fallacy instructive not
because of its flawed logic but because of the category which it identifies
in its key term: freedom. That was the category which Hamadhani also
celebrated in a mocking and irreverent way. It was the one category
which medieval social structure tended most to take for granted and
therefore to ignore-the one which Plato said was the glory of
democracy, just as license was its shame, and the one which no social
system can systematically restrain without self-destruction.

University of Hawaii L. E. GOODMAN