Sabbatai Zevi

Sabbatai Zevi

Sabbatai Zevi (Hebrew: שַׁבְּתַי צְבִי; August 1, 1626 – c. September 17, 1676), also spelled Shabbetai Ẓevi, Shabbeṯāy Ṣeḇī, Shabsai Tzvi, Sabbatai Zvi, and Sabetay Sevi in Turkish, was a Jewish mystic and ordained rabbi from Smyrna (now İzmir, Turkey). A kabbalist of Romaniote or Sephardic origin, Zevi, who was active throughout the Ottoman Empire, claimed to be the long-awaited Jewish Messiah. He was the founder of the Sabbatean movement, whose followers subsequently came to be known as Dönme (converts) or crypto-Jews.Upon arriving in Constantinople in February 1666, Sabbatai was imprisoned on the order of the grand vizier Köprülüzade Fazıl Ahmed Pasha; in September of that same year, after being moved from different prisons around the capital to Adrianople, (modern Edirne, the imperial court's then seat) to be judged on accusations of fomenting sedition, Sabbatai was given the choice of either facing death by some type of ordeal, or of converting to Islam by the Grand Vizier representing the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire, Mehmed IV. Read more on Wikipedia

Since 2007, the English Wikipedia page of Sabbatai Zevi has received more than 980,455 page views. His biography is available in 40 different languages on Wikipedia (up from 38 in 2019). Sabbatai Zevi is the 328th most popular religious figure (down from 256th in 2019), the 128th most popular biography from Turkey (down from 104th in 2019) and the 18th most popular Turkish Religious Figure.

Sabbatai Zevi was most famous for his conversion to Islam in 1666.