From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh

Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement
Ontwerp: mv levievandermeer
Isbn: 978-90-815860-5-4

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From lowly metaphor to divine flesh
Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement

Alexander van der Haven

Menasseh ben Israel Instituut Studies nr. 7

Amsterdam 2012, Menasseh ben Israel Instituut
Table of Contents
The metaphor’s rebellion in the Sabbatian movement 9
Imagining Sarah, imagining Sabbatianism 13
The life of a messianic spouse (c. 1640-1674) 23
Livorno: Birth of a sexual Sarah 27
The prostitute and the ascetic mystics 31
Earthly queen, heavenly shekhinah 40
A debaucherous prophetess 44
Donning the turban 47
Sarah’s gender and female and erotic symbolism in Jewish mysticism 53
From Eros to sexuality: The shekhinah and female bodies 56
Sabbatianism and its Spousal Theosis 58
Epilogue 60
Acknowledgments 63
References 65
Selected Bibliography 77
O n 13 March 1664, Sarah ‘the Ashkenazi,’ a refugee from the
pogroms in what is now Poland and Lithuania, married Sabbatai
Tsevi, son of a merchant in Ottoman Izmir, or Smyrna. 1 Their wedding,
7

which probably took place in Cairo at the house of Raphael Joseph, the
representative of Egyptian Jewry to the government, was not a usual wed-
ding.2 The bride had for years claimed to be destined to marry the mes-
siah, and the groom was a good match: Sabbatai Tsevi, a refugee of some
sort himself after having been banned from several cities, believed he
was the messiah. Their wedding was therefore a messianic wedding, their
marriage a messianic marriage.
A year or so after their wedding Sabbatai publically declared him-
self messiah. This event initiated the largest messianic movement in
Jewish history since the tragic Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century
CE. The Sabbatian movement, as it has become known, was headed by
the messianic couple and the movement’s indefatigable prophet Nathan
Ashkenazi (1643-1680), better known as Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatai’s
forced conversion to Islam in 1666 initiated the decline of Sabbatianism
as a mass movement. It gradually transformed into an antinomian
 tradition that would spur other antinomian messianic movements such
as Frankism until in the 19th century and still exists today in Turkey as
the Dönmeh sect.3
Although Sabbatai’s apostasy had undoubtedly a radicalizing influ-
ence on the movement, it was not the sole cause of its later antino-
mian character. In part because of Sarah, the Sabbatian movement was
enmeshed in controversy years before Sabbatai Tsevi’s conversion to
Islam. To begin with, Sarah’s past was tainted. Before her marriage, Sarah
had built a reputation of promiscuity, a fact that was not left unused in
the hands of the movement’s opponents. However, rather than being
an impediment, Sarah’s controversial pre-marital behavior made her an
appropriate spouse for Sabbatai Tsevi: The Sabbatians believed that they
had entered a messianic age and that their messiah had direct knowledge
8 of the will of God. As a result, many were convinced that this enabled
the suspension of halakhic rules, the Jewish religious laws believed to
be given to Moses by God and elaborated ever since, because they were
meant for exilic time in the absence of direct access to God.4
As a result, Sabbatai Tsevi declared traditional days of fasting and
lamentation such as the Ninth of Av when the Jews mourn the destruc-
tion of the Temple now as days of joyousness because the messianic era
had begun.5 Another effect of this messianism was the movement’s appar-
ent liberation of women from their halakhically submissive and sexu-
ally restricted role, as has been convincingly argued by Ada Rapoport-
Albert in 2001 and in her new book Women and the Messianic Heresy of
Sabbatai Zevi.6 Women became dominant as prophets in the movement
and against custom were allowed to read the Torah scroll in synagogue
services. Moreover, Sabbatai demonstratively spent the night with girls
engaged to be married to other men. In this transgressive atmosphere,
Sarah the messianic queen held a prominent position by being one of
the movement’s most important prophetesses. She was apparently also
allowed to have men in her room. This antinomian tendency, the idea
to be released from the observance of law
of unredeemed times, became even more
accentuated after Sabbatai and Sarah’s con-
version to Islam.

Portrait of Sabbatai Tsevi in Coenen’s Ydele verwacht-

inge (1669), according to Coenen an actual portrait
sketched in Smyrna.

The Metaphor’s Rebellion in the Sabbatian Movement

The antinomian characteristic of the Sabbatian movement that will play
a central role in the following pages is what Moshe Idel has called the
Sabbatians’ “realistic” and “nonmetaphorical” interpretations of the 9

“supernatural processes” described in different kabbalistic writings.7 In

other words, the Sabbatians, starting with Sabbatai and Sarah themselves,
started to actually physically act out that which their predecessors had
understood to be activities restricted to a supernatural level. The sexual
activities they engaged in for example were – in mystical practices prior
to Sabbatianism – written about but not supposed to take place in real
life. Rather than actions, the earlier mystics used language, namely meta-
phors of an encounter between the religious practitioner and an aspect of
the Godhead.
The Sabbatian movement’s antinomianism expressed itself in two dia-
metrically opposed attitudes toward earthly existence during the lifetime
of Sabbatai Tsevi (1626-1676). The first, ‘heavenly’ attitude, represented
by the movement’s main prophet and the young Sabbatai Tsevi, regarded
earthly existence and one’s actions in it as a mere shadow, a playfield of
metaphors, of the divine invisible world to which one’s actions should be
oriented. The second, ‘this-worldy,’ attitude denied this hierarchical dis-
tinction between the earthly and heavenly realms and instead regarded
 them as united. This attitude was embodied in Sarah the Ashkenazi
(c. 1640-1674).
The this-worldly orientation Sarah the Ashkenazi represented was
a turnaround of a long trend in the reverse direction. Jewish mystics of
the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period read erotic tropes in reli-
gious texts not as literal descriptions of sexual practices. Rather, they were
seen as sophisticated guides for mystical practices. In fact, these mystics
increasingly directed their erotic drives away from their wives toward
what they considered the female element of God. In spite of the divine
commandment mandating regular sexual intercourse with her, the mys-
tic’s wife became but the lowly metaphor for the erotic relationship
between the mystic and God.
The different value these Jewish mystics saw in on the one hand
10 the object that served as the metaphor, in this case the female sexual
body, and on the other the aspect of God it served to represent is typ-
ical of the Western, mostly Platonic, philosophical and religious tradi-
tion.8 Although the use of metaphors has always been lauded – Aristotle
called the use of metaphor “the token of genius” – the metaphor itself
has tended to occupy a secondary, merely referential position compared
to that of the primary object to which it refers.9 Exemplary of this atti-
tude is the foundational exegetical approach toward Scripture by Philo
of Alexandria (c.30 BCE - c.50 CE), who emphasized that the anthropo-
morphic descriptions of the Divine in the Biblical narratives were merely
lowly metaphors of the grand invisible nature of God and the soul.
Mistaking the divine breath that animated God’s human creation for the
actual physical breath of a human-like creator was for Philo an offense to
God’s greatness. “God forbid,” Philo wrote, “that we should be infected
with such monstrous folly as to think that God employs for inbreathing
organs such as mouth or nostrils; for God is not only not in the form of a
man but belongs to no class or kind.”10
Philo’s warning not to mistake the lowly earthly metaphor for the
far greater, celestial thing it represented was taken to heart by many of
those who came after him, such as the philosopher Maimonides and
the medieval Jewish mystics. However, in the modern period this hier-
archy was challenged, a challenge that culminated in claims by think-
ers such as David Hume, Ludwig Feuerbach and Sigmund Freud, that
gods and their attributes were the lowly metaphors, metaphors “gone
astray,” of human realities such as human sexualities or feelings of love
and dependence.
Preceding Hume, Feuerbach and Freud, the Sabbatian movement
challenged the denigration of the material of the metaphor against the
divine object it was to refer to – and here we return to the question of
the Jewish female body as a metaphor. During the messianic reign of
Sabbatai Tsevi, the trend of progressively distancing the erotic heav-
enly object from the sexual female body was reversed. Although initially 11

Sabbatai Tsevi displayed the same aversion as his mystical predecessors to

fulfill his sexual obligations to his wives and was divorced twice after fail-
ing to do so, his third marriage changed this. Sabbatai and Sarah, who
was his third wife (or fourth if one counts his dramatic wedding with a
Torah scroll in 1648), not only publically declared their marriage to have
been consummated, but also openly claimed to engage in sexual activities
with multiple partners at the Sabbatian messianic court, sexual activities
that they regarded as religious practices.
In order to truly appreciate this change it is therefore necessary
to investigate the role of Sarah the Ashkenazi in the Sabbatian move-
ment during the messianic reign of Sabbatai Tsevi, as well as her influ-
ence in this reversal, this reunion of the metaphoric ‘woman’ with the
female body. As remarkable as neglected, Sarah the Ashkenazi offers an
instance in which the sexual woman seems to have rebelled against her
inferior position of being a mere metaphor. She was so successful in this
rebellion that she brought about, in the Sabbatian imagination, the col-
lapse of metaphor back into its object, thus locating feminine, divine
 presence in the sexual body of the woman.
Until now, writers about Sabbatianism have largely denied Sarah
the Ashkenazi a role in the movement generally, and in this nonmet-
aphoric tendency of the movement in particular. Ever since her death
in 1674, Sarah stirred the imagination of nearly every student of the
movement. To some, she was one of the main culprits of what they con-
sidered the evil of the Sabbatian heresy. To others, as will be discussed
shortly, she was the heroine of a drama in which Sabbatai saw himself
confronted by the choice between being a healthy, muscular (Zionist)
Jew, or to remain a repressed, weak (exilic) Jew. Only recently a minor-
ity of scholars such as Rapoport-Albert have begun to think of her as
more than a colorful but insignificant player in a movement, a move-
ment habitually characterized as ultimately concerned only with the
12 divine and therefore metaphorical wife and queen in the form of the so-
called kabbalistic matronita, which was the Jewish mystical concept of
a feminine divine attribute, rather than a carnal queen, an earthly wife,
and a woman.
The following argument takes issue with the prevalent view of Sarah
as insignificant to the Sabbatian movement and will show that her role
was not only important but also essential and indispensable to the even-
tual domination of the antinomian element in the movement. The con-
temporary sources reporting about her suggest that despite the attempts
by Sabbatai Tsevi and especially Nathan of Gaza to control her, Sarah
refused to be confined to the role of lowly earthly wife and queen who
was just a metaphor of a divine female quality. Rather than submitting
to being an inferior reflection of a divine female quality, Sarah instead
attempted to unite in her person the cosmic and earthly female charac-
ter and as a result changed the way spiritual and material realities were
related to one another. The fact that reports of both marital and scandal-
ous sexual activities at the court invariably coincided with Sarah’s pres-
ence at Sabbatai’s side should therefore not be seen as a matter of pure
coincidence. Thus, not only the abstract ideas of Sabbatian theology but
also the active efforts of Sarah the Ashkenazi forced the mystical erotic
imagery onto the flesh of a messiah inclined toward sexual abstention.
Sarah’s refusal to abide by the submissive role prescribed to her by the
Jewish mystical traditions on which the Sabbatian movement was con-
structed therefore directly contributed to the – to reiterate Idel’s phras-
ing – Sabbatians’ realistic and nonmetaphorical interpretations of what
were previously regarded strictly supernatural processes. Her refusal to
regard female and erotic, mystical imagery as strictly metaphorical fos-
tered the radical Sabbatian transference of mystical action from a cosmic
to an earthly plane.

Imagining Sarah, Imagining Sabbatianism

Whether Sarah has been excluded or placed in the Sabbatian spotlight has 13

depended on with which of these two impetuses the Sabbatian movement

and sometimes with Judaism as a
whole has been identified, namely as
oriented primarily either toward the
spiritual or towards the earthly realm.
Until the nineteenth century
Sarah did not receive much atten-
tion either in Sabbatian or anti-
Sabbatian sources. Although four
mythical versions of her life before
her marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi exist,
Sarah was forced from the limelight
since scholarly or fictional narratives
focused on the movement in its hey-
days of the mid-1660s. Sabbatians
such as Abraham Miguel Cardozo, a
Title page of Schachnowitz,
prolific writer and aspiring messianic Die Messiasbraut (Frankfurt,1925).
 successor to Sabbatai Tsevi, mention Sarah only in passing if they do so
at all.11 For the enemies of Sabbatianism, Sarah was just another illustra-
tion of the movement’s disgraceful transgressions, as can be seen in the
contemporary correspondence of Jacob Sasportas, who, as we shall see,
merely disqualified her as a fool.12
In the second half of the nineteenth century, the question of Sarah’s
role in the movement resurfaced. At first, fiction writers turned Sarah
into a representative of Sabbatianism or as a rebel against it, writing books
or stories in which she championed what they thought was the healthy
earthly character of Judaism as compared to the otherworldly life-deny-
ing Christian religion – a dichotomy that some would later replace with
one set between Zionist and exilic Judaism. These views have been largely
abandoned by more recent scholarship, and in reaction to them scholars
14 such as Gershom Scholem and Yehuda Liebes tried to avoid this essen-
tialization of Judaism. Instead – perhaps as an overreaction – they have
tended to characterize the Sabbatian movement as centered on a small
elite of (male) mystics whose actions were ultimately oriented away from
the earthly and carnal and towards the spiritual realms. Since these mys-
tics tended to prefer the company of their divine spouse to that of their
worldly ones, this view of the nature of Sabbatianism deprived Sarah
again of the new status she had acquired in the nineteenth century. This
view on the movement in general and its consequent view of Sarah’s role
in it, has recently again been challenged by Ada Rapoport-Albert and
Matt Goldish, whose arguments will be discussed below.
The precise year of Sarah’s nineteenth century resurrection within
scholastic circles was 1868, when Heinrich Graetz wrote the first modern
history of the Sabbatian movement largely based on Jacob Emden’s 1752
(quite selective) edition of sources about the Sabbatian movement.13
Writing in the age where the passions of heroes and villains were impor-
tant drives for history, Graetz’ Sarah became a femme fatale.14 According
to Graetz, she was eccentric, “excited” and had an “unreal, free and hardly
timid character,” which, combined with her beauty, enabled the move-
ment’s success: “Her beauty and her free nature attracted youngsters
and men, who otherwise would not have had any sympathy for mystical
messianism.”15
While for the rationalist Graetz Sarah’s female force and its role for
the movement served his dismissal of the movement he despised, for oth-
ers the power of her gender turned Sarah into a hero, albeit often a tragic
one. In novels, plays and short stories written in the decades around 1900
such as those by Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Felix Theilhaber, Solomon
Poljakoff, Sholem Ash and Nathan Bistritzky – to name only a few – Sarah
as a woman of flesh and blood becomes an important actor in the mes-
sianic events, often even more important than Sabbatai Tsevi himself.16
In these works, Sarah comes to stand both for a radical alternative
to the Christian suppression of carnality and for an abandonment of 15

the passive otherworldly Jewish tradition. She comes to represent a this-

worldly, carnal and often political form of religion, often to the extent
that religion itself is abandoned in favor of a life of passion. In a 1886
story by the Austrian, non-Jewish writer Sacher-Masoch, the beautiful
heroine uses her tricks of sexual seduction to convert Sabbatai not just
from Judaism to Islam, but, to quote the equally gorgeous wife of the sul-
tan who advised her how to attain her goal, to “make out of your holy
man a human being” by initially refusing her body to Sabbatai and chas-
tising him physically. 17 Whereas Sabbatai’s previous wife, in the story
called Sarah, had failed to seduce him despite her consistent attempts for
thirty days and nights, Miriam (based on the character of Sarah) knew
how to influence the ascetic Sabbatai.18

When he approached her bed on the wedding night, she snapped at

him: “Do not move, Sabbatai Tsevi, Redeemer of Israel. Heaven has
made me your wife so that I can be a thorn in your flesh and a contin-
uous agony for your desiring senses.”19
 Aside from the fact that it is Sarah who declares Sabbatai messiah, it
is interesting to see how Sacher-Masoch’s Sarah exercises power over
Sabbatai and drives him to action. Because of her combination of aggres-
sive attitude and sexual rejection, Sabbatai’s lust is finally aroused, and
Sacher-Masoch’s analysis justifies why the term ‘masochism’ bears his
name: “Now the human being stirred in him, the man in whose nature
it is that the woman’s cold indifference excites him more than her surren-
der.”20 Sabbatai’s desire aroused, Sarah still does not surrender to him but
instead forces him to swear obedience to her, to undergo whipping, and
finally, in order to save his life, to convert to Islam. In the end of the story,
the two converts defend their choice and base it on the inevitable charac-
ter of sexuality and sin:

16 In the Talmud, Tractate Sanhedrin, it says: The Messiah son of David

cannot come unless the entire world has become either completely
virtuous or altogether sinful. To make all Jews virtuous appears to
be impossible, to become sinful is much easier. Since apostasy is the
greatest vice all Jews should become Mohammedans so to hasten the
arrival of the messiah.21

