Messiah of Transgression – Thoughts on Sabbatai Zevi (Part 1)

“Tell me, dunce: are you quite certain you will have a blessed afterlife for believing, without any sign or miracle, in a man insane?  Who perpetrated, moreover, one lawless act after another?  In Izmir, for example, he spoke the sacred Name of God in the city streets; he taught the rabble and the children to do the same; he smashed his way into a synagogue on the Sabbath day to kill the rabbis who did not believe in him. … He offered Passover sacrifice outside the Temple, ate its forbidden fat, and made his companions eat as well. … He cavorted with attractive married women.”
— Rabbi Joseph Halevi of Livorno to Rabbi Hosea Nantawa of Alexandria, November 1666 (my translation)

“Tell me, dunce” is not the way one rabbi would normally address another.  But 1666 was not a normal year for the Jewish communities of Europe and the Mediterranean world.  They were drastically split among themselves, “polarized” as we’d now say, set at each other’s throats by the man who’s gone down in history as one of its most divisive figures.

Just a little bit like today–with, of course, names and geography and ideologies changed.

The man was named Sabbatai Zevi.  Born in 1626 to a Jewish family in the Turkish city of Izmir, he acquired an early reputation as an eccentric.  People who’d known him as a young man, long before he became an international celebrity, remembered how he used to quote with reference to himself Isaiah 14:14, I will ascend upon the heights of the clouds, I will be like the Most High.  On one occasion, he was convinced that as he spoke these words he was lifted into the air, and demanded of those around him whether they’d seen him carried up.  When they answered truthfully that they hadn’t, he retorted: “You are not worthy of so glorious a sight, for you are not purified as I am.”

Nuts, we might say.  Narcissist with delusions of grandeur, we might say.  And when we recall that the words of the Biblical verse are spoken by the rebel Lucifer, we might detect a sinister, even demonic ambition driving these delusions.

But for the time being nobody took Sabbatai Zevi seriously.  When he proclaimed himself Messiah in 1648, hardly anyone paid attention.  It was only seventeen years later, in 1665, when Sabbatai teamed up with a brilliant young Kabbalist named Nathan of Gaza who became his prophet and publicist, that something about the pair’s synergy worked a miracle.

Within a few months, the word had gone viral: Behold your Redeemer cometh, Sabbatai Zevi his name.  And Jews everywhere were in a frenzy of messianic excitement.

It wasn’t only they who felt this fantastical thrill.  On February 19, 1666, a slightly nervous Samuel Pepys confided to his diary that, visiting his London bookseller, “I am told for certain, what I have heard once or twice already, of a Jew in town, that in the name of the rest do offer to give any man 10l. to be paid 100l., if a certain person now at Smyrna [Izmir] be within these two years owned by all the Princes of the East, and particularly the grand Signor [the Turkish sultan] as the King of the world, in the same manner we do the King of England here, and that this man is the true Messiah.”

“Very strange,” was Pepys’s opinion of the matter, “and certainly this year of 1666 will be a year of great action; but what the consequences of it will be, God knows!”

In September of 1666, brought before the Turkish sultan, Sabbatai Zevi converted to Islam.  And his Jewish opponents, who for months had gone about terrorized and in fear of their lives, let out–like Joseph Halevi in his letter to the “believing” rabbi Nantawa–a great howl of triumphant rage.

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I’ve published two books on Sabbatai and his believers over the past 20 years (click here and here), and the past few weeks have returned him to the forefront of my thoughts.  My interview with Nachi Weinstein for the SeforimChatter podcast, about the “Sabbatian” religious movement sparked within Judaism by his failed messiahship, has just gone live.  A few days ago, Jonathan Stewart interviewed me on the same subject for the “Talk Gnosis” podcast (where, a few months ago, I had a wonderful interview on UFOs with Jon and his colleague Jason Mehmel).

The same question kept coming up in our conversations: was the messianic fever of 1665-66 just a blip?  Or did it have lasting consequences for Jewish history?  Perhaps even world history?

Gershom Scholem, the 20th century’s greatest scholar of Jewish mysticism and the author of a monumental biography of Sabbatai, argued for the movement’s enduring influence  and importance.  By loosening the grip of the traditional Jewish religious law, by challenging the authority of Judaism’s religious leadership, it enabled the birth of Reform Judaism.  Calling on the Jewish people to unite and return to their ancient homeland, it was an early and drastically imperfect foreshadowing of Zionism.

Of course this “proto-Zionism” failed.  The people were worthy, the leader was not.  In the fullness of time, Scholem thought, the national impulse triggered by Sabbatai’s messianic proclamation would find better men and women to represent it, and Scholem’s nation Israel would be the result.

At times I’m carried away by Scholem’s breathtaking historical panorama.  At other times, in a more sour and skeptical mood, I find myself thinking he may have been imagining more connection that was really there.  Disentangling the threads of cause and effect in history is less a matter of scientific analysis than of imaginative fiction-writing.  (Which doesn’t discredit the effort–isn’t history itself a fictional “story” we tell ourselves of how we came to be?)

Yet there’s another way in which Sabbatai’s fantastic career has more than antiquarian interest.  He was a supreme rule-breaker, a man who “perpetrated one lawless act after another,” as Joseph Halevi truly said.  In the course of shattering norms, he shattered lives and split a society, which survived the crisis but long bore the wounds.  Hard not to think we’re in a similar place, in America today, and to wonder: will our society, our nation, hold together?  What wounds will our children, our grandchildren bear from the rage, the distrust, the bitterness that bedevil us now?

Looking back on Sabbatai Zevi from the perspective of the past six years, we may well think: we’ve seen this man before.

(To be continued.)