Sabbatianism (Shabbeta’ut) is the name of the movement that crystallized in the seventeenth century around the would-be Messiah Sab-batai Zevi (1626-1676). In 1665 and 1666, this Jew from Izmir set the Jewish world wild with Messianic expectation—and then, when the excitement was at its height, abruptly converted to Islam. The movement his career sparked was the most significant Messianic movement in Judaism since the beginning of Christianity. It revealed extraordinary parallels with Christianity, notably in its doctrine of “justification by faith” in the Messiah rather than the observance of the Jewish law. Yet the Christian insistence—in theory if not in practice—on love as the underlying principle and guide for human behavior is found in Sabba-tianism only faintly and ambiguously.
Love of One’s Fellow Humans The character of Sabbatai Zevi himself is at least partly responsible for this difference. The would-be Messiah has been convincingly diagnosed by modern scholars as having suffered from bipolar (manic-depressive) disorder. Throughout his career he displayed grandiose delusions of his own importance coupled with absolute egocentricity and lack of empathy for anyone other than himself. A faith with such a man at its center could hardly be expected to treat love for fellow humans as a cardinal virtue.
In 1666, while imprisoned by the Turkish authorities in the fortress of Gallipoli and before his conversion to Islam, Sabbatai received word that his enthusiasts in Venice had beaten to death—on the Sabbath—a man who had “spoken heresy against our righteous Messiah.” In response, Sabbatai ruled that this atrocity had involved no violation of the Sabbath. The perpetrators “kept the Sabbath strictly and well, for our Lord King [Sabbatai] is himself the Sabbath.” Jesus, similarly, is said to have approved and even committed violations of the Sabbath on the grounds that he himself was “lord of the Sabbath” (Matthew 12:8). But in the Gospel stories, the Messiah transcends the religious law in the interest of healing, not killing. Those personal traits of Sabbatai that enabled him to portray lynching as a signal act of faith must have hampered the development of an ethic of neighborly love among his devotees.
A remarkable passage in the Sefer Ha-briah (topic of Creation), the kabbalistic magnum opus of Sabbatai’s prophet Nathan of Gaza (1643-1680), elevated love—both neighborly and erotic—to a cosmic principle: uniting human individuals with one another and with the divine, and bringing the divine potentialities themselves into harmonious union. Nathan’s prime example was the Israelites at Mount Sinai, who sublimated their individual sexuality into a mass erotic communion with the community and their God. Yet Nathan’s epistles, written like Paul’s for the guidance and encouragement of the faithful, had nothing in them corresponding to the Pauline exhortations to mutual love. Nathan presumably saw his love-theology as a doctrine suitable for his abstruse theoretical writings, but of small importance for his public proclamation of Sabbatai’s Messiahship.
Erotic Love Sabbatai was in the habit of using eroticized behavior and language to represent his personal connection with the divine. On one occasion, before his rise to celebrity, he shocked local opinion by arranging a formal marriage ceremony between himself and a Torah scroll. Later he would describe himself as “the bridegroom coming forth from his chamber, husband of the beloved and precious Torah, the lovely and gracious Lady”—that is, the Shekhinah, the Divine Feminine of the kabbalists—and would sing Spanish love-songs to his Divine Beloved. His followers, accordingly, represented him as the Shekhinah’s devoted lover and companion, loyally accompanying Her— through his conversion to Islam—into Her exile in the demonic realms.
Sabbatai’s attachments to women were considerably more troubled. A childhood trauma, obscure in its nature, seems to have shaped his sexual behavior throughout his life. His first two marriages were dissolved because he could not or would not consummate them. With his third wife, the notorious Sarah, he was again impotent—if one may trust his earliest biographer—until “after he had put the pure turban on his head,” that is, become a Muslim. When he briefly divorced Sarah in 1671, he depicted his six-year marriage to her as the “servitude” of Exodus 21:2—she was a loyal wife to a difficult husband and deserved better from him.
At the same time, Sabbatai proclaimed a gender equality unheard of in Judaism until very modern times. He called women to the Torah along with men and declared he had come to liberate them from subjection to their husbands and from the curse of Eve. Not coin-cidentally, women figured prominently among Sabbatai’s prophets.
Partly for this reason, the Sabbatian movement was regularly accused of promoting sexual anarchy. Its enemies circulated grotesque stories in which Sabbatai demanded sexual misbehavior of his followers, declaring such deeds to be tikkunim—kabbalistic acts of cosmic mending. Sarah Zevi’s reputation for promiscuity gave some color to these stories. So did the undeniable fact that some Sabbatian thinkers argued for an antinomianism that, in its most radical versions, yielded the doctrine that the Torah’s commandments had been abolished. Sabbatian tradition told of an oracular rite performed at the “Messiah’s” command, in the course of which several Biblical sexual prohibitions were revealed anew—this time as positive injunctions.
To what extent these libertine theories were put into practice remains uncertain. Charismatic Sabbatian leaders might prey sexually upon their followers, as charismatics of all faiths have been known to do. Jacob Frank of Podolia (1726-1791), who advertised himself as Sabbatai’s reincarnation, was a case in point. So was Frank’s contemporary, the free-loving prophetess Haya Shor of Rohatyn. The nominally Muslim Donmeh sect in Turkey was rumored to practice ritual spouse-swapping, at least to the end of the nineteenth century. For the most part, however, those Sabbatians who flouted traditional sexual proprieties did so not as antinomian believers but as simple human beings.
