The Sabbatean Prophets

The Early Modern Context 33
miah, after he had handled in chapter 30 the redemption of Israel and Judah,
and of the war of Gog and Magog (of which Daniel also speaks in chapter
12), when he treats of the sceptre of the Messiah, the son of David, of
the ruin of the nations, of the restoration of Judah, of holy Jerusalem, and
of the third Temple, adds in 30:24: ‘The fierce anger of the Lord shall not return
till he hath executed it, and till he hath performed the intents of his
heart; in the latter days, ye shall understand it.’ Whence follows what we
have said, that the time of redemption is at hand. 139
Manasseh’s Hope of Israel was enormously influential in both Jewish and
European thought. It became integral in the rise of the Jewish Indian theory
(the common seventeenth-century belief that the American natives were
the Lost Tribes), 140 and was debated and discussed extensively. Ultimately
the story prompted Manasseh’s invitation to England, from where the Jews
had been expelled in 1290; he accepted and then pleaded with Oliver Cromwell
for their readmission. This mission too had a close connection with
messianic aims. The famous argument of Manasseh was that God had promised
the regathering of the Jews, a major step in the process of Christ’s Second
Coming for millenarian Christians, from the “four corners of the earth.”
For that to happen, they had first to be dispersed to the four corners of the
earth. Now that Jews were found in China, India, and America, the only
corner of the earth where no Jews were found, and therefore the place that
was holding up the regathering of the Jews, was the place that was actually
called, in its medieval Latin designation, Angle Terre, rendered (with some
imprecision) as the Land at the Corner of the Earth—England. 141
Manasseh’s Hope of Israel had a direct connection to the Sabbatean movement.
It is well known that Manasseh, who died a decade before the movement
arose, was close to people who would be very important Sabbateans,
including his fellow rabbi, Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, and the wealthy leader
Abraham Israel Pereira. He was also in close contact with Christian millenarians
who would take great interest in Sabbateanism, such as Henry
Oldenburg, secretary of the Royal Society, and Peter Serrarius, the influential
Dutch theologian. 142 The Hope of Israel was published in 1659 in Izmir,
Shabbatai’s birthplace, by a group of Portuguese Jews who would soon
embrace Sabbateanism with great enthusiasm. 143 Nobody better exemplifies
the relationship between the voyages of discovery, geography, Christian
chiliasm, Jewish messianism, and the Sabbatean movement than Manasseh—and
Manasseh was someone to whom many, many people listened.
Unlikely as it may seem to the modern mind, it is clear that both the hu-