"Things that are better concealed than revealed": An Historical-biographical study of S. Y. Agnon's attitude toward the sabbatean movement and the traditional Jewish world

The literary works of many Israeli novelists and poets-among them Ḣaim Hazaz, Nathan Bistriski, Uri Żvi Greenberg, Amir Gilboa, Theodor Herzl, Abraham Samuel Stein, Zalman Shazar, Benyamin Shvili, and Yehoram Ben Meir-reference and develop the themes of Sabbatai Żvi and the Sabbatean movement; and scholars have explored the use of messianism in general and Sabbateanism in particular in Israeli literature. Yet no one has comprehensively examined the role that the Sabbatean movement plays in the oeuvre of S. Y. Agnon, the most important Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, despite numerous references to it in his work.