Sabbatai Zevi, it was related, had already departed for Stamboul to claim his crown from the Sultan who ruled the Land of Israel. Cabalists pronounced 1666 as the year of fate, and wandering preachers carried the word. His name was Sabbatai Zevi he had risen in Smyrna and would lead the Jews back to Israel. Then came tales of the advent of the Messiah. But after some years, the ancient rabbi returned from Lublin, and remnants of the population crept back, shops opened, and there was a quorum for the synagogue. The isolated village of Goray had been gutted. His black-mirror narrative of miracles and cabala, of a hamlet in seventeenth-century Poland and a false Messiah, is in the tradition of suchĬlassics as ''The Dybbuk'' and ''The Golem.'' Poetically conceived, it captures the fever of longing, the folk-frenzy for salvation, that possessed the Jewish population of central Europe after theÄark decade of the Chmielnicki massacres, three centuries before Hitler.
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