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Review: Dissident Rabbi

This definitive study illuminates ways in which Sasportas’s text and conservative stance 'came to serve as a stand-in for a habit of mind that rejected novelty', writes Howard Cooper

December 18, 2019 17:24
Sabbetai Zevi: false messiah

Dissident Rabbi by Yaacob Dweck (Princeton University Press, £35)

As the summer of 1665 faded into autumn, messianic fervour swept across the Jewish world. 
From Gaza, through north Africa and Turkey on to Prague, Hamburg, Amsterdam and London, word was spreading: finally, an end to exile was in sight. 

Redemption was arriving through Sabbetai Zevi, who had proclaimed himself the Messiah, and whose message of the need for repentance and fasting was being promulgated through his appointed “prophet”, Nathan, a charismatic holy man and kabbalist from the Holy Land.  

Whole communities (rabbis as well as laity) succumbed to a form of mass hysteria. People fell into trances, spoke in tongues, sold all their possessions. There were few disbelievers — after all, who could, or would want to, oppose the coming of the long-awaited Redemption?