From Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevis Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian

Movement

Ontwerp: mv levievandermeer Isbn: 978-90-815860-5-4 Menasseh ben Israel Instituut/ Alexander van der Haven. Alle rechten voorbehouden. Niets uit deze uitgave mag worden verveelvoudigd, opgeslagen in een geautomatiseerd gegevensbestand, of openbaar gemaakt in enige vorm of op enige wijze, hetzij elektronisch, mechanisch, door fotokopien, opnamen of enige andere manier, zonder voorafgaande schriftelijke toestemming van de uitgever. Menasseh ben Israel Instituut/ Alexander van der Haven. All rights reserved. Nothing from this publication may be reproduced, stored in an automated database or published in any form or in any manner, either electronically or mechanically, by photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the publishers prior consent.

From lowly metaphor to divine flesh

Alexander van der Haven

Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevis Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement

Menasseh ben Israel Instituut Studies nr. 7 Amsterdam 2012, Menasseh ben Israel Instituut

Table of Contents The metaphors rebellion in the Sabbatian movement Imagining Sarah, imagining Sabbatianism The life of a messianic spouse (c. 1640-1674) Livorno: Birth of a sexual Sarah The prostitute and the ascetic mystics Earthly queen, heavenly shekhinah A debaucherous prophetess Donning the turban Sarahs gender and female and erotic symbolism in Jewish mysticism From Eros to sexuality: The shekhinah and female bodies Sabbatianism and its Spousal Theosis Epilogue Acknowledgments References Selected Bibliography

9 13 23 27 31 40 44 47 53 56 58 60 63 65 77

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, which probably took place in Cairo at the house of Raphael Joseph, the representative of Egyptian Jewry to the government, was not a usual wedding.2 The bride had for years claimed to be destined to marry the messiah, 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 himself 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 movements indefatigable prophet Nathan Ashkenazi (1643-1680), better known as Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatais 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 Dnmeh sect.3 Although Sabbatais apostasy had undoubtedly a radicalizing influence on the movement, it was not the sole cause of its later antinomian character. In part because of Sarah, the Sabbatian movement was enmeshed in controversy years before Sabbatai Tsevis conversion to Islam. To begin with, Sarahs 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 movements opponents. However, rather than being an impediment, Sarahs 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 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 destruction of the Temple now as days of joyousness because the messianic era had begun.5 Another effect of this messianism was the movements apparent liberation of women from their halakhically submissive and sexually restricted role, as has been convincingly argued by Ada RapoportAlbert 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 movements 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 Sarahs conversion to Islam.

Portrait of Sabbatai Tsevi in Coenens Ydele verwachtinge (1669), according to Coenen an actual portrait sketched in Smyrna.

The Metaphors 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 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 metaphors of an encounter between the religious practitioner and an aspect of the Godhead. The Sabbatian movements antinomianism expressed itself in two diametrically opposed attitudes toward earthly existence during the lifetime of Sabbatai Tsevi (1626-1676). The first, heavenly attitude, represented by the movements main prophet and the young Sabbatai Tsevi, regarded earthly existence and ones actions in it as a mere shadow, a playfield of metaphors, of the divine invisible world to which ones actions should be oriented. The second, this-worldy, attitude denied this hierarchical distinction between the earthly and heavenly realms and instead regarded

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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 religious 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 mystics 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 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 typical of the Western, mostly Platonic, philosophical and religious tradition.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 attitude is the foundational exegetical approach toward Scripture by Philo of Alexandria (c.30 BCE - c.50 CE), who emphasized that the anthropomorphic 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 Gods human creation for the actual physical breath of a human-like creator was for Philo an offense to Gods 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 Philos 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 hierarchy was challenged, a challenge that culminated in claims by thinkers 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 heavenly object from the sexual female body was reversed. Although initially Sabbatai Tsevi displayed the same aversion as his mystical predecessors to fulfill his sexual obligations to his wives and was divorced twice after failing 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 movement during the messianic reign of Sabbatai Tsevi, as well as her influence 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 collapse of metaphor back into its object, thus locating feminine, divine

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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 nonmetaphoric 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 considered 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 minority of scholars such as Rapoport-Albert have begun to think of her as more than a colorful but insignificant player in a movement, a movement habitually characterized as ultimately concerned only with the divine and therefore metaphorical wife and queen in the form of the socalled 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 eventual domination of the antinomian element in the movement. The contemporary 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 character and as a result changed the way spiritual and material realities were related to one another. The fact that reports of both marital and scandalous sexual activities at the court invariably coincided with Sarahs presence at Sabbatais 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. Sarahs refusal to abide by the submissive role prescribed to her by the Jewish mystical traditions on which the Sabbatian movement was constructed therefore directly contributed to the to reiterate Idels phrasing 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 fostered 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 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 attention either in Sabbatian or antiSabbatian 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 heydays of the mid-1660s. Sabbatians such as Abraham Miguel Cardozo, a Title page of Schachnowitz, prolific writer and aspiring messianic Die Messiasbraut (Frankfurt,1925).

