INTRODUCTION

ABRAHAM MIGUEL CARDOZO was born in 1627, one year after Sabbatai Zevi, and spent much of his long life imagining himself as Sabbatai's other half. He came from a family of Marranos, descendants of Jewish converts to Catholicism, practising and preserving their ancestral faith in secret. In 1648, at the age of 21, he converted formally to Judaism. With the spread, in 1665, of the good news of Sabbatai's advent, Cardozo conceived the idea that he had found the messiah. Not long afterwards he conceived that he was the messiah. More exactly, he was messiah ben Joseph to Sabbatai's messiah ben David, his own youthful profession of Christianity the perfect symmetrical counterweight to Sabbatai's late-life profession of Islam.

He was even a tsevi, a ‘gazelle’, no less than Sabbatai. But unlike Sabbatai Zevi, ‘who left the Jewish community and went out from Torah and holiness into the realms of the profane’, Cardozo would not follow the standard ‘gazelle’ behaviour of looking back towards the place from which he came. He was a Jew, and a proud one. This tsevi, at least, would never look back towards the alien religion of his birth.

Cardozo was surely the better man of the two, as well as—in so far as such a judgement can have any meaning—the better messiah. Intellectually, and perhaps morally as well, Sabbatai did not come up to Cardozo's kneecaps, and Cardozo's disconnection from reality, striking enough to the modern reader, was less severe and less destructive to those around him than Sabbatai’s. Cardozo was intermittently aware of his own superiority, yet he could not cease to struggle and pine for the attention and approval of his senior partner in redemption. Sometime around the beginning of 1673 he sent Sabbatai a copy of his fledgling work of theology, Derush boker de’avraham (‘Abraham's Morn’)—a poignant gesture, intended to enlighten the hitherto blind eyes of the elder messiah, who did not seem yet to understand how to be messiah and needed Cardozo to explain it to him. Sabbatai never replied; Cardozo was left to guess how he had responded to the treatise and the accompanying letter.