The Sabbatean Prophets

From Mystical Vision to Prophetic Eruption 109
ties—all of them, including Sarah, are identified only by the names of their
husbands or fathers. The educational backgrounds of the prophets span the
spectrum, from the women and children with hardly any education to important
rabbis, like Daniel Pinto and Moses Galante. 57 This is one of our first
indications that the easy distinction of elite versus popular culture must be
reevaluated.
Little information is given about the settings in which these events took
place, though we will learn more from the Peña case. It is unclear whether
groups of prophets actually went into their ecstasies together or whether
each person experienced it independently. We do not know of any preparations
that these visionaries made to induce prophetic experiences, but severe
penitential exercises were widely performed at the time, including intense
fasting and self-flagellation. Something important about the form, or
“genre” of the prophecies is known: they were almost all spirit possessions,
following a standard pattern. The visionary would convulse and faint away,
a short while later a voice would issue from his or her throat pronouncing
the messiahship of Shabbatai, then the person would faint again and wake
up remembering nothing. This places the “popular” Sabbatean prophets
into a rich nexus of contemporary phenomena.
The case of the popular Sabbatean prophets is treated by Scholem with as
much seriousness and detail as all other aspects of the movement, and he
mentions all the relevant contemporary parallels, yet he leaves them hanging
as a sort of odd appendage to the movement. Indeed, no author succeeds
in integrating these events organically into the Sabbatean movement or seventeenth
century life. They are conceived as parallel to contemporary prophetic
phenomena in the strict sense—that is, they occur at the same time
but have no connection. Yet even this interpretation fails because the contemporary
parallels occur in Europe and not at all in the Ottoman Empire.
The visions are labeled as a common religious or psychological phenomenon,
and thus packaged, are left taped clumsily to the side of the “real”
Sabbateanism, a mystical movement driven by heretical theology. But this
outbreak was exceedingly important to the movement and was by its nature
closely intertwined with the rest of Sabbatean history. At the same time, it
was part and parcel of the contemporary Ottoman and European scene.
The relationship between these prophetic possessions and Nathan of
Gaza’s Shavu’ot night possession can hardly be missed. The form of possession
and the stages of the physical event are virtually identical. We have al-