One thing Freely's book has done for me is made me realise there are some pretty significant gaps in my knowledge (this I already knew, though) and that one of those is the history of the Jewish people in Europe throughout the centuries. The world in which Sabbatai Sevi moved was one I clearly knew little if anything about previously, and I suppose the book has performed a valuable service in making me aware of this. And yet, having said that, I found it a hard world to visualise. Freely's book never quite makes it vivid and real. As he himself says, it was a world far removed from the scientific revolution happening in the rest of Europe in that age, but Freely still doesn't make me imagine it.

And unfortunately the same is ultimately true of Sabbatai himself. Freely does at least perhaps paint a more convincing picture of Sabbatai's achievements in galvanising so much of the Jewish world to believe in him, to convince them the messiah was finally at hand for real this time after centuries of disappointment, and that he was the messiah in question. If in the end Sabbatai's mission was still a failure, it doesn't seem quite so ignominious in Freely's account as it does in Wilson's (the end of the life itself, exiled to Albania after committing certain inappropriate sexual deeds, is another matter); certainly Wilson does not give the Sabbatian movement credit for surviving long after his death and into the 20th century as Freely does.

Sabbatai Sevi himself, though, remains about as distant and unimaginable as the world he lived in. For all Freely's efforts to bring him forth from behind the obscuring haze of the hagiographic writings of his devotees and the equally biased efforts of his detractors, he somehow never quite does it for me. In the end, the impression I'm left with from Freely's book is that the successes and failures of Sabbatai Sevi were those of an idea, some abstract desire that took hold of European Jewry in an astonishing way, rather than those of someone who was once a living, breathing human being... and the living, breathing human being is as far away from us in Freely's book as the messiah seems to be these days.