Manifiesto o Relacion, de que ha passado en el Examen del Libro intitulado Bet Codes a Codassim, y Oz Le-elohim, Compuesto por el H.R. Nehemya Hiya Jayon

When Nehemia Hiya Hayon, an itinerant kabbalist, long suspected of Sabbatian tendencies, arrived in Amsterdam in 1713 he submitted his books, Beth Kodesh Kodashim and Oz Le’Elo-him to the ma’amad (the lay leadership council of the Sephardic Jewish community) in order to receive permission to distribute them. The ma’amad asked their Hakham, Solomon Ayllon, to rule on the matter but before he issued a decision, two prominent anti-Sabbatians, Rabbi Moses Hagiz and Hakham Tzvi Ashkenazi published a Cheirem against Hayon’s books, and invited other prominent rabbis to do likewise. The ma’amad saw this as an egregious act of overreach by Hagiz and Ashkenazi against the authority of both themselves and Hakham Ayllon, and in the months that followed issued their own cherems against the two. Compounding the issue were the numerous rabbinical approbations that appeared in Hayon’s books; Hayon insisted they were genuine while Hagiz and Ashkenazi maintained that they were fabricated. Soon competing claims of heresy, forgery, collusion and chicanery enveloped the protagonists on both sides. When Moses Hagiz and Hakham Tzvi Ashkenazi had convinced those rabbis who had provided approbations to Hayon’s works to recant, they published a pamphlet to that effect. The Amsterdam ma’amad, stood by their previous assertion that Hayon was innocent of all charges and issued a rebuttal in December of 1713, entitled “Koshet Imrei Emeth.” The ma’amad then ordered that the text be translated into Spanish in order to ensure that their disdain for the actions of Hagiz and Tzvi be publicized to the broader Jewish population. The polemical controversy which raged in Amsterdam in 1713 concerning the Sabbatianism of Nehemiah Hayon, was a precursor to even more intense battles between opposing rabbinic camps, over alleged acts of Sabbatian heresy in the decades to come, most notably between Jacob Emden and Jonathan Eybeschuetz.