SHABBATAI ZVI AND ABRAHAM MIGUEL CARDOZO

HOW MUCH SIMILAR, HOW MUCH DIFFERENT

FELICIA WALDMAN

The life and fate of Shabbatai Zvi

Shabbatai Zvi was born in 1626 in Smyrna (today Izmir, Turkey) on the 9th day of
the Jewish month of Av. This is important because Teisha be Av is a tragic date
in Jewish history: according to tradition both the First and the Second Temple fell
on this day, as did Bar Kochbas fortress Betar. Nevertheless, Zvi started as a promising Talmudic scholar. He was in fact a student of Lurianic Kabbalah and it was
precisely Lurianic ideas that led him to believe in the imminence of national redemption. He had a strong personality but his behavior was strange, to say the
least, which has made many scholars wonder whether he was actually mentally
sane. For instance, he was expelled from Salonika by its rabbis for having staged a
wedding service with himself as bridegroom and the Torah as bride. However, he
was still OK until he found himself a prophet in the person of Nathan of Gaza, an
important kabbalist himself, who encouraged Zvi to proclaim himself the new
Messiah. That is why in 1665 Shabbatai Zvi named the year 1666 the millennium
and announced the opening of a new cosmic era in which a completely new Torah
would apply, which meant that the traditional rules (and especially restrictions!)
were no longer applicable.

To the Jewish communities throughout the world, who had been waiting for such
good news for 1600 years, the announcement sounded appealing: Redemption
would start on the 15th day of the month of Sivan (June 18, 1666). On the
background of the problems faced by Jews at the time (particularly in Poland, after
the Cossack massacres of 1648-49) this heresy caught on, not only in his native
Turkey and in the Near East but also in Europe. Well fed with legendary inputs,
reports about Shabbatai reached cities like Amsterdam, Venice and Livorno where
rabbis and businessmen alike hurried to acknowledge the King of Israel. Moreover,
millenarian Christians in Germany, England and Holland who awaited the second
coming of Jesus in the year 1666 encouraged this as well.
Zvi indeed wanted to reach the land of Israel in order to rebuild the Temple
and restore Jewish domination over Palestine, but the wonderful adventure was
brought to an abrupt end on September 15, 1666 when he was taken to the Sultan, who decided to imprison him in Constantinople for fear of a Jewish uprising.
As Gershom Scholem puts it, given the choice of death or apostasy, [he] prudently
chose the latter, setting a turban on his head to signify his conversion to Islam, for
which he was rewarded with the honorary title Keeper of the Palace Gates and a
pension of 150 piasters a day1. Of course, many of his disciples followed immediately. Other Jews followed too, accepting the explanation that conversion was a
necessary evil. Underground movements tried to preserve this heretic tradition.
Shabbatais followers continued their hidden life in the Turkish sect of the Donmeh, and to this day there are converts who pose as Muslims while secretly practicing Judaism, just as Zvi continued to preach his messianic message to the Jews under his new public Islamic identity, between 1666 and 1672.
In 1673, he was re-arrested by the Turkish authorities and exiled to Ulcinj, a
townlet with no history of Jewish life whatsoever located in Montenegro. He died
in 1676, but the location of his burial place remains unknown (which of course fed
his followers imagination with the idea that he did not die, but was taken to God
like Moses!). Some researchers think he is buried in Ulcinj itself, others place his
grave in Berat, Albania. After researching the various theories, in 2001 architect
Ivan Ceresnjes came to the conclusion that Shabbatai Zvis burial place is in a turbe
(a Muslim one-storeyed mausoleum) in the courtyard of a house in Ulcinj. Painted
green, the colour found all over the former Ottoman Empire, this turbe is regarded
by the locals as the burial place of the illustrious Jewish convert to Islam Shab1. Quoted in Abraham J. Karp, From the Ends of the Earth: Judaic Treasures of the Library of Congress, (DC: Library of Congress, 1991), on the Jewish Virtual Library website.

