Sabbatai Ṣevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626-1676 (Bollingen Series, 60) - Hardcover

Scholem, Gershom Gerhard

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691099162 ISBN 13: 9780691099163

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 1973

Synopsis

A richly detailed account of the only messianic movement ever to engulf the entire Jewish world.

The twentieth century produced a galaxy of extraordinary Jewish historians. Gershom Scholem stands out among them for the richness and power of his historical imagination. Born in Berlin in 1897, Scholem became a Zionist as a young student in a revolt against his family's bourgeois and assimilated life. He learned Hebrew and studied Kabbalah, the world of mystical teachings that had become marginalized--indeed stigmatized--within the mainstream rationalist Jewish tradition. In 1923, Scholem emigrated to Palestine and eventually joined the faculty of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, publishing groundbreaking studies in the field of Jewish mysticism.

In the 1930s, Scholem's scholarship turned to an obscure kabbalist rabbi of seventeenth-century Turkey, Sabbatai Ṣevi, who aroused a fervent following that spread over the Jewish world after he declared himself to be the Messiah. The movement suffered a severe blow when Ṣevi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A Bollingen Foundation grant enabled Scholem to complete the original Hebrew edition of his biography in 1957. Bollingen also supported R. J. Zwi Werblowsky's masterful English translation. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai Ṣevi stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and for its passion. It is widely esteemed as one of Scholem's masterworks. The author himself always regarded the Princeton/Bollingen edition as a highlight of his scholarship.

About this title

About the Author:

David J. Halperin is Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. He trained in Semitic languages at Cornell University, in Near Eastern Studies at the University of California at Berkeley, and in rabbinics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from Berkeley in 1977. From 1976 through 2000 he taught the history of Judaism in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where he was repeatedly recognized for excellence in undergraduate teaching. He is the author of The Merkabah in Rabbinic Literature (1980), The Faces of the Chariot: Early Jewish Responses to Ezekiel's Vision (1988), Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology (1993), and Abraham Miguel Cardozo: Selected Writings (2001).

Language Notes:

Text: English, Hebrew (translation)

About this edition

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 1973
• ISBN 10: 0691099162
• ISBN 13: 9780691099163
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 1027