Réka Újlaki-Nagy, Research Centre for the Humanities, Budapest
The Mosaic Law as a Point of Encounter and Disjunction Among Early Modern Transylvanian Religious Communities
In 1631, Simon Péchi, the former Sabbatarian chancellor of Transylvania records a short parable in his translation of a Talmudic commentary. He heard this parable from his study partner, a member of the Melamed family, with whom he studied together at the Sephardic Beth Midrash during his diplomatic mission in Constantinople. The parable depicts a Jew, a Christian, and a Muslim engaging in a debate about the true religion. The Jew asks his debate partners whether they acknowledge as divine and true the Law given to Moses on Mount Sinai. Both the Christian and the Muslim respond affirmatively, claiming it as divine, true, and holy. The Jew’s reply is simple: this way he has two witnesses for the truthfulness of his law and religion; now it’s up to his debate partners to provide two such proofs for the truth of their own law and religion.
Although the Mosaic Law is typically considered a distinguishing factor that separates Judaism from the Abrahamic religions, in this parable it appears as a point of connection and encounter. This interpretation aligns with the Sabbatarian thinking which equates genuine Christianity with Judaism itself, more precisely, it identifies Christianity with that Judaism which sees clearly regarding the issue of the Messiah. The Sabbatarians did not fear approaching Judaism through the Mosaic Law, but what about other representatives of Antitrinitarianism? What is the basis for the scholarly claim that, compared to other representatives of Radical Reformation, Transylvanian Antitrinitarians accorded greater authority to the Old Testament and the Mosaic Law? In my lecture I will analyze the connecting and separating roles of the Mosaic Law and the impact of the fear of Judaization among the representatives of Radical Reformation in Transylvania.
Réka Újlaki-Nagy studied Hungarian and Hebrew literature at Babeş-Bolyai University in Romania. During her university years, she began delving into Sabbatarian manuscripts and the history of Transylvanian Sabbatarianism. This topic, along with the broader context of the Transylvanian Radical Reformation, has remained the primary focus of her research. She started her PhD studies at the University of Szeged in Hungary and completed them at the Theologisches Forschungskolleg in Univeristy of Erfurt. Her dissertation, focusing on the early period of Transylvanian Sabbatarianism, was defended in Erfurt in 2021 and published as a monograph in 2022 in the Refo500 series (Christians or Jews? Early Transylvanian Sabbatarianism (1580-1621), Vandenhoeck&Ruprecht). Additionally, she has authored two other source editions based on texts related to Sabbatarianism or written by Sabbatarians (Korai szombatos írások [Early Transylvanian Writings], University of Szeged, 2010; Zsidó székelyek. A bözödújfalusi szombatos közösség emlékezete [Jewish Székelys. The Memory of the Sabbatarians of Bözödújfalu], Balassi, 2020). Since 2018, she has been employed as a research fellow at the Institute of History of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (now renamed HUN-REN Research Centre for the Humanities). Here she participated in an interdisciplinary project exploring encounters between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in seventeenth-century Ottoman Hungary and Transylvania. As part of this project, she was tasked with publishing a Sabbatarian translation of a rabbinic commentary on Talmud (Pirkei Avot). The objective of her next project is to compile a comprehensive bibliography of Transylvanian Sabbatarianism and to write the community’s history during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
