Tzitzat Novel Tzvi ציצת נובל צבי
Not published in the author's lifetime. An abridgement appeared in 1737, the full text only in 1954.
The title is from Isaiah 28:1, "the fading flower." The book is not a treatise but a dossier: R. Jacob Sasportas's letters to communities across Europe, North Africa and the Levant, and the answers to them, over the years 1665–67 and after, stitched together with his own commentary.
This is why it is invaluable and why it must be handled with care. The letters are genuine documents of their hour; but the author gathered and revised them afterwards, between 1666 and 1676, and Yaacob Dweck has shown that the revision sharpened his own prescience. To read it as a transparent record of 1666 is a methodological error.
Editions: the abridgement Kitzur Tzitzat Novel Tzvi under David Meldola, Amsterdam 1737; the full text, Jerusalem 1954, edited by Isaiah Tishby. The common citation "Tzitzat Novel Tzvi, Amsterdam 1737" confuses the book with the posthumous printing of the responsa Ohel Ya'akov of that year and with the abridgement.
On the timeline
Sources
Documents of the period
- The letters of 1665–67 within Tzitzat Novel Tzvi — contemporary documents of the Sabbatean upheaval
Scholarship
- The edition of I. Tishby, Jerusalem 1954 — the first complete text — two hundred and fifty years on
- Y. Dweck, Dissident Rabbi, Princeton — the dossier was assembled and revised by its author in hindsight
Basis: documents and evidence.