The Real History of the End of the World (20 page)

At this point, the Ottoman authorities began to take notice. Jewish employees of the government were neglecting their work and disrupting the order of the state in order to join the Sabbateans. Therefore, government officials arrested Sabbatai Sevi, imprisoned him in Gallipoli, and eventually brought him before the sultan in Istanbul. There in 1666, under pressure from the authorities, he officially converted to Islam and was released.

That should have been the end of the story. For some, it was. Many of his disciples were bitterly disappointed by his betrayal and returned to their normal lives. Some may have even converted to Christianity or Islam.

But this was an era when a large part of the monotheistic world anticipated the Messiah. A little thing like apostasy was not going to convince some of them that they had been mistaken. Christians who believed that Christ would again appear as a Jew were still willing to entertain the idea that it was in the person of Sabbatai Sevi. A preacher in the Netherlands told his congregation that the king of the Jews had appeared in the Holy Land.
¹⁴
The Christian scholar Peter Serrarius became a believer and, even after Sevi's conversion, set out for Smyrna to meet him, although he died on the way.
¹⁵

Even those who didn't believe in Sabbatai Sevi saw the movement as a positive step toward the Second Coming, “for when these surheli, or mocksuns, appear, the Son of righteousness is not far off.”
¹⁶

Nathan was one who did not abandon the cause. He continued to preach throughout the Balkans, Turkey, and Italy that Sevi was the Messiah. Using the same logic that denied that a miracle worker was automatically divine, he pointed out that, whatever he called himself, Sabbatai Sevi was still, in his essence, the Messiah. It was possible, he argued, that Sabbatai Sevi had converted in response to a vision telling him that it was a “punishment for the fact that the Jewish people do not understand the Godhead.”
¹⁷

Most believers regretted their misplaced enthusiasm and went back to normal life. Both the Turkish government and the foreign merchants were relieved when business seemed to return to normal. The extent to which Jews had participated in the messianic movement is clear from the reaction of various merchants to the end of the movement. An Englishman in Smyrna wrote, “Here is now greate hopes trade will suddenly much amend the Jewes . . . now beginning to Selle and promise to follow Tradeing as before, which they had totally neglected.”
¹⁸

But the Sabbateans continued. In Salonika, the belief in Sabbatai Sevi has lasted until the present. It has been suggested that the reason for this was due more to an economic crisis than a religious one, but it's amazing how often the two go together.
¹⁹
The Sabbateans in Turkey today are known as
Dönme
(convert). How many actually practice Judaism, believing that Sabbatai Sevi was the Messiah, is hard to say. Like the Marranos, who converted to Christianity but maintained their Jewish heritage, the
Dömne
are officially Muslim.
²⁰

The story of Sabbatai Sevi lasted in novels and other fiction for a long time. He became a symbol of the false prophet, along with Christian pretenders. It inspired Increase Mather, the New England Puritan, to write
The Mystery of Israel's Salvation,
in which he foresaw the conversion of the Jews.
²¹
On the other end of the spectrum seventeenth-century pamphleteers in Germany used the story as a cautionary tale to emphasize the deceitfulness of Jews, feeding into a new form of anti-Semitism that would lead to the Holocaust.

Sabbatai Sevi would never have become so widely known and discussed if Christians, Muslims, and Jews were not already expecting a Messiah, a Second Coming, or the Mahdi. The seventeenth century was primed for the end of the world.

1
Giacomo Saban, ed. and trans., “Sabbatai Sevi as Seen by a Contemporary Traveller,”
Jewish History
7, no. 2 (1993): 112.

2
Also spelled, Zvi, Tsevi, Tzevi, and so on, according to the mode of the translator of the Arabic and Hebrew script.

3
Moshe Idel,
Messianic Mystics
(New Haven, CT:, Yale University Press, 1998), 185.

4
Also known as Nathan of Gaza and Nathan Levi.

5
Stephen Sharot,
Messianism, Mysticism, and Magic: A Sociological Analysis of Jewish Religious Movements
(Raleigh:, University of North Carolina Press, 1992), 86.

