Heinrich Graetz
History of the Jews, Vol. 5 (of 6)

CHAPTER I.
CHMIELNICKI AND THE PERSECUTION OF THE JEWS OF POLAND BY THE COSSACKS

Condition of the Jews in Poland before the Outbreak of Persecution – Influence of the Jesuits – Characteristics of Poles and Jews – The Home of the Cossacks – Repression of the Cossacks by the Government – Jews appointed as Tax Farmers – Jurisdiction of the Synods – The Study of the Talmud in Poland – Hebrew Literature in that Country becomes entirely Rabbinical – Character of Polish Judaism – Jews and Cossacks – Chmielnicki – Sufferings of the Jews in consequence of his Successes – The Tartar Haidamaks – Fearful Massacres in Nemirov, Tulczyn, and Homel – Prince Vishnioviecki – Massacres at Polonnoie, Lemberg, Narol, and in other Towns – John Casimir – Lipmann Heller and Sabbataï Cohen – Renewal of the War between Cossacks and Poles – Russians join Cossacks in attacking the Jews – Charles X of Sweden – The Polish Fugitives – "Polonization" of Judaism.

1648–1656 C. E

Poland ceased to be a haven for the sons of Judah, when its short-sighted kings summoned the Jesuits to supervise the training of the young nobles and the clergy and crush the spirit of the Polish dissidents. These originators of disunion, to whom the frequent partition of Poland must be attributed, sought to undermine the unobtrusive power which the Jews, through their money and prudence, exercised over the nobles, and they combined with their other foes, German workmen and trades-people, members of the guilds, to restrict and oppress them. After that time there were repeated persecutions of Jews in Poland; sometimes the German guild members, sometimes the disciples of the Jesuits, raised a hue and cry against them. Still, in the calamities of the Thirty Years' War, fugitive Jews sought Poland, because the canonical laws against Jews were not applied there with strictness. The high nobility continued to be dependent on Jews, who in a measure counterbalanced the national defects. Polish flightiness, levity, unsteadiness, extravagance, and recklessness were compensated for by Jewish prudence, sagacity, economy, and cautiousness. The Jew was more than a financier to the Polish nobleman; he was his help in embarrassment, his prudent adviser, his all-in-all. Especially did the nobility make use of Jews in developing recently established colonies, for which they had neither the necessary perseverance nor the ability. Colonies had gradually been formed on the lower Dnieper and the northern shore of the Black Sea, by runaway Polish serfs, criminals, adventurers from every province, peasants, and nobles, who felt themselves cramped and endangered in their homes. These outcasts formed the root of the Cossack race at the waterfalls of the Dnieper (Za-Porogi), whence the Cossacks obtained the name of Zaporogians. To maintain themselves, they took to plundering the neighboring Tartars. They became inured to war, and with every success their courage and independent spirit increased.

The kings, who needed the Cossacks in military undertakings and to ward off the inroads of Tartars and Turks, granted them some independence in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and appointed a chieftain over them from their own midst, an Attaman, or Hetman, with special marks of dignity. But the bigoted temper of King Sigismund III and the Jesuits made the Cossacks, who might have become an element of strength for Poland, the source of endless discontent and rebellion. The Zaporogians for the most part were adherents of the Greek Church, the Greek Catholic confession being predominant in southern Poland. After the popes by means of the Jesuits had weakened and oppressed the Polish dissidents, they labored to unite the Greek Catholics with the Romish Church or to extirpate them. With the warlike spirit of the Cossacks this change was not easy; hence a regular system of enslavement was employed against them. Three noble houses, the Koniecpolski, Vishnioviecki, and Potocki, had control of colonization in the Ukraine and Little Russia, and they transferred to their Jewish business agents the farming of the oppressive imposts falling on the Cossacks. Thus Jewish communities gradually spread in the Ukraine, Little Russia, and even beyond these provinces. The Cossacks, for instance, had to pay a tax at the birth of a child and on every marriage. That there might be no evasion, the Jewish revenue farmers had the keys of the Greek churches, and when the clergyman wished to perform a baptism or a marriage, he was obliged to ask them for the key. In general, the position of the Jews in districts where none but Poles dwelt was better than in those which besides Polish inhabitants contained a German population, as was the case in the large cities, Posen, Cracow, Lublin, and Lemberg.

By reason of their great number, their importance, and their compact union, the Jews in Poland formed a state within a state. The general synod, which assembled twice a year at Lublin and Jaroslaw, formed a legislative and judicial parliament from which there was no appeal. At first called the Synod of the Three Countries, it became in the first quarter of the seventeenth century the Synod of the Four Countries (Vaad Arba Arazoth). An elective president (Parnes di Arba Arazoth) was at the head, and conducted public affairs. The communities and rabbis had civil, and, to a certain extent, criminal, jurisdiction, at least against informers and traitors. Hence no Jew ventured to bring an accusation against one of his race before the authorities of the country, fearing to expose himself to disgrace and contempt from public opinion, which would have embittered his life, or even entailed death. Almost every community had its college of judges, a rabbi with two assessors, before whom every complaint was brought, but the final decision rested with the synod. The synod also concerned itself about honesty in dealing and conduct, and in weight and measure, wherever Jews were affected.

The study of the Talmud in Poland, established by Shachna, Solomon Lurya, and Moses Isserles, reached a pitch attained at no previous time, nor in any other country. The demand for copies of the Talmud was so great that in less than twenty years three editions had to be printed, no doubt in thousands of copies. The study of the Talmud was a greater necessity in Poland than in the rest of Europe. The rabbis, as has been already said, had jurisdiction of their own, and decided according to Talmudical and Rabbinical laws. The great number of Jews in Poland, and their fondness for litigation, gave occasion to intricate law cases. The rabbi-judges were obliged to go back to the source of law, the Talmud, to seek points of support for such cases. The contending parties being themselves well informed and acute, the reasoning of the rabbis had to be flawless to escape criticism. Hence Rabbinical civil law in Poland met with extraordinary cultivation and extension, to adapt it to all cases and make it available for the learned litigants. Thus the ever-growing subtlety of the method of Talmud study depended on current conditions and wants, and on the circumstance that each Talmudist wished to surpass all others in ingenuity.

It would be tedious to enumerate the Rabbinical authors of Poland in the first half of the seventeenth century. The cultivation of a single faculty, that of hair-splitting judgment, at the cost of the rest, narrowed the imagination, hence not a single literary product appeared in Poland deserving the name of poetry. All the productions of the Polish school bore the Talmudical stamp, as the school regarded everything from the Talmudical point of view. The disciples of this school looked down almost with contempt on Scripture and its simple grandeur, or rather it did not exist for them. How, indeed, could they have found time to occupy themselves with it? And what could they do with these children's stories, which did not admit the application of intellectual subtlety? They knew something of the Bible from the extracts read in the synagogues, and those occasionally quoted in the Talmud. The faculty for appreciating the sublimity of biblical doctrines and characters, as well as simplicity and elevation in general, was denied them. A love of twisting, distorting, ingenious quibbling, and a foregone antipathy to what did not lie within their field of vision, constituted the character of the Polish Jews. Pride in their knowledge of the Talmud and a spirit of dogmatism attached even to the best rabbis, and undermined their moral sense. The Polish Jews of course were extraordinarily pious, but even their piety rested on sophistry and boastfulness. Each wished to surpass the other in knowledge of what the Code prescribed for one case or another. Thus religion sank, not merely, as among Jews of other countries, to a mechanical, unintelligent ceremonial, but to a subtle art of interpretation. To know better was everything to them; but to act according to acknowledged principles of religious purity, and exemplify them in a moral life, occurred to but few. Integrity and right-mindedness they had lost as completely as simplicity and the sense of truth. The vulgar acquired the quibbling method of the schools, and employed it to outwit the less cunning. They found pleasure and a sort of triumphant delight in deception and cheating. Against members of their own race cunning could not well be employed, because they were sharp-witted; but the non-Jewish world with which they came into contact experienced to its disadvantage the superiority of the Talmudical spirit of the Polish Jews. The Polish sons of the Talmud paid little attention to the fact, that the Talmud and the great teachers of Judaism object even more strongly to taking advantage of members of a different faith than of those of their own race.

The corruption of the Polish Jews was avenged upon them in a terrible way, and the result was, that the rest of the Jews in Europe were for a time infected with it. With fatal blindness Polish Jews offered the nobility and the Jesuits a helping hand in oppressing the Zaporogian Cossacks in the Ukraine and Little Russia. The magnates wished to make profitable serfs of the Cossacks, the Jesuits hoped to convert the Greek heretics into Roman Catholics, the Jews settled in the district expected to enrich themselves and play the lord over these pariahs. They advised the possessors of the Cossack colonies how most completely to humiliate, oppress, torment, and ill-use them; they usurped the office of judges over them, and vexed them in their ecclesiastical affairs. No wonder that the enslaved Cossacks hated the Jews, with whom their relations were closest, almost more than their noble and clerical foes. The Jews were not without warning what would be their lot, if these embittered enemies once got the upper hand. In an insurrection of the Zaporogians under their Hetman in about 1638, despite its brief duration, they slew 200 Jews, and destroyed several synagogues. Nevertheless, Jews lent a hand, when in consequence of the insurrection the further enslavement of the sufferers was determined upon. In the year 1648, fixed by that lying book, the Zohar, they expected the coming of the Messiah and the time of redemption, when they would be in power, and, therefore, they were more reckless and careless than was their custom at other times. Bloody retribution was not long delayed, and struck the innocent with the guilty, perhaps the former more severely than the latter.

It proceeded from a man who understood how to make use of the increasing hatred of the Cossacks for his purposes, and who was regarded by his countrymen as their ideal. Bogdan Chmielnicki (Russian Chmel), born about 1595, died 1657, before whom all Poland trembled for several years, gave Russia the first opportunity of interfering in the Polish republic, and was a frightful scourge for the Jews. Chmielnicki, brave in war and artful in the execution of his plans, impenetrable in his schemes, at once cruel and hypocritical, had been vexed by Jews, when he held the subordinate position of camp secretary (Pisar) of the Cossacks subject to the house of Koniecpolski. A Jew, Zachariah Sabilenki, had played him a trick, by which he was robbed of his wife and property. Another had betrayed him when he had come to an understanding with the Tartars. Besides injuries which his race had sustained from Jewish tax farmers in the Ukraine, he, therefore, had personal wrongs to avenge. His remark to the Cossacks, "The Poles have delivered us as slaves to the cursed breed of Jews," was enough to excite them. Vengeance-breathing Zaporogians and booty-loving Tartars in a short time put the Polish troops to flight by successful manœuvres (May 18, 1648). Potocki, the lieutenant-general, and 8,000 Poles, according to agreement, were delivered to the Tartars. After the victory the wild troops went eastward from the Dnieper, between Kiev and Pultava, plundering and murdering, especially the Jews who had not taken flight; the number of the murdered reached several thousand. Hundreds underwent baptism in the Greek Church, and pretended to be Christians, in order to save themselves. Fortunate were those who fell into captivity with the Tartars; they were transported to the Crimea, and ransomed by Turkish Jews. Four Jewish communities (Porobischa and others) of about 3,000 souls resolved to escape massacre by surrendering to the Tartars with all their property. They were well treated, and sold into Turkey, where they were ransomed in a brotherly manner by those of their own race. The Constantinople community sent a deputy to Holland to collect money from the rich communities for the ransom of captives.

Unfortunately for the Poles and Jews, King Vladislav, for whom Chmielnicki had shown some respect, was removed by death. During the inter-regnum of several months, from May to October, 1648, the usual Polish dissension occurred, which crippled every attempt at resistance. At first Chmielnicki drew back, apparently inclined to negotiate with the crown, but he gave his creatures full power to ravage the Polish provinces. Regular troops of murderers, called Haidamaks (the Tartar word for partisans), were formed under brutal leaders who cared not a straw for human life, and who reveled in the death-struggles of their Polish and Jewish foes. In the name of religion they were urged by the Greek popes to murder Catholics and Jews. The commander of each troop had his own method of exercising cruelty. One had thongs slung round the necks of Catholic and Jewish women, by which they were dragged along; this he called "presenting them with a red ribbon." A few weeks after the first victory of the Cossacks, a troop under another of these chiefs advanced against the stronghold of Nemirov, where 6,000 Jews, inhabitants and fugitives from the neighborhood, had assembled; they were in possession of the fortress, and closed the gates. But the Cossacks had an understanding with the Greek Christians in the town, and put on Polish uniforms in order to be taken for Poles. The Christian inhabitants urged the Jews to open the gates for their friends. They did so, and were suddenly attacked by the Cossacks and the inhabitants of the town, and almost entirely cut down amid frightful tortures (Siwan 20 – June 10, 1648).

Another Haidamak troop under Kryvonoss attacked the town of Tulczyn, where about 60 °Christians and 2,000 Jews had taken refuge in the fortress. There were brave Jews among them, or necessity had made them brave, and they would not die without resistance. Nobles and Jews swore to defend the town and fortress to the last man. As the Cossack peasants understood nothing of the art of siege, and had repeatedly suffered severely from the sorties of Jews and Poles, they resorted to a trick. They assured the nobles that their rage was directed only against the Jews, their deadly foes; if these were delivered up, they would withdraw. The infatuated nobles, forgetful of their oath, proposed that the Jews should deliver up their arms to them. The Jews at first thought of turning on the Poles for their treachery, as they exceeded them in numbers. But the rabbi of Tulczyn warned them against attacking the Poles, who would inflict bloody vengeance, and all Poland would be excited against the Jews, who would be exterminated. He implored them to sacrifice themselves for their brethren in the whole country; perhaps the Cossacks would accept their property as ransom. The Jews consented, and delivered up their arms, the Poles thereupon admitting the troops into the town. After the latter had taken everything from the Jews, they set before them the choice of death or baptism. Not one of them would purchase life at that price; about 1,500 were tortured and executed before the eyes of the Polish nobles (Tamuz 4 – June 24). The Cossacks left ten rabbis alive, in order to extort large sums from the communities. The Poles were immediately punished for their treachery. Deprived of the assistance of the Jews, they were attacked by the Cossacks and slain, proving that violators of their word cannot reckon on fidelity towards themselves. This sad event had the good effect that the Poles always sided with the Jews, and were not opposed to them in the course of the long war.

At the same time another Haidamak troop, under a leader named Hodki, had penetrated into Little Russia, and caused dreadful slaughter in the communities of Homel, Starodub, Czernigov, and other places east and north of Kiev. The Jews of Homel are said to have suffered martyrdom most firmly, on the same day on which the Tulczyn community was annihilated. The leader of the troop had all the Jews of Homel, inhabitants as well as fugitives, stripped outside the town, and surrounded by Cossacks, and called upon them to be baptized or to expect a most frightful death. They all, men, women, and children, to the number of about 1,500, preferred death.

Prince Vishnioviecki, the only heroic figure amongst the Poles at that time, a man of penetration, intrepid courage, and strategic ability, defended the cause of the persecuted Jews with devoted zeal. He took the fugitives under the protecting wings of his small, but brave force, with which he everywhere pursued the Cossack bands to destruction. But, because of his limited power, he could accomplish nothing of lasting import. Through petty jealousy, he was passed over at the election of the commander-in-chief against the Cossack insurrection, and instead of him three were chosen, of a character calculated to help on Chmielnicki to further victories.

Annoyed at the pitiful policy of the regent, the primate of Gnesen, Vishnioviecki followed his own course, but was compelled to retreat before the overpowering number of the roving troops and the Greek Catholic population in sympathy with them, and so destruction was brought on the Jews, who had reckoned on his heroic courage. In the fortress of Polonnoie, between Zaslav and Zytomir, 10,000 Jews, partly inhabitants, partly fugitives from the neighborhood, are said to have perished at the hand of the besieging Haidamaks and the traitorous inhabitants (Ab 13 – July 22).

The unfortunate issue of the second war between Poles and Cossacks (September, 1648), when the Polish army, more through dread of the Tartars under Tugaï Bey and the incapacity of its generals, than through Chmielnicki's bravery, was scattered in wild flight, and collected only behind the walls of Lemberg, prepared a bloody fate even for Jews who thought themselves safe at a distance from the field of battle. There was no escape from the wild assaults of the Zaporogians, unless they could reach the Wallachian borders. The blood of slaughtered and maltreated Jews marked the vast tract from the southern part of the Ukraine to Lemberg by way of Dubno and Brody; in the town of Bar alone from two to three thousand perished. It scarcely need be said that the brutal cruelty of the regular Cossacks, as well as of the wild Haidamaks, made no distinction between Rabbanites and Karaites. The important community of Lemberg lost many of its members through hunger and pestilence, and its property besides, which it had to pay to the Cossacks as ransom.

In the town of Narol the Zaporogians caused a revolting butchery. It is said that in the beginning of November 45,000 persons, among them 12,000 Jews, were slain there with the cruellest tortures. Among the corpses remained living women and children, who for several days had to feed on human flesh. Meanwhile the Haidamaks roamed about in Volhynia, Podolia, and West Russia, and slaked their revenge in the blood of nobles, Catholics, clergy, and Jews, to thousands and tens of thousands. In Crzemieniec an inhuman monster slew hundreds of Jewish children, scornfully examined the corpses as Jews do with cattle, and threw them to the dogs. In many towns Jews, as well as Catholics, armed themselves, and drove the bloodthirsty Cossacks away.

The election of a king, which finally was effected – and, though the Polish state was on the brink of an abyss, it took place amidst fights and commotions – put an end to bloodshed for the moment. Although for the most part in a drunken condition, Chmielnicki retained sobriety enough to dictate, among his conditions of peace, that no Catholic church should be tolerated, nor any Jew live, in the Cossack provinces. The commission, unable to accept the conditions, departed without settling the business (February 16, 1649). The Jews, who had reckoned upon a settlement, and returned to their home, paid for their confidence with death, for the Cossacks surrounded the towns with death-cries. Thus, a second time, many Jews and nobles perished at Ostrog (March 4, 1649).

