Scholem's essay is not really a history of Sabbatianism. It is a study of a certain way of thinking. It looks at the history of the movement as revealing important truths about the nature of Messianism in Judaism, and about the condition of Judaism and Jews after seventeen hundred years of exile and persecution.
Scholem sees in Kabbalah a way of answering a basic Jewish question: how can the Jew find redemption even in the midst of an unredeemed world? The Kabbalist's answer was that the Jew could transform his inward existence by mystical practices and by performing ordinary religious commandments with a mystical intention. This inward, spiritual transformation (uniting his soul -- his neshamah -- with the Sefirot, restoring the harmony of soul and revealed God) would offer a form of redemption. At some future time, the Sefirot would be brought back to their original harmony (the marriage of Tiferet and Malkhut), and the real world would change.
The Safed Kabbalists carried the doctrine further by seeing the world as full of divine lights. By "repairing" the shattered vessels which once contained these lights, the Jew will hasten the transformation of the world. This doctrine added a more dynamic, this-worldly focus to the Kabbalah.
For Scholem, the early Kabbalah of the *Zohar* and the later Kabbalah of the Safed school attempted to direct the energies of the Jewish desire to see the external world match their Messianic hopes for redemption. Scholem sees Judaism after over a thousand years of exilic life as facing a crisis. The crisis arose from the "unnatural" form of Judaic civilization: a civilization lived in the imagination more than in the real world; a civilization of Midrash, Torah, and its commentaries and not a civilization with political structures (national homeland, political leaders, economic infrastructure, and so on) to give it a grounding in "reality." For Scholem, Sabbatianism was the inevitable result of a people's yearning for "national redemption," even though Sabbatianism was not a movement of return to Palestine. Here are the words of Scholem:
... I hope to make the reader see how within the spiritual world of the Sabbatian sects, within the very sanctum sanctorum of Kabbalistic mysticism, as it were, the crisis of faith which overtook the Jewish people as a whole upon its emergence from its medieval isolaiton was first anticipated, and how groups of Jews within the walls of the ghetto, while still outwardly adhering to the practices of their forefathers, had begun to embark on a radically new inner life of their won. Prior to the French Revolution the historical conditions were lacking which might have caused this upheaval to break forth in the form of an open struggle for social change, with the result that it turned further inward upon itself to act upon the hidden recesses of the Jewish psyche; but it would be mistaken to conclude from this that Sabbatianism did not permanently affect the outward course of Jewish history. (Page 84)
For pages 78-108, consider the following question: Especially beginning on page 103 Scholem describes how Sabbatian theology introduced a doctrine about the "mystery of the Godhead" that was supposed to be the secret finally revealed by Sabbatai Zvi. This doctrine ran counter to the teaching of the rabbis. What did the new doctrine say about God and about how the rabbis had misunderstood Him? How did this new theology help the Sabbatians to maintain their beliefs against the opposition of the rabbis?
For the final pages of the essay, from page 108 to the end, consider the following questions: How did Sabbatianism (after the conversion of Sabbatai Zvi) offer an outlet for the deep-felt need of the Jewish people for redemption, and how was this need "turned further inward upon itself" in the life of moderate and radical Sabbatians? Consider especially the radical doctrine of the holiness of sin. Select details which particularly display the overturning from within of Jewish traditional values and beliefs. Don't lose yourself in details, however; keep your eye on the general shape of Sabbatianism as a profound upheaval in the Jewish world which was ultimately to produce fertile ground for more "normal" attempts to transform Judaism in the nineteenth century (Haskalah or Enlightenment, Reform Judaism, Zionism) after the French Revolution.