Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676 (Bollingen Series, 208)
Digital Verbum Edition
Overview
Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai Ṣevi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai Ṣevi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi details Ṣevi’s rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem’s work to a new generation of readers.
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- Offers a detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world
- Stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion
- Contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem’s work
- The Background of the Sabbatian Movement
- The Beginnings of Sabbatai Ṣevi (1626-1664)
- The Beginnings of the Movement in Palestine (1665)
- The Movements up to Sabbatai’s Imprisonmen (1665-1666)t
- The Movement in Europe (1666)
- The Movement in the East and the Center in Gallipoli Until Sabbatai’s Apostasy (1666)
- After the Apostasy (1667-1668)
- The Last Years of Sabbatai Ṣevi (1668-1676)
Scholem’s scholarship betrays an alert presentness. . . . No great textual scholar, no master of philology and historical criticism commands a technique at once more scrupulously attentive to its object and more instinct with the writer's voice. That voices reaches and grips. . . . [M]agisterial.
—New Yorker
Immensely important and fascinating. . . . A monumental work of historical scholarship, which recounts in minute detail a moving tragedy of vast dimensions.
—The New York Review of Books
Comprehensive. . . the last word on an astonishing episode of Jewish history.
—Times Literary Supplement