Proclaimed Messiah
Assisted by his wife, Sabbatai became the leader of the community. He used his power to crush the opposition. He deposed the old rabbi of Smyrna, Aaron Lapapa, and appointed Chaim Benveniste in his place. His popularity grew, as people of all faiths repeated his story. His fame extended to all countries. Italy, Germany, and the Netherlands had centers where the Messianic movement was followed, and the Jews of Hamburg and Amsterdam heard about the events in Smyrna from trustworthy Christians. A distinguished German savant, Heinrich Oldenburg, wrote to Baruch Spinoza (Spinozae Epistolae No 33): "All the world here is talking of a rumour of the return of the Israelites ... to their own country. ... Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things."
Sabbatai had many prominent rabbis as followers, including Isaac Aboab da Fonseca, Moses Raphael de Aguilar, Moses Galante, Moses Zacuto, and the above-mentioned Hayyim Benveniste. Dionysius Mussafia Musaphia, an adherent of Spinoza, likewise became one of Sabbatai's followers. In this time, people spread fantastic reports, which were widely believed. For example, it was said: "in the north of Scotland a ship had appeared with silken sails and ropes, manned by sailors who spoke Hebrew. The flag bore the inscription 'The Twelve Tribes of Israel'." The Jewish community of Avignon, France prepared to emigrate to the new kingdom in the spring of 1666.
The readiness of the Jews of the time to believe the messianic claims of Sabbatai Zevi may be largely explained by the desperate state of European Jewry in the mid-17th century. The bloody pogroms of Bohdan Khmelnytsky had wiped out one third of the Jewish population and destroyed many centers of Jewish learning and communal life (Cohen 1948). There is no doubt that for most of the Jews of Europe there could never have seemed a more propitious moment for the messiah to deliver salvation than the moment at which Sabbetai Zevi made his appearance.
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Famous quotes containing the words proclaimed and/or messiah:
“One who shows signs of mental aberration is, inevitably, perhaps, but cruelly, shut off from familiar, thoughtless intercourse, partly excommunicated; his isolation is unwittingly proclaimed to him on every countenance by curiosity, indifference, aversion, or pity, and in so far as he is human enough to need free and equal communication and feel the lack of it, he suffers pain and loss of a kind and degree which others can only faintly imagine, and for the most part ignore.”
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