Sabbatean

Sabbatean Women

 Sabbateanism displayed a particular interest in women and was especially attractive to them from the outset. It empowered many by acknowledging their prophetic inspiration, thus often turning them into the movement’s most ardent and effective propagandists; it identified women in their own right as a target-audience for its redemptive message; it granted them access to rituals and esoteric doctrines traditionally considered an exclusively male domain; it invested the wives of its leading protagonists with the aura and authority of messianic-divine consorts, and in one case it even promoted an unmarried woman to the status of “Holy Virgin’—its messianic figurehead and female incarnation of the divine.

Saloniki, Sabbatean

Sect of Saloniki, 

Sabbatean

Review: The Dönme: Jewish Converts, Muslim Revolutionaries, and Secular Turks, by Marc David Baer:

Sabbatai Zvi

Shabbateanism was the largest and most momentous messianic movement in Jewish history subsequent to the destruction of the Temple and the Bar Kokhba Revolt. The factors giving rise to its extraordinarily widespread and deep-seated appeal are twofold. On the one hand there was the general condition of the Jewish people in exile, and the hopes for political and spiritual redemption fostered by Jewish religious tradition and given great emphasis in Jewish thought, which at all times could provide fertile soil for the blossoming of messianic movements aimed at ushering in redemption. On the other hand there were the specific conditions contributing to the impetus of the movement that began in 1665

Rabbi Marvin Antelman

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