Sabbatai Zevi

SABBATAI ZEVI. - Pseudo-messiah and Jew, b. at Smyrna on 7 July 1626, d. at Berat (Albania) on 30 Sept. 1675. As a young man he devoted himself to the study of the cabbala (v.), but he soon showed signs of imbalance. In 1650 a mystifier made him believe he was the messiah, and later Abraham Nathan Benjamin Ashkenazi (called Nathan of Gaza or Nathan the prophet) firmly rooted this conviction in him (if Š. was the messiah, Nathan was Elijah). The people were seized with fanatical enthusiasm for him, while the rabbis regarded him with distrust, considering him mentally ill. Indeed his extravagances passed all bounds and the Turkish authorities arrested him. Unable to endure prison life, he denied being the messiah and converted to Islam.

Sabbatianism, the current of Š.'s followers, threatened to drag Judaism into religious anarchy; it was the first case in which ideas of a cabalistic character set themselves to disintegrating its foundations. Having indeed to justify Š.'s apostasy at all costs, the Sabbatians made a clear distinction between inner reality and historical reality, between the inner and the outer world, entirely to the disadvantage of the latter. While the earlier cabalism tended to present the outer world as the symbol of the inner world, now an antithesis was established between them. The historical fact of Š.'s apostasy lost all value when it was presented as the only act capable of saving the whole people from the fate of becoming marrano (the name given in Spain to those who abandoned Judaism only apparently, remaining attached to it in their hearts). The messiah had had to accept this sacrifice, being the only soul capable of enduring such a trial without suffering harm from it. The danger for Judaism was great, because the outer world devalued by Sabbatianism was represented by rabbinism; it came to be said that the Töräh had to dissolve, like the seed in the earth, in order to show itself afterwards in all its messianic glory.

Š.'s fortune must be sought in the sharpening of messianic interest that followed the expulsion of the Jews from Spain. Within Sabbatianism two currents took shape: one according to which the messiah's conduct was to serve as an example for all and which upheld the holiness of sin, which could only be conquered by plunging into it; the other which held instead that Š.'s conduct was justifiable only in his own case. There were two cases of mass apostasy: one on the part of the adherents of the sect called by the Turks the apostates, who went over to Islam at Salonica in 1683; and the other on the part of the Frankists (v. FRANK, JACOB) in Galicia in 1759, who went over to Catholicism. To Sabbatianism is linked the Frankist movement which, because of its anti-rabbinic spirit, is considered the remote origin of the reformist movement that arose in Germany in the 18th century.

Eugenio Zolli