Ebook: Sabbatai Ṣevi The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676

Cover; Title; Copyright; Dedication; TABLE OF CONTENTS; LIST OF PLATES; TABLE OF TRANSLITERATION; PREFACE; INTRODUCTION TO THE PRINCETION CLASSICS EDITION; 1 THE BACKGROUND OF THE SABBATIAN MOVEMENT; I Historical and sociological explanations of the Sabbatian movement and their deficiencies; II Messianism in Jewish history and its two conflicting tendencies: the catastrophic-utopian and the rationalistic forms; III The messianic idea in the kabbalah; IV Lurianic kabbalah and its myth of exile and redemption; V The historical role and social significance of Lurianic kabbalah.;Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai Ṣevi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai Ṣevi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi details Ṣevi's rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem's work to a new generation of readers.