Sabbateans - Sabbateans Who Remained Jews

Sabbateans Who Remained Jews

In Jewish history during the two centuries after Zevi's death in 1676, many Jews (including some Jewish scholars) who were horrified by Zevi's personal conversion to Islam nevertheless clung to the belief that Zevi was still the true Jewish Messiah. They constituted the largest number of Sabbateans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were vigorously opposed and were eventually forced into hiding their beliefs by the methodical opposition of almost all the leading rabbis who were determined to root out Zevi's kabbalistically derived anti-traditional teachings and his influence upon the Jewish masses. By the nineteenth century Jewish Sabbateans had been reduced to small groups of hidden followers who feared being discovered for their beliefs that were deemed to be entirely heretical and antithetical to classical Judaism (particularly since the head of the movement, Zevi, had become an openly practicing Muslim for the last ten years of his life until the time of his mysterious and premature death at the age of fifty.)

When the founder of Hasidic Judaism, Rabbi Yisrael ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov (1698–1760), emerged and made his teachings and influence felt through his own disciples, many rabbinical opponents of Hasidism were suspicious that he and his Hasidim were a class of Sabbateans. Some historians have written that many Sabbateans became followers of Hasidism, which unlike Zevi's movement, followed Halakha (Jewish law) and eventually opponents of Hasidism were convinced that the Hasidim were not Sabbateans.