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batai Zvi. Mr. Qazim Mani, who was 80 in 2001, was the custodian of this turbe,
which is infrequently visited but regarded as a holy place for Muslims!2
Two outlooks can be found in the Kabbalah that might explain Zvis conduct
(of course, always considering he knew what he was doing). As a kabbalist he must
have been aware of the existence of a book called Sefer ha-Temuna (Book on Appearance or Book on Image, referring to the letters image seen as the mystical appearance of the divine), published in Catalonia in 1250. Unlike previous kabbalistic writings, this work speaks of the aspects of a succession of creations. Each aspect
is governed by one of the seven subordinated Sefirot, because Gods creative power
becomes manifest in each Sefira and in a cosmic unit decisively formed by it, called
Shemita. Starting from the prescription related to the Sabbatical and the Jubilee
year in Deuteronomy 15, this conception states that each Shemita brings about another attribute of the divine, as the dominant power in the corresponding creation
process. Only in the final succession of the seven3 Shemitot that make up the great
Jubilee year of the worlds will Gods entire creative power become manifest. This
view is based on the conception that Torahs absolute being becomes more and
more relative, and reveals itself differently in each Shemita. In each such period the
text will read something completely different, for in any of them the divine wisdom
of the original Torah is represented under another aspect.
In an attempt to explain the current state of facts, the books author shows that,
just like in the succession of the Sefirot, the first three Shemitot are a period of grace,
a period of rigor or judgment and a period of mercy, mankind being now in the
second. So, in the first period, when creature and Creator were in a happy relationship, the Torah contained no interdictions, but only statements. In the period in
which we live the Torah has taken the form we know today, adjusting itself to the
circumstances. Evidently, the next period, that of mercy, will mark the return to
purer forms and harmony. Regarded from this perspective, the current form of the
Torah is accepted as final for this eon, with the amendment that it may have an
entirely different face in other eons.
On the other hand, some mystics conclude that the limitation of our live can
only be the result of an absence, of an imperfection. In order to account for the
current state of the world, something must be missing from the Torah. For instance, a letter from the present form of the Torah must be incomplete. As each
letter is a concentration of divine energy, any letter rendered in an incomplete form
2. Newsletter 16, Winter 2004, of the Center for Jewish Art, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Israel, available on-line at http://www.hum.huji.ac.il/cja/NL16/NL-16-7.htm.
3. Number 7 is extremely important in Jewish mysticism.

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will prevent the manifestation of the light and of the hidden forces. The blame was
finally laid on letter shin, which, some kabbalists said, should have not three arms,
as it has in the current writing, but four4. Other, more radical, kabbalists decided
that we are, in fact, dealing with a total occultation. To account for such a state of
the world a letter must have completely disappeared from the alphabet. However,
we must not despair all the necessary pre-requisites for an optimist attitude are
there. Although invisible to us, the 23rd letter of the true alphabet will become accessible by revelation in the next Shemita. This absence may additionally account
for the negative aspects of the Torah its presence will help turning them into
affirmations.
Evidently, from the religious authoritys point of view the conception regarding
the existence in the Torah of certain occulted parts, which will once become visible, provides too large a space of maneuver because it actually justifies any deviation and even heresy. In these circumstances, it becomes understandable why Shabbatai Zvi took this step astray in 1665. Considering that redemption makes it possible to uproot the old law and set up a new Shemita, it may be that he actually
tried to force Gods hand by declaring himself the Messiah. Starting from an older
theory, first expressed by the author of the Tikunei Zohar5, regarding the existence
of two different aspects of the Torah, Torah de-Beria (Torah in the stage of creation)6 and Torah de-Atzilut (Torah in the stage of emanation)7, Zvis adepts considered in their turn that the new spiritual Torah, brought by him on earth, replaced the Torah of the stage of creation. This way they tore away Torahs mystical
contents from the texts significance and indirectly from the symbols of the traditional Judaic lifestyle, setting them in contradiction and thus giving birth to a mystical nihilism taken almost to the absurd: the suspension of the Torah is its fulfillment.
As for the apostasy, a kabbalistic thesis developed around the end of the 13th
century claimed that the knowledge of the structure of the demonic was the most
profound form of Kabbalah, the most recondite. The adepts of this line wrote long
4. The theory is based on the fact that the Talmud recommends the impression of both forms of
letter shin on the leather straps fixed on the forehead with the phylacteries (Tefilin).
5. According to Gershom Scholem, Cabala si simbolistica ei, Humanitas, Bucharest 1996.
6. Mentioned in Proverbs 8:22 (The Lord possessed me in the beginning of his way, before his
works of old) as the one shown to us by God in creation
7. Mentioned in Psalms 19:8 (The statutes of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart: the commandment of the Lord is pure, enlightening the eyes) as being untouched and still sealed in its
divine nature. It is this non-created, emanation-related feature of the Torah that validates the
mystical thesis concerning its identity with God.

