In 1665 a Turkish Jew named Sabbatai Zevi was declared messiah by a young kabbalist, Nathan of Gaza, and within months the belief had spread through Yemen, Persia, Poland, Italy, Amsterdam and Hamburg. Communities fasted, then feasted, sold property, and in some places stopped repairing houses they expected to leave. Rabbinic opposition existed and was widely ignored. In 1666 the Ottoman authorities arrested him and offered a choice between death and Islam, and he took the turban and a court pension. The movement did not simply end: Nathan explained the apostasy as a necessary descent into the husks to redeem the sparks trapped there, and a Sabbatean underground persisted for generations, surfacing again in the Frankist movement of the eighteenth century, whose members converted to Catholicism. The consequences shaped the Judaism that followed — deep rabbinic suspicion of messianic enthusiasm and of unsupervised kabbalah, and part of the reason the Vilna Gaon looked at early Hasidism and saw the same thing coming.