Sacher-Masoch’s Sarah made Sabbatai Tsevi into a human being, namely

a sexual human being, a sinner, and thus guided him into the secret of the
modern Freudian era: it is our sexuality and passions that truly make us
human beings. Denying these is paramount to denying our humanity.
Whereas Sacher-Masoch’s Sarah redeems Sabbatai through sexuality,
in women’s rights proponent Felix Theilhaber’s novel Dein Reich Komme!
Sarah is in search of a messiah to redeem women from the yoke of a
maledominated society. Her first two candidates, Rembrandt and
Spinoza, who represent aesthetic and philosophical redemption, disap-
point (Rembrandt) and refuse (Spinoza) before she turns to Sabbatai
Tsevi. Her plea to Spinoza reveals what the messiah would mean to her:
“And us women you will liberate from our pains and subordination that
were put on us by the fault of Adam. Love songs we will sing to you and
we will caress you.”22
An historical account of the Sabbatian movement that also reflects
this interest in Sabbatianism/Judaism as a world-affirming movement
is Joseph Kastein’s 1930 Sabbatai Zevi: Der Messias von Ismir.23 Kastein
suggests that Sarah’s marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi was ultimately the result
of the difference between Jewish and Christian attitudes toward Eros.
Kastein claimed that Christians would have stifled the claims of a woman
notorious for her erotic behavior whereas the Jews productively trans-
formed the sexuality they feared as much as Christians into religion:

For the Christian persecutors of witches hated Eros and stifled the
weird sensations provoked by witches by putting them to death. The 17

Jewish Rabbis and scholars were also afraid of Eros, but they tried to
circumvent him by sublimating his influence. The former possessed a
dogma and cut off the legs of all who did not fit their Procrustean bed,
the latter were free from dogma but were dangerously susceptible to
any religious appeal. Thus in the end all they gathered from this bril-
liant creature was that she wished to be the bride of the Messiah.”24

Thus for Kastein, the sexual Sarah was an appropriate bride for the
messiah because of Judaism’s different attitude towards Eros. Whereas
Christians would have burned her on the stake as a witch, the Jews
accepted her sexuality as a religious inclination, and turned her into a
mystical queen: The irony seems to have been lost on these novelists and
playwrights that the woman who so vehemently resisted being reduced to
a metaphor was in their literature elevated to a mighty metaphor of their
own modern ideals.
The only publication I know from Nazi Germany that mentions
Sarah, by the historian Peter-Heinz Seraphim from 1938, also seems to
 subtly connect her to the success of what Seraphim regarded as the this-
worldly turn of the Sabbatian movement, but with an interesting (but
considering the time it was written not surprising) twist. Seraphim saw
the movement coming out of Sabbatai’s transformation from a “youth-
ful zealot deeply immersed in the secrets of the Kabbalah” to a “political
agitator of earthly Messianism.”25 Seraphim thought to be able to explain
the initial success of the movement, namely the sudden increase in fol-
lowers after Sabbatai’s arrival in Jerusalem, with the more base motives
of the local Jews who saw in Sabbatai’s connections to Egypt’s Jewry a
welcome alternative to the Polish monetary sources that had dried up
because of the massacres in Poland. To Sabbatai’s prestige, Seraphim
wrote, also contributed his “marriage to an as child from Poland fled
Jewess, Sarah. She had escaped from a monastery in Amsterdam to where
18 she was brought and claimed to be destined to marry the Messiah […].”26
Given the economical motives Seraphim attributed to Sabbatai’s new fol-
lowers in Jerusalem, it must for him not have been her claim to be pre-
destined to marry the messiah that added to Sabbatai’s status, but the
local Jews’ association of her Polish background with money.
Even Sabbatai Tsevi’s greatest modern biographer Gershom Scholem,
whom we shortly shall see rejects the assumptions made by these mostly
fictional accounts, granted Sarah the role of catalyst in Sabbatai’s pub-
lic declaration to be the messiah. When according to Scholem Sabbatai
heard about Sarah’s carnal reputation and her claim to be destined marry
the messiah, the news

strikes responsive chords in his sensitive imagination. Might it not

be that she really is his predestined mate? For the first time in his life,
flesh and blood seemed to respond to his heart’s most secret dreams
and wishes.27

This is a description of a turning point in Sabbatai Tsevi’s religious

development, in which the fusion of his most inner religious wishes with
his sensual longing for a woman bring his messianic ideals to the realm of
action.
Despite Scholem’s occasional lapse into romanticism, his biography
of Sabbatai Tsevi, published in 1957 in Hebrew and in 1973 as a sec-
ond edition, this time in English, brought about a new paradigm for,
or rather against, Sarah’s importance in the movement. Scholem wrote
about the lore passed down through the generations about Sarah that
“it is almost impossible to separate fact from fiction” and that therefore
the “nature of her influence on, and the measure of her significance for,
Sabbatai’s messianic career will always remain matters of conjecture and
speculation.”28 Nevertheless, based on his perspective of the nature of
the movement Scholem concluded that her influence was likely insignif-
icant. Speculating for instance whether Sarah could have played a role 19

in Sabbatai’s positive attitude toward the participation of women in reli-

gious practices, Scholem argued that “we should be wary of attribut-
ing too much to her influence.” Scholem located Sabbatai’s “feminism,”
as Scholem called Sabbatai’s advocacy for female participation, not in
Sarah’s influence but rather in the workings of the aforementioned kab-
balistic “female principle.” “We know enough of the latter,” Scholem
wrote, “and of the forces moving it, not to need Sarah as an explanation
of his feminist reforms.”29
Scholem’s refusal to even consider Sarah’s influence on Sabbatai’s
reforms in regard to women for his interpretation of the nature of the
Sabbatian movement is typical of Scholem’s inclination to emphasize the
primacy of ideas – traditionally the exclusive domain of men – rather
than persons as historical actors. This tendency is even taken further by
Scholem’s student Yehuda Liebes, one of the foremost contemporary
scholars of Sabbatianism. Liebes not only, like Scholem, focuses on the
movement’s intellectual (i.e. male) background, but he also dismisses the-
ories that assume that the Sabbatian movement was in any significant
 sense oriented toward a this-worldly transformation uniting the divine
female element with its metaphor, the female body. Liebes argues that
historical scholarship, inspired by Zionism, has wrongly assumed that
“Jewish messianism has an exclusively earthly character,” and as result has
mistakenly identified the Sabbatian movement with “a yearning for polit-
ical redemption.”30 Although Liebes distances himself from this theory,
from our perspective his work is nevertheless a continuation of Scholem’s
new direction, disparaging Sarah’s influence as well. The example from
Scholem’s work above about Sabbatai’s advocacy for female participa-
tion in religious rituals suggests that although the outcome of Sabbatai’s
beliefs might have been political, for Scholem, too, the earthly conse-
quences of his beliefs were a side-effect of an orientation to a spiritual
realm.
20 Furthermore, Liebes makes a distinction between the “hard core” of
the movement “as opposed to peripheral circles.” According to Liebes,
the latter disregarded the (true) ideology of the movement and mistak-
enly considered it a traditional messianic movement. It was the “hard
core” that produced Sabbatian texts and who continued the movement
after Sabbatai Tsevi’s conversion. The “peripheral circles” on the other
hand did not outlast the messianic fervor of 1665-1666 and contained
the masses of Jews who “failed” in this test.31 It is the hard core that Liebes
regards as the real movement, an elitist group that was not interested in
earthly political redemption. According to Liebes, earthly redemption for
these real Sabbatians was “merely an additional touch or a conventional
saying derived from the Scriptures or, at most and only for some, a side-
effect of the Supreme Amendment.”32 In Liebes’ analysis the hard core was
made up of these mystics rather than popular prophets. Since the mystics
were exclusively male while the majority of the prophets were women,
Sarah as a popular prophetess belonged to the periphery of the move-
ment and plays no significant role in Liebes’ analysis.33
Thus, for Scholem and Liebes – and for Liebes more than for Scholem
– the impetus of the movement is away from the concrete, the earthly.
Instead, despite the popular mass movement surrounding it, the true
Sabbatian movement was oriented toward mystical goals and its actions
aimed to affect cosmic relations between man (not woman) and God,
not between human beings. The example of Scholem’s understanding of
Sabbatai’s “feminism” given above is telling: in Scholem’s view, a mys-
tic female principle was important for Sabbatai and the Sabbatians, not
earthly women. Sarah and her gender therefore could not play a role
greater than the “additional touch” of gender dynamics played out in a
transcendent realm by and for male mystics.
The notion that Sarah was marginal at best and essentially insig-
nificant to the movement has recently been challenged by both Ada
Rapoport-Albert and Matt Goldish. Rapoport-Albert has, albeit very
cautiously, suggested in 2001 and in her new book that Sarah’s posi- 21

tion in the movement must have been related to the movement’s eman-
cipatory ethos toward female participation.34 In The Sabbatean Prophets
(2004) Goldish presented Sarah as one of the main prophets of a move-
ment that was essentially a mass prophetic movement.35 As with Scholem
and Liebes, the role that Goldish and Rapoport-Albert attribute to Sarah
is informed by their conception of the nature of the (early) Sabbatian
movement as a whole. In contrast to Liebes however, Rapoport-Albert
and Goldish regard mass prophecy as an integral part of the movement.
Both point out the importance of the fact that the messianic movement
was driven by popular prophets – many of them women – and that it
aimed to redeem the Jewish people on a historical level and rid itself
of inequality such as that of women. Looking at the movement from
this perspective, Goldish regards Nathan of Gaza’s theological founda-
tions of the movement, traditionally seen as its true engine, as “in itself
insufficient to explain a mass movement.”36 Instead Goldish claims the
movement’s prophets as the true carriers of the movement and presents
Sarah as one of its most prominent ones. Rapoport-Albert also places
 importance on the role of female prophets – Sarah among them – in the
movement, and emphasizes its earthly effect, namely the movement’s
positive attitude towards female participation in religious life.
What in Sabbatian scholarship therefore appears to be a factor in
including Sarah or not as a significant actor in and contributor to the
movement is how scholars of Sabbatianism view the nature of the move-
ment itself. Goldish and Rapoport-Albert regard Sarah’s role as significant
because they claim that the movement also aimed at actual socio-political
changes such as in the status and participation of women in religious life
and thus take its messianic aim to transform earthly existence seriously.37
Scholem and Liebes on the other hand deny Sarah any importance in the
movement because they regard the movement as ultimately not directed
at the earthly realm but at the invisible realm where the mystic interacts
22 with the Godhead. In all these readings of this immensely complex his-
tory, Sarah’s role, significant or not, seems to be the consequence of a
certain idea of Sabbatianism. In that sense – influential or not – she has
remained in essence symbolic.

The question whether the Sabbatian movement was motivated toward

earthly action or was singly oriented toward a spiritual realm seems to
miss the point. 38 The Sabbatian movement housed both of these impe-
tuses, and Sarah’s politico-religious position at the Sabbatian court
and her identification as a female religious symbol was its center of
contestation.
The following will therefore reconstruct the extent and nature of
Sarah’s role in the movement, especially with regard to her religious role
as a woman and her inclination toward earthly or spiritual interests. As
the difference between Sarah’s attitudes and the more spiritual inclina-
tions of both Nathan and the young Sabbatai will show, Sarah’s position
at the court and her power to define the character of the movement were
far from insignificant: We will see how Sarah refused to abide by her role
as the inferior carnal equivalent of the heavenly female element of God,
called the shekhinah. As a result she came to embody the far more this-
worldly impetus and in doing so she left an unmistakable mark on the
movement.
After reconstructing Sarah’s politico-religious position at the
Sabbatian court we will take a step back and trace the tension between
female symbolism and views of the female body in kabbalistic thought
leading up to the Sabbatian movement. This tension, which directly
relates to our present understanding of Sarah’s role in the movement,
is that between the ascendant female and erotic symbolism in Jewish
Kabbalah and the position of its counterpart, namely the actual woman,
particularly the mystic’s actual wife and one’s sexual duties toward her.
In the Sabbatian movement this conflict returns in the two impetuses
described above. 23

To prevent confusion several precise defining markers are needed.

From the work of scholars like Liebes, Goldish and Maciejko, who have
brought innovative approaches to different social groups and time frames,
the term “Sabbatian movement” has itself become contested. Fully
aware of the many ways in which a study of the rich and complex jour-
neys of Sabbatianism following the death of the messiah himself remains
a desideratum, in our context the scope of the analysis of the movement
is restricted to the lifetimes of Sarah and Sabbatai, who died in respec-
tively 1674 and 1676. A social restriction is also made, namely by remain-
ing within the parameters of the “Sabbatian court,” by which should be
understood the social space inhabited by Sabbatai and Sarah and their
direct followers, but also Nathan of Gaza, who despite his prophetic status
spent little time in the presence of the messiah and his wife.

The Life of a Messianic Spouse (c. 1640-1674)

The known details of Sarah’s life before her marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi
are scarce and untrustworthy. Of her early life several versions are extant,
 and, as Scholem pointed out, these circulated after 1666 and were there-
fore likely colored by the events after those they purport to record. As
result, Scholem has called the versions of Sarah’s early life “evidently
the joint product of her own fantasies and of the imagination of the
Sabbatian believers” and also Matt Goldish suggested that the different
versions “derive partly from Sarah’s own variations in the retelling.”39
The fact that the biographical versions of Sarah are suspect – to put
it mildly – of containing embellishments does not mean that they can-
not be used to find out more about the early years of Sarah.40 On the
contrary, while each version shows the hand of its author, the difference
between the versions also reveals what Sarah claimed about her past and
thus what Sarah wanted her local audience to believe about her. Sarah
seems to have changed the facts of her biography when a new location or
24 situation demanded a new narrative. This is not only logical in the case of
a refugee coming from a brutal situation whose sense of reality is either
suspended by trauma or by the necessity for survival in places, includ-
ing Amsterdam, that were not always welcoming to the refugees from the
East. It also shows the development of Sarah’s religious identity.41
The earliest report of Sarah’s existence is from Amsterdam. There,
according to its author, the archenemy of the Sabbatian movement Jacob
Sasportas (c. 1610-1698), Sarah arrived in Amsterdam around 1655, the
year before the Sephardic community excommunicated the philosopher
Spinoza. Sasportas met Sarah and described her as “a girl devoid of intel-
ligence, who in her madness said that she would marry the messianic
king.”42
No more traces of Sarah in Amsterdam exist in the archives, but a
later important source reports on what was remembered about Sarah
in Amsterdam many years later.43 Leyb ben Oyzer, the beadle of the
Amsterdam Ashkenazi congregation in the early eighteenth century,
recounted what Sarah told to many of his respectable sources includ-
ing Leyb’s own father in his Beshraybung fun sabtai sevi (Description of
Sabbatai Tsevi).44 After arriving in Amsterdam, Sarah told those who
wanted to hear her story that she was the daughter of a certain rabbi Meir
somewhere in Poland. The fact that she never gave an exact place-name
and merely a generic, unspecific name of her father bothered not only the
fact-driven Leyb but also suggests that, whether because of trauma, prag-
matism or a combination of the two, she needed a nonspecific and there-
fore flexible narrative in order to adapt to new situations.
According to the story Sarah told in Amsterdam, she was separated
from her father during the Chmielnicki massacres of 1648-1649 when
Ukrainian Cossacks rose up against their Polish overlords and brutally
slaughtered entire Jewish communities, a massacre that in the words of
Jonathan Israel “dwarfed every other Jewish tragedy between 1492 and the
Nazi holocaust.”45 She claimed she was brought to a convent where she
was raised as an orphan until the age of fifteen.46 The document does not 25

state that she was forcefully converted to Christianity, but it is very likely
that she did imply that she had converted.47 Then, according to Leyb:

Her dead father, the aforementioned R. Meir came to her in the night
and told her: “Come my daughter, you have to come with me away
from this convent.” He took the virgin by the middle of her body,
through the window and brought her to a community (I do not
know which one), and put her down in a cemetery, telling her: “My
daughter. Stay in this cemetery. Tomorrow people will arrive here for
a funeral, and they will find you and dress you, and send you further
on. You need to travel to Jerusalem. There is a man with the name
Sabbatai Tsevi, and he will make you his wife, and he is the messiah.
In the community of Amsterdam you have a brother with the name
Samuel and he will help you.48

