About the book: 2018 / Was he an apostate or a reformer, a paranoid or a mystic-conceptualist, a charlatan or the first Zionist of the Ottoman Empire? In 1666, Shabtai Zvi, a Kabbalist rabbi from Izmir who declared himself the Messiah, unexpectedly converted to Islam, but retained elements of Judaism in his religious creed. His life and the fate of his spiritual heirs in modern Turkey are similar to a novel, and in this fascinating novel “Yarmulke under a Turban” Zinoviy Zinik combined historical parallels with our century, memoirs and a philosophical diary about the fate of people who found themselves at the crossroads of cultures.