The crucial year is Anno Domini 1666 - Hegira 1067.
In that year "Jews in various part of the Middle East and Europe were taken by a messianic frenzy... began selling their goods... preparing for their joint return to the Holy Land".
A hectic exchange of letters span the Mediterranean, but also the New world is interested: in far away Brazil Portuguese Marranos talk about unfolding events, in Boston the sermons of reverend Cotton Mother wonder about the coming end of the Diaspora.
A sense that something important is going to happen grips the entire world. For a few months time seems to stop.
Oldenburg, the secretary of the British Royal Academy writes inquisitively to Spinoza, the ten lost tribes of Israel are reported to have put Mecca under siege, the anointed Messiah is coming to restore the Jewish nation to the promised land and will humble the infidel enemy.
The world upside down.

But the climax comes to a strange result: Sabbatai Sevi, the self appointed messiah, is forced by the Turkish authorities to abjure the Jewish faith and become a Muslim.
In a sense this is the turning point but not the end of the story, like one could be easily led to think: a definite change none the less. Because most of his followers kept their faith remaining in the Jewish religion (the still existing Sabbatian Jews), some joined him in the apostasy (the still existing Muslim Domne community), some of them, still faithful to his message, joined the Catholic Church (Yes! The picturesque Frankist community).

In the tumultuous unfolding of events we are guided by John Freely to the discovery of a vanished world: the many Jewish communities (Romaniotes, Sephardis, Askenazi, Karaites, Mustaribs,...) and the many cradles of the Diaspora (multinational Salonika, Alexandria, Cairo, Izmir, Istanbul, but also far away places like Amsterdam, Ferrara in Italy and the too many communities in Central Europe).
In a sense, this book can be read as well as a travel book: to search the material, Freely followed physically the footsteps of the Sabbatians and his effort to unearth that world is in itself a real pleasure.
Most of that world has gone, wiped by two world wars and by the mad specter of nationalism: the great Jewish communities of Greece are no more, gone the royal palace in Edirne, gone the Jewish quarter in Salonika, gone the Jewish quarters of Alexandria and Cairo, but sometimes a place has been able to defy time: Berat in Albania (truly gripping the description of the city), but also the valley of Nightingales in Istanbul.

A vanished world: a multinational empire where Greeks and Jews, Turks, Armenian and Arabs coexisted. A world that was apparently much more culturally global than our own and with an area that spanned from the new world to far away cities on the edge of India. A world in which many languages coexisted: the official Turkish and the semiofficial Greek, the multinational Ladino, Arabic and Yiddish...(it is curious that Sevi was not fluent in Turkish, notwithstanding his being born and lived most of his life in Izmir).

The story is framed and intersected by the relevant historic events of the time: the fall of Venetian Candia (Crete) to the Turks, the Chminielnicki massacres in Poland and Ukraine in 1648 (one of the first great scale pogroms), the birth of the first ghetto in Venice ("ghetto" is a Venetian word), the expulsion of the Jews from Spain (1492), up to the failed siege of Vienna that marks the beginning of the decline of the Turkish Empire.

I resolved to read this book after I first read about Sabbatai Sevi in the biography of Spinoza (Spinoza. A Life by Stephen Nadler). Many feature stimulated my interest, not the least the strange phenomenon of an unusual revivalist movement in the Jewish Religion, the fact that Freely is also author of respected travel books about Greece and Turkey, my passion for the Mediterranean heritage.

Possibly this book is a perfect blend of history, geography and religion. I enjoyed every page of it and cannot but recommend it.
I loved this book, and yet there are parts of it that are true cameos. Between the many, this anecdote of the late 50s is sure worth to be cited in full:
"While in the station in Edirne, Abraham Galant? (one of the leading authorities in the history of Turkish Jewry) waited for a train to take him back to Istanbul, he noticed an old woman who was sweeping up in the waiting room, and singing while she worked. When she came closer he could hear that she was singing in Ladino, and then to his astonish¬ment he realized that the song was one that the Donme sang together to keep up their hopes in the long centuries of waiting for Sabbatai Sevi to return:
Oh, my beloved's gone from me, God's chosen one, Sabbatai Sevi. Though fallen low and suffering smart, Yet he is closest to my heart. . .
Galant? questioned the woman, and learned that she was in fact a Donme - one of the very few who still remained in Edirne. He asked why she was cleaning up in the waiting room, and she explained that she did this every day to make sure that it would be spotless when Sabbatai arrived. The Messiah had gone to his rest in Albania she explained, and when he returned he would surely come by train, picking up his faithful followers on the way to Istanbul from where they would set sail for Jerusalem. She was waiting to join him, she said, and then excused herself to get on with her work, continuing her interrupted song."
(pag.241-242).
Three hundred years had elapsed but still someone was keeping the faith.

If you've been so patient and kind to follow me so far, there can be a chance you share some of my passions and could be interested in other books I had the opportunity to read in the past about similar arguments:
Most specifically historical:
- Steven Nadler - "Spinoza. A Life" , more a survey of the age and times in which Spinoza lived than a specific biography of the great philosopher (see also my review)
- Dimitry Obolensky - "The Byzantine Commonwealth" an informed survey of the Byzantine legacy in Eastern Europe (see also my review)
More travel-related:
- Predrag Matvejevic - "Mediterranean. A Cultural Landscape". Nostalgia over the shores of the dark wine sea (see also my review).
- Ernle Bradford - "Mediterranean. Portrait of a Sea". Possibly the best book I read on history, culture and traditions of the Mare Nostrum.
- John Ash - "A Byzantine Journey". A poetic, fragile and luminous evocation of the Byzantine past.
- Ohran Pamuk - "My Name is Red" a fabulous novel (a must read for sure) that uses Bellini's portrait of Mehmet the Conqueror to illustrate the clash between the artistic tradition of the West (art like mirror of an ideal reality) and the Eastern tradition (art like symbol and not representation) - (see also my review).

You are truly welcome if you can suggest other readings or just share ideas and comments!
Thanks for reading.