Sabbatai Tsevi, a kabbalist from Smyrna (now İzmir, Turkey), upended the Jewish world in the 1660s with the claim that he was the messiah. This claim was amplified by major rabbis and lay leaders, testimonials in broadsides, newspapers, and epistles, and a phenomenon of prophesying among the Jewish masses. It led Jews from Yemen to England to believe that the messianic age had begun, that the world had fundamentally changed, and that they would soon be liberated.

In 1666, word spread that Sabbatai would confront Mehmed IV, the Ottoman Sultan, take his crown, and go on to rule the Ottoman Empire, which included, crucially for his messianic mission, Jerusalem. The Jewish messiah, afterall, is a political figure, and is known as a “king messiah.” 

But Sabbatai was arrested. He was charged with sedition, placed in front of Mehmed IV, and given the choice of execution or conversion to Islam. Sabbatai chose to become a Muslim. In the parlance of the day, he took on the turban. 

His followers, who called themselves Ma’amanim, or Believers, and who are known to scholars as Sabbateans, faced a dilemma. What were they to do with a Jewish leader who became a Muslim, a king messiah who, when faced down by the Sultan, seemed to cave, not saving his Jewish subjects? 

Most Believers lost hope that Sabbatai would deliver them from oppression and suffering, and quietly went back to the lives they held before the messianic drama, albeit profoundly shaken.

Others, though, thought Sabbatai’s conversion was a necessary step in the process of redemption. It was all part of a great tikkun, the rectification of celestial imperfections through the gathering and raising of divine sparks scattered around the world. They didn’t feel betrayed by Sabbatai’s conversion. Instead they interpreted it as a redemptive act which couldn’t fully be understood, but could be reflected upon and, in some cases, emulated.

Some of Sabbatai’s followers converted to Islam and formed three sects known as the Kapancı, Yakubi, and Karakaş. They lived, ostensibly, as Muslims in the Ottoman Empire, though they maintained tight knit communities and had heterodox messianic Jewish practices, rituals, and beliefs. Their center was Salonika (now Thessaloniki, Greece) until they were forcibly transferred to Turkey during the 1923 population exchange between Greece and Turkey. The Kapancı and Yakubi ceased communal activity in the 20th century, while the Karakaş are still active today.

Other Sabbateans, especially Jews in Central and Western Europe and North Africa, did not convert. Known to scholars as crypto-Sabbateans, they incorporated sometimes subtle, sometimes not so subtle references to Sabbatai into their Jewish practices, and secretly studied Sabbatean kabbalah. Crypto-Sabbateans were at the center of local conflicts and debates in Jewish communities for more than a century after Sabbatai’s death.

Still other Sabbateans, particularly ones in Eastern European, stayed Jewish but were more public with their beliefs than their Central and Western European and North African counterparts. Many would rally around another Jewish messianic figure, Jacob Frank, in the 18th century and some, but not all, followed his lead and converted to Catholicism. 

If Sabbatai Tsevi and his followers are remembered today, they’re usually thought of as a historical blip, a surge of misguided religious devotion around a person who was at best delusional and at worst malicious. Some conspiracy theorists fixate on Sabbatai, painting him as a villain and spreading lies about how secret Sabbateans control the levers of power.

We have too much to learn, though, from Sabbatai and the Sabbateans to think about them like this. The Sabbateans passed down a complicated, rich, diverse, rebellious, pious, antinomian legacy that can’t just be written off, ignored, or maligned. They can teach us lessons about existing in the modern world, about holding views that put one in conflict with one’s wider community, about responding to material conditions with spiritual evolution, about relating to a dominant culture’s religion, and about making sense and meaning out of crisis and chaos.

Sabbateanism is a movement that many people, whether they know it or not, have ancestral connections to. This includes but is not limited to Sephardi, Mizrahi, and Ashkenazi Jews, descendants of Turkish Sabbateans who converted to Islam, and descendants of Czech, German, Polish, and Ukrainian Sabbateans who converted to Catholicism. 

Sabbateanism is a deep well of ancestral knowledge to draw from, and is something to engage with honestly, bravely, passionately, theologically, academically, personally, and spiritually. We should study Sabbatean history, kabbalah, and hymns. We should write about Sabbateanism, make music and art and film and radio and theater about it, and try to understand its contemporary implications. We should wrestle with how utopian and dystopian frames shape our own worlds, and what redemption and messianism mean for us today, whether we are religious, secular, or something else.  

The conspiracy theorists don’t get to own this story. We can create much more robust and realistic discourse and cultural production on Sabbateanism, not just for its own sake but also to drown out these conspiracy theorists’ antisemitic and anti-Sabbatean lies.

Many of our ancestors earnestly believed that they were living in the messianic age, and changed their lives to reflect that, in the process creating radically different ways of being and believing. They created theologies and life practices that defy easy categorization, and that transcend lines of religious difference, sometimes borrowing, sometimes rejecting, elements of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity. We owe it to them to try to understand their motivations, their inner realities, their hopes, and their ways of connecting with each other and with the divine.

Sabbatai Tsevi and the movement around him were an explosion that shook the Jewish world. The initial fire from that explosion burned out relatively quickly, but the embers—the sparks—spread far, simmered long, and embedded deeply. These sparks are scattered throughout our world in ways that we’re just beginning to truly understand. I think it is time to seek them out, to raise them up, and to continue our ancestors’ tikkun.

August 2022/Av 5782

Photo by Mark Seton (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)