Ancient
In a letter written around 701 BC, the Assyrian king Sanherib described his conquest of Lachish on the "seventh (time)" of Hezekiah, then king of Judah. It is assumed that the Jews' day of rest was meant and that this enabled the Assyrians to win. The first Babylonian conquest of Jerusalem in 597 BC, the first attack of Nebuchadnezzar on the temple city in 588 BC and its fall in the reign of Zedekiah (Jer 52:5-8 EU) are also dated on a Shabbat by comparing biblical dates with Babylonian chronicles. According to this, the great kings of the Assyrians and Babylonians used this specifically Jewish day of rest, known to them, to more easily put down the rebellious Jews. The Ptolemies and later the Seleucids also attacked the Jews more often on a Shabbat because they did not exercise military resistance on this day out of loyalty to the Torah.
According to the books of the Maccabees, written around 170-100 BC, Jews were massacred by the army of Antiochos IV because of the strict observance of Shabbat rest (1 Macc 2:29-38). As a result, the Maccabee Mattatias and his followers would have decided to fight on the Shabbat in case they were attacked, in order not to be completely destroyed (1 Macc 2:39ff.; 2 Macc 5:25f.). With this exceptional rule (takhana), the ordinance (halacha) that had existed since the Jubilee Book was not abrogated, but modified for acute needs.
The decision remained controversial and was not always observed. According to the Roman historian Cassius Dio, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus was able to conquer Jerusalem on a Shabbat in 63 BC; Sosius, on the other hand, had only been able to place Jerusalem back under the Roman procuracy after the end of Pontius Pilate's term of office in 37 AD against strong Jewish resistance, even on the Shabbat. Around 100 AD, the pro-Roman Jewish historian FlaviusJosephus described the dilemma of believing Jews as Agrippa's speech during the siege of Jerusalem in 66: He who kept the Shabbat commandment in war would, like the forefathers, be easily defeated. Whoever broke it would no longer be defending Judaism and its identity, and could just as well leave war alone. For how could one still call upon God for help whose commandments one disregarded? Later, rebellious Jews would have attacked the Romans on a Shabbat, who had not expected it because of the Jewish day of rest. According to letters of Bar Kochba around 135, rebellious Jews also at least observed the prohibition of travel and trade on Shabbat.
In the Jewish diaspora, the Shabbat was observed as a day of rest for work and trade and for worship since about 500 BC, just as it was in Palestine, so that it was generally known as a special feature of Judaism and was increasingly respected by non-Jews as well. The authorities of the Roman Empire protected Jewish minorities from attacks by Greek cities on their Shabbat customs, exempted Jews from military service, from court appointments on Shabbat and preparation days for Shabbat, and kept grain distributed on Shabbat for Jewish beneficiaries to hand over to them the following day. After the suppressed Jewish uprising of 135, however, Emperor Hadrian banned large parts of Jewish religious practice, including the Shabbat.
Egyptians, Greeks and Romans influenced by Hellenism, including Apion and Manetho, saw the Shabbat as a curiosity and a sign of weakness, superstition and laziness on the part of the Jews. The prohibition of warfare on Shabbat was considered foolishness and absurdity by Agatarchides of Knidos, for example. Tacitus considered Jewish customs "sinister and shameful". He believed that Jews did not work every seventh year because of an inclination to idleness and that they worshipped the astral god Saturnus on Shabbat, whom he understood as a symbol of negative striving for power (Annales 5,4,3-4). Seneca was outraged by the influence of Jewish Sabbath observance on gentiles: "The vanquished have given laws to the victors." He described Jewish Shabbat observance as the loss of a seventh of one's life time, which would have been better devoted to urgent business. Aulus Persius Flaccus sneered that the Jews would celebrate Shabbat behind smudged windows with smoking lamps. According to Plutarch, Jerusalem's conquest happened on a Shabbat (70) because of the "low habits" of the Jews, who were "entangled in their superstitions as in a net". Rutilius Claudius Namatianus summarised this widespread contempt in a poem around 400:
"Dishonouring abuse has come from us to the wicked sex...,
That celebrates its sad Sabbaths in league with folly. [...]
To dishonouring rest it
condemns the seventh day,
As it were a female image of the weary god.
Oh that Rome had never subdued Judea,
Since the conquered people defeat their conquerors."
