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[We are looking at the story of Sabbatai Zevi. If you’ve just arrived, click here to see the beginning.]
In the year 1665, Sabbatai met his prophet. It was a lad of 20 or 21 years old; Sabatai, on the other hand, was already in his forties. The young man, until then known as Nathan Ashkenazi, was a native of Palestine and the son of an Ashkenazi man who traveled around Europe collecting donations for the poor Jews of the Holy Land. Living in this mystical environment, Nathan studied Kabbalah as a self-taught man; and, by 1665, he already had a reasonable reputation because of a very specific ability: knowing the sins of others just by looking at their faces. Jews of the diaspora went to Gaza, in Ottoman Palestine, so that Nathan could tell them their sins and determine their penance. It was like the confession of Catholics, only with a touch of magic.
Scholem does not have a secular explanation for the phenomenon, but denies that he needs one, since, according to him, this is a common phenomenon in the history of religions. In fact, in the modern West we can point to Padre Pio, an Italian who also had this reputation in the 20th century and was canonized in a short time. However, for the Church this phenomenon is not considered good in itself, since those possessed by the devil can exhibit this type of knowledge (as well as speaking in languages they have not learned). Another extraordinary thing admitted by Scholem is the possibility of learning Kabbalah through magidim, that is, angels and holy spirits who manifest themselves and give private lessons to the Kabbalist. Nathan of Gaza’s self-taught ability could come from there, and this is supposedly usual for Kabbalists.
In February or March of 1665, while meditating, Nathan has a mystical experience: he sees the face of Sabbatai and sees in him the Messiah. (It was possible that they had met before in Jerusalem.) Months later, unaware of what had happened, Sabbatai travels to Gaza, preoccupied with his demonic afflictions, and seeks out the famous Nathan Ashkenazi so that he may see him and prescribe a penance. Nathan tells him, however, that he needs no penance at all, for his soul is pure and he is the Messiah. Moreover, his manic phases were not demonic affliction, but divine illumination. Sabbatai, who had been sober since the exorcism, initially rejected the diagnosis.
Nevertheless, during the Jewish Pentecost of 1665, in Gaza, Nathan participated in a meeting with some rabbis, performed an ecstatic dance in which he gradually removed his clothes, went into a trance, fell to the ground unconscious, and through his mouth, a magid ordered the rabbis to listen to Nathan and Sabbatai. Awakened from the trance, the rabbis asked them who this Sabbatai was, and so Nathan proclaimed that Sabbatai was worthy to reign over Israel, that he was the Messiah. These rabbis from the Holy Land were the first converts to Sabbateanism, and thus it became easier to convert Sabbatai Zevi himself. According to some sources consulted by Scholem, the rabbis acclaimed Sabbatai, who then proclaimed himself Messiah and rode out on horseback through the streets of Gaza “like a king,” with a man before him. This is the beginning of Sabbateanism, and the controversial official date is May 31, 1665. Mirroring Jesus, he chose 12 disciples, who were rabbis representing the tribes of Israel. He wanted to go with them to the Temple Mount to make sacrifices.
In the dynamics of the movement, Sabbatai used to act and Nathan used to write. During his manic phases, Sabbatai sang romantic Spanish songs in a sweet voice that captivated his followers, pronounced the ineffable name of God (“Shaddai!”), commanded his followers to eat forbidden fats because he believed that transgressing the Law sanctified, and altered the practices of the religious calendar (for example, exchanging a day of fasting and penance for a day of feasting and banqueting). The sanctification of transgression is important because the Talmud lists 36 transgressions punishable by death. Among them are simple things like pronouncing the ineffable name, eating forbidden fats… and things like incest. (While researching these transgressions, I found a source that lists an even more sinister transgression not mentioned by Scholem: handing over the offspring to Moloch, the god who delighted in children being burned to death.)
