Sabbatai Zevi, Marrano Messiah

Sabbatai Zevi: Messiah in spite of himself

Born in Smyrna (Izmir) on the 9th of Av 1626 into a family of merchants, Sabbatai Zevi studies according to tradition and very early shows particular aptitudes. He is ordained “hakham”¹ around the age of eighteen. He has solid kabbalistic knowledge. Unfortunately, he suffers from manic-depressive disorders and passes from periods of uncontrollable exaltation to phases of depression and isolation. During his periods of “illumination,” he violates the Law, whether on the dietary or the sexual plane. By contrast, during the periods of depression, he withdraws from the world, meditates to try to combat the forces of evil and to heal his soul. It is to this end that he goes to meet the young Nathan of Gaza, and, following a dream, the latter will convince Sabbatai Zevi that he is indeed the Messiah. Nathan of Gaza is the true creator of the Messiah Sabbatai Zevi; he becomes his spokesman and his unconditional propagandist throughout the world.

Sabbatai Zevi has a complex personality. He is at once endearing (he very easily makes new friends ready to support him), charismatic, erudite. His rabbinic and kabbalistic knowledge earns him respect. But he is also rejected on account of his excesses and of his transgressive position with respect to the law. He is several times driven out by the rabbis of the towns where he arrives. Yet for most of his contemporaries and for the Jewish world of orthodoxy, that he is the Messiah is in no doubt. In the four corners of Europe the Jews hope and prepare for the great journey, sometimes symbolically, sometimes materially by selling their belongings and building up reserves of provisions.

According to Gershom Scholem, the true history of Sabbatai Zevi and the problems it raises do not really begin until after his conversion to Islam, on September 15, 1666, at Adrianople. It is from there that the true history of Sabbatianism begins — the cause of the greatest deflagration that has taken place within Judaism and, for me, the cause of the end of orthodox Judaism².

Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion to Islam

When Sabbatai Zevi converts to Islam, many see in it the proof that he was not the awaited Messiah, and they return to Judaism and to tradition, henceforth forbidding the study of the Kabbalah before the age of forty. But others, and they were numerous, were too committed to their hope of a messianic deliverance from the dreadful sufferings of this world. They were too committed to their faith in Sabbatai Zevi as the Messiah to accept a return to the former world. They discovered with stupefaction the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi, but they set out from the idea that this conversion was necessary, so as to reread the Texts in this new light. The justification of the conversion they found in the rereading of the myth of the lights fallen at the creation of the world. Indeed, they understood — in particular the Marrano thinkers, who could only be sensitive to a Messiah converted but remaining secretly Jewish, thus Marrano like themselves — that the divine lights were not only scattered within Israel, but also among the Nations. The role of the Messiah was to go and seek them everywhere, including in the Muslim world; the conversion of Sabbatai Zevi was only a means to accomplish his mission.

But a problem arises for the Sabbatians: must one let the Messiah act alone, or must one help him? Two groups will then form. The first group is composed of those who let the Messiah act alone. They remain Jews but are secretly adepts of Sabbatianism. They live a form of inverted Marranism, such as Rabbi Jonathan Eibeschütz practiced it. The second group is composed of those who think that one must help the Messiah in his undertaking. They will convert like him or justify his conversion, like the Dönmeh or the Frankists at Lvov.

The conversion of the Sabbatians to Islam: the Dönmeh

Those who decided to help the Messiah converted to Islam in order to go with him in search of the lost lights of God, in the Islamic world. They then form a group that exists down to our day, the Dönmeh of Salonika (of whom a few families remain today in Istanbul). It seems that this group played an important role in the secularization of Turkey, and that Atatürk, the father of that secularism, was trained in Dönmeh schools³.

The conversion of the Sabbatians to Catholicism: Frankism

Having lived with the Dönmeh of Salonika, Jacob Frank decided to deepen their undertaking by positioning himself little by little as the heir of Sabbatai Zevi, then as the true Messiah. For him, the lights had also fallen into the Catholic world, and he led his faithful to convert to Christianity. Several hundred Jewish families converted in the cathedral of Lvov (Lemberg), on September 17, 1759. Gershom Scholem evokes the event at length.

The “conversion” of Sabbatians to Judaism

But the most unexpected conversion was that of Sabbatians to orthodox Judaism, when it appeared to them that lights were still to be sought within the religious Jewish world. The scandal of scandals erupted when it was discovered that the chief rabbi of Metz — that is, of France — Jonathan Eybeschütz, the leader of the struggle against Sabbatianism, was very probably himself a Sabbatian. A scandal so enormous that he was cleared, but at his death he was refused burial in his family’s Jewish cemetery.

Some have wanted to see in Mendelssohn an initiator of the undertaking that, in the age of the Enlightenment, led the Jews toward modernity. In fact the itinerary of Mendelssohn represents the attempt of a Jewish orthodoxy to integrate modernity. It seems to me that the precursors of secularism are to be sought on the side of the Frankists, who sought and found a Jewish integration into the modern world. For despite their conversion, some of them remained Jews, continuing to marry among themselves and to observe certain rites.

An emblematic story is that of Moses Dobruska, alias Franz Thomas von Schönfeld, alias Junius Frey, a Czech Jew who passed from the lights of the Kabbalah to the radiance of the century of the Enlightenment. A poet, affiliated with the Freemasons, frequenting the court at Vienna and benefiting from the trust of the Emperor Joseph II, he leaves for France, takes part in the French Revolution, and is guillotined with Danton, Chabot, and the other members of his faction, including his brother. He was forty years old⁴.

Thus Sabbatai Zevi was the Marrano Messiah. It is possible and probable that his conversion was not an attempt to save his life, but the reflection of his fidelity to the mission he had set himself: to bring Israel back to Palestine. He thought that this mission was worth a conversion to the religion of those who held the country, the Turks. But this conversion — due to the betrayal of the Polish kabbalist Nehemiah Cohen — opened onto a fracture within Judaism. It led many Jews to join the revolution of the Enlightenment and to commit themselves to movements that would result in secularism and in the expression of a new form of Jewishness.

Notes