Sabbatians and “Redemption through Sin”: The Crisis of 1666
In 1665 and 1666, a wave of messianic expectation swept Jewish communities from Yemen to Amsterdam, from Morocco to Poland. At its center stood Sabbatai Zevi, 1626 to 1676, a kabbalist from Smyrna, and his prophet Nathan of Gaza. Believers prepared for imminent redemption: they sold property, abolished traditional fasts such as Tisha B’Av, and awaited the Messiah’s bloodless conquest of the Ottoman sultan. The year 1666, long associated in Christian and Jewish apocalyptic calculation with the end of days, seemed to confirm the timetable. Then, in September 1666, the movement confronted an event that should have ended it: the Messiah converted to Islam.
What followed was not simple collapse. A minority of believers developed a theology that recast apostasy as a necessary stage of redemption. Later scholars, above all Gershom Scholem, described this paradoxical turn with the phrase “redemption through sin.” The idea did not appear fully formed in 1666, nor did it mean that every Sabbatian immediately abandoned Jewish law. It grew out of Lurianic Kabbalah under the pressure of a public catastrophe that faith refused to accept as defeat.
The Rise and the Fall
Sabbatai Zevi had long displayed erratic piety, periods of illumination, and “strange acts” that already strained rabbinic norms. In May 1665, Nathan of Gaza, a young kabbalist who had gained a reputation as a healer of souls, proclaimed him the Messiah. Nathan’s letters and treatises supplied the missing public theology. Drawing on Isaac Luria’s sixteenth-century system, he argued that the cosmic process of tikkun, restoration of the divine sparks scattered in the kelipot, the husks of impurity, had reached its final stage. The old meditations and even aspects of the Law were no longer fully operative; a new era had begun. If the divine spark sounds familiar, it should, for this is the ministry of Yehoshua.
Most Jews treated the conversion as proof of fraud. Business resumed; pilgrimages stopped; rabbis who had opposed the movement regained authority. Yet a core of believers, ma’aminim, would not accept that their inner experience of redemption had been anything less than lived experience. The contradiction between subjective certainty and objective disgrace was a continuation of the Gnostic Wisdom of Melchizedek which would flow through many following sages.
Nathan of Gaza and other theologians, notably Abraham Miguel Cardozo, immediately began to reinterpret the event. The Savior’s task was not only to gather the sparks belonging to Israel through observance of the Torah. Certain sparks were imprisoned in the deepest kelipot, bodies of spiritually impure, usually identified with the Gentile world and especially with Islam. Only the Anointed One himself could descend into that realm, submit outwardly to its power, and extract the last holy fragments. Once those sparks were removed, the husks would collapse. Apostasy was therefore not betrayal, but the most extreme of Ha Moshiach’s “strange acts,” ma’asim zarim.
The Hidden Combat
Isaiah 53 was reread: the servant is “profaned for our sins.” Biblical and midrashic stories of righteous figures who appeared to sin were treated as typological prefigurations. The Messiah, like a spy entering enemy territory, had to wear the “evil turban.” Nathan portrayed an inner mythic combat in which Sabbatai, the “holy serpent,” struggled with the serpents of the kelipot which clung to his own soul. The conversion was the visible surface of that battle.
This explanation preserved two truths at once: redemption had inwardly begun, and the external world remained unredeemed. Until the hidden work was finished, most Jews were still bound by the Law. Ha Moshiach’s descent was unique; ordinary believers were not required to convert. That distinction would later erode among radicals, such as Paul.
“Redemption through Sin”
Scholem’s famous 1937 essay used the rabbinic phrase mitzvah ha-ba’ah ba-averah, a commandment fulfilled through a transgression, as the title for his analysis of post-1666 Sabbatianism. The English rendering “Redemption through Sin” became a scholarly catchphrase. The phrase itself is older than Sabbatianism; it appears in the Talmud in limited legal contexts. Sabbatian writers did not always use it as a slogan. What they did develop was the conviction that, in the messianic age, the relationship between holiness and transgression had changed.
Two related ideas emerged. First, Ha Moshiach had to enter impurity in order to defeat it from within; his apparent sin was the highest form of tikkun. Second, once the inner structure of the worlds had been repaired, certain prohibitions no longer bound those who already lived in the redeemed material reality. Actions which looked like sin from the outside could be holy from the inside. Moderate Sabbatians generally reserved this paradox for Ha Moshiach alone and continued to live as observant Jews, often in secret. Radical circles, especially in later generations, treated antinomian acts as a spiritual duty: the kelipot could be starved of sparks or flooded with holiness until they burst.
Aftermath and Meaning
Sabbatai Zevi’s conversion did not destroy Sabbatianism; it transformed it from a public mass movement into an underground heresy that lasted, in various forms, into the nineteenth century. Rabbinic authorities issued bans, composed polemics, and tried to suppress both the memory of 1666 and the lingering cells of believers. The episode also prompted caution toward unchecked kabbalistic messianism.
The events of 1666 expose a recurring pattern in religious history: when a prophecy fails in public, the most committed believers often deepen rather than abandon the myth. They relocate redemption from visible history to hidden processes, from the letter of the Law to its paradoxical fulfillment. In Sabbatian terms, Ha Moshiach had to become profane so that the last sparks could be raised.
Whether one regards that solution as profound mysticism or as a rationalization of collapse, it remains one of the most striking theological responses ever given to a messianic disaster. The year that was supposed to end exile instead produced a doctrine in which exile, apostasy, and even sin could be read as instruments of restoration.
Pastor Mark