Introduction Shabbatai Tzevi’s principles. The Karakaş became the most antinomian,
eclectic sect, with the greatest investment in the concept of reincarnation,
and had links to the Bektaşi Sufi order.^40 The Bektaşi order was significant,
for Shabbatai Tzevi reportedly participated in prayers and public recita-
tions of God’s names (dhikr) in their lodge in Edirne.^41 Karakaş informers
told late-nineteenth-century German scholars that Shabbatai Tzevi had
relations with antinomian Sufis, including Halveti Sheikh Niyazi Mısri.^42
As Gershom Scholem notes, because Mısri’s followers established a Sufi
lodge in Salonika, it may be that Karakaş and Halvetis actually were in
contact, but that they transformed their real connections into a mythical
encounter between the founders of their respective “orders.” Regardless
of what occurred, what is important is that the Karakaş accepted the link
between their path to God and Sufism.
After his proclamation as messiah, the Karakaş Osman Baba attracted
followers in central as well as in Ottoman Europe. One outcome was a
movement in Poland, led by Jacob Frank ( 1726 – 91 ), an Ashkenazi Jew
from Podolia (in what is now Ukraine) who traded in Ottoman territory,
where he came into contact with Dönme. Frank was educated by Karakaş
leaders in Salonika and converted to Islam. He set out from the Ottoman
Empire to Poland, where he was recognized as a Dönme authority, the re-
incarnation of Shabbatai Tzevi and successor to Osman Baba. In the end,
however, this resulted in the conversion of his followers, not to Islam,
but to Catholicism. Frank himself converted to Catholicism in L’viv and
was renamed Baron Jakob Jozef Frank in 1759. He and his followers es-
tablished themselves in a royal fortress adjacent to the shrine of the Black
Virgin in Cze ̧stochowa, then moved to Brno (in Moravia, today part of
the Czech Republic), finally ending up in Offenbach on the Rhine in
Germany, where he was close to the founders of a Masonic lodge.
The formation of the third Ottoman Empire–based group of Dönme,
the Kapancı, was the other outcome of Osman Baba being declared the
messiah. The Kapancı can be seen as representing a pietistic or revival-
ist streak among the Dönme, the outcome of Osman Baba’s split. They
sought to return Dönme religion to its first state, excising all accretions,
and they developed ties to the Mevlevi Sufi order. A group of Karakaş
denied that Shabbatai Tzevi had been reincarnated in Yakub Çelebi or
Osman Baba, and that the latter was the messiah, preferring to believe
that only Shabbatai Tzevi had been the messiah. They formed this final
group after Osman Baba died around 1720. Osman Baba’s grave, which