Sabbatean Religious Community in the Ottoman Era

Today, in Israel and in all Jewish communities around the world, Sabbateans are treated as if they did not arise from Jewish culture, as if they did not exist at all. Indeed, it is noteworthy that in the celebrations of the 500th arrival of Sephardic Jews in Ottoman lands, no mention was made of the Sabbateans in Türkiye or Israel.

Mavi Boncuk | 

Sabbatean religious community was a messianic religious movement established around the Jewish theologian Nathan of Gaza (1643–80) and the Kabbalist Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76), a Jewish mystic who was proclaimed to be a messiah in 1666. The movement originated in Turkey and also flourished in the neighbouring countries.

The Sabetayists / Sabbateans, who were first divided into two as the Yakubiler /  Jacobites and the Sabetayists, were eventually divided into three with the "Osman Baba" incident. The division occurred with the departure of the Karakaşlar - or Önyollular - who believed in the Messiahship of Baruchya Ruso[1] named Osman from the large Sabetayists group. The name of the last group is the Kapancılar.[2]

The Dönme hierarchy was based on branch divisions. The Ismailis, comprising the merchant classes and intelligentsia, were at the top of the hierarchy. The artisans tended to be mostly Karakashis, while the lower classes were mostly Yakubis. Each branch had its own prayer community, organized into a (Hebrew) "Kahal" or congregation. 

Despite their false conversion 'Dönme' to Islam, the Sabbateans secretly remained close to Judaism and continued to practice Jewish rituals in secret.[3] The Dönme group has several branches. The first is the "İzmirli", based in İzmir. This was the original sect from which the other two eventually split. 

The first split produced the Jacobite sect, founded by Yakub Querido (c. 1650–1690), the brother of Zevi's last wife. Querido claimed that Zevi was reincarnated and was a messiah in his own right.

Frankism was a spiritual movement that flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century in central Europe. Its founder, leader, and supposed messiah, Jacob Frank, was born around 1726 in Podolia (in today’s Ukraine). Frank grew up in the Sabbatean religious community and later incorporated its teaching into his own belief system, inspired by Jewish Kabbalah and Catholic Marian mysticism. Like the Sabbateans, the Frankists saw the messiah in the figure of Sabbatai Zevi (1626–76), sometimes referred to as Amira in the writings of the Prague Frankist circle.

A converso "convert" (from Latin conversus 'converted, turned around'), was a Jew who converted to Catholicism in Spain or Portugal, particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries, or one of their descendants.

[1] Berekiah Russo / Baruchya Ruso (1695–1740), known as Señor Santo, was considered another incarnation of the messiah.

[2] Şemsi Efendi, who was Mustafa Kemal Atatürk’s first teacher and whose name is mentioned in his Nutuk, was not only a great educator of his time, but also a cabalist with political aspects. This person, who spent a large part of his life studying the Zohar, aimed to unite the Karaka and Kapancı groups and ensure the survival of the Sabbatean community. However, he died before he could achieve this ideal. What is sad is that sufficient scientific studies have not been conducted on this person, who spent the last years of his life in misery and difficulties, and his contributions to Turkish educational life have been forgotten.

[3] Some commentators have suggested that some prominent members of the Young Turks, an anti-absolutist movement of constitutional monarchist revolutionaries who forced the sultan to reinstate the Constitution in 1908, were Dönme. One of the leaders of the plot to assassinate President Mustafa Kemal Pasha in Izmir after the founding of the Republic of Turkey was Mehmed Cavid Bey, a prominent Dönme member of the Committee of Union and Progress and former Minister of Finance of the Ottoman Empire. After a thorough investigation, Cavid Bey was found guilty and later executed by hanging in Ankara on 26 August 1926.

Further Reading

Frankism

Galas, Michał. 2010. ‘Sabbatianism.’ In The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved from https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Sabbatianism.

Maciejko, Paweł. 2010. ‘Frankism.’ In The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Retrieved from https://yivoencyclopedia.org/article.aspx/Frankism.

Mandel, Arthur. 1979. The Militant Messiah: Or, the Flight from the Ghetto: The Story of Jacob Frank and the Frankist Movement. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

Rapoport-Albert, Ada. 2015. Woman and the Messianic Heresy of Sabbatai Zevi 1666–1816. Liverpool: The Littman Library of Jewish Civilization.

Scholem, Gershom. 1971. The Messianic Idea in Judaism and Other Essays on Jewish Spirituality. New York: Schocken Books.

Scholem, Gershom. 1989. Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Scholem, Gershom. 1995. Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism. New York: Schocken Books.