in which Emmanuel tells of the false messiah Sabbatai Zevi, a secret society of his resolute followers, the burial of The Book of the Coming and the day of its resurrection
from: emmanuel@gmail.com
As I’ve mentioned, Fra Dolcino left a manuscript in the Franciscan monastery on the banks of Bojana River announcing he would be resurrected. It was hidden in the walls of the friary. Several years later, when it became clear that all further resistance to the furious Novarese besieging Mount Rubello was futile and only defeat and death lay ahead, he entrusted his secret to a handful of his closest pupils.
Over three centuries later, in the garden of the imperial palace in Istanbul, the Sultan asked: Where do you wish to be exiled? Sabbatai Zevi replied: To Ulcinj. He had Dolcino’s secret in mind.
What we read today as the biography of Sabbatai Zevi may correspond to the historical truth about him. On the other hand, it may be that most of the things we know about him, starting with the year of his birth and through to the year of his death, are only what he wanted us to know. Sabbatai Zevi was a first-rate manipulator, a Wildean figure before Wilde, with his life as his chef-d’oeuvre. His antics, sometimes incomprehensible and ludicrously inconsistent but always spectacular, were part of a grandiose project intended to convince the Jews that he was the Messiah. There’s not the slightest doubt that he believed it himself.
The year of Zevi’s birth is given as 1626. Was that really so, or did Zevi dictate that year to his biographers so that the very date of his birth would seem to confirm his messianic status? After all, there’s a Jewish belief that the Messiah will appear on the anniversary of the destruction of the Temple. Zevi’s playing with dates of great significance to Jews doesn’t end there: the self-proclaimed Messiah was born in Smyrna, now Izmir, on 9 August. That was a Sabbath. He died in Ulcinj on 30 September 1676. That was Yom Kippur.
Zevi died ten years after the failure of his key prophecy – the one according to which he was the King who would return the Jewish people to Israel. Zevi had presaged that this would occur in 1666. He certainly reckoned with the interesting associations awoken by the three sixes. In fact, his whole biography is in three sixes: the year of his birth, his unfulfilled prophecy and his death all end in a six.
The books say that Zevi stood out even as a child. He didn’t get on easily with the other boys studying to be rabbis. He had periods of deep melancholy alternating with phases of wild euphoria. (Dr Schulz would definitely have recognised the symptoms of bipolar disorder.) At the time, many considered them a sign that the young Zevi was the chosen one. At the age of twenty-five, Zevi proclaimed: ‘I am the Messiah and will return my people to Israel,’ and he immediately declared the abolition of God’s Law. He called on the followers gathered around him to eat non-kosher food. He put on a lunatic performance and publically wedded the Torah. In a later phase of his messianic madness, he tore up and trampled on the Torah, and then dedesecrad leather tefilins containing the holy verses. This man, whom two women had left because he’d shown no interest in them, now became sexually insatiable. He demanded of his followers that they bring him their maiden daughters to create a harem. What was more, he claimed he could have intercourse with virgins and they would remain pure.
Zevi’s theologians wrote: ‘As long as taboos regarding incest prevail on Earth it will be impossible to carry out union from above. The mystic annulment of the ban on incest will allow man to become like his Creator and learn the secrets of the Tree of Life.’
While Zevi enjoyed the pleasures of promiscuity, the Sultan was worried. On 6 February 1666, he ordered that Zevi be arrested. The Jewish prophet had become a danger to his throne. Jews from all over Europe poured into the Empire to follow the Messiah. Others were preparing to sell all their belongings and follow him to Israel. Many Christians, even learned ones, attentively and optimistically awaited confirmation that Zevi held the truth. Henry Oldenburg wrote to Spinoza: ‘All the world here is talking of the return of the Israelites to their own country. Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things.’