The next day the girl was found with the blue finger marks of her father’s
hands on her arm, marks that according to witnesses whom Leyb ben
 Oyzer argued to be trustworthy, were still visible years later. After
local Jews found her, they helped her leave Poland: “The funeral visi-
tors dressed her and sent her from community to community, until she
arrived in Amsterdam, where she stayed with her brother Samuel.”49
The prophecy that she would travel to Jerusalem to marry the mes-
siah, which she told others probably as early as her stay in Amsterdam,
is a first testimony to her budding identity as a religious virtuoso and to
her powers of persuasion. Many years after meeting Sarah, Leyb’s sources
remained impressed by their memory of the apparent marks her father
had left on her arms during her marvelous nightly journey.50
While the story of her miraculous rescue from her Christian prison
and the marks on her arms showed her success as a religious entrepreneur,
her insertion of a reference to her ‘brother’ Samuel also reveals Sarah’s
26 ability to adapt to local situations. It is quite likely that Samuel was her
‘revealed’ brother rather than her biological brother. Not only had their
kinship to be established through a miraculous story rather than by
exchanging facts, also the framework of the story itself does not make
sense because Sarah and her brother must have been old enough at the
time of the massacres not to need to be told about their kinship by the
words of their dead father in a dream.51 It seems therefore that their kin-
ship was conceived in Amsterdam, enabled by Sarah’s ambiguity about
her background, her skilful adaptability and the desire of an earlier refu-
gee to be rejoined with his lost kin.
These two fabrications (and it is not important whether these were
deliberate or unconscious), namely her father’s prophecy about her mar-
riage to the messiah and his words about her brother, served two different
functions in Amsterdam. Her father’s prophecy of her messianic marriage
served to proleptically justify her religious career, while the mention-
ing of her brother in Amsterdam, somewhat of an anti-climax after her
father’s previous prophecy, forged a stronger relationship between Sarah
and the local community. Many Polish refugees were arrested for begging
or vagrancy in Amsterdam, and the funds of Amsterdam’s Jews were
more often used for ships to relocate Jews to other countries than to help
them settle in the Netherlands.52 Family ties with a local Jew would save
a lone female refugee from deportation or imprisonment for begging or
vagrancy, and Sarah’s absence from police files suggest that her ingenuity
helped her to escape this fate, at least for a while.
Despite its imaginary nature, Sarah’s kinship with Samuel was a last-
ing one. Years after Sarah had left Amsterdam, a former Jew named Jacob
Ragstatt de Weile claimed to have met Samuel in 1666 in West-German
Cleve en route to Constantinople were Samuel expected to receive a
dukedom from his messianic brother-in-law. From Ragstatt the Weile
we also hear that Samuel was a tobacco sorter, a profession he picked up
again following his disgraced return to Amsterdam after Sabbatai’s apos-
tasy, where he, at least according to Leyb ben Ozer, hence became known 27

as Samuel the Messiah. 53

Livorno: Birth of a Sexual Sarah

Sarah left Amsterdam, but it is not clear after how long and why. It is
possible that Sasportas was correct and that her messianic claims had
become unsuccessful in Amsterdam.54 Another possibility is that her
departure from Amsterdam meant a step in her social ascent, in spe-
cific her ascent from the poorer Ashkenazic community to the gen-
erally wealthier Sephardic community of her future husband. The
tobacco industry where the man she claimed was her brother worked
for instance, employed Ashkenazic Jews but was run by members of the
wealthy Portuguese community. 55 It is very well possible that she ingrati-
ated herself with this community, which consequently helped her estab-
lish her in her next haven, Livorno, whose Jewish community was over-
whelmingly Portuguese and controlled nearly the entire business of this
Mediterranean’s chief port after the Thirty Years War.56
But she might not have traveled directly from Amsterdam to Livorno,
 nor once she arrived there,
have succeeded to immedi-
ately land in better finan-
cial or social circumstances
than when she came to
Amsterdam. She report-
edly had been in Germany
as well, perhaps not only
before but also after her
stay in Amsterdam.57
Thomas Coenen, a Dutch
minister in Smyrna who
wrote one of the earli-
28 est accounts on Sabbatai
Tsevi, reported rumors
that Sarah had lived in
Mantua in a “Godtshuys,”
an almshouse, from which
“she did not leave without
reputation in regard to her
Front page Coenen’s Ydele verwachtinge (Amsterdam,
1669). Jewish National Library, Jerusalem. chastity.”58

The sexual nature of the last rumor was not an individual incident. About
her stay in Italy three new elements surface in Sarah’s behavior and self-
presentation that again demonstrate her resourceful character and the
direction in the formation of her religious identity: the place itself, Italy,
her sexual behavior and her activities as a seeress. Firstly, Amsterdam,
where her kin was supposed to live, disappears from the most important
document written in Italy based on her self-presentation, namely Baruch
of Arezzo’s Zikaron le-vene Israel (Memorial to the Children of Israel).59
In Baruch of Arezzo’s description, the young Sarah travels through the
Ashkenazic lands, “sent from one place to the next and from one city to
another, through Venice, until she was brought to Livorno. She stayed
there until a ship came through headed to Egypt.”60 The removal of
Amsterdam and her brother from the biographical facts perfectly suits
both Sarah’s new situation and the needs of her audience. Whereas the
Amsterdam Jews were told that Amsterdam was Sarah’s midstation to the
messiah, in Italy it became Livorno.
The second change in Sarah’s behavior and self-presentation is of a
sexual nature. The rumor Coenen had heard was not the only one cir-
culating among the Jewish communities in the Levant. The poet
Emanuel Frances, who wrote satirical verses on the Sabbatians, stated
that she worked as a servant in the house of David Jessurun, and wrote
of her “whoredoms.”61 Rabbi Joseph ha-Levi, like Frances hostile to the
Sabbatian movement, wrote that Sarah had become notorious in Livorno 29

because she prostituted herself to everybody.62

It is possible that these rumors and hostile reports represent a local
coloring of Sarah, since Italy and the Balkans were the only area in
Europe where Jewish prostitution, albeit very sporadically, existed.63
Nevertheless, her later role in the Sabbatian movement and a signifi-
cant change in her biography in the Italian period suggests we should
not disregard these claims off-hand, but rather take them seriously, as
will become clear when we compare the different versions Sarah gave of
her background. Whereas Sarah told the Jews of Amsterdam that she was
raised in a convent after the Chmielnicki massacres, where she had been
“schooled in impurity (tomaah)” as Leyb phrased it, in Italy she changed
her story, and her impurity became a sexual one. When she was a very
young girl, Baruch of Arezzo reported the story that gentiles kidnapped
her, converted her and gave her to the care of an exceedingly rich gentile
woman. This woman had only one son, and when the boy and the girl
grew up she wanted to marry them to one another and to give them all
her money and possessions.64
 As in her Amsterdam version her dead father saved her. On the night
before the wedding, he came to her in a dream. He chided her and gave her
a garment on which was written: “This woman will be the messiah’s wife.”
He then instructed her to go to the graveyard and said: “Stay there. The
Lord will be your confidence; He will keep your foot from the snare.”65
There are important differences between the Dutch version and
the Italian version. Firstly, the later version is that of a mature woman
concerned with marriage and (forbidden) sexuality. 66 Moreover, whereas
in the Dutch version Sarah was a young girl imprisoned between
the gentile walls of celibacy, in the Italian version she came close to
committing carnal apostasy in the form of marriage to a wealthy gentile.
Note also that whereas in the Dutch version her father takes her to the
cemetery, in the Italian version Sarah journeys by herself to the cemetery
30 where she is not protected by her father but acts on his moral advice with
a reference from Proverbs 3:26. Sarah has become a mature woman who
can choose for herself and who is ready to enter the sexual phase.67
In Baruch of Arezzo’s story of Sarah’s life, a small detail about what
occurred after her stay in Livorno also betrays the author’s concern for
her chaste reputation. When he reports that Sarah, after having refused
wealthy marriage (this time with a Jew) in Egypt, travels to Jerusalem to
find the messiah, he adds that she was sent “with a straight and reliable
Jew.”68 In other Sabbatian versions, too, the pure Sarah was chaperoned
until her wedding.69
In addition to a narrative refocus on Italy and sexual maturity, a third
new element in the Livorno episode of Sarah’s life is that she not only
claimed to be destined to marry the messiah, as she did in Amsterdam,
but she also claimed the art of being able to see others’ prior lives and
read their future fate. Whereas in Amsterdam the alleged prints of her
father’s fingers on her arm sufficed to support her claim to be the future
spouse of the messiah, in Italy she carved out a religious role for herself by
adding oracular practices to her claim to be the messianic bride. Baruch
of Arezzo reports that she “delivered prophecies of the future, all of which
came true” and was able to tell people what were the so-called roots of
their soul, namely their previous lives.70 That Sarah was successful at this
shows Baruch’s report that the “great sage” Rabbi Isaac ha-Levi Valle not
only turned to her but also believed “for certain that her answers were
correct and true.”71
With her oracular claims Sarah joined a tradition of Jewish female
oracular practices. In his work on Jewish possession in the Early Modern
period, J.H. Chayes pointed out that (especially young) women had played
respected roles as visionaries throughout the period and in both Ashkenazi
and Sephardi domains. The great Lurianic kabbalist Haim Vital (1542-
1620) for instance, whose work we know Sabbatai Tsevi read because he
wrote his signature in the margins of one of its remaining copies, was for
years instructed by his dead predecessors channeled through the young 31

daughter of Rabbi Anav, a girl whose name remains unknown.72

But Sarah’s alleged ability to read the future and past of people’s
souls was not appreciated by everybody. Emanuel Frances called Sarah
a “witch’’ based on her oracular claims and suggested that her activities
took place “in the heat of the night.”73 Frances’ demonization of Sarah’s
visionary claims, only decades after Christian witchcraft persecutions had
passed their height, might have been aimed at Sarah alone, but used the
language of an increasingly negative attitude toward female bodily reli-
gious experiences generally, resulting in accusations of witchcraft and
possession.74 Despite this negative attitude of Frances and those of simi-
lar attitude, the Sabbatian movement would become a mass movement
in which female prophets played a central role, and Sarah’s position in the
court played a significant role in this.

The Prostitute and the Ascetic Mystics

The next step in Sarah’s biography is her marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi.
Notorious for her sexual behavior, Sarah married someone known
 to have failed twice to consummate his marriage, a man who, like his
prophet Nathan, practiced sexual abstinence. What was the character
of Sabbatai and Nathan’s sexual abstinence, and how does this attitude
rhyme with Sabbatai’s wish to marry a woman representing the oppo-
site? Did Sabbatai plan to subjugate sin in the form of a woman, and then
clearly fail to do so?
As far as we know, Sarah left from Livorno straight for Egypt where
on 13 March 1664 she married Sabbatai Tsevi. Scholem points out that
the report of the Frances brothers, who wrote that it was Sarah who must
have incited Sabbatai Tsevi to believe he was the messiah, cannot be true.
After all, already in 1648 Sabbatai Tsevi was convinced he was a mes-
siah.75 Scholem therefore supported Sasportas’ claim that Sabbatai Tsevi
already believed himself to be the messiah before he heard of the beauty
32 who claimed she would marry the messiah.76
But there seems to have been more than Sarah’s reputed claim to
be destined to marry the messiah that made her attractive to Sabbatai
Tsevi. Scholem’s suggestion that Sabbatai Tsevi had found in Sarah a
soulmate is highly unlikely. As shortly will become clearer from our
analysis of Sabbatai and Nathan’s attitude toward and practices of
spousal relations, not much romanticism was to be expected from the
messiah from Smyrna. Scholem also suggested that Sabbatai’s marriage
to a woman of ill repute should be seen in the context of Sabbatai’s
later promise to liberate women from the curse of Eve. This seems
more likely, although a far less positive reading offers itself that reflects
Sabbatai’s disdain for women at worst and utilitarian attitude at best, as
well as his aversion to marital sexual relations.77 Sabbatai Tsevi wanted
to be a redeemer, and he chose a spouse who not only claimed to be
destined to marry a redeemer but also seemed to have all the quali-
fications to represent the counterpart of that relationship in which
Sabbatai was truly interested: not the relationship between husband
and wife, but that between God and a fallen Israel in need of being
chastised into redemption.
Several years after the wedding, Sabbatian followers in Constanti-
nople claimed that Sabbatai married Sarah following Hosea 1:2: “Go,
get yourself a wife of whoredom.”78 The Book of Hosea is situated in the
Northern Kingdom of Israel in the eighth century BCE, the kingdom
which was to fall to the Assyrian armies in 722 BCE. In the book, the
prophet Hosea marries Gomer daughter of Diblaim, whom the prophet
accuses of whoredom and who is compared to the people of Israel who
have fallen in with other gods. The prophet promises to force her to aban-
don her worship of other gods: “I will remove the names of the Baalim
from her mouth. And they shall nevermore be mentioned by name”
(Hosea 2:19). In a time of messianic expectations of the return to the fold
of Jews who had forcedly been converted to Christianity in the Iberian
peninsula and Poland, no candidate could be more appropriate than a 33

wife who not only reputedly practiced the sins Hosea identified with the
abandonment of one’s God, but who also claimed to have been raised
among Christians.
Sabbatai’s view of Hosea’s marriage to a licentious woman there-
fore does not necessarily reflect his noble intentions toward the second
sex, as many modern feminist readings also have pointed out in regard
to Hosea’s motives.79 Rather the opposite was the case because Hosea’s
Gomer is told not to continue her whoredoms. In Hosea 3, which returns
to God’s commandment for Hosea to “befriend a woman, who, while
befriended by a companion consorts with others” (Hosea 3:1), Hosea
obeys God.80 The prophet then however tells her that he will not have
sexual relations with her: “you are to go a long time without either for-
nicating or marrying; even I [shall not cohabit] with you” (Hosea 3:3).
Sabbatai, having proven not to be very capable of or willing to consum-
mate his marriages, embarked on another marriage. This marriage was
not as much to a woman as one to what he would have seen as a sym-
bol of his fallen people, and one in which the wife is chastised by not
 receiving her spousal right to have sexual relations with her husband.
How did Sabbatai Tsevi arrive at the intention to marry a Gomer, and
how did his Gomer succeed in avoiding the punishment of chastity? For
this, we will have to return first to Sabbatai’s background in regard to
sexuality, and to that of Nathan of Gaza’s, Sabbatai Tsevi’s prophet and
Sarah’s nemesis. For both, as will become clear, sexual asceticism, in
specific the discipline of sexual abstinence rather than disciplined sex-
ual activity, was an important practice, which makes Sabbatai’s marital
choice and the sexual rumors that emanated from the messianic court an
interesting question.
After having undergone traditional religious training in his native
Smyrna, Sabbatai began committing himself to ascetic practices at the age
of fifteen. According to a document written during the early movement,
34 these practices entailed “discipline, to renounce all pleasures because of
their sinfulness, and to reject the frivolous one […].”81 Sexual pleasure
was a main concern in these practices, as shown in a story told in the
Sabbatian document Vision of R. Abraham, written probably by Nathan
of Gaza when Sabbatai was already married to Sarah but had likely yet
not consummated the marriage.82 The story tells that:

When he [Sabbatai] was six years old a flame appeared in a dream and
caused a burn on his penis; and dreams would frighten him but he
never told anyone. And the sons of whoredom [the demons] accosted
him so as to cause him to stumble and they beat him, but he would
not hearken unto them. They were the sons of Na’amah, the scourges
of the children of man, who would always pursue him so as to lead
him astray.83

The term “scourges of the children of man” is the zoharic term for “those
demons born of masturbation, when Na’amah, the queen of demons,
seduced men by lascivious fantasies.”84
The discipline the young Sabbatai imposed on himself was not merely
Print displaying events from Sabbatai Tsevi’s life. In translation from the original Dutch: “ 35
1. Sabbatai Tsevi 2. Spits fire from his mouth in front of the cadi. 3 Sits on a heavenly lion
4. His heavenly visions 5. He was declared King. 6. was by the order of the vizir greeted by
beatings with sticks. 7. and locked up in prison. 8. Nathan receives gifts (Decker, 167).
Collection Jaap van Velzen, Joods Historisch Museum.

sexual but seemed to have been directed at a general regiment that was
oriented toward solitary existence undisturbed by social or bodily pleas-
ures. Abraham Cuenque, the eloquent money raiser from Hebron, wrote
about Sabbatai’s youth in 1692:

He held himself aloof from all pleasures of this world, spurning

money and eating and drinking, and human society. Daily did he tor-
ment himself, abstaining from food for almost the bulk of the year,
except for Sabbaths and holy days. He would go off by himself for
days at a time in the mountains, or in caves or deserts, and his broth-
ers and his father’s household would have no idea where he was.
Sometimes he would hide himself in Izmir, in a poor dingy room,
and would spend years shut away there, appearing only at intervals.
Meagerly and sparingly did he sustain himself.85
 At some point Sabbatai must have undergone a religious experience that
convinced him to have gained access to what he called “the mystery of the
Godhead.”86 As a result he revealed himself as the messiah to a small group
of followers in 1648. From then on, Sabbatai had periods of illumination,
ecstatic activity, and periods of despondency, and this continued until his
death.87 In his periods of illumination he seemed to have displayed strange
behavior and he was banned from Smyrna around 1651.88 In the years fol-
lowing he wandered around, mostly with some followers, and was among
others in Salonika, Hebron, Jerusalem, Constantinople and Cairo. In
Salonika he shocked the inhabitants by holding a wedding ceremony with
a Torah scroll, whereas in these other places he displayed bizarre behavior
by walking around with a large fish in a cradle and celebrating the three
pilgrim festivals in one week.89 Note that the first two of these acts, the
36 marriage to a Torah scroll and the walking around with a fish in a cradle
were consistent with his ascetic past: They were celibate, non-sexual refer-
ences to God’s commandment to marry and reproduce.
The young Sabbatai Tsevi’s attitude toward sexuality reflected that of
Nathan of Gaza. In the spring of 1663, Nathan Ashkenazi, better known
as Nathan of Gaza, had an ecstatic experience in Gaza that revealed to this
young kabbalist that Sabbatai Tsevi was the messiah.90 Because this was
almost a year before Sarah claimed to have found her messiah and married
him, Scholem argues that Nathan’s recognition of Sabbatai as the messiah
was the beginning of the movement. Goldish and Rappaport-Albert, how-
ever, argue that Sarah recognized Sabbatai as the messiah before Nathan
did since earlier prophecies mention him by name.91 It is well possible,
however, that Sabbatai Tsevi’s name was added later to Sarah’s prophecies.

