ARS No.4 year 2003

(an excerpt from the novel The Star of David)
 
- It is too improbable not to be true, the story of Shabbetai's life, interwoven with the legends that came about before and after his death. Death did not end his life. On the contrary. Turning it into the golden yarn of memory, imagination and dreams, it wove a nest from which it will ever, like a miraculous bird, spin a story, always different, richer and more beautiful, it will fly quickly and easily over the centuries, as if from branch to branch. It will testify to the human need to make all unusual things even more unreal, and thus more convincing. Like legends which also have another side, invisible but truer, a soul of their own which should be searched out and found like a precious ore and, cleansed of impurities and all that is not a part of it, should be made to shine and come to life.

Where is the soul to the legend of our hero?

It is in his life and in his role which, observed in broader social-historical currents and events, call for the caution of historians, theologians, philosophers, writers, and now even us, the curious, call for us to get to know the fate of this man of the world who lived in Dulcigno (present day Ulcinj) and, in distant 1676, died there. In a short exposé, casting light on the external, it is impossible to shed light on the internal side of such a complex person. That, after all, is not even our task. Such an undertaking belongs to others, to writers and other creative folk.

As a story about a leader who was more believed by others than he believed himself, or about a man who believed in himself more than others believed in him, the tale of Shabbetai will, in either case, seem familiar to you. Histories recalls many leaders and messiahs, and thus even those like him who believed they would change the world but, fearing for their lives, ultimately betrayed thousands of their followers who, even after everything was over, still believed them. Judas Maccabeus, Bar Kokhba, Judas of Galilee and others, each in their own way and in their own time, searching for greater happiness for their people, brought them even greater misfortune.

Such was the fate of Shabbetai Tzevi and the movement which he headed, convinced that he was the Messiah.

Speaking a prayer for it and for himself, believing in their common god, in the path on which he led them and on which he left them, they continued on to their deaths, which he himself avoided. For him they found justification; for themselves they chose death. Although the dungeons of Istanbul were overcrowded, the sea beneath them was deep. It swallowed up the innocent and the deceived, feeding the fish they attracted. Without looking into the waxy faces of the Jewish wretches, or at their bared chests, the prison guard Hajrulah himself strangled and "threw into the Karadeniz Bogazi four thousand Jews". Also strangled was the noble Adam Meir (you see, his name has been remembered) who, along with seven others, more hungry than satisfied, submitted themselves to the Turkish orphan, the future Khodja-pasha Sinan. The Pasha rushed to extract his benefactors from the procession waiting for the executioner to break their necks, his sons and grandsons. Separated for a moment, confused by that, the Meirs returned to their company - to die for the faith with which they lived.

"It is God's will," they told the Pasha. "Just as rays shine from the Sun, so from God comes our strength."

They turned their heads so they would not see how Sinan's hands cramped into fists and how his eyes glazed over.

For the leader of the chosen people and the one they had chosen, fate had a different role
in mind. Or perhaps he chose that role himself, guided by inexplicable reasons: fearing for life or in the name of living.

It is not up to us to judge or justify. We are, simply, leafing through one of the stories about him, originating in the mid-seventeenth century, at a time when the white crescent moon shone over half the Earth, although not as brightly as before. The eclipse of the Sun and Moon, foretold in incredible detail two centuries earlier by Jewish, Persian and Arab astronomers, was interpreted at that time as the dusk of the powerful Ottoman Empire.

The great are the most dangerous when they are in the most trouble. The lion roared even before the spear was stabbed into his loins. Mortal wounds were inflicted on enemies, whether abroad or at home.

In the Empire, in which generosity was viewed as weakness and mercy was compared to a drop of oil in the Bosphorus, Shabbetai Tzevi, the leader who raised the sons of Israel, was met as the mortal enemy of the faithful.

The roads of the Empire were paved with skulls. Nameless followers of Shabbetai, people who raised their heads toward their leader, lost those heads overnight. The leader kept his own! By the mercy of the one from whom it was least expected: the Sultan!