Middle Ages and Early Modern Times
In the Middle Ages, Jews continued to develop the Shabbat customs (מנהגים minhagim) on the basis of the Torah and Talmud provisions that had been handed down. In the 13th century, three Shabbat middles were created, and later a fourth. The Zohar (c. 1280) justified them on the grounds that Shabbat was a name of God and thus signified perfect universal joy: it nurtured all Jews as offspring of the three original fathers and protected all living beings in the cosmos from God's judgement. In the 16th century, representatives of the Kabbalah in Safed created a fixed Shabbat liturgy for the house celebration with the Kiddush at the beginning and the Hawdala at the end. While the Karaites also forbade lit lights before the beginning of Shabbat, they permitted the lighting of two lights as a symbol of the soul doubled on Shabbat, enabling the perception of creation and its future salvation. Isaac Luria (1534-1572) supplemented the ritual greeting and catching up with the "bride" (Kabbalat Shabbat) with psalm singing and semiroth. Schlomo Alkabez (1505-1584) composed and wrote the Hebrew Shabbat song לכה דודי Lecha Dodi, which is still customary in all Jewish traditions today: "Let us go, my friend, to meet the bride, Queen Shabbat we will receive". The now customary reading of Prov 31:10-31 EU at the first Shabbat meal was understood by Isaiah Horovitz in 1623 as an invitation for the Hebrew שְׁכִינָה Shechina (indwelling of God). In the Central European summer, the beginning and end of Shabbat were timed differently locally, independently of sunset. Jewish philosophers declared the Shabbat to be a proof of God and supplemented its character of rest with the obligatory study of the Torah.
In 1158, Abraham ibn Ezra rejected attempts to celebrate Shabbat from Saturday to Sunday morning. In 1546, Solomon Adret forbade stove heating on Shabbat in winter and recommended a lock on the stove for this purpose. Since tobacco smoking fell under the fire prohibition, Jews lit a large water pipe on Fridays, whose tobacco continued to smoulder on Saturdays. According to Mendel ben Abraham, in 1675 Jews in Amsterdam were no longer to buy fish from non-Jews for two months, as the latter had exploited fish purchases from Jews, especially herring and carp, for Shabbat by charging high prices. Jewish merchants sold their shops to non-Jews on Fridays for a symbolic price and bought them back after Shabbat ended; if they had Christian business partners, they left the Shabbat earnings to them.
As an overview of the more developed halakhot, Maimonides wrote his major work, Guide of the Undecided, between 1176 and 1200. According to this, the Shabbat commandment was intended to affirm the createdness of the world and the existence of God, to remind us of His graces for Israel, and thus to promote theoretical knowledge of truth and practical welfare at the same time. According to the Sefer Ha-Turim of Jacob ben Asher, Shabbat was meant to commemorate the creation and Sinai revelation and to look ahead to the rest of the resurrection to come. Commenting on this for the Sephardim, Joseph Karo wrote the Shulchan Aruch ('The Set Table') from about 1545 to 1565. In a similar commentary for the Ashkenazim, HaMappa ('The Tablecloth'), Moses Isserles contrasted Sephardic and Ashkenazic Shabbat halachot. Both works became binding for Jewish life.
Modern times
Advances towards Shabbat rescheduling
For centuries, the state-imposed Sunday rest forced observant Jews living in Christianised countries to close their shops on two days of the week and made it difficult for them to rest from work on Shabbat. This put them at an economic disadvantage and discriminated against them religiously. The legal equality of the Jews demanded by the Enlightenment philosopher Christian Wilhelm Dohm in 1781 was accompanied by increased pressure for their complete assimilation. Christian citizens demanded that Jews give up their Shabbat customs in return for offered civil rights. The theologian Johann David Michaelis, for example, believed that Jews had no chance in the Prussian military because of their alleged short stature and their refusal to fight on Shabbat.
The Jewish Haskalah in the 18th century and the Jewish Emancipation in the 19th century reacted to such widespread reservations. Moses Mendelssohn, for example, replied to Dohm in 1783 that if "civil unification" could only be achieved at the price of giving up the Torah, Jews would have to do without it. For their part, however, many Jews sought to assimilate fully into the Christian-dominated nation-state in which they lived, and regarded Shabbat as an obstacle to this.
This was the subject of the German Rabbinical Conference of 1845, where Samuel Holdheim demanded that Shabbat be moved to Sunday, as this was the only way to preserve Judaism in the long term and actively sanctify the day of rest. Only individual German groups, such as the Berlin Reform congregation in 1849 and some US-American groups, followed this proposal. In 1869, Hermann Cohen again called for the Shabbat service to be moved to Sunday in order to promote the desired "national fusion". In 1919, however, he wrote that through Shabbat alone, Judaism had already proven itself to the world as a "bringer of joy and a peacemaker". Others were indifferent to their Jewish tradition or converted to Christianity for better chances of advancement.