The breaking off of the negotiation with Chmielnicki led to a third encounter. Although the Polish army this time appeared better armed on the field of battle, it had as little success as before. In the battle at Sbaráz it would have been completely destroyed by the Zaporogians and Tartars, if the king had not wisely come to an understanding with the Tartar chief. Thereupon followed the peace (August, 1649), which confirmed Chmielnicki's programme, among other points that concerning the Jews. In the chief seats of the Cossacks (i. e., in the Ukraine, West Russia, in the district of Kiev, and a part of Podolia) they could neither own or rent landed estates, nor live there.

In consequence of this convention, the Poles and Jews were unmolested for about a year and a half, although on both sides schemes were harbored to break the agreement at the first opportunity. As far as residence was allowed them, the fugitive Jews returned to their homes. King John Casimir allowed the Jews baptized according to the Greek confession openly to profess Judaism. In consequence, the baptized Jews fled from the Catholic districts to Poland to be free from compulsory Christianity. This permission was especially used by Jewish women whom the rude Zaporogians had married. The Jews brought back into Judaism many hundreds of children, who had lost their parents and relatives, and had been brought up in Christianity, investigated their descent, and hung the indication of it in a small roll round their necks, that they might not marry blood relations of forbidden degrees. The general synod of rabbis and leaders which assembled at Lublin in 1650 occupied itself entirely with the attempt to heal, at least partially, the wounds of Judaism. Many hundreds, even thousands, of Jewish women did not know whether their husbands lay in the grave, or were begging in the East or West, in Turkey or Germany, whether they were widows or wives, or they found themselves in other perplexities created by the Rabbinical law. The synod of Lublin is said to have hit upon excellent arrangements. Most probably the lenient Lipmann Heller, then rabbi of Cracow, strove to effect a mild interpretation of the law relating to supposed death. At the instigation of the young, genial rabbi Sabbataï Cohen (Shach), the day of the first massacre at Nemirov (Siwan 20) was appointed as a general fast day for the remnant of the Polish community. The hoary Lipmann Heller, at Cracow, Sabbataï Hurwitz, at Posen, and the young Sabbataï Cohen drew up penitential prayers (Selichoth), mostly selected from older pieces, for this sad memorial day.

After a pause of a year and a half, the war between Cossacks and Poles broke out in the early part of the year 1651, the first victims again being Jews, as Chmielnicki and the wild Zaporogians now fell upon the Polish territory where Jewish communities had again settled. The massacre, however, could not be so extensive as before; there no longer were thousands of Jews to slaughter. Moreover the evil days had inspired the Jews with courage; they armed a troop of Jewish soldiers, and enlisted them in the king's service. The fortune of war turned against the Cossacks, and they were obliged to accept the peace dictated by the king (November 11, 1651). John Casimir and his ministers did not forget to guard the rights of the Jews in the treaty. They were to be permitted to settle anywhere in the Ukraine, and to hold property on lease.

This treaty also was concluded and ratified only to be broken. Chmielnicki had accepted it to strengthen himself and restore his reputation with the Cossacks. As soon as he had gained his first object, he began hostilities against the Poles, from which Jews always suffered most severely. In two years after the first insurrection of the Zaporogians, more than 300 communities were completely destroyed by death or flight, and the end of their suffering had not yet arrived. The Polish troops could not withstand the violent attacks or skillful policy of Chmielnicki. When he could no longer hope for help from the Tartars, he combined with the Russians, and incited them to a war against unhappy Poland, divided against itself. In consequence of the Russian war in the early part of 1654 and 1655, those communities suffered which had been spared by the Cossack swarms, i. e., the western districts and Lithuania. The community of Wilna, one of the largest, was completely depopulated (July, 1655) by slaughter on the part of the Russians and by migration. As if fate were then determining upon the partition of Poland, a new enemy was added to the Cossacks and Russians in Charles X of Sweden, who used Poland as the first available pretext to slake his thirst for war. Through the Swedish war, the communities of Great and Little Poland, from Posen to Cracow, were reduced to want and despair. The Jews of Poland had to drink the cup of poison to the dregs. The Polish general, Czarnicki, who hated the Jews, ill-used those spared by Cossacks, Russians, and the wild Swedes of the Thirty Years' War, under the pretense that they had a traitorous understanding with the Swedes. The Poles also behaved barbarously to the Jews, destroyed the synagogues, and tore up the holy scriptures. All Poland was like a bloody field of battle, on which Cossacks, Russians, Prussians, Swedes, and the troops of Prince Ragoczi of Transylvania wrestled; the Jews were ill-used or slain by all. Only the Great Elector of Brandenburg behaved leniently towards them. The number of Jewish families said to have perished in ten years of this war (600,000) is certainly exaggerated, but the slaughtered Jews of Poland may well be rated at a quarter of a million. With the decline of Poland as a power of the first rank, the importance of Polish Judaism diminished. The remnant were impoverished, depressed, and could not recover their former position. Their need was so great, that those who drifted to the neighborhood of Prussia hired themselves to Christians as day laborers for field work.

As at the time of the expulsion of the Jews from Spain and Portugal every place was filled with fugitive Sephardic Jews, so during the Cossack-Polish war fugitive Polish Jews, wretched in appearance, with hollow eyes, who had escaped the sword, the flames, hunger, and pestilence; or who, dragged by the Tartars into captivity, had been ransomed by their brethren, were seeking shelter everywhere. Westwards, by way of Dantzic and through the Vistula district, Jewish-Polish fugitives wandered to Amsterdam, and were forwarded thence to Frankfort-on-the-Main and other Rhenish cities. Three thousand Lithuanian Jews came to Texel in the Netherlands, and were hospitably received. Southwards many fled to Moravia, Bohemia, Austria, and Hungary, and wandered from those places to Italy. The prisoners in the armies of the Tartars came to the Turkish provinces, and some of them drifted to Barbary. Everywhere they were received by their brethren with great cordiality and love, cared for, clothed, and supported. The Italian Jews ransomed and supported them at great sacrifice. Thus, the community of Leghorn at this time formed a resolution to collect and spend a quarter of their income for the liberation and maintenance of the unfortunate Polish Jews. The German and Austrian communities, also, although they had suffered under the calamities of the Thirty Years' War, exercised that brotherly feeling which they rarely professed with their lips, but cherished the more deeply in their hearts.

The number and misery of those escaped from Poland were so great, that the German communities and probably others were obliged to devote the money intended for Jerusalem to the maintenance of Polish Jews. The Jews of Jerusalem dependent on alms, who were drained by the pasha and his subordinates, felt the want of their regular support from Europe. They soon fell into such distress, that of the 700 widows and a smaller number of men living there nearly 400 are said to have died of hunger.

The Cossack persecution of the Jews, in a sense, remodeled Judaism. It became Polonized, so to speak. The Polish-Rabbinical method of study had long dominated the Talmudical schools of Germany and Italy through the abundant literature by Polish authors. Now, through the fugitives, most of whom were Talmudical scholars, it became authoritative. Rabbinical appointments were mostly conferred on Polish Talmudists, as in Moravia, Amsterdam, Fürth, Frankfort, and Metz. On account of their superiority in their department, these Polish Talmudists were as proud as the Spanish and Portuguese fugitives had been, and looked down with contempt on the rabbis who spoke German, Portuguese, and Italian. Far from giving up their own method in a foreign country, they demanded that all the world should be regulated by them, and they gained their point. People joked about the "Polacks," but nevertheless became subordinate to them. Whoever wished to acquire thorough Talmudic and Rabbinical knowledge was obliged to sit at the feet of Polish rabbis; every father of a family who wished to educate his children in the Talmud sought a Polish rabbi for them. These Polish rabbis gradually forced their sophistical piety upon the German, and partly on the Portuguese, and Italian, communities. Through their influence, scientific knowledge and the study of the Bible declined still more than previously. In the century of Descartes and Spinoza, when the three Christian nations, the French, English, and Dutch, gave the death-blow to the Middle Ages, Jewish-Polish emigrants, baited by Chmielnicki's bands, brought a new middle age over European Judaism, which maintained itself in full vigor for more than a century, to some extent lasting to our time.

CHAPTER II.
SETTLEMENT OF THE JEWS IN ENGLAND AND MANASSEH BEN ISRAEL

Obstacles to the Resettlement of Jews in England – Manasseh ben Israel – His Character and Attainments – Christian Students of Jewish Literature: Scaliger, the Buxtorfs, Selden, and Vossius – Women devote themselves to Hebrew – The Fifth-Monarchy Men: Expectation of the Millennium – Enthusiastic Friends of the Jews – The Puritans – Cromwell and Holmes – Nicholas' Protection of the Jews – "The Hope of Israel" – Fresh Victims of the Inquisition – Manasseh ben Israel's Negotiations with the English Parliament – He journeys to London, and is graciously received by Cromwell – A Council sits at Whitehall to decide the Question of the Re-admission of the Jews – Prynne's anti-Jewish Work – Controversial Pamphlets – Manasseh's "Vindication" – The Re-admission of the Jews connived at.

1655–1657 C. E

At the very time when the Jews of Poland were trodden down, slaughtered, or driven through Europe like terrified wild beasts, a land of freedom was opened, from which the Jews had been banished for more than three centuries and a half. England, which the wise queen Elizabeth and the brave Cromwell had raised to be the first power in Europe, a position very different from that of crumbling Poland, again admitted Jews, not indeed through the great portal, yet through the back door. But this admission was so bruited abroad, that it was like a triumph for Judaism. The Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg looked with longing to this island, to which they were so near, with whose merchants, shipowners, and scholars they were in connection, and which promised wide scope for the exercise of their varied abilities. But settlement there seemed beset with insuperable obstacles. The English episcopal church, which exercised sway over the English conscience, was even more intolerant than the popery which it persecuted. Not granting freedom to Catholics and Dissenters, would it tolerate the descendants of those aspersed in the New Testament? The English people, who for centuries had seen no Jew, shared to the full the antipathy of the clergy. To them every Jew was a Shylock, who, with hearty goodwill, would cut a Christian to pieces – a monster in human form, bearing the mark of Cain. Who would undertake to banish this strong prejudice in order to render people and rulers favorable to the descendants of Israel?

The man who undertook and executed this difficult task did not belong to the first rank of intellectual men, but possessed the right measure of insight and narrowness, strength of will and flexibility, knowledge and imagination, self-denial and vanity, required for so arduous an undertaking. Manasseh ben Israel, second or third rabbi at Amsterdam, who at home played only a subordinate part, the poor preacher who, to support his family, was obliged to resort to printing, but obtained so little profit from it, that he wished to exchange pulpit oratory for mercantile speculation, and was near settling in Brazil; he it was who won England for Judaism, and, if he did not banish, diminished the prejudice against his race. To him belongs the credit for a service not to be lightly estimated, for there were but few to help him. The release of the Jews from their thousand years' contempt and depreciation in European society, or rather the struggle for civil equality, begins with Manasseh ben Israel. He was the Riesser of the seventeenth century. As has been stated, he was not in the true sense great, and can only be reckoned a man of mediocrity. He belonged to the happily constituted class of persons, who do not perceive the harsh contrasts and shrill discords in the world around, hence are confiding and enterprising. His heart was deeper than his mind. His power rested in his easy eloquence, his facility in explaining and working out ideas which lay within his narrow field of vision, and which he had acquired rather than produced. Manasseh ben Israel had complete grasp of Jewish literature, and knew the Christian theology of his time, and what was to be said on each point, i. e., what had been said by his predecessors. On the other hand, he had only a superficial knowledge of those branches of learning which require keenness of intellect, such as philosophy and the Talmud. His strength was in one respect his weakness. His facility in speaking and writing encouraged a verbose style and excessive productiveness. He left more than 400 sermons in Portuguese, and a mass of writings that fill a catalogue, but discuss their subjects only superficially. Manasseh's contemporaries looked upon his writings with different eyes. The learning amassed therein from all literatures and languages, and the smoothness of form riveted their attention, and excited their admiration. Among Jews he was extraordinarily celebrated; whoever could produce Latin, Portuguese, or Spanish verse, made known his praise. But even Christian scholars of his time over-estimated him.

In Holland, which, by the concurrence of many circumstances, and especially through the powerful impulse of Joseph Scaliger, the prince of philologists, had become in a sense the school of Europe, the foundation was laid in the seventeenth century for the wonderful learning contained in voluminous folios. At no time had there been so many philologists with early-matured learning, iron memory, and wonderful devotion to the science of language, as in the first half of the seventeenth century, which seems to have been specially appointed to revive what had so long been neglected. All the literary treasures of antiquity were collected and utilized; statesmen vied with professional scholars. In this gigantic collection there was little critical search for truth; the chief consideration was the number of scientific facts gathered. The ambition of many was spurred on to understand the three favored languages of antiquity – Greek, Latin, and Hebrew – and their literatures. Hebrew, the language of religion, enjoyed special preference, and whoever understood it as well as the other two tongues was sure of distinction. Joseph Scaliger, the oracle of Dutch and Protestant theology, had given to Rabbinical literature, so-called, a place in the republic of letters beside the Hebrew language, and even the Talmud he treated with a certain amount of respect. His Dutch, French, and English disciples followed his example, and devoted themselves with zeal to this branch of knowledge, formerly regarded with contempt or even aversion.

John Buxtorf, senior (born 1564, died 1639), of Basle, may be said to have been master of Hebrew and Rabbinical literature, and he rendered them accessible to Christian circles. He carried on a lively correspondence in Hebrew with Jewish scholars in Amsterdam, Germany, and Constantinople. Even ladies devoted themselves to Hebrew language and literature. That prodigy, Anna Maria Schurmann, of Utrecht, who knew almost all European languages and their literature, corresponded in Hebrew with scholars, and also with an English lady, Dorothea Moore, and quoted Rashi and Ibn-Ezra with a scholar's accuracy. The eccentric queen Christina of Sweden, the learned daughter of Gustavus Adolphus, understood Hebrew. Statesmen, such as Hugo Grotius, and the Englishman John Selden, seriously and deeply engaged in its pursuit for their theological or historical studies.

But Christian scholars, with all their zeal, had not yet acquired independence in Rabbinical literature; without a Jewish guide, they could not move, or felt unsafe. To Christian inquirers, therefore, Manasseh ben Israel's treatises, which presented many Rabbinical passages and new points of view, were highly welcome. Much of the Talmudic literature became accessible through his clear exposition. Hence, Dutch scholars sought out Manasseh, courted his friendship, fairly hung upon his lips, and gradually discarded prejudice against Jews, which even the most liberal-minded men in the most tolerant country of Europe had not laid aside. Manasseh was joined particularly by those eager inquirers who were persecuted or declared heretics by the ruling church. The learned Vossius family, even John Gerard Vossius, senior, although filled with strong hatred against Jews, was affable to Manasseh. His son, Dionysius Vossius, a prodigy of learning, snatched away by death in his eighteenth year, on his death-bed translated into Latin Manasseh's "Reconciler" (Conciliador) shortly after its appearance. Isaac Vossius, the youngest son, who filled an honorable office under the queen of Sweden, recommended Manasseh ben Israel to her. By this family he was made acquainted with the learned statesman Hugo Grotius, who also received instruction from him. The chief of the Arminians, Simon Episcopius, sought intercourse with Manasseh, as did Caspar Barlæus, who as a Socinian, i. e., a denier of the Trinity, was avoided by orthodox Christians. He attached himself to Manasseh, and sang his praise in Latin verses, on which account he was attacked yet more violently, because he had put the Jewish faith on an equality with the Christian. The learned Jesuit Peter Daniel Huet also cultivated his friendship. Gradually the Chacham and preacher of Amsterdam acquired such a reputation among Christians, that every scholar traveling through that city sought him out as an extraordinary personage. Foreigners exchanged letters with him, and obtained from him explanations on difficult points. Manasseh had an interview with Queen Christina of Sweden, which stimulated her kindness for the Jews, and her liking for Jewish literature. So highly did many Christians rate Manasseh ben Israel, that they could not suppress the wish to see so learned and excellent a rabbi won over to Christianity.

Most of all Christian visionaries, who dreamt of the coming of the Fifth Monarchy, the reign of the saints (in the language of Daniel), crowded round Manasseh ben Israel. The Thirty Years' War which had delivered property and life over to wild soldiers, the tyrannical oppression of believers struggling for inward freedom and morality – in England by the bishops and the secular government, in France by the despotic Richelieu – awakened in visionaries the idea that the Messianic millennium, announced in the book of Daniel and the Apocalypse, was near, and that their sufferings were only the forerunners of the time of grace. These fantastic visionaries showed themselves favorable to the Jews; they wished this great change to be effected with the participation of those to whom the announcement had first been made. They conceded that the Jews must first take possession of the Holy Land, which could not easily be accomplished, even by a miracle. For, the lost Ten Tribes must first be found, and gathered together, if the prophetic words were not to fall to the ground. The tribes assembled to take possession of the Holy Land must have their Messiah, a shoot out of the stem of Jesse. But what would become of Jesus, the Christ, i. e., Messiah, in whom Jews could not be made to believe? Some of the Fifth Monarchy visionaries conceded to Jews a Messiah of their own, in the expectation that the struggle for precedence between the Jewish and the Christian saviour would decide itself.

