Harif, Spiro Ark and the Jewish Genealogical Society of Great Britain present
Shabbetai Zvi: the False Messiah
Date: Wednesday, 16 January 2008
Time: 7:30pm
Venue: The Spiro Ark Centre - 25-26 Enford St, W1
Price: £7
Shabbetai Zvi took the entire Jewish world by storm in the 17th century: the learned and the ignorant, the rich and the poor all rushed to acknowledge him as King Messiah. Samuel Pepys reported in his diary that a London Jew was offering odds of 10 to one in gold that the sovereignty of the Messiah would shortly be accepted by the Turkish Sultan and the princes of the East.
Lucien Gubbay, author of Quest for the Messiah (1990), explains the appeal of one of the most controversial figures in Jewish history. When Zvi finally converted to Islam in 1666, he took hundreds of his followers with him. A few of their descendants, known as Doenmeh, are still thought to be leading strange double lives as crypto-Jews within Islam.