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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 illustration of the movements 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 Sarahs 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-denying 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 such as Gershom Scholem and Yehuda Liebes tried to avoid this essentialization 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 mystics 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 Sarahs 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 Sarahs nineteenth century resurrection within scholastic circles was 1868, when Heinrich Graetz wrote the first modern history of the Sabbatian movement largely based on Jacob Emdens 1752 (quite selective) edition of sources about the Sabbatian movement.13 Writing in the age where the passions of heroes and villains were important 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 movements 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 Sarahs female force and its role for the movement served his dismissal of the movement he despised, for others 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 messianic 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 the passive otherworldly Jewish tradition. She comes to represent a thisworldly, 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 sultan 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 chastising him physically. 17 Whereas Sabbatais 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 continuous agony for your desiring senses.19

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Aside from the fact that it is Sarah who declares Sabbatai messiah, it is interesting to see how Sacher-Masochs Sarah exercises power over Sabbatai and drives him to action. Because of her combination of aggressive attitude and sexual rejection, Sabbatais lust is finally aroused, and Sacher-Masochs 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 womans cold indifference excites him more than her surrender.20 Sabbatais 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 character of sexuality and sin:
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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-Masochs 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-Masochs Sarah redeems Sabbatai through sexuality, in womens rights proponent Felix Theilhabers 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, disappoint (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 Kasteins 1930 Sabbatai Zevi: Der Messias von Ismir.23 Kastein suggests that Sarahs 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 transformed 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 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 brilliant 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 Judaisms 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

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subtly connect her to the success of what Seraphim regarded as the thisworldly 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 Sabbatais transformation from a youthful 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 followers after Sabbatais arrival in Jerusalem, with the more base motives of the local Jews who saw in Sabbatais connections to Egypts Jewry a welcome alternative to the Polish monetary sources that had dried up because of the massacres in Poland. To Sabbatais 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 she was brought and claimed to be destined to marry the Messiah [].26 Given the economical motives Seraphim attributed to Sabbatais new followers in Jerusalem, it must for him not have been her claim to be predestined to marry the messiah that added to Sabbatais status, but the local Jews association of her Polish background with money. Even Sabbatai Tsevis 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 Sabbatais public declaration to be the messiah. When according to Scholem Sabbatai heard about Sarahs 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 hearts most secret dreams and wishes.27 This is a description of a turning point in Sabbatai Tsevis 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 Scholems occasional lapse into romanticism, his biography of Sabbatai Tsevi, published in 1957 in Hebrew and in 1973 as a second edition, this time in English, brought about a new paradigm for, or rather against, Sarahs 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, Sabbatais 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 insignificant. Speculating for instance whether Sarah could have played a role in Sabbatais positive attitude toward the participation of women in religious practices, Scholem argued that we should be wary of attributing too much to her influence. Scholem located Sabbatais feminism, as Scholem called Sabbatais advocacy for female participation, not in Sarahs influence but rather in the workings of the aforementioned kabbalistic 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 Scholems refusal to even consider Sarahs influence on Sabbatais reforms in regard to women for his interpretation of the nature of the Sabbatian movement is typical of Scholems 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 Scholems student Yehuda Liebes, one of the foremost contemporary scholars of Sabbatianism. Liebes not only, like Scholem, focuses on the movements intellectual (i.e. male) background, but he also dismisses theories that assume that the Sabbatian movement was in any significant

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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 political redemption.30 Although Liebes distances himself from this theory, from our perspective his work is nevertheless a continuation of Scholems new direction, disparaging Sarahs influence as well. The example from Scholems work above about Sabbatais advocacy for female participation in religious rituals suggests that although the outcome of Sabbatais beliefs might have been political, for Scholem, too, the earthly consequences of his beliefs were a side-effect of an orientation to a spiritual realm. 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 mistakenly considered it a traditional messianic movement. It was the hard core that produced Sabbatian texts and who continued the movement after Sabbatai Tsevis 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 sideeffect 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 movement 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 Scholems understanding of Sabbatais feminism given above is telling: in Scholems view, a mystic 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 insignificant 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 Sarahs position in the movement must have been related to the movements emancipatory ethos toward female participation.34 In The Sabbatean Prophets (2004) Goldish presented Sarah as one of the main prophets of a movement 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 Gazas theological foundations of the movement, traditionally seen as its true engine, as in itself insufficient to explain a mass movement.36 Instead Goldish claims the movements prophets as the true carriers of the movement and presents Sarah as one of its most prominent ones. Rapoport-Albert also places