Such apocalyptic dreams struck a responsive chord in Manasseh ben Israel's heart. He also expected, not the reign of the saints, but, according to Kabbalistic reckoning, the speedy advent of the Messianic time. The Zohar, the book revered by him as divine, announced in unambiguous terms, that Israel's time of grace would begin with the year 5408 of the world (1648). Manasseh in his innermost being was a mystic, his classical and literary education being only external varnish, not diminishing his belief in miracles. Hence he was pleased with the letter of a Christian visionary of Dantzic, expressing belief in the restoration of the glory of the Jews. John Mochinger, of the old Tyrolese nobility, who had fallen into the whirlpool of mysticism, wrote to Manasseh ben Israel in the midst of an eulogium on his learning: "Know and be convinced that I duly honor your doctrines, and together with some of my brethren in the faith, earnestly desire that Israel may be enlightened with the true light, and enjoy its ancient renown and happiness." At a later period another German mystic of Dantzic established relations with the Kabbalistic Chacham of Amsterdam – viz., Abraham von Frankenberg, a nobleman, and a disciple of Jacob Böhme. He openly said: "The true light will come from the Jews; their time is not far off. From day to day news will be heard from different places of wonderful things come to pass in their favor, and all the islands shall rejoice with them." In daily intercourse with Manasseh were two Christian friends, Henry Jesse and Peter Serrarius, who were enthusiasts in the cause of Israel's restoration. In France, in the service of the great Condé, there was a peculiar visionary, Isaac La Peyrère of Bordeaux, a Huguenot, perhaps of Jewish-Marrano blood. He had the strange notion that there were men before Adam (pre-Adamites), from whom all men except the Jews were descended. In a book on the subject, which brought him to the dungeon of the Inquisition, he attached great importance to the Jews. In another work on "The Return of the Jews," he maintained that the Jews ought to be recalled from their dispersion in all parts of the world, to effect a speedy return to the Holy Land. The king of France, the eldest son of the Church, has the duty to bring about this return of the eldest son of God. He, too, entered into communication with Manasseh.

The greatest number of ardent admirers "God's people" found in England, precisely among those who had powerful influence in the council and the camp. At the time when the Germans were fighting each other on account of difference of creed, invoking the interference of foreigners, and impairing their own freedom and power, England was gaining what could never be taken away, religious and, at the same time, political freedom, and this made it a most powerful and prosperous country. In Germany the religious parties, Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists, in selfish blindness demanded religious freedom each for itself alone, reserving oppression and persecution for the others. These internecine quarrels of the Germans were utilized by the princes to confirm their own despotic power. In England, the same selfishness prevailed among the Episcopalians, Presbyterians, and Catholics, but a fourth party arose whose motto was religious freedom for all. The senseless despotism of Charles I and the narrow-mindedness of the Long Parliament had played into the hands of this intelligent and powerful party. England, like Germany, resembled a great blood-stained battle-field, but it had produced men who knew what they wanted, who staked their lives for it, and effected the rejuvenescence of the nation. Oliver Cromwell was at once the head which devised, and the arm which executed sound ideas. By the sword he and his army obtained religious freedom, not only for themselves, but also for others. He and his officers were not revengeful freebooters or blood-thirsty soldiers, but high-minded, inspired warriors of God, who waged war against wickedness and falseness, and hoped for, and undertook to establish a moral system of government, the kingdom of God. Like the Maccabees of old, the Puritan warriors fought "sword in hand, and praise of God in their mouth." Cromwell and his soldiers read the Bible as often as they fought. But not out of the New Testament could the Roundheads derive inspiration and warlike courage. The Christian Bible, with its monkish figures, its exorcists, its praying brethren, and pietistic saints, supplied no models for warriors contending with a faithless king, a false aristocracy, and unholy priests. Only the great heroes of the Old Testament, with fear of God in their hearts and the sword in their hands, at once religious and national champions, could serve as models for the Puritans: the Judges, freeing the oppressed people from the yoke of foreign domination; Saul, David, and Joab, routing the foes of their country; and Jehu, making an end of an idolatrous and blasphemous royal house – these were favorite characters with Puritan warriors. In every verse of the books of Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings, they saw their own condition reflected; every psalm seemed composed for them, to teach them that, though surrounded on every side by ungodly foes, they need not fear while they trusted in God. Oliver Cromwell compared himself to the judge Gideon, who first obeyed the voice of God hesitatingly, but afterwards courageously scattered the attacking heathens; or to Judas Maccabæus, who out of a handful of martyrs formed a host of victorious warriors.

To bury oneself in the history, prophecy, and poetry of the Old Testament, to revere them as divine inspiration, to live in them with every emotion, yet not to consider the people who had originated all this glory and greatness as preferred and chosen, was impossible. Among the Puritans, therefore, were many earnest admirers of "God's people," and Cromwell was one of them. It seemed a marvel that the people, or a remnant of the people, whom God had distinguished by great favor and stern discipline, should still exist. A desire was excited in the hearts of the Puritans to see this living wonder, the Jewish people, with their own eyes, to bring Jews to England, and, by making them part of the theocratic community about to be established, stamp it with the seal of completion. The sentiments of the Puritans towards the Jews were expressed in Oliver Cromwell's observation, "Great is my sympathy with this poor people, whom God chose, and to whom He gave His law; it rejects Jesus, because it does not recognize him as the Messiah." Cromwell dreamt of a reconciliation of the Old and the New Testament, of an intimate connection between the Jewish people of God and the English Puritan theocracy. But other Puritans were so absorbed in the Old Testament that the New Testament was of no importance. Especially the visionaries in Cromwell's army and among the members of Parliament, who were hoping for the Fifth Monarchy, or the reign of the saints, assigned to the Jewish people a glorious position in the expected millennium. A Puritan preacher, Nathaniel Holmes (Holmesius), wished, according to the letter of many prophetic verses, to become the servant of Israel, and serve him on bended knees. The more the tension in England increased through the imprisonment of the king, the dissensions between the Presbyterian Long Parliament and the Puritan army, the civil war, the execution of King Charles, and the establishment of a republic in England, the more public life and religious thought assumed Jewish coloring. The only thing wanting to make one think himself in Judæa was for the orators in Parliament to speak Hebrew. One author proposed the seventh day as the day of rest, and in a work showed the holiness of this day, and the duty of the English people to honor it. This was in the beginning of 1649. Parliament, it is true, condemned this work to be burnt as heretical, scandalous, and profane, and sentenced the printer and author to punishment. But the Israelite spirit among the Puritans, especially among the Levelers, or ultra-republicans, was not suppressed by these means. Many wished the government to declare the Torah to be the code for England.

These proceedings in the British islands, which promised the exaltation of Israel at no distant period, were followed by Manasseh with beating heart. Did these voices not announce the coming of the Messianic kingdom? He hoped so, and put forth feverish activity to help to bring about the desired time. He entertained a visionary train of thought. The Messiah could not appear till the punishment of Israel, to be scattered from one end of the earth to the other, had been fulfilled. There were no Jews then living in England. Exertions must be made to obtain permission for Jews to dwell in England, that this hindrance to the advent of the Messiah might be removed. Manasseh therefore put himself into communication with some important persons, who assured him that "the minds of men were favorable to the Jews, and that they would be acceptable and welcome to Englishmen." What especially justified his hopes was the "Apology" by Edward Nicholas, former secretary to Parliament, "for the honorable nation of the Jews." In this work, which the author dedicated to the Long Parliament, the Jews were treated, as the chosen people of God, with a tenderness to which they were not accustomed. Hence the author felt it necessary to affirm at the end, that he wrote it, not at the instigation of Jews, but out of love to God and his country. The opinion of the apologist was, that the great sufferings brought upon England by the religious and civil war were a just punishment for English persecution of the saints and favorites of God, i. e., the Jews, and an urgent admonition to atone for this great sin by admitting them and showing them brotherly treatment. The author proved the preference and selection of Israel by many biblical quotations. He referred to a preacher who had said in Parliament in connection with the verse: "Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm," that the weal or woe of the world depended upon the good or bad treatment of God's people. God in His secret counsel had sustained this people to the present day, and a glorious future was reserved for them. Hence it was the duty of Englishmen to endeavor to comfort them, if possible give them satisfaction for their innocent blood shed in this kingdom, and enter into friendly intercourse with them. This work also defends the Jews against the accusation of having crucified Jesus. The death of Jesus took place at the instigation of the Synhedrion, not of the people. In most impressive terms it urges the English to comfort the afflicted and unhappy Jews. The pope and his adherents, he said, would be enraged at the kind treatment of the Jews, for they still inflicted cruelty and humiliation upon the people of God, the popes compelling the Jews to wear opprobrious badges, and Catholics avoiding all contact with them, because they abhorred idols and heathen worship.

This work, which, more than friendly, absolutely glorified the Jews, excited the greatest attention in England and Holland. Manasseh ben Israel was delighted with it, thinking that he was near his object, especially as his friend Holmes at once communicated with him on the subject, saying that he himself was about to prepare a work on the millennium, in which he would emphasize the importance of the Jews in the molding of the future. Manasseh ben Israel immediately set to work to do his share towards the realization of his object. He, however, as well as the Christian mystics in England, had one anxiety; what had become of the lost Ten Tribes banished by the Assyrian king Shalmanassar? A restoration of the Jewish kingdom without these Ten Tribes seemed impossible, nay, their discovery was the guarantee of the truth of the prophetic promises. The union of Judah and Israel which some of the prophets had impressively announced would remain unfulfilled if the Ten Tribes had ceased to exist. Manasseh, therefore, laid great stress upon being able to prove their existence somewhere. Fortunately he was in a position to specify the situation of the Ten Tribes. Some years before, a Jewish traveler, named Montezinos, had affirmed on oath that he had seen native Jews of the tribe of Reuben, in South America, and had held communication with them. The circumstantiality of his tale excited curiosity, and inclined his contemporaries to belief. Antonio de Montezinos was a Marrano, whom business or love of travel had led to America. There he had stumbled upon a Mestizo (Indian), who had excited in him a suspicion that members of his race were living in America, persecuted and oppressed by the Indians, as the Indians had been by the Spaniards, and later experiences confirmed the suspicion.

Antonio de Montezinos, or Aaron Levi, had brought the surprising news to Amsterdam, and had related it under oath to a number of persons, among them Manasseh ben Israel (about 1644). Afterwards he went to Brazil, and there died. On his deathbed he repeatedly asserted the truth of the existence of some Israelite tribes in America. Manasseh ben Israel was firmly convinced by the statement of this man, and made it the foundation of a work, entitled "Israel's Hope," composed to pave the way for the Messianic time. The Ten Tribes, according to his assumption, had been dispersed to Tartary and China, and some might have gone thence to the American continent. Some indications and certain manners and customs of the Indians, resembling those of the Jews, seemed to him to favor this idea. The prophetic announcement of the perpetuity of the Israelite people had accordingly been confirmed; moreover there were signs that the tribes were ready to come forth from their hiding-places and unite with the others. The time of redemption, which, it was true, could not be foretold, and in the calculation of which many had erred, appeared at last to be approaching. The prophets' threats of punishment to the Jews had been fulfilled in a terrible manner; why should not their hope-awakening promises be verified? What unspeakable cruelty the monster of the Inquisition had inflicted, and still continued to inflict, on the poor innocents of the Jewish race, on adults and children of every age and either sex! For what reason? Because they would not depart from the Law of Moses, revealed to them amidst so many miracles. For it numberless victims had perished wherever the tyrannical rule of the Inquisition was exercised. And martyrs continued to show incredible firmness, permitting themselves to be burnt alive to honor the name of God.

Manasseh enumerated all the autos-da-fé of Marranos and other Jewish martyrs which had taken place in his time.

Great excitement was caused among Dutch Portuguese Jews by the burning of a young Marrano, twenty-five years old, well read in Latin and Greek literature. Isaac de Castro-Tartas, born at Tartas, a small town in Gascony, had come with his parents to Amsterdam. Glowing with zeal and a desire to bring back to Judaism those Marranos who continued Christians, he prepared to travel to Brazil. In vain his parents and friends warned him against this mad step. In Bahia he was arrested by the Portuguese, recognized as a Jew, sent to Lisbon, and handed over to the Inquisition. This body had no formal right over Isaac de Castro, for when arrested he was a Dutch citizen. The tribunal in vain tried to induce him to abjure Judaism. Young De Castro-Tartas was determined manfully to endure a martyr's death in honor of his faith. His death was attended with the éclat he had longed for. In Lisbon the funeral pile was kindled for him and several others, on December 22d, 1647. He cried out of the flames, "Hear, O Israel, God is one," in so impressive a tone that the witnesses of the dreadful spectacle were greatly moved. For several days nothing else was talked of in the capital but the dreadful voice of the martyr Isaac de Castro-Tartas and the "Shema," uttered with his last breath. People spoke of it shudderingly. The Inquisition was obliged to forbid the uttering of the word "Shema" with a threat of heavy punishment. It is said, too, that at that time it was determined to burn no more Jewish heretics alive in Lisbon.

The Amsterdam community was stunned by the news of successive executions of youthful sufferers. De Castro-Tartas had parents, relatives, and friends in Amsterdam, and was beloved on account of his knowledge and character. The rabbi, Saul Morteira, delivered a memorial address on his death. Poets deplored and honored him in Hebrew and Spanish verses, and, horrified by the new atrocities of the Inquisition against Jews, Manasseh ben Israel wrote "Israel's Hope." Even the reader of to-day can feel grief trembling in every word. Indeed, if martyrs could prove the truth and tenability of the cause for which they bleed, Judaism needs no further proof; for no people and no religion on earth have produced such numerous and firm martyrs. Manasseh used this proof to draw the conclusion that, as promised sufferings had been inflicted, so the promised redemption and regeneration of God's people would be fulfilled. He sent this Latin treatise on the existence of the Ten Tribes and their hopes to a prominent and learned personage in England, to be read before Parliament, which was under Cromwell's influence, and before the Council of State. In an accompanying letter Manasseh explained to Parliament his favorite idea, that the return of the Jews to their native land – the time for which was so near – must be preceded by their complete dispersion. The dispersion, according to the words of Scripture, was to be from one end of the earth to the other, naturally including the island of England, in the extreme north of the inhabited world. But for more than 300 years no Jews had lived in England; therefore, he added the request that the Council and Parliament grant Jews permission to settle in England, to have the free exercise of their religion, and to build synagogues there (1650). Manasseh made no secret of his Messianic hopes, because he could and did reckon upon the fact that the saints or Puritans themselves wished for the "assembling of God's people" in their ancestral home, and were inclined to help and promote it. He also intimated in his letter, that he was resolved to go to England, to arrange for the settlement of the Jews.

Manasseh ben Israel had not reckoned amiss. His request and dedication were favorably received by Parliament. Lord Middlesex, probably the mediator, sent him a letter of thanks with the superscription, "To my dear brother, the Hebrew philosopher, Manasseh ben Israel." A passport to England was also sent to him. The English ambassador in Holland, Lord Oliver St. John, a relative of Cromwell, told him that he wished to go to the Amsterdam synagogue, and gave him to understand, probably according to Cromwell's instructions, that England was inclined to gratify the long-cherished wish of the Jews. Manasseh took care that he be received in the house of prayer with music and hymns (about August, 1651). However, the goal to which he seemed so near was removed by political complications. England and Holland entered into a fierce war, which broke off the connection between Amsterdam and London. Manasseh's relations to his elder colleague, Saul Morteira (1652), and the president, Joseph da Costa – it is not known on what account – became strained, and in an angry mood he formed the resolution to leave Amsterdam. The directors of the community succeeded in establishing a tolerable understanding between the two chachams, but Manasseh had neither the cheerfulness required nor a favorable opportunity to resume his adventurous scheme.

But when Oliver Cromwell, by the illegal but necessary dissolution of the Long Parliament, assumed the chief power in April, 1653, and showed an inclination to conclude peace with the States General, Manasseh again took up his project. Cromwell had called together a new parliament, the so-called Short, or Barebones, Parliament, which was composed wholly of saints, i. e., Puritan preachers, officers with a biblical bias, and millennium visionaries. The partiality of Cromwell's officers for the old Jewish system is shown by the serious proposition that the Council of State should consist of seventy members, after the number of the Jewish synhedrion. In Parliament sat General Harrison, a Baptist, who, with his party, wished to see the Mosaic law introduced into England. When Parliament met (July 5, 1653), Manasseh hastened to repeat his request, that Jews be granted permission to reside in England. The question of the Jews was immediately put on the programme of business. Parliament sent Manasseh a safe conduct to London, that he might conduct the business in person. As the war between England and Holland still continued, his relatives and friends urged him not to expose himself to the danger of a daily change of affairs, and he again put off his voyage to a more favorable time. The Short Parliament was soon dissolved (December 12, 1653), and Cromwell obtained kingly power under the title of Protector of the Realm. When he concluded peace with Holland (April, 1654), Manasseh thought the time well suited for effecting his wishes for the redemption of Israel. He was encouraged by the fact that three admirals of the English fleet had drawn up a petition in October, 1654, to admit Jews into England. Manasseh presented his petition for their admission to Cromwell's second, still shorter Parliament, and, probably at his instigation, David Abrabanel Dormido, one of the leading men at Amsterdam, at the same time presented one to the same effect, which Cromwell urgently recommended to the Council for speedy decision (November 3, 1654).

