Jewish Messiahs Abroad : American Encounters with the Sabbatian Past

Jewish Messiahs Abroad explores a previously overlooked aspect of Jewish American identity, thought, and cultural production: the legacy and retelling of Sabbatian and Frankist narratives in America from the seventeenth century to the present day. Although Sabbatai Sevi and Jacob Frank-two controversial figures in Jewish messianic history-never came to America or developed followings there, stories about them circulated across the centuries in a wide array of American texts and contexts. More specifically, the book examines stories about and references to the Sabbatian past in a seventeenth-century Puritan sermon by Increase Mather, an eighteenth-century conversion narrative of a Jew turned American missionary, a nineteenth-century law review article by Louis Brandeis, plays and novels by Isaac Bashevis Singer, David Pinski, Scholem Ash and Moyshe Nadir, twentieth- and twenty-first century conspiracy narratives and finally, the New Age spiritual movements and avant-garde poetry of the 1960s to the 1980s. In reworking Sabbatian history, the book argues, American Jews and non-Jews found a usable past that allowed them to reimagine themselves in relation to a host of issues, including national belonging, religious tradition, public identity, and anti-Jewish animus.