History of the Jews

by Paul Johnson

On 31 May 1665, as if on cue, the Messiah appeared and was proclaimed as such in Gaza. He was called Shabbetai Zevi (1626-76). But the man behind his appearance, the master-mind, chief theorist and impresario of the whole phenomenon, was a local resident, one Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Hayyim Ashkenazi, known as Nathan of Gaza (c. 1643-80). This young man was learned, brilliant, inventive and resourceful. He had been born in Jerusalem, son of a respected rabbinical scholar and kabbalist; had married the daughter of a wealthy Gaza merchant and gone to live there; and in 1664 he had taken up the intensive study of Lurianic kabbalah. He quickly mastered Lurianic techniques of meditation and ecstasy-inducement. By early 1665 he was experiencing prolonged visions. But it is significant that he was already modifying Lurianic concepts to suit the particular projection of the Messiah he was conceiving in his mind. Nathan was an outstanding example of a highly imaginative and dangerous Jewish archetype which was to become of world importance when the Jewish intellect became secularized. He could construct a system of explanations and predictions of phenomena which was both highly plausible and at the same time sufficiently imprecise and flexible to accommodate new–and often highly inconvenient–events when they occurred. And he had the gift of presenting his protean-type theory, with its built-in capacity to absorb phenomena by a process of osmosis, with tremendous conviction and apl...