INTRODUCTION

FOUR LETTERS from Rabbi Joseph Halevi of Leghorn are preserved in the book Sefer tsitsat novel tsevi (‘Zevi's Fading Flower’), Jacob Sasportas’s dossier of materials on the Sabbatian movement in its heyday. One of these letters, the earliest, was written by Halevi to an Alexandrian ‘believer’ named Hosea Nantawa at the beginning of November 1666, when the rumours of Sabbatai's apostasy had begun to spread. It is a prolonged howl of triumphant rage, an ‘I told you so’ from a man who had always loathed Sabbatai Zevi and now saw himself vindicated, which Halevi copied and sent to his fellow-sceptic Sasportas for his delectation. The other three letters— dated, respectively, the last week of November 1666, 16 February 1667, and 27 March 1667—are reports addressed to Sasportas himself.

About Halevi we know surprisingly little. From his letters, and from the framing narrative of Sefer tsitsat novel tsevi, we can gather he was rabbi and preacher in the newly thriving port city of Leghorn (Livorno), whose Jewish community was then some decades old. Yet Renzo Toaff's massive history of the Jewries of seventeenth-century Pisa and Leghorn contains not a single mention of him. He wrote, as a learned rabbi would be expected to do, presumably on religious subjects other than Sabbatai Zevi. What these were we do not know. ‘I intend, if God favours us, to bring my complete works to press’, he told Sasportas. But God did not favour Joseph Halevi, at least not in this regard. No published writings of his are known, and perhaps this has something to do with the obscurity that seems to surround him. We shall see presently that there may have been other factors involved.

Halevi was a brilliant Hebrew stylist. He wrote his letters burning with anger against Sabbatai and his believers—‘these nincompoops, these credulous imbeciles’—in pungent, at times scarifying prose. Often he is offensive in his vituperation, his bitterness, his undisguised thirst for revenge. He is never boring.