Shai believes that he has uncovered the secret behind Sabbatai Sevi's deviant behavior. The secret, claims Shai, is a truly traumatic incident that occurred when Sabbatai Sevi was 6 years old, which caused him to deviate from a normal way of life and turned him, for the rest of his life, into a radical, marginal figure. As a child, he underwent an entire series of acts of sexual abuse, apparently committed by Muslim youths in his neighborhood, who not only raped him, forcing him to engage in homosexual relations, but also inflicted burns on his penis. Shai bases this claim on a single piece of evidence - testimony presented by Nathan of Gaza in an essay, "Mareh Avraham": "From the age of 5 or 6 he submitted his body ... He saw a dream in which he is 6 years old and is caught in a giant flame. He suffers burns to his skin in his private parts and dreams throw him into utter confusion ... He told no one about this incident and promiscuous youth pretended to be his friends simply in order to lead him astray and to beat him ... They, the children of Na'ama, perverted human beings, consistently persecuted him in order to mislead him."
Reliance on this testimony - which neither Scholem nor any other scholar has interpreted literally - is problematic because all of the biographical depictions of Sabbatai Sevi have been enveloped in mythical mantles and have attempted to present him as "larger than life" - in the same style used in hagiographic literature to depict the saints of the Roman Catholic Church. Every event, even bathing in the sea and the theft of the messiah's clothes, is described against the background of the struggle with the demonic world. Thus, even the term "promiscuous youth" should not be interpreted, in the absence of other pieces of corroborating evidence, simply as flesh-and-blood, evil-minded neighbors. The term "in his private parts" sounds like a de facto attempt to explain, on the one hand, the messiah's refusal to have sex with his first two wives and, on the other, his problematic sex life later on.
Shai accepts the bulk of Scholem's claim that the messiah was a manic depressive and he tries to add to that claim a psychosexual element. The term sounds familiar. Here again is the example of an attempt to psychoanalyze historical figures, based on the assumption that the patterns of human response to crisis situations, to socialization, to personal problems, etc., have remained constant over the centuries and that it is therefore possible to explain and interpret, with the use of psychoanalytical tools, the behavior of key figures in history (after all, Freud tried to psychoanalyze Moses, in addition to Michelangelo). However, as in psychoanalysis, the interpreter here always finds just what he is looking for: sex, sex and more sex.
Read the whole review. For my part, I am very wary of Freudian analyses of this sort: they tend to be infinitely adaptable to whatever circumstances (or texts) to which they're applied, and it's generally difficult to show how, even in principle, they could be demonstrated to be wrong. If a theory is unfalsifiable, it isn't well constructed.
Certainly in the case above the proof-text looks to be open to a wide range of interpretations.
Incidentally, another book with a similar theme is David Halperin's Seeking Ezekiel: Text and Psychology, which purports to show that the weird prophethood of Ezekiel was generated by sexual abuse by his mother's partner when Ezekiel was a child.
I have provided some links on Shabbetai Zvi and related matters here.
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