The Sabbatean Prophets

108 The Sabbatean Prophets
Sabatai, all which were certainly true, being effects of Diabolical delusions:
as the Jews themselves since have confessed unto me. 53
The first two accounts are by Jewish Sabbateans, the last four by more or
less hostile Christian witnesses to the movement. Nevertheless, certain facts
and themes arise from all these accounts (constituting only part of the
extant records concerning popular Sabbatean prophecy) that bear examination.
A first question might be, where and when did the prophecies take place
It appears that they started in Safed, a very fitting location, where ten
prophets and ten prophetesses had appeared by early fall of 1665, according
to one reliable report. 54 Aleppo was the site of the next outbreak, where
twenty prophets and twenty prophetesses are reported at about the same
time; a less reliable report tells of 400 prophets there, while others list different
numbers. 55 (Note that although the precisely equal numbers of men and
women in these reports are certainly fanciful, the Arezzo list indicates that
this may indeed have been the overall balance.) There followed the great
outpouring in Izmir and other locations in Turkey and Greece in winter of
1665–66. It is likely that the prophetess of Galata (in Istanbul) mentioned
above was not active before Shabbatai left Jerusalem, but rather that the reporter
conflated accounts, and she was actually part of the prophetic wave
the following winter. It appears that very diverse locations had prophets, a
point illustrated by the famous visionary of Portoferraio on Elba. This figure
is notable also for the fact that he was prophesying in the spring of 1666,
proving that the popular prophecies did not begin and end over the course
of just a few weeks in the winter.
The identity of the prophets is telling. To begin with, most of those
mentioned in the Arezzo list have Sephardic names, indicating that they
were descendants of Spanish or Portuguese immigrants, not native Jews
(Romaniotes). Some of them were Portuguese former conversos whose
names can be traced from other documents, including the important Peña
family. 56 In Izmir there were six women and eight men, in Aleppo three
women and three men named. All the reports emphasize that numerous
women and children became prophets along with the men. The lists from
Arezzo do not tell us much about age, but we might surmise that the daughters
of various figures mentioned were not yet married, and therefore in
their teens or younger. Note that these women, like Cardoso’s sister-in-law
and Vital’s “daughter of R. Raphael Anau,” do not have independent identi-