Who was Nathan of Gaza?

Nathan of Gaza precipitated one of the most profound events in the history of Judaism. In 1665, while only 21 or 22 years old, he proclaimed that Sabbatai Tzevi was the Messiah. In itself this would not have been extraordinary, as there had been other messianic claimants in the past, but due to the extraordinary personalities of Nathan and Sabbatai Tzevi, the news of the Messiah's coming spread like wildfire all over Europe. The repercussions of this event lasted for centuries. Judaism would never be the same.

Nathan was born in Jerusalem in 1643 or 1644. He married the daughter of a wealthy merchant in Gaza and moved there. He was a brilliant student of Torah and Talmud, and took up the study of Kabbalah in 1664. The atmosphere at that time was charged with the expectation of the coming of the Messiah. The brilliant and charismatic Kabbalist Isaac Luria had hinted that the process of restoration was near to completion, and the time of the redemption and the Messiah was nigh. One of the key attributes of Luria's Kabbalah was the belief that, due to a primordial catastrophe during the creation of the universe, the souls of human beings had become immersed in a grossly material world which was nigh to the realm of the Klippoth. The Klippoth were the source of evil. The word means a husk or shell, and the implication is that the Klippoth were the husks or shells of materiality which ensnare the spirit.

Luria's Kabbalah was based on very old traditions. One such tradition was that God created several worlds before this one, but they were unbalanced, unstable, and disintegrated. The 3rd. century Rabbi Abbahu wrote "God made many worlds and destroyed them until he made the present universe". This was combined with the Biblical legend of the Kings of Edom which were but are no more, to produce a highly elaborate myth concerning the creation of the universe. The quality that Kabbalists call Din, or judgement, is that quality which separates on thing from another. The Klippoth represent an extreme embodiment of this quality. The creation of the universe was essentially a process of definition and separation, and hence an expression of Din, but the powers of Din were too concentrated for a viable universe and had to be separated out for a second, viable creation to take place. These concentrated shards of the original creation, pure Din, fell into the abyss. Unfortunately some sparks of light fell with them, so that the Klippoth were more than just empty shells. They had life. Not much life, but enough. Human sinfulness reinforces the Klippoth because it transfers some of our life to them. If I am selfish, for example, I am creating a separation between myself and another, so the Klippoth are reinforced by my selfishness.

The need to free the sparks of light from the Klippoth was one of the dominant themes of Kabbalah. It was believed that living according to the commandments of the Torah and combining this with mystical insight, concentration, and intention, could help to free the trapped sparks, but living sinfully was a sure way of strengthening the Klippoths' hold. In later developments the Klippoth were regarded as primordial, demonic powers with seven kings, reflecting the seven destroyed worlds of the orginal creation.

The Klippoth held a strong fascination for Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatai Tzevi appears to have been a manic-depressive. In his manic states he had the most extraordinary force of personality, and there are many reports of his face literally shining like the sun. In his ecstatic states he would do things which no pious Jew would do. Nathan wrote a document entitled Treatise on the Dragons (the dragons being the Klippoth) which was an attempt to mythologise Tsevi's behaviour, explaining it in terms of the Messiah's need to descend into the world of the Klippoth to redeem the remaining sparks (just as Christ is depicted harrowing Hell, and Orpheus descents into the Underworld to rescue his love). The mythic credentials of the Treatise on the Dragons are impeccable.

Before the publication of the Treatise, Nathan circulated a curious document, the Sepher ha-Sha'are ha-Daath. He described this as a commentary on two chapters of the Book of the Alhazred, an ancient history of the world. The title means "the Book of the Gates of Knowledge". The word for knowledge, da'ath, has a technical meaning. When the Bible was translated into Greek, the word da'ath was translated as gnosis. Da'ath has a very peculiar status in Kabbalah, being a kind of non-existent, a nothingness. In modern Hermetic Kabbalah it is sometimes represented a hole or gate into an abyss of consciousness. Crowley's experiments with the Call of the Thirty Aethyrs led him into this abyss.

Da'ath has a dual aspect; on one hand it is our knowledge of the world of appearance, the body of facts which constitute our beliefs and prop up the illusion of identity and ego and separateness. On the other hand it is revelation, objective knowledge, what is often referred to as gnosis. The transition between the knowledge of the world of appearance and revelation entails the experience of the abyss, the abolition of the sense of ego, the negation of identity. From within the abyss any identity is possible. It is chaos, unformed. It contains, as it were, the seeds of identity. It is from this point that an infinity of gates open, each one a gateway to a mode of being. These are what Nathan is referring to as the "Gates of Knowledge".

Nathan's purpose appears to have been to develop a methodology for a systematic exploration of the realms of the Klippoth, as part of his mission to redeem the sparks, using some of Alhazred's techniques. It is an extraordinary development of Alhazred's work, identifying the Klippoth with the primordial Old Ones. It has a modern counterpart in Kenneth Grant's Nightside of Eden.

Nathan developed a huge following and for many years Judaism was riven with charges of heresy. Many prominent Rabbis and community leaders sided with Nathan, and it took most of a century for the drama to unwind. Eventually the Sabbatean movement went underground, and while it is a certainty that a copy of the Sepher ha-Sha'are ha-Daath exists in a private library somewhere, no one is admitting that they have it.