Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676

Description

Gershom Scholem stands out among modern thinkers for the richness and power of his historical imagination. A work widely esteemed as his magnum opus, Sabbatai ?evi offers a vividly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world. Sabbatai ?evi was an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey who ar

Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) was one of the most important Jewish intellectuals of the twentieth century and the father of the academic study of Jewish mysticism. He was a professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Yaacob Dweck is associate professor of history and Judaic studies at Princeton University. He is the author of The Scandal of Kabbalah (Princeton).

"Scholem's scholarship betrays an alert presentness... No great textual scholar, no master of philology and historical criticism commands a technique at once more scrupulously attentive to its object and more instinct with the writer's voice. That voices reaches and grips... [M]agisterial."--New Yorker "Immensely important and fascinating... A monumental work of historical scholarship, which recounts in minute detail a moving tragedy of vast dimensions."--The New York Review of Books "Comprehensive... the last word on an astonishing episode of Jewish history."--Times Literary Supplement "A masterful mix of traditional Jewish scholarship and... original insight into the psychology of Judaism."--Boston Globe "Undoubtedly one of the all-time masterpieces of scholarship and intellectual history."--Commonweal "A major contribution not only to the study of messianic movements but also a study enlightening to the history of the Jewish people."--Jewish Press