The light that failed
Turi Munthe
THE LOST MESSIAH by John Freely Viking, £20, pp. 286, ISBN 0670886750 In 1666, a year that saw millenarian anxiety reach fever pitch across the Christian world, letters passed between Henry Oldenburg, Secretary of the Royal Society, and Bishop John Wilkins, one of its founder members. Amidst gossip about the latest rumours of scientific interest to them are references to a Jewish Messiah, Sabbatai Sevi, said to be blazing a messianic trail across the Ottoman empire. When the year's triple 6 turned peacefully into 1667, and the luminaries of budding Western empiricism turned to more serious study, so Sabbatai Sevi drifted from view and memory, as he did amongst the Jewish
community, for reasons that will become clear.
Sabbatai was born in Ottoman Izmir. on 9 Ab in the Hebrew year 5386 (1 August. 1626), a festival day in which the Jews commemorate the destruction of the First and Second Temples. It is a day upon which, according to a midrash, or rabbinic tradition, the Messiah is to be born. All reports confirm that Sabbatai was one of the brightest children the rabbis of Izmir had ever tutored, but in his late teens, he taught himself kabbalah, and the wunderkind became enfant terrible. Devoting himself, according to later detractors, to the study of the unclean names of God (meaning practising black magic), he would curse ceremony and publicly flout the rules of Jewish ritual — from eating non-kosher food to speaking the Tetragrammaton, the unutterable name, YWHW. In 1650, already hated and feared by the rabbinate, a voice told him that he was the Messiah. He declared, 'There is no God beside me', and was finally banished.
So began years of peregrination, which took him to Salonika, until he was expelled by the large Jewish community there, through Greece, into Istanbul, and on to Rhodes, Cairo and Jerusalem. On his return from Jerusalem to Cairo in 1663 Sabbatai the Messiah met his Prophet. Nathan of Gaza, a young and brilliant kabbalist, who would proclaim Sabbatai's mission to the Jewish world. By 1665, Sabbatai
had followers as far afield as the Spanish Indies and the Yemen preparing to sell up and come to live in Jerusalem in preparation for the Second Coming. In 1666, when Sabbatai had been incarcerated in Gallipoli. Jewish communities in the Ottoman empire, Persia, Italy, Poland, Germany, Holland and France sent delegations or letters of homage to him. From his gilded prison, dressed in the finest silks his followers could afford, he conferred titles upon them (his brothers were appointed King of Turkey and Emperor of Rome, while others he recognised as reincarnations of the kings of ancient Judah) and issued apocalyptic pronouncements. In 1676, as Jewish unrest grew across the empire, Vani Effendi. the Ottoman Grand Vizier, offered Sabbatai a choice. He could convert, or prove his calling by being 'stripped naked, and set as a mark to ... dextrous archers, but that if his flesh and skin were proof, like Armour, then he [Vani Effendi] would believe him to be the Messiah'. Sabbatai apostasised.
Israel today is host to a particular, localised psychological illness called the 'Jerusalem syndrome'. Yearly, between two and three dozen (mostly) men, both Jewish and Christian, are admitted into psychiatric care convinced that they are the Messiah. What is surprising about Sabbatai is that he was believed.
While charisma is not at everyone's disposal, it is not, as Weber pointed out, an intrinsic quality of the person who embodies it. Charisma is created and sustained by those whom it affects. If the Christian world was quaking at the Number of the Beast in its calendar year, the Jewish world had more serious concerns. In 1648-9, the Chmielnicki massacres occurred, killing 100,000 Jews in eastern Europe. And if the Jews of the Ottoman empire were saved from such atrocities, they were under no illusions as to the precariousness of their position as dhiminis, or second-class subjects of the Sultan. Fear is propitious to messianism, as every street corner prophet of doom reminds us. They tend to breed each other.
But for all the historical justifiers of Sabbatai's movement, charisma can yet be treated as a generic phenomenon, to be looked at outside any specific framework of time or context. Sabbatai's profile is a blueprint of charismatics through the ages. He had all the natural attributes — beauty, brilliance, striking individuality and selfbelief — and spawned all the appropriate legends: he smelled of holiness (where Father Zossima failed), and on his 'death' is supposed to have risen on the third day, and have hidden himself in readiness for return at the ordained time (a direct echo of Shfite Mahdism and, for that matter, of the King Arthur and Elvis myths). Like most of his type, he suffered from manic depression (an illness that the psychologist Anthony Storr identified in countless charismatics from Ignatius of Loyola to Gurdjieff). And finally, though Freely makes too little of this here (along with Gershom Scholem, the doyen of studies in mystical Judaism, and author of the first biography of Sevi), Sabbatai was truly brilliant — his theology a deeply complex but coherent melding of Lurianic Kabbalah, elements of Bektashi and Halveti Sufism and his own innovations.
What makes Sabbatai's story of particular interest in the study of gurus and holy men is his apostasy. From a social or psychological point of view, there are a frenzy and terror in the responses of his followers that tell us almost more about mythmaking and the yearnings of 'disciples' than working myths like the Gospels — like a building razed, whose skeleton appears from inside its façade. And historically speaking, the nature of the Sabbataian movement combined with the apostasy could well be seen to lead to such phenomena as the Jewish Enlightenment and the birth of Reform Judaism, as Scholem thought. Its condemnation of traditional rules and ritual may have cast the first stone at orthodoxy, and the humiliation of Sabbatai's betrayal can easily be seen as a betrayal of the very idea of messianism. Perhaps, more simply. it points to the catholicity of mysticism — considerably more sophisticated than the responses it elicited in England and Europe. There it harked back to a mediaeval world of prophecies, predictions and demonised Israelites, even amongst the luminaries of the Scientific Revolution, for whom it represented a last and distant hope that the universe they were busy demolishing might still have meaning.
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