6
Richard H. Popkin, “Three English Tellings of the Sabbatai Sevi Story,”
Jewish History
8, no. 1-2 (1994): 44.

7
Quoted in Idel, 197.

8
Jane Hathaway, “The Grand Vizier and the False Messiah: The Sabbatai Sevi Controversy and the Ottoman Reform in Egypt,”
Journal of the American Oriental Society
7, no. 4 (1997): 667-668.

9
Sharot, 88.

10
Popkin, 43.

11
Daniel Clark Waugh, “News of the False Messiah: Reports on Shabbetai Zevi in Ukraine and Muscovy,”
Jewish Social Studies
44, No.3/4 (Summer-Autumn, 1979) 317.

12
Bernard Capp,
The Fifth Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth Century English Millenarianism
, rpt. ed. (London: Faber & Faber, 2008), 213-214.

13
Jacob Barnai, “Christian Messianism and the Portuguese Marranos: The Emergence of Sabbteanism Is Smyrna,”
Jewish History
7, no. 2 (1993), 122.

14
Richard Popkin, “Jewish-Christian Relations in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries: The Conception of the Messiah,”
Jewish History
6. The Frank Talmadge Memorial Volume (1992): 169.

15
Ibid., 170.

16
Quoted in Michael McKeon, “Sabbatai Sevi in England,”
AJS Review
2 (1977): 158.

17
Idel, 206.

18
Quoted in McKeon, 156.

19
Sharot, 111.

20
Leyla Nezi, “Remembering to Forget: Sabbateanism, National Identity, and Subjectivity in Turkey,”
Comparative Studies in Society and History
44, no. 1 (2002): 137.

21
Richard W. Cogley, “The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Restoration of Israel in the ‘Judeo-Centric' Strand of Puritan Millenarianism,”
Church History
72. no. 2 (2003): 326.

The Russian people, in accordance with their metaphysical
nature and vocation in the world, are a people of the End.
Apocalypse has always played a great part both among the
masses of our people and at the highest cultural level
among our writers and thinkers.

—Nicolas Berdyaev,
The Russian Idea
¹

 

 

 

 

S
eventeenth-century Russia had its own millennial movement that has lasted, despite persecution, to the present. It began, like many world-changing events, with a dispute that seemed to outsiders, inconsequential. It had to do with how many fingers one uses to make the sign of the cross.

Of course, that was just the trigger. The loaded gun rested with the beliefs of the Russian Orthodox people, their sense of identity, and their quasi-religious relationship with the czar. The seemingly innocent and orthodox plans of Czar Alexander I and the Patriarch Nikon in the seventeenth century threatened all three of these and set in motion a schism that split the Russian Church, caused the deaths of thousands of people, and indirectly led to the downfall of the Romanov Dynasty.

Patriarch Nikon, who bore the brunt of the blame for the schism, was born in a peasant family near Novgorod in 1605. He learned to read and write and, at the age of twenty, became a priest. He married, but after their three children died in infancy, he convinced his wife that they should give up the world and become monastics.
²
She entered a convent, and Nikon became a monk. Thanks to the patronage of another monk, Nikon was introduced into the Russian court and eventually became an abbot.
³

In 1649, he was made patriarch of Novgorod. The conditions of his election would later be used as an excuse to revolt against him. Rather than being chosen by other bishops, as was customary, he was selected by Czar Alexander and his confessor. This was part of an imperial plan to reform the church. It is not entirely coincidental that 1649 was also the year in which the Russian peasants were declared serfs, binding them to the land and depriving them of what little freedom they had once enjoyed.
⁴

Nikon, with the approval of the czar, set about bringing the Russian church in line with the practices of the Greek Orthodox Church in Constantinople. Apparently Alexander felt that the prelates of the Greek Church looked down on the Russian clergy for their ignorance and backward ways.
⁵
The new patriarch was already a part of a group of reformers known as the “New Zealots.” These clerics agreed with the Greeks and, using material from the church of Kiev, not yet a part of Russia, they published revised editions of liturgical books.
⁶

