The Sabbatean Prophets

190 Notes to Pages 46–49
Mysticism, and Magic: A Sociological Analysis of Jewish Religious Movements (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 101–14, gives a relatively detailed
account of the possible links between conversos and Sabbateanism, but
neither Scholem nor Sharot offers the concrete documentary evidence that
Barnai has assembled to make the connection.
25. The literature on Sepharadi (Spanish) Jews and conversos is enormous, but one
might start with Kedourie, Spain and the Jews.
26. The foregoing paragraphs, and much of what follows, are based on Goldish,
“Patterns in Converso Messianism.”
27. Elias Lipiner discusses the debate about Bandarra’s converso background, which
is still inconclusive. See Lipiner, O sapateiro de Trancoso e o Alfaiate de Setúbal (Rio
de Janeiro: Imago Editora, 1993), 25–33.
28. See ibid., passim; J. Lúcio de Azevedo, A Evolução do Sebastianismo (Lisbon:
Livraria Clássica Editora, 1947); Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court to
Italian Ghetto (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1981), ch. 7, who makes
the explicit connection between Sebastianism and Sabbateanism.
29. See Antonio José Saraiva, “Bocarro-Rosales and the Messianism of the Sixteenth
Century,” in Menasseh ben Israel and His World, ed. Y. Kaplan, H.
Méchoulan, and R. H. Popkin (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1989), 240–43; Francisco
Moreno-Carvalho, “Yaakov Rosales: Medicine, Astrology, and Political
Thought in the Works of a Seventeenth-Century Jewish-Portuguese Physician,”
Korot: The Israel Journal of the History of Medicine and Science 10 (1993–4):
143–156; Moreno-Carvalho, “On the Boundaries of Our Understanding: The
Case of Manuel Bocarro Francês/Jacob Rosales’ Intellectual Life,” in Troubled
Souls: Conversos, Crypto-Jews, and Other Confused Jewish Intellectuals from the Fourteenth
Through the Eighteenth Century, ed. C. Meyers and N. Simms (Hamilton,
New Zealand: Outrigger Publishers, 2001), 65–75.
30. A comment made by Saraiva may be helpful in understanding this paradoxical
belief system. In comparing the millenarian Jesuit Antonio Vieira with
Bocarro-Rosales, he suggests they have in common “their belief in a sort of recurrence
of the same human being, or soul, appearing behind several masks
throughout history. Bocarro seems to have believed that he himself was a new
Rosales [after his ancestor], and D. Teodósio [the current Duke of Bragança]
was a new D. Fernando [the Duke of Bragança in his ancestor’s time].”
Saraiva, “Bocarro-Rosales,” 243. Were the thinkers involved here actually
kabbalists one would be inclined to consider such a belief in terms of gigul haneshamot,
the metempsychosis stressed in Lurianic Kabbalah. Moreno-
Carvalho, “On the Boundaries,” takes a systematic approach to this question
and comes up with rather different ideas.
31. Yerushalmi, From Spanish Court, 306–13.
32. On Menasseh’s relationships with Christian millenarians, see Roth, A Life of
Menasseh, ch. 8; Menasseh ben Israel and His World; Menachem Dorman, Menasseh
ben Israel [Hebrew] (Tel-Aviv: ha-Kibbutz ha-Me’uhad, 1989), intro. On all aspects
of Menasseh’s activities, see J. H. Coppenhagen, Menasseh ben Israel: A Bibliography
(Jerusalem: Misgav Yerushalayim, 1990).