Manasseh reveled in intoxicating dreams of the approaching glorious time for Israel. He regarded himself as the instrument of Providence to bring about its fulfillment. In these dreams he was upheld and confirmed by Christian mystics, who were eagerly awaiting the millennium. The Dutchman, Henry Jesse, had shortly before published a work, "On the Speedy Glory of Judah and Israel," in the Dutch language. The Bohemian physician, mystic, and alchemist, Paul Felgenhauer, went beyond the bounds of reason. Disgusted with the formal creed of the Evangelical Church, and the idolatrous tendency of Catholicism, he wrote during the Thirty Years' War against the corruption of the Church and the Protestant clergy, and wished for a spiritual, mystical religion. By a peculiar calculation, Felgenhauer was led to believe that the year six thousand and the advent of the Messiah connected with it were not far off. Persecuted in Germany by Catholics and Protestants, he sought an asylum in Amsterdam, and there formed the acquaintance of Manasseh ben Israel. Between these men and a third visionary, Peter Serrarius, the speedy coming of the Messianic time was often the subject of conversation. Felgenhauer then composed an original work (December, 1654) entitled "Good News of the Messiah for Israel! The redemption of Israel from all his sufferings, his deliverance from captivity, and the glorious advent of the Messiah are nigh for the comfort of Israel. Taken from the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament, by a Christian who is expecting him with the Jews." Felgenhauer places the Jewish people very high, as the seed of Abraham, and considers true believers of all nations the spiritual seed of Abraham. Hence Jews and Christians should love, not despise, one another. They should unite in God. This union is near at hand. The bloody wars of nation against nation by sea and land in the whole world, which had not happened before to anything like the same extent, are signs thereof. As further signs he accounted the comets which appeared in 1618, 1648, and 1652, and the furious Polish war kindled by the Cossacks. Verses from the Bible, especially from Daniel and the Apocalypse, with daring interpretations, served him as proofs. Felgenhauer denied an earthly Messiah, nor did he allow the claim of Jesus to the title.

As this half-insane work was dedicated to Manasseh, he was obliged to answer it, which he did with great prudence (February 1, 1655), gladly welcoming the pages favorable to Jews, and passing over the rest in silence. The good news concerning the near future was the more welcome to his heart, he said, as he himself, in spite of the afflictions of many centuries, did not cease ardently to hope for better times.

"How gladly would I believe you, that the time is near when God, who has so long been angry with us, will again comfort His people, and deliver it from more than Babylonian captivity, and more than Egyptian bondage! Your sign of the commencement of the Messianic age, the announcement of the exaltation of Israel throughout the whole world, appears to me not only probable, but plain and clear. A not inconsiderable number of these announcements (on the Christian side) for the consolation of Zion have been sent to me from Frankenberg and Mochinger, from France and Hungary. And from England alone how many voices! They are like that small cloud in the time of the prophet Elijah, which suddenly extended so that it covered the whole of the heavens."

Manasseh ben Israel had the courage to express without ambiguity Jewish expectations in opposition to the opinions held by Christian enthusiasts. They, for the most part, imagined the fifth monarchy, which they alleged was about to commence, as the millennium, when Jesus would again appear and hand over the sovereign power to the saints. The Jews would have a share in it; they would assemble from the ends of the earth, return to their ancestral home, and again build Jerusalem and the Temple. But this would be only an intermediate state, the means to enable the whole Twelve Tribes to acknowledge Jesus as Messiah, so that there be but one flock under one shepherd. Against this Manasseh ben Israel composed a treatise, ended April 25, 1655, on the fifth kingdom of the prophecy of Daniel, interpreting it to mean the independence of Israel. In this work, called "The Glorious Stone, or the Image of Nebuchadnezzar," and dedicated to Isaac Vossius, then in the service of the queen of Sweden, he put forth all his learning to show that the visions of the "four beasts," or great kingdoms, had been verified in the successive sway of the Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, and therefore the coming of the fifth kingdom also was certain. This was shown in Daniel plainly enough to be the kingdom of Israel, the people of God. In this Messianic kingdom all nations of the earth will have part, and they will be treated with kindness, but the authority will ever rest with Israel. Manasseh disfigured this simple thought by Kabbalistic triviality and sophistry. It is singular that not only did a learned Christian accept the dedication of this essentially Jewish work, but the celebrated painter Rembrandt supplied four artistic engravings representing Nebuchadnezzar's, or Manasseh's vision.

Manasseh had received a friendly invitation from the second Parliament assembled by Cromwell; but as it had meanwhile been dissolved, he could not begin his journey until invited by the Protector himself. He seems to have sent on in advance his son, Samuel ben Israel, who was presented by the University of Oxford, in consideration of his knowledge and natural gifts, with the degree of doctor of philosophy and medicine, and according to custom, received the gold ring, the biretta, and the kiss of peace. It was no insignificant circumstance that this honor should be conferred upon a Jew by a university strictly Christian in its conduct. Cromwell's will appears to have been decisive in the matter. He sent an invitation to Manasseh, but the journey was delayed till autumn. Not till the end of the Tishri festivals (October 25–31, 1655) did Manasseh undertake the important voyage to London, in his view, of the utmost consequence to the world. He was received in a friendly manner by Cromwell, and had a residence granted him. Among his companions was Jacob Sasportas, a learned man, accustomed to intercourse with persons of high rank, who had been rabbi in African cities. Other Jews accompanied him in the hope that the admission of Jews would meet with no difficulty. Some secret Jews from Spain and Portugal were already domiciled in London, among them being the rich and respected Fernandez Carvajal. But the matter did not admit of such speedy settlement. At an audience, Manasseh delivered to the Protector a carefully composed petition, or address. He had obtained the authorization of the Jews of the different countries of Europe to act as their representative, so that the admission of Jews into England might be urged not in his own name alone, but in that of the whole Jewish nation. In his petition he skillfully developed the argument, by means of passages from the Bible and the Talmud, that power and authority are conferred by God according to his will; that God rewards and punishes even the rulers of the earth, and that this had been verified in Jewish history; that great monarchs who had troubled Israel had met with an unhappy end, as Pharaoh, Nebuchadnezzar, Antiochus Epiphanes, Pompey, and others. On the other hand, benefactors of the Jewish nation had enjoyed happiness even here below, so that the word of God to Abraham had been literally fulfilled: —

"'I will bless them that bless thee, and curse them that curse thee.' Hence I, one of the least among the Hebrews, since by experience I have found, that through God's great bounty towards us, many considerable and eminent persons both of piety and power are moved with sincere and inward pity and compassion towards us, and do comfort us concerning the approaching Deliverance of Israel, could not but for myself, and in the behalf of my countrymen, make this my humble Address to your Highness, and beseech you for God's sake that ye would, according to that piety and power wherein you are eminent beyond others, vouchsafe to grant that the great and glorious name of the Lord our God may be extolled, and solemnly worshiped and praised by us through all the bounds of this Commonwealth; and to grant us place in your country, that we may have our Synagogues, and free exercise of our religion. Pagans have of old … granted free liberty even to apostate Jews: … how much more then may we, that are not Apostate or runagate Jews, hope it from your Highness and your Christian Council, since you have so great knowledge of, and adore the same one only God of Israel, together with us… For our people did … presage that … the ancient hatred towards them would also be changed into goodwill: that those rigorous laws, … against so innocent a people would happily be repealed."

At the same time Manasseh ben Israel circulated through the press a "Declaration" which served to explain the reasons for admitting Jews, and to meet objections and allay prejudices against their admission. All his reasons can be reduced to two – one mystical and one of trade policy. The mystical reason has been repeatedly explained. His opinion coincided with that of many Christians, that the return of the Israelites to their home was near at hand. According to his view the general dispersion of the Jews must precede this event: —

"Now we know how our nation is spread all about, and has its seat and dwelling in the most flourishing countries of the world, as well in America as in the other three parts thereof, except only in this considerable and mighty island. And therefore, before the Messiah come … first we must have our seat here likewise."

The other reason was put in this form: that through the Jews the trade of England would greatly increase in exports and imports from all parts of the world. He developed this point of the advantage which the Jews might bestow at great length, showing that on account of their fidelity and attachment to the countries hospitable and friendly to them they deserved to be treated with consideration. Besides, they ought to be esteemed, on account of their ancient nobility and purity of blood, among a people which attached importance to such distinctions.

Manasseh ben Israel considered the commerce to which Jews were for the most part devoted from a higher point of view. He had in mind the wholesale trade of the Portuguese Jews of Holland in the coin of various nations (exchange business), in diamonds, cochineal, indigo, wine, and oil. Their money transactions were not based on usury, on which the Jews of Germany and Poland relied. The Amsterdam Jews deposited their capital in banks, and satisfied themselves with five per cent interest. The capital of the Portuguese Jews in Holland and Italy was very considerable, because Marranos in Spain and Portugal invested their money with them, to evade the avarice of the Inquisition. Hence Manasseh laid great weight on the advantages which England might expect from his enterprising countrymen. He thought that trading, the chief occupation, and, to a certain extent, the natural inclination, of the Jews of all countries since their dispersion, was the work of Providence, a mark of divine favor towards them, that by accumulated treasures they might find grace in the eyes of rulers and nations. They were forced to occupy themselves with commerce, because, owing to the insecurity of their existence, they could not possess landed estates. Accordingly, they were obliged to pursue trade till their return to their land, for then "there shall be no more any trader in the house of the Lord," as a prophet declares.

Manasseh ben Israel then took a survey over all the countries where Jews, in his time, or shortly before, by means of trade, had attained to importance, and enumerated the persons who had risen to high positions by their services to states or rulers. However, much that he adduced, when closely considered, is not very brilliant, with the exception of the esteemed and secure position which the Jews occupied in Holland. Then he quoted examples of the fidelity and devotedness of Jews in ancient and modern times towards their protectors. He forcibly refuted the calumny that the Jews had been banished from Spain and Portugal for treachery and faithlessness. It was easy for him to show from Christian authors that the expulsion of the Jews, and their cruel treatment by Portugal, were at once criminal and foolish, and most emphatically condemned by wise rulers. He took occasion to defend his brethren against three other charges: usury, child murder, and proselytism. To wipe off the stain of usury, he made use of the justification employed by Simone Luzzatto, a contemporary Jewish Italian author, that usury was objectionable not in itself, but in its excess. Of great weight was the fact which he adduced, that the Portuguese Jews, for whom he was pleading, abhorred usury as much as many Christians, and that their large capital had not been obtained from it. Manasseh could repudiate with more vehemence the charge of murdering Christian children. Christians made the accusation, he thought, pretty much from the motives that influenced the negroes of Guinea and Brazil, who tormented those just escaped from shipwreck, or visited by misfortune in general, by assuming that such persons were accursed of God.

"We live not amongst the Black-moors and wild-men, but amongst the white and civilized people of the world, yet we find this an ordinary course, that men are very prone to hate and despise him that hath ill fortune; and on the other side, to make much of those whom fortune doth favor."

Manasseh reminded the Christians that there had been a time when they, too, had been charged by heathens with being murderers of children, sorcerers, and conjurers, and had been punished by heathen emperors and officials. He was able to refer to a case of his own time, that of Isaac Jeshurun, of Ragusa, a Jew repeatedly tortured for child murder, whose innocence had come to light, and filled the judges with remorse. Manasseh denied the accusation of the conversion of Christians to Judaism, and referred to the injunction of the Jewish law to dissuade rather than attract proselytes.

"Now, because I believe, that with a good conscience I have discharged our nation of the Jews of those three slanders… I may from these two qualities, of Profitableness and Fidelity, conclude, that such a nation ought to be well entertained, and also beloved and protected generally of all. The more, considering they are called in the Sacred Scriptures the sons of God… I could add a third (point), viz., of the Nobility of the Jews, but because that point is enough known amongst all Christians, as lately it has been shown … by that worthy Christian minister, Mr. Henry Jessey … and by Mr. Edw. Nicholas, Gentleman. Therefore I will here forbear and rest on the saying of Solomon … 'Let another man's mouth praise thee, and not thine own.'"

Cromwell was decidedly inclined to the admission of the Jews. He may have had in view the probability that the extensive trade and capital of the Spanish and Portuguese Jews, those professing Judaism openly as well as secretly, might be brought to England, which at that time could not yet compete with Holland. He was also animated by the great idea of the unconditional toleration of all religions, and even thought of granting religious freedom to the intensely hated, feared, hence persecuted Catholics. Therefore, he acceded to the wish of the Jews to open an asylum to them in England. But he was most influenced by the religious desire to win over the Jews to Christianity by friendly treatment. He thought that Christianity, as preached in England by the Independents, without idolatry and superstition, would captivate the Jews, hitherto deterred from Christianity.

Cromwell and Manasseh ben Israel agreed in an unexpressed, visionary, Messianic reason for the admission of Jews into England. The Kabbalistic rabbi thought that in consequence of the settlement of Jews in the British island, the Messianic redemption would commence, and the Puritan Protector believed that Jews in great numbers would accept Christianity, and then would come the time of one shepherd and one flock. To dispose the people favorably towards the Jews, Cromwell employed two most zealous Independents, his secretary, the clergyman Hugh Peters, and Harry Marten, the fiery member of the Council, to labor at the task.

At last the time came to consider the question of the admission of Jews seriously. They had been banished in the year 1290 in pursuance of a decree enacting that they should never return, and it was questionable whether the decree was not still in force. Therefore, Cromwell assembled a commission at Whitehall (December 4, 1655), to discuss every aspect of the matter. The commission was composed of Lord Chief Justice Glynn, Lord Chief Baron Steel, and seven citizens, including the Lord Mayor, the two sheriffs of London, an alderman, and the recorder of the city, and fourteen eminent clergymen of different towns. Cromwell mentioned two subjects for discussion: whether it was lawful to admit Jews into England, and, in case it was not opposed to the law, under what conditions the admission should take place. Manasseh had formulated his proposal under seven heads: that they should be admitted and protected against violence; that they should be granted synagogues, the free exercise of religion, and places of burial; that they should enjoy freedom of trade; and that their disputes should be settled by their own rabbis and directors; and that all former laws hostile to Jews should be repealed for their greater security. On admission, every Jew should take the oath of fidelity to the realm.

There was great excitement in London during the discussion on the admission of the Jews, and popular feeling was much divided. Blind hatred against the crucifiers of the Son of God, and blind love for the people of God; fear of the competition of Jews in trade, and hope of gaining the precedence from the Dutch and Spaniards by their means, prejudiced ideas that they crucified Christian children, clipped coin, or wished to make all the English people Jews – these conflicting feelings disturbed the judgment for and against them. Cromwell's followers, and the Republicans in general, were for their admission; Royalists and Papists, secretly or openly his enemies, were opposed to the proposal. The people crowded to the hall where the Jewish question was publicly discussed. At the very beginning the legal representatives declared that no ancient law excluded the Jews from England, for their banishment had been enacted by the king, without the consent of Parliament. The city representatives remained silent; the most violent were the clergy, who could not rid themselves of their hatred against Jews, derived from the gospels and their theological literature. Cromwell, who most earnestly wished to see them admitted, therefore added three clergymen, among them Hugh Peters, from whom he expected a vote favorable to the Jews. The question was not brought to a decision in three sittings. Cromwell therefore ordered a final discussion (December 18, 1655), at which he presided. The majority of the clergy on this day, too, were against the admission of Jews, even the minority favoring it only with due precautions. Cromwell, dissatisfied with the course of the discussion, first had the theological objections refuted by Manasseh ben Israel, then expressed himself with much warmth, and reprimanded the clergy. He said that he had hoped to receive enlightenment for his conscience; instead, they had made the question more obscure. The main strength of his arguments was: The pure (Puritan) gospel must be preached to the Jews, to win them to the church. "But can we preach to them, if we will not tolerate them among us?" Cromwell thereupon closed the discussion, and resolved to decide the matter according to his own judgment.

He had not only the opposition of the fanatical clergy to contend against, but also that of the multitude, who shared their prejudiced feeling. The enemies of the Jews made every effort to win over the people against their admission. They spread the report that the Jews intended to buy the library of the University of Oxford, and, if possible, turn St. Paul's into a synagogue. They sought to bring Cromwell's friendship for the Jews under suspicion, and circulated the report that an embassy had come to England from Asia and Prague to find out whether Cromwell was not the expected Messiah of the Jews. A clerical pamphleteer, named William Prynne, stirred up a most fanatical excitement against the Jews. He composed a venomous work, "A Short Demurrer," in which he raked up all false accusations against them of counterfeit coining, and the crucifixion of Christian children, and briefly summarized the anti-Jewish decrees of the thirteenth century, so as to make the name of Jew hated. From other quarters, also, various publications appeared against them. John Hoornbeek, a Dutchman, composed a book on the conversion of the Jews, in which he pretended to be their friend, but actually sought to asperse them. John Dury, an Englishman residing at the time at Cassel, was also resolved to make his voice heard about the Jews; he weighed arguments for and against their admission, and at last inclined to the view that it was a serious matter to permit Jews to enter England. His work was printed and distributed. Probably at Cromwell's suggestion, Thomas Collier wrote a refutation of Prynne's charges, dedicating it to the Protector. He even justified the crucifixion of Jesus by the Jews, and concluded his work with a passage in the taste of that time:

"Oh, let us respect them; let us wait for that glorious day which will make them the head of the nations. Oh, the time is at hand when every one shall think himself happy that can but lay hold on the skirt of a Jew. Our salvation came from them! Our Jesus was of them! We are gotten into their promises and privileges! The natural branches were cut off, that we might be grafted on! Oh, let us not be high-minded, but fear. Let us not, for God's sake, be unmerciful to them! No! let it be enough if we have all their [spiritual] riches."

While the admission of Jews met with so many difficulties in England, the Dutch Government was by no means pleased with Manasseh ben Israel's efforts to bring it to pass, fearing, doubtless, that the Amsterdam Jews would remove to England, with all their capital. Manasseh was obliged to pacify the Dutch ambassador in an interview, and to assure him that his exertions concerned not Dutch Jews, but the Marranos, watched with Argus eyes in Spain and Portugal, for whom he wished to provide an asylum. Manasseh waited six months in London to obtain from Cromwell a favorable decision, but without success. The Protector found no leisure to attend to the Jewish question, his energies were devoted to obtaining the funds necessary for the government and foreign wars, refused by one Parliament after another, and to frustrating the royalist conspiracy against his life. Manasseh's companions, who had given up all hopes of success, left London; others who, having fled from the Pyrenean peninsula, were on their way thither, turned back, and settled in Italy or Geneva.