Nathan of Gaza, on the other hand, rationalized Sabbatai’s actions and built a theological doctrine. To Scholem’s astonishment, and ours as well, Nathan’s theology resembled that of Protestantism, as it determined that only faith in the Messiah, and not works, saves man. Therefore, Sabbatai would not perform miracles, and no one should expect them, as faith had to be independent of proof. Since Sabbatai was God (and the idea that the Messiah was God had no precedent in Talmudic or mystical Judaism), Nathan determined that he could save the worst of men—Jesus Christ—and condemn the best of men, according to his own will. Jesus was considered the worst of men for having founded a religion that persecutes Jews. As Sabbatai was tormented by the possibility of being a false Messiah, Nathan elaborated a theory according to which all false Messiahs were, in fact, true—even Jesus. Each one contained a piece of the Messiah, and Jesus was his kelipah, his shell, his evilness. But Sabbatai was the last Messiah; after him, there would be no other.
According to Scholem, Nathan was at once the John the Baptist and the Saint Paul of Sabbatai, for he prophesied the Messiah and put on paper the ideas to be instilled in the communities of followers – which would include Jews from all over the diaspora, from Yemen to Amsterdam, passing through Poland. Therefore, Scholem says that this was the most important Jewish movement since the fall of the Second Temple.
How did he do this? Above all, through letters. As early as the spring (March-June) of 1665, Nathan had “found” an ancient apocalypse, according to which the Messiah would be called Sabbatai Zevi, son of Mordecai Zevi, and would be born in the year 5386 (1626 AD). He would still write other apocalypses. The practice of pseudepigraphy is a constant in the history of Kabbalah: it is common to write a new text and attribute it to some historical or simply older figure.
But until the summer (June-Sept.) of 1665, Nathan was not yet sending Sabbatean letters to the diaspora. During this period, he and Sabbatai were occupied with messianic fervor in the Holy Land. Sabbatai left for Jerusalem with 12 disciples and made preparations to offer a sacrifice on the Temple Mount, possibly with a view to beginning its reconstruction. The rabbis of Jerusalem began to tear their clothes, indignant. To make matters worse, Sabbatai acted in the usual way of his manic phase: he pronounced the ineffable name, etc. As a result, he was excommunicated by the rabbis of Jerusalem.
At the end of the summer of 1665, the letters from the Holy Land began to flood the diaspora. However, all the letters were favorable to Sabbateanism, and no rabbi in Jerusalem has ever brought up the excommunication of Sabbatai. Why? It is unknown. This is a fact that, according to Scholem, remains mysterious. Perhaps it is the greatest mystery in the history of Sabbateanism.
The fact is that, if the rabbis of Jerusalem had wanted to, Sabbateanism would not have grown much. We can look at the movement as a typical political delusion based on fake news (such as the one that in 72 hours the Brazilian Army will prevent Lula from taking office for his third term), only hatched in a time when communication depended on paper. In the West, they arrived by two routes: they went by boat to Italy, from where they spread to the Western world, or they went to the Balkans and from there reached the Ashkenazim, who made Poland a second center of diffusion in the West. Many Jewish communities had someone with a relative in the Holy Land, and a house that received such letters soon attracted a crowd. Copies were produced, and of course, alleged copies too. In the Calvinist world (which hosted the powerful Amsterdam community), the letters were also the object of keen interest among Christians.
Before the flood of letters, however, Sabbatai was expelled from Jerusalem and headed for Aleppo (Syria), passing through Safed (Galilee, northern Palestine) and Damascus (Syria) along the way. He was very well received in these places and urged the local authorities not to act like those in Jerusalem. From these cities, come the first reports of prophetic gifts manifesting in those present: even women and children fell at the sound of the shofar (the ram’s horn trumpet) and began to pronounce words in Hebrew, a language they did not know (because Hebrew was like Latin: a dead language used by scholars, or in liturgy). However, the first manifestations of mass prophecy occur in Smyrna, at the beginning of December, after the flood of letters from Palestine announcing redemption.
