_And you should if you please refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews._
The reader of John Evelyn's _History of Sabatai Sevi, The Pretended
Messiah of the Jewes_ or of the _History of the Three Late Famous
Impostors_ (1669) in which it is the most significant part, discovers a
fascinating, if unoriginal, addition to the work of the great diarist
and dilettante, the amateur student of engraving and trees--and smoke.
Evelyn's work was almost totally derived from the account of Sir Paul
Rycaut, who was from 1661 secretary (and later consul) for the Levant
mercantile company in Smyrna. Rycaut was in fact responsible for what
first-hand reporting there is in the _History_, and Evelyn's book
preceded by only eleven years Rycaut's _History of the Turkish Empire
1623-1677_, where the story first appeared under the author's own name.
What gives Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ its own interest is partly the
immediacy of the news of Sabatai Sevi, and partly the context in which
Evelyn places the story, a context to some extent indicated in the
title, _History of the Three Late Famous Impostors_. When the work was
published in 1669, Sevi was neither the amusing curiosity he is likely
to be for the modern reader, nor the impertinent confidence man
suggested by Evelyn's "impostor." Evelyn was reviewing for an English
audience one of the great crises in Jewish history, the career of the
man who has been called Judaism's "most notorious messianic
claimant."[1] That career was not entirely past history in 1669. Sevi
lived until 1675, and even after his humiliation and final banishment in
1673 he could write to his father-in-law in Salonica that men would see
in his lifetime the day of redemption and the return of the Jews to
Zion; "For God hath appointed me Lord of all Mizrayim."[2] Indeed, a
remnant of Judaeo-Turkish Shabbethaians called Doenmehs apparently
exists in Salonica to the present day.
Whatever the appeal of Sevi's story may be for modern readers--as a mode
of fiction, perhaps, or an instance of mass hysteria--Evelyn's discovery
of an exemplum for religious and political enthusiasts may seem forced
or reductive. In 1669, however, the interest of Englishmen in Jewish
affairs was by no means merely academic--or narrowly commercial. There
were, it is true, English sportsmen in 1666 who were actually betting on
the Sevi career--ten to one that the "Messiah of Ismir" would be crowned
King of Jerusalem within two years. And what was most disturbing about
Sevi to the English nation as a whole was perhaps the disruption of
trade, in which Sevi's father was intimately involved, as the agent of
an English mercantile house. At the height of the furor, Jewish
merchants were dissolving businesses as well as unroofing their houses
in preparation for the return to Jerusalem. But the prime significance
for Evelyn--perhaps more than for Rycaut--is revealed in the instinctive
mental connection between Jewish and Christian history, or ways of
thinking about history, on the one hand, and political realities in
England on the other. Only nine years had passed since the return of
Charles II and the displacement of the Protectorate, with its remarkable
Jewish elements. As for the return of the Christian Messiah and an
imminent reign of the saints, Sevi might well have reminded Evelyn of
the English "impostor," the Quaker Jacob Naylor, whose messianic claims
were publicly examined at Bristol in 1657. Far more important to
Englishmen of the period, however, was the episode involving the mission
of the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to Cromwell's England in
1655, a year after Naylor's first appearance.
For two centuries after their expulsion from England by Edward I--that
is, until the seventeenth century--Jews either avoided England entirely
or lived there in deliberate obscurity. Some Spanish and Portuguese
Jewish refugees from the Inquisition did arrive in England; but
particularly after the execution for treason of Elizabeth's physician
Roderigo Lopez in 1594, they could remain only as "Crypto-Jews." It was
during the Puritan regime that the Jewish position in England really
improved, and the removal of the legal bar dates from the conference
summoned by Cromwell in response to the demands of Menasseh.[3] The
interest in Rabbinical literature displayed by learned men like Joseph
Scaliger, Johann Buxtorf, Hugo Grotius, and John Selden, together with a
general Old Testament emphasis in Protestant scriptural study, made
Judaism a more fashionable interest than it had been in previous years.
Cromwell's own encouragement of Menasseh is usually viewed as an
expression of his tolerationist principles and the hope that the return
of Jews to England would aid in extending trade with Spain and Portugal,
and even with the Levant. An additional facet of his general reception
of Menasseh is relevant to Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_. A chief
argument in _The Humble Address of Menasseh ben Israel_ (November 5,
1655) was the Amsterdam rabbi's belief that since England was the only
country rejecting the Jews, their readmittance would be the signal for
the coming of the Messiah. Fifth-Monarchy enthusiasts recalled the
prophecies of _Daniel_ and _Revelations_ and linked them with the
relatively immediate experience of the Thirty Years' War; motives of
mercantile jealousy were to some extent offset by millenarian anxiety.
Indeed, the possibility of an imminent millennial reign of the saints
could be the strongest kind of argument for showing favor to the Jews.
Cromwell all but proselytized at the meetings of the conference;
ultimately, because of the opposition of commercial interests, he was
forced to dissolve it.
We can perhaps best understand Evelyn's account of Sabatai Sevi, "the
Messiah of Ismir," against this background of English Protestant
millennial thinking, admirably summarized in Michael Fixler's recent
study.[4] As Fixler suggests, it was possibly to discredit the
Fifth-Monarchy men that Rycaut first included the account in what was to
become his _History of the Turkish Empire_. At any rate, Sevi himself
was hardly the mere con-man Rycaut and Evelyn portray; the mask, indeed,
is _erepta_ only with the greatest of difficulty. Because Rycaut was
interested in trade and cultural _mores_, his (and consequently,
Evelyn's) account neglects features of the story which are of primary
interest to more psychologically inclined readers. We are told almost
nothing, for example, of the details of Sevi's solitary youth; his
physical attractiveness; his clear voice as well suited to lascivious
Spanish love-songs (interpreted mystically) as to Psalms; and his early
rejection of the Talmud for the practical Cabala, with its strenuous,
self-mortifying asceticism. One would gather from Evelyn that only the
deluded followers of the "impostor" and not Sevi himself imposed such
punishments as self-burial, and bathing in the sea, even in midwinter.