But the friends of the Jews were unwearied, and hoped to produce a change of mind in the people. One of "the saints" published a small work (April, 1656), in which he briefly summarized the proceedings at the discussion on the admission of Jews, and then added:

"What shall be the issue of this, the most high God knoweth; Rabbi Manasseh ben Israel still remains in London, desiring a favorable answer to his proposals; and not receiving it he hath desired, that if they may not be granted, he may have a favorable dismission, and return home. But other great affairs being now in hand, and this being business of very great concernment, no absolute answer is yet returned to him."

To elicit a thorough refutation of all the charges advanced by the enemies of the Jews and the opponents of toleration, a person of high rank, in close relation with the government, induced Manasseh ben Israel to publish a brief but comprehensive work, in defense of the Jews. In the form of a letter he stated all the grounds of accusation. These included the current slanders: the use of the blood of Christians at the Passover, curses upon Christians and blasphemy against the God of the Christians in Jewish prayers, and the idolatrous reverence alleged to be shown the Torah-scrolls. The defense of the Jews, which Manasseh ben Israel composed in reply (April 10), and which was soon afterwards circulated through the press, is perhaps the best work from his pen. It is written with deep feeling, and is, therefore, convincing; learned matter is not wanting, but the learning is subordinate to the main object. In the composition of this defense Manasseh must have had peculiar feelings. He had come to England the interpreter or representative of the people of God, expecting speedily to conquer the sympathy of Christians, and pave the way for the lordship of Israel over the world, and now his people was placed at the bar, and he had to defend it. Hence the tone of this work is not aggressive and triumphant, but plaintive. He affirmed that nothing had ever produced a deeper impression on his mind than the letter addressed to him with the list of anti-Jewish charges.

"It reflects upon the credit of a nation, which amongst so many calumnies, so manifest (and therefore shameful), I dare to pronounce innocent. And in the first place, I cannot but weep bitterly, and with much anguish of soul lament, that strange and horrid accusation of some Christians against the dispersed and afflicted Jews that dwell among them, when they say (what I tremble to write) that the Jews are wont to celebrate the Feast of Unleavened Bread, fermenting it with the blood of some Christians whom they have for that purpose killed."

To this false charge so often made, among others by Prynne, the greatest part of his defense is devoted, and it is indeed striking. He traced the accusation to false witnesses or the confession of accused persons under torture. The innocence of the accused was often brought to light, but too late, when they had been executed. Manasseh confirmed this by an entertaining story. The physician of a Portuguese count had been charged by the Inquisition as a Judaizing Christian. In vain the count pledged himself for his orthodoxy, he was nevertheless tortured, and himself confessed that he was a Judaizing sinner. Subsequently the count, pretending serious illness, sent for the inquisitor, and in his house, with doors closed, he commanded him in a threatening tone to confess in writing that he was a Jew. The inquisitor refused; then a servant brought in a red-hot helmet to put upon his head. Thereupon the inquisitor confessed everything demanded by the count, who took this opportunity to reproach him with his cruelty and inhumanity.

Manasseh ben Israel besides affirmed with a solemn oath the absolute falsehood of the oft-repeated charges as to the use of Christian blood.

After meeting the other accusations against the Jews, he concludes his defense with a fine prayer and an address to England:

"And to the highly honored nation of England I make my most humble request, that they would read over my arguments impartially, without prejudice and devoid of all passion, effectually recommending me to their grace and favor, and earnestly beseeching God that He would be pleased to hasten the time promised by Zephaniah, wherein we shall all serve him with one consent, after the same manner, and shall be all of the same judgment; that as his name is one, so his fear may be also one, and that we may all see the goodness of the Lord (blessed for ever!) and the consolations of Zion."

This last work of Manasseh ben Israel produced in England the favorable effect desired. Though Cromwell, amidst the increasing difficulties of his government, could not fully carry out the admission of the Jews, he made a beginning towards it. He dismissed Manasseh with honorable distinctions, and granted him a yearly allowance of one hundred pounds (February 20, 1657) out of the public treasury. The Jews were not admitted in triumph through the great portal, but they were let in by Cromwell through a back door, yet they established themselves firmly. This was in consequence of an indictment brought against an immigrant Marrano merchant, Antonio Robles, that he, a Portuguese Papist, had illegally engaged in business pursuits in England, but he was acquitted by the Protector on the ground that he was not a Catholic, but a Jew. Thus the residence of such Jews was suffered; they could therefore drop the mask of Catholicism. Two respected Marranos, Simon de Caceres and Fernandez (Isaac) Carvajal, in fact received Cromwell's permission to open a special burial-ground for the Sephardic Jews settled in London (1657). In consequence of this permission it was no longer necessary to make a show of attending church or of having their newly-born children baptized. But they occupied an anomalous position. Being strangers, and on account of their insignificant numbers, they lived not exactly on sufferance, but were ignored. Thus Manasseh ben Israel's endeavors were not entirely vain. He did not draw the pension awarded him, nor did he live to witness the coming up of the seed scattered by him, for on the way home he died, at Middelburg, probably broken down by his exertions and the disappointment of his hopes, even before he reached his family (November, 1657). His body was afterwards brought to Amsterdam, and an honorable epitaph was put over his grave. But his zealous activity, outcome though it was of Messianic delusions, bore fruit, because it was sincere. Before he had been dead ten years, Jews were gradually admitted into England by the monarchy which succeeded the republic. A community was assembled which soon became organized, a room was fitted up in King street as a synagogue, and Jacob Sasportas, the wanderer from Africa, Manasseh ben Israel's companion, was chosen rabbi. The branch community of London took as its model that of Amsterdam. From this second stronghold, occupied by Portuguese Jews, afterwards proceeded the agitation for popular freedom and the liberation of the Jews.

CHAPTER III.
THE SCEPTICS

Condition of Judaism – Complete Triumph of the Kabbala – The Disciples of Isaac Lurya – Vital Calabrese, Abraham de Herrera, and Isaiah Hurwitz – Immanuel Aboab – Uriel da Costa; his Career and Death – Leo Modena; his Character and his Writings – Deborah Ascarelli and Sarah Copia Sullam, Jewish Authoresses – Leo Modena's veiled Scepticism – The Travels and Influence of Joseph Delmedigo – The Writings of Simone Luzzatto.

1620–166 °C. E

Judaism, then in its three thousandth year, was like a rich kernel, covered and concealed by crusts deposited one upon another, and by extraneous matter, so that only very few could recognize its true character. The Sinaitic and prophetic kernel of thought had long been covered over with the threefold layer of Sopheric, Mishnic, and Talmudical explanations and restrictions. Over these, in the course of centuries, new layers had been formed by the Gaonic, Spanish, French, German, and Polish schools, and these layers and strata were enclosed by an unsightly growth of fungus forms, the mouldy coating of the Kabbala, which, settling in the gaps and chinks, grew and ramified. All these new forms had already the authority of age in their favor, and were considered inviolable. People no longer asked what was taught in the fundamental Sinaitic law, or what was considered of importance by the prophets; they scarcely regarded what the Talmud decided to be essential or non-essential; the Rabbinical writers alone, Joseph Karo and Moses Isserles being the highest authorities, decided what was Judaism. Besides, there were superadditions from the Polish schools, and lastly the Kabbalistic dreams of Isaac Lurya. The parasitic Kabbala choked the whole religious life of the Jews. Almost all rabbis and leaders of Jewish communities, whether in small Polish towns or in cultivated Amsterdam, the Chacham Isaac Aboab de Fonseca, as well as Isaiah Hurwitz, the emigrant to Palestine, were ensnared by the Kabbala. Gaining influence in the fourteenth century, contemporaneously with the ban against science, it had made such giant strides since Isaac Lurya's death, or rather committed such gigantic ravages, that nothing could keep it in check. Lurya's wild notions of the origin, transmigration, and union of souls, of redemption, and wonder-working, after his death attracted more and more adherents into his magic circle, clouding their minds and narrowing their sympathies.

Lurya's disciples, the lion's whelps, as they boastfully called themselves, made systematic efforts to effect conversions, circulated most absurd stories about Lurya's miracles, gave out that their master's spirit had come upon them, and shrouded themselves in mystery, in order to attract greater attention. Chayim Vital Calabrese had been most prominent, and with his juggleries deluded the credulous in Palestine and the neighboring countries (1572–1620) till his death. He claimed to be the Ephraimitic Messiah, and therefore assumed a sort of authority over his fellow-disciples. In Jerusalem, where he resided for several years, Vital preached, and had visions, but did not meet with the recognition he expected. Only women said that they had seen a pillar of fire or the prophet Elijah hovering over Vital while he preached.

In Safet, Vital, imitating his master, visited graves, carried on exorcism of spirits, and other mystic follies, but not living on good terms with his colleagues, especially his brother-in-law, Gedaliah Levi, of whom he was jealous, he settled at Damascus (1594–1620), continued his mystifications, affected great personal importance, as if the salvation of the world rested on his shoulders, and preached the speedy appearance of the Messiah, and his mission to hasten it. Jesus and Mahomet, repenting their errors, would lay their crowns at his feet. Ridiculed on account of his wild proceedings, and declared to be a false prophet, he took vengeance on his detractors by gross slanders.

In old age he continued his mystical nonsense, saying that he had been forbidden to reveal his visions, but this prohibition having been withdrawn, he could now announce that certain souls living in human bodies would be united to him – of course, in a subordinate capacity – to bring about the redemption, one of the souls destined for this mission being in a foreign country. This was a bait to attract Kabbala enthusiasts, and thus secure a following. And enthusiasts hastened from Italy, Germany, Poland, and other countries to play a Messianic part. The manuscript notes left by Lurya gave rise to further frauds. Vital asserted that he alone was in possession of them, and obtained a decree from the college at Safet, declaring that no one was authorized to publish information about Lurya's Kabbala elsewhere. Kabbalists became the more anxious to possess this incomparable treasure. Chayim Vital's brother, Moses Vital, took advantage of their eagerness to make a good business of it. During an illness of his brother's, he caused the writings found at his house to be copied, and sold them at a high price. After his recovery, Chayim Vital affirmed that the writings stolen were not the genuine ones; these he would never publish. He is said in his will to have directed them to be laid in his grave. Nevertheless, after his death, his son, Samuel Vital, sold Luryan Kabbalistic revelations, and published his father's dreams and visions in a separate work. An immigrant Marrano from Portugal, a devotee of the Kabbala, asserted that he had found the best collection in Vital's grave.

After this time a regular search was made after the Kabbala of Lurya and Vital. Whoever was in possession of copies, and offered them for sale or publication, found ready purchasers. Messengers were employed to give this fraud currency in the Jewish communities. Israel Saruk, or Sarug, a German, one of Lurya's disciples, introduced the Luryan Kabbala into Italy, gained many adherents for it, and much money for himself. His account of his master's miracles offended the taste of very few. From Italy he betook himself to Holland, and there gained a disciple who knew how to give the Kabbalistic frenzy a philosophic complexion. Alonzo, or Abraham, de Herrera (died 1639), a descendant of the Great Captain, the viceroy of Naples, was introduced by Saruk into the mysteries of the Luryan Kabbala. Having lived a Christian during the greatest part of his life, he was more familiar with non-Jewish philosophy than with Jewish literature; therefore it was easy to deceive him into taking dross for gold. He felt clearly that Lurya's Kabbala betrayed resemblances to Neoplatonic philosophy, but this disturbed De Herrera little, or rather, it confirmed the Kabbalistic teaching, and he endeavored to explain one by the other. Finding it impossible to reconcile the two systems, he, too, fell into idle talk and rambling expressions. Abraham de Herrera, who, as has been stated, became a Jew at a ripe age, could not learn Hebrew, and hence had his two Kabbalistic works, the "House of God" and the "Gate of Heaven," translated by the Amsterdam preacher Isaac Aboab from Spanish into Hebrew, and in his will set apart a considerable sum of money for their publication. The author and translator doubtless thought that they had rendered an inexpressibly great service to Judaism. But by the meretricious splendor which these works imparted to the Kabbala, they blinded the superficial minds of the average Portuguese Jews, who, in spite of their knowledge of classical literature and European culture, abandoned themselves to the delusions of the Kabbala. Manasseh ben Israel and all his older and younger contemporaries in Holland paid homage to mysticism, and had no doubt of its truth and divinity.

In Germany and Poland two men, half Polish and half German, brought Lurya's Kabbala into high estimation: Isaiah Hurwitz (Sheloh), called the Holy, and Naphtali Frankfurter, to whom we may perhaps add the credulous Solomon, or Shlomel, of Moravia, who glorified the silliest stories of wonders performed by Isaac Lurya, Vital, and their circle, in letters sent to Germany and Poland, which were eagerly read and circulated.

However, in this thick unsightly crust over-spreading the Kabbala, some rifts and chinks appeared, which indicated disintegration. Here and there were found unprejudiced men, who felt and expressed doubts as to the truth of Judaism in its later Rabbinical and Kabbalistic form. Many went further, and included Talmudical interpretation. Others advanced from doubt to certainty, and proceeded more or less openly against the existing form of Judaism. Such inquirers, of course, were not to be met with among German and Polish, nor among Asiatic Jews; these considered every letter in the Talmud and Zohar, every law in the code (Shulchan Aruch) as the inviolable word of God. The doubters were only in Italian and Portuguese communities, which had relations with educated circles. A pious adherent of tradition, Immanuel Aboab, of Portuguese origin, who had long resided in Italy, felt called upon to compose a defense of the Judaism of the Talmud and the rabbis (Nomologia, composed 1616–1625), showing an unbroken chain of exponents of true tradition down to his own time, a well-meant, but not very convincing work. The confused Kabbalist Naphtali Frankfurter complained of his contemporaries who ridiculed the Talmud. Three or four gifted investigators more or less frankly revealed the scepticism working beneath the surface. These three men, differing in character, mode of life, and position, were Uriel Acosta, Judah Leo Modena, and Joseph Delmedigo; we may perhaps add Simone Luzzatto to the list. They endeavored to lay bare the disadvantages and weaknesses of existing Judaism; but not one of them was able to suggest or apply a remedy.

Uriel da Costa (Gabriel Acosta, born about 1590, died April, 1640) was an original character, whose inward unrest and external course of life could not but bring him into conflict with Judaism. He was descended from a Portuguese Marrano family at Oporto, whose members had been made sincere believers in Christ by the terrors of the Inquisition. His father, at least, who belonged to the higher classes in Portugal, had become a strict Catholic. Young Gabriel learnt ecclesiasticism and the accomplishments of a cavalier from his father, was, like him, a good rider, and entered upon a course of education, limited, indeed, but sufficient for that time. He adopted the only career open to young Portuguese of the upper middle class, by means of which the gifted could rise to distinction, and to a certain equality with the nobility. He was prepared for the law, a study which might pave the way to the second rank, the clerical. In his youth the Jesuits had already obtained powerful influence over men's minds, and their methods of exciting the imagination and subduing the intellect by depicting everlasting damnation and the punishments of hell had proved effectual. Nothing but punctilious, mechanical worship and continual confession could overcome the terrors of hell.

Gabriel da Costa, in spite of his punctilious ecclesiasticism, did not feel quieted in his conscience. Daily mechanical exercises failed to influence his mind, and continual confession to obtain absolution from the lips of the priest pleased him less as he became more mature. Somewhat of the subtle Jewish spirit remained in his nature, and shook the strongly built Catholic system of belief to its foundations. The more deeply he plunged into the Catholic Jesuitic teaching, the more did doubts trouble him, and disturb his conscience. However, he accepted a semi-ecclesiastical office as chief treasurer to an abbey about 1615. To end his doubts, he investigated the oldest records of Holy Scripture. The prophets were to solve the riddles which the Roman Catholic Church doctrines daily presented to him. The fresh spirit which breathed from out of the Old Testament, disfigured though it was in its Latin guise, brought repose to his mind. The doctrines of Judaism appeared the more certain, as they were recognized by the New Testament and the Church, while those of Catholicism were rejected by Judaism; in the one case there was unanimity, in the other, contradiction. Da Costa formed the resolution to forsake Catholicism and return to Judaism. Of an impulsive, passionate temperament, he sought to carry his resolution into effect quickly. With great caution he communicated his intention to his mother and brothers – his father was already dead – and they also resolved to expose themselves to the danger of secret emigration, to leave their hearth and home, give up a respected position in society, and exchange the certain present for an uncertain future. In spite of the Argus-eyed espionage of Marranos by the Inquisition and the secular authorities, the Da Costa family succeeded in gaining a vessel and escaping to Amsterdam (about 1617–18). Gabriel da Costa and his brothers were admitted to the covenant of Abraham, and Gabriel changed his name to Uriel.

