new certainties and new mysticism 403
begging Him to show them the path they must take and the thing they
must do. They all then assembled. They prepared two slips of paper, on
one of which was written ‘festival’ and on the other ‘fast’. They put them
in a jar; they summoned a boy and told him to pick out one of them and
hold his hand high. So he did – and out came ‘festival’. Back went the slips
of paper into the jar. Again the boy pulled one out – ‘festival’. A third time
they put the slips into the jar; out came ‘festival’.^37
For all of July and August, Jews waited for the redemption to come
at any moment. Then, on 16 September, Sabbetai Zevi was summoned
to the presence of the sultan in Adrianople. If the prophecy of Nathan
were correct, this should have been the moment when the sultan would
hand over his power to the King Messiah. If the expectations of ‘the
Turks and the uncircumcised’ are correctly recorded by Baruch of
Arezzo, Sabbetai Zevi should have been killed, and his execution fol-
lowed by a pogrom of the Jews of Adrianople:
When the Muslims and Christians of Adrianople heard the king had sum-
moned our Lord, they assumed his head was about to be cut off and all the
Jews to be murdered, it having become common knowledge that the king
had sentenced the city’s Jews to death. They sent emissaries to Constan-
tinople to do that same dreadful deed there. They sharpened their swords
and awaited [Sabbetai’s] arrival, all ready to work their will upon the
Jews.What actually happened was quite different. The sultan bestowed on
Sabbetai Zevi a turban and a new name. Sabbetai Zevi became Aziz
Mehmed Effendi, and a Muslim. There was no disguise: he wrote to his
brother Elijah in Smyrna just eight days later that ‘the Creator has made
me into a Muslim ... created me anew, according to His will.’^38
Reactions around the Jewish world varied greatly. For those who had
never believed in Sabbetai’s claims, here was the strongest possible
proof of the validity of their doubts, and in November 1666 Joseph
Halevi of Livorno wrote to his friend Jacob Sasportas in Hamburg
about what had happened to the ‘coarse, malignant lunatic whose Jew-
ish name used to be Sabbetai Zevi’ and whom ‘all Jewry’ had invoked
as ‘our redeemer’, instructing Sasportas that he should tell the followers
of this redeemer that ‘Mehmed their saviour has now returned to his
school days, a pupil now of the Muslim religion’. For believers, there
was shock, abandonment of hope and, for many, silence. Jewish leaders
in Turkey tried to return their community to normality, perhaps in part