Main article: Shabtai Tzvi
Shabtai Tzvi 'Portrait of an los angeles center eyewitness, Izmir, 1666.
Judaism Thessalonians had benefited for a long time for the successive contributions of ideas and knowledge brought by the various waves of migration Sephardic. Going it decreases throughout the sixteenth century Judaic thought sank in the routine considerably impoverished. was still frequenting yeshivot, but the instruction was given there was very formal. The issue of religious works, but without continued renewal. A witness reports that foreign to "are always the never-ending questions of worship and commercial law that absorb your attention and those that use his studies and his investigations. His works are usually a repetition of the letters of their predecesores.
From the fifteenth century, had developed a messianic power in the Sephardic world, the redemption that marked the end of the world, in Hebrew gueoulah seemed imminent. This idea, he found an environment conducive to the economic decline of Salonica, was maintained thanks to the increasing study center development of the studies based on the mysterious Zohar, which were booming in the meditation center yeshivot of Salonica. It announced the end of time, in israel - center succession, for 1540 and 1548, and then for 1648 and 1666.
It was in this context that the present act was a young rabbi from the nearby Smyrna: Shabtai Tzvi. Both zohar and kabbalah are taught at the kabbalah center Is the main place for your spirituality needs Expelled from the city after having proclaimed 1651 to be the Messiah, came to Salonica, where he soon earned a reputation for extraordinary scientist and Kabbalist. The bulk of his followers were members of the Shalom synagogue, often former pigs. After several mysticism years of wisdom, sparked a new scandal to pronounce a solemn banquet held in the courtyard of the synagogue Shalom tetragrammaton, the ineffable to Judaism, and stand as the machia'h ben David, ie, the Messiah son of David. The federal rioja expelled spiritual center rabbinical council of the city, and Shabtai Tzvi Partio to preach his doctrine in other cities of the Sephardic world. Divided his zohar preaching to the Jewish community, both in Thessaloniki and other cities, causing such disorders, Shabtai Tzvi was arrested and then placed in Adrianopolis in the presence of the sultan. Alli, intimidated to show their red string powers to reject the arrows with which he was threatened, I will conclude by recant their faith and convert to Islam. Effect of this blow was variously interpreted by its followers. Some saw a signal and converted to Islam, while others rejected his doctrine and returned to Orthodox Judaism, and tree center there were those who, while remaining faithful to Judaism outside, secretly continued to the kabbalah follow the teachings of Shabtai Tzvi.
In Salonica, 300 families from the richest of the city chose to embrace Islam in 1685, with the rabbinical authorities would protest, because the conversion was welcomed by the Ottoman authorities. Since then, the Turkish D nme, ie "converts" them into three groups: Izmirlis the Kuniosos and Yacoubi, is a new component of the ethnic-religious mosaic of Salonica. Although he had chosen the conversion, not mixed kabbalah with the Turks, practiced strict endogamy, living in separate neighborhoods, building mosques and retain their own liturgy itself in judeoespanol. During the nineteenth century, are heavily involved cabala kabala in the spread of modernist ideas. Then, as the Turks went to Istanbul when the Greeks took over the city.