Instead of leading to revolution, Zevi was led in chains before the Sultan. He was given the choice: Islam or death. If he didn’t wish to adopt Islam, the Sultan was prepared to let him demonstrate his power: a master archer would loose an arrow at his breast, and if he was indeed the Messiah it cer tainly wouldn’t be difficult for him to perform a miracle and stop the arrow. Zevi didn’t hesitate for an instant: he removed his Jewish cap and donned a Turkish turban. The Messiah had changed faith at the last moment.
Aziz Mehmed Efendi, as Zevi was called after his conversion to Islam, didn’t relinquish Judaism completely or sincerely, and certainly not voluntarily and free of coercion. He continued to perform Jewish rites and even to preach in synagogues. The fact that he’d become a Muslim didn’t prevent him from continuing to claim he was the Jewish Messiah. The Sultan, who’d hoped Zevi’s conversion would make Jews flock to Islam, watched this messianic carnival with increasing consternation.
In the end, he decided to banish Zevi. It seems this is just what Zevi had been hoping for. He tried to persuade the Sultan that Ulcinj was an ideal town for exile – at the outer edge of the Empire, at the end of all roads. He’d be quite far away and out of sight there, in the fortress above the sea.
Ulcinj was populated at this time by pirates: both local buccaneers and Barbary corsairs. It was the most recalcitrant town in the whole of the Ottoman Empire. The people of Ulcinj feared neither God nor master. Being so wild and reckless, they’d sabre Zevi if he dared to bother them with his follies, the Sultan thought. ‘Let it be Ulcinj then,’ he pronounced.
The Ulcinj pirates were a plague on shipping and even raided the Venetian possessions in the Adriatic. In the years to come, the Sublime Porte’s conflict with these outlaws would escalate into an undeclared but no less savage war. The Pasha of Skadar was ordered to attack and set fire to a dozen of the Ulcinj pirates’ vessels. When the Sultan sent a missive to Ulcinj the following year demanding that further ships be burned, the pirates killed the messenger and threw his body from the town’s walls.
The Venetian authorities, for their own part, were itching to take action but realised that Ulcinj lay in Turkish territory. They didn’t want to risk war with the Empire. Instead, they sought to resolve the problem by diplomatic means. One Venetian dispatch even appealed to the Sultan’s vanity: ‘All the inhabitants of Dalmatia and Albania are astonished that you allow the pirates of Ulcinj to so audaciously flout your authority.’
The ship carrying Zevi and twenty-nine families of his followers approached Ulcinj. A black cloud was circling above the town and the travellers watched it in trepidation. As they disembarked on the beach below the fortress, the birds were on the sand, waiting with beady eyes. They seemed to be sizing up the newcomers, whose hands trembled and knees knocked: ‘As if we’d arrived in Hell!’ one of the women wailed. More and more of the feathered creatures poured forth, cawing, from caverns beneath the fortress, which would ultimately collapse in the earthquake of 1979, and rose up above Zevi and his following like a black flood to sow fear in even the bravest hearts. Imagine the sky above us in black turmoil as we ascend the stone stairs towards the fortress gate. Anxiety and despair are in the eyes of Zevi’s followers, but in Zevi’s I see only joy, for the circling murder of crows which blocks out the sun has shown him the sign.
Fra Dolcino’s followers had been unable to keep the secret he’d entrusted to them. Drunken mouths let it slip out and inquisitive ears were listening. As stories have a way of finding those who want to hear them, the story about Fra Dolcino and his hidden manuscript made it all the way to Smyrna. Zevi listened with disdain to those who spoke of Dolcino being a madman, illusionist and trickster. He knew Dolcino had hidden his book because he intended to return. But there could only be one Messiah. Therefore Zevi was determined to destroy the book of the ‘false prophet’.
Zevi spent his days in Ulcinj in writing and prayer. He carved the Star of David into the wall of his tower and there he spoke with God, whom he’d never renounced. Zevi left Ulcinj only twice: once he went to Bojana River to try and find Dolcino’s book in the ruins of the Franciscan monastery; the other time he travelled to the Archdiocese in Bar to try and find some trace of the book or at least rekindle his hope that the search would bear fruit.
