"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."--

"This is the first comprehensive social, intellectual and religious history of the wide-spread Sabbatean movement from its birth in the Ottoman Empire in the seventeenth century to the Republic of Turkey in the first half of the twentieth century, claiming that they owed their survival to the internalization of the Kabbalistic "burden of silence"--

Sabbatai Zevi stirred up the Jewish world in the mid-seventeenth century by claiming to be the messiah, then stunned it by suddenly converting to Islam. The story is presented here for the first time through contemporary documents, written by Sabbatai’s followers and by one of his detractors, in translations that brilliantly capture the vividness of this landmark episode in early modern Jewish history.

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.

A timely and fascinating study of an early modern movement that transcended traditional Jewish gender paradigms and allowed women to express their spirituality freely in the public arena.

One of the worl'ds leading scholars of Jewish thought examines the long tradition of Jewish messianism and mystical experience.

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