Mystical systems
Sabbatai Zevi
Direct answer
Sabbatai Zevi (1626 to 1676) was a rabbi and kabbalist from Smyrna who was proclaimed the messiah in 1665, drew a vast following and converted to Islam the next year.
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At a glance
- Also called
- shabbetai tzvi, sabbatai sevi, sabbatean movement
- Found in
- Mystical Systems
- Related
- Lurianic Kabbalah, Tikkun, Kabbalah, Hasidic Mysticism
Sabbatai Zevi (1626 to 1676) was a rabbi and kabbalist from Smyrna who was proclaimed the messiah in 1665, drew a vast following and converted to Islam the next year.
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Who was Sabbatai Zevi?
Sabbatai Zevi was a learned and unstable man, given to spells of exaltation in which he broke religious law in public and to stretches of dejection. In the spring of 1665 he went to Gaza to consult a young kabbalist, Nathan, hoping to be put right. Nathan instead declared that he was the awaited messiah, and then wrote the letters and the theology that made others believe it.
The news ran through Jewish communities from Yemen to Amsterdam within months. People fasted, did penance and in places sold their goods in readiness. In 1666 the Ottoman authorities arrested him, and in September, brought before the sultan's court at Adrianople, he accepted Islam. Most followers gave him up in shock. A minority kept faith and explained the conversion in Lurianic terms, as a descent into the husks to free the last sparks.
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What sets Sabbatai Zevi apart
What sets the Sabbatian affair apart from other messianic episodes is that it survived its own refutation. A messiah who apostatised ought to have ended the matter. Nathan of Gaza instead built a theology in which the redeemer must enter the realm of impurity to rescue what is held there, so that the betrayal became the proof. The movement was also the work of two men. Sabbatai supplied the strange and compelling figure; Nathan, still in his early twenties, supplied the prophecy, the letters and the doctrine.
- Born: Smyrna, now Izmir, 1626
- Proclaimed: at Gaza in May 1665, by Nathan of Gaza
- Conversion: Adrianople, September 1666
- Died: Dulcigno, now Ulcinj, 1676
- Later believers: the Dönmeh of Salonica, outwardly Muslim
- Standard study: Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah
Often mistaken for something else: Jacob Frank led a later Sabbatian offshoot in eighteenth-century Poland and took his followers into Catholicism in 1759; Sabbatai Zevi was the original claimant of 1665, in the Ottoman lands.
The story behind Sabbatai Zevi
He was born at Smyrna, now Izmir, in 1626 and died in exile at Dulcigno, now Ulcinj in Montenegro, in 1676. Groups of believers lasted for generations, among them the Dönmeh of Salonica, who followed him into Islam. The affair left the rabbinic authorities wary of popular mysticism. Gershom Scholem's study Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, published in Hebrew in 1957 and in English in 1973, argued that the spread of Lurianic Kabbalah had prepared the ground.
Why Sabbatai Zevi matters
The movement is the largest messianic upheaval in Jewish history since antiquity, and it shows kabbalistic ideas acting as a force in public events.
How to read Sabbatai Zevi
The name stands for the man and, as Sabbatianism, for the movement and its later secret circles, which historians trace into the eighteenth century.
Sabbatai Zevi in practice: an example
A historian explaining why some eighteenth-century rabbis distrusted the first Hasidim points back to the memory of 1666.
Where readings of Sabbatai Zevi go wrong
Accounts of his inner state are reconstructions from hostile and admiring sources alike, and should be read as such.
Sources and editorial method
This entry summarizes the tradition in the Almanac's own words; where no source is listed, it is an editorial summary rather than a primary text, and symbolic readings are named as the tradition's, not as fact.
- Source
- The Great Almanac Dictionary
- Category
- Mystical Systems
- Aliases
- shabbetai tzvi, sabbatai sevi, sabbatai zevi messiah, sabbatean movement, who was sabbatai zevi
- Last updated
- 2026-09-26
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Common questions
Who was Sabbatai Zevi?
He was a seventeenth-century rabbi from Smyrna in the Ottoman empire who was proclaimed messiah in 1665. He became the centre of a mass movement and converted to Islam in 1666.
Why did Sabbatai Zevi convert to Islam?
He was brought before the Ottoman court in September 1666 and, by most accounts, given the choice of conversion or death. He chose conversion and lived for another ten years.
What happened to his followers afterwards?
Most abandoned the movement. Some continued to believe in private, and one group in Salonica, the Dönmeh, converted outwardly to Islam and kept a separate identity into the twentieth century.