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lists of evil angels and described the relationships between the demonic and the
divine. This tradition, whose representative was, among others, Moses de Leon,
held that it was a religious duty to know, and pursue knowledge of, the demonic
world so that one would not be immersed in it. Only by knowing the evil and distinguishing it from the good can one keep it away and truly worship God. Unlike
in the case of ecstatic mysticism, where the mystical experience takes place in the
mystics inner self and does not affect the divine realm, in theosophical and theurgical Kabbalah the effect of the mystics action on the non-human realms is deep.
In the theosophical paradigm, the Divine is not a simple entity, but a system of
divine powers, and the mystics entry into this realm influences the relationships
between these divine powers. In the theurgical paradigm, this interaction involves a
struggle with the demonic realm. Although seemingly different, the demonic and
the divine share a common anthropomorphic structure. The Sefirot are prototypes
for both realms. Therefore the mystics intervention aims either at inducing harmony in the Divine world or at combating some aspect of the demonic world.
We must also recall that Zvi was knowledgeable in Lurianic Kabbalah. To Luria, if the Tikkun Olam has a positive aspect, related to the restoration of the rightful connection between the things in their true unity, the process has a negative
aspect as well, for which he uses the term Berur (textually selection). Berur is the
separation and elimination of the demonic forces, of the other side (Sitra Ahra).
According to the Lurianic theory of the ritual, Torah is intended to constantly provoke a rejection and progressive elimination of the Sitra Ahra, which is now mixed
up in all things and threatens to destroy them from the inside. That is why the Kavanah ritual warns against the dangers and gaps the mystic can come across on his
way. From this perspective, the end of the Morning Prayer, when the initiate
would throw himself to the ground, constituted an enterprise that could have endangered his life. After having reached the peak of his fervor and after feeling included in the divine name that he had united, the mystic had to jump into the
Sitra Ahra to free the holy sparks imprisoned in the klippot. Only the perfect Tzaddik can fulfill this meditation, because, for his merits, he is worthy of descending and
undertaking those selections in the Klippot, the realms of the other side, even against
their will. Otherwise, when he puts his soul at stake and sends it down there, in the
Klippot, he may not only be unable to bring out the souls fallen there but he may also
loose his own soul to those realms8.
It thus becomes obvious why so many people believed Zvi was in fact continuing
8. Gershom Scholem, Cabala si simbolistica ei, idem, p.151, quoting from Chaim Vitals Shaar haKavanot.

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his mission when he converted to Islam. Although this was the end of the adventure,
Sabbateanism nevertheless proposed innovative and challenging kabbalistic conceptions, not at all uninteresting, starting from its very paradoxical nature and internal
contradiction and ending with the survival unto this day of the Donmeh, unlike, for
instance, the Frankists.

