new certainties and new mysticism 409
North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean, over some thirty years,
often under compulsion from rabbinic authorities who would not allow
him to settle in their midst, and a voluminous correspondence with dis-
ciples as far away as Morocco and England, spread his influence in the
competition after 1670 to claim to represent truthfully the secret teach-
ings of Sabbetai Zevi, contradicting the kabbalistic system of Nathan of
Gaza and others who claimed Sabbetai’s legacy.
Different groups of Sabbatians could soon be found in Turkey, Italy
and Poland, with wholly different sets of beliefs, as prophets claimed
visions of Sabbetai after his death. The greatest division was in attitudes
to Islam. Sabbetai Zevi seems to have believed, at least sometimes, that
Judaism and Islam were compatible, although it would be unwise to
expect him to have been consistent in this attitude any more than in
anything else. We have seen that Cardoso knew that Sabbetai had
demanded that his believers also enter into Islam, and that some did so,
but that Cardoso disapproved strongly, referring with some disdain to
‘a man of some importance who had taken on the turban at Sabbetai
Zevi’s behest’. This man had come to Cardoso in Istanbul on 10 May
1682 to ask if he should remove the turban and return to the Jewish
fold. According to Cardoso’s reminiscence, he said that he (Cardoso)
‘had no competence to issue rulings on this subject, and that they should
go and ask the one who had made them wear the turban in the first
place’ – an impossibility, six years after Sabbetai’s death. The following
year in Salonica, however, the brother of Sabbetai Zevi’s last wife, Jacob
Filosof (later known as Jacob Querido), led some 300 local Jewish fami-
lies into Islam, his authority supported by his sister’s claim in 1676 that
he had inherited Sabbetai’s soul. The new converts were to form the
Dönmeh, a distinct group, surviving today, of crypto- Jews who live
openly as Muslims but keep many Jewish practices in secret, awaiting
the return of the Messiah. In 1999, it was reported that ‘one of the
elders of the community ... ventures to the shores of the Bosporus,
shortly before dawn, and recites [in Ladino (Judaeo- Spanish)] ... “Sab-
betai, Sabbetai, we wait for you.” ’ The Dönmeh have retained their
separate identity by marrying only among themselves, although early
on they split into three groups. Many moved from Salonica to Istanbul
in 1924 as part of the population exchanges between Turkey and Greece
when the Turkish Republic was founded. One small sect of the Dön-
meh, led by a certain Baruchiah Russo (also known as Osman Baba),
taught in the early eighteenth century both that Sabbetai Zevi was
divine and that the messianic Torah requires a complete reversal of