The Jewish New Year begins between September and October. At that time, it spread that the new year was the Year of Jubilee – a festival that presumes the existence of the Temple and the end of the exile. Most of the Sabbatean Year of Jubilee coincided with 1666 in the Christian calendar. From then on, synagogues stopped citing the Ottoman Sultan as a secular authority and replaced him with Sultan Sabbatai. At that time, Nathan wrote for the “believers” (that is what the Sabbateans called themselves) a prophecy according to which within less than two years Sabbatai would take power from the king of Turkey, because all the kings of the world would submit to him. Sabbatai’s method for this would be his singing, which so pleased his followers. Sabatai would sing psalms and romantic songs in Spanish, and the kings would become his servants.
Scholem calls this production of letters from the Holy Land a propaganda machine. Sabbateanism had the peculiarity of being a movement without an institution, entirely founded on rumors. It also had the peculiar characteristic of being an unarmed rebellion.
Scholem lists three reasons why Sabbateanism went so far: 1) it originated in the Holy Land; 2) it benefited from the messianic climate of the period; 3) it preached repentance, and it was difficult for rabbis to protest against a movement that preaches repentance. This messianic climate already included a fever for fanciful letters before Sabbateanism. The previous trend was news of the ten lost tribes of Israel, which were seen by anonymous letter writers, ready for war, in the most unlikely places. All this because, at the end of times, the ten lost tribes would return and reconquer the Holy Land. In one of these accounts, disseminated in the Christian world by Rabbi Menasseh Ben Israel, who died in 1657, the lost tribes were among the Native Americans.
Sabbatean letters reached the communities of believers, the conservative rabbis offered resistance and were called “infidels.” The first drastic case was in Smyrna, where Sabbatai had already been excommunicated before. An “infidel” rabbi of the Portuguese Synagogue had been harassed by the crowd of “believers” and was nearly stoned. Then, on a Shabbat (the Jewish holy day), Sabbatai walked to the Portuguese Synagogue with an axe in his hands and a legion of believers, invaded it with axe blows, and proclaimed himself king. He made a speech with blasphemies and sang his favorite song: Melizelda. The believers fell to the ground and “prophesied” in Hebrew amidst epileptic seizures.
The hysteria in Smyrna was such that Turkish children learned the word “infidel” in Hebrew and began shouting it indiscriminately at the Jews, just for fun. No one dared confront the believers, and the movement gained even more strength. Sabbatai appointed kings for Rome and for the Islamic countries. (Later the “kings” sold their titles, except for a proud beggar.) The prophecies became mass phenomena in Smyrna: people fell to the ground trembling and speaking Hebrew, even four-year-old children who did not know the language. In Constantinople, a charismatic prophet appeared preaching the word of Sabbatai and drawing crowds. Scholem points out that the phenomenon of mass prophecy was not restricted, at the time, to the Jews, and a Protestant observer opposed to the Sabbatean cause noted the similarity between them and the Quakers.
Critical observers noted that the popular prophecies did not come true. Nathan then created a theory according to which even Samael, the Prince of Evil, is obliged to announce the good news. Then he whistles to the demons, who speak through the mouths of women, children, and the common people, and at the same time the Prophet Elijah, who speaks the truth, speaks to a few. Thus, all this prophetic clamor, which mixes truth with lies, would be for the glory of Israel.
At this point, we can already understand that the Jews were really very crazy. And this had economic consequences, because the Jews stopped working to do penance. In some more enlightened communities, such as Amsterdam, the Jews discussed the logistics of transferring to the Holy Land by boat. In others, which included Russia and Greece, the Jews awaited a cloud that would transport them. Jews died from excessive fasting, or from climbing onto the roof and trying to reach the cloud (there is a record of a case in Greece). The Christian authorities, who did not communicate with the Turkish authorities, knew that something was wrong. A New Christian who communicated with Amsterdam explained the situation to the Spanish Inquisition, which then did everything possible to prevent the New Christians from traveling. The entire diaspora wanted to go to Palestine to await the Messiah, or else head to Smyrna to contemplate the face of God, that is, to take a look on Sabbatai’s cheeks.
To be continued.