Where does Abraham Miguel Cardozo come in

By just one year Zvis junior, Cardozo was born in Spain in 1627, into a Marrano
family, and therefore officially a Christian. He left Spain at the age of 21, settled in
Venice where he converted back to Judaism, and ended by studying Kabbalah in
Egypt (or so he claimed in his writings). By 1663 he was, it seems, the physician of
Osman Pasha and Rejeb Bey in Tripoli. In 1673, following their death during a local revolution, Cardozo fled to Tunis, which he had to leave one year later after
being expelled at the request of the local Jews, who did not favor his messianic reputation. In 1675 he was again forced to move, from Leghorn (Livorno), where he
had tried to settle, and ended up in Izmir. Here his family was decimated by the
plague and in 1680 he was expelled once more, this time to Constantinople. Between 1681, when he was excommunicated again, and 1706, when he was stabbed
to death by his nephew, Cardozo wandered from Rodosto to the Dardanelles and
from Adrianople to Alexandria, trying unsuccessfully to reach Palestine and eventually losing the rest of his family to the plague.
If Zvis torment had consisted in a long search for his own personal God, Cardozos consisted in a self-understanding journey that brought him back to his Jewish
roots. Nevertheless, despite his decisive choice of Judaism, Cardozos split background always provided him with a double vision and a special capacity to see both
sides of an issue, but also with knowledge of Christianity that more or less willingly
influenced his view of Judaism. As M. Goldish remarks9, a converso, whether he or
she continued to live as a Catholic or reverted to Judaism, could never escape the
effects of a Catholic upbringing. Like other conversos, Cardozo used Christian ideas
to combat Christian notions but even the fact that he did it in full awareness did not
prevent the criticism of contemporary rabbis like Jacob Sasportas, for instance.
9. Matt D. Goldish, Patterns in Converso Messianism, in Matt D. Goldish and Richard H.
Popkin (eds.), Millenarianism and Messianism in the Early Modern European Culture, volume
1, Jewish Messianism in the Early Modern World, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, p.
42.

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Naturally, it was precisely his duplicitous identity that made Cardozo understand
Zvis apostasy so well. Also, it was into this personal experience that he translated
the belief that there will be a discrepancy between the way the Messiah will be on
the inside and will look on the outside, which led him to believe the Messiah
would be a Marrano like himself. In fact, as Moshe Idel underlines10, this came
against the background of the crucial role played by the Marranos and especially
by those who converted back to Judaism in the reception sometimes to the
point of annulment of some ideas of the Sabbatean messianic message.
Unlike Zvi, who eventually became a man of action under Nathan of Gazas influence, Cardozo remained a man of thought. Like Zvi, he was a learnt scholar of
the Jewish tradition of which he made extensive use to prove his points. For instance
he wrote quite extensively on the interpretation on the two messianic figures of the
Jewish tradition: the Davidic Messiah, who descended from holiness to impurity
and whom he thus identified with Zvi, who had converted from Judaism to Islam,
and the Ephraimite Messiah, who rose from impurity to holiness and whom he thus
identified with himself11. It is therefore obvious how his conviction evolved from
truly believing in Zvis messianism to considering himself in a way equal to Zvi, and
why he ended by thinking he was the true Messiah (ironically, his own death was to
confirm his claim, as he was pierced just like in the prediction concerning the
Ephraimite Messiah). In fact, as David J. Halperin underlines12, Cardozo knew
there was something messianic about his destiny long before he had heard of Zvi
and he probably came to the conclusion that they were the two sides of the same
Messianic figure before realizing what a weak human being Zvi had been. Quite
extraordinarily, his disappointment with Zvi did not come from the latters apostasy, but from his view of God. Cardozo was convinced that the Messiahs apostasy
was a fulfillment of Gods commandment and that a new aspect of the Torah had
been revealed. This, of course, must have had to do with the fact that he saw in this
ultimate act a justification of the earlier Marrano conversions. He expressed this
view as early as 1668, when he wrote: the Torah as it now exists will not exist in the
Messianic age13, naturally as a result of the tikkun, in conformity with previous
kabbalistic thought. However, contrary to the provisions of Lurianic Kabbalah,
10. Moshe Idel, Messianic Mystics, Yale University Press, New Haven-London, 1998, p. 183.
11. Elliott Wolfson, Preface, in David J. Halperin (ed.), Abraham Miguel Cardozo, Selected Writings,
Paulist Press, New York, Mahwah, NJ, 2001, p. xiii.
12. David J. Halperin, idem, p. xxx.
13. Quoted in Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, Schocken Books, New York, 1995,
p. 65.