According to the ancient prophesy, the Empire would be shaken after an eclipse by rebellions and uprising, religious conflict, conspiracies, defeat on the battlefield, the loss of cities and territories, battles for the capital city, and grief. The walls of the Ka'bah in Mecca would be undercut by flooding, holy carpets would float like shells, Istanbul would be alight like kindling, the flames would swirl up to the heavens that would be as sooty as a gypsy tent. Ice would form on the Bosphorus, thin but hard like a copper shield. The earth would tremble like a feather in a headdress, shouts and wails would echo back from the heavens as if they were drums beating. God would punish the righteous and the just the same as the Jewish and the Christian subjects. The Sultan would celebrate Ramadan Bairam but not live to see Kurban Bairam. Then the Savior would appear. The Jews call him the Messiah, Moslems call him the Mahdi.

Both of faiths were waiting for him. His time was fast approaching, like everything for which it is time.

A certain fellow named Muhrebi recognized in himself the soul of the Mahdi. He announced this from the minaret of Bayazid's Mosque. The credulous and quick rushed to hear the holy words. However, the executioner was faster: Muhrebi was impaled on a stake in front of the mosque. The Mahdi's spirit also moved into Zulfikar, a dervish from the Sakarya. He was, together with the thousands who supported him, sliced to bits by the Janissary swords and fed to the dogs and carrion birds. And the son of a Kurdish sheik went to sleep as Mehmed and woke up as the Mahdi. Hundreds of his tribe and three times more of others, doubtful of everything and everyone, began to believe in the barefaced youth, a headstrong lad who cared nothing for his own father, nor for the religious writings, nor for the holy places. And he awoke with a better knowledge of the Koran than any learned man. That he was the Mahdi even his father began to believe, to whom he had given nothing but grief until then. Both of them were lured in by the emperor's words and strangled, their followers were killed or brought to their downfall where no one would even think of looking for them?

Istanbul, the heart and mind of the empire and of the world, was in the grip of the Kuprili family, first the father, then the son. In its other hand it brandished a bloody sword. Aided by their compatriots, fearsome and incorruptible Albanian warriors, they let the blood of the weary empire as they did sick sheep in their mountain homes, raising the empire and themselves, and their favorites, the fierce Albanians of whom there were ever more and more.

To this situation in which a brother was often also a mortal enemy, the Albanians also brought something that the Empire had long since lost, if it had ever had it at all: the readiness to die but not to be defeated, the sacrifice of self for the common good, respect for the given word, loyalty and pride, power and strength, the features of untamed nature and of a beautiful tradition.

The Kuprili family knew how to utilize this. Empire to them, which he had to do, and also Istanbul, which he wanted to do. He moved to Edirne. For ten years he did not go to Istanbul.

"I would like to see the city and the caravansary go up in flames," he confided in Abdi, his friend.

He had a reason for that. He had become the Sultan as a nine year-old. His childhood games were interrupted by the swishing of swords, the shouts and howls of the furious Janissaries who poured into the court. Terrified, the little prince had seen - that which even an enemy would not wish to see! - his father Sultan Ibrahim, the viziers, pashas and the entourage, stripped naked and slaughtered, reeling in the churning and roiling blood. The chopped off heads rolled on the couch, they popped and rattled like broken vases. Bits of flesh flew into the air, sticking to the walls and the marble columns, to the candleholders and curtains, and flying out the windows.

"Every bite of food I raised to my mouth, it seemed to me to be human flesh. I began to hate the court, and Istanbul," wrote the young sultan. He did not long for authority. Two loves warmed his heart. One that everyone knew about, as it grew into a passion that was stronger than anything else - hunting, and the other that only he knew of - writing! The moment when the hand drew the bowstring, the barking of panting of black hounds, graceful greyhounds and 'sniffing' hounds, the shouts of the beaters, the flight and jump of the game, they all excited him more than the houri (beautiful, exotic women) of the harem. The smell of resin and of the forest pleased him more than that of their naked and bathed bodies, sprayed with rose water. The round-shouldered bison, the light-footed doe, the clever tiger, the slender fallow deer, the golden marten, the steppe antelope, the brown sable, the nimble chamois, the proud lion, the wide-eyed boar, all of them attracted him more than the euphoric dancers and their belly dances. The sounding of the hunting horn made him happy, the army trumpets made him cover his ears. Colorful flintlocks and arquebuses appeared, but he would brand the chest of anyone who aimed them at wild game. Hunting was done only with spears and bows, like in the old times. The walls, carpets, curtains, furniture and dishes were decorated with scenes from the hunt, and the front door was ornamented with a string of deer antlers. Over the head of his bed hung a large hunting horn of ivory.

