The Sabbatean Movement, Its Roots, Its Twists and Turns, and Its Ramifications (Hebrew), Gershom Scholem’s handwritten Hebrew draft. [1942-1945].
Lengthy draft: manuscript of the introduction Gershom Scholem (1897-1982) composed for his future book "Sabbatai Zevi and the Sabbatean Movement During His Lifetime", First Edition, 1957 (Hebrew); later edition posthumously translated by R. J. Zwi Werblowsky into English as "Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626–1676", Princeton, New Jersey, 2016. Widely regarded as Scholem’s most important work. Present manuscript: eleven handwritten pages, with numerous corrections, edits, and deletions (incl. one full page crossed out with a thin line). Comment (Hebrew) in margin of first page: "Written between 1942 and 1945 and [then] lost by me for several years, and I was therefore unable to use it as an introduction to my book".
Among other things, the introduction comprehensively traces the history of the Sabbatean movement and discusses its uniqueness, the circumstances behind its birth, and its decline – all from an angle Scholem himself refers to in this particular introduction as the "Law of Dialectics Regarding History". Here, from his deeply profound and lucid perspective, Gershom Scholem makes the following observations (in Hebrew):
"There is no greater falsehood than the idea that truth is simple […] a truth that struggles over its own truthfulness, a truth that is capable of awakening and arousing what sleeps in our depths, and even to light up our dark places, in a word, a truth of life, and a truth destined to emerge from among the living – [such a truth] will not manage to preserve its lofty simplicity for long. Its inherent vitality is doomed to shatter its simplicity, and what had appeared […] as a plain, opaque ball, will most certainly reveal itself today to be a, entanglement of dilemmas and contradictions that permeate to the depths. The hidden side of the truth is a manifestation of its own innate contradictions and in the language of the philosophers, we refer to this great, basic ‘secret’ as ‘the Dialectics of Truth’" (p. 1). (The "Simple Truth" Scholem seeks to investigate is none other than "the vision of redemption and liberation envisioned by the Prophets of Israel" as it came to be reflected in the path taken by the Sabbatean movement from its beginnings in the 17th century until its eventual and final demise in the 19th century.)

The first edition of the book "Shabetai Tzvi VeHa-Tenu’ah Ha-Shabta’it BiYemei Chayav" was published (in its original Hebrew) in two volumes, in 1957, and continued to be widely regarded as Gershom Scholem’s greatest contribution to the field of Jewish studies. The present introduction was a work he had misplaced. It had yet to be found at the time of the publication of the first edition of the book. It remained unpublished for many years; in fact, he only rediscovered it some thirty years later. It was finally published only posthumously – with a number of modifications – as the introduction to the 1987 edition of the book.

[10] leaves (11 handwritten pages, 9 of them numbered). Good condition. Minor blemishes.