The History Of Sabatai Sevi Part 1

The History of Sabatai Sevi.

by John Evelyn.

INTRODUCTION

_And you should if you please refuse Till the conversion of the Jews._

The reader of John Evelyn's _History of Sabatai Sevi, The Pretended Messiah of the Jewes_ or of the _History of the Three Late Famous Impostors_ (1669) in which it is the most significant part, discovers a fascinating, if unoriginal, addition to the work of the great diarist and dilettante, the amateur student of engraving and trees--and smoke.

Evelyn's work was almost totally derived from the account of Sir Paul Rycaut, who was from 1661 secretary (and later consul) for the Levant mercantile company in Smyrna. Rycaut was in fact responsible for what first-hand reporting there is in the _History_, and Evelyn's book preceded by only eleven years Rycaut's _History of the Turkish Empire 1623-1677_, where the story first appeared under the author's own name.

What gives Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ its own interest is partly the immediacy of the news of Sabatai Sevi, and partly the context in which Evelyn places the story, a context to some extent indicated in the t.i.tle, _History of the Three Late Famous Impostors_. When the work was published in 1669, Sevi was neither the amusing curiosity he is likely to be for the modern reader, nor the impertinent confidence man suggested by Evelyn's "impostor." Evelyn was reviewing for an English audience one of the great crises in Jewish history, the career of the man who has been called Judaism's "most notorious messianic claimant."[1] That career was not entirely past history in 1669. Sevi lived until 1675, and even after his humiliation and final banishment in 1673 he could write to his father-in-law in Salonica that men would see in his lifetime the day of redemption and the return of the Jews to Zion; "For G.o.d hath appointed me Lord of all Mizrayim."[2] Indeed, a remnant of Judaeo-Turkish Shabbethaians called Donmehs apparently exists in Salonica to the present day.

Whatever the appeal of Sevi's story may be for modern readers--as a mode of fiction, perhaps, or an instance of ma.s.s hysteria--Evelyn's discovery of an exemplum for religious and political enthusiasts may seem forced or reductive. In 1669, however, the interest of Englishmen in Jewish affairs was by no means merely academic--or narrowly commercial. There were, it is true, English sportsmen in 1666 who were actually betting on the Sevi career--ten to one that the "Messiah of Ismir" would be crowned King of Jerusalem within two years. And what was most disturbing about Sevi to the English nation as a whole was perhaps the disruption of trade, in which Sevi's father was intimately involved, as the agent of an English mercantile house. At the height of the furor, Jewish merchants were dissolving businesses as well as unroofing their houses in preparation for the return to Jerusalem. But the prime significance for Evelyn--perhaps more than for Rycaut--is revealed in the instinctive mental connection between Jewish and Christian history, or ways of thinking about history, on the one hand, and political realities in England on the other. Only nine years had pa.s.sed since the return of Charles II and the displacement of the Protectorate, with its remarkable Jewish elements. As for the return of the Christian Messiah and an imminent reign of the saints, Sevi might well have reminded Evelyn of the English "impostor," the Quaker Jacob Naylor, whose messianic claims were publicly examined at Bristol in 1657. Far more important to Englishmen of the period, however, was the episode involving the mission of the Amsterdam rabbi Mena.s.seh ben Israel to Cromwell's England in 1655, a year after Naylor's first appearance.

For two centuries after their expulsion from England by Edward I--that is, until the seventeenth century--Jews either avoided England entirely or lived there in deliberate obscurity. Some Spanish and Portuguese Jewish refugees from the Inquisition did arrive in England; but particularly after the execution for treason of Elizabeth's physician Roderigo Lopez in 1594, they could remain only as "Crypto-Jews." It was during the Puritan regime that the Jewish position in England really improved, and the removal of the legal bar dates from the conference summoned by Cromwell in response to the demands of Mena.s.seh.[3] The interest in Rabbinical literature displayed by learned men like Joseph Scaliger, Johann Buxtorf, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, together with a general Old Testament emphasis in Protestant scriptural study, made Judaism a more fashionable interest than it had been in previous years.