In terms of their character and the religious roles they carved out for them-
selves, Nathan and Sarah resemble and differ from each other in equally
interesting ways. Both are referred to as “the Ashkenazi,” and both shared
important characteristics in their roles of religious virtuosos. They differed
however in how they constructed their identity in terms of sexuality.
 Both Nathan and Sarah claimed
the gift to see others’ previous lives,
sins, and other secrets only known to
these people or to God. After a great
illumination in the beginning of
March 1665, Baruch of Arezzo wrote,

Nathan came to know the secrets

of others’ consciences and the sins
they had committed. One by one
he summoned them, saying to
them: ‘I know you have done such-
and-such a sin, in such-and-such
a place, on such-and-such a day.’ Portrait of Nathan of Gaza (anonymous, 37

They would all admit the truth of around 1670). Collection Jaap van
Velzen, Joods Historisch Museum.
what he said, whereat he would
prescribe for them a mending for their souls. His reputation spread in
those parts, with the result that many people came to Gaza to consult
with him about their souls’ mending.92

According to Baruch of Arezzo Nathan was guided by a maggid, a spirit

guide, who revealed to him things unknown and invisible to others.93
According to Cuenque, Nathan was able to “reveal the graves of many
ancient holy men, tanaim and amoraim, in the vicinity of Gath and
Lydda and Yavneh. He would stretch himself out upon the grave and
make connection [with the holy man’s spirit], and a voice would arise
from the grave and speak with him as he pleased.”94
Like Sarah’s, Nathan’s prophecies were respected. As Sarah who was
able to satisfy the – in his own eyes – probing questions of a respected
rabbi, Nathan was never fooled by those who gave him names of dead
people or infants.95 As a result, masses came to Nathan for help. Both
came to project their gifts onto a person who claimed to be the messiah,
 Sabbatai Tsevi. Sarah claimed to be destined to marry him while read-
ing Valle’s roots of his soul. Nathan became Sabbatai’s prophet and ‘dis-
covered’ a voice speaking from a grave declaring “Sabbatai Tsevi is king
Messiah.”96 Both carved out for themselves a role that was not that of
messiah itself but on which the messiah was dependent. Sarah was the
wife a Jewish messiah would need, and Nathan provided the systematic
thought for the messiah who seemed to have been more oriented toward
performance than systemizing theology.
But there were also two important differences between the religious
roles Sarah and Nathan constructed for themselves. Whereas Sarah was
Sabbatai’s wordly wife of dubious sexual reputation who, as we shall see,
was supposed to produce a messianic dynasty and very likely played an
important role in the uncommon sexual practices at the messianic court
38 of Sabbatai Tsevi, Nathan’s role was of a very different character. No sex-
ual notoriety clung to his reputation. Rather, his image was the oppo-
site. Cuenque reported that Nathan married the one-eyed daughter of
the rich Samuel Lisboa. This Lisboa “led [Nathan] to the bridal canopy
with his daughter; he kept all his promises to him. He fixed him up with
a book-filled study where he would seclude himself, fasting much, pray-
ing in tears.”97 Although the marriage reportedly did produce children,
the wedding seems to have suited Nathan’s more spiritual needs such as
making a sacrifice of carnal needs by doing the charity of marrying an
unattractive girl and securing the means to a life of study in seclusion.98
The ascetic life of the rabbi’s in Nathan’s circle, specifically when
it came to sexuality, is illustrated by the following incident: Baruch of
Arezzo reports that one night, Nathan and the rabbi’s had gathered
together to study all night. Nathan instructed them not to eat anything
and sat in a room different from that of the rabbis:

As they began their studying, he emerged from his room and said:
‘One of you has eaten.’ And one rabbi indeed admitted he had
 absently eaten a plum that had been in his pouch. An hour later he
came forth once more. ‘One of you has had an emission!’ he said.
And so it was.99

Cuenque renders the same incident, and adds that Nathan also
points out the name of the sex offender and that Nathan was “deeply
embarrassed.”100
Although one should be careful to argue that Nathan was inclined
toward asceticism of sexual abstention or abstention from sexual pleas-
ure based on marrying an unattractive girl, the propensity for lone study
and the rejection of involuntary emissions, the overall image created in
texts about and by Nathan is difficult to interpret otherwise. The rabbis
with whom Nathan spent his nights, presumably all married, abstained
enough from sexual relations with their wives to be in danger of falling 39

prey to Lilith’s nightly overtures. The wife Nathan married was in con-
trast to Sarah not described as of great physical beauty. Moreover, unlike
in case of the royal couple at the Sabbatian court, Nathan did not think
it was his duty to be at his wife’s side. Rather the reverse was the case:
Nathan’s marriage, because of the financial security it gave him, enabled
solitude.
Although Sabbatai and Nathan had the same ascetic background of
sexual abstinence and Sabbatai seemed to have entered marriage in order
to punish his wife by withholding from her her marital rights, the mar-
riage seemed to have changed Sabbatai’s behavior. The abstinent ascetic
messiah appeared to have become an ascetic practicing sexuality, his wife
became pregnant and engaged as well, as we shall see, in all sorts of sex-
ual practices. Although Nathan legitimized Sabbatai’s sexually transgres-
sive and other bizarre actions in his writings, he never was part of them.
Nathan never converted to Islam as Sarah did, and he was absent from
any of Sabbatai’s other controversial acts. Indeed as close to the mes-
siah as he is generally taken to be, Nathan remained an outsider to the
 Sabbatian court. Nathan, then, seems to have played the ascetic, non-
sexual, non-transgressive prophet to a messiah who during his reign over
the Sabbatian court came to represent the opposite. In his 1670 Sefer
ha Beri’a (Book of Creation), Nathan presents Sabbatai Tsevi as what
Yehuda Liebes described as “the primeval element, free from thought and
inessential factors” whereas Nathan represented himself as “the second
element, which curbs this power [the primeval element] with the bridle
of thought and turns it from a destructive into a constructive role.”101
Behind this difference, which Liebes sees as between Sabbatai Tsevi and
Nathan of Gaza, the unrestrained, liberated messiah on one hand ver-
sus the controlled and constructive force of the prophet on the other, lies
a different contrast, namely that between Nathan on the one hand, and
Sarah on the other, while Sabbatai was slowly being pulled into Sarah’s
40 camp.

Earthly Queen, Heavenly Shekhinah

About the couple’s period in Smyrna, where the Sabbatian messianic
court can be seen as in its first stage, Coenen wrote that Sabbatai was
not greeted “as a poor Messiah, seated on the colt or a donkey; but as a
rich man, seated on a throne.” Also “mevrouw de koninginne,” “Mrs. the
queen” had her throne, Coenen wrote.102 Sabbatai now had left behind
those days of youth, that time of which Cuenque would later write:
“Fasting he came; fasting he departed.” Sabbatai started to live as a true
king. At his side was Sarah, apparently not disciplined as a Gomer, but
treated like a queen.103
That Sarah’s role in the early movement was truly that of a queen is
demonstrated by a revelation Nathan distributed and by Sarah’s brilliant
response to this revelation. The revelation was made in a letter Nathan
wrote to the same Raphael Joseph in whose house Sabbatai and Sarah
probably were married. He wrote the letter in the fall of 1665, after
both Nathan and Sabbatai publically declared Sabbatai messiah and
toured through the Holy Land. Nathan returned to Gaza while Sabbatai
traveled to Smyrna where Sarah joined him. While Sabbatai and Sarah
built a messianic court in Smyrna, Nathan prophesied that in a few
months from then, Sabbatai would peacefully take the throne from the
Turkish sultan and then after four or five years go east to cross the mythi-
cal river Sambatyon. The sultan would initially serve Sabbatai as viceroy
but would consequently rebel as a result of which everything except Gaza
would be destroyed. After this destruction, Sabbatai would cross the
Sambatyon again and return. At this point in the prophecy, the impor-
tant details concerning Sarah are introduced:

At that time the aforementioned rabbi will return from the river
Sambatyon, together with his predestined mate, the daughter of
Moses. It will be known that today it was fifteen years since Moses 41

was resuscitated and that [today] the aforementioned rabbi’s predes-

tined wife, whose name is Rebecca, is thirteen years old. His present
wife will be a handmaid, and the wife which he shall marry shall be
the queen;104 but as long as he is still outside Jerusalem (that she will
be built swiftly and in our days), the handmaid is queen [the lady:
matronita].105

Several observers have pointed out how Nathan’s prophecy is quite reveal-
ing about his feelings with regard to Sarah.106 Part of the redemption by
Sabbatai is the removal of Sarah. Clearly, Nathan did not regard her fit as
the wife of the victorious messiah. The prophecy betrays two other ele-
ments as well, namely in what respect Nathan differentiated Sarah from
how the messianic queen ought to be, and, moreover, that he recognized
the strength of her position.
Nathan predicted that Sabbatai’s present wife – thus Sarah – would
be demoted and replaced by Rebecca, the daughter of Moses. The word
Nathan used to define Sarah’s future status was shafhah. This does not
 only mean handmaid, as Werblowsky translated the text in Scholem’s
biography, but also means concubine. For Nathan, who, as suggested,
had no high regard for sexuality, whether licit or illicit, Sarah, after the
redemptive events he predicted, could not be more than a sexual partner
of inferior social status to Sabbatai Tsevi.
What the textual source for the origin of ‘Rebecca daughter of Moses’
was is not clear. Perhaps it was a mean-spirited hint that the old Sarah,
the first matriarch, would be replaced by a younger woman, symbolized
by biblical Sarah’s daughter-in-law Rebecca, the second matriarch.107
Rebecca stands however for more than merely a better Sarah. She
seems to represent the spiritual and, as will become clear, the symboli-
cal and superior counterpart to the this-worldly wife. In his letter Nathan
used matronita for ‘queen.’ As later will be shown, this was a common
42 term employed to represent not only someone of high social status. It was
also the Aramaic kabbalistic term for the female aspect of God. Nathan,
however, only used it to describe the future messianic queen and not
Sabbatai Tsevi’s present wife Sarah.108
It seems that Nathan called Sabbatai’s future queen ‘Rebecca daugh-
ter of Moses’ because he needed the future queen to be a less carnal queen
than Sarah was. Moses was in some kabbalistic traditions a messianic
figure who served as a spiritual and therefore superior counterpart to a
this-worldly Davidic messiah. For instance, R. Solomon Turiel, a Safed
kabbalist whom Scholem characterized as a “poor and humble and yet
high-flying kabbalist” wrote that the kabbalistic mystics did not need a
messiah “meek and sitting upon an ass.” Instead, their messiah would
be Moses in paradise, not, as Scholem paraphrased, “the son of David
to whom they cannot be subject since they are superior to him.”109 The
daughter, and not even daughter in the flesh, of a kabbalistic messianic
character who was the spiritual and superior counterpart to the messiah
king of David, was thus a better spiritual alternative to that carnal refugee
from Poland, Sarah the Ashkenazi.
 At the same time, Nathan’s prophecy shows that he expected Sarah to
be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. In Nathan’s prophecy,
Sarah’s messianic role would only diminish after the redemptive events,
years after the writing of the letter and under the condition that it would
only occur on the successful messianic return to Jerusalem. Outside and
before redeemed Jerusalem, Nathan expected his rival to be the undis-
puted mistress.110
Also an obscure passage in Nathan’s Treatise on the Dragons reveals
Nathan’s dislike and fear of Sarah. There Nathan suggests that before
or juxtaposed to a certain mystical union in “the mystery of Jacob and
Rachel” a negative sort of union needed to exist, one that Scholem
believed to be a veiled reference to Sarah. Scholem wrote that that this

“union” in the sphere of evil (the qelippa) […] was contained in the 43

mystery of holiness. All this is said to be mystically indicated by

Scripture as the mystery of “the way of a man with a maid” (Prov:
30:10) and the mystery of “the way of an adulterous woman” (Prov.
30:20).111

Nathan was correct in regarding Sarah as a formidable opponent.

Although copies of the Nathan’s letter to Raphael Jospeh were widely
distributed, they did not harm Sarah’s position.112 On the contrary,
Sarah used the prophecy to strengthen her own religious role at the
Sabbatian court by uniting the identities of the servant and Rebecca the
queen. Sasportas reported about Sarah that in the time of the Smyrna
court she would write to her female friends promising them favors,
and signed with the name matrona rivka: the lady queen Rebecca.113
As Ada Rapoport-Albert has noted, with this move Sarah thus “subtly
challenged” Nathan’s prophecy, which presented Sarah as the unwor-
thy wife who would not emerge like her husband from the realm of
the qelippot, of evil. By claiming the name Rebecca, Sarah showed she
 could neutralize Nathan’s negative prophecy and make it serve her own
agenda.
Sarah’s usurpation of the title of matrona (interchangeably used with
matronita) and her identification with Rebecca is more radical than a
subtle challenge to Nathan’s negative prophecy. She cannot have been
unaware that matrona was a term also used for the female aspect of God
– which will be discussed in detail later – and that Nathan probably used
it in this way. Her use of matrona, especially when coupled to Nathan’s
spiritual queen Rebecca, could very well constitute a claim to unite the
divine female principle, the bride of God, with herself. This has been sug-
gested by Rapoport-Albert, who compared Sarah’s claim with the iden-
tifications of later Sabbatian messianic wives with the shekhinah such as
Jacob Frank’s wife and his daughter Ewa.114
44

A Debaucherous Prophetess
Sarah’s presence prompted Sabbatai Tsevi to transgress accepted sexual
boundaries: his sexually transgressive behavior started after he was reu-
nited with his wife, not, as one would expect, when he was without Sarah
in the first period in Constantinople before she joined him, or earlier,
when he traveled with Nathan through the Holy Land and Syria. It seems
that with Nathan, sexual abstinence was the norm, and when Sarah was
around, the opposite happened.
While, as the Capuccin friar Michel Fèvre reported from Smyrna,
ascetic discourses continued to circulate in which some “swore that he
[Sabbatai] was so pure and chaste that he had never had any commerce
with women although he had been married for several years,” with Sarah
at his side in Smyrna Sabbatai behaved very unlike he had in his ascetic
past.115 First of all, in Smyrna, Sarah and Sabbatai publically announced
to have independently received revelations that they should consum-
mate their marriage (they apparently claimed they had not done that
already), and the next morning promptly displayed evidence of Sarah’s
lost virginity.116 Sabbatai might have intended to become the messiah
known to have disciplined his chosen bride by not having sexual relations
with her, but obviously their marriage took a different turn. Apparently
a more esoteric inner circle was told that this evidence was to deceive the
uninitiated, because Arezzo reported that the marriage was only consum-
mated after their conversion to Islam the next year.117
Thus, the struggle between Hosea and Gomer’s lifestyles seems,
temporarily and to the outside world at least, to have ended in favor
of Gomer’s, and transformed the outlook of the movement from one
of sexual austerity to one of apparent sexual excess. The royal couple
held a banquet where men and women danced together. As an adul-
terous Gomer rather than virtuous Hosea, Sabbatai met his divorced
wives in person, an act regarded as inacceptable, and even retired to a
room with his first wife. He allegedly also persuaded a visitor to enter 45

Sarah’s room, and when this person became frightened and fled outside,
Sabbatai was to have claimed that “if he had done her will, he would
have performed a great tikkun [a mystical act that contributes to the res-
toration of the redeemed state before what is conceived as the primor-
dial catastrophy]”.118 The circumstances of this anecdote and the con-
tent of Sabbatai’s words, admittedly third-hand, suggest not only that
doing Sarah’s ‘will’ was important for Sabbatai, but also that her sex-
ual behavior had transformed from something emblematic of the fallen
state of the Jewish people to a redeeming behavior in itself, since sleep-
ing with Sarah was apparently a redemptive act.
In addition to transgressing the boundaries of appropriate distance
and interaction between men and women, so sharply different from the
image of Nathan and his disciples, Sabbatai Tsevi also allowed women to
perform Torah readings during a service in a Portuguese synagogue he
had violently entered using an axe.119
After the Sabbatian takeover of Smyrna, Sabbatai set sail for
Constantinople on 30 December 1665 and arrived there on February
 8.120 Although he was arrested rather than crowned, the Sabbatian
enthusiasm was only dealt a temporary blow. Because of bribes by fol-
lowers, Sabbatai Tsevi was soon placed in a prison where he held court
like the sultan himself, for many the sign of him being the messiah.121
On April 18 he was moved to a fortress near Gallipoli that would
become known as Migdal Oz, the tower of strength, where Sarah joined
him.122
Sarah had not been inactive during Sabbatai’s absence from Smyrna.
Not only does she seem to have played a role in Sabbatai’s “transvaluation
of values,” as Scholem put Sabbatai’s transgressive behavior in Smyrna
in Nietzschean terms, she was also one of the first and most important
prophets in Smyrna when Sabbatai had left for Constantinople.123 While
Scholem admitted no more than that this “was one of the few instances
46 of her active participation in the movement, and it undoubtedly made an
impression,”124 Goldish and Rapoport-Albert’s emphasis on the impor-
tance of the prophets in the movement suggests Sarah’s religious impor-
tance in the court.
For the second time, Sarah’s reunion with Sabbatai, this time in
Constantinople, propelled stories of debaucheries.125 Moses Hagiz, a
visitor from Jerusalem, reported that Sabbatai was surrounded by “sev-
enty beautiful virgins, the daughters of the most illustrious rabbis, all
dressed in royal apparel.” Rather than being absent from this picture,
Hagiz mentioned immediately after the seventy virgins that “Sarah was
like unto a queen.”126
Sabbatai apparently also prided himself on sleeping with virgins
and then returning either untouched or having had intercourse with
them without actually deflowering them.127 Although the miraculous
consequence of this intercourse raises the suspicion that Sabbatai had
no actual sexual intercourse with these virgins, publically, Sabbatai
engaged in illicit sexual activities.
Donning the Turban
In September 1666
Sabbatai was arrested. The
reasons are not entirely
clear, and for the present
purposes not directly rel-
evant. Sabbatai was given
the choice between death
by torture and conversion
to Islam. Forfeiting mar-
tyrdom and apparently
unable to perform mira- Sabbatai Tsevi as a prisoner in Abydos. Print from
Ketzergeschichte (1701), reproduced in the 1901-6
cles, Sabbatai Tsevi took Jewish Encyclopedia.
on the turban and received 47

a pension from the sul-

tan and a position in the
courts as usher.128 Nathan,
and this is important for
our later argument, would
later compare his conver-
sion to Esther’s marriage
to Ahasverus, in which
Sabbatai was Esther and
Ahasverus the sultan.129

