The personality of the messiah himself is remarkably well‐documented. He was plump, young, attractive. He had a beautiful singing voice, which he liked to show off in the synagogue, chanting psalms. An undistinguished writer, he was poetic in act rather than in word. He was not intellectually notable, although the study of Kabbalah, which formed his character, demands unusual conceptual gifts: Kabbalah is a kind of Einsteinian mysticism — the brilliance of its inventions is precisely the brillance of an original physics. It is no easy, amoral occultism, rather the vision of a universal moral restitution willed so acutely that only an alteration in the perception of the cosmos can account for it. Without the Kabbalah, Scholem explains, there could have been no Sabbatai Sevi to inaugurate the messianic dream, and no messianic dream to inaugurate the career of Sabbatai Sevi.

But he was, above all, a man of afflictions, subject to periods of “darkness,” which then gave way to phases of “illumination.” In short, a classic manic‐depressive; and, worn and perplexed by his suffering during the cycle, of bleakness, he traveled from Jerusalem, where he was tolerated as peculiar though harmless, to Gaza, to receive a healing penance from a 20‐year‐old Kabbalist named Nathan. Nathan was a young man of genius—a natural theologian, given to bending Kabbalah with the craft of a chessmaster plying new openings. Sabbatai Sevi confessed that now and then, in moments of exaltation, he conceived himself to be the messiah—and Nathan, all at once, irradiated, confirmed him as exactly that, conferred on him his mission, and theologized his madness.

The madness expressed itself in what were termed “strange acts.” When the mania came on him, the messiah's face grew rosy and glowing, and, lifted up by glory, he would compel his followers to engage in unprecedented and bizarre performances. He made changes in the liturgy, pronounced the unutterable Tetragrammaton, called women to the Ark, married himself to the Scrolls of the Law, turned fasts into feasts. Once he crammed three holidays into a single week; another time he declared that Monday was the real Sabbath. The glad tidings of the messianic age began to supersede the Law by eroding its strict practice—prayerbooks were amended to include the new messiah—and meanwhile the awakening to redeinption burgeoned among all classes of Jews. One widespread group was especially receptive—those refugees called marranos, who had survived the Inquisition in the guise of professing Christians, all the while secretly maintaining themselves as Jews. Their Catholic inheritance had inclined them toward worship of a redeemer, and their public apostasy prepared them for the strangest of Sabbatai's strange acts: his conversion to Islam.

The political meaning of the ingathering of the exiles into Turkishheld Palestine was not lost on the sultan and his viziers, who smelled, in so much penitence and prayer, a nuance of insurrection. Sabbatai Sevi was arrested in Smyrna, where he had come home under the triumphant name of King Messiah, Savior and Redeemer. He was offered one or the other: execution or apostasy. He chose to save his life, and with that one signal tossed thousands of his shocked and disillusioned followers back into the ordinary fact of exile, to be swallowed up once again by unmediated, unmiraculous history.

But masses of others, the believers, continued to nurture their faith: for them the messiah's act was a sacred mystery shielding an arcane purpose. An underground literature and liturgy sprang up: Nathan promulgated a new theology of paradox to account for the apostasy, wherein the inward reality of belief was held to be more forceful than the outer reality of happening. The “true” truth is always the concealed truth. The holiness‐at‐the‐core is the real revelation even when it is clothed in seeming evil. The sacred and the profane change places. The Sabbatians came at length to an astounding prayer: “Blessed art Thou, Lord of the Universe, who permittest that which is forbidden.”