Sabbateans

Millenarian ideas of the approach of the Messianic time, and more especially of the redemption of the Jews and their return to the land of Israel, with their own independent sovereignty, have been popular during the first half of the seventeenth century.

Belief in the apocalyptic year, identified by Christian authors as 1666, is so dominant that Manasseh ben Israel, in his letter to Oliver Cromwell and the Rump Parliament, will not hesitate to use it as a motive for his plea for the readmission of the Jews into England, remarking "the opinions of many Christians and mine do concur herein, that we both believe that the restoring time of our Nation into their native country is very near at hand".

Apart from this general Messianic theory, there had been another computation, based on an interpreted passage in the Zohar (a famous Jewish mystical text), and particularly popular among the Jews, according to which the year 1648 was to be the year of Israel's redemption by their long-awaited Jewish Messiah.

Mordecai Zevi had been a poor poultry dealer in the Morea until, when in consequence of the war between Turkey and Venice under the Sultan Ibrahim I, Smyrna became the center of Levantine trade, Mordecai became the Smyrnan agent of an English house.

As a consequence, he has acquired considerable wealth.

His son, eventually to gain fame and notoriety as Sabbatai Zevi (also spelled Shabbetai Tzevi, Zebi, or Zvi) has steeped himself in the influential body of Jewish mystical writings known as the Kabbala.

His extended periods of ecstasy and his strong personality have combined to attract many disciples.

The twenty-two-year-old Sabbatai in 1648 proclaims himself as the true Messianic redeemer, designated by God to overthrow the governments of the nations and to restore the kingdom of Israel.

His mode of revealing his mission is the pronouncing of the Tetragrammaton in Hebrew, an act which Judaism emphatically prohibits, except the Jewish high priest in the Temple in Jerusalem on the Day of Atonement.

This is of great significance to those acquainted with rabbinical, and especially kabbalistic, literature.

However, Sabbatai's authority at the age of twenty-two does not reach far enough for him to gain many adherents.

Sabbatai had remained at Smyrna for several years, leading the pious life of a mystic, and giving rise to much argument in the community, the details of which are not known.

Among the first of those to whom Sabbatai Zevi had revealed his Messiahship are Isaac Silveyra and Moses Pinheiro, the latter a brother-in-law of the Italian rabbi and kabbalist Joseph Ergas.

The college of rabbis, having at its head his teacher, Joseph Escapa, watched Sabbatai closely, and when his Messianic pretensions became too bold they put him and his followers under a ban of cherem, a type of excommunication in classical Judaism.

Sabbatai and his disciples had been banished from Smyrna in about the year 1651 (according to others, 1654) by the aroused rabbinate.

It is not quite certain where he went from there.

He was in 1653, or at the latest 1658, in Constantinople, where he met an esteemed and forceful Jewish preacher and Kabbalist, Abraham ha-Yakini (a disciple of Joseph di Trani), who confirmed Sabbatai.

Abraham Ha-Yakini is said to have forged a manuscript in archaic characters and in a style imitating the ancient apocalypses, and which, he alleged, bore testimony to Sabbatai's Messiahship.

With this document, which he appears to have accepted as an actual revelation, Sabbatai determined to choose Salonika, at this time a center of kabbalists, as the field for his further operations.

Here he had boldly proclaimed himself the Messiah, gaining many adherents.

In order to impress his Messiahship upon the minds of his enthusiastic friends he put on all sorts of mystical events — e.g., the celebration of his marriage as the “One Without End” (the Ein Sof) with the Torah, preparing a solemn festival to which he invited his friends.

The consequence had been his banishment from the city by the rabbis of Salonica, headed by Rabbi Hiyya Abraham Di Boton.

The sources differ widely as to the route he took after this expulsion, Alexandria, Athens, Constantinople, Jerusalem, Smyrna and other places being mentioned as temporary centers.

In 1660, however, after long wanderings, he settles in Cairo, where he is to reside for about two years, during which time he wins over to his cause Raphael Halebi, the wealthy and powerful treasurer of the Turkish governor.

Sabbatai, accompanied in 1664 by a retinue of believers and assured of financial backing, triumphantly returns to Jerusalem.

Here, a twenty-year-old student known as Nathan of Gaza assumes the role of a modern Elijah, in his traditional role of forerunner of the messiah.

Nathan ecstatically prophesies the imminent restoration of Israel and world salvation through the bloodless victory of Sabbatai, riding on a lion with a seven-headed dragon in his jaws.

In accordance with millenarian belief, he cites 1666 as the apocalyptic year.

Threatened with excommunication by the rabbis of Jerusalem, ...

...Sabbatai returns to Smyrna in the autumn of 1665 to wild acclaim.

Reports of the coming of the Messiah in the person of Sabbatai, and his prophecies, vision and miracles, sweep across Europe.

Messianic fervor engulfs all classes of Jews in both the Ashkenazic and Sephardic communities.

In April 1666, an Englishman reports to London from Florence that many families of Jews have come to Leghorn (Livorno) from Rome, Verona and Germany to “mbarque to find their Messiah”.

Leghorn’s Jewish community is just one of the many to send an envoy to Smyrna to pay homage to “our king.”

Sabbatai had gone to Constantinople at the beginning of 1666, and had been imprisoned on his arrival.

After a few months, he had been transferred to the castle at Abydos, which becomes known to his followers as Migdal Oz, the Tower of Strength.

Sabbatai is in September, however, brought before the sultan in Adrianople and, having been previously threatened with torture, becomes converted to Islam after denying he ever made messianic claims.

The placated sultan renames him Mehmed Efendi, appoints him his personal doorkeeper, and provides him with a generous allowance.

All but Sabbatai’s most faithful or self-seeking disciples are disillusioned by his apostasy.

Even so, Sabbatai's movement, which becomes known as Sabbateanism, spreads to Venice, Hamburg, London, Amsterdam, and other cities in Europe and North Africa.

The emotion aroused by the false messiah throughout the diaspora, well beyond the Ottoman domains, has made the political loyalty of the Jewish community suspect in the eyes of the sultan.

From the second half of the seventeenth centuryGreeks and Armenians, not Jews, hold the most important posts in the empire.

Sabbatai had eventually fallen out of favor, his demise clouded in some mystery because of conflicting accounts about exactly how, when and where he died.

There are those who maintain he died of natural causes and others that claim he was executed by hanging.

Historians seem to agree that in 1673 Zevi was exiled by the Turkish sultan to the Albanian port of Ulqin, now in Montenegro, dying there some years later.