Sabbatai Zevi

The mystical Messiah of 1666: a manic-melancholic kabbalist from Smyrna whom half the Jewish world — Amsterdam to Yemen — believed was the redeemer, until the Sultan offered conversion or death and he took the turban. The greatest messianic explosion since antiquity, powered entirely by Lurianic ideas (the sparks needed retrieving even inside Islam, his apologists said — "holy apostasy"). The trauma made mainstream Judaism quarantine Kabbalah for generations; Scholem made the episode the hinge of his whole history.