Vol. 24 No. 10 · 23 May 2002
pages 28-29 | 3451 words
When it is advisable to put on a fez
Richard Popkin
- The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi by John Freely
Viking, 275 pp, £20.00, September 2001, ISBN 0 670 88675 0
The dramatic story of the rise and fall of the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Sevi has usually been presented as a weird anomaly in Jewish history, with no redeeming merit as a lesson. However, as more and more becomes known about it, the case becomes of greater, and more general interest.
Sabbatai Sevi was born in 1626, the son of a Jewish assistant to the Dutch, English and French merchants then living in Smyrna (now Izmir). He was a brilliant student, with an impressive knowledge and understanding of Jewish texts. But then, after periods of fasting followed by moments of ecstasy, he began violating the fundamental principles of Jewish belief and law, something only the messiah was permitted to do. He had heard that the messiah would be named Sabbatai, the Hebrew equivalent of Saturn, and seems to have gone around testing to see whether he was the right Sabbatai. He is supposed, for example, to have uttered the Tetragrammaton, the taboo name of God. The rabbis banished him from Smyrna, and not long afterwards Nathan of Gaza, a kabbalistic scholar who had got to know him, announced that Sabbatai was indeed the expected messiah.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 12 · 27 June 2002
From Constance Blackwell
Richard Popkin is always a delight to read or listen to when he speaks about the curious case of Sabbatai Sevi (LRB, 23 May). However, John Freely's book about Sabbatai is far more than just a racy copy of Gershom Scholem's book. Not only does he add new material about the graveyards of Sabbatai's followers, but he gives a cultural texture to the story he tells that makes him one of the great travel writers about Istanbul and other parts of Turkey. In an earlier book, The Western Shores of Turkey, he describes a visit to the house said to be Sabbatai's birthplace. There he saw people 'who looked more Spanish than Turkish' and who 'were praying and speaking in Ladino, the language of the Sephardic Jews'. It could well be that the Jews of Izmir do not want tourists coming to see the house, for when I went there to find it, the rabbi who was to direct us did not turn up.
Two and a half years ago, in Istanbul for a conference, I asked if Freely was well known in Turkey. 'We consider him one of us,' my host replied.
Constance Blackwell
London NW1
Vol. 24 No. 13 · 11 July 2002
From Paul Bessemer
Richard Popkin writes of Sabbatai Sevi donning a fez (LRB, 23 May), but the fez was only widely known as Ottoman headgear from the 1820s, when Sultan Mahmud II made it a part of the uniform of the reorganised Ottoman Army. Gershom Scholem speaks only of turbans.
Paul Bessemer
Eugene, Oregon
Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002
From Marc David Baer
In his review of John Freely's The Lost Messiah: In Search of Sabbatai Sevi, Richard Popkin (LRB, 23 May) writes: 'Freely has omitted all of Scholem's scholarly apparatus, which has the advantage of making his book easier to read, but the disadvantage that we don't know what the sources are for various elements in the story.' In fact, Freely sometimes fails to recognise the difference between sources that are works of fiction and those that are historical documents. A poem that I wrote and published in Turkish in 1999 appears in The Lost Messiah as a 17th-century work.
Marc David Baer
Istanbul