Zevi would have gone to the very ends of the earth to find Dolcino’s book: his thoughts probed the distance in search of it. But the whole time it seems to have been right under his very nose.
Twenty years after Zevi’s death, the Morean War was raging. A Venetian fleet assembled in the sea off Ulcinj. It was 10 August 1696. Historical documents state: ‘The aim of the attack was to take the town and destroy the pirate nest because all attempts by the Venetians to wipe out the pirates in battles at sea had been unsuccessful.’
The blatant lies of history! As he was deploying his ships before Ulcinj, General Providur Daniel Dolfino IV thought back to the day his uncle told him Fra Dolcino’s secret. His uncle had spoken slowly, and he, still a boy, had stared wide-mouthed and absorbed every word. The air around them had burned on that serene, summer day, just like today, when he and his army were finally so close to the book he’d sworn to retake for Christendom.
The General Providur believed he’d find the book hidden in the wall of the church which the infidel had turned into a mosque. When the monastery by Bojana River had been destroyed, one of the Franciscan friars, who knew Dolcino’s secret, had taken the book and hidden it in the church in Ulcinj’s Old Town. But Ulcinj fell to the Mohammedans. Today people captured on pirate raids are sold as slaves in the church square, Daniel Dolfino thought with disgust. And there, overlooking the square, is the tower where the Jewish prophet who became a Mohammedan lived until his death. Pah, work of the infidel! With God’s aid, order would soon be returned to that part of the world: shipping in the Adriatic would be free of the infidel threat, Ulcinj would be Christian again, and he would finally get hold of the book which had fired his imagination for so many years – the book he believed to contain the answers to so many questions humanity could only ask with fear.
It’s noon, and a mistral from the sea fills the sails of the Venetian ships. Standing beside the general, I can see the deadly determination in his eyes. Fire! he commands his troops.
The siege of Ulcinj lasted almost one month. In the end, the Venetian troops re-boarded their ships and returned to the Bay of Kotor. They’d managed to take the town of Ulcinj and well nigh raze it to the ground; they’d also blocked off the aqueduct. But the pirate stronghold had not fallen.
Rain beat against the windows of the Venetian headquarters in Perast. In the library, General Providur Daniel Dolfino wrote his report to his superiors: ‘We were unable to take Ulcinj, but if the main goal was to punish the audacity and arrogance of the pirates, we have at least taught them a lesson.’ History books would describe his campaign as a partial success. But he alone knew how immense and utter his defeat was. All the honour and glory of this world would be worthless to him after that. Until the end of his earthly days he’d dream of the former church – now a mosque – up in the unassailable Ulcinj fortress; he’d dream of opening the book whose words would take him by the hand and lead him to where only the elect may go.
Back in his Smyrna days, Zevi arrived at the idea that all books and human knowledge are not only superfluous but a diabolical burden on humanity’s shoulders. He was completely obsessed by this idea during his ten-year stay in Ulcinj. Knowledge, he told his followers, prevents us from hearing the clear message of God. We may thus assume that Zevi was familiar with the teachings of Thomas Müntzer. ‘Bibel, Bubel, Babel – Bible-babble and Babylon: all that clutter has to be discarded so we can turn directly to God,’ Müntzer wrote. ‘The scholars think it’s sufficient to read the Word of God in books and spit it out raw, like a stork spits out frogs for its young in the nest.’