Shortly thereafter, Sarah

converted too. Although
most sources claim that she
did this under the guid-
ance of the sultan’s mother,
Portrait of Sabbatai Tsevi wearing a turban (anony-
a much later source based mous artist, c. 1670-1700). Collection Jaap van
on Dönmeh traditions Velzen, Joods Historisch Museum.
 states that Vani Efendi, the sultan’s vizir and the mastermind behind
Sabbatai’s conversion, personally supervised her conversion. If this is
true, the Turkish government must have regarded her a big political prize.
The same source claims that also Sabbatai’s ‘companion’ (Sarah) was, like
her husband, given the position of usher. Although it is unlikely that a
woman would be given an official position at the court, Sarah was, by all
means, a woman unlikely not to go for a position of some sort. 130
The apostasy was the beginning of the negative turn in the move-
ment’s fortune throughout the Jewish world, and for many the apos-
tasy was the end of their belief.131 Sarah’s ‘brother’ Samuel, for instance,
returned immediately from Constantinople to Amsterdam and returned
to his old profession.132 But the movement was far from over, and Pawel
Maciejko’s recent work shows that Sabbatianism continued in many
48 places to coexist, often peacefully, with rabbinic Judaism for almost a
century.133
While apparently Muslims, the messianic couple continued their
Jewish messianic claims after their conversion in an esoteric manner. For
instance, although Sabbatai had assumed the name ‘Mehemet Effendi’
and Sarah had become ‘Fatima Cadin’ (Lady Fatima), the letters issued
by the Sabbatian court were also signed with the names “Turko” and,
“Turka,” meaning in Spanish the “Turk” and the “Turkish woman.”134
As one of Sabbatai’s closest followers, Moses Pineiro (and also Baruch
of Arezzo) wrote, Sabbatai spelled these names deliberately not with a
‘kuf ’ ( ), as one would expect, but with a ‘kaf ’ ( ). This deliberate
alternative spelling, Pineiro claimed, suggested an esoteric meaning of
the names of Sabbatai and Sarah, and several scholars of Sabbatianism
have pointed out that the name ‘Turko’ could kabbalistically be read as
‘mountain of God,’ since ‘Tur’ is Aramaic for ‘mountain’ and 26 is the
numerical equivalent for the name of God. Equally, the letters ‘caf he’ of
‘Turka,’ thus Sarah, could be interpretated as the female element of God,
the shekhinah, since 25 was the numerical equivalent for the shekhinah.135
 Yehuda Liebes has argued that Sabbatai did not sign with ‘Turka’
because he identified his wife Sarah with the shekhinah, but because he,
Sabbatai, identified with the shekhinah. This makes sense in the light of
an older kabbalistic identification of the messiah with the shekhinah.136
Liebes’ argument also fits in with androgynous claims of Sabbatai Tsevi
after his conversion, when he identified with Esther at the court of
Ahasverus and declared himself “the divine androgyne being.”137
Whereas Sabbatai possibly meant ‘Turka’ to refer to himself, this
interpretation was not the public one: Moshe Pineiro, one of the main
Sabbatians, understood ‘Turka’ to refer to “the queen” Sarah. It is likely
that also Sarah understood this to refer to her and even might have played
a role in acquiring this name. This not only again confirms her position
at the court in the eyes of important followers such as Pinheiro, but also
that with matrona or matronita she did not just mean ‘queen’ but also 49

usurped this role’s heavenly equivalent.

Although their marriage had unlike Sabbatai’s previous marriages
been declared consummated and by all appearances produced a son
called Ishmael Mordecai in 1667, Sabbatai Tsevi divorced Sarah on the
5th of Nisan, 5431 (1671).138 Jacob Najara, a rabbi from Gaza who was
then at the court in its next location of exile, in Adrianople, wrote that
Sabbatai “went to the gentile archives and divorced his wife. He applied
to himself the biblical verse: ‘Six years shall [the slave] labour and in
the seventh year [he shall go free], for on that day a full seven years had
passed since he married her.”139 (Exodus 21:2) Najara also reported that
in the Sabbath worship service on the following Sabbath, which was the
Sabbath before Passover, Sabbatai read the parashah (the weekly portion
of the Torah) that should have been read three weeks later.140 The par-
ashah that Sabbatai chose to read too early in the yearly cycle of parashah
readings was from Leviticus 14, which opens with “This shall be the law
of the leper on the day he is purified of his leprosy.” Sabbatai explained
afterwards that this parashah referred to his wife, who was “like leprosy
 to her husband.”141 Leprosy, as David Halperin has pointed out in his
commentary on Najara, was an illness for which the Talmud prescribes
divorce as a cure.142

Nathan of Gaza arrived

on May 18 at Sabbatai’s
court in Adrianople,
and the coinciding of his
arrival with Sabbatai’s
divorce suggests that the
divorce might have been
plotted with Nathan’s
help, who, as we
50 know, was not fond of
Sarah.143 From Nathan,
a fascinating letter exists
from almost a year later
Jews in Salonika performing penance after Sabbatai Tsevi’s that describes the events
conversion to Islam. Print from Ketzergeschichte (1701),
reproduced in the 1901-6 Jewish Encyclopedia. that led to the divorce.
Nathan wrote that
Sabbatai saw himself as the Hebrew slave having suffered under Sarah.
Nathan wrote that Sarah was constantly picking fights with Sabbatai
and even twice attempted to poison him. Nathan wrote that she “perse-
cuted him with all her power” and “stood up in rebellion” against him.144
Nathan also called her a snake, perhaps not a strategic choice of words
since Sabbatian followers also argued that the Hebrew word for snake,
nahash, had the same numerical value as the Hebrew word for messiah,
mashi’ah.145 Probably its association with poison trumped for Nathan the
numerical meaning.
The divorce reveals not only how Sarah was an important player at
the court, but also the nature of the power struggle between Sarah on the
one hand, and Sabbatai and Nathan on the other. Sarah’s power shows
from the fact that apparently Sabbatai needed both a convincing sym-
bolical timing for the divorce that would fulfill Nathan’s earlier proph-
ecy and Nathan’s prophetic presence to be able to stand up to his wife.
The nature of the conflict on the other hand, rooted in Sarah’s “rebellion”
against her husband, can be read in Sabbatai’s argument for the need of a
new marriage.
After the divorce, Sabbatai did not tarry and quickly declared his
intention to marry a new bride, this time a Jewess who should not con-
vert to Islam but who would play the role of an Esther to Ahasverus.146
Whereas Sabbatai earlier identified himself with Esther while designating
the Turkish sultan as Ahasverus, he now reshuffled the signifiers and sig-
nifieds and declared himself to be Ahasverus in search of a Jewish Esther,
one that was to replace his Muslim wife Lady Fatima, Sarah. 51

Sabbatai’s transformation from the role of Esther to that of Ahasverus

was yet another failed attempt by Nathan and Sabbatai to disem-
power Sarah’s wordly position as a woman in the movement. The to-be-
redeemed Gomer had remained unrepentant in her ways and, like Gomer
who according to some interpretations of Hosea prostituted herself as
part of fertility rituals at temples of Canaanite gods, transformed sleeping
with another man from a sin into a redemptive act. Also Nathan’s earlier
prophetic coup to reduce Sarah to the future concubine who would be
replaced by Moses’ daughter Rebecca had failed when Sarah adopted the
name Rebecca. With this new attempt, Nathan and Sabbatai tried once
again to diminish her worldly powerful position.
Sabbatai’s change in self-identification from Esther to Ahasverus also
revealed Sarah’s growing influence. It showed that Sarah’s religious role of
the sinner had been so successful that Sabbatai tried to usurp it by identify-
ing with the non-Jewish king Ahasverus rather than with his pure counter-
part, the Jewish Esther. Although Scholem and Liebes have written exten-
sively about Sabbatianism’s “redemption through sin,” as the English title
 of Scholem’s essay on the subject is called, and Sabbatai committed many
transgressive actions, in his self-presentation he initially contrasted him-
self rather than identified with the sinful. Despite his provocative behavior,
Sabbatai was intitally the pure and good Hosea, and not the sinful Gomer,
whose role Sarah was to play. Before he became Ahasverus he was the noble
Esther, the sufficiently virtuous Jewish woman on whose shoulders rested
the fate of the Jewish people in Ahasverus’ empire, whereas the sultan was
Ahasverus, the gentile king who could easily have been swayed to massacre
his Jews if it was not for Esther’s courageous actions. Now, Sabbatai had,
like his wife, adopted the role of sinner.
The divorce took place as planned, and Nathan and Sabbatai seemed
to have triumphed after all. Finally, the polluted Sarah would be replaced
by a pure Rebecca. A new bride was soon found but died before she could
52 travel to Sabbatai.147 Sabbatai, having gotten rid of Sarah, appeared to
have become the sole, and sinful, religious core of the Sabbatian court.
Sarah, however, prevailed yet once more, and Nathan had to report
that “against the advice of all his friends,” Sabbatai took Sarah back.
Scholem thought Sabbatai did this because he had mercy on her, but it is
also possible that Sabbatai and Nathan underestimated Sarah’s position at
the court and in the movement. Nathan’s fortunes, briefly up, had turned
again, and his coup failed.148
Sabbatai and Sarah’s court in Adrianople lasted until the beginning of
1673, when the opposition finally prevailed and Sabbatai was banned to
distant Dulcigno (the present Ulcinj in Albania).149 Sarah was allowed to
join him because Sabbatai’s brother bribed the local Turkish authorities,
another indication that Sarah was needed at Sabbatai’s side.150
Sarah died shortly after, in 1674.151 Sabbatai soon remarried,
namely with the daughter of Josef Filosof from Salonika, a girl who
went in Sabbatai’s letters by the names of Esther, Jocheved, Michal,
and Hadassa.152 Sarah had however become so important that Abraham
Cuenque, the Sabbatian chronicler from Hebron who must have known
better, still claimed Sarah was living, thus maintaining that the messianic
marriage with was Sarah intact, even beyond death.153

Sarah’s Gender and Female and Erotic Symbolism in Jewish

Mysticism
Sarah’s rivalry with Nathan and Sabbatai shows that Sarah succeeded
to create a religious role for herself at the Sabbatian court. She usurped
the religious roles Nathan and Sabbatai had reserved for the shekhinah
and the new bride from the other bank of the mythical Sambatyon river,
and was able to transform the sexuality with which she was associated
from vice to redemptive virtue. In this, Sarah embodied the impetus of
the movement orientated to the earthly realm, whereas Nathan and the
young Sabbatai represented the opposing impetus, namely the orienta-
tion toward a heavenly realm. While Nathan and the young Sabbatai 53

were concerned with the shekhinah as otherworldly, Sarah forced the

shekhinah to descend to earth and to ‘become Sarah.’
But it was not only the differences between the individual charac-
ters of Sarah, Sabbatai and Nathan led to their respective embodiments
of these opposing orientations. It will become clear that Sarah’s gender
was a quintessential factor that made her embody this impetus. Sarah
belonged to the sex that was not only excluded from mystical practices
but which was also seen as an inferior reflection of a growing focus on
the divine feminine. The acting out of erotic metaphors was therefore
Sarah’s only option for participation in a movement based on a mysticism
increasingly concerned with otherworldly femininity and Eros.154 To well
appreciate Sarah’s conduct it will be necessary to go back in history and
describe the development of female and erotic symbolism in the mysti-
cal tradition that lies at the root of the mystical ideas and practices of the
Sabbatian movement. After this, we will return to Sarah and draw con-
clusions on her role in the movement.
In the centuries before the movement, an unprecedentedly influential
 female and erotic symbolism emerged in Jewish mystical discourses and
practices. This development was accompanied by a devaluation of the
wife in the flesh and increasing inner conflicts with the divine command-
ment to have sexual relations with one’s wife (see e.g. Exodus 24:10).155
Beginning in the late Middle Ages, gender symbolism progressively
played a role in Jewish mystical discourse in the form of erotic and
female symbolism.156 David Biale has argued that in 12th and 13th cen-
tury Provence, perhaps as on the one hand a reflection of unprecedented
cultural and consequently sexual contacts between Jews and Gentiles,
and on the other as an attempt to sublimate these through spiritualiza-
tion, Jewish mystical texts increasingly used sexual language to describe
human interaction with God.157
Also the Zohar (“Book of Splendor”), the most important Jewish
54 mystical text since its creation in Spain at the end of the 13th century, used
explicit erotic metaphors to describe the restoration of human and divine
relations. The author(s) of the Zohar regarded the reason for Israel’s exile,
in Yehuda Liebes’ words, as “the severance of the male divine element
from the female element (i.e. the exile of the shekhinah).”158 Imagining
that God revealed himself and continued his creation through ten gen-
dered and divine attributes, or sefirot, the divine order and human
(Jewish) existence was believed to depend on the harmonious balance
between God’s male and female aspects.
Two of these sefirot were regarded as female. These included the low-
est one, which was commonly called malkhut, meaning kingship or king-
dom and became also known as the shekhinah. The meaning of the word
shekhinah is based in the root of the Hebrew word meaning ‘dwelling’ or
‘indwelling.’ The Bible uses the term for the appearance of God in nature,
for instance in the noun mishkan, which was used for the tabernacle, the
dwelling place of God. In the rabbinical texts, Jewish texts written in the
first millennium after the descruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E.,
the word was, as Benjamin Sommer has pointed out, used when talking
about God in regard to the location of God.159
This notion of ‘presence’ later became personified. In the kabbalistic
tradition beginning already before the Zohar, namely with the late 12th
century Sefer ha-Bahir, the shekhinah is described as ‘daughter’ and ‘prin-
cess’ and as ‘spouse,’ the latter designated with the Aramaic matronita.160
The shekhinah consequently became an important element in the Zohar.
Unlike the other attributes, the Zohar’s shekhinah did not emanate from
God directly but emanated indirectly from the other attributes. This on
the one hand reduced the shekhinah in status but at the same time made
it the indispensable connection between earthly existence and the other
sefirot. Since the Zohar regarded the shekhinah exiled from the other (in
majority) male attributes, their reunion, expressed in erotic terms, would
mean divine restoration.
The (male) Jewish mystic, the Zohar proposed, could cement this 55

erotic cosmic union between the female lowest sefirah and the others it
was disconnected from. He could contribute to this restoration by creat-
ing a parallel erotic union, namely that between himself and the shekhi-
nah, which thus became the connecting attribute between human beings
and God.161 This mystical erotic encounter between the mystic and God
was an erotic one between the male practitioner and a female God by
means of the shekhinah. An example of this erotic imagery in religious
action is one of Sabbatai Tsevi’s performative acts when he sang the pop-
ular sensuous love song “Meliselda” to the Torah scroll during a the syn-
agogue service.162 While holding the Torah in his arms Sabbatai sang to
it, about a king’s daughter who in front of the poet’s eyes emerges from
the river where she had been bathing in all her beauty and, it may be
assumed, without all her clothes.163
Of all the sefirot, malkhut or shekhinah remained the most impor-
tant one for Safed’s mystics in the heyday of Safed’s mysticism in the two
centuries after the exile from Spain. It required an even greater impor-
tance – be it problematic – in their private erotic lives. In contrast to
 earlier periods, it seemed that the mystics started, in the words of Biale,
to be “more open to discussing the relationship between the personal and
the cosmic.” As result, the question of the relationship between the mys-
tic’s wife in the flesh and his otherworldly wife, the shekhinah, became an
issue that mystics felt they needed to address.164

From Eros to Sexuality: The Shekhinah and Female Bodies

Whereas one would perhaps expect that the redemptive character of eros
in Jewish mysticism would lead to a positive attitude toward entertain-
ing marital relations and, as a result, to the position of women, mostly
the reverse seems to have been the case.165 For instance, the popular
16th century work Sefer ha-Haredim (‘Book of the Fearful’ or, perhaps
more appropriately, ‘Book of the Anxious’) by Eliezer Azkari explained
56 Deuteronomy 21:15 concerning the man who has two wives, one
beloved and another hated:

