VERSKI POKRET ŠABATAJA CVIJA I JEDNA KNJIŽEVNA AFERA, TRI STOTINE GODINA KASNIJE
RELIGIOUS MOVEMENT SABBATAI SEVI AND A LITERARY AFFAIR THREE HUNDRED YEARS LATER

Summary/Abstract: In this paper, we try to introduce the Messianic movement of false messiah Shabbatai Sevi (XVII c.) and diachronic reflexes that can be read in the literary scandal which was a result of the publication of the novel In search of the Messiah Erich Kosch. History of the Sabbatean movement, during Sevi`s life, but after his death too, was primarily analyzed by Gershom Scholem in his book Sabbatai Sevi The Mystical Messiah (1957). Religious mysticism, based on Lurianic Kabbalah, which was primary Sevi`s starting point, generated a messianic movement, which at that time propel a large part of European Jewry. By the fall of movement Sabbatean ideas did not quite disappeared. Their vestige can still be identified in Dönmeh sect which still has followers in Turkey, while Shabbatai Sevi was treated as a false messiah in Judaism. These topics in the Serbian literature, through Erich Kosch`s novel In search of the Messiah (1978) produced, at the reception level, dramatic reactions even before the publication of it and the author’s self-censorship procedures. Although the manuscripts of unpublished versions show that interventions in the text did not substantially damaged its literary quality, they are a testimony of people and time, particularly because this literary scandal involved some of the most respected writers of postwar Serbian literature. Ideologized criticism pointed to the very limited horizon of expectations, which reduced the novel to a political pamphlet. That is a missed opportunity to spot the formative elements of Kosch`s manuscripts that are inseparable from the internal properties of the prototext which formed the Sabbatean movement.

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