Of a hot-blooded nature, an enthusiast whose imagination overpowered his judgment, Uriel da Costa had formed for himself an ideal of Judaism which he expected to meet with in Amsterdam, but which had never been realized. He thought to see biblical conditions, supported by pure Pentateuchal laws, realized in the young Amsterdam community, and to find an elevation of mind which would at once clear up the puzzles that the Catholic Church could not solve. What the Catholic confessors could not offer, he thought that he would be able to obtain from the rabbis of Amsterdam. Da Costa had built religious and dogmatic castles in the air, and was annoyed not to meet with them in the world of reality. He soon found that the religious life of the Amsterdam community and its established laws did not agree with Mosaic or Pentateuchal precepts, but were often opposed to them. As he had made great sacrifices for his convictions, he thought that he had the right to express his opinion freely, and point to the gap which existed between biblical and Rabbinical Judaism. He was deeply wounded, embittered, and irritated, and allowed himself to be completely overpowered by his feelings. He did not stop at mere words, but regulated his conduct accordingly, openly disregarded religious usages, and thought that in opposing the ordinances of the "Pharisees" (as, in the language of the Church, he called the rabbis), he was recommending himself to the favor of God. He thereby brought upon himself unpleasantnesses destined to end tragically. Were the Amsterdam Jews, who had suffered so much for their religion, quietly to see one of their members openly assail and ridicule Judaism, become so dear to them? Those born and brought up in the land of the Inquisition had no idea of toleration and indulgence for the conviction of others. The rabbis, perhaps Isaac Uziel and Joseph Pardo, threatened Da Costa with excommunication, i. e., expulsion from the religious community and severance of all relations with it, if he persisted in transgressing the religious ordinances of Judaism. This opposition only served to increase Da Costa's passion; he was ill-content to have purchased new fetters by the sacrifices he had made. He continued to disregard the laws in force, and was eventually excommunicated. Uriel's relatives, who had more easily adapted themselves to the new faith, avoided him, and spoke not a word to him. Thus Da Costa stood alone in the midst of a great city. Separated from his race, friends, and relatives, a stranger amongst the Christian inhabitants of Amsterdam, whose language he had not yet learnt, and thrown upon himself, he fell more and more into subtle speculation. Acting under excessive irritation, he resolved to publish a work hostile to the Judaism of the day, and bring out particularly the glaring contrast between it and the Bible. As irrefragable proof, he intended to emphasize that the former recognized only bodily punishments and rewards, and taught nothing as to the immortality of the soul. But he discovered that the Bible itself observes silence about a purely spiritual future life, and does not bring within the circle of religion the idea of a soul separated from the body. In short, his investigations led him away not only from Catholicism and Rabbinical Judaism, but from the Bible itself. It is not known how it was circulated that the excommunicated Da Costa intended to give public offense, but he was anticipated. Samuel da Silva, a Jewish physician, in 1623 published a work in the Portuguese language, entitled "A Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul, in order to confute the Ignorance of a certain Opponent, who in Delusion affirms many Errors." In the course of the work the author plainly named Uriel, and described him as "blind and incapable." Da Costa thought his opponents, especially the rabbis, had hired Da Silva's pen to attack him. Hence he hastened to publish his work, also in Portuguese (1624–1625), entitled "An Examination of the Pharisaic Traditions, compared with the written Laws, and Reply to the Slanderer Samuel da Silva." The fact of his calling his opponent a slanderer shows his confusion, for he actually asserted what Da Silva had reproached him with, that the soul is not immortal. As he now had unequivocally declared his breach with Judaism, he had to take the consequences. Before, he had been openly scorned by young people in the street as an excommunicant, a heretic, an Epicurean (in the Talmudical sense); he had been pelted with stones, disturbed and annoyed in his own house (as he thought, at the instigation of the rabbis). Now, after the appearance of his work, the official representatives of the Amsterdam community complained to the magistrates that by denying the immortality of the soul, he had attacked not only the teaching of Judaism, but also of Christianity, and had published errors. Da Costa was arrested, kept for several days in prison, at last fined 300 gulden, and his work condemned to the flames. The freest state of that time believed that it had the right to keep watch over and limit freedom of thought and writing; its distinction was merely that it kindled no funeral piles for human beings. Da Costa's brethren in race could not have persecuted him very severely, for he was able to bear excommunication during the long space of fifteen years. Only his isolation was a heavy burden; he could not endure to be avoided by his family as one infected with the plague. Da Costa was not a strong-minded man, a thinker of the first order, who could live happily in his world of ideas as in boundless space, unconcerned about the outer world, and glad of his solitary freedom; he could not do without the world. He had invested his capital with one of his brothers, and he thought that it would be endangered if he continued the war against the community. He thought of taking a wife, which was impossible so long as he was excommunicated. Hence he at last yielded to the urgency of his relatives to become reconciled with the community. He was willing, as he said, "to be an ape among apes." He confessed Judaism with his lips at the very time when he had in his heart thoroughly fallen away from it.

Da Costa, in his philosophical inquiries, had come upon a new discovery. Judaism, even in its pure biblical form, could not have been of divine origin, because it contradicts nature in many points, and God, the Creator of nature, can not contradict Himself in revelation. He cannot command a principle in the Law, if He has implanted in nature an opposing principle. This was the first step to the deistic tendency then appearing in France and the Netherlands, which acknowledged God only in nature, not in the moral law, and in religious and political development. Da Costa's theory supposed a religion of nature inborn in man, which produced and built up the moral law, and culminated in the love of members of a family to one another. The best in Judaism and other revealed religions is borrowed from the religion of nature. The latter knows only love and union; the others, on the contrary, arm parents and children against one another on account of the faith. This theory was the suggestion of his bitterness, because his relatives avoided him, and showed him but little consideration. Da Costa appears to have put forward as the religion of nature what the Talmud calls the Noachian commandments.

In spite of his complete falling away from Judaism, he resolved, as he himself states, on the intervention of his nephew, and after passing fifteen years in excommunication (about 1618–1633), to alter his course of life and actions, make a confession, or rather put his signature to such a document, an act of what he himself describes as thoroughgoing hypocrisy, designed to purchase repose and comfort, at the cost of conviction. But his passionate nature robbed him of both. He could not impose renunciation upon himself to conform to the religious usages of Judaism, but transgressed them immediately after his penitent confession. He was detected by one of his relatives, and they all, especially the nephew who had brought about the reconciliation, were so embittered that they persecuted him even more relentlessly than those less nearly connected with him. They again renounced intercourse with him, prevented his marriage, and are said to have injured him in his property. Through his passionate hatred of Judaism, which he had confessed with his lips, he committed an act of folly which exposed his true sentiments. Two Christians, an Italian and a Spaniard, had come from London to Amsterdam to attach themselves to Judaism. When they consulted Uriel da Costa on the subject, he gave a frightful picture of the Jewish form of religion, warned them against laying a heavy yoke on their necks, and advised them to continue in their own faith. Contrary to promise, the two Christians betrayed Da Costa's remarks on Judaism to the leaders of the community. The war between them and him broke out afresh. The rabbis summoned him a second time before their tribunal, set before him his religious transgressions, and declared that he could escape a second severe excommunication only by submitting to a solemn penance in public. More from a sense of honor than from conviction he refused this penance, and so was a second time laid under the ban, much more severe than the first, in which condition he continued for seven years. During this time he was treated by the members of the community with contempt, and even spat upon. His brothers and nephews behaved with the greatest severity towards him, because they thought by that means to force him to repentance. They reckoned on his helplessness and weakness, and they did not reckon amiss.

Da Costa meanwhile had reached middle age, had been made submissive by conflicts and excitement, and longed for repose. By process of law, which he had instituted against the Amsterdam authorities, he could obtain nothing, because he could not put his complaints into a tangible form; he consented, therefore, to everything demanded for his humiliation. His public penance was to be very severe. There was no definite prescription on the subject in the religious Code, which, in fact, is opposed in spirit to public penance; the sinner is not to confess aloud his transgressions against religion, but in silence to God. Judaism, from its origin, objected to confession and the mechanical avowal of sins. For this reason it remained for the college of rabbis to appoint a form of penance. The Amsterdam rabbis and the communal council, consisting of Marranos, adopted as a model the gloomy form of the tribunal of the Inquisition.

As soon as Da Costa had consented to his humiliation, he was led into one of the synagogues, which was full of men and women. There was to be a sort of auto-da-fé, and the greatest possible publicity was given to his penance because the scandal had been public. He had to ascend a stage and read out his confession of sins: that he had desecrated the Sabbath, violated the dietary laws, denied articles of faith, and advised persons not to adopt Judaism. He solemnly declared that he resolved to be no longer guilty of such offenses, but to live as a true Jew. On a whisper from the first rabbi, probably Saul Morteira, he went to a corner of the synagogue, stripped as far as the girdle, and received thirty-nine stripes with a scourge. Then he was obliged to sit on the ground, after which the ban was removed. Not yet having satisfied the authorities, he had to stretch himself out on the threshold of the synagogue, that those present might step over him. It was certainly an excessive penance which was imposed upon him, not from a desire of persecution or vengeance, but from religious scrupulousness and mimicry of Catholic forms. No wonder that the disgrace and humiliation deeply wounded Da Costa, who had consented to the punishment, not from inward repentance, but from exhaustion. The public disgrace had shaken his whole being, and suggested thoughts of revenge. Instead of pitying the rabbis as the creatures of historical conditions, he hated them with a glowing feeling of revenge as the refuse of mankind, and as if they thought of nothing but deception, lying, and wickedness. His wounded sense of honor and heated imagination saw in the Jews of the Amsterdam community, perhaps in all the Jews on the earth's surface, his personal, venomous foes, and in Judaism an institution to stir up men to hatred and persecution. Thinking that he was surrounded by bitter enemies, and feeling too weak for a fresh conflict, he resolved to die, but at the same time to take vengeance on his chief persecutor, his brother (or cousin). To excite the sympathy of his contemporaries and posterity, he wrote his autobiography and confession, which, however, contain no new thoughts, only bitterness and furious attacks against the Jews, intermingled with fresh aspersions of them in the eyes of Christians: that even at this time they would have crucified Jesus, and that the state ought not to grant them freedom of religious profession. This document, drawn up amidst preparations for death, breathed nothing but revenge against his enemies. After he had finished his impassioned testament, he loaded two pistols, and fired one at his relative, who was passing his house. He missed his aim, so he shut the door of his room, and killed himself with the other weapon (April, 1640).

On opening his residence after the report of the shot, they found on the table his autobiography, "An Example of Human Life," in which he brought Jews and Judaism to the bar, and with pathetic sentences described them as his excited imagination in the last hour suggested. By this act and legacy Da Costa showed that he suffered himself to be overpowered by his feelings rather than guided by reason. He was neither a thinker nor a wise man, nor was his a manly character. As his system of thought was not well balanced, leading him to oppose what existed as false and bad, because it was in his way, he left no lasting impression. His Jewish contemporaries persisted in stubborn silence about him, as if they wished his memory to fall into oblivion. He acted like a boy who breaks the windows in an old decaying building, and thus creates a draught.

The second seditious thinker of this time, Leo (Judah) ben Isaac Modena (born 1571, died 1649), was of another stamp, and was reared in different surroundings. Leo Modena was descended from a cultivated family which migrated to Modena, in Italy, on the expulsion of the Jews from France, and whose ancestors, from lack of intellectual clearness, despite their education, fostered every kind of superstition and fanciful idea.

Leo Modena possessed this family peculiarity in a high degree. He was a marvelous child. In his third year he could read a portion from the prophets; in his tenth, he delivered a sort of sermon; in his thirteenth, he wrote a clever dialogue on the question of the lawfulness of playing with cards and dice, and composed an elegy on the death of the teacher of his youth, Moses Basula, in Hebrew and Italian verses having the same sound – a mere trifle, to be sure, but which at a riper age pleased him so well that he had it printed. But the marvelous child did not develop into a marvelous man, into a personage of prominence or distinction. Modena became, however, the possessor of astonishingly varied knowledge. As he pursued all sorts of occupations to support himself, viz., those of preacher, teacher of Jews and Christians, reader of prayers, interpreter, writer, proof-reader, book-seller, broker, merchant, rabbi, musician, match-maker, and manufacturer of amulets, without ever attaining to a fixed position, so he studied many departments of knowledge without specially distinguishing himself in any. He grasped the whole of biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic literature, was well read in Christian theological works, understood something of philosophy and physics, was able to write Hebrew and Italian verses – in short, he had read everything accessible through the medium of three languages, Hebrew, Latin, and Italian. He remembered what he read, for he possessed an excellent memory, invented a method of sharpening it still more, and wrote a book on this subject. But Leo Modena had no delight either in knowledge or poetry; neither had value for him except so far as they brought bread. He preached, wrote books and verses, translated and commented, all to earn money, which he wasted in card-playing, a passion which he theoretically considered most culpable, but in practice could not overcome. At the age of sixty he acquired property, but lost it more quickly than he had acquired it, squandering 100 ducats in scarcely a month, and twice as much in the following year. Knowledge had not enlightened and elevated him, had had no influence on his principles. Leo Modena possessed neither genius nor character. Dissatisfied with himself and his lot, in constant disquiet on account of his fondness for gaming, and battling with need, he became a prey to doubt. Religion had no power over his heart; he preached to others, but not to himself. Unbelief and superstition waged continual war within him. He envied naïve believers, who, in their simplicity, are undisturbed by doubt, expect, and, as Leo added, obtain happiness from scrupulously observing the ceremonies. Inquirers, on the other hand, are obliged to struggle for their faith and the happiness dependent upon it, and are tortured incessantly by pangs of doubt. He had no real earnestness nor true conviction, or rather, according to his humor and mood, he had a different one every day, without being a hypocrite. Hence he could say of himself, "I do not belong to the class of painted people, my outward conduct always corresponds with my feelings."

Leo Modena was sincere at each moment. On one day he broke a lance for the Talmud and Rabbinical Judaism, on the next, condemned them utterly. He disapproved of gaming, and grieved that the stars had given him this unfortunate propensity, for he believed also in astrology; yet he prepared a Talmudical decision defending it. When the Venetian college of rabbis pronounced the ban on cards and dice, he pointed out that gaming was permissible by Rabbinical principles, and that the ban had no justification. His disciple, Joseph Chamiz, a physician and mystic, once asked him his opinion on the Kabbalistic transmigration of souls. Modena replied that as a rule he would profess belief in the doctrine even though convinced of its folly, in order not to be pronounced a heretic and a fool, but to him he was willing to express his sincere and true views. Thereupon Leo Modena prepared a work to expose the absurdity and inconsistency with Judaism of the belief in transmigration of souls. But so feebly was this conviction rooted in his nature that, having had an extraordinary experience, he again, at least for a time, believed in the transmigration of souls, a favorite theory of the Kabbala.

The Ghetto of Venice must have been a totally different place from that of Frankfort, or Prague, or from the Polish-Jewish quarters, since it was possible for men like Leo Modena, with his peculiar principles, and Simone Luzzatto, as little of a genuine rabbi, to be members of the rabbinate. In the largest Italian community next to that of Rome, consisting of 6,000 souls, there were cultivated Jews interested in Italian and general European culture, and enjoying not only social, but also literary intercourse with Christian society. The walls of the Ghetto formed no partition between the Jewish and the Christian population. At this time, in the age of Shakespeare, there was no Shylock, certainly not in Venice, who would have stipulated as payment for his loan a pound of flesh from his Christian debtor. The people properly so called, workmen, sailors, and porters, precisely in Venice, were milder and more friendly towards Jews than in other Christian cities. Jewish manufacturers employed 4,00 °Christian workmen in the lagoon city, so that their existence depended on their Jewish employers alone. At the time of a devastating pestilence, when, even in this well policed city, the reins of government became slacker and looser, and threatened to fall from the hands of those in power, Jewish capitalists voluntarily offered their money to the state to prevent embarrassment. There were not a few among them who vied with the cultivated classes among the Christians in the elegant use of the Italian language in speaking and writing, and in making good verses. Besides the two rabbis, Leo Modena and Simone Luzzatto, two Jewish poetesses, Deborah Ascarelli and Sarah Copia Sullam, are illustrations thereof. The first, the wife of Joseph Ascarelli, a respected Venetian, translated Hebrew hymns into elegant Italian strophes, and also composed original verses. A Jewish-Italian poet addressed her in verses thus: "Others may sing of great trophies, thou glorifiest thy people."

The graceful and spiritual Sarah Copia (born about 1600, died 1641) excited a certain amount of attention in her time. She was an original poetess and thinker, and her gifts, as well as her grace, brought her temptations and dangers. The only child of a wealthy father, Simon Copia (Coppio) in Venice, who loved her tenderly, she yielded to her inclination for instruction, and devoted herself to science and literature. To this inclination she remained true even after her marriage with Jacob Sullam. Sarah Copia Sullam surpassed her sex and even men of her age in knowledge. She delighted in beauty, and breathed out her inspirations in rhythmic, elegant verses. Young, attractive, with a noble heart and a penetrating understanding, striving after high ideals, and a favorite of the muses, Sarah Sullam fascinated the old as well as the young. Her musical, well-trained voice excited admiration. When an elderly Italian priest, Ansaldo Ceba, at Genoa, published an heroic poem in Italian strophes, of which the scriptural Esther was the heroine, Sarah was so delighted, that she addressed an enthusiastic anonymous letter full of praise to the author (1618). It pleased her to see a Jewish heroine, her ideal, celebrated in verses, and the attention of the cultivated public directed to Jewish antiquity. She hoped that thereby the prejudice against the Jews of the day would vanish. Sarah did not conceal from the poet that she always carried his poetical creations about with her, and at night put his book under her pillow. Instead of finding satisfaction in the sincere homage of a pure woman's soul, Ceba, in his zeal for conversion, thought only of bringing her over to Christianity. When he heard Sarah's beauty extolled by the servant whom he sent with presents and verses, love for her awoke in him. This was increased by her sending him her portrait, accompanied by enthusiastic verses in the exaggerated style of that time, in which she said: "I carry my idol in my heart, and I wish everyone to worship him." But the beautiful Venetian Jewess did not allow herself to be entrapped. She held firmly to her Jewish beliefs, and unfolded to her priestly friend the reasons that induced her to prefer Judaism. In vain did Ceba, by tenderness, reproofs, and sentimental languishing, with intimations of his speedy end, and his longing to be united with her in heaven, endeavor to make her waver in her conviction. When he begged permission to pray for her salvation, she granted his request on condition that she might pray for his conversion to Judaism.