Behold the Torah, she is the wife God has given thee […] and the
other wife is of flesh and blood […] The King, blessed be He, com-
manded us to love her [too], but the real love should be for the former
[…] glorious is the King’s daughter [i.e. the shekhinah] within the
palace [Ps xlv 14]. The King – that is the King of the universe – and
thou art the King’s son-in-law.166

In this passage, Azkari makes use of gender symbolism by suggesting

that the mystical practitioner has not only one wife: the Torah, which he
equals with the shekhinah, is the practitioner’s spiritual wife.167 Azkari’s
phrasing of “the other wife” to designate the mystic’s wife of flesh and
blood shows with whom his priorities lie: the mystic’s own wife is a poor
reflection of his ‘real’ wife, a wife of a much more elevated status than
his wife of flesh and blood. In his spiritual practice, the mystic is God’s
son in law and married to the shekhinah, the King’s (God’s) daughter,
whereas in real life his family by marriage surely was of lesser status, and
“hated” (in the language of Deuteronomy) compared to the love he feels
for God and his daughter.
Azkari’s statement reveals another important matter besides disdain
for the fleshly wife in comparison to his betrothed shekhinah. It shows
that despite this preference, God has commanded to love one’s own wife,
a duty to be fulfilled even if it is not as spiritually rewarding as the mari-
tal relations with the shekhinah. Even though the impetus to turn away
from the love for one’s own wife in the flesh is fostered by works such
as Sefer ha-Haredim, this impetus is always hampered, or kept in check,
by God’s commandment to entertain sexual relations with one’s own
wife. In fact, celibacy was generally regarded as an impediment for spir-
itual success, as is lyrically put in the words of Moses Cordovero, the six-
teenth-century kabbalistic master from Safed: 57

It is obvious that the shekhinah cannot be with a man as long as he

is unmarried, for the shekhinah cometh to man mainly from the
female. Man stands between two females: the lower, physical female
[…] and the shekhinah who stands above him. […] He who wants to
be united with the King’s daughter must sanctify himself, and, after
his mystical marriage, must always give her her [mystical] ‘food, rai-
ment and conjugal rights’ exactly as he is required to do, on the physi-
cal plane, to his physical wife.168

Thus, the mystic at once needs to comply with his wife’s rights to sexual-
ity, and at the same time be directed at the higher wife, the shekhinah. As
for the extent to which the relations with the wife should lead to pleasure,
and to whose pleasure, the different sources were quite divided.169
This commandment of directing one’s sexual energy both at one’s wife
and at the shekhinah often led to great tensions between the relations one
was to have with one’s spiritual and one’s material wife. Joseph Karo, who
 was not only the author of the famed halakhic work Shulkhan Arukh but
who also like Nathan of Gaza received revelations from his maggid for
years, is emblematic of the confusion that the combination of command-
ment for marital relations and the orientation away from the flesh could
cause for mystics in this period. Explaining why Karo and his third wife
had remained childless for a long time, the maggid claimed that while
their bodies were male and female, Karo’s wife’s soul was a male soul.
She was a reincarnation of a very important rabbi, so important the mag-
gid could not reveal his name. The maggid therefore warned that Karo
should “be ashamed of having intercourse with her for pleasure.”
Since Karo’s soul was male as well, they could not have children.170
Adding to this the fact that the nameless sage returned as a woman as the
result of his miserliness, the voice of the maggid is that of great confusion
58 about gender, sexuality, not just of Joseph Karo, but also of an entire mys-
tical culture. The issue at hand was the failure of the couple to conceive,
for which not only a gender difference between bodies, but also between
souls is incumbent. Thus where not only a female body but also a female
soul is necessary for fulfillment of the commandment to procreate, it is
clear that Karo was torn between on the one hand privileging mascu-
linity that he associated with the most important of his religious obliga-
tions and which expressed itself as the nameless rabbinical sage, and on
the other hand the practical and spiritual necessities of procreation. This
expresses itself in the restraint on the emotions as warned by Karo’s mag-
gid: while having to entertain conjugal relations, he should be ashamed if
they arouse any pleasure in him.

Sabbatianism and its Spousal Theosis

What is the relationship between shekhinah and spouse in Sabbatianism?
Much is written about Sabbatianism’s sexual excesses, in which cos-
mic eros was performed in the flesh. As I previously mentioned, Moshe
Idel argued that Sabbatianism took “some impetuses” from different
kabbalistic theosophies further than any previous kabbalist ever intended
and interpreted the kabbalistic female and erotic imagery in a non-
metaphorical sense and thus put these interpretations into practice.171
According to Idel, Sabbatians thus uprooted the strict separation between
heavenly and earthly realities. In contrast to Karo and other earlier kab-
balists’ (problematic) differentiation between their cosmic relationship
with their heavenly spouse and the mandatory carnal one with their actual
wives, the Sabbatians aimed their spiritual Eros at actual women.
Like Idel, David Biale has interpreted the sexual behavior of the
Sabbatians as a suspension of earlier spiritualization of sexuality and in
addition emphasized that it was the opposite of the renunciatory tenden-
cies described above. Thus, similarly to Idel, Biale writes: “In its frank
eroticism, Sabbatianism was, then, not so much the direct product of
the Kabbalah as its dialectical negation, in which the urge toward sexual 59

renunciation was turned into its opposite.”172

At first sight, Nathan of Gaza’s messianic rhetoric seems to confirm
Idel and Biale’s argument in that it legitimized this ‘displacement’ of spir-
itual eros to free sexual activity. Nathan claimed that the coming of the
Messiah had redeemed ‘the sense of touch,’ namely sexuality:

The patriarchs came into the world to repair the senses and this they
did to four of them. Then came Sabbatai Tsevi and repaired the fifth,
the sense of touch, which according to Aristotle and Maimonides is
a source of shame to us but which now has been raised by him to a
place of honor and glory.173

Nathan thus claimed that Sabbatai Tsevi redeemed sexuality from its sin-
ful state therewith opening the gate to a greater openness to sexuality.
But how did this “liberation of touch,” as Nathan called it, rhyme
with Nathan’s own tendency toward sexual asceticism? We have seen that
Nathan never put this restoration of touch into action, and there seems
 to be more than personal enmity to the fact that he did everything to rid
the movement of Sarah whose reputation and behavior could not be bet-
ter embodiments of the actual implementation of this notion of the res-
toration of touch. As Liebes has convincingly argued, Nathan was prima-
rily interested in mystical acts upon an unseen reality.
Also the nature of what Sabbatai seems to have understood by this
restoration of touch seemed best represented in the example of his claim
that the betrothed virgins he claimed to have had intercourse with mirac-
ulously remained virgins. Whereas his claim to have had intercourse with
virgins served as a public statement of his messianic act of the restoration
of touch and served the Sabbatian impetus that Sarah presented, Sabbatai
also needed to satisfy the other (and it seems his own) impetus of the
movement by claiming the girls’ virginity had remained intact. Thus,
60 Sabbatai’s ‘restoration’ of touch took place as much on a mystical level as
on that of the physical world.

Epilogue
The Sabbatian movement thus represented both impetuses, one that can
be identified with Nathan and Sabbatai, and for which, to remain with
the previous example, the intercourse with virgins was a reflection of
redemptive actions that took place in that realm where the mystic inter-
acts with the heavenly shekhinah, in which their intact virginity signified
that the true location of this action was not in this physical world. The
other impetus on the other hand, presented by Sarah and all those female
prophetesses in the movement, was oriented toward the earthly realm.
Gershom Scholem has described the sudden influence of the female
metaphor in the form of the female shekhinah, as a “rebellion of images”
in which “the power of images proved to be stronger than the conscious
intent of their authors.”174 Scholem did also offer psychological and his-
torical explanations, but in the end he understood this development as
the resurgence of “the archetypal, primordial image of the female.”175 To
Scholem, therefore, the images of the shekhinah created by kabbalists had
become independent agents that caused the rebellion of Sabbatianism.
That made Scholem the phenomenologist for whom the return of the
shekhinah was an instance of the recurrent manifestation in history of pri-
mordial archetypes, in this case that of the primordial mother.
Arthur Green and Peter Schäfer have criticized this phenomenologi-
cal mechanism. Rather than thinking in terms of primordial archetypes
‘breaking through’ into history, Green and Schäfer return to a traditional
historicist explanation by trying to find which female symbolism exter-
nal to Judaism influenced Jewish mysticism, and found the source for the
emergence of the shekhinah not in the autonomous power of images, but
in contemporary Christian Mariology.176
Also for the specific case of Sabbatianism such theories have been
developed that offer external cultural influences. Matt Goldish’s entire 61

first chapter in his book on the movement describes prophetic move-

ments in the Christian and Muslim worlds contemporary to the
Sabbatian movement, and he consequently places Sabbatianism in this
messianic prophetic context rather than in that of Nathan’s theological
mysticism concerned with cosmic action. Liebes follows a different but
also fundamentally historicist approach by pointing out not the differ-
ences between the Sabbatian movement and its mystical predecessors,
but the continuities between them.
Although Scholem’s phenomenological theory is problematic, his
argument that metaphors and the symbols constructed upon them are
not easily controlled supplies us with the explanatory value that the his-
torical models discussed above lack because each of them restricts its
explanatory scope to the influence of prior or external traditions.177 An
adjustment of Scholem’s model could therefore be useful to explain the
existence of these two conflicting impetuses beyond the argument that
two conflicting cultural influences meet in the Sabbatian movement.
Whereas Scholem assumed that primordial archetypes can break
 through into history and as result can create certain behaviors, metaphors
and their applications can als be seen as sites of contestation. ‘Wife’ and
‘shekhinah’ and the relationship between the two were certainly inter-
preted differently by Sarah on the one hand, and Sabbatai and Nathan
on the other. One therefore has to find out what was at stake for whom
in order to explain why and in which ways certain metaphors were used.
Therefore, the sudden emergence of female and erotic metaphors and,
several centuries later, the sudden suspensions of the distinction between
this divine erotic and feminine on the one hand and on the other gen-
dered and erotic social roles and behavior were not two incremental steps
of a return of the repressed archetype.
In the fact that the Sabbatian movement housed two diametrically
opposed impetuses of dealing with female and erotic metaphors we can
62 see, with Scholem, a form of rebellion, but in contrast to Scholem not a
“rebellion of images” but a “rebellion of interpreters,” thus not a rebel-
lion by non-human archetypes or metaphors but a subversion of a tra-
ditional interpretation by human beings. This rebellion of interpreters
was one that favored the position of women, who were not only histor-
ically excluded from mystical practice but even regarded as occupying
an inferior position vis-à-vis their sacred counterpart, the shekhinah. As
Rapoport-Albert and Goldish have extensively shown, Sabbatianism was
particularly successful among women, and women played a central role
in the prophetic Sabbatian movement. Liebes was correct in noting that
Sabbatai Tsevi and Nathan of Gaza were hardly interested in a change
of status for women, at most they took an interest in it as a byproduct
of the mystical transformation they believed was occurring. Their inter-
est was not sufficient to give the actual queen an important role in the
movement. At the same time, the movement was just as much claimed by
those women whose interests were denied by Nathan and Sabbatai, and
by refusing to be the temporary, this-worldly wife that would be replaced
by the shekhinah in a redemptive future, Sarah decided to be both.
Acknowledgments 63

