Nathan of Gaza נתן העזתי

Abraham Nathan ben Elisha Chaim Ashkenazi was born in Jerusalem in 1643, studied there, and lived in Gaza — whence the name.

About Purim 1665 he had a long vision in which he saw the image of Shabbetai Tzvi upon the throne of glory. At Shavuot of the same year — now publicly, in a trance, before the assembled sages of Gaza — he proclaimed Shabbetai messiah. The two events are often merged into one; they are distinct.

He then took on the role of herald, an Elijah before the messiah, and sent letters across the Jewish world. The movement rose within a year: Smyrna, Constantinople, Salonica, Jerusalem, Egypt, Italy, Amsterdam, Hamburg, Prague, Poland, Yemen, Morocco. How many followed no one knows; the current "half" or "two thirds of world Jewry" rests on no source at all.

In the summer of 1666, while Shabbetai sat in the fortress of Gallipoli, Nathan wrote Derush ha-Tanninim, the "Treatise on the Dragon": the messiah's soul, confined since creation in the depths, wrestling with serpents. The treatise was written before the apostasy, not after — and this matters: the myth was ready in advance.

In September 1666 Shabbetai accepted Islam. Nathan then explained it thus: the messiah had descended into the kelipot, the husks of impurity, to gather the last sparks that cannot be reached from outside. From this came the Sabbatean "holy sin" — a thought that would return a century later as Frankism.

Nathan died at Skopje in 1680. Scholem held that the ground of it all was Lurianic kabbalah spread through the communities; Moshe Idel objects that before 1665 the Lurianic texts hardly circulated at all — few, in manuscript, and deliberately closed. The dispute is unsettled.