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This chapter assesses the doubt of an individual versus the certainty of the crowd. It posits that Jacob Sasportas's aversion to Sabbetai Zevi as the Messiah was as much a response to the force of perceived social chaos as it was an attack on the truth-value of Sabbetai Zevi's claims. Sabbatianism posed an acute philosophical problem to Sasportas. The certainty with which the Sabbatian believers propagated their newfound faith, the confidence and imperiousness with which they attempted to silence dissent, and their contempt for doubt as a condition for belief, all of these threatened the welfare of the body politic. Belief, or the acquisition of the correct opinions, could be cultivated and acquired only if the welfare of the body politic and the welfare of the soul had been adequately regulated. These intellectual and social demands forced Sasportas to draw upon the single most important resource he had in order to confer intellectual legitimacy upon his argument for the conditionality of messianic belief: Maimonides. As opposed to the collective need for instant certainty, he upheld the individual quest for discernment. Throughout The Fading Flower of the Zevi and throughout his long career in the Sephardic Diaspora, Sasportas consciously cultivated the posture of an articulate outsider. He saw himself as a figure of authority, the product of his lineage and his learning, who was quite capable of seeing the problems in Jewish society.

This introductory chapter provides a background of Jacob Sasportas. Around 1610, Sasportas was born in Oran, a garrison town at the edge of the Iberian Empire on the Mediterranean coast of North Africa in present day Algeria. The scion of a rabbinic family, Sasportas served the Jews of Oran and nearby Tlemcen as a rabbinic judge for several decades. In his early forties, he was exiled from North Africa for reasons that remain unknown, and fled to Amsterdam. For almost half a century, Sasportas lived among the Portuguese Jews of the Sephardic Diaspora. In 1665, he emerged as one of the few opponents to the provocative persona of Sabbetai Zevi, the self-proclaimed Messiah who became the center of a mass movement. From his temporary home in Hamburg, he conducted a vigorous campaign first to challenge and later to undermine the messianic claims of Sabbetai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, keeping a meticulous record of Sabbatianism as it was occurring. This book asks why Sasportas would oppose a messianic movement and what the substance of this opposition is. In other words, it explores the truth-value of doubt within the rabbinic tradition as it was expressed by one man living in the midst of a maelstrom.

This chapter traces the life of Jacob Sasportas prior to Sabbatianism. It places Sasportas in a series of different contexts: a member of a leading Sephardic family in Spanish Oran, a corrector in the printing house of Menasseh ben Israel in Amsterdam, and a minister to the fledgling congregation of Portuguese Jews in London. In each of these contexts, Sasportas emerges as “a man against,” challenging truisms and opposing received opinions, even as he sought patronage from wealthy Jews whom he scorned. Sasportas's response to the different centers in the western Sephardic Diaspora—Amsterdam, Hamburg, London, and Livorno—was conditioned by the fact that he experienced them as an outsider. Much of this was a rhetorical posture. Sasportas repeatedly placed himself on the margins of the places in which he lived, even as the Jews in these cities provided him and his family with material support. However, his marginality was not only rhetorical; or perhaps the rhetoric itself bears close scrutiny. What few accounts remain indicate that Sasportas was perceived by others, particularly other Jews, as an outsider as well. Occasionally, this led to comity and a meeting of the minds. More often, though, this posture of the outsider led to conflict, and these conflicts frequently left a long paper trail—a paper trail that offers a perspective, however partial, on the Sephardic Diaspora in western Europe in the seventeenth century.

This chapter examines the development of Jewish political structures. Over the course of the sixteenth century, the Sephardic world was built upon an organic manifestation of cultural identity, but it was also shaped by a core tension within this emerging diaspora community between the government and the governed. In other words, the way in which successive generations of Sephardic Jews established and maintained political frameworks in their new lands of settlement highlights the distinction between the formation of sociocultural and sociopolitical communities. While shared cultural heritage was an important factor in organizing Iberian Jews into new congregations and communities, this same process was also marked by widespread conflict between the vast majority of the Jewish polity and those Jews who sought to position themselves as their communities' principal governing agents.

This chapter concludes that the story of the formation of Sephardic Diaspora and the long and difficult resettlement of Iberian Jewry in the lands of the sixteenth-century Mediterranean offers valuable insights into the essential nature of Jewish communal organization and the self-fashioning of communal identities. Key to a better understanding of these issues is the recognition that they transcend the question of the Jews' political and religious relationships to their host societies. Indeed, although outside forces determined the general contours of Jewish society, the primary challenges to executing the rabbinic ideal of autonomous government came from within. In many ways, this communal instability was a central feature of Hispano-Jewish life that carried over into its diaspora.

This chapter explores the roots of the Sephardic Diaspora, particularly the amorphous structure of the Jewish community (aljama). Hispano-Jewish society was characterized by a loose association of local polities that were themselves divided by internal fissures among various factions and families. These tensions and mutual suspicions also pervaded the relationships among the rabbinic elite, popular preachers, and the general Jewish populace that both groups sought to guide. Although various factions sought leadership over Iberia's Jewish communities throughout the late medieval period, no single group emerged as the primary authority. Recognition of this internal complexity of the medieval Iberian aljama emphasizes that the reorganization of communal life in the Sephardic Diaspora was not the product of a natural solidarity inherited from the Middle Ages, and allows a greater appreciation of the individuality and effective pragmatism of the exiles.

This chapter recounts the first years following the expulsion of 1492. The passage of Iberian Jewry from West to East was neither immediate nor direct. Whereas some of the refugees were able to find safe haven in the eastern Mediterranean, the vast majority spent the rest of their lives amid a succession of tribulations in Portugal, North Africa, and Italy. Those who were able to gain a foothold in their new lands laid the first tentative foundations for the various communities that would eventually develop into the Sephardic Diaspora. Other refugees found the hardships of those first years too much to bear and accepted conversion in exchange for sustenance. Indeed, those who decided to return to Spain did so because they saw life in exile as socially, politically, and economically untenable, not because they had a theological change of heart.

This chapter offers a detailed view of lay authority in the first decades of the nineteenth century. It traces the migration of religious authority from American Jewish communities in Europe and impact that these religious folkways had once transplanted in the United States. While a few Jewish ministers were able to gain footholds of religious power within the all-important synagogue community, the vast majority of Hebrew clergymen could not.