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“A Mighty Multitude

of Israelites”

Year 5354 [ 1594 ]: In that year, I had the same dream two or three
consecutive nights.... I was walking along a great river, and I saw a large
and mighty multitude of Israelites who were camping there in tents. I
entered one tent and I saw their king reclining on his side.... When he
saw me, he seated me at his side with great joy and said to me: Know that
I am the king of Israel, of the tribe of Ephraim, and we have come now
because the time has come for the ingathering of the exiles.
—Rabbi Hayyim Vital, rabbi and mystic, Safed,
Palestine

An Arab Jew in Rome

In 1524 , an unusual person arrived in Rome demanding to see
Pope Clement VII (Giulio do Giuliano de’ Medici, 1478 – 1534 ). He
identified himself as “prince David son of King Solomon and brother
of my older brother King Yosef, king of the tribes of Reuben and half
of Manasseh,” or, in short, David Reuveni. He bore a simple message
from his brother. The king of the Israelites offered a military and
political alliance between Christendom (Europe) and the kingdom of
the ten tribes against the Muslim Arabs and Turks.^1 David presented
himself also as “field marshal” of his kingdom’s army of “ 300 , 000
combatants.”^2 According to the Vatican’s record of the interview, the
pope identified David’s homeland as a kingdom of “Arab-Jews”—