In May 1957, an American warship, the USS Yankee, stopped at a Pacific island called Tanna — then ruled jointly by Britain and France. The US military was well-known in the area, having commandeered land and manpower to fight Japan during World War Two. On Tanna, wartime contact with US service personnel sparked a religious movement called John Frum, a fusion of Christian and local beliefs with a hefty dose of messianism. In John Frum villages, the Stars and Stripes flew, and land was cleared for runways. Men marched with dummy rifles, the initials USA — TA (Tanna Army) painted on their chests, all in hope of expediting the Americans’ return.

The USS Yankee was there to quash it. In full naval attire, the ship’s commander addressed the Frummers with a message directly from President Harry S. Truman. America was not coming back, he said. Nobody in America had heard of John Frum. The Tanna Army should disband, and the people remain loyal to the Anglo-French government.

There’s always been an uneasy relationship between messiahs and governments. Messiahs mean unruly mobs, people not showing up for work. No messiah ever told his followers to follow the rules, stick with the zero-hours contract and the tugging of the forelock.

That might explain why — outside Chasidic circles — Jewish messianism is conspicuously understated.

Believing “with perfect faith” in the coming of the Messiah is one of the principles drawn up by Maimonides in the 12th century, and consequently recited daily by the faithful. It’s 12th of 13 though: hardly top billing. And in the Rambam’s digest of religious law penned in Egypt between 1170 and 1180, the Mishneh Torah, there’s a concern to uphold the belief whilst signalling its pitfalls.

“Do not think that the Messianic King will… perform signs and wonders and bring about novel things in the world, or resurrect the dead, and other such things. It is not so.” Maimonides, remember, was forced to flee his native Cordoba after the Almohad conquest. In the 1160s, he’d negotiated the freedom of Egyptian Jews being held to ransom by Crusaders. He understood the precarious nature of being Jewish, belonging to a population in exile, dependent on the tolerance of hosts and overlords. Rocking the boat was risky.

To underscore his point, Maimonides reminded his readers of Rabbi Akiva. In the mid-second century, the sage backed an armed struggle against Roman rule in Judea and declared its leader, Simon bar Kochba, as the Messiah. Early victories bolstered the messianic hopes but, ultimately, Rome prevailed, Jews were slaughtered and Akiva executed.

Yet despite such cautionary examples, Jewish messianism never entirely vanished. That’s because the conditions which made Jewish existence so precarious — ie exile — are those which made the belief so attractive. The principal expectations — an in-gathering of the exiles, a rebuilding of the Temple, an era of peace and justice — were first voiced at a time when the ancient nation was either facing obliteration by powerful enemies or coping with the aftermath of it. For similar reasons, and regardless of the truth or falsehood of their missions, messiah-figures kept finding a warm reception over the centuries.

In 1648, reports came from Smyrna, then part of the Ottoman Empire, of a man whose antics captivated and horrified the city’s Jewish community. Shabbetai Zvi was a merchant’s son, who’d had some rabbinic training and would probably these days be diagnosed as bipolar. He’d committed public acts of blasphemy, celebrated three Jewish holy days simultaneously and declared himself Messiah.

Not coincidentally, 1648 was a year of intense anxiety for Europe’s Jewish population: the pogroms following the Ukrainian peasant uprising marked the worst outbreak of antisemitic violence since the First Crusade in 1096. It was also time to take stock at the close of the Thirty Years’ War, during which several million lives were lost to battle, disease and famine.

Ejected from Smyrna, Zvi obtained the backing of a respected Kabbalist in Palestine and proceeded to criss-cross the Holy Land on horseback, appointing various “ambassadors” to summon all the tribes of Israel. Even so, no rabbi actually denounced Zvi. No-one wanted to look silly if it all turned out to be true.

In 1666, as Zvi marched on Constantinople with his followers, things got messy. En route, he ate treif foods and urged his acolytes to join in. At one stop-off, the congregation refused him entry to the shul, so Zvi hacked the door down with an axe, before dancing provocatively with the Torah scrolls, while singing a Spanish love song.

Zvi-fever spread: from Amsterdam to Prague, successful Jewish merchants sold off their possessions and headed for the Holy Land. June 18 1666 was foretold as the Day of Reckoning, when everything would come right and the Sultan would be deposed. But when that date came, Zvi was in an Ottoman jail and the miracles were absent.

A noted rabbi managed to interview him, reporting his findings to a shocked Jewish world. Zvi was a fraud. Worse news followed. Offered an ultimatum by the Sultan, the one-time Messiah converted to Islam, accepting a job in the Royal Palace.

Later, Polish merchant Jacob ben Judah Leib said he was a reincarnation of Zvi; following a rash of accusations, which included identifying as part of the  Christian trinity and indulging in forbidden sexual practices, he was excommunicated in 1756, subsequently renaming himself Jacob Frank and converting to Islam. Poland’s Catholic church saw him as a useful propaganda tool against its ancient enemy, the Jews, and curried favour with him by publicly burning the Talmud. In return, Frank and his followers converted to Catholicism.

But the love affair was brief: after making the (startlingly modern-sounding) claim that Frankists could belong to any religion, Frank was locked up in Czestochowa’s monastery for 13 years.

His religious volte-faces were baffling and probably self-serving but appealing, too. It wasn’t impossible to switch faiths in former centuries but it came at a high price, ostracism being the mildest of the possible penalties. By changing religions like he changed his socks, Frank mocked forces that trapped and oppressed people for so long, and suggested things could be different.

So it’s worth looking at these movements in the rear view mirror. Not at how much mayhem they caused or how obviously untrue their beliefs were but in terms of what they did for followers. To return to the South Pacific: Tanna’s Frummers now have representatives in the national parliament; due to the combination of political clout and streams of dollar-spending, camera-clutching tourists and film crews, Frum villages often have better resources than others on the island. Was that the purpose all along? The US military brought dollars; as the island transitioned, turbulently, to independent rule post-war, John Frum worship kept those dollars coming.

Another misunderstood movement popped up in 1964, when the people of a village in Papua New Guinea invited US President Lyndon B. Johnson to be their leader. The media had a field day , ignoring an important point. The area had been ruled, badly, by Britain, Germany and Australia in turn.

When self-government beckoned, the candidates were all, in one way or another, approved-of by the departing colonial authorities and little liked by the tribal villagers. They weren’t inviting an unpopular US leader to lead them because they believed he might really do so. They were making a comment on the choices offered.

No messiah ever pops up in isolation. In the troubled centuries of Zvi and Frank, Jews and Christians alike were swept up into mass delusions like the “Tulip Fever” of Amsterdam and the South Sea Bubble of London, with consequences affecting everyone who lent, borrowed or invested. These were Messiah-free versions of messianism, with the same algorithm: drastic measures in expectation of unlikely rewards. They sound daft, deluded, backward — until you look at the things 21st century politicians promise or compare the amount people spend on lottery tickets to the odds of a jackpot win. Maybe messianism is part of our make-up.

Matthew Baylis is author of Man Belong Mrs Queen: Adventures with the Philip-Worshippers’