At first the changes were cosmetic and conformed to Russian practice. It was when Nikon decided to call in some Greek and Ukrainian theologians to bring the Russian Church in line that things got ugly. The first change was in the matter of the sign of the cross. Russians used two fingers, symbolizing the dual nature of Christ, human and divine. The Greeks used three, for the Trinity.
⁷
Other changes consisted of “presenting five consecrated loaves instead of seven, chanting Alleluia three times instead of two, spelling Jesus
Iisus
instead of
Isus
, and moving a church procession against the sun instead of with it.”
⁸
These abrupt changes in long-established practices created a storm of outrage, led by the archpriest Avvakum, who had once been a friend of Nikon's.

For the Orthodox Russians, like the Egyptians and others, the symbols of religions and the rituals were as important as the faith. How one worshiped mattered in terms of respect for God. Maintaining traditional patterns was essential.

Also there was the conviction among many Russian Christians that Moscow was the “Third Rome.” The first was the real city of Rome at the time of the first Christians, the second was Constantinople. But both these Romes had betrayed the faith. The Catholics controlled the first and, in Constantinople, the Greek Orthodox Church existed only with the permission of the Ottoman Sultans. Therefore, Moscow was the last bastion of the true faith. “If Moscow were to fall from grace . . . it would mean not only the fall of Moscow as a state, as divine punishment, but the end of the whole world; a fourth Rome there could not be.”
⁹
So any deviation from standard practice, especially by adopting the customs of the Greeks, would mean a global catastrophe.

There was more going on, of course. Nikon wasn't the most tactful of men in pushing his reforms through. He excommunicated the popular archpriest and preacher Neronov and exiled him. He also exiled the priest Avvakum, along with his family, to Siberia. Avvakum later wrote poignantly of their suffering there and how his daughter, Agrafena, waited at the window in case a neighbor lady came out to give them the remains of the food she gave the hens.
¹⁰

Nikon eventually overstepped himself and was arrested, tried, and sent to a monastery/prison where he died. One accusation against him was that he was trying to set himself up as a pope.
¹¹

Avvakum was brought back from exile twelve years later and continued to preach against the new ways, which hadn't ended with Nikon's banishment. As a result, the priest was beaten, whipped, and sent into imprisonment in a monastery.
¹²
This did nothing to change his thinking.

Alexander was determined that the country would conform to his reforms. The severity of the punishments for priests who disobeyed the new laws was extreme. Many were exiled, imprisoned, and whipped. Friends of Avvakum had their tongues cut out and their right hands cut off.
¹³
The persecution, as happens in most cases, only increased the resolve of the believers. This division in the Russian Church was called
Raskol,
or schism. The schism never healed. The
Raskolniki
, or Old Believers, remained separate from the hierarchy of the Russian Church, attending their own services. The coming end of the world brought about by the treachery of the czars was incorporated into their belief. With each generation, their millenarianism became stronger.

For many Russians, it came down to a choice between the state and their own salvation. They had been taught that the czar was Christ's representative on earth, as much as the patriarch. Now both men seemed to have betrayed them. Where could they turn?

The decision was influenced for many by the martyrdom of the monks of the Solvetskii Monastery, “one of the holiest places of Russia.”
¹⁴
The monks refused to submit to Moscow, holding out for eight years (1668-1676) against the soldiers of the czar. When the monastery fell, all the monks and everyone inside with them were killed.

Inspired by their faith and, perhaps, driven by a sense of hopeless-ness, thousands of Old Believer communities also chose death rather than forced compliance. The preferred method was self-immolation. An earlier apocalyptic sect, the Kapitonists, in the millennial year of 1666, burned themselves to death in a “purification by fire.” Their example may have inspired the
Raskolniki
to do the same.
¹⁵