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importance on the role of female prophets Sarah among them in the movement, and emphasizes its earthly effect, namely the movements 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 movement itself. Goldish and Rapoport-Albert regard Sarahs 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 with the Godhead. In all these readings of this immensely complex history, Sarahs 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 impetuses, and Sarahs 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 Sarahs 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 Sarahs attitudes and the more spiritual inclinations of both Nathan and the young Sabbatai will show, Sarahs 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 thisworldly impetus and in doing so she left an unmistakable mark on the movement. After reconstructing Sarahs 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 Sarahs 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 mystics actual wife and ones sexual duties toward her. In the Sabbatian movement this conflict returns in the two impetuses described above. 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 journeys 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 respectively 1674 and 1676. A social restriction is also made, namely by remaining 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 Sarahs life before her marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi are scarce and untrustworthy. Of her early life several versions are extant,

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and, as Scholem pointed out, these circulated after 1666 and were therefore likely colored by the events after those they purport to record. As result, Scholem has called the versions of Sarahs 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 Sarahs 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 cannot 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 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, including Amsterdam, that were not always welcoming to the refugees from the East. It also shows the development of Sarahs religious identity.41 The earliest report of Sarahs 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 intelligence, 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 including Leybs 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, pragmatism or a combination of the two, she needed a nonspecific and therefore 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 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 fathers hands on her arm, marks that according to witnesses whom Leyb ben

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Oyzer argued to be trustworthy, were still visible years later. After local Jews found her, they helped her leave Poland: The funeral visitors 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 messiah, 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, Leybs 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 Sarahs 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 kinship was conceived in Amsterdam, enabled by Sarahs ambiguity about her background, her skilful adaptability and the desire of an earlier refugee to be rejoined with his lost kin. These two fabrications (and it is not important whether these were deliberate or unconscious), namely her fathers prophecy about her marriage to the messiah and his words about her brother, served two different functions in Amsterdam. Her fathers prophecy of her messianic marriage served to proleptically justify her religious career, while the mentioning of her brother in Amsterdam, somewhat of an anti-climax after her fathers 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 Amsterdams 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 Sarahs absence from police files suggest that her ingenuity helped her to escape this fate, at least for a while. Despite its imaginary nature, Sarahs kinship with Samuel was a lasting 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 Sabbatais apostasy, where he, at least according to Leyb ben Ozer, hence became known 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 specific her ascent from the poorer Ashkenazic community to the generally 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 ingratiated herself with this community, which consequently helped her establish her in her next haven, Livorno, whose Jewish community was overwhelmingly Portuguese and controlled nearly the entire business of this Mediterraneans chief port after the Thirty Years War.56 But she might not have traveled directly from Amsterdam to Livorno,

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Front page Coenens Ydele verwachtinge (Amsterdam, 1669). Jewish National Library, Jerusalem.

nor once she arrived there, have succeeded to immediately land in better financial or social circumstances than when she came to Amsterdam. She reportedly 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 earliest 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 chastity.58

The sexual nature of the last rumor was not an individual incident. About her stay in Italy three new elements surface in Sarahs behavior and selfpresentation 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 Arezzos Zikaron le-vene Israel (Memorial to the Children of Israel).59 In Baruch of Arezzos 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 Sarahs new situation and the needs of her audience. Whereas the Amsterdam Jews were told that Amsterdam was Sarahs midstation to the messiah, in Italy it became Livorno. The second change in Sarahs behavior and self-presentation is of a sexual nature. The rumor Coenen had heard was not the only one circulating 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 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 significant 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

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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 messiahs 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 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 Arezzos story of Sarahs life, a small detail about what occurred after her stay in Livorno also betrays the authors 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 Sarahs 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 fathers 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 Baruchs 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 (15421620) 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 daughter of Rabbi Anav, a girl whose name remains unknown.72 But Sarahs alleged ability to read the future and past of peoples 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 Sarahs 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 religious experiences generally, resulting in accusations of witchcraft and possession.74 Despite this negative attitude of Frances and those of similar attitude, the Sabbatian movement would become a mass movement in which female prophets played a central role, and Sarahs position in the court played a significant role in this. The Prostitute and the Ascetic Mystics The next step in Sarahs biography is her marriage to Sabbatai Tsevi. Notorious for her sexual behavior, Sarah married someone known

