The Sabbatean Prophets

94 The Sabbatean Prophets
Whether or not the dream was the source of Sarah’s prophecy, all accounts
agree that she told anyone who would listen that she was destined to
marry the messiah. This prophecy became self-fulfilling as the rumors about
Sarah reached Shabbatai, and perhaps rumors of Shabbatai’s earliest messianic
claims from 1648 reached Sarah. For whatever reason—indeed, her
selection of Shabbatai was itself a prophetic manifestation—Sarah wedded
the would-be messiah a year before he made any public claim to the title.
Shabbatai’s acceptability as messiah must have been enhanced by his marriage
to the girl who said she would wed the messiah, even if Sarah had not
earlier named him explicitly.
Sarah’s prophetic powers were not limited to this matter, however. In
Arezzo’s tale Sarah prophesied while in Livorno, and her predictions came
true. Rabbi Isaac ha-Levi Valle, attracted by this success, came to her with
the express purpose of using her as an oracle. The tradition of inspired lay
women acting as oracles was popular in ancient Judaism, but we have little
record of it since then until it resurfaced a generation before Shabbatai’s day
within that hotbed of Sabbatean antecedents, the circle of Rabbi Hayyim
Vital.
A number of such oracles, strongly related to Vital’s messianic status, appears
in Vital’s Book of Visions. 7 The most important of these occurrences took
place when the daughter of R. Raphael Anau of Damascus, where Vital then
lived, was possessed by an oracular spirit. Vital was called and found that the
spirit belonged to a deceased sage who claimed to have come explicitly to
teach him. Vital interrogated the spirit and reported what it said at length.
After the spirit departed, the girl continued to prophesy, and Vital continued
to report her words. 8 Similar events occurred with other young women elsewhere
in the Book of Visions. In Sarah’s case, Valle pleads that she reveal the
roots of his soul, a request with meaning almost exclusively in the world of
Lurianic psychology. Valle asks about other matters, presumably of a secret
mystical nature, and is satisfied that the answers are all true.
The willingness of important personages to heed prophecies by young
women is an issue with many dimensions. On the most basic level it was apparently
founded on a belief that this source of divine communication was
less fallible than others. This was an era when prophecy was valued as a reliable
source of knowledge amid the shifting sands of Renaissance and Baroque
learning. Yet one could not be indiscriminate, for divinatory insight
could have as its source either genuine inspiration from holy origins, false or
mixed inspiration from satanic sources, or disingenuousness on the part of a
cunning medium. 9 Adolescent girls might be channeling messages from the