Jewish schisms
Nebuchadnezzar had additional reasons for taking over Judah and turning its inhabitants into exiles, including challenging its great rival Egypt.
According to Josephus, the Sadducees differed from the Pharisees on a number of doctrinal grounds, notably rejecting ideas of life after death.
Those who argued that the law was abrogated (either partially or fully, either by Jesus or Paul or by the Roman destruction of the Temple) broke to form Christianity.
[6] The eventual repudiation of Moses' Law by Jesus' disciples and their belief in his divinity, along with the development of the New Testament, ensured that Christianity and Judaism would become different and often conflicting religions.
Karaites prefer to use the peshat method of study, seeking a meaning within the text that would have been naturally understood by the ancient Hebrews.
Today they are a small group, living mostly in Israel; estimates of the number of Israeli Karaites range from as low as 10,000 to as high as 50,000.
Vast numbers of Jews, known as Sabbateans, believed him; but when under pain of a death sentence in front of the Ottoman sultan Mehmed IV he became an apostate from Judaism by becoming a Muslim, his movement crumbled.
Nevertheless, for centuries, small groups of Jews believed in him, and the rabbis were always on guard against any manifestations of this schism, always suspicious of hidden Shebselekh (Yiddish for "little Sabbatians", a play on the word for "young dumb sheep").
When confronted by the Polish authorities, he converted to Catholicism in 1759 in the presence of King Augustus III of Poland, together with groups of his Jewish followers, known as "Frankists".
To the alarm of his opponents, he was received by reigning European monarchs who were anxious to see their Jewish subjects abandon Judaism and apostacise.
Israel ben Eliezer (1698–1760), also known as the Baal Shem Tov ('Master [of the] Good Name'), changed much of Jewish history in Eastern Europe for what is now known as Haredi Judaism.
Baal Shem Tov came after Jews of Eastern Europe were collectively recovering from false messiahs Shabtai Tzvi (1626–1676) and Jacob Frank (1726–1791) in particular.
Already during his lifetime, and gaining momentum following his death, Baal Shem Tov's disciples spread out to teach his mystical creeds all over Eastern Europe.
The Vilna Gaon, who was himself steeped in both Talmudic and Kabbalistic wisdom, analyzed the theological underpinnings of this new "Hasidism" and in his view, concluded that it was deeply flawed since it had elements of what may be roughly termed as panentheism and perhaps even outright pantheism, dangerous aspirations for bringing the Jewish Messiah that could easily be twisted in unpredictable directions for Jewry as had previously happened with the Tzvi and Frank religious "revival" fiascos, and an array of complex rejections of their religious ideology.
The Vilna Gaon's views were later formulated by his chief disciple Rabbi Chaim Volozhin (1741–1821) in his work Nefesh HaChaim.
They were criticized by the Orthodox rabbis, such as Samson Raphael Hirsch in Germany, and condemned particularly by those known today as followers of Haredi Judaism, based mainly in Eastern Europe.