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Cardozo believed that the mystical abundance of power resident in the Messiah
himself brings the process of healing salvation to its conclusion14. Just like Zvi he
was an adept of the theory of the shemitot, thinking that the salvation process manifested itself in the giving of the Torah in different stages, in keeping with the needs
of the various generations, and he made a clear distinction between the Written
Torah and the Oral Torah, firmly believing that the crisis of the former affected the
forms of the latter (tradition). If Zvi chose to violate the law at the height of his religious experience, Cardozo was of the opinion that in the messianic age the law
would no longer be necessary. Taken to the extreme, this view was translated into
the abrogation, among other things, of the sexual taboos. As a result, Zvi praised He
who permitted the forbidden, and Cardozo took several wives.
Though he never belonged to the inner circle of the Sabbateans, and in fact
never met Zvi himself or had any written contact with him, even if he rushed to
publish an early letter in defense of his Messiahship in 1668 (mentioned above) and
then the most famous Epistle to the Judges of Izmir in 166915, Cardozo came to be
regarded as the third major figure of the movement because of his contribution to
its ideology, and as its most important theologian (besides Nathan of Gaza, of
course). Just like Zvi, he was in search of his own personal God (and in fact he
wrote over sixty treatises on his findings), but unlike Zvi, who took action, with him
this turned into a lifetime obsession, probably because he conceived it in terms of his
Marrano background, in which his true identity had been concealed, an outlook
that he transferred upon God, whose essential identity thus had to be revealed for
the mending of the world (tikkun olam) to take place. Therefore, he took upon himself to complete the task that Zvi had failed fulfilling.
Cardozo resembled Shabbatai Zvi, in that he placed no value except on the
God of his belief and took pains until he seated the King on his throne, but he
had a somewhat different view on the abstraction and theological expression of their
common outlook16. He thought he shared with Zvi the task of discovering the mystery of divinity and as such he felt the need to write the treatise Raza de-Meheimanuta [The Secret of Faith] and, as Yehuda Liebes has endeavored to prove, claim
that this had been Shabbatai Zvis creation. He really thought he was entitled to
clarify Zvis intentions, to the point of believing he understood them better than Zvi
himself.
14. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Judaism, p. 66.
15. David J. Halperin, Abraham Miguel Cardozo, Selected Writings, p. 55.
16. Yehuda Liebes, Studies in Jewish Myth and Jewish Messianism, State University of New York
Press, Albany 1993, p. 104.

