I t can be equally useful and instructive to take a glimpse at the closing of religions, or religious

movements. The once-apocalyptic “Millerites,” for example, survive only in the reduced form of

“Seventh Day Adventists.” And we shall not hear again, in any but the most vestigial and

nostalgic way, of Pan or Osiris or any of the thousands of gods who once held people in utter

thrall. But I have to confess to a slight sympathy, that I have tried and failed to repress, for

Sabbatai Sevi, the most imposing of the “false Messiahs.” In the mid-seventeenth century, he

galvanized whole Jewish communities across the Mediterranean and the Levant (and as far

afield as Poland, Hamburg, and even Amsterdam, repudiator of Spinoza) with his claim to be the

chosen one who would lead the exiles back to the Holy Land and begin the era of universal

peace. His key to revelation was the study of the Kabbalah—more recently revived in fashion by

a showbiz woman bizarrely known as Madonna—and his arrival was greeted by hysterical

Jewish congregations from his home base in Smyrna to Salonika, Constantinople, and Aleppo.

(The rabbis of Jerusalem, having been inconvenienced by premature messianic claims before,

were more skeptical.) By the use of Kabbalistic conjury that made his own name the equivalent

of “Mosiach” or “Messiah” when unscrambled from a Hebrew anagram, he may have persuaded

himself, and certainly persuaded others, that he was the expected one. As one of his disciples

phrased it:

The prophet Nathan prophesied and Sabbatai Sevi preached that whoever did not mend

his ways would not behold the comforting of Zion and Jerusalem, and that they would be

condemned to shame and to everlasting contempt. And there was a repentance, the like of

which has never been seen since the world was created and unto this day.

This was no crude “Millerite” panic. Scholars and learned men debated the question

passionately and in writing, and as a consequence we have a very good record of events. All the

elements of a true (and a false) prophecy were present. Sabbatai’s devotees pointed to his

equivalent of John the Baptist, a charismatic rabbi called Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatai’s enemies

described him as an epileptic and a heretic, and accused him of violating the law. They in turn

were stoned by Sabbatai’s partisans. Convocations and congregations raged together, and

raged against each other. On a voyage to announce himself in Constantinople, Sabbatai’s ship

was storm-tossed yet he rebuked the waters, and when incarcerated by the Turks his prison was

illuminated with holy fires and sweet scents (or not, according to many discrepant accounts).

Echoing a very harsh Christian dispute, the supporters of Rabbi Nathan and Sabbatai

maintained that without faith, knowledge of the Torah and the performance of good works

would be unavailing. Their opponents asserted that the Torah and good works were the main

thing. So complete in every respect was the drama that even the stubbornly anti-Sabbatai

rabbis in Jerusalem at one point asked to be told if any verifiable miracles or signs had been

attached to the claimant who was intoxicating the Jews with joy. Men and women sold all that

they had and prepared to follow him to the Promised Land.

The Ottoman imperial authorities had a good deal of experience in dealing with civil unrest

among confessional minorities at the time (they were just in the process of wresting Crete fromthe Venetians) and behaved with much more circumspection than the Romans are supposed to

have done. They understood that if Sabbatai was to claim kingdom over all kings, let alone to

claim a large tract of their province in Palestine, then he was a secular challenger as well as a

religious one. But when he arrived in Constantinople, all they did was lock him up. The ulema, or

Muslim religious authority, was likewise sagacious. They counseled against the execution of this

turbulent subject, lest his enthused believers “make a new religion.”

The script was almost complete when a former disciple of Sabbatai’s, one Nehemiah Kohen,

came to the grand vizier’s headquarters in Edirne and denounced his former master as a

practitioner of immorality and heresy. Summoned to the vizier’s palace, and allowed to make

his way from prison with a procession of hymn-singing supporters, the Messiah was very bluntly

asked if he would agree to a trial by ordeal. The archers of the court would use him as a target,

and if heaven deflected the arrows he would be adjudged genuine. Should he refuse, he would

be impaled. If he wished to decline the choice altogether, he could affirm himself to be a true

Muslim and be allowed to live. Sabbatai Zevi did what almost any ordinary mammal would have

done, made the standard profession of belief in the one god and his messenger and was

awarded a sinecure. He was later deported to an almost Judenrein part of the empire, on the

Albanian-Montenegrin border, and there expired, supposedly on Yom Kippur 1676, at the precise

hour of the evening prayer when Moses is said to have breathed his last. His grave, much

sought, has never been conclusively identified.

His distraught followers immediately divided into several factions. There were those who

refused to believe in his conversion or apostasy. There were those who argued that he had only

become a Muslim in order to be an even greater Messiah. There were those who felt that he had

only adopted a disguise. And of course there were those who claimed that he had risen into the

heavens. His true disciples eventually adopted the doctrine of “occultation,” which, it may not

surprise you to learn, involves the belief that the Messiah, invisible to us, has not “died” at all but

awaits the moment when humanity will be ready for his magnificent return. (“Occultation” is

also the term employed by pious Shia, to describe the present and long-standing condition of

the Twelfth Imam or “Mahdi”: a child of five who apparently vanished from human view in the

year 873.)

So the Sabbatai Sevi religion came to an end, and survives only in the tiny syncretic sect

known in Turkey as the Donme, which conceals a Jewish loyalty within an outward Islamic

observance. But had its founder been put to death, we should be hearing of it still, and of the

elaborate mutual excommunications, stonings, and schisms that its followers would

subsequently have engaged in. The nearest approximation in our own day is the Hasidic sect

known as Chabad, the Lubavitcher movement once led (and according to some, still led) by

Menachem Schneerson. This man’s death in Brooklyn in 1994 was confidently expected to

produce an age of redemption, which it so far has not. The United States Congress had already

established an official “day” in Schneerson’s honor in 1983. Just as there are still Jewish sects

who maintain that the Nazi “final solution” was a punishment for living in exile from Jerusalem,

so there are those who preserve the ghetto policy which maintained a watcher at the gates,

whose job it was to alert the others if the Messiah arrived unexpectedly. (“It’s steady work,” as

one of these watchmen is supposed, rather defensively, to have said.) Surveying the not-quite

and might-have-been religions, one could experience a slight feeling of pathos, were it not for

the constant din of other sermonizers, all of them claiming that it is their Messiah, and not

anybody else’s, who is to be awaited with servility and awe.