Jewish Messiah fell to his knees and begged the sultan to accept him as a convert

The idea that Zevi was the Messiah had taken such firm root in the mind of his Jewish followers that now they were convinced the moment of his triumph had arrived. The time had come when Zevi was to take the crown from the head of the sultan. After charming him into submission with song, Zevi would place that crown on his own head and inaugurate the kingdom of heaven on earth. Robert de Dreux, a chaplain at the French embassy, recounted later that crowds of Jews ran about spreading carpets over the streets of Adrianople in anticipation of his arrival. When de Dreux gave voice to his skepticism, he was told by an innkeeper's son "there is nothing to scoff at, for before long you will be our slaves by the power of the messiah."274

The Turks had lost none of their shrewdness during the months of Zevi's captivity. They knew that Zevi's death would almost certainly mean a rebellion by the Jews, who were already primed for the arrival of Armageddon. After consulting with the sultan's physician, the apostate Jew Mustapha Fawzi Hayati Zade, the Turks came up with a better strategy. Dragged before the divan, Zevi was given an opportunity to prove he was indeed the messiah. Zevi was to be stripped naked and tied to a post outside the gate of the seraglio, where the sultan's archers would shoot arrows at him. If he were indeed the Messiah, the arrows would not harm him. If he were unsure of whether he were the Messiah and, therefore, unwilling to undergo the test, there was a simpler alternative. Zevi could become a Muslim.

It didn't take Zevi long to decide. Faced with either death or apostasy, Zevi chose apostasy. The Jewish Messiah fell to his knees and begged the sultan to accept him as a convert. For emphasis, Zevi "threw his [Jewish] hat down and spat on it and reviled the Jewish religion publicly desecrated the name of Heaven .... 75 He then "slandered and denounced his faithful believers.".176 Impressed with Zevi's zeal for his new religion, the sultan changed Zevi's name to his own, calling him Mehmed Effendi and granted him a pension of 150 piatres per day as kapici bahsi or keeper of the palace gates. To prove his sincerity in adopting his new faith, Zevi agreed to take one of the queen's slave girls as an additional wife. Sarah didn't seem upset by this arrangement. She was, according to Scholem, "already familiar with the expe-rience of outwardly professing another religion":'77 because of her days in Poland.

Under the tutelage of the sultan's mother, Zevi's wife apostatized too, taking the name Fatima Cadin.

According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, the apostasy of the man the over-whelming number of synagogues in Europe had acknowledged as the Messiah was the greatest catastrophe to strike the Jewish people since the destruction of the Temple. Because of the time lag inherent in communication then, letters were still arriving from Europe offering homage to the failed Jewish messiah a month after his apostasy. On October 9, 1666, the day of Atonement, the Jews of Hamburg pronounced a five-fold blessing over his name. The rabbis of Amsterdam, afflicted by the same time lag, sent a letter of homage that arrived at the time of his apos-tasy. Like Cromwell, Zevi tried to shift the blame for his apostasy onto God. A few days after his conversion, Zevi explained in a letter to one of his brothers, "God has made me an Ishmaelite.">78

Gradually, word of Zevi's apostasy trickled back to Europe during the fall of 1666. On November 10, 1666 Henry Oldenburg wrote he had just received news from Amsterdam that "the King ofthe Jews was turned Turk.">79 He noted that "our Jews">80 didn't believe the news, but by December, news of the apostasy was accepted as undeniably true. Jews who not long before had warned Christians that the tables would soon be turned when Zevi ascended his throne, now had to endure the scorn of Muslims and Christians who ridiculed them mercilessly as blind and credulous fools. Now that Zevi had been marginalized, the sultan could move against the Jews of Turkey with impunity, which he did by having 50 rabbis executed:

Repression was the most common Jewish response to Zevi's apostasy. The rab-bis of Constantinople threatened to expel from the synagogue anyone who even pronounced Zevi's name, and, as if that weren't enough, threatened to hand vio-lators of the ban over to Turkish authorities once they had been expelled. Conversion to Christianity was another response. Jakob Melammed, who taught at a school run by Ashkenazi community in Hamburg, converted with his family in 1676 when he realized "the noise which the Jews had made about their Shabbetai Zevi, for which we had waited for a whole year with fasts and mortifications was all lies." Zevi's apostasy "had aroused in him the first doubts about the Jewish religion."'8.

Docetism was another common response, especially among followers of the cabala. Zevi, according to this explanation, hadn't really converted to Islam. A phantom that resembled Zevi had converted, but the real Zevi had repaired to the vicinity of the Ten Lost Tribes and was even then preparing to lead them back to Jerusalem. Nathan of Gaza claimed Zevi's conversion presented a deep mystery whose meaning Nathan would reveal shortly. Samuel Primo, Zevi's spin doctor, claimed Zevi had undergone a "mock conversion," and that Zevi's duplicity proved he was the real Messiah, because like Moses at Pharaoh's court he was "outwardly sinful" but "inwardly pure.">8.

from the book The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit And Its Impact on World History by E. Michael Jones