Jews as the cataclysmic event that, according to rabbinic tradition, would
precede the arrival of the Messiah; thus, the ground was fertile for messianic
belief in the aftermath of 1648–9. If this were the case, one would have
expected the belief in Shabbetai Zvi to originate, or at least be most intense,
in southern Poland, where the events of 1648 had been the most devastating;
neither was the case. Other historians suggested the messianic character of
the year 1666, noting that Shabbetai Zvi was only one of several messianic
pretenders who appeared in or around that year. As with other such “meteo-
rological” explanations (i.e. there was something in the air), there is no
evidence of any connection between Shabbetai Zvi’s following and the appear-
ance of other messianic figures.
The most compelling explanation was suggested by the historian Gershom
Scholem, who rooted Shabbetai Zvi’s broad following in the dissemination of
Lurianic Kabbala beginning at the end of the sixteenth century; and particu-
larly the Lurianic notion of Tikkun(Perfecting the World) through human
activity, which had saturated the Jewish world with imminent messianic
expectations. Recently, critics of Scholem have questioned how, even if
Lurianic Kabbala had been widely disseminated, ordinary Jews could have
come to be familiar with and to understand these complex ideas. In response,
anthropologist Sylvie-Anne Goldberg suggested a means by which Lurianic
Kabbala could have found more grassroots Jewish audience: the emergence of
the hevra kadisha(Jewish burial society) at the beginning of the sixteenth cen-
tury as a fixture of virtually every Jewish community in the world.
The Jewish burial society, whose membership was both male and female,
attracted the most pious elements within the Jewish community, including
pious Jews who were not scholars. The activities of burial societies included
not only burial, but also preparing the soul of the deceased for passage from
this world to the next. Thus, involvement with a burial society meant encoun-
tering the basic rabbinic and kabbalistic vocabulary regarding heaven and
earth, and the messianic paradise of the afterlife. This, Goldberg suggested,
could have provided a small but distinct constituency in scores of Jewish com-
munities with the necessary vocabulary to grasp at least some of the intricacies
of Lurianic Kabbala.
Along with explaining this broad following, historians have also noted a
methodological problem in studying Shabbetai Zvi. Like other charismatic
figures, he never wrote anything down. We know of him only through the
eyes of his believers or detractors. However, historians have gleaned from the
various accounts about him and sayings attributed to him, and fashioned a
composite image of his life and thought.
Shabbetai Zvi was born in Izmir (Smyrna), in the Ottoman Empire, in
- He received a traditional Jewish education. From 1642 to 1648, he
lived in isolation and was known as a young man of extremes. By present-day
standards, he may have suffered from bipolar manic-depressive disorder. Along
World Jewry in flux, 1492–1750 127