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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 Nathans sexual abstinence, and how does this attitude rhyme with Sabbatais wish to marry a woman representing the opposite? 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 messiah.75 Scholem therefore supported Sasportas claim that Sabbatai Tsevi already believed himself to be the messiah before he heard of the beauty who claimed she would marry the messiah.76 But there seems to have been more than Sarahs reputed claim to be destined to marry the messiah that made her attractive to Sabbatai Tsevi. Scholems suggestion that Sabbatai Tsevi had found in Sarah a soulmate is highly unlikely. As shortly will become clearer from our analysis of Sabbatai and Nathans attitude toward and practices of spousal relations, not much romanticism was to be expected from the messiah from Smyrna. Scholem also suggested that Sabbatais marriage to a woman of ill repute should be seen in the context of Sabbatais later promise to liberate women from the curse of Eve. This seems more likely, although a far less positive reading offers itself that reflects Sabbatais 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 qualifications 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 Constantinople 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 abandon 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 wife who not only reputedly practiced the sins Hosea identified with the abandonment of ones God, but who also claimed to have been raised among Christians. Sabbatais view of Hoseas marriage to a licentious woman therefore does not necessarily reflect his noble intentions toward the second sex, as many modern feminist readings also have pointed out in regard to Hoseas motives.79 Rather the opposite was the case because Hoseas Gomer is told not to continue her whoredoms. In Hosea 3, which returns to Gods 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 fornicating or marrying; even I [shall not cohabit] with you (Hosea 3:3). Sabbatai, having proven not to be very capable of or willing to consummate 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 symbol of his fallen people, and one in which the wife is chastised by not

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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 Sabbatais background in regard to sexuality, and to that of Nathan of Gazas, Sabbatai Tsevis prophet and Sarahs nemesis. For both, as will become clear, sexual asceticism, in specific the discipline of sexual abstinence rather than disciplined sexual activity, was an important practice, which makes Sabbatais 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, 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 Naamah, 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 Naamah, 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 Tsevis life. In translation from the original Dutch: 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.

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sexual but seemed to have been directed at a general regiment that was oriented toward solitary existence undisturbed by social or bodily pleasures. Abraham Cuenque, the eloquent money raiser from Hebron, wrote about Sabbatais 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 torment 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 brothers and his fathers 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

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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 following 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 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 references to Gods commandment to marry and reproduce. The young Sabbatai Tsevis 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 Nathans recognition of Sabbatai as the messiah was the beginning of the movement. Goldish and Rappaport-Albert, however, 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 Tsevis name was added later to Sarahs prophecies. In terms of their character and the religious roles they carved out for themselves, 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 suchand-such a sin, in such-and-such a place, on such-and-such a day. Portrait of Nathan of Gaza (anonymous, 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 mans spirit], and a voice would arise from the grave and speak with him as he pleased.94 Like Sarahs, Nathans 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,

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Sabbatai Tsevi. Sarah claimed to be destined to marry him while reading Valles roots of his soul. Nathan became Sabbatais prophet and discovered 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 Sabbatais 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 of Sabbatai Tsevi, Nathans role was of a very different character. No sexual notoriety clung to his reputation. Rather, his image was the opposite. 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, praying in tears.97 Although the marriage reportedly did produce children, the wedding seems to have suited Nathans 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 rabbis in Nathans circle, specifically when it came to sexuality, is illustrated by the following incident: Baruch of Arezzo reports that one night, Nathan and the rabbis 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 pleasure 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 prey to Liliths nightly overtures. The wife Nathan married was in contrast 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 wifes side. Rather the reverse was the case: Nathans 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 marriage seemed to have changed Sabbatais 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 sexual practices. Although Nathan legitimized Sabbatais sexually transgressive 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 Sabbatais other controversial acts. Indeed as close to the messiah as he is generally taken to be, Nathan remained an outsider to the

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Sabbatian court. Nathan, then, seems to have played the ascetic, nonsexual, non-transgressive prophet to a messiah who during his reign over the Sabbatian court came to represent the opposite. In his 1670 Sefer ha Beria (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 versus 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 Sarahs camp. Earthly Queen, Heavenly Shekhinah About the couples 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 Sarahs role in the early movement was truly that of a queen is demonstrated by a revelation Nathan distributed and by Sarahs 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 mythical 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 important 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 was resuscitated and that [today] the aforementioned rabbis predestined 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 Nathans prophecy is quite revealing 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 elements 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 Sabbatais present wife thus Sarah would be demoted and replaced by Rebecca, the daughter of Moses. The word Nathan used to define Sarahs future status was shafhah. This does not