With an honest ardor, atypical of the sultans, he also loved young Rebia Gulnush, the "rose dew of spring", a Greek woman from Retimo, who he "made an empress more than a wife". The dark skinned beauty even accompanied him on the hunt, making his happiness and enjoyment complete. The Sultan hunted everywhere: around Levadhia, near Thessaly, in Syracuse, beside the Tundzha in Yamboli. His hunting successes were talked about as if they were victories on the battlefield. His subjects called him Avci, the Hunter, which pleased him more than if he had gathered the military renown of all his predecessors. He was proud of his reputation as a hunter who "knows the habits of all wild game", a man who could be caught off guard by another man but never by a wild beast. An excellent tracker, with stamina and skill, constantly on the move, he hounded his prey until he had caught it, as happy in the blind and ambush as when he was in pursuit and on the trail. He could shoot the bow with both left hand and right, he could hit the head of a buck even before the jay and blackbird had announced the arrival of the deer, he could hear a fallow deer wheezing from a great distance.

A hunting accident, on the eve of the Sultan's encounter with Shabbetai, was decisive for the Messiah's life.

The tiercel of Mufti Ibrahim, one of the court's imams, stole the prey away from the Sultan's falcon. An unforgettable faux pas for which all of Mehmed's predecessors would have killed even the best of their viziers and army commanders. The Sultan grumbled, his jaw set, his brow furrowed up, but he said nothing. The Mufti broke the golden perch and grabbed the hawk to ring its neck. Defending itself, the enraged bird shook off its blinders, scratched the Mufti's hands and bloodied them. His face whiter than an ahmadiyah, trembling from fury and fear, the Mufti stared at the Sultan, expecting the worse. Mohammed waved him away, as if to say:

"Get lost!"

Still under the influence of this misfortune, as if to spite him, the carcasses were come across by some strangers: poachers, bandits or wanderers. The Sultan was enraged:

"What is this? What, are we in Istanbul?!"

The hunt was stopped. They went back to Edirne where, as if caught in a trap, Shabbetai was waiting.

* * *

Before we present the meeting of the Sultan and his victim, we should remember the other of his passions ? writing! When he began to rule and handle the affairs of state, the Sultan invited the famous Abdi to the court, a man gifted with many virtues, a religious and very learned man. The Sultan commanded him, like the old historian Ali, to faithfully write down everything he saw fit (even those things he did not like) for his Chronicle. Whatever he wrote there would remain a secret to all, even to the Sultan! He swore to Allah that it would be so. And by Allah it was so.

"You are writing for those who, after us, will thus know what happened and how it happened. It is better if you offend the Sultan than if you betray the truth. You will be respected for that. You're not a judge, nor an interpreter, you are a historian," said the Sultan.

Not revealing his secret to anyone, the Sultan likewise wrote down something every night that he thought Abdi would be writing about, and perhaps what others would be writing about. Thus, two chronicles, parallel and similar, were created, both from reliable sources. The task he had given to another, the Sultan did worthily himself. It was as if they copied from one another, which they are to be praised for if the two chronicles are compared with other sources and with reality. Both were published by the same publisher, and he could have, as he says in the foreword, saved the trouble and money by just publishing one of them.

Why do we mention this? Because both of them also wrote about Shabbetai Tzevi, faithfully recounting that meeting for us.

The Sultan had heard quite a lot about Shabbetai. His death could easily have been carried out in Istanbul - where they remove your head and then find reason to do so, where the lives of the faithful are cheaper than the pit of a date, not to mention the lives of rebels, rivals and enemies. The Grand Vizier Kuprili had caught him and thrown him in the Dardanelle prison. (Nothing ever got by him!) Informed of this, inspired by the vice vizier's stories that many rabbis had complained that Shabbetai had separated them from their congregations, that Shabbetai had bragged he would convert the Sultan himself (the Sultan, who did not even go hunting without taking the Koran!), and this had aroused the curiosity of the Sultan. He commanded that Shabbetai be brought to Edirne.

And now we return to the hero of our story.