This project has been made possible thanks to the generous support of
the Menasseh ben Israel Institute in Amsterdam and its director, David
Wertheim, who originally contacted me with the idea and has read and
commented on the entire manuscript. The project has also greatly bene-
fitted from the Summer School 2010 at the Institute of Advanced Studies
at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, led by David Assaf and Haym
Soloveitchik, as well as from conversations with Shlomo Berger, Theodor
Dunkelgrün, Rachel Elior, Moshe Idel, Yosef Kaplan, Tirtsah Levie-
Bernfeld, Pawel Maciejko, Jay Munsch, Ada Rapoport-Albert, Emile
Schrijver, Odette Vlessing, and the helpful staff of the Center for the
Research of Dutch Jewry at the Hebrew University. The responsibility for
the present analysis and its shortcomings is entirely my own.
References
1 There is quite some variety when
it comes to spelling the name of the
Sabbatian movement and its messiah.
‘Sabbatian’ is occasionally also spelled
‘Sabbatean,’ and ‘Tsevi’ has quite a few
alternatives, ‘Sevi’ and ‘Zevi’ being the
most common of them. In regard to my
choice to spell ‘Tsevi’ rather than an
alternative: ‘Tsevi’ is the transliteration
of his name in Hebrew, the language
in which most original documents on
the movement is written, that would be
suggested by the Encyclopaedia Judaica
and is also often used by modern authors.
I have held to ‘Sabbatai’ not because it
is the best transliteration, but because
most authors use this spelling. I have
changed these spellings in quotations
from other sources to avoid annoyance
during reading, but have maintained
original spellings in book and article titles.
Occasionally I have also adapted the style
such as capitalization and the use of italics
of quotations to suit the present style.
2 Gershom Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi: The
Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676, transl.
Zwi Werblowsky, Bollingen series 93
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University
Press, 1973), 129, 191 n. 234. This
English edition is a revised and augmented
translation of the 1957 Hebrew edition:
Shabtai tsevi ve-ha-tenu’ah ha-shabta’it
bi-yame hayav [Sabbatai Tsevi and the
Sabbatian movement during his lifetime]
(Tel Aviv: Am Oved, 1957).
3 On Frankism see Gershom Scholem
who describes Sabbatai Tsevi’s
antinomianism and also that of the
Frankists in his essay “Redemption
Through Sin” in: The Messianic Idea
in Judaism and other Essays on Jewish
Spirituality (New York: Schocken Books,
1971): 78-141. See also Scholem’s essay,
“Jacob Frank and the Frankists” in his
Kabbalah (New York: New American
Library, 1974). Two other good writings
on Frankism are Rachel Elior, “sefer divre
ha-adon le-ya’akov frank: otomitografiyah
mistit, nihilizm dati ve-hazon ha-hirut
ha-meshihi ke-realizatsiyah shel mitus”
(The very different English title is:
“Jacob Frank and his Book The Sayings
of the Lord: Religious Anarchism as a
Restoration of Myth and Metaphor”),
Ha-halom ve-shviro. Ha-tenu’ah ha-
shabta’it u-sheluhoteha: meshihiyut,
shabta’ut u-frankiszm/The Sabbatian
Movement and its Aftermath: Messianism,
Sabbatianism and Frankism, ed. Rachel
Elior (Jerusalem: Institute of Jewish
Studies, 2001), 2: 471-548, and Pawel
Maciejko’s long-awaited The Mixed
Multitude: Jacob Frank and the Frankist
Movement, 1755-1816, Jewish Cultures
and Contexts (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylviania Press, 2011). On the
Dönmeh see Scholem, “The Crypto-
Jewish Sect of the Dönmeh (Sabbatians)
in Turkey,” The Messianic Idea in
Judaism, 142-166; Cengiz Sisman, “A
Jewish Messiah in the Ottoman Court: 65
Sabbatai Sevi and the Emergence of a
Judeo-Islamic Community (1666-1720),
Harvard University Ph.D. Thesis, 2004;
Marc David Baer, The Dönme: Jewish
Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries,
and Secular Turks (Stanford: Stanford
University Press, 2011).
4 Sabbatai Tsevi claimed to have direct
knowledge of the will of God through
the so-called ‘Mystery of the Godhead.’
On this and the relationship between
antinomianism and the Mystery of the
Godhead see Yehuda Liebes, Studies in
Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism.
SUNY Series in Judaica (Albany: State
University of New York Press, 1993), 109-
111.
5 Scholem, Messianic Idea in Judaism,
101.
6 Ada Rapoport-Albert, “Al ma’amad ha-
nashim be-shabta’ut” (on the position of
women in Sabbatianism), The Sabbatian
Movement and its Aftermath, 1: 143-328.
Rapoport-Albert’s English book, which is
based on a translation of this long article,
came out when my manuscript was in
the last revising stages and therefore my
 references to Rapoport-Albert’s argument
are to her article. Rapoport-Albert, Women
and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi
1666-1816 (Oxford: Littman Library of
Jewish Civilization, 2011).
7 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 2005), 232.
8 The classical definition of metaphor
is Aristotle’s. He defines metaphor in
the twenty-first chapter of his Poetics as
“the application of a strange term either
transferred from the genus and applied
to the species or from the species and
applied to the genus, or from one species
to another or else be analogy.” Aristotle,
Aristotle: the Poetics; “Longinus:” On
the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style, transl.
W. Hamilton Fyfe, Loeb Classical Library
(London: Heinemann, 1965), 81.
9 Aristotle wrote: “by far the greatest
thing is the use of metaphor. That alone
cannot be learnt; it is the token of genius.”
66 Aristotle, Aristotle: The Poetics, 91.
10 Philo, Philo, transl. F.H. Colson and
G.H. Whitaker, Loeb Classical Library
(London: Heinemann, 1929), 1: 171.
11 To my knowledge Cardozo did not
mention Sarah at all. See Abraham Miguel
Cardozo, Abraham Miguel Cardozo:
Selected Writings, transl. and ed. David
J. Halperin, The Classics of Western
Spirituality (New York: Paulist Press,
2001).
12 See for more contemporary sources
the biography of Sarah below. Jacob
Sasportas, Tsitsat novel tsevi (Further as:
The Withering of the Flower Tsevi), ed.
Isaiah Tishby (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute,
1954). On Sasportas, see Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 566-572.
13 Jacob Emden, Sefer torat ha-kenot
[The Torah of Zealotry] (Amsterdam:
n.p., 1752). Heinrich Graetz, Geschichte
der Juden von den ältesten Zeiten bis
auf die Gegenwart: aus den Quellen neu
bearbeitet (Leipzig: O. Leiner, 1868), 10:
168-253.
14 The 19th century quest for
personalities behind history was also
central in the quest for the historical
Jesus as attests for Ernest Renan’s Vie
de Jésus (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères,
1863). Renan’s Jesus was a romantic
youth turned dark revolutionary prophet
who was seduced by his contemporaries’
hunger for miracles and by his attraction
to the gullible Galilean maidens.
15 My translation. Graetz, Geschichte der
Juden, 10: 216-217.
16 For an overview of the image of Sarah
in 19th and respectively early 20th century
fiction, see Shmuel Werses, Haskalah
ve-shabta’ut [Enlightenment and
Sabbatianism] (Jerusalem: Magnes, 1988),
and David Biale, “Shabbtai Zvi and the
Seductions of Jewish Orientalism,” The
Sabbatian Movement and its Aftermath: 2:
85*-110* (English section). The works on
which I base my general analysis of fiction
about Sabbatai Tsevi and Sarah are the
following: Scholem Asch, Sabbatai Zevi:
A Tragedy in Three Acts (Philadelphia:
Jewish Publication Society: 1930 (1908));
Nathan Bistritzky, Schabbetai Zewi:
historisches Schauspiel (Jerusalem: n.p.,
1939); S. Meschelssohn, Sabbathey
Zwy: Historische Erzählung aus dem
siebzehnten Jahrhundert, 2 vols (Glogau:
Im Selbstverlage, 1856) (I have not
been able to locate vol. 2); S. Poljakoff,
Sabbatai Zewi: Roman, transl. Z. Holm
(Berlin: Welt-Verlag, 1927); Pordes-Milo,
Der letzte Messias: Tragikomödie in 4
Akten (Berlin: Hugo Bermühlers, 1907);
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, Sabbathai
Zewy und die Judith von Bialopol (Berlin:
R. Jacobsthal, 1886); S. Schachnowitz,
Die Messiasbraut. Die Geschichte einer
verlorenen Hoffnung: Historischer Roman
aus dem 17. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.
Main: Hermon Verlags-Aktiengesellschaft,
1925); Ludwig Storch, Der Jakobsstern.
Messiade. Erster Theil. Der Sternes
Aufgang, oder der Lehrerder Kabbalah
(Frankfuhrt am Main: Sauerländer, 1836);
Felix Theilhaber, Dein Reich Komme!
Ein chiliastischer Roman aus der Zeit
Rembrandts und Spinozas (Berlin: C.A.
Schwetschke & Sohn, 1924); Heinrich
von Maltzan, Der Messias der Juden:
Roman aus der Geschichte des Orients
im siebsehnten Jahrhundert (Oldenburg:
Landsberg, n.d.); Jacob Wasserman,
Die Juden von Zirndorf (Berlin and
Vienna: S. Fischer, new edition 1897).
Israel Zangwill, “The Turkish Messiah,”
Dreamers of the Ghetto (New York and
London: Harper & Brothers, 1924 [1898]),
115-185.
17 Sacher-Masoch, Sabbathai Zewy,
30 (my translation). See on Sacher-
Masoch: David Biale, “Masochism and
Philosemitism: The Strange Case of
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch,” Sexuality
in History, Journal of Contemporary
History 17, no. 2, (April 1982), 305-323.
18 Sacher-Masoch’s source might have
been de la Croix, who calls her Miriam:
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 192 n. 238.
19 Sacher-Masoch, Sabbathai Zewy, 22.
20 Sacher-Masoch, Sabbathai Zewy, 23.
21 Sacher-Masoch, Sabbathai Zewy, 41.
22 Theilhaber, Dein Reich Komme! 155.
23 Joseph Kastein, Sabbatai Zevi. Der
Messias von Ismir (Berlin: E. Rowohlt,
1930). The English translation, from
which I cite, was published a year later
as The Messiah of Ismir: Sabbatai Zevi,
transl. Huntley Paterson (New York:
Viking Press, 1931).
24 Kastein, Messiah of Ismir, 117-118.
25 “[…] ein in die Geheimnisse der
Kabbala früh versunkener jugendlicher
Schwärmer, trat als politischer Agitator
des irdischen Messianismus auf.”
Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum
im osteuropäischen Raum, Reihe
Hintergrundanalysen 36, Archiv
Edition (Viöl, Nordfriesland: Verlag für
ganzheitliche Forschung, 2000) [facsimile
of 1938 edition], 81. I thank Heinz
Mürmel for this reference.
26 Seine Ehe mit einer als Kind aus Polen
entflohenen Jüdin, Sara, die aus einem
Amsterdamer Kloster, wohin sie gebracht
worden war, entwichen war, und die
behauptete, sie sei dem Messias zur Braut
bestimmt […] 81, n. 147.
27 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 193.
28 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 194.
29 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 403.
30 Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth, 93.
See also Liebes, Studies in the Zohar,
SUNY Series in Judaica (Albany:
State University of New York Press,
1993) and Liebes, Sod ha-emunah ha-
shabta’it: kovets ma’amarim [The secret
of the Sabbatian faith: collected essays]
(Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1995).
31 Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth, 95.
32 Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth, 99,
italics in original.
33 In the index of Secret of the Sabbatian
Faith, she, as in many Sabbatian texts,
remains nameless as “Sabbatai Tsevi, wife
of.”
34 Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism;” Women and the
Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi: 1666-
1816.
35 Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University
Press, 2004). 67
36 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 89. The
citation he uses is from Moshe Idel, and
Goldish places it as motto at the beginning
of the chapter on the prophets, the first of
which described is Sarah.
37 The lack of sources creates a dilemma
for writing about Sarah, as shows the
very careful and tentative language of
Rapoport-Albert’s article on women in
Sabbatianism (Rapoport-Albert, “On the
position of Women in Sabbatianism”). A
work on Sabbatianism as social movement
but which does not discuss the issue of
women is by Ya’akov Barnai, shabta’ut:
hebetim hevratiyim [Sabbatianism: Social
Perspectives] (Jerusalem: Shazar Institute,
2000).
38 Religious movements never have
a singular character or can be seen as
represented in a single person, in our case
for instance Sabbatai Tsevi, Sarah the
Ashkenazi or Nathan of Gaza. Rather than
owned, they have multiple and contested
ownerships. They have no innate direction
or purpose, but are fields consisting of a
plurality of more or less interacting forces,
all of which move in different directions.
 From this perspective, the uneducated
young women who prophesied during the
mass movement were not more or less
essential or peripheral to the movement
than the highly gifted Nathan of Gaza.
39 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 194; Goldish,
Sabbatean Prophets, 90.
40 Compare for instance how E.P.
Sanders’ reconstructs the life of Jesus of
Nazareth. Rather than dismissing, like
for example in David Friedrich Strauss’
famous case, the details of the life of Jesus
as purely fictional because of false facts,
he sorts through the different claims made
in the Gospels (mostly the synoptic) by
analyzing factors such as how these related
to the interests of the early Church, and as
a result reconstructs which were probably
authentic biographical facts and which
were not. E.P. Sanders, The Historical
Figure of Jesus (London: Penguin, 1993),
David Friedrich Strauss, Das Leben Jesu
68 (Tübingen: C.F. Osiander, 1835).
41 See the discussion on Amsterdam and
refugees below. In regard to trauma: I
thank Rachel Elior for her suggestion to
look at Sarah in this context.
42 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 192;
Sasportas, Withering, 5; See on Scholem’s
dating above and Sasportas, 4-5; See
Scholem’s argument based on Tishby’s
dating of the first pages of Sasportas:
Scholem, 192 n. 239.
43 I have tried to find traces of Sarah
in the Jewish archives and those of the
civil authorities in the Amsterdams
Gemeentearchief, but have not found
anything.
44 Leib ben Oyzer, Sipur ma’ase shabtai
tsevi: me’et r. layb bar oyzer, Amsterdam
1711-1718 [The Story of Sabbatai
Tsevi], transl. and edited Z. Shazar, ed.
S. Zucker and R. Plesser (Jerusalem:
Shazar Center, 1978), 13. Paul Radensky
has argued that Leyb’s description favors
the Ashkenazi characters in the Sabbatai
Tsevi story, namely Sarah, Nathan, and
the rabbi Nehemiah, who confronts
Sabbatai Tsevi. Paul Ira Radensky, “Leyb
ben Ozer’s “Bashraybung fun Shabsai
Tsvi:” An Ashkenazi Appropriation of
Sabbatianism,” The Jewish Quarterly
Review, New Series, 88, No. ½ (Jul-Oct
1997), 43-56.
45 Jonathan L. Israel, European Jewry
in the Age of Mercantilism 1550-1750
(Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985), 121.
46 In the published version of Leyb’s
manuscript that Scholem studied I have
not found that she was six when she
entered the convent as Scholem claims is
written there. It also states she was fifteen
when she left rather than what Scholem
claims, sixteen. It seems that Scholem’s
claim is likely incorrect since it does not
fit with the overall chronology. Since the
Chmielnicki massacres only six to seven
years had passed before Sarah arrived
in Amsterdam, whereas Scholem’s time
frame suggest a ten year difference. Leib
ben Oyzer, Story, 13 n. 16; Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 194 n. 245. See for another
possibility below.
47 The archives of the Polish community
in Amsterdam reveal that a number of
Jewish refugees from the East, who
settled in Amsterdam had been forcefully
converted to Christianity: Yosef Kaplan,
“Amsterdam and Ashkenazic Migration
in the Seventeenth Century,” Studia
Rosenthaliana 23, no. 2 (Fall 1989),
22-44 (special issue containing the
proceedings of the Fifth International
Symposium on the History of the Jews in
the Netherlands), 39.
48 Leib ben Oyzer, Story, 13-4 (my
translation).
49 Leib ben Oyzer, Story, 15.
50 Matt Goldish suggests that Sarah
was the first person “outside of Sabbatai
and his immediate circle to name him
as the messiah,” but also notes that
Sarah’s mentioning of Sabbatai Tsevi
in her story was also “a central point in
Leyb’s narrative,” two points I find to be
a suspicious couple (Goldish, Sabbatean
Prophets, 93). Goldish bases his argument
on the possibility that Sabbatai’s earliest
messianic claims go back to 1848,
which means they could have arrived in
Amsterdam. It could however also very
well be that the well-disposed collective
memory of the Jews of Amsterdam or
Leyb’s own ambivalent feelings about the
movement he chronicled inserted the name
of Sarah’s future messianic groom in the
prophecy (see for the Sabbatian aftermath
in Amsterdam: Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi,
754-756, 785-786).
51 Unless she had a reason to lie about
her age, Sarah must have been born
around 1640 or earlier, since she said she
was 15 when she left the monastery and
arrived in Amsterdam around 1655. This
makes her at least 8 or 9 years old at the
time that she became separated from her
father, which makes it hard to believe that
she did not know that she had a brother
and that his name was Samuel. I assume
that she would not receive much help from
a six or seven year old and Samuel must
therefore have been born before 1648-
1649.
Another possibility is that Sarah had
not been a victim of the Chmielnicki
massacres at all, but arrived in Amsterdam
as a victim of later pogroms, namely in
what is today Lithuania, which had mostly
escaped the Chmielnicki massacres but
which was attacked by Moscovites allied
to Chmielnicki in 1654-1655. In that
case, Sarah would be a recent victim of a
massacre, and would have invented her
stay in a monastery and the other versions
mentioned below. Between 1655, when
Sasportas met Sarah, and 1666, hundreds
of Jewish refugees from this later
progrom reached Amsterdam, a number
far greater than the earlier refugees from
the Chmielnicki massacres. Kaplan,
“Amsterdam and Ashkenazic Migration,”
37-38. The legendary Chmielnicki
massacres were, for our messianic spouse,
a better narrative than a second, ‘minor’
massacre, and might also have been
conceived when she met a real survivor
of the Chmielnicki massacres, Samuel.
See on the later pogroms Israel, European
Jewry, 122.
52 Kaplan, “Amsterdam and Ashkenazic
Migration,” 28, 39-44. Some who left,
either voluntarily or forced, left for Italy:
44.
53 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 193. About
Sarah’s alleged brother, Samuel, I have
not been able to find much. In 1657 a
wedding took place between a certain
Samuel Meijer (thus Samuel b. Meir)
and a certain Clara Mozes. It is remotely
possible that this is the Samuel we speak
of. Dave Verdooner, Harmen Snel,
Trouwen in Mokum. Joodse Huwelijken
in Amsterdam. 1589-1811 en 1834-1938,
2 vols (The Hague: Warray, 1991), 2: 72.
On Ashkenazi marriages in Amsterdam:
“Of 252 Ashkenazi Jews who married
in Amsterdam between 1635 and 1670
whose places of birth were registered, only
thirty-five, or less than 14 per cent, were
born in Poland or Lithuania. M. Vas Dias,
“Nieuwe bijdragen tot de geschiedenis der
69
Amsterdamsche hoogduitsch-joodsche
gemeente,” Bijdragen en Mededelingen
van het Genootschap voor de Joodsche
Wetenschap in Nederland 6 (1940) 153-
81: 165-6.
54 Sasportas, Withering, 5.
55 Amsterdam and Hamburg were major
tobacco-spinning workshop centers.
There, Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews
worked together, the former in business
positions, the latter as laborers. Israel,
European Jewry, 179.
56 Israel, European Jewry, 113, 197. See
on converso communities in Amsterdam
and Livorno: David B. Ruderman, Early
Modern Jewry: A New Cultural History
(Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2010), 65-74. Ruderman too writes about
the Sabbatian movement and emphasizes
that it was a mass movement that should
be seen in the context of a general Jewish
crisis of authority, which he relates to
the prominent presence of conversos in
important European Jewish centers and
a wider European context of religious
syncretism: 136-158, 163-173.
Sarah’s ‘interdenominational’ migration
is quite interesting, because Amsterdam
 was quite segregated in that aspect. The
Amsterdam Sephardi Jews, as Yosef
Kaplan has pointed out, easily reached
out to Sephardi conversos abroad based
on their emphasis on ‘purity of blood,’
namely the importance they placed
on their shared Iberian kinship. They
however restricted interactions with local
Ashkenazim and did not favor Sephardi-
Ashkenazi marriage alliances. Yosef
Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World
of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam: The
Problem of Exclusion and the Boundaries
of Self-Identity,” Menasseh Ben Israel
and His World, ed. Yosef Kaplan, Henry
Méchoulan, Richard H. Popkin (Leiden:
Brill 1989), 45-62.
57 Sasportas claims she went directly
from Amsterdam to Livorno. Sasportas,
Withering, 5. See Scholem on Ragstatt de
Weile’s report: Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi,
193-194.
70 58 “[…] sy niet onbesproken aengaende
hare eerbaerheyt gegaen is.” Thomas
Coenen, Ydele verwachtinge der Joden
(Amsterdam, n.p.: 1669), 11. Baruch of
Arezzo claimed she had been in Venice as
well (see below).
59 See for a discussion of Baruch’s text
and its title: David J. Halperin, Sabbatai
Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah
(Oxford, Littman Littman Library of
Jewish Civilization, 2007), 21-27.
60 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 91.
61 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 195.
62 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 195;
Sasportas, Withering, 5, 197.
63 Israel, European Jewry, 201.
64 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 31-32.
65 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 32.
66 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 91. The
German version reported by Ragstatt is
close to the Italian version but adds more
fanciful elements. Ragstatt writes that
Sarah claimed that a Polish nobleman
adopted her. On the death of the nobleman
his family wanted to marry her off and
she was miraculously transported not to a
nearby village this time but to Persia, to
where her father had fled and where his
tomb was. From there she was air lifted
to ‘Asia’ where an angel gave her a coat
of skin with divine names (on the coat of
skin see Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 93)