Shabbat observance
Orthodox, Conservative, Liberal and non-believing Jews have defended Shabbat. The Christian poet Heinrich Heine honoured it in 1851 with his poem Princess Sabbath. He said it restored the dignity of the people of Israel, who had been degraded to dogs by their environment, once a week. The Zionist Max Joseph criticised Jewish emancipation as "discount Judaism", which alienated Jewish children from elementary traditions such as Shabbat and thus led to the self-dissolution of the Jewish religion. Samson Raphael Hirsch warned: "Eradicate Shabbat and you have broken the ground of Israel and its religion. Shabbat observance determines one's affiliation to Judaism. Achad Ha'am, the founder of Cultural Zionism, emphasised in 1895: "A Jew who feels a real connection to the life of his people will find it utterly impossible to imagine Israel's existence without the Shabbat. It can be said without exaggeration: more than Israel has preserved the Shabbat, it has preserved Israel."
Because the Shabbat commandment was supposed to be the exclusive covenant sign of the chosen people according to the Torah, devout Jews often rejected its Christian use for Sunday. From around 1900, Jews who were faithful to the Shabbat organised themselves into associations called שומר שבת Shomre Shabbat ('guardians of the Shabbat'). They sought to fulfil not only the Torah but also the halachot completely, and published books and pamphlets with practical advice to this end. They formed a 'World Association for Shabbat Protection Shomre Shabbos' in Berlin in 1928. Such associations and their predecessors achieved partial exemption from the legal Sunday rest for Jewish businesses in England (1860 and 1931), the Netherlands, Galicia and Bukovina, for example. In Prussia, Jewish schoolchildren had been exempt from classes on Saturdays since 1859. The special regulation existed until 22 June 1933.
Other believing and non-believing Jews, like Philo of Alexandria, emphasised the relevance of the Shabbat for humanity. Leo Baeck wrote in 1906 that the Sabbath commandment Dtn 5 was meant to protect the unabridged and unabridged human right of slaves and female slaves. The commanded rest for all members of the family should also grant the servants dependent on them the rest necessary for their survival. According to the Torah, they too have a right, granted with all God's authority, to rejoice in Shabbat in the same way as the free, and are therefore already religiously equal to them. He pointed out that the Romans also knew about slave festivals, but limited them to a few days a year and did not regard them as a slave right, but as alms.
Anti-Semites often used the Sabbath to attack Jews: during the First World War, for example, they had to open their shops on Saturdays from 1916 onwards. The National Socialists' boycott of Jews on 1 April 1933, a Saturday, was again to affect assimilated Jews. Jewish children had to go to school on Saturdays again from 26 June 1933. Inciting pamphlets derided Jewish Sabbath observance as laziness and alleged exploitation of non-Jews. With decrees, Jews were also forced to work on Friday evenings, Saturdays and their feast days. The obligation to work was constantly tightened and non-compliance was punished ever more severely, especially in Poland, which had been occupied since 1939.
As a result, Polish rabbis often allowed their congregations to work and cook hot soup on Shabbat and High Holy Days when their lives were in danger. Strictly religious Jews in the ghettos, however, often had themselves divided into brigades that did not work on Shabbat, but had to do particularly unpleasant work and received fewer food rations. Jews interned in temporary camps refused to accept temporary releases deliberately offered always on Saturdays because of the halachic travel ban. Deported Jews celebrated Shabbat with candles and the singing of the Lecha Dodi even on the way to their murder on railway platforms, in railway carriages and in extermination camps; so did survivors after their liberation.
In several of his writings, the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm dealt with the Sabbath, which he considered the most important idea in the Bible. In 1980 he explained its meaning as follows: "The Sabbath is the anticipation of the messianic time not through a magical ritual but through practical behaviour that puts man in a real situation of harmony and peace. The other practice of life changes man." "In Jewish tradition, the highest value is not work, but rest, the state that has no other purpose than to be human. But the Sabbath ritual has another aspect that one must know in order to understand it fully. The Sabbath seems to have been an ancient Babylonian holiday, celebrated on every seventh day (Sabattu) of a lunar month. However, it had a completely different meaning from the biblical Sabbath. The Babylonian Sabattu was a day of mourning and self-chastisement. It was a gloomy day consecrated to the planet Saturn (the English name for Saturday still indicates this today) and people sought to appease their anger through self-mortification and self-punishment. In the Bible, however, the holy day has lost its character as a day of self-flagellation and mourning; it is no longer a "bad" day, but a good day; the Sabbath has become the opposite of the gloomy Sabattu." Fromm's association of the Sabbath with the ideal of an egalitarian society expected as the goal of history followed authors of early socialism and communism such as Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Moses Hess, who called the perpetual Sabbath the "Sabbath of history", and Karl Marx.
Under certain circumstances, turning on devices while observing Sabbath rest is made possible by the grama technology developed in Jerusalem in the 2000s. Certain devices have the so-called Sabbath mode for the same purpose.
Design differences
The basic components of the Shabbat, which have existed for thousands of years (rest from work, ritually opened feasts in the family and synagogue services) are intended to express the joy in God's work of creation and in the conclusion of the covenant. Since the Middle Ages, Jews have interpreted the Torah's non-specific prohibition of work in different ways, depending on their religious beliefs.
