Avraham Miguel Cardozo

Avraham Miguel Cardozo (1626-1706), born to a Portuguese-Converso family in Spain, escaped the Inquisition, returned to open Jewish life in Venice and later Tripoli, and became — alongside Nathan of Gaza — the leading theological voice of the post-apostasy Sabbatean movement. He produced an extensive Sabbatean theological corpus centered on his distinctive doctrine that the God of Israel is metaphysically distinct from the impersonal First Cause of philosophy — a structurally Gnostic claim that Sabbatean theology would extend in increasingly heretical directions over the next century.

Cardozo himself never converted to Islam and considered Shabbetai's apostasy a redemptive 'descent of the messiah'. Persecuted from one city to another by anti-Sabbatean rabbis (Sasportas, Hagiz), he spent his last decades in Cairo and Alexandria. He was murdered by his nephew over an inheritance dispute in 1706.