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There is however, one matter on which he totally disagreed with Zvi. Zvi had
sworn all his followers to secrecy in regard to the Mystery of the Godhead that he
had discovered and was convinced that any revelation entailed distortion. Cardozo
made his lifes aim to share his view on the divine with everyone else.
If Zvi remained on the record as a somewhat exalted figure, on the verge of
madness, for his acts, Cardozo had his own share of special fame for his conversations with the dead. His by now proven use of ghosts in his tikkunim is strange to
say the least, especially since in 1669 he would swear to the opposite in front of the
judges of Izmir. Most of his writings were based on his tormented revelatory visions (and, even more strangely, on the dreams of the women in his household,
which he would only interpret17), where one can identify certain kabbalistic ideas
also shared by Zvi, like for instance the importance of the demonic.
Like Zvi, Cardozo believed that the divine sparks of holiness and good, which
fell at the time of the Adamic sin into the Sitra Ahra, the impure realm of the Klipot (the husks that entrap the sparks, representing the evil) had to be gathered back
to their source for the process of redemption to be complete. In his view it was up
to the Redeemer to accomplish the ultimate task: to descend through the gates of
impurity into the realm of the Klipot and to rescue the divine sparks still imprisoned there. As Gershom Scholem puts it, as soon as this task is performed the
Kingdom of Evil will collapse of itself, for its existence is made possible only by the
divine sparks in its midst. The Messiah is constrained to commit strange acts
(ma'asim zarim; a concept hereafter to occupy a central place in Sabbatean theology), of which his apostasy is the most startling; all of these, however, are necessary
for the fulfillment of his mission18.
Just like Zvi, who convinced so many of his messianic powers, Cardozo persuaded his disciples that they did not even need to perform specific rites, for his
own merits ensured their success. To realize the extent to which this went, suffice it
to recall that among the maggidim, spirit-guides mostly dead saints he used as
assistants to him or his disciples in the spiritual world was Isaac Luria himself,
whom he summoned and dismissed at his sole discretion. It is also important to
mention that he shared Zvis (and not only his) preoccupation with astrology,
though he favored the moon rather than Saturn (Shabbatai in Hebrew).
Moreover, besides ideas, and notions, and views, Cardozo and Zvi came close
to sharing a wife! As David Halperin amusingly puts it, Zvis young widow Esther
17. Matt Goldish, The Sabbatean Prophets, Harvard University Press, Cambridge Massachusetts
London 2004, p. 100.
18. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Jewish Mysticism, p. 95.

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emerges from our sources as a smart, ambitious and resourceful lady with a talent
for making Messiahs the men in her life or where this failed for making the men in
her life into Messiahs19: after her first husbands death and a failed attempt to
transfer the messianic fervor unto Zvis eight year old son (who had the bad taste to
follow his fathers example and die) she tried to marry Cardozo, seeing in him a
new messianic prey. He postponed a final decision for fear of Messiahs imminent
return, and to his later regret she soon turned her attention to another victim: her
own brother.
But that was not all. Another interesting life episode which Zvi and Cardozo
seem to have shared was their own prophecy about their respective sons: both announced that they would have a male child, who would not live, an event which
Matt Goldish relates to the Prophecy of the Child, in which a son is born to a rabbi, who speaks from the womb, warns of the coming of the Messiah and dies, but
also to the Christian interpretation of Isaiah 9:520, which is explainable in the case
of Cardozo but less obvious in the case of Zvi (apparently this happened at the
height of the movement, in Izmir).
Again in a similar pattern with Zvi, Cardozo announced a new Redemption
(on Passover, April 22, 1682), which failed to materialize, but his fate was different.
He was not faced with death or conversion but only excommunication. Moreover, soon afterwards he witnessed from a distance the mass conversion to Islam of
many Jews in Salonika led by Esther Zvis family (in an act which Gershom Scholem calls voluntary Marranism21), which he could not understand: he had found
Zvis apostasy to be a necessary act, meant to redeem the others, not to be followed
or imitated. To him, the return to the Adamic state was not possible until the Redeemer had come back from the Sitra Ahra after having gathered, and thus released, the holy sparks.
As such one can see that there are similarities as much as there are differences
between the two mystics but to a certain extent they obviously shared more than
ideas and outlooks: they shared a vivid imagination, an obvious exaltation and even
episodes of life.

19. David J. Halperin, Abraham Miguel Cardozo, Selected Writings, p. 72.

20. For a child is born unto us, A son is given unto us, And the government is upon his shoulder,
And his name is called Pele-joez-el-gibbor-Abi-ad-sar-shalom, quoted in Matt Goldish, The
Sabbatean Prophets, p. 100.
21. Gershom Scholem, The Messianic Idea in Jewish Mysticism, p. 93.

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