Müntzer was Luther’s student: a brilliant intellectual who burned with hatred towards everything that in the slightest way resembled intellect. Not inappropriately, they dubbed him the Apostle of the Ignorant. In his reckoning with books, Müntzer elevated the illiterate masses to authorised expositors of Scripture. The weakening of the authority of the Catholic Church also weakened its Truth, which at that time was the backbone of the world. Now, in place of that backbone, doomsday movements embedded implants fashioned in smithies and sheds, forests and caves. Their peg-legged Truth was crooked, crippled and lame. The common people took the matter into their own hands and Europe was ravaged by myriad groups guided by grotesquely distorted ideas. The people intervened in the corpus of the Christian idea, carrying out their operations with butcher-like precision. After this surgery by the ‘popular experts’, Christian Europe resembled Frankenstein. All across Europe, cities blazed, outlaw communities replaced liturgy with sexual perversions, cannibalism took over from Communion in places, and the ground was soaked with blood. Under the rule of millenarians, one contemporary wrote, ‘the world is awash in a torrent of blood which will rise as high as a horse’s head’.
Unlike Müntzer, who rejected all books, Zevi recommended the world one title – the one he himself authored and titled The Book of the Coming. But it will only be read when he arises and brings the Truth. For the interim, he left a fake book in this world of lies: The Glory of the Return, which he wrote by candlelight during the long nights in his tower, before the Star of David. Zevi considered that this book, which explains his teachings and the future of his people, contains just about as much truth as the world can bear. He bequeathed a difficult task to his followers, who would pass his words from mouth to mouth through many generations up until today: they must destroy his fake book, as well as that of the false messiah Fra Dolcino, before he can return and bring with him the real Holy Book. His followers had to find and burn those two books, otherwise his coming would be prevented and his people would continue to roam the world without peace and without a home.
Zevi left Ulcinj in the same way he arrived – spectacularly. Back when he disembarked on the beach below the fortress, black birds had risen up to meet him. On his last day he was strolling through the town in the company of two followers. They came across a group of people gathered around a fig tree, crying. A woman held in her arms a lifeless boy who’d fallen out of the tree. Then Zevi said: ‘O Lord, send back this child and take me instead!’ The boy opened his eyes and started to cry, while Zevi fell down dead on the cobbles. As the people lifted up his body and bore it away in wonder and gratitude, a murder of crows circled above them.
Now you know it all. The Ulcinj Library was burned down because Dolcino’s book lay hidden there among all the worthless titles. Daniel Dolfino IV had been right – Dolcino’s book really was hidden in the wall of the former church, now a mosque, in the Old Town. Workers renovating the church after the cataclysmic earthquake of 1979 found it, after which it was kept at the Ulcinj Library. The staff there didn’t know its value and consigned it to a depot for old books no one wanted.
About a hundred of Zevi’s followers had gone with him to Ulcinj. Although they’d all formally adopted Islam, in their hearts they’d never renounced Judaism. After Zevi’s death, they scattered to all parts of the world: some returned to Smyrna, while others went as far away as Australia. They in turn died, but their descendants learned to preserve the secret of their faith about what lay buried in the hill cemetery above Ulcinj. Where did the devotees come from to carry out their assignment and await the coming of the Messiah? Who’ll ever know? – perhaps from Turkey, where they’re called Dönmeh, or from California, where Yakov Leib HaKohain of Galata in Istanbul went to gather the faithful and prepare them for Zevi’s return.
When Zevi had felt his end drawing near, he crept out of the fortress and climbed up to the cemetery with a group of his disciples. There his Book of the Coming was buried in a tomb, following ancient rites. The Messiah would thus have his Holy Book nearby when he arose at his burial place in Ulcinj.
Zevi’s fake book, The Glory of the Return, was stolen from the house of the Vukotics, who’d bought it at auction in London. Zevi’s followers are fiendishly cunning: they burned down an entire library to cover up their burning of one book. And in order to conceal their theft of the other, they killed an entire family and left misleading clues.
From the Vukotićs’, they went straight to the old Jewish cemetery where The Book of the Coming lay waiting in deep, sylvan oblivion. There, on the grave of Zevi’s true book, they performed a ritual according to rules laid down by the Messiah himself and burned his fake script.
The first book had been destroyed in the library fire. The second was burned at the cemetery. The third was now dug out of its tomb: the Messiah could come again.