and the persecution of east European Jewry by the Cossacks. Expectations – both Jewish and Christian – focused on the year 1666. ‘According to the Predictions of several Christian writers, especially of such who Comment on the Apocalyps, or Revelations,’ wrote one commentator, ‘this year of 1666 was to prove a Year of Wonders, and Strange Revolutions in the World.’ Protestants looked forward to the Jews’ conversion, Jews themselves to their imminent return to Zion. Rumours ran across Europe, and it was reported ‘that a Ship was arrived in the Northern parts of Scotland with her Sails and Cordage of Silk, Navigated by Mariners who spake nothing but Hebrew; with this Motto on their Sails, The Twelve Tribes of Israel.’12
That winter a forty-year-old Jewish scholar from Izmir headed for Istanbul with the declared intention of toppling the sultan and ushering in the day of redemption. Sabbatai Zevi had been proclaiming himself the Messiah on and off for some years while he wandered through the rabbinical academies of the eastern Mediterranean. Helped by wealthy Jewish backers in Egypt, and by a promotional campaign launched on his behalf by a young Gaza rabbi, he was mobbed by supporters when he returned to his home-town. According to one account ‘he immediately started to appear as a Monarch, dressed in golden and silken clothes, most beautiful and rich. He used to carry a sort of Sceptre in his hand and to go about Town always escorted by a great number of Jews, some of whome, to honour him, would spread carpets on the streets for him to step on.’13
It was only, however, once he headed for the capital, announcing he was planning to depose the sultan himself, that the Ottoman authorities became alarmed. By this point, he had thrown the entire Jewish world into turmoil. From Buda to Aleppo and Cairo, thousands declared their allegiance and shouted down the doubters. ‘It was strange to see how the fancy took, and how fast the report of Sabatai and his Doctrine flew through all parts where Turks and Jews inhabited’, noted an English observer. ‘I perceived a strange transport in the Jews, none of them attending to any business unless to wind up former negotiations, and to prepare themselves and Families for a Journey to Jerusalem: All their Discourses, their Dreams and disposal of their Affairs tended to no other Design but a re-establishment in the Land of Promise, to Greatness, Glory, Wisdom, and Doctrine of the Messiah.”14
Nowhere was the frenzy greater than in Salonica, where Zevi was a well-known figure. He had spent some years studying there with local scholars, and preached regularly in the synagogue of the Marranos. In 1659 he had outraged his audience by pronouncing the divine name and was excommunicated and forced to leave. Now, however, the city was gripped by millenarian hysteria. Anticipating the Messiah’s arrival, rabbis ordered acts of penance and fasting; in their enthusiasm some acolytes starved themselves to death, or whipped themselves till their backs were bleeding. ‘Others buryed themselves in their Gardens, covering their naked Bodies with Earth, their heads onely excepted remained in their Beds of dirt until their Bodies were stiffened with the cold and moisture: others would indure to have melted Wax dropt upon their Shoulders, others to rowl themselves in Snow, and throw their Bodies in the Coldest season of Winter into the Sea, or Frozen Waters.’ Preparing to go and meet him, shopkeepers sold off their stock at bargain prices, parents married off their children and all sought ‘to purge their Consciences of Sin.’ Christians and Muslims looked on in bemusement and scorn. When a French onlooker smiled at the wild abandon of the crowds, a young Jewish boy told him ‘that I had nothing to smile about since shortly we would all become their slaves by the virtue of their Messiah.”15
Even Zevi’s arrest en route to the capital, and his subsequent detention, did not diminish his influence. To the Grand Vizier he denied ever having claimed he was the Messiah; but at the same time, he addressed the Jews of the capital as ‘The Only Son and Firstborn of God, Messiah and Saviour of the World.’ Delegations visited him from as far afield as Holland, Poland, Germany and Persia, and hundreds of pilgrims made their way to see him. A light – so bright as to blind those who looked upon it – was said to have shone from his face and a crown of fire was seen above his head. He was dressed in expensive garments paid for by his admirers; in return, he sent out instructions for new festivals to be celebrated in his honour. Only in Istanbul did doubters publicly resist his claims. In the Balkans his supporters held sway; women dressed themselves in white and prepared to ‘go and slay demons’. His fame even prompted another Kabbalist, a Polish Jew named Nehemiah, to make his way to Gallipoli, where Zevi was being held, to tell him that the books foretold the arrival of a second, subordinate Messiah, which unsurprisingly he proclaimed himself to be.16
Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi suspected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct – and his well-known views that ‘God permittest that which is forbidden’ – made highly plausible. Although Mehmed IV’s first impulse seems to have been to have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give him the chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interrogated in the sultan’s presence where one of the royal physicians, Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi – a convert whose original name was Moshe Abravanel – translated for him from Turkish into Judeo-Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte, receiving instruction in Islam from – and offering insights into Judaism to – the Grand Vizier’s personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others, he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later. Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse, the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out.17
The Messiah’s conversion was not the end of the matter, however. After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers remained undeflected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves onto the right path – for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all kinds – Jews, Christians and Muslims. Zevi’s apostasy was recast in Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the rabbis managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi’s followers – like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan – never did convert and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.18