that was to have been Adam’s coat. The
angels told her she would be a queen and
the messiah’s wife (Scholem, Sabbatai
Sevi, 194 n. 245).
67 Halperin points out that this phrase
comes from Proverbs 3:26. Halperin,
Sabbatai Zevi, 33 n. 32.
68 Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 91.
69 According to De la Croix, she traveled
with two matrons. Goldish, Sabbatean
Prophets, 95. Scholem also argues this
claim served to counter rumors. Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 195n. Goldish counters
Scholem stating that De la Croix’s report
“contains more material suggestive of her
unchaste side than Scholem indicates.”
Goldish, 200 n. 14. I do not see this
contradicting Scholem’s suspicion that
the story of the matrons was launched
(by others than De la Croix) to protect
her reputation. The material suggesting
the opposite could have come from other
sources.
70 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 32
71 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 32.
72 J.H. Chajes, Between Worlds:
Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern
Judaism, Jewish Culture and Contexts
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press, 2003), 104-113.
73 Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism,” 159 n. 53.
74 For a discussion on the relationship
between an increasingly negative view of
female bodily religious experience and
claims of witchcraft and possession, see
Chajes, Between Worlds, 5, 183-184 n. 20.
75 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 192.
76 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 193,
Sasportas, Withering, 5.
77 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 404.
78 This observation was made by an
anonymous French cleric. Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 196, 413. See also
Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism,” 266 n. 547.
79 Recent feminist readings do approach
Hosea not only with a critical eye, but also
tend to criticize earlier feminist readings
that observe the negative metaphors
surrounding Gomer but fail to apply a
deconstructive reading that places Gomer
in a new, more positive light, for instance
in Sharon Moughtin-Mumby, Sexual and
Marital Metaphors in Hosea, Jeremiah,
Isaiah and Ezekiel (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008). For an overview
of feminist interpretations of Hosea, and
an interesting critical alternative, see
Alice A. Keefe, Woman’s Body and the
Social Body in Hosea (London: Sheffield
University Press, 2001), 140-161. See also
Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the
Prophet: Hosea’s Marriage in Literary-
Theoretical Perspective, Journal for the
Study of the Old Testament Supplement
Serie 212, Gender, Culture, Theory 2
(Sheffield: Sheffield University Press,
1996), especially 254-322. Sherwood’s
deconstructive reading is fascinating in
the light of how Sarah might have reacted
to her identification with Gomer by other
Sabbatians.
80 Scholars are divided if this “woman”
refers to Gomer or someone else, but we
will assume the Sabbatians interpreted her
as identical with Gomer.
81 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 112. My
argument very much benefitted from
several sessions by Ada Rapoport-Albert
on asceticism in the Jewish tradition: Her
Female Bodies, Male Souls: Asceticism
and Gender in the Jewish Tradition
(Oxford: Littman Library of Jewish
Civilization) is to appear in 2012. On
earlier asceticism in Judaism, especially
in regard to sexuality see E. Diamond,
“Hunger Artists and Householders: The
Tension Between Asceticism and Family
Responsibility among Jewish Pietists
in Late Antiquity,” Union Seminary
Quarterly Review, 48 (1996), 28-47.
82 It is also possible that the marriage
was never consummated at all, and the
child was not really Sabbatai’s.
83 Quoted (with brackets) in Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 113.
84 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 113.
85 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 158. In
this edition ‘meagerly’ is misspelled as
‘meagrely.’ On Cuenque and his text see
147-155.
86 See Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth
and Jewish Messianism, 107-113.
Scholem doubts whether this mystery
already existed or was fully developed in
1648. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 862.
87 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 133-134.
88 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 143, 151.
89 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 161. Scholem
argues that the fish symbolized the
redemption of Israel, which was to take
place under the astrological sign of pisces.
90 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 206-207.
91 Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position
of Women,” 263; Goldish, Sabbatean
Prophets, 94.
92 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 33.
93 Halperin Sabbatai Zevi, 63, 74. 71
94 Halperin Sabbatai Zevi, 166, see also
180-181.
95 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 37.
96 Halperin Sabbatai Zevi, 180. See for
another confirmation of Sabbatai from the
grave: 181.
97 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 163.
98 Halperin points out that Cuenque’s
language is from the Talmud Bavli Ta’an
31a, where marrying an unattractive girl
is presented as charity. Halperin, Sabbatai
Zevi, 163 n. 65.
99 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 36.
100 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 164.
101 Liebes, Jewish Myth and Jewish
Messianism, 102.
102 Coenen, Ydele Verwachtinge, 32.
103 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 161.
104 Sasportas, Withering, 11. This term is
also used in kabbalistic writings to refer to
the shekhinah, a meaning that will become
important below.
105 This is Werblowsky’s less literal
but more logical translation. Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 273-274. A literal
translation would suggest that Sarah
would be queen anywhere but in
 Jerusalem. Sasportas, Withering, 12. The
content of the letter as communicated
throughout the Jewish world did not stay
the same. In a letter from Yosef Ha-Levi to
Hosea Naneto Ha-Levi writes that tihiyeh
shafhah rivkah huts le-yerushalayim)
(outside of Jerusalem she will be the
servant): Sasportas, 193.
106 Avraham Elkayam recently suggested
that Nathan cherished homosexual
feelings for Sabbatai: Avraham Elqayam,
“Lada’at mashiah – ha-diyalektikah shel
ha si’ah ha-mini be-haguto ha-meshihi
shel natan azati” [To know the Messiah:
The dialectics of sexual discourse in the
messianic thought of Nathan of Gaza],
Tarbits – Rev’on le-mada’e ha-yehadut 65
no. 4 (1996), 637-670: 670.
107 Moses had no daughter named
Rebecca, but perhaps – this might be
part of a Zoharic or aggadic tradition I
am not familiar with. However, this is
72 not likely because Scholem contrasts this
“strange detail” with the other details of
the prophecy as apocalyptic legends of the
midrash and Zohar: Scholem, Sabbatai
Sevi, 289. Sasportas has the best Hebrew
text since it is edited and commented by
Tishby: Sasportas, Withering, 7-12: 11-12.
108 On matronita as zoharic term: Idel,
Kabbalah and Eros, 140-141; on the
use of matrona and matronita: see Elliot
Wolfson, Circle in the Square: Studies
in the Use of Gender in Kabbalistic
Symbolism (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995),
82. “Matronita” means in Aramaic
“matron, queen, lady.”
109 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 59. See also
on Sabbatai Tsevi compared to Moses as
messiah in Sabbatian writings: Scholem
584-586. According to Liebes, Sabbatai
Tsevi compared himself to Moses as a
lawgiver, thus holding “the authority to
hand down God’s Torah to the people of
Israel enabled Sabbatai Tsevi to revoke the
Torah.” Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth,
112.
110 Scholem’s interpretation is more
careful: “Is this merely the free play of
Nathan’s imagination, or a veiled criticism
of Sabbatai’s wife, whose premarital
behavior had given rise to unedifying
rumors?” Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 289.
111 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 197
(brackets in Scholem).
112 According to Scholem, the letter had
become widely known by the end of 1665.
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 290. Sasportas
wrote (mockingly) about the letter to
Aharon Tsarfati and to Rafael Sofino in
January 1666: Sasportas, Withering, 37,
70.
113 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 192;
Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism,” 263; Sasportas
4. Scholem mentions this in the body
text as evidence that Sarah did not take
“any initiative in the movement. As a rule
she merely followed the example of her
husband, even to the extent of sending
letters to her friends and signing them
with the symbolic name that Nathan had
bestowed upon the messiah’s wife […]” In
the footnote of this text however Scholem
writes that “she thus usurped the title
of the messiah’s consort which Nathan
had reserved for “Rebecca, the daughter
of Moses.” Rapoport-Albert criticizes
Scholem for the remark in the body text:
Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism,” 263. At the
Sabbatian court she was called ‘matrona.’
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 839, 885 n. 147.
114 Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women,” 262-263.
115 Giacomo Saban, “Sabbatai Sevi as
Seen by a Contemporary Traveler,” Jewish
History 7 no. 2 (Fall 1993), 105-118: 113.
116 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 413;
Coenen, Ydele verwachtinge, 15.
117 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 75.
118 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 404;
Sasportas, Withering, 80; Sarah’s room:
Scholem, 387. Scholem disagrees with
Rosanes and thinks the source, a former
believer’s testimony written down by
Moses b. Isaac b. Habib, is authentic.
At the same time, Scholem states that
Habib was “a sworn enemy of the
movement” which does not plead for the
trustworthiness of the story. Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 387.
119 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 396-397.
120 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 433, 448.
121 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 454-456.
122 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 670.
123 Before describing the Sabbatian
movement, Goldish dedicates an entire
chapter to describing prophecy in the
Christian, Muslim and Jewish world.
Scholem also already suggested influences
from or contact with Christian and Muslim
prophetic movements, namely the French
Camisards, Quakers and Dervishes
(Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 418-419,
547-548, 836-837). For an example of the
typical content of a Sabbatian prophecy,
see Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 420-422.
124 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 419.
125 Scholem suggests this was related
to Sarah’s reputation but is also forced
to admit that there is too much evidence
of transgressive sexual behavior
for “dismissing the accusation too
summarily.” Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 670.
126 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 670. On
Moses Hagiz: Scholem, 181-182.
127 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 670-671.
128 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 678, 681.
Scholem points out that among Marranos,
Jews publically living as Christians but in
secret continuing their Jewish practices,
the story of Esther was popular to explain
and justify their Christian behavior.
Scholem, Messianic Idea in Judaism, 95.
See for two recent interpretations of the
conversion Liebes, Secret of the Sabbatian
Faith, 20-34, and David Halperin,
“Sabbatai Zevi, Metatron, and Mehmed:
Myth and History in Seventeenth-Century
Judaism,” The Seductiveness of Jewish
Myth: Challenge or Response, ed. by S.
Daniel Breslauer, SUNY Series in Judaica:
Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion
(Albany: State University of New York
Press, 1997), 271-308.
129 Sasportas, Withering, 262.
130 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 684; Sisman,
“A Jewish Messiah in the Ottoman Court,”
134.
131 Although Scholem emphasizes that
the movement for many years was quite
influential despite the efforts to ban it, and
Liebes, as discussed above, regards this
popular phase of the movement irrelevant
in comparison to the until the 19th century
lasting esoteric Sabbatian movement.
132 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 193.
Scholem’s source is Leyb ben Ozer.
133 Maciejko, The Mixed Multitude.
134 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 685, 835.
135 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 835;
Rapoport-Albert, “On women in
Sabbatianism,” 264.
136 Liebes, Secret of the Sabbatian
Faith, 279-280, n. 68. See also Rapoport-
Albert, “On the Position of Women in
Sabbatianism,” 264 for a discussion of this
debate.
137 Sabbatai Tsevi declares himself the
“divine androgyne in his being” when
converting to Islam. Elliot Wolfson, “The
Engenderment of Messianic Politics: 73
Symbolic Significance of Sabbatai Sevi’s
Coronation,” Toward the Millenium.
Messianic Expectations from the Bible to
Waco, ed. Peter Schäfer, Mark R. Cohen
(Leiden: Brill, 1998), 203-258: 246.
138 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 848.
139 On Jacob Najara and his report, see
Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 124-128; citation
from 134.
140 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 135 n. 57.
141 Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi, 135-136.
142 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 849, Talmud
Bavli, Yev. 63b., San. 100b: the prescribed
cure is divorce: Halperin, Sabbatai Zevi,
135.
143 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 850. My
suggestion that the divorce was the
result of elaborate plotting runs against
Scholem’s reading of the events. Scholem
thought that the decision to divorce
must have been made shortly before the
divorce itself, since Sarah had conceived
somewhere in the Spring (she gave birth
by the end of the year to a daughter).
Scholem thus assumed that first, Sabbatai
would not have marital relations while
plotting his divorce and, second, that
 despite the sexual practices occurring
at the court, the child must have been
Sabbatai’s. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 851.
On p. 886 Scholem writes that Sarah bore
Sabbatai a daughter in 1672. I assume that
this is a mistake. If it is not, Scholem’s
argument above becomes irrelevant.
144 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 851;
Rapoport-Albert, “On the Position of
Women in Sabbatianism,” 264 n. 540.
145 Sasportas, Withering, 78.
146 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 851.
147 In 1671, in the year that Sabbatai had
divorced Sarah, a certain Sarah Meijer
served as the witness in Amsterdam for
Sarah Abraham in Haarlem to Jabob Rietti
from Venice. Because of the distance
and the fact that Sarah was pregnant it
is unlikely that this Sarah Meijer is our
Sarah. If this is true however, this would
be an interesting fact because it would
mean that Sarah stood in contact with
74 the Jews from Amsterdam and that she,
despite the apostasy, was considered
attractive as witness. See on the role
of converts in religious services in the
Sephardi community in Amsterdam:
Kaplan, “Political Concepts in the World
of the Portuguese Jews of Amsterdam.”
148 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 851.
149 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 877.
150 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 884.
151 Scholem states that Baruch of
Arezzo’s argument that Sarah died before
the banishment was incorrect: Scholem,
Sabbatai Sevi, 885 n. 147.
152 In the Dönmeh tradition she was
remembered by the name of Jocheved.
Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 887-889.
153 As pointed out by Halperin, Sabbatai
Zevi, 181-182. On Cuenque and his text:
147-155.
154 In his Major Trends in Jewish
Mysticism (3rd revised edition, New York:
Schocken, 1961), Scholem unequivocally
stated that the “long history of Jewish
mysticism shows no trace of feminine
influence (37).
155 Although scholars such as Moshe
Idel and David Biale have shown that
transformations in female and erotic
discourses and practices during the late
Middle Ages and the Early Modern
period are far more varied and complex
than I describe here and could be seen as
taking place over a far longer historical
period, my description does provide
the correct background for the issues of
mystical traditions on which the Sabbatian
movement was constructed.
156 By stating that female and erotic
symbolism acquired a greater role in
Jewish mysticism in this period, I do not
mean that female and erotic symbolism
did not play any role in Judaism – mystical
and otherwise – before this period. For
this topic in earlier periods see for the
Biblical period until early Kabbalah: Peter
Schäfer, Mirror of His Beauty: Feminine
Images of God from the Bible to the Early
Kabbalah (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2002) and the controversial but
still relevant Raphael Patai, The Hebrew
Goddess (New York: Avon Books, 1967).
On sexuality in the Talmudic period see
Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel: Reading
Sex in Talmudic Culture, New Historicism:
Studies in Cultural Poetics (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1995). See
also Elliot Wolfson, Circle in the Square.
The most accessible overview of Eros,
including feminine symbolism is David
Biale’s concise Eros and the Jews: From
Biblical Israel to Contemporary America
(New York: BasicBooks, 1992).
157 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 86-89.
158 Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, 69.
159 Benjamin Sommer, The Bodies of
God and the World of Ancient Israel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 126-128.
160 Scholem, “Shekhinah: The Feminine
Element in Divinity.” Mystical Shape of
the Godhead, 140-196. Peter Schäfer,
“Daughter, Sister, Bride and Mother:
Images of the Femininity of God in the
early Kabbala,” Journal of the American
Academy of Religion 68, no. 2 (June
2000), 221-242: 223-224. Although the
shekhinah is commonly identified with the
lowest sefira Malkhut, it should be noted
that shekhinah is also associated with
the only other female sefira. According
to Elliot Wolfson, the identification of
malkhut and shekhinah is restricted to
the ‘lower’ shekhinah, whereas the sefira
Binah is the higher shekhinah. Wolfson,
Circle in the Square, 99. See also Schäfer,
226. See on matronita Schäfer, 227. See
on the history of the term, especially in
the change in which it is used from the
12th century: Arthur Green, “Shekhinah,
the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs:
Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol
in Historical Context,” AJS Review 26
(2002), 1-52: 17-18.
161 Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, 71.
162 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 400-401.
163 Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 401. This
was an old Castilian love song that was
popular among the Spanish exiles in
Turkey. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 400.
164 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 114. This of
course does not mean that before Safed’s
mysticism the minds of Jewish mystics
were able to strictly separate religious
gendered symbolism and the gender of
sexual issues in their private lives. In the
Safed period however, this relationship
became an issue that was felt one needed
to deal with.
165 Idel strongly protests against
this interpretation I base on Biale and
Werblowsky’s argument. Biale and
Werblowsky describe this process in terms
of a development of (sexual) asceticism
and Idel argues that their use of this
term is ‘unqualified’ and that the tension
between sexuality and their religious
duties is (here he refers to Werblowsky’s
case) based on a “latent Christian
axiology transferred to the Kabbalists’
self-awareness, creating an alleged
cognitive dissonance between their life
and thought.” (Idel, Kabbalah and Eros,
224-226). It seems to me however that in
his criticism it is Idel who holds on to a
latent axiology, namely one that values
Jewish attitudes toward sexuality over
that of Christians. This axiology is the
discursive dichotomy between sexually
healthy Judaism and Christian anxiety
about sexuality that I mentioned before. It
is precisely writers such as Werblowsky
and Biale who attempt to abandon an
essentialist differentiation between
Judaism and Christianity by emphasizing
that Jewish attitudes toward women,
sexuality, female pleasure throughout
Jewish history were not less complex,
highly varied and problematic than in
Christianity.
166 R.J. Zwi Werblowsky, Joseph Karo,
Lawyer and Mystic, Scripta Judaica 4
(London: Oxford University Press, 1962),
136. The brackets are from Werblowsky’s
text.
167 The notion of two wives originates
in the Zohar: According to the Zohar, one
female is not sufficient for a righteous
man; he must be “adorned by two females:
(I, 50a) his wife and the shekhinah.”
Liebes, Studies in the Zohar, 72-73. 75
168 Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, 137.
169 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 109-113.
170 Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, 112-
115. It should be noted that the present
transmigration into a female body was the
result of a punishment: ‘soulmates’ can
only be of a different gender (113).
171 Moshe Idel, Kabbalah and Eros, 232.
172 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 119.
173 Scholem, “Redemption Through
Sin,” 117.
174 Scholem, On the Mystical Shape of
the Godhead, 146-147.
175 Scholem, Mystical Shape , 160ff.
176 Green, “Shekhinah, the Virgin
Mary, and the Song of Songs;” Schäfer,
“Daughter, Sister, Bride and Mother.”
177 See for a profound criticism of
the historical sciences’ exclusion of the
‘new’ in history: Cornelius Castoriadis,
l’Institution imaginaire de la société
(Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).
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