The Jews had been waiting for the Messiah. They carried the dream of Him within themselves, they inherited it. They lived with him as they lived with their prayers. The dream of the Messiah was inseparable from reality, as necessary as bread, water and air. The year 1666 was drawing near when, according to the ancient prophesies, the Messiah would appear. He was to appear when things were most difficult. Not a single generation of Jews ever had it easy; every generation thought that it suffered for all the others as well. All around Istanbul, synagogues had sprung up. Thousands of refugees poured into the city from Poland and the Ukraine. The Cossacks and Tatars were demolishing their homes, burning the ancient scrolls, even slaughtering children in their cribs. The wailing and moaning was heard even beyond the heavens! The tiny flames that flickered in the breast of every Jew erupted into a wildfire that burned everywhere - in the desert night, in caves, in barren places, in the big and small cities, in the East and in the West. The fire caught in Istanbul as well, stronger even than when the fire had turned the most beautiful palaces and mosques to ashes... Hope was stirred up as well. The Messiah appeared in the character of the Cabbalist Tzevi, a follower and adherent of Isaac ben Solomon Luria, the famous Ha-ari. He was convinced of this even by Nathan of Gaza, a renowned prophet who knew how to heal the soul and to interpret the will of God better than anyone.

"Shabbetai is our Messiah!" he repeated euphorically.

"Shabbetai is our Messiah!" resounded in Jewish hearts all over the country.

"I am the Messiah!" Shabbetai was the most easily convinced by Nathan's prophesy.

"You are the Messiah!" he was persuaded by all for whom a Messiah was necessary.

"He's not!" claimed the rabbis and the fervent, but no one was listening to them anymore. In vain they proclaimed the heresy and excluded him.

"The Messiah, the Messiah!" it was whispered, but it was also shouted.

"You are the Messiah!" many of the rabbis conceded. The Earth turned three times in a day and twice a night. Before the young man from Smyrna, who was the best student of the heder, the elementary school, and the yeshivas, who knew the Torah and Talmud by heart even as a child, the seas began to part to let him through. The kahins, the diviners, gazed into the heavens and pointed out a six-pointed star that was now seen by others as well. It blocked the Moon and the crescent Moon. They pointed also to Shabbetai's star, it shone bright, even during the day. The paths of God and man were full of magibi, preachers, proclaiming the arrival of the Messiah. The synagogues in Italy, England, Germany, were filled with the faithful, and in Turkey they were full of informers as well. His followers multiplied, as did his enemies. Full of faith in themselves and in those who followed him and who were as the "sands of the earth", after seventeen years of wandering the earth he returned home to Smyrna from which he had been exiled. The masses of people met him with cheers. Riding high on their fervor, he wrote the Sultan a letter, urging him to join him. He arrived in Istanbul - straight into the hands of Köprülü!

Shabbetai's arrest neither calmed nor frightened his advocates. They were convinced that Shabbetai would gather all the Jews from the diaspora in Palestine, taking them from their galut, overthrowing the kings and making himself the lord of the earth. The prophesies foretold that he would vanish for nine months and return riding on the back of a lion, holding a seven-headed dragon in its jaws. He would be followed by the Jewish brothers from the other side of the River Sabbation?

Now he was standing in front of the Sultan, alone, across from them all.

Copied from Abdi's chronicle, the meeting unfolded like this:
"Having heard Tzevi out, the Sultan turned to his Mufti: he was to give his own opinion. This very religious man, it was known, could not stand Sufis and mystics. 'They're worse than Satan,' he was known to say. His rage was not tempered even for the famous philosopher Karabash, nor for Misri, the poet from Bursa. They were executed as murderers.

"The Mufti spoke scathingly and caustically, incoherently and disjointedly, he was stinging and burning, he poured with sweat, shaking and threatening with his finger, demanding that the rebel's neck be broken. Shabbetai wanted to get the upper hand over the Sultan in Palestine? To seize what was the Sultan's? 'His neck should be broken like this,' he hissed and demonstrated with his hands, as if he were breaking the neck of a falcon. 'There'll be no usurpation! None!'

"The Sultan calmed him with a wave of his hand, as if to say:

'Quiet down! Quiet down!'

"He ordered that Shabbetai be stripped naked, as if in the baths. It was ridiculous and sad to see how he was ashamed and mortified. He did not know what to do with his hands, raising them to his eyes then lowering them to cover his circumcised member and hanging scrotum. As if his strength and faith had fallen away with his robes. He was dejected and diminished, he seemed smaller and more miserable than Dzheladin the Crazed.

" 'Now we will see if what they say about you is true. You will stand against that pillar, and the archers will shoot at you. We'll see if the arrows bounce off of you and break like straws,' said the holy Emperor.

