Sabbatai Zevi, the Messiah of 1666

Jewish tradition has long held that a Messiah, a descendant of King David, will one day gather the exiles of Israel and bring an age of peace. Through the centuries several figures claimed or were given that role, and each time most rabbis urged caution. In the seventeenth century this hope took on fresh urgency. The massacres of Jews in Ukraine during the Khmelnytsky uprising of 1648 had shocked the Jewish world, and the teachings of the sixteenth-century kabbalist Isaac Luria of Safed had spread widely. Lurianic Kabbalah described the world as a place of scattered divine sparks waiting to be gathered, a process called tikkun, or repair, which would end with redemption.

Sabbatai Zevi was born in Smyrna, a busy Ottoman port, in 1626. He was learned in Talmud and Kabbalah, but his behaviour puzzled those around him. Periods of deep depression alternated with moments of exaltation, during which he performed strange acts, such as pronouncing the forbidden name of God. Rabbis in Smyrna and later in Salonica expelled him. Modern writers have often suggested he suffered from what would now be called bipolar disorder, though such diagnoses across centuries remain speculative.

The decisive meeting came in 1665. Sabbatai visited Gaza to seek out Nathan, a young scholar there with a reputation as a healer of souls. Nathan, who had experienced a prophetic vision of his own, declared that Sabbatai was the Messiah. Sabbatai accepted the role. Nathan soon became the movement’s voice, writing letters, prayers and penitential instructions that travelled across the Jewish world.

What followed is one of the most remarkable episodes in Jewish history. Letters announcing the Messiah reached Aleppo, Cairo, Venice, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Poland and Yemen within months. In many communities people fasted, bathed in icy water and gave alms as penance, while in others there was dancing in the streets. Prayers for Sabbatai were added to synagogue services. Merchants in Amsterdam, a wealthy and sophisticated community, were among his enthusiastic supporters, and believers and sceptics argued fiercely in many cities.

The excitement reached beyond the Jewish world. Christian millenarians in England and the Netherlands, many of whom expected great events in 1666, followed the news closely, and newsletters and pamphlets reported on the supposed King of the Jews. The secretary of the Royal Society in London, Henry Oldenburg, asked the philosopher Spinoza what he made of the rumours. Sabbatai’s marriage added to the drama. His wife, Sarah, was a young woman who had survived the massacres in Poland as a child and was said to have announced that she was destined to marry the Messiah. Her story, retold with many embellishments, became part of the legend.

Sabbatai returned to Smyrna in late 1665, where he took control of the community amid great excitement. He announced changes to Jewish practice, beginning with the abolition of a fast day; later, from prison, he would turn the fast of the Ninth of Av, which mourns the destruction of the Temple and was also his birthday, into a feast. In early 1666 he sailed for Istanbul, apparently expecting to take the crown from the sultan. Instead the Ottoman authorities arrested him. After a time in prison he was held in the fortress of Gallipoli, which his followers called the Tower of Strength. There he received visitors and lived in some comfort, and pilgrims from many lands came to see him.

The turning point came in September 1666. A Polish kabbalist, Nehemiah ha-Kohen, visited Sabbatai, and according to the sources, after their meeting denounced him to the Ottoman authorities. Sabbatai was taken to the sultan’s court at Edirne. Offered the choice, as the reports say, between death and conversion, he put on a Muslim turban and took the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi. He was given an honorary position and a pension.

For most believers, the news was a catastrophe. Rabbis worked to restore order, and many communities tried to remove traces of the episode from their records. Rabbi Jacob Sasportas of Hamburg, who had opposed the movement from the start, collected letters and reports that remain an important source. Glikl of Hameln, a Jewish businesswoman whose memoir is a rare first-person account by a woman of the period, recalled how her father-in-law had packed barrels of provisions for the journey to the Holy Land, and how they stood waiting in his house for years.

A minority did not give up. Nathan of Gaza argued that the Messiah had to descend into the realm of impurity to rescue the holy sparks hidden there, so the apostasy was not a betrayal but a necessary, hidden stage of redemption. Some followers, seeing this as a model, converted to Islam themselves. Sabbatai, still observing some Jewish practices, was eventually exiled to Dulcigno on the Adriatic coast, where he died in 1676. Nathan died in Skopje in 1680. For his remaining followers, the death of the Messiah in exile became one more mystery to be explained, and some held that he had not truly died but had been hidden away, to return at the appointed time.

In Salonica, several hundred families of believers converted to Islam in the 1680s, after Sabbatai’s death. They became known in Turkish as the Dönme, meaning those who turned. Outwardly they were Muslims, but for generations they married within their own groups and kept private prayers and traditions honouring Sabbatai. In the early twentieth century some were prominent in Salonica’s commerce and in reform movements. After the Greek–Turkish population exchange of 1923–1924, most moved to Turkey, where the community gradually dissolved into the wider society.

In Europe, Sabbatean ideas continued underground in the eighteenth century and fed into the movement of Jacob Frank in Poland. The rabbinic world reacted with heightened suspicion of messianic claims and of secret kabbalistic teachings. The great historian Gershom Scholem, in his monumental study of 1957, translated into English in 1973, argued that the Sabbatean crisis was a turning point in Jewish history. Later scholars have debated parts of his interpretation, but the episode remains central to understanding Jewish mysticism, messianic hope and the costs of disappointed expectation.