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Sabbatai Sevi
The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676
Scholem's magisterial biography of the seventeenth-century messianic claimant shows how Lurianic Kabbalah prepared the ground for a mass movement that swept the Jewish world, and how Sabbatai Sevi's conversion to Islam produced a radical heretical theology. Vast in scope and documentation, it is both a study of a mystical movement and a profound reflection on messianism, crisis and religious paradox.






