 Becoming thereafter fairly prosperous, Cardoso married two wives, and began to devote himself to kabbalistic speculations, in which he appears to have been previously initiated at Livorno by Moses Pinheiro.With the appearance of the Shabbethaian movement, he assumed the character of a prophet, pretending to have had dreams and visions, and sent circulars in all directions to support the Messianic claim of Sabbatai Zevi.Cardoso's pretended or actual belief in the Messiah was not renounced even when Zevi embraced Islam; he justified the latter on the plea that it was necessary for him to be counted among the sinners, in order that he might atone for Israel's sins, in a common messianic interpretation to Isaiah LIII that resembles in many ways the early Christian messianic interpretation of that chapter.