Note: Most Sabbateans during and after Sabbatai Zevi were Jews and practiced only Judaism, whereas the Dönmeh officially practice/d Islam and are not regarded as Jews.

Sabbateans (Sabbatians) is a complex general term that refers to a variety of followers of, disciples and believers in Sabbatai Zevi (1626–1676), a Jewish rabbi who was proclaimed to be the Jewish Messiah in 1665 by Nathan of Gaza. Vast numbers of Jews in the Jewish diaspora accepted his claims, even after he became a Jewish apostate with his conversion to Islam in 1666. Sabbatai Zevi's followers, both during his "Messiahship" and after his conversion to Islam, are known as Sabbateans. They can be grouped into three: "Maaminim" (believers), "Haberim" (associates), and "Ba'ale Milhamah" (warriors).

In Jewish history during the two centuries after Zevi's death in 1676, many Jews (including some Jewish scholars) who were horrified by Zevi's personal conversion to Islam nevertheless clung to the belief that Zevi was still the true Jewish Messiah. They constituted the largest number of Sabbateans during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. They were vigorously opposed and were eventually forced into hiding their beliefs by the methodical opposition of almost all the leading rabbis who were determined to root out Zevi's kabbalistically derived anti-traditional teachings and his influence upon the Jewish masses. By the nineteenth century Jewish Sabbateans had been reduced to small groups of hidden followers who feared being discovered for their beliefs that were deemed to be entirely heretical and antithetical to classical Judaism (particularly since the head of the movement, Zevi, had become an openly practicing Muslim for the last ten years of his life until the time of his mysterious and premature death at the age of fifty.)

Barry Chamish (born January 13, 1952) is a Canadian-Israeli writer and public speaker. Chamish is known for his controversial views regarding the assassination of the Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin.

Barry Chamish was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada.

In the first half of the 1970s, Chamish had three novels and a book of short stories published in his native Canada. His novel Mack won a Canada Council Award worth several thousand dollars. In 1976, his book Alice in Newfoundland won a Manitoba Arts Council Award.

Chamish earned a Bachelor of Arts degree at the University of Manitoba in 1974. In 1975, Chamish moved to Israel, where he attended the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where he received a Master of Arts degree in 1979.

Following graduation, Chamish was conscripted into the Israeli Defense Forces, and served as a regular from 1979 to 1981. He was mobilized as a reservist in 1982 and fought in the 1982 Lebanon war, in which he operated a Redeye anti-aircraft missile.

Chamish began to work as a free-lance writer, publishing material in a range of publications including The Atlantic, National Review, and the New York Newsday. Chamish established a news service to distribute his work called "Profiles of Israel," which he continued throughout the decade of the 1980s.

Benjamin Fulford (古歩道ベンジャミン 1961–) is a Canadian journalist living in Japan.

He is the great-grandson of George Taylor Fulford.

In the early 1980s he went to Japan to study at Sophia University. After receiving a B.A. from the University of British Columbia, he returned to Japan in the mid-1980s to pursue a career in journalism.

On July 14, 2009 the Tokyo District Court awarded American broadcast journalist Steven L. Herman more than Yen 1,700,000 (17K euro) in the civil libel case brought against Fulford and his publisher (Herman vs. Fulford, Fusosha & M. Katagiri).

After the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, Fulford claimed on Japanese television that "[t]he American government in cooperation with [the] Federal Reserve, the Rockefellers, and other powerful groups, they are planning the eruption of Mt. Fuji Volcano. The earthquake and the tsunami was March 11th, 2011, 03.11.11. The Mt. Fuji Eruption they are planning is for April 11th, 2011." Fulford attributed the earthquake, tsunami and his predicted eruption of Mt. Fuji to HAARP, a scientific facility used by physicists to research the upper atmosphere. There has been no such eruption of Mt. Fuji since 1708.

Jacob Frank (יעקב פרנק Ya'akov Frank, Jakob Frank; 1726, Korolivka–December 10, 1791, Offenbach am Main) was an 18th century Jewish religious leader who claimed to be the reincarnation of the self-proclaimed messiah Sabbatai Zevi and also of the biblical patriarch Jacob. The Jewish authorities in Poland excommunicated Frank and his followers due to his heretical doctrines that included deification of himself as a part of a trinity and other controversial concepts such as "purification through transgression".

Frank arguably created a new religion, now referred to as Frankism, which combined some aspects of Christianity and Judaism. The development of Frankism was one of the consequences of the messianic movement of Sabbatai Zevi, the religious mysticism that followed violent persecution and socioeconomic upheavals among the Jews of Poland and Ukraine.

There were numerous secret societies of Sabbateans (followers of Sabbatai Zevi) in Eastern Poland (now Ukraine), particularly in Podolia and Galicia at the end of the seventeenth century