"The wretch's body began to tremble. His legs, as if they were separated from his body, gave way. He fell to his knees. He was hardly able to mumble out:

" 'I am just a rabbi- a common?'

"Then he raised his head, his eyes shone, they flashed like a thousand Stars of David.

" 'I beg you in the name of your son, Prince Mustafa, who will be born tonight to you by your wife Gulnush, spare my life?'

"As if caught in a trap, the Sultan jerked backwards. He frowned and his mouth fell open.

" 'If that happens?'

"The Star of David, tattooed on Shabbetai's breast, began glowing and shining like the rays of the sun. The Sultan covered his eyes with his hand.

" 'If that happens?'

"Knowing nothing of this, at dusk the sultana began to get early pains and contractions. At midnight, she bore the Sultan a son. Tzevi even got the name right. It had come to the Sultan long before in a dream, and not in his wildest dreams had he ever even thought of revealing it to anyone before his son was born. He feared for his son's life - that no one might cast a spell on him. The Padishah now showed great mercy and generosity to Tzevi.

" 'If you once asked that I convert to your faith, it is only right now that you convert to mine,' he said to Shabbetai.

"Thus Shabbetai became Mehmed, in order to show his gratitude to the Sultan with his new name. He was rewarded with a sack of golden ducats, a fleece of mink and a salary of one hundred akche?"

Written by the Sultan's hand, this whole event is different only in the reasons for which Shabbetai's life was spared:
"Seeing how the Mufti was frothing and shouting, 'He's trying to seize what is the Sultan's', I remembered his tiercel and the grabbing for my prey during the hunt. It seemed to me he wanted the same thing. Oh, no, I'll not allow that! I forgot that I am the Sultan. I took it like a hunter, but I was not sorry I did so. The birth of my son will justify me to the world. They will praise my generosity and mercy, which I showed to this wretch who wanted to be emperor. If he knew what awaited him, he would have chosen the hunt?"

The arrow that was never drawn hit two targets at once. Shabbetai's conversion to Islam was celebrated as a victory by the Jews and Moslems alike. Only he experienced it as a defeat.

The man who had intended to change the world had to change religions so that, by going through such trials, he might recognize why their religion was better, as his followers interpreted things.

He stayed with the Sultan for a while, teaching him the secrets of the Cabbala and his own teachings. Having fun and entertaining himself more than taking his convert seriously, the Sultan even took him hunting. An arrow which missed Shabbetai's heart and stuck in a tree which immediately began to get brown boils and its leaves began to wither, and a second arrow which hit his turban and took it flying away like a bird, convinced Shabbetai that it would be better for him to get away from the Sultan. The Mufti was too powerful, his hatred might boil over. If it burst out - he might be poisoned! In greatest secrecy he slipped away to where it was safest, where no one knew who he was and where he would not care even if they found out. He chose Dulcigno, where the pirates cared neither about the emperor nor about God.

With sails unfurled like a blacksmith's billows, in a boat of Hajdar Karamindžoja, before which the waves scattered like children with stolen fruit, he drew closer to Dulcigno. The sun was hot, red and warm like a fresh baked bun.

Awakened suddenly, basking in the sunshine like a woman does in gifts, the countless lit
toral plants and bushes stretched out their hands to him. Leaning against the rail of the ship, Shabbetai watched the marvelous countryside and the white city that was rousing from its slumber like a seagull.

"It's as if I am returning to Smyrna? The city of my birth, the same as this one where I will?" he almost said "die" but corrected himself. "Where I will live from now on?"

The sky opened up like a huge calyx, across the colors mixed like a meadow flourishing with belladonna and spurge, spruce and bladder senna, lungwort and other plants of his native Smyrna.

Just then, a fight broke out on board, the shouting deafened him, the deck was popping and cracking. Fleeing from a large mulatto whose head was bleeding, not dropping a piece of broken ladder, a young man ran into Shabbetai... He tripped, pushed him and the deck railing broke. Practically hugging each other, Shabbetai and the young man flew headfirst into the sea. The heavy mulatto threw himself into the sea after them. Shabbetai's followers jumped into the sea as well?just in time to pull him from the powerful grasp of the mulatto. Blinded with rage, the mulatto did not know who he was grabbing or who he was beating. They were thrashing about, splashing like fish, choking each other, shouting and tearing each other's clothes. Bareheaded and almost naked, his shirt pulled off and his pantaloons torn, Shabbetai barely managed to drag himself out onto the beach. Offended and angry, gasping for breath, his lungs were wheezing as if they would burst. Contorting and twisting on the sand, he felt as if he were empty, as he once did in Edirne before the Sultan? Small and trembling, by themselves, his hands came together between his legs, as if he were protecting his nether parts. Someone from the ship brought a piece of canvass to cover him with. Thus, wrapped in cloth like a mummy, withdrawn into himself, ashamed (it seemed to him that his followers were barely managing to stifle their laughter), he entered the fortress he had been assigned to command.

