ABSTRACT
In September 1665, at the very acme of the messianic upheaval surrounding Sabbatai Tsevi, his prophet Nathan of Gaza composed a letter to Çelebi Raphael Joseph, the high official of the Jewish community of Cairo. Wealthy and powerful, Raphael Joseph was an enthusiastic supporter of Sabbatai and generous donor to his cause. The letter was intended as a manifesto of the rapidly spreading messianic movement: it was immediately given great publicity and, within a month, was disseminated throughout the Jewish Diaspora, from Smyrna to Frankfurt and from Yemen to Holland. The missive had two parts: the opening section discussed the nature of the Messiah, while the remainder of the letter provided apocalyptic prophecies about future events. The first, doctrinal section of the letter constituted the earliest attempt to formulate the ideas that soon became the nuclei of Sabbatian theology and marked out the lines of development of the subsequent debate concerning Sabbatai Tsevi and Jewish messianism in general.
