With the sure touch of the true historian (a rare gift) Gershom Scholem has opened up for us new avenues toward the understanding of Jewish messianism and, in particular, its most fateful manifestation after the catastrophic Bar Kokhba revolt: Sabbatianism. There are no pseudomessiahs, he teaches us. For any attempt to translate the idea of messianism into reality is doomed to end in failure, but failure is not its end. This is demonstrated by the movement connected with Sabbatai Sevi, or, if one may associate two such incongruous phenomena, the death of Christ on the cross.