Moses Maimonides wrote of a man known as the Yemenite Messiah,
arrested in Fez (contemporary Morocco) in 1172 during a period when
Arabs in the region had begun compelling Jewish conversions to Islam.
The Yemenite Messiah preached division of wealth with the poor - and despite the name that became attached to him personally, he taught that this sort of piety would hasten the coming of the true Messiah.
When his Arab captors
asked for proof of the divinity of his cause, the Yemenite Messiah
suggested that they behead him so he could come back to life. So they
beheaded him. He did not come back to life.