It was to that fortress, as it will be seen, that he became a voluntary slave.

He almost never left it. He departed from the city only twice: to see a Benedictine monastery at Ratac near Bar, and to see nearby Sva?, a town that once had as many churches as a year does days, erased from the past and from the future by an attack of the Mongols.

"As dilapidated and laid to waste as I am myself," he wrote in a letter to Sara Elah, the youngest of his three wives he had left in Smyrna. There, among the ruins, the verses of Judah ben Samuel Halevi poured out of him, verses he had learned back at the heder. He spoke them as a prayer:
"Where shall I find wings?
I shall carry my broken heart
Far, far away into the desolate heights,
I shall graze and kiss the earth,
Day and night uncovered both hand and foot
I shall wander about Your ruins?"

The letters he meant for his friends, never intending to send them, some of which have been kept and published in Zagreb in "Gideon" in 1924, broaden our knowledge of Shabbetai's contradictory nature, his tendency to fall from heavenly euphoria into the throes of dejection, about his feelings and his sensitive soul, but, they also reveal to us many valuable facts about the past of Ulcinj. Because, as it usually is, that which is closest to us we rarely know much about. Others see us better than we do: their judgments should be heeded.

Hence, from one of Shabbetai's letters (which leaves the unavoidable impression that it was sent to us), we learn, for example, about the horrible earthquake which demolished the Montenegrin coastline the same day, month and hour as the recent quake in April, only three centuries earlier:
"Four times the sea separated itself from the hills, slamming back into the reef and town, chasing and grabbing at it like a wild beast does its prey. Houses fell into the sea like tiles falling from a roof, and overturned sailboats were raised up and thrown to the ground over the ramparts of the town."

Shabbetai also writes of four hundred Algerian pirates who feared no one, the same number of Albanians who did not fear the pirates, and of three hundred blacks who feared both. He leaves record of thirty dönme, monks who threw themselves from the ramparts onto the stones below so that they would not be captured by the Turks.

He talks of the "rampart grass" which grows only below Ulcinj, and of a certain fish that can, even when fried, jump from the frying pan and swim away. He mentions fishing by trained cormorant, and how children beat snipe, woodcock and dowitcher with sticks, and gather in so many that even a wagon cannot haul them away? He writes also of "Albanian women who walk about town with their faces uncovered and their hair cut, their clothes decorated with coins, among which are valuable Venetian coins and sequins, and coins from Dubrovnik, Byzantium, Rome, Macedonia and the German lands..."

Shabbetai, who as a student of the yeshivas learned to speak six languages as he spoke his own, and who understood twice as many more, because languages are like musical notes, wrote that in Svač he heard many people talking and that he made out all the languages spoken under the earth? Illyrian, Greek (but not the one he learned in Smyrna, but the other which he was taught by Hirosoph, the mystic), Latin, Slavic, Mongol and Turk.

"They all spoke about the same thing?"

What Shabbetai meant by "the same thing" they all spoke about remains for us to figure out, because he does not say a word about it in the letter. Obviously, it was clear and simple -just as everyone knows that they were born and will die...

As alone among people as he was within the walls of the Tower, plagued by faith more than by doubt, changing his moods five times a day, as often as one should bow in prayer each day, he let the years run through his fingers like grains of amber.

The Tower in which he lived had long loomed over the town and everything in it. And then, under his supervision, the church of St. Mary, two centuries old, was converted into a mosque. The balcony of the minaret - where the muezzin came out in the morning, at noon and in the evening - looked right into the window of Shabbetai's room. The Tower and minaret were almost touching, so similar and so different, one next to the other, close and irreconcilable.

"If I reached out, I could grab the muezzin by the beard," said Shabbetai. From then on, the shutters of the window were not even opened at night. The muezzin's powerful voice pounded on them like the south wind.

