I first read about Sabbatai Sevi (the spelling of whose name varies) in Colin Wilson's recent book The Devil's Party (a.k.a. Rogue Messiahs in the US). In that book he occupied only part of one chapter and shared space with the likes of David Koresh, Charles Manson, Jim Jones, Joseph Smith, Aleister Crowley, and so on. As Wilson describes him, Sabbatai was merely the latest in a long line of messiahs, the saviour expected by the Jewish people since the Babylonian exile in the 6th century BC. The Greek conqueror Alexander the Great was considered by the Jews of the 4th century BC to be the anointed one, for example. Judas Maccabeus (d. 161 BC) was the next most serious contender. That nice young man Jesus then came along and wound up instead becoming the anointed one of an entirely different group of people. Such figures as Simon bar Kochba, Moses of Crete, the Christ of Gevaudon, Aldebert, Eudo de Stella, Tanchelm of Antwerp and Klaus Ludwig followed over the next fifteen centuries.

Sabbatai Sevi then came along in the 17th century and set about becoming the most successful saviour of the Jews since Jesus himself. From a reasonably early age he acquired a considerable number of followers, though an equal number regarded him and his proclamations about changes to the Law, the abolition of the Ten Commandments, etc, as merely mad; then, just as he was at the height of his influence and people everywhere were basically expecting him to be crowned king of the entire world in 1666, the entire edifice came crashing down when the Sultan of Istanbul, Mehmet IV, flung him into prison and offered him the choice between conversion to Islam and death. Understandably he took the former, whereupon the wind was well and truly knocked out of the sails of the messianic movement he had created.

Wilson has a long-standing fascination with human failure that stretches all the way back to his first book, The Outsider. As for me, I want a little bit more than that. And Wilson's short section on Sabbatai didn't entirely convince me that he was much more than a not particularly interesting segment of that subset of religious history containing those people who mistook themselves for God. I was interested, therefore, to see John Freely's The Lost Messiah (out now in Australia in paperback, though not available in the US until next February, apparently) on sale recently, with its promise of a much fuller and more detailed look at Sabbatai's life and times.