Sabbatai Ṣevi
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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 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 ?evi was forced to convert to Islam, but a clandestine sect survived. A monumental and revisionary work of Jewish historiography, Sabbatai ?evi details ?evi's rise to prominence and stands out for its combination of philological and empirical authority and passion. This edition contains a new introduction by Yaacob Dweck that explains the scholarly importance of Scholem's work to a new generation of readers.
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).