“For I Have Misled Such a Great Nation, and My Time Has Passed”

Ottoman Millenarianism and the “True Religion” in R. Ḥayyim Vital’s Book of Vision

الملخص

The article explores a peculiar dream described in Sefer ha-Ḥezyonot (The Book of Visions)—a collection of events, dreams, and visions by and about R. Ḥayyim Vital (1542-1620), one of the most prominent Kabbalists operating in Safed, Jerusalem and Damascus. This dream, attributed to a figure described as “ha-palil Saʿad al-Din dgl, the impurity of all the Islamic nation”, depicts the dreamer finding both Muhammad and `Isa, the son of Miriam, degraded for misleading their believers, and declaring their religions empty and abrogated. The dream goes on to describe the Muslim masses searching for a “true religion”, which they find in Judaism with Vital as its head. The article offers a contextualization of the dream, and of the political fantasy that it raises, both in Vital’s life-long relationship with the pelilim, local Muslim clerics, and in the fervent Muslim millenarian discourse of the period and its Ottoman confessional contexts. The article suggests that the dream can be seen as a sensitive Jewish adaptation of a contemporary eschatological counter-narrative, Sufi or other, harnessing this to a Jewish conceptualization of the aspiration for change in the power relations and acknowledgment of the delicate nature of inter-religious relations in the empire.