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This chapter is a survey of the dynamics of messianic movements over a period of some two millennia. The most dramatic tests of leadership in the history of the Jewish diaspora have come when an individual presented himself as playing a central role in the process that would bring an end to the exile of the diaspora. The messianic figure — whether claiming to be the actual messiah from the line of David or a prophet or forerunner of the messiah — transcended the accepted categories by which authority has been asserted and expressed in post-biblical Jewish life. However, rooted in traditional texts and expectations, the ideology of the incipient movement may have been, for the individual at its core this claim was by its very nature a radical departure from the norms, a revolutionary challenge to the status quo. This placed the more traditional Jewish leadership, especially the rabbinic authorities, who were structurally bound to a conservative position in society, in a difficult situation.

This chapter addresses the question of “popular religion” and the relation between religion and magic in India and China. The categories of popular belief, superstition, and magic have been used by modernizers in India and China to intervene in people's daily practices and remove obstacles to the total transformation of their communities. These attempts have developed in different ways in India and China, but in neither case have they been entirely successful. After a historical discussion of heterodoxy, messianic movements, and political protest, the chapter delineates the transformation of popular religion in India and China under the influence of liberalization of the economy and globalization.

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 coda details how Jacob Sasportas, as well as his three most intensive readers—Jacob Emden, Gershom Scholem, and Joel Teitelbaum—all perceived their worlds to be in crisis. For Sasportas, the crisis in the middle of the 1660s was one of order. This manifested itself as contempt for the law. Sasportas used all the resources of the textual tradition he called his own to make sense of the world around him, a world that a Messiah whom he had never met and who lived half a world away had turned upside down. He gestured toward a position that validated his own provisional skepticism as a better path to genuine repentance than the ardent and collective certainty of the Jewish crowd. A half century after Sasportas died, Jacob Emden reedited and reprinted Sasportas, thereby forging an image of Sasportas as a heresy hunter. A century and a half after Emden's death, Gershom Scholem turned to Sabbetai Zevi and the messianic movement around him, which enabled Scholem to tell a story about Jewish immanence without the law. Meanwhile, Joel Teitelbaum lived through the same geopolitical catastrophe as Scholem but reached a different conclusion about it. Just as Sasportas had the courage of his convictions to speak out against the Jews of his day, nearly all of whom had become believers in Sabbetai Zevi, Teitelbaum similarly rebuked the Jews of his own time, nearly all of whom had become Zionists.

This chapter looks at the political and cultural order known as the Regeneration, which reassembled state and church power along new authoritarian lines. Faced with the loss of economic, political, and spiritual sovereignty, Caribbean people responded in a mass messianic movement, El Enviado de Dios. The state suppression of this movement led to armed rebellion, which preceded and in many ways anticipated civil war.

This chapter discusses how the diversity of Indian tribes was reflected in their different responses to the daunting transformation of their circumstances; for instance, by the turn of the twentieth century, a population estimated at 1.5 million in the seventeenth century had dwindled to 237,000. Some sought spiritual solace in messianic religious movements such as the Sioux Ghost Dances, which anticipated the return of dead relatives and a lost way of life, and the sacred peyote rituals, which combined consumption of hallucinogenic cacti with a Pan-Indian politics that united adherents from various tribes. Others, such as the Cherokees and the Creeks, chose military resistance. Still another option was represented by a considerable Indian leadership, which formed the Society of American Indians in Columbus, Ohio, in 1911.

This chapter explores the Sabbatean movement as the most significant messianic movement since the first century BCE. It explains the context in which Sabbatai emerged, as well as its particular stresses that were apparent in the middle of the seventeenth century. It also highlights the enthusiasm for Sabbatai that drew on longer traditions of messianic thought that constituted the most important division between Christians and Jews. The chapter recounts the series of attacks against Jewish communities in Poland–Lithuania by Bogdan Chmielnicki and his army of Cossacks as part of a wider assault on the established order of that society. It also talks about the ruthless and highly unpopular Sultan Ibrahim, who had been Ottoman ruler since 1640 but was deposed and killed by his Janissaries in 1648.

Rufino’s interrogation shows he also drew attention because he raised the memories of the 1835 Muslim rebellion in Bahia and of the “Divine Teacher” episode in Recife in 1846. The latter involved a black man who led a messianic movement of free and enslaved black Christians, whom he taught how to read and write using subversive verses that threatened a Haitian-style slave revolution unless freedom was granted peacefully. Since Rufino could read, write, and indoctrinate, the press referred to him as the Divine Teacher II, though he was a Muslim. After two weeks in jail, Rufino was released free of charges. His story was told by the press all over Brazil.