Rabbi Jacob Sasportas רבי יעקב ששפורטש

Born in 1610 at Oran, then Spanish, into a family claiming descent in the tenth generation from Nahmanides. At eighteen he sat on the rabbinical court of Tlemcen and at twenty-four became its rabbi; he served at Marrakesh, Fez and Salé, was imprisoned by the ruler and escaped. About 1653 he reached Amsterdam; in 1664–65 he was first hakham of the new Sephardi congregation in London and left during the Great Plague; in 1666–73 Hamburg; then Amsterdam again at the head of the Keter Torah yeshiva; Livorno in 1675–78; from 1680 Amsterdam once more, at the head of Ets Haim. And only from 1693, aged eighty-three, hakham of the Portuguese community of Amsterdam, successor to Aboab da Fonseca. He died on 15 April 1698.

Tzitzat Novel Tzvi — "the fading flower of Zevi," from Isaiah 28:1 — is built as a documentary dossier: his own letters to and from communities across Europe, North Africa and the Levant through the Sabbatean explosion of 1665–66 and after, stitched together with his own commentary. It is the single most important contemporary source for the movement — and at the same time an archive curated by its own author.

His objection was not merely theological but epistemic: prophecy has ceased; no messianic claim overrides the law; mass enthusiasm is not evidence. And he insisted on the primacy of rabbinic judgment over popular acclamation — which in 1666 made him, not the believers, the outsider.

Three corrections. "Sasportas led the opposition from Amsterdam" — no: he spent the whole upheaval of 1665–66 in Hamburg, an unemployed refugee from the London plague, on an Amsterdam stipend, writing letters to Amsterdam rather than from it. His authority in those years was moral and epistolary, not institutional. Tzitzat Novel Tzvi was not published in his lifetime at all: an abridgement appeared at Amsterdam in 1737 under David Meldola, and the full text only in 1954, in Isaiah Tishby's Jerusalem edition; and Yaacob Dweck has shown that the author revised his own letters afterwards, sharpening his own prescience. And the figure of the lone hero is a later construction: in 1665–66 it was Sasportas and a handful of allies whom the crowd denounced as heretics.