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    The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews
    The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews
    The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews
    Ebook91 pages1 hour

    The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews

    By Christopher W. Grose and John Evelyn

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    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherArchive Classics
    Release dateNov 15, 2013
    The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews

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      Book preview

      The History of Sabatai Sevi The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews - Christopher W. Grose

      The Project Gutenberg EBook of The History of Sabatai Sevi, by John Evelyn

      This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with

      almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or

      re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included

      with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.net

      Title: The History of Sabatai Sevi

      The Suppos'd Messiah of the Jews

      Author: John Evelyn

      Editor: Christopher W. Grose

      Release Date: December 17, 2011 [EBook #38327]

      Language: English

      *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HISTORY OF SABATAI SEVI ***

      Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Moti Ben-Ari and

      the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

      http://www.pgdp.net

      The Augustan Reprint Society

      JOHN EVELYN

      THE HISTORY OF SABATAI SEVI,

      The Suppos'd Messiah OF THE JEWS.

      (1669)

      Introduction by

      Christopher W. Grose

      PUBLICATION NUMBER 131

      WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY

      University of California, Los Angeles

      1968

      GENERAL EDITORS

      George Robert Guffey, University of California, Los Angeles

      Maximillian E. Novak, University of California, Los Angeles

      Robert Vosper, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

      ADVISORY EDITORS

      Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan

      James L. Clifford, Columbia University

      Ralph Cohen, University of Virginia

      Vinton A. Dearing, University of California, Los Angeles

      Arthur Friedman, University of Chicago

      Louis A. Landa, Princeton University

      Earl Miner, University of California, Los Angeles

      Samuel H. Monk, University of Minnesota

      Everett T. Moore, University of California, Los Angeles

      Lawrence Clark Powell, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

      James Sutherland, University College, London

      H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., University of California, Los Angeles

      CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

      Edna C. Davis, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library

      INTRODUCTION

      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 Dönmehs 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

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