The Sabbatean Prophets

96 The Sabbatean Prophets
They reflect the polarized, archetypical male notions of female sexuality,
and their ubiquitousness in literature composed by males says a great deal
about how men see the world. In marrying Sarah, Shabbatai Zvi in a sense
marries into Christianity—or perhaps even marries the Virgin Mary. It can
hardly be an accident that de la Croix gives her name as Meriam (Mary)
rather than Sarah or Rebecca. 16 For Christians Mary is the archetypical virgin;
but the author of Toledoth Yeshu, a widely read Jewish parody of Jesus’
life, describes a different scenario: “In the month of Nisan, after the Passover
holiday, in the middle of the night on a Saturday night, Joseph had risen to
learn at the house of study. The aforementioned evil man [the lecherous
neighbor, John] came in after him, found Mary, and slept with her. She
thought it was her husband; and she became pregnant from him.” 17 Although
she had been duped, Mary was nevertheless abandoned by her husband
and shamed by the courts—she was treated as a whore, and her son
was a mamzer, a bastard, who is essentially irredeemable in Jewish law. So,
from a Jewish perspective, Mary, from whose model Sarah/Miriam is drawn
in these accounts, might be both virgin and prostitute.
The other association given to Sarah is with Eve. Sarah is found in a field
or a graveyard naked as on the day of creation, with only a coat over her—a
coat that had belonged to Eve on the one hand, and that stated that its
bearer was to be the wife of the messiah on the other. In the Jewish tradition,
the acrostic of the Hebrew name Adam (AD”M) stands for Adam/David/Messiah,
indicating the identity or relationship between these souls. 18
So the spiritual descendant of Eve would indeed be destined to marry the
messiah. Eve was created in the ultimate virginal state, never conceived or
born out of a human union. Yet she was seduced by the snake, and the Midrash
avers that this is to be taken literally. The snake, possessed at the time
by Samael (Satan), plotted to kill Adam and take Eve as his mate—a scheme
that was at least partially successful. 19 Thus Eve too takes on both virginal
and meretricious qualities, which Sarah inherited, according to the preserved
accounts.
Nathan and Shabbatai had a fascination with the new world order of messianic
times and its ability to reach back into history to redeem the unredeemable.
Using the Lurianic concept of tikkun, cosmic repair, Sabbatean
theology imagined the realignment of all forces in the universe to the new
messianic reality. Evil and good would ultimately enter a dialectic that nullifies
both, leaving only the will of the messiah to prevail. 20 Sarah now fits
into this new paradigm. She is both prostitute and virgin, Christian and Jew.
She is Eve (mother of all people), Sarah/Rebecca (mothers of all Jews), 21