Sabbatai Ṣevi

Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai Ṣevi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai Ṣevi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi details Ṣevi's rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem's work to a new generation of readers.

This monumental work is an in-depth study of the charming and now widely known - thanks to Scholem ‒ history of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Ṣevi.---George Koutzakiotis, Historical Review
A major contribution not only to the study of messianic movements but also a study enlightening to the history of the Jewish people.-- "Jewish Press"
A masterful mix of traditional Jewish scholarship and. . . original insight into the psychology of Judaism.-- "Boston Globe"
Comprehensive. . . the last word on an astonishing episode of Jewish history.-- "Times Literary Supplement"
Immensely important and fascinating. . . . A monumental work of historical scholarship, which recounts in minute detail a moving tragedy of vast dimensions.-- "The New York Review of Books"
Scholem's scholarship betrays an alert presentness. . . . No great textual scholar, no master of philology and historical criticism commands a technique at once more scrupulously attentive to its object and more instinct with the writer's voice. That voices reaches and grips. . . . [M]agisterial.-- "New Yorker"
Undoubtedly one of the all-time masterpieces of scholarship and intellectual history.-- "Commonweal"