Transnational Networks and Cross-Religious Exchange in the Seventeenth-Century Mediterranean and Atlantic Worlds

In 1644 the news that Antonio de Montezinos claimed to have discovered the Lost Tribes of Israel in the jungles of South America spread across Europe and the Ottoman Empire fuelling an already febrile atmosphere of millenarian expectation, culminating in the claims of Sabbatai Sevi to be the Jewish messiah. By situating this transmission in a historical context stretching back to 1492, this book reveals the importance of early-modern crises, diasporas and newsgathering networks in generating eschatological constructs and transforming them through a process of intercultural dissemination into complex new hybrid religious conceptions and identities.