Discuss the life and impact of Sabbati Sevi.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

Answers will vary. Jewish mystics had anticipated the coming of the Messiah in 1648; the phrase "Next Year in Jerusalem" had become a rallying cry for the restoration of the Jewish people to a homeland, especially after their expulsions from the Iberian peninsula and the slaughter in Poland. But the Messiah did not appear. Then, in 1665, a twenty-nine-year-old Jew from Smyrna, Sabbatai Sevi, proclaimed that he was the Messiah. Before Sevi claimed to be the Messiah, he had wandered around the Ottoman Empire from Greece to Egypt. He experienced dramatic shifts in his mental state, ranging from deep depression to frenzied exaltation. He also fell into religious ecstasies that some believed revealed his Messianic status. Although it has been speculated that Sevi suffered from bipolar disorder, there were also historical reasons for his intense spiritual experiences, since they were at the heart of the Jewish mystical tradition centered on the kabbalah that Spanish Jews had developed during the late Middle Ages. In Sevi's case, the version of kabbalah he embraced was a particularly emotion-laden and ecstatic one. Known as Lurianic kabbalah, it had been taught by Isaac Luria, a Jew living in the Galilee region of the present-day state of Israel. Its mystical emphasis on union with the Divine influenced a number of movements in early modern Judaism. Sevi's followers grew, and the enthusiasm for him swelled until his journey to Constantinople, where, arrested and threatened with execution, he converted to Islam, enraging his followers and forever changing the Jewish cultural relationship to claims of Messiahship.