More surprising, perhaps, is the almost total neglect of Sarah, Sevi's
third wife, mentioned in the _Pretended Messiah_ only as the "Ligornese
Lady" whom Sevi acquired after freeing himself "from the Incumbrances of
a Family." In fact, the beautiful and engaging Sarah seems to have
become an integral part of the movement, a movement which in its early
stages was all-male. A prostitute notorious in her own right, primarily
for her claims to be the destined bride of the Messiah, Sarah apparently
escaped miraculously from a Christian convent after being cared for as
an orphan of the savage Chmielnicki massacres in Poland. As he was later
to do with a more formidable rival to his exclusive claims (Nehemiah
ha-Kohen, who ultimately exposed him as a fraud) Sevi called Sarah to
Cairo in 1664, claiming to have dreamed of her as _his_ future bride.
Eventually, after his "conversion," she followed him even into the
Turkish seraglio where he bore the title Mahmed Effendi.
Other details are missing from Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_; the
interested reader may pursue the strange tale in Graetz's _History of
the Jews_ or the partly fictionalized biography by Joseph Kastein, _The
Messiah of Ismir_.[5] We may note in passing one additional incident.
After his first banishment from Smyrna (as a result of pronouncing the
sacred tetragrammaton in Hebrew), Sevi met the mystic Abraham ha-Yakini,
who subsequently forged in archaic characters and style a document
entitled "The Great Wisdom of Solomon"--a document accepted by Sevi as
an authentic "archeological" revelation. The event was shortly followed
by a bizarre celebration of Sevi's marriage as the Son of God ("En Sof")
with the Torah, and may have provided climactic metaphysical
confirmation of Sevi's hopes. In the manner of the old apocalypses, it
pronounced Sevi the "saviour of My people, Israel," one who in time
"shall overthrow the great dragon and kill the serpent."[6]
Good as Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ may have been for contemporaries
as a review of recent "news," and we must not underestimate this
function, to the modern reader it seems closer to fiction, of a
peculiarly propagandistic and ironic kind. Aside from omissions from the
story--partly a matter of ignorance or failure in perception, and partly
deliberate exclusion of inconvenient material--Evelyn's enthusiastic
acceptance of his source's frequent theatrical metaphors is one measure
of the distance from history of the _Pretended Messiah_. When Evelyn's
Sevi is grave, it is a "formal and pharisaical gravitie" which is
"starcht on." His motives in general seem highly conscious, even
deliberate; and despite a certain doubleness in the point of view of the
_Pretended Messiah_, the reason for Sevi's comic simplicity is not
difficult to discover. Sir Paul Rycaut, as I have suggested, seems
primarily interested in the effects of the movement on trade. The most
vehement thinking of the book, though ascribed to an unnamed opponent of
Sevi, could well be that of Rycaut himself:
[The opponent observed] in what a wilde manner the whole People
of the Jewes was transported, with the groundless beliefe of a
_Messiah_, leaving not onely their Trade, and course of living,
but publishing Prophesies of a speedy Kingdome, of rescue from
the Tyranny of the Turk, and leading the Grand Signior himself
Captive in Chaines; matters so dangerous and obnoxious to the
State wherein they lived, as might justly convict them of
Treason and Rebellion, and leave them to the Mercy of that
Justice, which on the least jealousie and suspicion of Matters
of this nature uses to extirpate Families, and subvert the
Mansion-houses of their own People, much rather of the Jewes, on
whom the Turkes would gladly take occasion to dispoile them of
their Estates, and condemn the whole Nation to perpetual
slavery.
(pp. 78-79)
Evelyn retains this and similar material, apparently never suspecting
that the Turks may well have been hesitant from real fear; but the
burden of his emphasis is more overtly political and religious. Evelyn
is less than ingenuous, perhaps, in associating Sevi with Peter Serini's
fake brother, or even with Mahomed Bei--another of the "late famous
impostors." But the connection does have the effect of putting Sevi in
an imaginary world where all masks will be discovered and the truth
known. Ultimately, Evelyn's Jews, like Dryden's and Milton's, are
English--"_our_ modern Enthusiasts and other prodigious Sects amongst
us, who Dreame of the like Carnal Expectations, and a Temporal Monarchy"
(sig. A8; italics mine). One hardly needs to fill out the reading. With
a traditional reminder that "the Time is not yet Accomplished," Evelyn
warns English sectarians to beware of misleading fictions--"to weigh how
nearly their Characters approach the Style and Design of those deluded
wretches."
Evelyn's words here suggest something of the wider interest of the
_Pretended Messiah_. For in threatening the modern enthusiasts, as it
were, with the status of comic fiction, he also hinted at the literal
immediacy of such explicitly imaginative works as _Absalom and
Achitophel_, _Paradise Regained_, and _Samson Agonistes_. What Evelyn's
_Pretended Messiah_ helps to reveal, then, is not only the potential
metaphoric value of news itself, but also the peculiar proximity of
poetry to "history" in a period when historical thought was inseparable
from apocalyptic myth.[7]
University of California,
Los Angeles