"It is time for me to move on to Sheol," he wrote just before his death. The man, who had not even stepped over the threshold of his forties, did not write, "I feel old", but rather "I have grown old?", the difference being an important one, easily recognizable. He knew that he could no longer flee from death, nor would he wait for it to come: he would rather meet it face to face. He even knew when they would meet. As he did every morning, he once opened the engraved silver box that had a mirror on the inside of the lid in the shape of the Star of David, but Shabbetai did not see his reflection in it, nor could he fog it up with his breath.

"I no longer have a soul," he mumbled, closing the box, as if he were closing his life along with it. Even though it was not customary, he attempted to have his body, "from which his soul had flown", embalmed. In Dulcigno, there also lived a certain Julio Eborenzis, a slave, experienced in the stuffing of animals, birds and fish. His work was skillful, it seemed as if they were alive. In the house where he lived, to the right of the gate, he placed a mezuzah, a hidden amulet the Jews put at the doorpost to protect them from ghosts. Walking down the street, Shabbetai saw it and it struck him as if an arrow had pierced him. Julio was followed secretly. Nahman the servant did not let him out of his sight. They discovered he was a Marrano, an Iberian Jew who had, fearing for his life, accepted Christianity.

He was taken to the commander.

"Salaam allahem, brother!" he was greeted by Shabbetai.

"Allahem salaam!" he answered back and immediately bit his lip. He was convinced he had fallen into a trap. The star on Shabbetai's chest convinced him otherwise. Julio moved into the Tower. Hidden behind its walls, he could celebrate Purim and Rosh Hashanah, to fast during Yom Kippur, to eat Kosher, and to pray with Shabbetai and Nahman.

He confided in Shabbetai that he knew also how to embalm the human body, that he did it even more skillfully and differently, even better than the masters of old. He did not remove the innards from the body, he did not keep it soaking in brine, he did not torture it. He injected it with a fluid that circulated like blood.

"If you hadn't lost your soul, I would wait for it and catch it," he said.

Well ahead of time they procured everything he asked for. From Egypt came lime, from Greece came perfumed oils, from Persia came palm wine and the powder of ground herbs, from India came tiger's oil and resin, from Smyrna came a coffin of carved cedar, covered with pictures of Biblical motifs, on the lid of which were carved the words, "The soul returns after death...".
He died during the dzhuma namaz, the common prayers in the mosque at noon. While others were sending their words to Allah, alone and there, Shabbetai also straightened up his body, lowered himself into a half-sitting position, touched his forehead with a prayer cloth and bowed, but his thoughts carried him far away from the people around him, the people and the town in which his heart was beating ever weaker.

"Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God,
God is one Lord," as if to himself he spoke out the words of the Shema.

"Hear, O Israel!" resounded, it echoed around the mosque, accompanied by the sound of the shophar. Shabbetai recoiled, hearing "Hear, O Israel, the Lord God is our God" being said by Hur Nahman, louder than all the others. He stepped toward him, faltered and fell.

"Mehmed-Efendi has died," everyone in town knew it. The crowd around the mosque had still not departed, the echoes of the muezzin's prayer for the dead were resounding from Suka and Pinješine, and it was already known in Istanbul.

"Shabbetai is dead!" they proclaimed. "Tzevi is dead!" they repeated, giving him recognition of that which they were aware: there were many Mehmeds and Mehmed-Efendis in the empire, but there was only one Shabbetai. The news of his passing reached his followers as well. While he was still alive they believed him to be dead. When he died, not one of them could believe it.

Among the things and books found in the Tower, besides manuscripts and the notebooks of Halevi, Joseph ben Ephraim, Isaac ben Solomon, Maimonides and other Jewish and Arab thinkers, teachers and mystics, a copy of the first edition of the Zohar from 1559, other works by local people were also found - Ljudevit Pasković from Kotor, Ivan Bona Bolica and George Byzanti, Pir Didak of Dubrovnik, and a copy of Rubens' painting "Moses with the Commandments" and "Jeremiah's Lament over Jerusalem" the work of someone named Mazarević, probably from Perast; Shabbetai's own drawing of the town, and six golden coins, minted in Dulcigno, Bar and Drač.

His story also remained which, here in Ulcinj now three centuries later, we still tell in the town where he died.


Translated by: Randall A. Major

 ARS No.4 year 2003