The Sabbatean Prophets

110 The Sabbatean Prophets
ready come across the phenomenon of mimesis with reference to the visions
of pillars of fire and revelations of Elijah upon Shabbatai’s arrival in Izmir.
We know that the pillars of fire were first described in the stories of Shabbatai’s
visit to the cadi and were subsequently picked up by ordinary Jews,
who began to see such pillars everywhere, adding their own embellishments.
These possession events follow precisely the same pattern. We can
trace the trail of mimesis from a leading Sabbatean rabbi, Nathan of Gaza, to
the revered emissaries, Daniel Pinto and Moses Galante. Galante had been
explicitly invited to Gaza by Nathan, 58 where he was either an eyewitnesses
to the Shavu’ot night event or at least spoke extensively with Nathan and
many people who were there. Galante then traveled to Aleppo, whence he
and Pinto, an Aleppan rabbi, had gone to see Nathan in Gaza. Both became
Sabbatean prophets in September of 1665. 59 This sparked off the mass
prophecies in Aleppo. The two rabbis proceeded to Izmir at around the time
letters containing tales of Nathan’s Shavu’ot night prophecy and other Urevents
of the movement in Palestine were arriving. Prophecy erupted in
Izmir immediately afterward. We are thus not dealing with a spontaneous
outbreak of visionary possessions, but a mass mimesis whose source was itself
mimetic—Nathan mimed the possession of R. Joseph Karo.
Nathan, however, was not the only model of inspired possession. It is
likely that stories circulated orally about R. Hayyim Vital and his female oracles
in Damascus a generation earlier. The most important of these concerned
the daughter of R. Raphael Anau, whose relationship with Vital began
with her possession by the spirit of a dead Torah sage. Other precedents,
such as the prophetesses from the converso circle of Inés of Herrera and María
Gómez, may have been known through tales passed among Sepharadi Jews.
A more local model was the Sufis, whose meditative practices were aimed at
inducing inspired trance states. Perhaps even more compelling in that context
are the Bektashi dervishes, who were numerous in the Ottoman Empire
at this time. Their trances and possession states were achieved publicly
by adepts who were by no means all scholars. In addition, belief in possession
by jinn, evil spirits, survived among the popular classes in the Levant. 60
While it is doubtful that any of these sources had the impact of Nathan’s explicitly
Sabbatean possession, any or all of them may have influenced specific
prophetic events.
A much broader possession model is well known from Europe and its colonies.
Four groups in particular were known for visionary episodes similar
to those found among the Sabbateans: the Quakers, the French Camisard
prophets, the convulsionaries of Saint-Médard, and the Spanish beatas.