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only mean handmaid, as Werblowsky translated the text in Scholems 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 Sarahs 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 symbolical 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 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 Tsevis present wife Sarah.108 It seems that Nathan called Sabbatais future queen Rebecca daughter 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, Nathans prophecy shows that he expected Sarah to be a force to be reckoned with for years to come. In Nathans prophecy, Sarahs 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 undisputed mistress.110 Also an obscure passage in Nathans Treatise on the Dragons reveals Nathans 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 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 Nathans letter to Raphael Jospeh were widely distributed, they did not harm Sarahs 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 Nathans prophecy, which presented Sarah as the unworthy wife who would not emerge like her husband from the realm of the qelippot, of evil. By claiming the name Rebecca, Sarah showed she
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could neutralize Nathans negative prophecy and make it serve her own agenda. Sarahs usurpation of the title of matrona (interchangeably used with matronita) and her identification with Rebecca is more radical than a subtle challenge to Nathans 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 Nathans spiritual queen Rebecca, could very well constitute a claim to unite the divine female principle, the bride of God, with herself. This has been suggested by Rapoport-Albert, who compared Sarahs claim with the identifications of later Sabbatian messianic wives with the shekhinah such as Jacob Franks wife and his daughter Ewa.114
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A Debaucherous Prophetess Sarahs presence prompted Sabbatai Tsevi to transgress accepted sexual boundaries: his sexually transgressive behavior started after he was reunited 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 Fvre 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 consummate their marriage (they apparently claimed they had not done that already), and the next morning promptly displayed evidence of Sarahs

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 consummated after their conversion to Islam the next year.117 Thus, the struggle between Hosea and Gomers lifestyles seems, temporarily and to the outside world at least, to have ended in favor of Gomers, 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 adulterous 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 Sarahs 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 restoration of the redeemed state before what is conceived as the primordial catastrophy].118 The circumstances of this anecdote and the content of Sabbatais words, admittedly third-hand, suggest not only that doing Sarahs will was important for Sabbatai, but also that her sexual behavior had transformed from something emblematic of the fallen state of the Jewish people to a redeeming behavior in itself, since sleeping 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

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8.120 Although he was arrested rather than crowned, the Sabbatian enthusiasm was only dealt a temporary blow. Because of bribes by followers, 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 Sabbatais absence from Smyrna. Not only does she seem to have played a role in Sabbatais transvaluation of values, as Scholem put Sabbatais 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 of her active participation in the movement, and it undoubtedly made an impression,124 Goldish and Rapoport-Alberts emphasis on the importance of the prophets in the movement suggests Sarahs religious importance in the court. For the second time, Sarahs reunion with Sabbatai, this time in Constantinople, propelled stories of debaucheries.125 Moses Hagiz, a visitor from Jerusalem, reported that Sabbatai was surrounded by seventy 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 relevant. Sabbatai was given the choice between death by torture and conversion to Islam. Forfeiting martyrdom and apparently unable to perform miracles, Sabbatai Tsevi took on the turban and received a pension from the sultan and a position in the courts as usher.128 Nathan, and this is important for our later argument, would later compare his conversion to Esthers 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 guidance of the sultans mother, a much later source based on Dnmeh traditions

Sabbatai Tsevi as a prisoner in Abydos. Print from Ketzergeschichte(1701), reproduced in the 1901-6 Jewish Encyclopedia.
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Portrait of Sabbatai Tsevi wearing a turban (anonymous artist, c. 1670-1700). Collection Jaap van Velzen, Joods Historisch Museum.

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states that Vani Efendi, the sultans vizir and the mastermind behind Sabbatais 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 Sabbatais 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 movements fortune throughout the Jewish world, and for many the apostasy was the end of their belief.131 Sarahs 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 Maciejkos recent work shows that Sabbatianism continued in many 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 Sabbatais 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 usurped this roles heavenly equivalent. Although their marriage had unlike Sabbatais 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 parashah 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

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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 Sabbatais court in Adrianople, and the coinciding of his arrival with Sabbatais divorce suggests that the divorce might have been plotted with Nathans help, who, as we 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 Tsevis that describes the events conversion to Islam.Print fromKetzergeschichte(1701), that led to the divorce. reproduced in the 1901-6 Jewish Encyclopedia. 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 persecuted 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, mashiah.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

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one hand, and Sabbatai and Nathan on the other. Sarahs power shows from the fact that apparently Sabbatai needed both a convincing symbolical timing for the divorce that would fulfill Nathans earlier prophecy and Nathans prophetic presence to be able to stand up to his wife. The nature of the conflict on the other hand, rooted in Sarahs rebellion against her husband, can be read in Sabbatais 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 convert 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 signifieds and declared himself to be Ahasverus in search of a Jewish Esther, one that was to replace his Muslim wife Lady Fatima, Sarah. Sabbatais transformation from the role of Esther to that of Ahasverus was yet another failed attempt by Nathan and Sabbatai to disempower Sarahs wordly position as a woman in the movement. The to-beredeemed 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 Nathans 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. Sabbatais change in self-identification from Esther to Ahasverus also revealed Sarahs growing influence. It showed that Sarahs religious role of the sinner had been so successful that Sabbatai tried to usurp it by identifying with the non-Jewish king Ahasverus rather than with his pure counterpart, the Jewish Esther. Although Scholem and Liebes have written extensively about Sabbatianisms redemption through sin, as the English title

