INTRODUCTION

IT WAS JACOB NAJARA'S famous grandfather who was responsible, indirectly, for his having known Sabbatai Zevi. The brilliant and much-admired poet Israel Najara, born in Damascus around 1555, lived a wandering, irregular life that brought him eventually to Gaza. There he served as rabbi, as did his son Moses and his grandson Jacob after him. Thus it was that Jacob Najara was rabbi in Gaza when Sabbatai Zevi arrived there in the spring of 1665 for his fateful meeting with the young prophet Nathan. When Nathan revealed in his Shavuot night trance that Sabbatai Zevi was the messiah, Sabbatai was staying as a guest in Najara's home.

Israel Najara's soul had yearned passionately for God, his heart just as passionately for the redemption of his people. ‘O God of glory and greatness!’ he cried out in the best-known of his poems. ‘Save Your flock from the mouth of the lions! Bring Your people out from the midst of exile!’ Now, two generations later, the poet's grandson had played host to the man, proclaimed messiah by God's inspired prophet, who promised to do just that. From that time forth Jacob Najara was a believer. When his messiah converted to Islam, he kept on believing.

And so in 1671 Najara travelled to Adrianople, where his former guest was now a minor appendage to the sultan's court, to pay a visit of his own. By his own account, he arrived there at the end of January. We do not know how long he stayed; his narrative of the visit is incomplete, and its end, as well as some of its middle, is missing. The surviving portion of the text, at any rate, extends into the second week of June 1671. In this ‘Najara Chronicle’, we have what amounts almost to a diary of four months of Sabbatai's life as a nominal Muslim, recorded by an eyewitness observer. In its vividness and immediacy, and its close-up view of the enigmatic messiah, Najara's text has no equal.