Book Review: Transnational networks and cross-religious exchange in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Sabbatai Sevi and the lost tribes of Israel

Transnational networks and cross-religious exchange in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. Sabbatai Sevi and the lost tribes of Israel . By Brandon Marriott . (Universal Reform. Studies in Intellectual History, 1550-1700.) Pp. xii + 167 incl. 1 fig. Farnham-Burlington, Vt : Ashgate , 2015. £65. 978 1 47 243584 2

Reviews

This well-written and engaging monograph uses new archival evidence to reexamines the emergence and reception of the Sabbatian movement. Whilst the story of Sabbatai Sevi is well known, the author's transnational approach deserves credit for breaking the traditional divides between East/West, North/South, Islam/Christianity by weaving together correspondence, familial, religious, mercantile and diplomatic networks.

The book opens and closes with Petrus Serrarius, the Protestant scholar who died in 1669 on his way to Adrianople to meet Sevi despite the latter's conversion to Islam. To understand the appeal of Jewish...