Cromwell's own encouragement of Mena.s.seh is usually viewed as an expression of his tolerationist principles and the hope that the return of Jews to England would aid in extending trade with Spain and Portugal, and even with the Levant. An additional facet of his general reception of Mena.s.seh is relevant to Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_. A chief argument in _The Humble Address of Mena.s.seh ben Israel_ (November 5, 1655) was the Amsterdam rabbi's belief that since England was the only country rejecting the Jews, their readmittance would be the signal for the coming of the Messiah. Fifth-Monarchy enthusiasts recalled the prophecies of _Daniel_ and _Revelations_ and linked them with the relatively immediate experience of the Thirty Years' War; motives of mercantile jealousy were to some extent offset by millenarian anxiety.

Indeed, the possibility of an imminent millennial reign of the saints could be the strongest kind of argument for showing favor to the Jews.

Cromwell all but proselytized at the meetings of the conference; ultimately, because of the opposition of commercial interests, he was forced to dissolve it.

We can perhaps best understand Evelyn's account of Sabatai Sevi, "the Messiah of Ismir," against this background of English Protestant millennial thinking, admirably summarized in Michael Fixler's recent study.[4] As Fixler suggests, it was possibly to discredit the Fifth-Monarchy men that Rycaut first included the account in what was to become his _History of the Turkish Empire_. At any rate, Sevi himself was hardly the mere con-man Rycaut and Evelyn portray; the mask, indeed, is _erepta_ only with the greatest of difficulty. Because Rycaut was interested in trade and cultural _mores_, his (and consequently, Evelyn's) account neglects features of the story which are of primary interest to more psychologically inclined readers. We are told almost nothing, for example, of the details of Sevi's solitary youth; his physical attractiveness; his clear voice as well suited to lascivious Spanish love-songs (interpreted mystically) as to Psalms; and his early rejection of the Talmud for the practical Cabala, with its strenuous, self-mortifying asceticism. One would gather from Evelyn that only the deluded followers of the "impostor" and not Sevi himself imposed such punishments as self-burial, and bathing in the sea, even in midwinter.

More surprising, perhaps, is the almost total neglect of Sarah, Sevi's third wife, mentioned in the _Pretended Messiah_ only as the "Ligornese Lady" whom Sevi acquired after freeing himself "from the Inc.u.mbrances of a Family." In fact, the beautiful and engaging Sarah seems to have become an integral part of the movement, a movement which in its early stages was all-male. A prost.i.tute notorious in her own right, primarily for her claims to be the destined bride of the Messiah, Sarah apparently escaped miraculously from a Christian convent after being cared for as an orphan of the savage Chmielnicki ma.s.sacres in Poland. As he was later to do with a more formidable rival to his exclusive claims (Nehemiah ha-Kohen, who ultimately exposed him as a fraud) Sevi called Sarah to Cairo in 1664, claiming to have dreamed of her as _his_ future bride.

Eventually, after his "conversion," she followed him even into the Turkish seraglio where he bore the t.i.tle Mahmed Effendi.

Other details are missing from Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_; the interested reader may pursue the strange tale in Graetz's _History of the Jews_ or the partly fictionalized biography by Joseph Kastein, _The Messiah of Ismir_.[5] We may note in pa.s.sing one additional incident.

After his first banishment from Smyrna (as a result of p.r.o.nouncing the sacred tetragrammaton in Hebrew), Sevi met the mystic Abraham ha-Yakini, who subsequently forged in archaic characters and style a doc.u.ment ent.i.tled "The Great Wisdom of Solomon"--a doc.u.ment accepted by Sevi as an authentic "archeological" revelation. The event was shortly followed by a bizarre celebration of Sevi's marriage as the Son of G.o.d ("En Sof") with the Torah, and may have provided climactic metaphysical confirmation of Sevi's hopes. In the manner of the old apocalypses, it p.r.o.nounced Sevi the "saviour of My people, Israel," one who in time "shall overthrow the great dragon and kill the serpent."[6]

Good as Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ may have been for contemporaries as a review of recent "news," and we must not underestimate this function, to the modern reader it seems closer to fiction, of a peculiarly propagandistic and ironic kind. Aside from omissions from the story--partly a matter of ignorance or failure in perception, and partly deliberate exclusion of inconvenient material--Evelyn's enthusiastic acceptance of his source's frequent theatrical metaphors is one measure of the distance from history of the _Pretended Messiah_. When Evelyn's Sevi is grave, it is a "formal and pharisaical gravitie" which is "starcht on." His motives in general seem highly conscious, even deliberate; and despite a certain doubleness in the point of view of the _Pretended Messiah_, the reason for Sevi's comic simplicity is not difficult to discover. Sir Paul Rycaut, as I have suggested, seems primarily interested in the effects of the movement on trade. The most vehement thinking of the book, though ascribed to an unnamed opponent of Sevi, could well be that of Rycaut himself:

[The opponent observed] in what a wilde manner the whole People of the Jewes was transported, with the groundless beliefe of a _Messiah_, leaving not onely their Trade, and course of living, but publishing Prophesies of a speedy Kingdome, of rescue from the Tyranny of the Turk, and leading the Grand Signior himself Captive in Chaines; matters so dangerous and obnoxious to the State wherein they lived, as might justly convict them of Treason and Rebellion, and leave them to the Mercy of that Justice, which on the least jealousie and suspicion of Matters of this nature uses to extirpate Families, and subvert the Mansion-houses of their own People, much rather of the Jewes, on whom the Turkes would gladly take occasion to dispoile them of their Estates, and condemn the whole Nation to perpetual slavery.

(pp. 78-79)

Evelyn retains this and similar material, apparently never suspecting that the Turks may well have been hesitant from real fear; but the burden of his emphasis is more overtly political and religious. Evelyn is less than ingenuous, perhaps, in a.s.sociating Sevi with Peter Serini's fake brother, or even with Mahomed Bei--another of the "late famous impostors." But the connection does have the effect of putting Sevi in an imaginary world where all masks will be discovered and the truth known. Ultimately, Evelyn's Jews, like Dryden's and Milton's, are English--"_our_ modern Enthusiasts and other prodigious Sects amongst us, who Dreame of the like Carnal Expectations, and a Temporal Monarchy"

(sig. A8; italics mine). One hardly needs to fill out the reading. With a traditional reminder that "the Time is not yet Accomplished," Evelyn warns English sectarians to beware of misleading fictions--"to weigh how nearly their Characters approach the Style and Design of those deluded wretches."

Evelyn's words here suggest something of the wider interest of the _Pretended Messiah_. For in threatening the modern enthusiasts, as it were, with the status of comic fiction, he also hinted at the literal immediacy of such explicitly imaginative works as _Absalom and Achitophel_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_. What Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ helps to reveal, then, is not only the potential metaphoric value of news itself, but also the peculiar proximity of poetry to "history" in a period when historical thought was inseparable from apocalyptic myth.[7]

University of California, Los Angeles

NOTES TO THE INTRODUCTION

[1] Michael Fixler, _Milton and the Kingdoms of G.o.d_ (London, 1964), p.

244.

[2] Joseph Kastein, _The Messiah of Ismir_, trans. Huntley Paterson (New York, 1931), p. 323.

[3] For an account of the events leading to the extra-judicial opinion of Glyn and Steele, see Samuel R. Gardiner, _History of the Commonwealth and Protectorate, 1649-1660_, III (London, 1901), 216-222.

[4] _Milton and the Kingdoms of G.o.d_ (London, 1964), especially pp.

237-249.

[5] Heinrich Graetz, _History of the Jews_, V (Philadelphia, 1895), 118-167. See also Henry Malter, "Shabetai Zebi B. Mordecai," _The Jewish Encyclopedia_, X (1905).

[6] Kastein, p. 77.

[7] For a provocative study of apocalypse in fiction, see Frank Kermode, _The Sense of An Ending_ (Oxford, 1966).

BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTE

The text of this edition is reproduced from a copy in the William Andrews Clark Memorial Library.

THE HISTORY Of the THREE late famous IMPOSTORS,

{_Padre Ottomano_, viz. {_Mahomed Bei_, and {_Sabatai Sevi_.

The _One_, pretended _Son_ and _Heir_ to the late _Grand Signior_;

The _Other_, a _Prince_ of the _Ottoman_ Family, but in _truth_, a _Valachian Counterfeit_.

And the Last, The Suppos'd _MESSIAH_ of the _Jews_, in the _Year_ of the true _Messiah_, 1666.

With a brief _Account_ of the _Ground_, and _Occasion_ of the present _War_ between the _TURK_ and the _VENETIAN_.

Together with the _Cause_ of the final _Extirpation_, _Destruction_ and _Exile_ of the _JEWS_ out of the EMPIRE of PERSIA.

In the _SAVOY_, Printed for _Henry Herringman_ at the Sign of the _Anchor_ in the Lower-Walk of the _New-Exchange_. 1669.

[Ill.u.s.tration: t.i.tle decoration]

To the READER.