by Ra'Anan Elozory

Created on: January 27, 2009   Last Updated: March 11, 2009

Despite claims that say otherwise in a different article under this subject heading, Judaism has more or less been monolithic in its tenets and is a closed system based on divine revelation that occurred fifty days after the Exodus of the Jewish people from ancient Egypt. The Sadducees, who appeared around 1400 years after the Sinaic Revelation, were a very small group of dissidents who were opposed for their nontraditional readings of the 5 Books of Moses which resulted in their insisting on different halakhic practices. The normative rabbinical sages instituted certain practices to uproot the Sadducee ideas & the vast majority of people basically disregarded their ideas. The Sadducees were generally of the more powerful, wealthy class & centered in Jerusalem. I'm not sure if they even existed more than one hundred years, if that.

After the destruction of Herod's Temple and the subsequent Roman exile of the Jewish people, there was one basic Jewish ideology based on the teachings of such Tannaic sages as Hillel until Rabbi 'Aqiva, but not so finalized until about 200 years later in Babylon by the sealers of the Talmud, Ravina and Rav Ashi. The three main schools of halakhic behaviour that arose were finalized in the three groups of Yemenites and Ashkenazim, and later Sefaradim. Yemenites and Ashkenazim closely followed what their fathers did, while Sefaradim followed what the Beith Yosef ruled by weighing out majority decisions of the Rif (Fez, Morocco), Rambam (mostly Spain and Egypt) and Rosh (German who fled to Spain). These three groups, though, do not oppose each other, rather they respect and honour each other's halakhic rulings for their respective communities and today they all encompass the very broad community of worldwide orthodoxy.

Many think that the dissident movements in Judaism of about 250 years ago in Western Europe were German Jews who'd sought to protect their social positions in German society by attempting to appear more German than Jewish so that Germans would not have a reason to hate them.

Actually, the roots of dissident Jewish ideologies are much darker as evidenced in the historical writiing of Graetz, Scholem & Wein. Jewish historian Rabbi Berel Wein say that these "reformers" of Judaism were disciples of Polish Jew Jacob Frank who was an indirect disciple of manic Turkish Jew Shabthai Tzevi who had claimed that he was the messiah. Much of the Jewish people actually began to follow Shabthai Tzevi until the Sultan of Turkey

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