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of Scholems essay on the subject is called, and Sabbatai committed many transgressive actions, in his self-presentation he initially contrasted himself 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 Esthers 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 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 Sarahs position at the court and in the movement. Nathans fortunes, briefly up, had turned again, and his coup failed.148 Sabbatai and Sarahs 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 Sabbatais brother bribed the local Turkish authorities, another indication that Sarah was needed at Sabbatais 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 Sabbatais 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 Sarahs Gender and Female and Erotic Symbolism in Jewish Mysticism Sarahs 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 orientation toward a heavenly realm. While Nathan and the young Sabbatai were concerned with the shekhinahas otherworldly, Sarah forced the shekhinah to descend to earth and to become Sarah. But it was not only the differences between the individual characters of Sarah, Sabbatai and Nathan led to their respective embodiments of these opposing orientations. It will become clear that Sarahs 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 Sarahs only option for participation in a movement based on a mysticism increasingly concerned with otherworldly femininity and Eros.154 To well appreciate Sarahs conduct it will be necessary to go back in history and describe the development of female and erotic symbolism in the mystical 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 conclusions on her role in the movement. In the centuries before the movement, an unprecedentedly influential

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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 commandment to have sexual relations with ones 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 century 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 spiritualization, Jewish mystical texts increasingly used sexual language to describe human interaction with God.157 Also the Zohar (Book of Splendor), the most important Jewish 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 Israels 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 gendered and divine attributes, or sefirot, the divine order and human (Jewish) existence was believed to depend on the harmonious balance between Gods male and female aspects. Two of these sefirot were regarded as female. These included the lowest one, which was commonly called malkhut, meaning kingship or kingdom 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 princess 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 Zohars 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 erotic cosmic union between the female lowest sefirah and the others it was disconnected from. He could contribute to this restoration by creating a parallel erotic union, namely that between himself and the shekhinah, 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 Tsevis performative acts when he sang the popular sensuous love song Meliselda to the Torah scroll during a the synagogue service.162 While holding the Torah in his arms Sabbatai sang to it, about a kings daughter who in front of the poets 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 important one for Safeds mystics in the heyday of Safeds mysticism in the two centuries after the exile from Spain. It required an even greater importance be it problematic in their private erotic lives. In contrast to

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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 mystics 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 entertaining 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 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, commanded us to love her [too], but the real love should be for the former [] glorious is the Kings daughter [i.e. the shekhinah] within the palace [Ps xlv 14]. The King that is the King of the universe and thou art the Kings 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 practitioners spiritual wife.167 Azkaris phrasing of the other wife to designate the mystics wife of flesh and blood shows with whom his priorities lie: the mystics 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 Gods son in law and married to the shekhinah, the Kings (Gods) daughter,

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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. Azkaris 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 ones own wife, a duty to be fulfilled even if it is not as spiritually rewarding as the marital relations with the shekhinah. Even though the impetus to turn away from the love for ones own wife in the flesh is fostered by works such as Sefer ha-Haredim, this impetus is always hampered, or kept in check, by Gods commandment to entertain sexual relations with ones own wife. In fact, celibacy was generally regarded as an impediment for spiritual success, as is lyrically put in the words of Moses Cordovero, the sixteenth-century kabbalistic master from Safed: 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 Kings daughter must sanctify himself, and, after his mystical marriage, must always give her her [mystical] food, raiment and conjugal rights exactly as he is required to do, on the physical plane, to his physical wife.168 Thus, the mystic at once needs to comply with his wifes rights to sexuality, 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 ones sexual energy both at ones wife and at the shekhinah often led to great tensions between the relations one was to have with ones spiritual and ones material wife. Joseph Karo, who

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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 commandment 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, Karos wifes soul was a male soul. She was a reincarnation of a very important rabbi, so important the maggid could not reveal his name. The maggid therefore warned that Karo should be ashamed of having intercourse with her for pleasure. Since Karos 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 about gender, sexuality, not just of Joseph Karo, but also of an entire mystical 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 masculinity that he associated with the most important of his religious obligations 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 Karos maggid: 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 Sabbatianisms sexual excesses, in which cosmic 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 nonmetaphorical 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 kabbalists (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 tendencies 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 renunciation was turned into its opposite.172 At first sight, Nathan of Gazas messianic rhetoric seems to confirm Idel and Biales argument in that it legitimized this displacement of spiritual 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 sinful state therewith opening the gate to a greater openness to sexuality. But how did this liberation of touch, as Nathan called it, rhyme with Nathans own tendency toward sexual asceticism? We have seen that Nathan never put this restoration of touch into action, and there seems

