



Produced by Chris Curnow, Joseph Cooper, Moti Ben-Ari and
the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at
http://www.pgdp.net









[Illustration: Cover]




    THE AUGUSTAN REPRINT SOCIETY

    JOHN EVELYN

    THE HISTORY
    OF
    SABATAI SEVI,
    _The Suppos'd Messiah_
    OF THE JEWS.

    (1669)

    _Introduction by_
    CHRISTOPHER W. GROSE

    PUBLICATION NUMBER 131
    WILLIAM ANDREWS CLARK MEMORIAL LIBRARY
    UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, LOS ANGELES

    1968




GENERAL EDITORS

    George Robert Guffey, _University of California, Los Angeles_
    Maximillian E. Novak, _University of California, Los Angeles_
    Robert Vosper, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_


ADVISORY EDITORS

    Richard C. Boys, _University of Michigan_
    James L. Clifford, _Columbia University_
    Ralph Cohen, _University of Virginia_
    Vinton A. Dearing, _University of California, Los Angeles_
    Arthur Friedman, _University of Chicago_
    Louis A. Landa, _Princeton University_
    Earl Miner, _University of California, Los Angeles_
    Samuel H. Monk, _University of Minnesota_
    Everett T. Moore, _University of California, Los Angeles_
    Lawrence Clark Powell, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_
    James Sutherland, _University College, London_
    H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., _University of California, Los Angeles_


CORRESPONDING SECRETARY

Edna C. Davis, _William Andrews Clark Memorial Library_




INTRODUCTION

    _And you should if you please refuse
    Till the conversion of the Jews._


The reader of John Evelyn's _History of Sabatai Sevi, The Pretended
Messiah of the Jewes_ or of the _History of the Three Late Famous
Impostors_ (1669) in which it is the most significant part, discovers a
fascinating, if unoriginal, addition to the work of the great diarist
and dilettante, the amateur student of engraving and trees--and smoke.
Evelyn's work was almost totally derived from the account of Sir Paul
Rycaut, who was from 1661 secretary (and later consul) for the Levant
mercantile company in Smyrna. Rycaut was in fact responsible for what
first-hand reporting there is in the _History_, and Evelyn's book
preceded by only eleven years Rycaut's _History of the Turkish Empire
1623-1677_, where the story first appeared under the author's own name.

What gives Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ its own interest is partly the
immediacy of the news of Sabatai Sevi, and partly the context in which
Evelyn places the story, a context to some extent indicated in the
title, _History of the Three Late Famous Impostors_. When the work was
published in 1669, Sevi was neither the amusing curiosity he is likely
to be for the modern reader, nor the impertinent confidence man
suggested by Evelyn's "impostor." Evelyn was reviewing for an English
audience one of the great crises in Jewish history, the career of the
man who has been called Judaism's "most notorious messianic
claimant."[1] That career was not entirely past history in 1669. Sevi
lived until 1675, and even after his humiliation and final banishment in
1673 he could write to his father-in-law in Salonica that men would see
in his lifetime the day of redemption and the return of the Jews to
Zion; "For God hath appointed me Lord of all Mizrayim."[2] Indeed, a
remnant of Judaeo-Turkish Shabbethaians called Doenmehs apparently
exists in Salonica to the present day.

Whatever the appeal of Sevi's story may be for modern readers--as a mode
of fiction, perhaps, or an instance of mass hysteria--Evelyn's discovery
of an exemplum for religious and political enthusiasts may seem forced
or reductive. In 1669, however, the interest of Englishmen in Jewish
affairs was by no means merely academic--or narrowly commercial. There
were, it is true, English sportsmen in 1666 who were actually betting on
the Sevi career--ten to one that the "Messiah of Ismir" would be crowned
King of Jerusalem within two years. And what was most disturbing about
Sevi to the English nation as a whole was perhaps the disruption of
trade, in which Sevi's father was intimately involved, as the agent of
an English mercantile house. At the height of the furor, Jewish
merchants were dissolving businesses as well as unroofing their houses
in preparation for the return to Jerusalem. But the prime significance
for Evelyn--perhaps more than for Rycaut--is revealed