Orthodox and ultra-Orthodox Jews (יַהֲדוּת חֲרֵדִית jahadut charedit, Haredim) still observe the 39 melachot, the 39 prohibitions on work in the Talmud, so in larger Haredi residential neighbourhoods such as the former Eastern European shtetls, the Scheunenviertel (Berlin) and Jerusalem's Old City. Their representatives continue to discuss the halakhot in responsa and try to adapt them to modern conditions and technology. Since the use of electricity has been included in the fire ban since 1900, this has resulted in the prohibition of using lifts, escalators, cars, listening to the radio, watching television, etc. The use of electrical devices with batteries charged before Shabbat, devices necessary for medical operations, etc. was controversial. In order to solve such problems practically, Levi Jizhak Halperin founded the "Institute for Science and Halacha" in Jerusalem in 1963. There, for example, a "Shabbat socket" was invented that interrupts the electric circuit for 30 seconds every three minutes to allow appliances to be plugged in without breaking the fire ban. Some modern refrigerators and ovens have a Sabbath mode that allows them to be used on the holiday without human switching.
In liberal and progressive Judaism, the Shabbat purpose of joyful and peaceful rest and spiritual renewal in the circle of family, friends and guests is emphasised. The prohibition of work is recognised in principle, but not formally defined according to biblical and Talmudic passages, but according to contemporary social conditions. Ordinary gainful employment and trade are refrained from as far as possible; those who absolutely have to work on Shabbat should use the time off work all the more for spiritual reflection. The use of electricity is not generally forbidden. If activities serve the sanctification of Shabbat, they are permitted, such as driving a car to attend synagogue, restful gardening, writing as part of a creative service. The responsibility of the individual is emphasised: negligence is permitted, but whoever transgresses a commandment also deprives himself of the pleasure associated with its observance. In 1972, the Central Conference of Rabbis in the USA published a Shabbat Manual in order to relate the halakhic rules to modern living conditions and needs.
Between 1924 and 1934, the Zionist poet Chaim Nachman Bialik first introduced regular, informal, non-halacha-oriented public Friday evening meetings with his friends in Tel Aviv, which quickly became popular, especially among young people. He called them Oneg Shabbat (Shabbat delight, joy, enjoyment), following Is 58:13 EU, in order to emphasise this aspect, which is essential for the whole Shabbat. From 1939 to 1944, Oneg Shabbat was also the cover name of a Jewish resistance group in the Warsaw Ghetto and the associated archive of Emanuel Ringelblum.
Shabbat in Israel
In Israel, the long-established Jews had kept Shabbat strictly according to the Halacha, while the immigrants (עולים olim) of the first and second עֲלִיָּה aliyah celebrated it without special services and also varied the starting dates. The British Mandate administration granted the settlers communal autonomy, so that a variety of Shabbat arrangements emerged.
On 14 May 1948, Shabbat was established as a legal day of rest, as the Jewish Agency had promised Orthodox Jews on 19 June 1947. At the same time, non-Jews were guaranteed the right to observe their own days of rest and holidays. In 1951, the Knesset passed a law guaranteeing a weekly rest period of at least 36 hours for all Israelis and prohibiting employment during it, but allowing exceptions for national defence, public security and government services, for example. These may only be approved by a committee consisting of the prime minister, the minister of labour, the minister of religion and the minister of defence. Since the halacha regulations have not been regulated by law, conflicts often arise over questions of detail.
In Israel, most shops are closed on Shabbat and public transport is at a standstill, except in Haifa. In multi-storey hotels, a Shabbat lift works. It goes up and down automatically and stops at every floor, so there is no need to press a button. In the strictly religious Jerusalem neighbourhood of Me'a She'arim, all restaurants remain closed on Shabbat, in other neighbourhoods most are, as well as in Tel Aviv, Haifa and other places where Haredim do not make up a majority of the population. A ban on El Al airline flights on Shabbat has often put it in financial straits. Israelis, meanwhile, are allowed to take part in space flights with rabbinical permission if they keep Shabbat in space after Jerusalem local time. In Petach Tikva, Orthodox Jews attacked restaurants and cinemas open on Shabbat in 1984; after the arrest of the grand rabbi involved, the Agudat Yisra'el party threatened to break the governing coalition. In 1986, Prime Minister Shimon Peres banned the Ramat Gan City Council from using the local stadium for football matches on Shabbat. A popular kibbutz Shabbat flea market met with fierce protests in 1986, as did a cable car built in Haifa to run on Shabbat. In 1987, thousands of Haredim demonstrated in Jerusalem in front of open cinemas and restaurants to force their closure on Shabbat.
