404 A History of Judaism
out of fear of punishment from the Turkish authorities for having
encouraged the popular uprising. In Italy, records of the support there
had once been for Sabbetai were destroyed, although it would take time
for the indignation to die down of those, like Joseph Halevi, who had
suffered for opposing the hysteria. It took time also for believers to
recover. Glückel of Hameln, who had been a young adult in 1666 and
began composing her remarkable memoirs, in Yiddish, in the 1690s pri-
marily as a family chronicle for the benefit of her descendants after the
death of her first husband, reported in those memoirs that her father- in-
law in Hildesheim had packed his belongings in 1666 to travel to the
land of Israel to meet the Messiah, and that it took him three years to
bring himself to unpack:
Many sold their houses and lands and all their possessions, for any day
they hoped to be redeemed. My good father- in- law left his home in
Hameln, abandoned his house and lands and all his goodly furniture, and
moved to Hildesheim. He sent on to us in Hamburg two enormous casks
packed with linens and with peas, beans, dried meats, shredded prunes and
like stuff, every manner of food that would keep. For the old man expected
to sail any moment from Hamburg to the Holy Land. More than a year
the casks lay in my house. At length the old folks feared the meat and other
edibles would rot; and they wrote us, we should open the casks and remove
the foodstuffs, to save the linens from ruin. For three years the casks stood
ready, and all this while my father- in- law awaited the signal to depart. But
the Most High pleased otherwise.^39
And there were some – although only a minority of the mass move-
ment of 1665– 6 – who continued to believe that Sabbetai Zevi was the
Messiah. One such believer was evidently Sabbetai himself, who was
observed in 1671 – by the same Jacob Najara who had witnessed in
his own house in Gaza the fateful prophecy of Nathan on Pentecost
in 1665 – still living as a Jew, despite being a Muslim in the Otto-
man court, preaching in synagogues and keeping Jewish customs,
albeit in eccentric fashion. Najara himself circumcised a boy aged
ten whose father had ‘vowed while Amirah was in the Tower of Strength
[in Gallipoli] that he would not circumcise his son except in the pres-
ence of King Messiah. Amirah thereupon commanded this rabbi
[Najara] to circumcise the boy.’ At the same time, Sabbetai was in con-
tact with Muslim mystics of the Dervish orders and, according to
Najara, enthusiastically encouraged his followers to embrace Islam
alongside him: