An Ex-Sabbatean's Remorse? Sambari's Polemics against Islam

The present study discusses the Hebrew chronicle Divre Yosef by the seventeenth-century Egyptian Jewish author Joseph Sambari. This chronicle, a history of the Jews in the Islamic world, is prefaced by a lengthy introduction to the origins of Islam in which Sambari employs biblical allusions and midrashim that result in a subversive subtext designed to be decoded solely by a Jewish audience trained in that tradition. Sambari makes polemical use of biblical exegesis, which serves as a mode of constructing a Jewish religious identity vis-à-vis a competing tradition—Islam. As part of his project, Sambari satirizes Islamic legends about the life of Muhammad.

Jacobs's thesis is that Sambari not only concealed an anti-Islamic polemic within the complex textual allusions of his work but that he also adhered to an anti-Sabbatean agenda. He argues that Sambari's jibes against Islam can be understood as a response to the failure of the messianic movement around Sabbatai Sevi after the messianic candidate and some of his followers had converted to Islam. This religious crisis had blurred the boundaries between Judaism and Islam; and a desire to redraw these lines of difference motivated Sambari—in all likelihood an ex-Sabbatean himself—to compose his chronicle. In addition, the article argues that Sambari's work echoes a puritanical tendency in seventeenth-century Ottoman Islam that was inspired by the preachers of the Kadizadeli movement and which—while originally directed against certain Islamic Sufi orders—may have conditioned the Ottoman response to the Jewish messianic movement.