(SHABBATHAI TZVI).

One of Twenty-Five Copies of the Most Credible Contemporay Source for the Events Concerning the “Messiah of Izmir” “One of the best known books about the life of Sabbatai Sevi and the messianic upheaval which he aroused.” J. Kaplan, Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana, Treasures of Jewish Booklore (1994), pp. 40-3. An important contemporary account of the rise of the famous false Messiah, Shabethai Zevi by Thomas Coenen, a Protestant minister serving the Dutch merchant community in Smyrna (Izmir). Coenen’s detailed account provides a wealth of primary historical source material on the life of Sabathai Zevi, and has been used extensively by subsequent biographers and scholars, including Rabbi Jacob Emden in his Kitzur Tzitzath Novel Tzvi (Altona, 1757). Coenen was so meticulous that he went to the trouble of providing the original Hebrew texts of various invaluable documents such as the letters of Shabethai Zevi and Nathan of Gaza, as well as those of their supporters and detractors. Scholem, who relied on Coenen extensively for his masterful biography, calls the work “a great rarity.” According to B. T. de Heringa, only 25 copies of Coenen’s work were issued exclusively for the officers of the Levant tTrading Company. See Story of the Levantine Trade (Dutch), vol. II, p.163