Her exceptional position as poetess, and her connection with Christians of high rank, brought her renown, not unattended by annoyances. Slanderous fellow-believers spread the report, that she esteemed the principles of Judaism but lightly, and did not fully believe in their divinity. An unprincipled Christian priest, Balthasar Bonifaccio, who later occupied the position of bishop, published a work accusing the Jewess Sarah Sullam of denying the immortality of the soul. Such a charge might in Catholic Venice have had other effects than that against Uriel da Costa in free-thinking, Protestant Amsterdam. Not merely fine and imprisonment might have been inflicted, but the Inquisition might have sentenced her to the dungeon, to torture, and perhaps even the stake. Hardly recovered from illness, she wrote (1621) a manifesto on the immortality of the soul, full of ripe dialectics, noble courage, and crushing force, against her slanderous accuser. The dedication to her deceased father is touching, and still more touching is her fervent psalm-like prayer in melodious Italian verses. The consciousness that she, a woman and Jewess, could not rely on her own strength, but only on help from above, spreads a halo about her memory. The end of this affair is not known. Ceba's epic "Esther" probably induced Leo Modena to translate Solomon Usque's tragedy on the same subject from Spanish into Italian verse; he dedicated it to Sarah Copia, whose epitaph he composed in melodious Hebrew verses.

Leo Modena also had frequent intercourse with Christians. His peculiar nature, his communicative disposition, and great learning, as also his wit and his fondness for gaming, opened the doors of Christian circles to the volatile rabbi. Christian disciples sat at his feet. The French bishop Jacob Plantavicius, and the half-crazed Christian Kabbalist Jacob Gaffarelli, were his pupils. Nobles and learned men corresponded with him, and permitted him to inscribe his works to them with flattering dedications. Leo Modena held in Italy nearly the same position as Manasseh ben Israel in Holland. In the conversation of serious men and in the merry circle of gamesters, he often heard the ceremonies of Judaism ridiculed as childish nonsense (Lex Judæorum lex puerorum). At first he defended his religion, but gradually was forced to admit one thing and another in Judaism to be defective and ridiculous; he was ashamed to be so thoroughly a Jew as to justify all consequences. His necessities led him, on pressure from Christian friends, to render single portions, and at last the whole, of the Jewish code accessible to the Christian public in the Italian language. An English lord paid him for the work, with the intention of giving it to King James I, who made pretensions to extensive learning. Afterwards his Christian disciple Gaffarelli had this work, entitled "The Hebrew Rites," printed in Paris, and dedicated it to the French ambassador at Venice. In this work, eagerly read by Christians, Leo Modena, like Ham, uncovered his father's nakedness, exposed the inner sanctuary of the Jews to prying and mocking eyes. To the uninitiated, that which within the Jewish circle was a matter for reverence could not but appear petty, silly, and absurd. Leo Modena explained what ceremonies and statutes Jews employ in connection with their dwellings, clothing, household furniture, up-rising and lying down, physical functions, and in the synagogues and schools. Involuntarily the author associated himself with the despisers of Judaism, which he as rabbi had practiced and taught. He showed that he was conscious of this:

"While writing I in fact forgot that I am a Jew, and considered myself a simple, impartial narrator. However, I do not deny that I have taken pains to avoid ridicule on account of the numerous ceremonies, but I had no intention to defend and palliate, because I wished only to communicate, not convince."

However, it would be an error to infer from this that Leo Modena had at heart completely broken with Rabbinical Judaism. He was, as has been stated, not a man of firm and lasting convictions. Almost at the same time when he exposed the rites of Judaism to the Christian public, he composed a defense of them and oral teaching in general against attacks from the Jewish side. A Hamburg Jew of Marrano descent had raised eleven points to show the falsehood of Talmudic tradition. Of these arguments some are important, others frivolous. The Hamburg sceptic laid chief stress on the point that Talmudic and Rabbinic ordinances are additions to Pentateuchal Judaism, and the Pentateuch had expressly forbidden additions of this sort. At the wish of certain Portuguese Jews, Leo Modena confuted these objections, raised by a sciolist. His confutation was a feeble performance, and contains nothing new. With Leo Modena one never knew whether he was earnest in his belief or his unbelief. As in youth he had brought forward reasons for and against games of chance, had finally condemned them, and nevertheless freely engaged in them, so he behaved with regard to Talmudical Judaism. He attacked it, defended it, made it appear ridiculous, and yet practiced it with a certain degree of honesty.

Some years after his vindication of Talmudical Judaism against the Hamburg sceptic he composed the best work (1624) that issued from his active pen. On the one side it was a weighty attack on Rabbinical Judaism, such as had hardly been made even by Christians and Karaites, on the other side, an impressive defense of it. He did not venture to put his own name to the heavy charges against Judaism, but used a fictitious name. The part which contains the attacks he called "The Fool's Voice" (Kol Sachal), and the defense, "The Roaring of the Lion" (Shaagath Aryeh). Leo Modena allotted to two characters his own duplex nature, his varying convictions. He makes the opponent of Judaism express himself with a boldness such as Uriel da Costa might have envied. Not only did he undermine the Rabbinical Judaism of the Talmud, but also biblical Judaism, the Sinaitic revelation, and the Torah. But the blows which Leo Modena, under the name of Ibn-Raz of Alkala, in an attack of unbelief, inflicted on oral teaching, or Talmudical Judaism, were most telling.

He premises that no form of religion maintains itself in its original state and purity according to the views of its founder. Judaism, also, although the lawgiver expressly warned his followers against adding anything, had many additions thrust upon it. Interpretation and comment had altered many things in it. Ibn-Raz (or Leo Modena in his unbelieving mood) examines with a critical eye Jacob Asheri's code, and at each point marks the additions made by the rabbis to the original code, and where they had weakened and distorted it. He goes so far as to make proposals how to clear Judaism of excrescences, in order to restore genuine, ancient, biblical, spiritual Judaism. This was the first attempt at reform: a simplification of the prayers and synagogue service, abolition of rites, omission of the second day of the festivals, relaxation of Sabbath, festival, Passover, and even Day of Atonement laws. Every one was to fast only according to his bodily and spiritual powers. He wished to see the ritual for slaughtering animals and the laws as to food set aside, or simplified. The prohibition to drink wine with those of other creeds made Jews ridiculous, as also did the strictness against alleged idolatry. All this, observed Ibn-Raz, or Leo Modena, at the close, does not exhaust the subject; it is only a specimen of the evil of Rabbinical Judaism. He knew well that he would be pronounced a heretic, and persecuted on account of his frank criticism, but if he could open the eyes of a single reader, he would consider himself amply rewarded.

Had Leo Modena been in earnest with this bold view, which would have revolutionized the Judaism of his day, had he uttered it to the world with deep conviction, he would no doubt have produced great commotion in Judaism. But criticism of the Talmud was only mental amusement for him; he did not intend to engage in an actual conflict. He composed a reply with as little sincerity, and let both attack and defense slumber among his papers.

Leo Modena was more in earnest with the attack on the Kabbala, which had become burdensome and repulsive to him. He felt impelled to discharge destructive arrows against it, and this he did with masterly skill. He called the anti-Kabbalistic work, which he dedicated to his disciple Joseph Chamiz, a Luryan enthusiast, "The Roaring Lion" (Ari Noham). From many sides he threw light on the deceptions, the absurdity, and the falsehood of the Kabbala and its fundamental source, the Zohar. Neither this work nor his attacks on Talmudical Judaism were published by him: the author was not anxious to labor in either direction. To a late age he continued his irregular life, without striving after real improvement. Leo Modena died, weary of the conflict, not with gods (i. e., ideas) and men, but with himself, and of the troubles which he had brought upon himself.

Apparently similar, yet differing fundamentally from him, was the third burrower of this period: Joseph Solomon Delmedigo (born 1591, died 1655). Scion of an old and noble family, in whose midst science and the Talmud were cultivated, and great-grandson on the female side of the clear thinker Elias del Medigo, he but slightly resembled the other members of his house. His father, a rabbi in Candia, had not only initiated him into Talmudic literature, but also made him learn Greek. Later Delmedigo acquired the literary languages of the time, Italian and Spanish in addition to Latin. The knowledge of languages, however, was only a means to an end. At the University of Padua he obtained his scientific education; he showed decided inclination for mathematics and astronomy, and could boast of having as his tutor the great Galileo, the discoverer of the laws of the heavens, the martyr to natural science. By him he was made acquainted with the Copernican system of the sun and the planets. Neither Delmedigo nor any believing Jew labored under the delusion that the stability of the sun and the motion of the earth were in contradiction to the Bible, and therefore heretical. Delmedigo also studied medicine, but only as a profession; his favorite subject continued to be mathematics. He enriched his mind with all the treasures of knowledge, more varied even than that of Leo Modena, to whom during his residence in Italy he clung as a disciple to his master. In the circle of Jewish-Italian semi-freethinkers he lost the simple faith which he had brought from home, and doubts as to the truth of tradition stole upon him, but he was not sufficiently animated by a desire for truth either to overcome these doubts and become settled in the early belief to which he had been brought up, or unsparingly to expose the false elements in Jewish tradition. Joseph Delmedigo was as little formed to be a martyr to his convictions as Leo Modena, the latter by reason of fickleness, the former, of insincerity.

With doubt in his heart he returned to his home in Candia, and gave offense by his free mode of thought, especially by his preference for secular knowledge. He made enemies, who are said to have persecuted him, and was obliged to leave his native land. Then began a migratory life, which drove him from city to city, like his model Ibn-Ezra. Like him, he made friends with the Karaites wherever he met them, and they thronged to his presence. At Cairo Delmedigo celebrated a complete triumph with his mathematical knowledge, when an old Mahometan teacher of mathematics, Ali Ibn-Rahmadan, challenged him, a youth, to a public combat, in which Ali was beaten. The victorious combatant was magnanimous enough to show honor to Ali before the world. Instead of betaking himself to Palestine as he had intended, Delmedigo traveled to Constantinople; here also he attached himself to the circle of the Karaites, and at last passed through Wallachia and Moldavia to Poland. There, mathematics procuring him no bread, he practiced medicine, of which, however, he had learnt more from books than by the bedside of patients. In Poland he passed for a great physician, and was taken into the service of Prince Radziwill, in Wilna (about 1619–1620). Here, through the excessive attention given to the Talmud, general culture was forsaken, but youths and men eager for learning, especially Karaites, thronged to Delmedigo to slake their thirst for knowledge. A half-crazed Karaite, Serach ben Nathan of Trok, who had an inclination to Rabbinical Judaism, in order to show his extensive knowledge, with mock humility laid before him a number of important questions, which Delmedigo was to answer offhand, and sent him a sable fur for the Polish winter.

Delmedigo found it to his advantage, in order to give himself the appearance of a distinguished character in Poland, to shroud himself in silence and seclusion. He at first answered Serach's questions not personally, but through one of his companions, an assistant and follower, Moses Metz. This man described his teacher as a choice intellect, a demi-god, who carried in his brain all human and divine knowledge. He sketched his appearance and character, his occupation and behavior, regulated, as he said, by higher wisdom, gave information about his descent from a learned and distinguished family on his father's and his mother's side, and, as his teacher's mouth-piece, imposed upon the credulous Karaite by saying that he had composed works on all branches of knowledge, at which the world would be astonished, if they came to light. Metz also communicated to Serach some of his teacher's theories in mathematics, religion, and philosophy, and thus still more confused Serach's mind. In his communications on Judaism, which Delmedigo either made himself or through Moses Metz, he was very cautious; here and there, it is true, he allowed a suggestion of unbelief to glimmer through, but quickly covered it over with a haze of orthodoxy. Only where he could do so without danger Delmedigo expressed his real opinion.

When he at last sent the Karaite an answer to a letter with his own hand (about 1621), he did not conceal his true views, but declared his preference for Karaism and its ancient teachers, loaded them undeservedly with praise, exalted science, and ridiculed the delusions of the Kabbala and its adherents. In the same letter to Serach, Delmedigo indulged in scoffs against the Talmud, and thought the Karaites fortunate that they were able to dispense with it. He had nothing to fear when he unburdened his heart before his Karaite admirer.

Delmedigo does not seem, on the whole, to have been at ease in Poland. He could not carouse with the nobles whom he attended professionally for fear of the Jews, and it was not possible to earn money in so poor a country. So he betook himself by way of Dantzic to Hamburg, where a Portuguese community had been lately permitted to settle. His knowledge of medicine seems to have met with little esteem in the city on the Elbe. What was his skill in comparison with that of the De Castros, father and son? He was compelled, in order to subsist, to undertake a certain amount of rabbinical duty, if only as preacher. For the sake of bread he had to play the hypocrite, and speak in favor of Rabbinical Judaism. Nay, in order to dissipate the rumor from Poland, which represented him as a heretic, he was not ashamed to praise the Kabbala, which he had shortly before condemned, as the highest wisdom, before which philosophy and all sciences must be dumb. For this purpose he prepared his defense of the secret doctrine, in refutation of the crushing arguments against it by one of his ancestors, Elias Del Medigo. His work was of the kind to throw dust in the eyes of the ignorant multitude; it displayed a smattering of learning on all sorts of subjects, but no trace of logic. He was too clever to maintain the sheepish style of dull, stupid credulity, and could not refrain from satire. He defended the genuineness of the Zohar as an ancient work by Simon bar Yochaï, or at least by his school. He argued that one must not be shocked by its many incongruities and absurdities; the Talmud also contains not a few, and is yet a sacred book. To save his reputation with the more intelligent, Delmedigo intimated that he had defended the Kabbala only from necessity. We must not, he says, superficially judge the character of an author by his words. He, for instance, was writing this defense of the Kabbala at the desire of a patron of high position, who was enamored of it. Should this friend come to be of another mind, and require an attack upon the Kabbala, he would not refuse him. In conclusion, he observes that philosophical students would no doubt ridicule him for having turned his back on wisdom, and betaken himself to folly; but he would rather be called a fool all his life than for a single hour transgress against piety.

This work, commenced in Hamburg, Delmedigo could not finish there. A pestilence broke out, and drove him, physician though he was, to Glückstadt. In this small community, where, as he said, there was neither town (Stadt) nor luck (Glück), he could find no means of subsistence, and he traveled on to Amsterdam about 1629. He could not attempt to practice medicine in a city where physicians lived of even higher eminence than at Hamburg, and so was obliged a second time to apply himself to the functions of rabbi. To show his importance, he printed his scientific replies to the questions of his Polish admirers, with the fulsome eulogies, clouds of incense, and foolish homage which the young Karaite Serach had offered him. It is a work of truly Polish disorder, in which mathematical theorems and scientific problems are discussed by the side of philosophical and theological questions, in a confused way. Delmedigo took care not to print his attacks upon the Kabbala and the Talmud, and his preference for the Karaites – in short, all that he had written to please the rich Serach. Instead of publishing an encyclopædic work which he boastfully said he had composed in his earliest youth, and which embraced all sciences and solved all questions, he produced a mere medley.

The Amsterdam community was then full of suspicion against philosophy and culture owing to the reckless behavior of Da Costa, and therefore Delmedigo thought it advisable to ward off every suspicion of unbelief, and get a reputation for strictest orthodoxy. This transparent hypocrisy did not answer well. He was, it is true, appointed preacher, and partially rabbi, in or near Amsterdam, but he could remain in Holland only a few years. Poor and unstable as he was, he went with his wife to Frankfort-on-the-Main about 1630 to seek means of subsistence. But here, in a German community, where Rabbinical learning was diffused, he could not obtain a rabbinical office; but he could turn his medical knowledge, scanty as it was, to account. As he felt no vocation for the office of rabbi, nor for medical practice, it was a matter of indifference if he changed the preacher's gown for the doctor's mantle. He was engaged, under irksome conditions, as communal doctor (February 14, 1631). How long he remained at Frankfort is not known; his position cannot have been favorable, for he removed to Prague (about 1648–1650), and in this most neglected community he settled. Later (1652) he was at Worms, probably only temporarily, and ended his life, which had promised so much, and realized so little, at Prague. Nor did he publish any part of his great work, which he had announced with so much pomposity.

In a measure Simone (Simcha) Luzzatto (born about 1590, died 1663) may be reckoned among the sceptics of this time. He was, at the same time as Leo Modena, rabbi in Venice. Luzzatto was not an eminent personage; but he had more solidity than his colleague Modena, or than Delmedigo. By the latter, who knew him personally, he was praised as a distinguished mathematician. He was also well read in ancient and modern literature. His uprightness and love of truth, which he never belied, distinguished him more than his knowledge and learning. A parable which Luzzatto wrote in Italian in his youth shows his views, as also his maturity of thought, and that he had reflected early on the relation of faith to science. He puts his thoughts into the mouth of Socrates, the father of Greek wisdom. At Delphi an academy had been formed to rectify the errors of human knowledge. Reason immediately presented a petition from the dungeon, where she had been so long kept by orthodox authority, to be set at liberty. Although the chief representatives of knowledge, Pythagoras and Aristotle, spoke against this request, and uttered a warning against her liberation, because, when free, she would produce and spread abroad most frightful errors, yet the academy set her at liberty; for by that means alone could knowledge be promoted. But the newly liberated minds caused great mischief; and the academicians were at a loss what to do. Then Socrates rose, and in a long speech explained that reason and authority, if allowed to reign alone, would produce only errors and mischief; but if mutually limited, reason by revelation, and revelation by reason, they mingle in the right proportion, and produce beautiful harmony, whereby man may attain his goal here below and hereafter. This thought, that reason and faith must regulate and keep watch over each other, which, in Maimuni's time had passed into a commonplace, was at this period, under the rule of Lurya's Kabbala, considered in Jewish circles a bold innovation.

