new certainties and new mysticism 407
second coming of Christ would occur in 1666 helped the spread of news
about Sabbetai throughout Christian Europe during that year. But
Christian millenarianism cannot account for the excitement of Jews in
Islamic lands – there is almost no reference to Sabbetai in contemporary
Muslim sources, and the gentle treatment meted out to him, compared
to the normal policy of brutal suppression of troublemakers, suggests
that the Ottoman state could afford to treat the whole episode lightly.
Lurianic kabbalah provided Nathan of Gaza with the basis of his the-
ology to explain the descent of the Messiah into the abyss by becoming
Muslim in order to bring redemption, but too few Jews in the mid-
seventeenth century were familiar with the complexities of Luria’s
mystical system for them to have seen such dramatic behaviour as self-
evidently justified – as is clear from the time taken by Nathan to come
up with his theology when the news of Sabbetai’s adoption of the tur-
ban reached him. Nor can the frustration with the restrictions of a
religion based on divine command which irked Spinoza, whose Trac‑
tatus Theologico‑ Politicus was published in Amsterdam in 1670, explain
the willingness of Jews in Yemen, Turkey and Morocco to cast aside
treasured aspects of the Torah in a wild hope that such antinomianism
was a sign of a new beginning. Due allowance must be made for mass
hysteria, for the impact of ideas spread by the new medium of printing
and, as we have seen in the bitter accusations of Joseph Halevi, for the
moral blackmail of those who doubted: ‘But the reaction of the empty-
headed rabble, once they grasped that I [Joseph Halevi] had totally
refuted their faith in the prophet and his messiah, was something else
again. They waxed mightily indignant and launched against me an
unending stream of verbal abuse.’^43
The aftershocks of the upheavals of 1665 and 1666 rumbled on
within many Jewish communities for well over a century. In some rab-
binic circles it had long been speculated that the ‘Messiah, son of David’
would be accompanied by a ‘Messiah, son of Joseph’, and even before
the death of Sabbetai Zevi it was revealed to an uneducated youth in
Meknes, in Morocco, called Joseph ibn Tsur, that he was this figure. A
contemporary letter from one rabbi to another, dated 5 February 1675,
expressed delight at the secret he revealed:
I must inform you, sir, that fresh reports arrive here daily from Meknes
concerning this young man, and the interpretations and secret revelations
of which he speaks. I could not restrain myself when I realized what was
happening. It is essential, said I, that I go see it for myself. So I took the