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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 better embodiments of the actual implementation of this notion of the restoration of touch. As Liebes has convincingly argued, Nathan was primarily 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 miraculously 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, Sabbatais 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 interacts 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 historical 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 primordial archetypes, in this case that of the primordial mother. Arthur Green and Peter Schfer have criticized this phenomenological mechanism. Rather than thinking in terms of primordial archetypes breaking through into history, Green and Schfer return to a traditional historicist explanation by trying to find which female symbolism external 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 Goldishs entire first chapter in his book on the movement describes prophetic movements 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 Nathans theological mysticism concerned with cosmic action. Liebes follows a different but also fundamentally historicist approach by pointing out not the differences between the Sabbatian movement and its mystical predecessors, but the continuities between them. Although Scholems 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 historical models discussed above lack because each of them restricts its explanatory scope to the influence of prior or external traditions.177 An adjustment of Scholems 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

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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 interpreted 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 gendered 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 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 rebellion by non-human archetypes or metaphors but a subversion of a traditional interpretation by human beings. This rebellion of interpreters was one that favored the position of women, who were not only historically excluded from mystical practice but even regarded as occupying an inferior position vis--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 interest 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 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 benefitted 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 Dunkelgrn, Rachel Elior, Moshe Idel, Yosef Kaplan, Tirtsah LevieBernfeld, 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.

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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-tenuah ha-shabtait 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 Tsevis 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 Scholems 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-yaakov 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-tenuah hashabtait u-sheluhoteha: meshihiyut, shabtaut 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 Maciejkos 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 Dnmeh see Scholem, The CryptoJewish Sect of the Dnmeh (Sabbatians) in Turkey, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, 142-166; Cengiz Sisman, A Jewish Messiah in the Ottoman Court: Sabbatai Sevi and the Emergence of a Judeo-Islamic Community (1666-1720), Harvard University Ph.D. Thesis, 2004; Marc David Baer, The Dnme: 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), 109111. 5 Scholem, Messianic Idea in Judaism, 101. 6 Ada Rapoport-Albert, Al maamad hanashim be-shabtaut (on the position of women in Sabbatianism), The Sabbatian Movement and its Aftermath, 1: 143-328. Rapoport-Alberts 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

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references to Rapoport-Alberts 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 Aristotles. 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. 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 ltesten 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 Renans Vie de Jsus (Paris: Michel Lvy Frres, 1863). Renans 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-shabtaut [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 Erzhlung 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: Tragikomdie in 4 Akten (Berlin: Hugo Bermhlers, 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: Sauerlnder, 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 SacherMasoch: 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-Masochs 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 frh versunkener jugendlicher Schwrmer, trat als politischer Agitator des irdischen Messianismus auf. Peter-Heinz Seraphim, Das Judentum im osteuropischen Raum, Reihe Hintergrundanalysen 36, Archiv Edition (Vil, Nordfriesland: Verlag fr ganzheitliche Forschung, 2000) [facsimile of 1938 edition], 81. I thank Heinz Mrmel for this reference. 26 Seine Ehe mit einer als Kind aus Polen entflohenen Jdin, 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 hashabtait: kovets maamarim [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: 16661816. 35 Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004). 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-Alberts 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 Yaakov Barnai, shabtaut: 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.

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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 (Tbingen: 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 Scholems dating above and Sasportas, 4-5; See Scholems argument based on Tishbys 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 maase shabtai tsevi: meet 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 Leybs 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 Ozers Bashraybung fun Shabsai

Tsvi: An Ashkenazi Appropriation of Sabbatianism, The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, 88, No. (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 Leybs 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 Scholems 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 Scholems 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 Sarahs mentioning of Sabbatai Tsevi in her story was also a central point in Leybs narrative, two points I find to be a suspicious couple (Goldish, Sabbatean Prophets, 93). Goldish bases his argument on the possibility that Sabbatais 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 Leybs own ambivalent feelings about the movement he chronicled inserted the name of Sarahs 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 16481649. 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 Sarahs 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 Amsterdamsche hoogduitsch-joodsche gemeente, Bijdragen en Mededelingen van het Genootschap voor de Joodsche Wetenschap in Nederland 6 (1940) 15381: 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. Sarahs interdenominational migration is quite interesting, because Amsterdam

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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 SephardiAshkenazi 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 Mchoulan, 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 Weiles report: Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 193-194. 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 Baruchs 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 Adams coat. The angels told her she would be a queen and the messiahs 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 Croixs report contains more material suggestive of her unchaste side than Scholem indicates. Goldish, 200 n. 14. I do not see this contradicting Scholems 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, Womans Body and the Social Body in Hosea (London: Sheffield University Press, 2001), 140-161. See also Yvonne Sherwood, The Prostitute and the Prophet: Hoseas Marriage in LiteraryTheoretical Perspective, Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement Serie 212, Gender, Culture, Theory 2 (Sheffield: Sheffield University Press, 1996), especially 254-322. Sherwoods 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 Sabbatais. 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. 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 Cuenques language is from the Talmud Bavli Taan 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 Werblowskys less literal but more logical translation. Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 273-274. A literal translation would suggest that Sarah would be queen anywhere but in

