Zevi and Nehemiah quickly quarrelled, no doubt because Zevi suspected the newcomer of trying to steal his thunder. But the quarrel had fateful implications, for Nehemiah went straight to the Ottoman authorities and revealed the full extent of what Zevi had been saying to his followers. For added effect, he accused Zevi of lewdness and immorality, charges which his ecstatic conduct – and his well-known views that ‘God permittest that which is forbidden’ – made highly plausible. Although Mehmed IV’s first impulse seems to have been to have Zevi executed, the hunt-loving monarch, who rarely attended too closely to matters of state, was persuaded by his advisers to give him the chance to convert to Islam. The ulema were conscious of the danger of turning him into a martyr; the Grand Vizier agreed. Zevi was interrogated in the sultan’s presence where one of the royal physicians, Hayatizade Mustafa Fevzi Efendi – a convert whose original name was Moshe Abravanel – translated for him from Turkish into Judeo-Spanish, and said he could get his supporters to follow him if he became a Muslim. To the astonishment of Ottoman Jewry, Zevi agreed, taking the name Aziz Mehmed Efendi and being honoured with the title of Chief Palace Gatekeeper and a royal pension. For the next six years, he lived in Edirne, Salonica and Istanbul under the eye of the Porte, receiving instruction in Islam from – and offering insights into Judaism to – the Grand Vizier’s personal spiritual adviser. Sometimes Zevi issued commands which encouraged his followers to convert; at others, he behaved as though still a Jew at heart. In 1672 he was banished to a remote port on the Albanian coast where he died four years later. Despite the temptation to take stern action against the Jews, even apparently considering at one stage to force them to convert en masse, the Ottoman authorities adroitly allowed the movement to fizzle out.17
The Messiah’s conversion was not the end of the matter, however. After his apostasy, there were ceremonies of expiation, contrition, and later of excommunication, but even then many of his followers remained undeflected: they argued the Messiah had converted to test the strength of their faith, or perhaps to bring the Turks themselves onto the right path – for was the Messiah not to care for humanity as a whole, and not just the Jews? Reading things in this way did not seem perverse to them: interpreting events so as to distinguish their outward meaning from their true, inner significance was, after all, at the heart of the Sabbataian teaching, while dissimulation and deliberate self-abasement in the eyes of the world had a positive value for mystics of all kinds – Jews, Christians and Muslims. Zevi’s apostasy was recast in Kabbalistic terms as an act of virtue, a way to redemption, gathering in the sparks of the Divine that had become scattered throughout the material world of sensory perception and matter itself. Zevi may have confirmed that those who thought this way were on the right path when he stopped briefly in Salonica the year after his conversion. He certainly got a number of leading notables and rabbis to follow him, provoking further fratricidal rage, brawls and even killings which the rabbis managed to hush up. Eventually he was forced out of the city for the last time, and a triumvirate of chief rabbis took control and attempted to avert any further disturbances. Henceforth there was a deep suspicion of mysticism. Yet most of Zevi’s followers – like his right-hand man, the Gaza rabbi Nathan – never did convert and subterranean Sabbataian influences could be found among Jews as far afield as Poland, Italy and Egypt. In Salonica they lingered on for decades and only disappeared after the Napoleonic wars.18
The Ma’min
Hundreds more, however, did actually follow Zevi into Islam – some at the time, and others a few years later – and by doing so they gave rise to what was perhaps one of the most unusual religious communities in the Levant. To the Turks they were called Dönmehs [turn-coats], a derogatory term which conveyed the suspicion with which others always regarded them. But they called themselves simply Ma’min – the Faithful – a term commonly used by all Muslims.* There were small groups of them elsewhere, but Zevi’s last wife, Ayse, and her father, a respected rabbi called Joseph Filosof, were from Salonica, and after Zevi’s death, they returned there and helped to establish the new sect which he had created. By 1900, the city’s ten-thousand-strong community of Judeo-Spanish-speaking Muslims was one of the most extraordinary and (for its size) influential elements in the confessional mosaic of the late Ottoman empire.
Schism was built into their history from the start. Not unlike the Sunni-Shia split in mainstream Islam, the internal divisions of the Ma’min stemmed from disagreement over the line of succession which followed their Prophet’s death. In 1683 his widow Ayse hailed her brother Jacob – Zevi’s brother-in-law – as the Querido [Beloved] who had received Zevi’s spirit, and there was a second wave of conversions. Many of those who had converted at the same time as Zevi regarded this as impious nonsense: they were known as Izmirlis, after Zevi’s birthplace. Jacob Querido himself helped Islamicize his followers and left Salonica to make the haj in the early 1690s but died during his return from Mecca. As the historian Nikos Stavroulakis points out, both the Izmirlis and the Yakublar [the followers of Jacob Querido] saw themselves as the faithful awaiting the return of the Messiah who had ‘withdrawn’ himself from the world; it was a stance which crossed the Judeo-Muslim divide and turned Sabbatai Zevi himself into something like a hidden Imam of the kind found in some Shia theology.19 A few years later, a third group, drawn mostly from among the poor and artisanal classes, broke off from the Izmirlis to follow another charismatic leader, the youthful Barouch Russo [known to his followers as Osman Baba], who claimed to be not merely the vessel for Zevi’s spirit but his very reincarnation.20
Although they differed on doctrinal matters, the three factions had features in common. Following the advice of Zevi himself, whose eighteen commandments forbade any form of proselytism, they preserved an extreme discretion as a precaution against the suspicions and accusations which they encountered from both Turks and Jews. Even their prayers were suffused with mystical allusions to protect their inner meanings from being deciphered by outsiders.21
Gradually they developed a kind of mystical Islam with a Judaic component not found in mainstream Muslim life. While they attended mosque and sometimes made the haj, they initially preserved Judeo-Spanish for use within the home, something which lasted longest among Russo’s followers. They celebrated Ramadan, and ate the traditional sweets on the 10th of Moharrem, to mark the deaths of Hasan and Huseyn. Like their cooking, the eighteen commandments which they attributed to Zevi showed clearly the influence of both Muslim and Talmudic practice. [Was it coincidence that eighteen was also a number of special significance to the Mevlevi order?] They prayed to their Messiah, ‘our King, our Redeemer’ in ‘the name of God, the God of Israel’, but followed many of the patterns of Muslim prayer. They increasingly followed Muslim custom in circumcizing their males just before puberty, and read the Qur’an, but referred to their festivals using the Jewish calendar. Some hired rabbis to teach the Torah to their children. Although the common suspicion throughout the city – certainly well into the nineteenth century – was that they were really Jews (if of a highly unreliable kind), in fact they were evolving over time into a distinctive heterodox Muslim sect, much influenced by the Sufi orders.
The Ottoman authorities clearly regarded their heterodoxy with some suspicion and as late as 1905 treated a case of a Ma’min girl who had fallen in love with her tutor, Hadji Feyzullah Effendi, as a question of conversion. Yet with their usual indifference to inner belief, they left them alone. A pasha who proposed to put them all to death was, according to local myth, removed by God before he could realize his plan. In 1859, at a time when the Ottoman authorities were starting to worry more about religious orthodoxy, a governor of the city carried out an enquiry which concluded they posed no threat to public order. All he did was to prevent rabbis from instructing them any longer. A later investigation confirmed their prosperity and honesty and after 1875 such official monitoring lapsed. Ma’min