INTRODUCTION

‘A PEDDLER who tramped from town to town filling his hands with the wealth of the scattered Jewish people … a slick-tongued rascal who caught his prey with his jaws … like a pig stretching out its hooves … like a slut spreading her legs for every passer-by, copulating with donkeys … ‘. This is how the anti-Sabbatian crusader Jacob Emden described Abraham Cuenque, in his preface to the first publication (1752) of Cuenque's sixtyyear- old biography of Sabbatai Zevi. Cuenque himself, naturally, had a rather different estimate of his own character: ‘the faithful friend, exiled and roaming in his community's toilsome service … the emissary, authorized agent, scribe, and trustee of the holy community of Hebron, who sacrifices his own wishes in order to serve the wishes of others—the humble Abraham Cuenque’.

Like the Sabbatian Meir Rofé, Cuenque hailed from the town of Hebron in the Holy Land. Like Rofé, he travelled far and wide raising money from the Jews of Europe for his impoverished, often persecuted community. We know the two men were acquainted, for their signatures appear together on a legal document prepared at Hebron at the beginning of 1682. They shared a patron: the Amsterdam millionaire (and devout Sabbatian believer) Abraham Pereira, who had endowed the Hebron yeshiva where Rofé served as director, and to whose memory and whose sons Cuenque dedicated his book Avak soferim (‘Scribes’ Dust’). It would be interesting to know what they thought of each other—the learned but simple-hearted Rofé, the silkysmooth Cuenque. Like so much else about Cuenque, this is likely to remain a mystery.

What do we know about Cuenque's life, and the circumstances in which he wrote his (evidently untitled) biography of Sabbatai Zevi?

He speaks of himself as having been ‘of tender years’ when Sabbatai was proclaimed messiah in 1665.5 The eighteenth-century bibliographer H. J. D. Azulai tells us he ‘lived to a ripe old age in Hebron’.We will not go too far astray if we give 1650–1730 as his dates.