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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, Ladaat mashiah ha-diyalektikah shel ha siah 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 Revon le-madae 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 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 Gods Torah to the people of Israel enabled Sabbatai Tsevi to revoke the Torah. Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth, 112. 110 Scholems interpretation is more careful: Is this merely the free play of Nathans imagination, or a veiled criticism

of Sabbatais 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 messiahs wife [] In the footnote of this text however Scholem writes that she thus usurped the title of the messiahs 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; Sarahs room: Scholem, 387. Scholem disagrees with Rosanes and thinks the source, a former believers 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 Sarahs 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. Scholems 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 RapoportAlbert, 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: Symbolic Significance of Sabbatai Sevis Coronation, Toward the Millenium. Messianic Expectations from the Bible to Waco, ed. Peter Schfer, 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 Scholems 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

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despite the sexual practices occurring at the court, the child must have been Sabbatais. 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, Scholems 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 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 Arezzos argument that Sarah died before the banishment was incorrect: Scholem, Sabbatai Sevi, 885 n. 147. 152 In the Dnmeh 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 Schfer, 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 Biales 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 Schfer, 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 Schfer, 226. See on matronita Schfer, 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 Safeds 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 Werblowskys 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 Werblowskys 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 Werblowskys 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. 168 Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, 137. 169 Biale, Eros and the Jews, 109-113. 170 Werblowsky, Joseph Karo, 112115. 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; Schfer, Daughter, Sister, Bride and Mother. 177 See for a profound criticism of the historical sciences exclusion of the new in history: Cornelius Castoriadis, lInstitution imaginaire de la socit (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975).

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Selected Bibliography Aristotle. Aristotle: the Poetics; Longinus: On the Sublime; Demetrius: On Style. Transl. W. Hamilton Fyfe. Loeb Classical Library. London: Heinemann, 1965. Baer, Marc David. The Dnme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011. Barnai, Yaakov. Shabtaut: hebetim hevratiyim [Sabbatianism: Social Perspectives]. Jerusalem: Shazar Center, 2000. Biale, David. 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. . Eros and the Jews: From Biblical Israel to Contemporary America. New York: BasicBooks, 1992. . Shabbtai Zvi and the Seductions of Jewish Orientalism. Rachel Elior, ed. Hahalom ve-shviro. Ha-tenuah ha-shabtait u-sheluhoteha: meshihiyut, shabtaut u-frankiszm/The Sabbatian Movement and its Aftermath: Messianism, Sabbatianism and Frankism. Jerusalem: Institute of Jewish Studies, 2001. Vol. 2: 85*-110* (English section). Boyarin, Daniel. Carnal Israel: Reading Sex in Talmudic Culture. New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. Cardozo, Abraham Miguel. Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings. Transl. and ed. David J. Halperin. The Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 2001. Castoriadis, Cornelius. lIstitution imaginaire de la socit. Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1975. Chajes, J.H. Between Worlds: Dybbuks, Exorcists, and Early Modern Judaism. Jewish Culture and Contexts. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003. Coenen, Thomas. Ydele verwachtinge der Joden. Amsterdam: n.p, 1669.

Diamond, E. 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. Elior, Rachel. Sefer divre ha-adon le-yaakov frank: otomitografiyah mistit, nihilizm dati ve-hazon ha-hirut ha-meshihi ke-realizatsiyah shel mitus [Jacob Frank and his Book The Sayings of the Lord: Religious Anarchism as a Restoration of Myth and Metaphor]. Sabbatian Movement and its Aftermath. Vol. 2: 471-548. Elqayam, Avraham. Ladaat mashiah ha-diyalektikah shel ha siah 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 Revon le-madae ha-yehadut 65, no. 4 (1996), 637-670. Emden, Jacob. Sefer torat hakenaot [The Torah of zealotry]. Amsterdam: n.p., 1752. Goldish, Matt. The Sabbatean Prophets. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Graetz, Heinrich. Geschichte der Juden von den ltesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart: aus den Quellen neu bearbeitet. Vol. 10. Leipzig: Leiner, 1868: 168-253. Green, Arthur. Shekhinah, the Virgin Mary, and the Song of Songs: Reflections on a Kabbalistic Symbol in Historical Context. AJS Review 26 (2002): 1-52. Halperin, David J. Sabbatai Zevi: Testimonies to a Fallen Messiah. Littman Library of Jewish Civilization. Oxford; Portland, Or.: Littman Library of Jewish Civilization, 2007. . Sabbatai Zevi, Metatron, and Mehmed: Myth and History in Seventeenth-Century Judaism. S. Daniel Breslauer, ed. The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth: Challenge or Response. SUNY Series in Judaica: Hermeneutics, Mysticism, and Religion. Albany: State

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