Reddit reviews Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah (Bollingen Series, No. 93)

> Oh, and he also patented the use of tetrasilver tetraoxide as a supposed cure for cancer and AIDS.

Well this certainly raises questions about him. I did not trust each of his claims at face value anyway, but I will say his books are meticulously researched, and much of what he says is documented elsewhere either by Scholem, or in Perfidy I believe is the book, and other sources much more reputable than Rabbi Antelman appears. His work is completely sourced. I will have to go over the sources soon. Even with the internet, acquiring knowledge can still be work....

Anyway, Antelman's modern day theories may be questionable, but this is documented history and I am hoping someone on this sub has read that book, or knows about it, and can answer my questions about the historical aspect. As I said in another comment, we can leave modern-day Antelman's conspiracy theories to the conspiracy sub, but the Sabbatean-Frankist movement was a real thing that Scholem, a much more reputable source, documented.

This just hit my door. I didn't know it was 1,000 pages! It's like a Pynchon novel -- that really happened:

"There are certain magisterial works of the human mind that alter ordinary comprehension so unpredictably and on so prodigious a scale that culture itself is set awry, and nothing can ever be seen again except in the strange light of that new knowledge. Obviously it is not possible to “review” such a work, any more than one can review a mountain range: an accretion of fundamental insight takes on the power of a natural force. Gershom Scholem's oeuvre has such a force, and its massive keystone, “Sabbatai Sevi,” presses down on the gasping consciousness with the strength not simply of its invulnerable, almost tidal, scholarship, but of its singular instruction in the nature of man.

“Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah is a titanic investigation into the substance and effect of illusion. It explores the rise, in the years 1665 and 1666 of a messianic movement among a profoundly oppressed people only just recovering from the Inquisition and the Iberian expulsion, thrown into yet another holocaust—the catastrophic massacres of the Jews of Poland that began in 1648 and continued until 1655. ...

"But he was, above all, a man of afflictions, subject to periods of “darkness,” which then gave way to phases of “illumination.” In short, a classic manic‐depressive; and, worn and perplexed by his suffering during the cycle, of bleakness, he traveled from Jerusalem, where he was tolerated as peculiar though harmless, to Gaza, to receive a healing penance from a 20‐year‐old Kabbalist named Nathan. Nathan was a young man of genius—a natural theologian, given to bending Kabbalah with the craft of a chessmaster plying new openings. Sabbatai Sevi confessed that now and then, in moments of exaltation, he conceived himself to be the messiah—and Nathan, all at once, irradiated, confirmed him as exactly that, conferred on him his mission, and theologized his madness."

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Nathan, too, cited Isaiah 53. The story of the Exile out-Pynchons Pynchon and makes Cormac McCarthy seem tame.

Who Was Shabbetai Tsvi? by Dr. Henry Abramson