Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626 to 1676

Gershom Scholem founded the modern academic study of Jewish mysticism, and this biography, translated from his original 1957 Hebrew study, remains the standard scholarly account of Sabbatai Zevi's messianic movement, its 1666 climax and its fragmentation into believers, penitents and the crypto Jewish Donmeh after Zevi's conversion to Islam. The book is now half a century old, and this record states that plainly: later scholars, Matt Goldish among them, have refined points of Scholem's psychological portrait of Zevi and his account of the movement's later theology, without displacing the book's core documentary history of the events of 1665 and 1666. Use it for the documented history of Sabbatai Zevi's claim, its following and its aftermath; a claim resting on later Frankist or Donmeh theological development specifically may need a more recent dedicated source alongside it.