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At the height of his popularity, Sabbatai Zevi could count among his followers up to one third of European Jewry. Even after his apostasy, thousands remained faithful, either as Jews with a secret belief system, or as Muslims with a secret religion. This community, concentrated in Turkey but spread throughout Europe and the Mediterranean, produced liturgy, theology – even cookbooks for their special festivals. In the 1950s, Moshe Attias published a collection of Sabbatean hyms, translated into Hebrew with notes by Gershom Scholem and Yitzhak Ben-Zvi. It was Ben-Zvi, a former president of Israel, who instigated the project and who had gathered the crumbling manuscripts together; many of them now sit in the archive that bears his name. The book itself is hard to find – my copy is a rumpled photocopy of the edition from the Scholem Library in Jerusalem, dog-eared and recently stained by a broken bottle of juice. We at Zeek hope to publish a translation of this lost literature, together with other documents of Jewish “heretical” movements – if we can find the money to do it. In the meantime, here is one of the hymns, in the Ladino original, Attias’s Hebrew translation, and a new translated into English by Rabbi Gavriel Wasserman, a student and scribe who lives in Jerusalem. – Jay Michaelson |
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