(1626-1676). Pseudo-Messiah in Turkey; creator of the most powerful and widespread of all Jewish Messianic Movements in the Diaspora. Three major factors led to its appearance: the Wars of Religion in Europe (1618-1648); the spread of the kabbalistic doctrines of Isaac Luria; the traumatic effect of the Chmielnicki massacres among East European Jewry (1648-49). Their combined effect was to make Jews everywhere receptive to the idea that a Messianic redeemer had emerged from the general chaos of the times.
A gifted scholar, ordained at 18 in his native Smyrna, Shabbetai Tsevi increasingly devoted himself to ascetic exercises and study of the Zohar, also attracting numerous disciples. However, throughout his life, he suffered from bouts of manic depression alternating with periods of tranquillity or euphoric illumination. At times he was locked in battle with what he supposed to be demonic powers; at others he was capable of the most extraordinary and paradoxical irreligious behavior. The fact that he had been born on Tishah Be-Av, the Messiah's traditional birthday, must have strengthened his belief in his own messianic destiny and led him to begin pronouncing the Tetragrammaton (see God, Names of) in 1648. That year was marked by various calamities and was also viewed by kabbalists as one that would herald Israel's redemption. After a period of forbearance, the Smyrna rabbinate expelled Shabbetai Tsevi (c. 1651) and over the next few years he wandered through Greece and European Turkey, scandalizing Jews with his antinomian demonstrations and pronouncements.
He later found a more congenial environment in Jerusalem and in Cairo, where (in March 1664) the prophet Hosea served as role model for his marriage to a girl of doubtful repute named Sarah, who had survived the Cossack massacres in Poland and whom Shabbetai Tsevi dubbed "the bride of the Messiah." A renewed spell of depression made him turn for help to Nathan of Gaza (1643-1680), a brilliant young rabbi; but instead of curing him, Nathan hailed Shabbetai Tsevi as the promised redeemer and cast himself in the role of Elijah the Prophet. Nathan created vast enthusiasm throughout the Jewish world by dispatching a communiqué which told how the Turkish Sultan would be deposed, Israel's Ten Lost Tribes would return from their exile, and a short-lived rebellion would signal the "birth pangs of redemption" heralding the Messiah's advent.
Many leading rabbis were swept along in the euphoria; those who remained hostile or skeptical were often cowed into silence. From Jerusalem to Aleppo to Hamburg and Amsterdam, communities split over their belief in Shabbetai Tsevi's messiahship. In the Smyrna synagogue, Shabbetai Tsevi abrogated the commandments, performed forbidden acts, and proclaimed himself "the Lord's anointed" (December 1665). Opponents were excommunicated and fled for their lives, the messianic redemption being scheduled for 18 June 1666. Meanwhile, penitential liturgies composed by Nathan of Gaza heightened the frenzy. Before long, prayers for "our Lord and King, Shabbetai Tsevi" replaced those for the Sultan; major fast days were converted into festivals and Jews, rich and poor alike, sold everything they had in time for the expected redemption.
Shabbetai Tsevi sailed to Constantinople, but this messianic journey ended in his arrest and imprisonment by the Turks (February 1666) in the fortress of Gallipoli. Although reluctant to turn the visionary into a martyr, and even prepared to grant him the facilities of a "court," the Turkish authorities soon realized that imprisonment had not weakened his resolve or the almost hysterical devotion of his followers. When faced with a choice between death and Islam, Shabbetai Tsevi opted to become a Muslim (16 September 1666), though he, his wife, and others who followed him thereafter led a crypto-Jewish life. This sudden betrayal, inconceivable to the hitherto loyal masses, drove tens of thousands back to the traditional fold. Others, however, remained faithful "believers," even after Shabbetai Tsevi's death as an exile in Albania (1676).
The Shabbatean Movement
In its major centers (Turkey, Italy, and Poland), the Shabbatean movement faced violent opposition from the rabbinical authorities and went underground. Here and there, during the 18th century, crypto-Shabbateans could be discovered at work even in the rabbinate (see Eybeschütz, Jonathan). In Turkey, hundreds of "believers" formally converted to Islam and (between 1683 and 1924) their sect of the Dönmeh (Turkish for "apostates") could be found chiefly in Salonika. While rejecting much of the Torah (contracting forbidden marriages, indulging in ritualized sexual promiscuity and observing 9 Av as a festival, etc.), the Dönmeh long maintained a separate "Jewish life." They opposed intermarriage with Muslims, had their own prayer houses and cemeteries, developed a Judeo-Spanish form of liturgy, and even retained their ancestral (Sephardi) family names.
The Konyosos, one subsect of the Dönmeh, conducted missionary propaganda and gave rise to the Frankists, a late 18th-century Shabbatean group which embraced Catholicism and spread from Poland to Bohemia and Germany. By 1850, except for the Dönmeh, Shabbateanism had practically vanished. From the ranks of the Dönmeh several leaders of the revolutionary Young Turk movement emerged in 1909. Until recently, a small Dönmeh community existed in Istanbul.
