What gives Evelyn's _Pretended Messiah_ its own interest is partly the immediacy of the news of Sabatai Sevi, and partly the context in which Evelyn places the story, a context to some extent indicated in the title, _History of the Three Late Famous Impostors_. When the work was published in 1669, Sevi was neither the amusing curiosity he is likely to be for the modern reader, nor the impertinent confidence man suggested by Evelyn's "impostor." Evelyn was reviewing for an English audience one of the great crises in Jewish history, the career of the man who has been called Judaism's "most notorious messianic claimant."[1] That career was not entirely past history in 1669. Sevi lived until 1675, and even after his humiliation and final banishment in 1673 he could write to his father-in-law in Salonica that men would see in his lifetime the day of redemption and the return of the Jews to Zion; "For God hath appointed me Lord of all Mizrayim."[2] Indeed, a remnant of Judaeo-Turkish Shabbethaians called Dönmehs apparently exists in Salonica to the present day. Whatever the appeal of Sevi's story may be for modern readers--as a mode of fiction, perhaps, or an instance of mass hysteria--Evelyn's discovery of an exemplum for religious and political enthusiasts may seem forced or reductive. In 1669, however, the interest of Englishmen in Jewish affairs was by no means merely academic--or narrowly commercial. There were, it is true, English sportsmen in 1666 who were actually betting on the Sevi career--ten to one that the "Messiah of Ismir" would be crowned King of Jerusalem within two years. And what was most disturbing about Sevi to the English nation as a whole was perhaps the disruption of trade, in which Sevi's father was intimately involved, as the agent of an English mercantile house. At the height of the furor, Jewish merchants were dissolving businesses as well as unroofing their houses in preparation for the return to Jerusalem. But the prime significance for Evelyn--perhaps more than for Rycaut--is revealed in the instinctive mental connection between Jewish and Christian history, or ways of thinking about history, on the one hand, and political realities in England on the other. Only nine years had passed since the return of Charles II and the displacement of the Protectorate, with its remarkable Jewish elements. As for the return of the Christian Messiah and an imminent reign of the saints, Sevi might well have reminded Evelyn of the English "impostor," the Quaker Jacob Naylor, whose messianic claims were publicly examined at Bristol in 1657. Far more important to Englishmen of the period, however, was the episode involving the mission of the Amsterdam rabbi Menasseh ben Israel to Cromwell's England in 1655, a year after Naylor's first appearance.