Table Of ContentFrom Lowly Metaphor to Divine Flesh
Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement
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From lowly metaphor to divine flesh
Sarah the Ashkenazi, Sabbatai Tsevi’s Messianic Queen and the Sabbatian Movement
Alexander van der Haven
Menasseh ben Israel Instituut Studies nr. 7
Amsterdam 2012, Menasseh ben Israel Instituut
Table of Contents
The metaphor’s rebellion in the Sabbatian movement 9
Imagining Sarah, imagining Sabbatianism 13
The life of a messianic spouse (c. 1640-1674) 23
Livorno: Birth of a sexual Sarah 27
The prostitute and the ascetic mystics 31
Earthly queen, heavenly shekhinah 40
A debaucherous prophetess 44
Donning the turban 47
Sarah’s gender and female and erotic symbolism in Jewish mysticism 53
From Eros to sexuality: The shekhinah and female bodies 56
Sabbatianism and its Spousal Theosis 58
Epilogue 60
Acknowledgments 63
References 65
Selected Bibliography 77
On 13 March 1664, Sarah ‘the Ashkenazi,’ a refugee from the 7
pogroms in what is now Poland and Lithuania, married Sabbatai
Tsevi, son of a merchant in Ottoman Izmir, or Smyrna. 1 Their wedding,
which probably took place in Cairo at the house of Raphael Joseph, the
representative of Egyptian Jewry to the government, was not a usual wed-
ding.2 The bride had for years claimed to be destined to marry the mes-
siah, and the groom was a good match: Sabbatai Tsevi, a refugee of some
sort himself after having been banned from several cities, believed he
was the messiah. Their wedding was therefore a messianic wedding, their
marriage a messianic marriage.
A year or so after their wedding Sabbatai publically declared him-
self messiah. This event initiated the largest messianic movement in
Jewish history since the tragic Bar Kokhba revolt in the second century
CE. The Sabbatian movement, as it has become known, was headed by
the messianic couple and the movement’s indefatigable prophet Nathan
Ashkenazi (1643-1680), better known as Nathan of Gaza. Sabbatai’s
forced conversion to Islam in 1666 initiated the decline of Sabbatianism
as a mass movement. It gradually transformed into an antinomian
tradition that would spur other antinomian messianic movements such
as Frankism until in the 19th century and still exists today in Turkey as
the Dönmeh sect.3
Although Sabbatai’s apostasy had undoubtedly a radicalizing influ-
ence on the movement, it was not the sole cause of its later antino-
mian character. In part because of Sarah, the Sabbatian movement was
enmeshed in controversy years before Sabbatai Tsevi’s conversion to
Islam. To begin with, Sarah’s past was tainted. Before her marriage, Sarah
had built a reputation of promiscuity, a fact that was not left unused in
the hands of the movement’s opponents. However, rather than being
an impediment, Sarah’s controversial pre-marital behavior made her an
appropriate spouse for Sabbatai Tsevi: The Sabbatians believed that they
had entered a messianic age and that their messiah had direct knowledge
8 of the will of God. As a result, many were convinced that this enabled
the suspension of halakhic rules, the Jewish religious laws believed to
be given to Moses by God and elaborated ever since, because they were
meant for exilic time in the absence of direct access to God.4
As a result, Sabbatai Tsevi declared traditional days of fasting and
lamentation such as the Ninth of Av when the Jews mourn the destruc-
tion of the Temple now as days of joyousness because the messianic era
had begun.5 Another effect of this messianism was the movement’s appar-
ent liberation of women from their halakhically submissive and sexu-
ally restricted role, as has been convincingly argued by Ada Rapoport-
Albert in 2001 and in her new book Women and the Messianic Heresy of
Sabbatai Zevi.6 Women became dominant as prophets in the movement
and against custom were allowed to read the Torah scroll in synagogue
services. Moreover, Sabbatai demonstratively spent the night with girls
engaged to be married to other men. In this transgressive atmosphere,
Sarah the messianic queen held a prominent position by being one of
the movement’s most important prophetesses. She was apparently also
allowed to have men in her room. This antinomian tendency, the idea
to be released from the observance of law
of unredeemed times, became even more
accentuated after Sabbatai and Sarah’s con-
version to Islam.
Portrait of Sabbatai Tsevi in Coenen’s Ydele verwacht-
inge (1669), according to Coenen an actual portrait
sketched in Smyrna.
The Metaphor’s Rebellion in the Sabbatian Movement
The antinomian characteristic of the Sabbatian movement that will play
a central role in the following pages is what Moshe Idel has called the
Sabbatians’ “realistic” and “nonmetaphorical” interpretations of the 9
“supernatural processes” described in different kabbalistic writings.7 In
other words, the Sabbatians, starting with Sabbatai and Sarah themselves,
started to actually physically act out that which their predecessors had
understood to be activities restricted to a supernatural level. The sexual
activities they engaged in for example were – in mystical practices prior
to Sabbatianism – written about but not supposed to take place in real
life. Rather than actions, the earlier mystics used language, namely meta-
phors of an encounter between the religious practitioner and an aspect of
the Godhead.
The Sabbatian movement’s antinomianism expressed itself in two dia-
metrically opposed attitudes toward earthly existence during the lifetime
of Sabbatai Tsevi (1626-1676). The first, ‘heavenly’ attitude, represented
by the movement’s main prophet and the young Sabbatai Tsevi, regarded
earthly existence and one’s actions in it as a mere shadow, a playfield of
metaphors, of the divine invisible world to which one’s actions should be
oriented. The second, ‘this-worldy,’ attitude denied this hierarchical dis-
tinction between the earthly and heavenly realms and instead regarded
them as united. This attitude was embodied in Sarah the Ashkenazi
(c. 1640-1674).
The this-worldly orientation Sarah the Ashkenazi represented was
a turnaround of a long trend in the reverse direction. Jewish mystics of
the late Middle Ages and Early Modern period read erotic tropes in reli-
gious texts not as literal descriptions of sexual practices. Rather, they were
seen as sophisticated guides for mystical practices. In fact, these mystics
increasingly directed their erotic drives away from their wives toward
what they considered the female element of God. In spite of the divine
commandment mandating regular sexual intercourse with her, the mys-
tic’s wife became but the lowly metaphor for the erotic relationship
between the mystic and God.
The different value these Jewish mystics saw in on the one hand
10 the object that served as the metaphor, in this case the female sexual
body, and on the other the aspect of God it served to represent is typ-
ical of the Western, mostly Platonic, philosophical and religious tradi-
tion.8 Although the use of metaphors has always been lauded – Aristotle
called the use of metaphor “the token of genius” – the metaphor itself
has tended to occupy a secondary, merely referential position compared
to that of the primary object to which it refers.9 Exemplary of this atti-
tude is the foundational exegetical approach toward Scripture by Philo
of Alexandria (c.30 BCE - c.50 CE), who emphasized that the anthropo-
morphic descriptions of the Divine in the Biblical narratives were merely
lowly metaphors of the grand invisible nature of God and the soul.
Mistaking the divine breath that animated God’s human creation for the
actual physical breath of a human-like creator was for Philo an offense to
God’s greatness. “God forbid,” Philo wrote, “that we should be infected
with such monstrous folly as to think that God employs for inbreathing
organs such as mouth or nostrils; for God is not only not in the form of a
man but belongs to no class or kind.”10
Philo’s warning not to mistake the lowly earthly metaphor for the
