Shabbetai Zevi
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Description: Extensive article on the messianic figure with reference to Karen Armstrong's book "A History of God" and Gershom G. Scholem's text "Sabbati Sevi".
In 1666 a Jewish Messiah declared that redemption was at hand and was accepted ecstatically by Jews all over the world. Shabbetai Zevi had been born in 1626 to a family of wealthy Sephardic Jews in Smyrna in Asia Minor. As he grew up he developed strange tendencies which were probably manic-depressive. He had periods of deep-despair, when he would withdraw from his family and live in seclusion. These were succeeded by an elation that bordered on ecstasy. During these manic periods he would sometimes deliberately and spectacularly break the law of Moses: he would publicly eat forbidden foods, utter the sacred name of God and claim that he had been inspired to do so by a special revelation. He believed that he was the long awaited Messiah. Eventually the Rabbis could bear it no longer and in 1656 they expelled Shabbetai from the city. He became a wanderer among the Jewish communities of the Ottoman empire. During a manic spell in Istanbul, he announced that the Torah had been abrogated, crying aloud: 'Blessed art Thou, 0 Lord our God, Who permits the forbidden!' In Cairo he caused scandal by marrying a woman who had fled the murderous pogroms in Poland in 1648 and now lived as a prostitute. In 1662 Shabbetai set off for Jerusalem: at this point he was in a depressive phase and believed that he must be possessed by demons. In Palestine he heard about a young, learned Rabbi called Nathan who was a skilled exorcist, so he set out to find him in his home in Gaza.
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