Simone Luzzatto did not suffer himself to be ensnared by Kabbalistic delusions; he did not cast reason behind him; he was a believer, but withal sober-minded. He did not share the delusion of Manasseh ben Israel and others that the lost tribes of Israel were existing in some part of the world enjoying independence as a military power. With sober Jewish inquirers of former times, he assumed that Daniel's revelation does not point to a future Messiah, but only reflects historical events. He composed a work on the manners and beliefs of the Jews, which he proposed to exhibit "faithfully to truth, without zeal and passion." It was probably designed to form a counterpart to Leo Modena's representation, which cast a shadow on Judaism.

Luzzatto's defense of Judaism and the Jews, under the title "A Treatise on the Position of the Hebrews," is masterly. It speaks eloquently for his practical, sober sense, for his love of truth, his attachment to Judaism, and his solid knowledge. He did not wish to dedicate it to any individual patron out of flattery, but to the friends of truth in general. He conjured these friends not to esteem the remnant of the ancient Hebrew nation, even if disfigured by sufferings, and saddened by long oppression, more lightly than a mutilated work of art by Phidias or Lysippus, since all men were agreed that this nation was once animated and led by the greatest of Masters. It is astonishing what thorough knowledge the rabbi had of the commerce of that time, and the influence upon it of the political position of European and neighboring Asiatic states. The object of his defense was primarily to disarm the ill-will of certain Venetian patricians against the Jews in that strictly governed state. The common people had little antipathy to the Jews; they lived to some extent on them. But among those who had a share in the government there were fanatical religious zealots and envious opponents, who advocated further restrictions, or even banishment. It did not suit them that the Venetian Jews, who, shut up in the Ghetto, possessed neither land nor the right to carry on a handicraft, competed with them in finance and trade. The commercial city of Venice, far surpassed by the new naval powers, Holland and England, which had gradually obtained control of the trade with the Levant, saw many of its great houses of business in splendid misery, while new Jewish capitalists stepped into their place, and seized the Levantine business. With artful turns and delicate hints, Luzzatto gave the politicians of Venice to understand that exhaustion was hastening the downfall of the republic. The prosperous cared only to keep what they had acquired and for enjoyment, and former Venetian commerce seemed to be falling into the hands of foreigners. Hence the Jews had become a blessing to the state. It was more advisable to leave its extensive trade, especially that of the East, to native Jews, and to protect them, than to see it diverted to neighboring towns, or to strangers, who formed a state within the state, were not always obedient to the laws, and gradually carried the ready money out of the country. Luzzatto calculated from statistics that the Jews contributed more than 250,000 ducats to the republic every year, that they gave bread to 4,000 workpeople, supplied home manufactures at a cheap rate, and obtained goods from distant countries. It was reserved for a rabbi to bring this political-economical consideration, of vital importance for the island republic, to the notice of wise councilors. Luzzatto also called attention to the important advantage which the capital of the Jews had recently been, when, during the pestilence and the dissolution of political government, the Jews had spontaneously offered money to the state to prevent embarrassment.

Luzzatto also defended the Jews against attacks on the religious side, but on this point his exposition is not original. If he brought out the bright traits of his Jewish contemporaries, he by no means passed over their dark ones in silence, and that redounds to his credit. Luzzatto depicted them in the following manner. However different may be the manner of Venetian Jews from their brethren in Constantinople, Damascus, Germany, or Poland, they all have something in common: —

"It is a nation of timid and unmanly disposition, at present incapable of political government, occupied only with its separate interests, and caring little about the public welfare. The economy of the Jews borders on avarice; they are admirers of antiquity, and have no eye for the present course of things. Many are uneducated, without taste for learning or the knowledge of languages, and, in following the laws of their religion, they exaggerate to the most painful degree. But they have also noteworthy peculiarities – firmness and endurance in their religion, uniformity of doctrinal teaching in the long course of more than fifteen centuries since the dispersion; wonderful steadfastness, which leads them, if not to go into dangers, yet to endure the severest suffering. They possess knowledge of Holy Scripture and its exposition, gentleness and hospitality to the members of their race – the Persian Jew in some degree suffers the wrongs of the Italian – strict abstinence from carnal offenses, extraordinary carefulness to keep the family unspotted, and skill in managing difficult matters. They are submissive and yielding to everyone, only not to their brethren in religion. The failings of the Jews have rather the character of cowardice and meanness than of cruelty and atrocity."

What Luzzatto's position was with regard to the Talmud he did not distinctly state, but only explained generally that there are three or four classes of Jews: Talmudists or Rabbanites, who hold the oral law of equal authority with the Bible; secondly, a philosophical and cultured class; and, lastly, Kabbalists, and Karaites. Yet he intimated that he held the Talmudical tradition to be true; whilst he considered the Kabbala as not of Jewish, but of Platonic, Pythagorean, and Gnostic origin. One of his disciples relates of him that he ridiculed the Kabbalists, and thought their theory had no claim to the title of tradition; it was wanting in the Holy Spirit.

These four thinkers, more or less dissatisfied with the Judaism of the day, who were furnished with so much intellect, knowledge, and eloquence, yet exerted very little influence over their Jewish contemporaries, and thus did not break through the prevailing obscurity in the smallest degree. Luzzatto wrote for only a limited class of readers, and did not inflict, or wish to inflict, heavy blows on Judaism. Uriel da Costa missed his mark on account of his violent, impatient disposition; Leo Modena was himself too wavering, driven hither and thither by the wind of conflicting opinions, to acquire serious convictions and do battle for them. His attacks on the weak side of Judaism, as has been stated, were made in private. Joseph Delmedigo did more harm than good through his insincerity and hypocrisy. Lacking character, he sank so low as to speak in favor of the confused doctrines of the Kabbala, and by the weight of his knowledge confirmed and increased the delusion of the multitude. But from two other quarters, by two quite opposite characters, weighty blows against Judaism were delivered, threatening completely to shatter it. Reason incorporated, as it were, in one Jew, and unreason incarnate in another, joined hands to treat Judaism as abolished and dissolved, and, so to speak, to dethrone the God of Israel.

CHAPTER IV.
SPINOZA AND SABBATAÏ ZEVI

Spinoza's Youth and Education – His Intellectual Breach with Judaism – Fresh Martyrs of the Inquisition – The Rabbis and Spinoza – Excommunication – Spinoza's "Tractate" and "Ethics" – Spinoza's Writings Concerning Judaism – Spinoza's Contemporaries in Amsterdam – De Paz and Penso – The Mystical Character of the Years 1648 and 1666 – Sabbataï Zevi's early Career – The Jerusalem Community – Sabbataï's Travels – Nathan Ghazati – Sabbataï announced in Smyrna as the Messiah – Spread of Enthusiastic Belief in the pseudo-Messiah – Manoel Texeira – Ritual Changes introduced by the Sabbatians – Sabbataï proceeds to Constantinople – Nehemiah Cohen – Sabbataï Zevi's Apostasy to Islam and its Consequences – Continuation of the Sabbatian Movement – Death of Sabbataï and Spinoza – Results of the Sabbatian Imposture.

1656–1677 C. E

Whilst Manasseh ben Israel was zealously laboring to complete the fabric of Judaism by hastening on the Messianic era, one of his disciples was applying an intellectual lever to destroy this edifice to its foundation and convert it into a shapeless dust heap. He was earnest about what was only amusement for Leo Modena. The Jewish race once more brought a deep thinker into the world, one who was radically to heal the human mind of its rooted perversities and errors, and to prescribe a new direction for it, that it might better comprehend the connection between heaven and earth, between mind and matter. Like his ancestor Abraham, this Jewish thinker desired to break to pieces all idols and vain images, before which men had hitherto bowed down through fear, custom, and indolence, and to reveal to them a new God, not enthroned in heaven's height beyond their reach, but living and moving within them, whose temple they themselves should be. His influence was like that of the storm, deafening and crushing down, but also purifying and refreshing.

The lightning flashes of this great philosophical genius did greatest injury to Judaism which was nearest to him. In the degradation of the religion of his day and its professors, even his searching gaze could not recognize the fair form concealed beneath a loathsome exterior.

This great thinker, the most famous philosopher of his time, who brought about a new redemption, was Baruch Spinoza (really Espinosa, born in Spain 1632, died 1677). He belonged to a family eminent for neither intellect nor wealth. No sign at his birth portended that he would reign for more than two centuries a king in the realm of thought. With many other boys, he attended the Jewish school, consisting of seven classes, recently established in Amsterdam, whither his parents had migrated. With his extraordinary talents he surely kept pace with the requirements of the school, if he did not exceed them. In his thirteenth or fourteenth year he was probably introduced by Manasseh ben Israel to the study of the Talmud, and initiated into Hebrew grammar, rhetoric, and poetry. He received final instruction in Rabbinical lore from Saul Morteira, the greatest Talmudist of his time in Amsterdam. Together with Spinoza Morteira taught others who later had more or less influence on Jewish history, but were of quite another stamp.

Moses Zacut (1630–1697), a descendant of the famous family of that name, was held to be Morteira's first disciple. From his youth upwards, with his predilection for mysticism and poetry, he formed a direct contrast to Spinoza. He loved what was inexact and obscure, Spinoza the clear and definite. Two incidents may serve to portray Moses Zacut. He was asked when young what he thought of the fabulous narratives of Rabba Bar-Bar-Chana in the Talmud, which are like those of Münchhausen, and he replied that he regarded them as historical. When young he learned Latin like most Portuguese youths in Amsterdam. Later, he so regretted having learned that language, that he fasted forty days in order to forget it, because, as he thought, this tongue of the devil was not compatible with Kabbalistic truth. Another fellow-disciple of Spinoza was Isaac Naar (Nahar), likewise a mystic, and of a spiteful and not over-scrupulous nature.

Thirst for knowledge stimulated Spinoza to venture beyond the limited circle of studies pursued in Morteira's lecture-room. He plunged into the writings of older Jewish thinkers, three of whom alike attracted and repelled him: Ibn-Ezra with his free-thinking and his reticence, Moses Maimuni with his artificial system, aiming at the reconciliation of faith and science, of Judaism and philosophy, and Chasdaï Crescas with his hostility to traditional philosophy. Spinoza was also at home in the Kabbala, the main doctrines of which had been rendered accessible through Abraham de Herrera and Isaac Aboab. These various elements heaved and fermented in his mind, which strove for insight, and excited in his breast tormenting doubts, to which Ibn-Ezra's covert unbelief mainly contributed. A youth of fifteen, Spinoza is said to have expressed his doubts in the form of questions to his master Morteira, which may have not a little perplexed a rabbi accustomed to beaten tracks. To these elements of scepticism, conveyed to him from Jewish literature, others were added from without. Spinoza learned Latin, in itself nothing remarkable, since, as has been remarked, nearly all the Jewish youths of Amsterdam, as well as Christians of the educated classes of Holland, regarded that language as a means of culture. But he was not contented with superficial knowledge; he desired to drink deep of classical literature. He sought the instruction of an eminent philologist of his time, Dr. Franz van den Enden, who lectured in Amsterdam to noble youths, native and foreign. Here he learned, in contact with educated Christian youths, to adopt a different point of view from that which obtained in Morteira's lecture-room and in Jewish circles. Van den Enden also strongly influenced his mind. Though not an atheist, he was a man of sceptical and satirical vein, who turned religious customs and prejudices to ridicule, and exposed their weaknesses. But what with him was the object of humor and wit, excited Spinoza's susceptible and analytical mind to deep reflection and meditation. The natural sciences, mathematics, and physics, which he pursued with devotion, and the new-born, imposing philosophy of Descartes (Cartesius), for which his mind had special affinity, extended his circle of vision and enlightened his judgment. The more he imbibed ideas from various sources, assimilating them with those innate in him, and the more his logical understanding developed, the more did he become alienated from Judaism, in its Rabbinical and Kabbalistic trappings, and love of Van den Enden's learned daughter was not needed to make him a pervert from Jewish belief.

Independent, judicial reason, which disregards what is traditional or hallowed by time, and follows its own laws, was his mistress. To her he dedicated pure, undivided worship, and she led him to break with inherited views. All that cannot be justified before the inexorable tribunal of clear human vision, passed with him for superstition and clouded thought, if not actual frenzy. His ardent desire for truth, pure truth and certainty, led him to a complete breach with the religion endeared to him from childhood; he not only rejected Talmudical Judaism, but also regarded the Bible as the work of man. The apparent contradictions in the books of Holy Scripture appear to have first raised his doubts as to their inspiration. It must have cost him a hard struggle to give up the customs and opinions endeared to him through manifold ties, and to become, to a certain extent, a new man. For Spinoza was quite as much a moral character as a deep thinker. To hold anything as false in theory, and yet from fear, custom, or advantage to adopt it in practice was impossible for him. He was differently constituted to his revered master Descartes, who kept away from the church the torch of truth which he had kindled, made a gap between theory and practice to avoid offending that church, and, for example, vowed a pilgrimage to our Lady of Loretto for the success of his system and its destructive tendency. According to Spinoza's idea every action ought to be a true reflection of reason. When he could no longer find truth in Judaism, he could not bring himself to follow its ritual precepts. He ceased to attend the synagogue, cared no longer for the Sabbath and the festivals, and broke the laws concerning diet. He did not confine himself to the renunciation of Judaism, but imparted his convictions to young men who sought his instruction.

The representatives of the community of Amsterdam were the more concerned at the daily increasing report of Spinoza's estrangement from, and hostility to Judaism, as they had in a measure looked upon the gifted youth as their exponent, and as a firm support to the jeopardized religion of their fathers. Now it was to be feared that he would abandon it, go over to Christianity, and devote his intellectual gifts to doing battle against his mother-faith. Could the representatives of that faith, the college of rabbis and the secular heads of the community, behold with indifference this systematic neglect of Judaism in their midst? Fugitives were ever coming from Spain and Portugal, who forfeited their high position, and staked life and property, to remain true to Judaism. Others with unbending attachment to the faith of their fathers, let themselves be dragged to the dark prisons of the Inquisition, or with cheerful courage mounted the funeral pile. A contemporary writer, an eye-witness, reports:

"In Spain and Portugal there are monasteries and convents full of Jews. Not a few conceal Judaism in their heart and feign Christianity on account of worldly goods. Some of these feel the stings of conscience and escape, if they are able. In this city (Amsterdam) and in several other places, we have monks, Augustinians, Franciscans, Jesuits, Dominicans, who have rejected idolatry. There are bishops in Spain and grave monks, whose parents, brothers, or sisters, dwell here (in Amsterdam) and in other cities in order to be able to profess Judaism."

At the very time when Spinoza became estranged from Judaism, the smoke and flames of the funeral piles of Jewish martyrs rose in several cities of Spain and Portugal, in Cuenca, Granada, Santiago de Compostela, Cordova, and Lisbon.

In the last-named city a distinguished Marrano, Manuel Fernando de Villa-Real, statesman, political writer, and poet, who conducted the consular affairs of the Portuguese court at Paris, returned to Lisbon on business, was seized by the Inquisition, gagged, and led to execution (December 1, 1652). In Cuenca on one day (June 29, 1654) fifty-seven Christian proselytes to Judaism were dragged to the auto-da-fé. Most of them only received corporal chastisement with loss of property, but ten were burned to death. Amongst them was a distinguished man, the court-saddler Balthasar Lopez, from Valladolid, who had amassed a fortune of 100,000 ducats. He had migrated to Bayonne, where a small community of former Marranos was tolerated, and had returned to Spain only to persuade a nephew to come back to Judaism. He was seized by the Inquisition, tortured, and condemned to death by the halter and the stake. On his way to the scaffold, Balthasar Lopez ridiculed the Inquisition and Christianity. He exclaimed to the executioner about to bind him, "I do not believe in your Christ, even if you bind me," and threw the cross which had been forced upon him to the ground. Five months later twelve Marranos were burnt in Granada. Again, some months later (March, 1655), a promising youth of twenty, Marcos da Almeyda Bernal, whose Jewish name was Isaac, died at the stake; and two months afterwards (May 3d) Abraham Nuñes Bernal was burnt at Cordova.

Whoever in the community of Amsterdam could compose verses in Spanish, Portuguese, or Latin, sang or bewailed the martyrdom of the two Bernals. Was Spinoza's view correct that all these martyrs, and the thousands of Jewish victims still hounded by the Inquisition, pursued a delusion? Could the representatives of Judaism allow unreproved, in their immediate neighborhood, the promulgation of the idea that Judaism is merely an antiquated error?

The college of rabbis, in which sat the two chief Chachams, Saul Morteira and Isaac Aboab – Manasseh ben Israel was then living in London – had ascertained the fact of Spinoza's change of opinion, and had collected evidence. It was not easy to accuse him of apostasy, as he did not proclaim his thoughts aloud in the market-place, as Uriel da Costa had announced his breach with Judaism. Besides, he led a quiet, self-contained life, and associated little with men. His avoidance of the synagogue, the first thing probably to attract notice, could not form the subject of a Rabbinical accusation. It is possible that, as is related, two of his fellow-students (one, perhaps, the sly Isaac Naar) thrust themselves upon him, drew him out, and accused him of unbelief, and contempt for Judaism. Spinoza was summoned, tried, and admonished to return to his former course of life. The court of rabbis did not at first proceed with severity against him, for he was a favorite of his teacher, and beloved in the community on account of his modest bearing and moral behavior. By virtue of the firmness of his character Spinoza probably made no sort of concession, but insisted upon freedom of thought and conduct. Without doubt he was, in consequence, laid under the lesser excommunication, that is, close intercourse with him was forbidden for thirty days. This probably caused less pain to Spinoza, who, self-centred, found sufficient resource in his rich world of thought, than to the superficial Da Costa. Also, he was not without Christian friends, and he, therefore, made no alteration in his manner of life. This firmness was naturally construed as obstinacy and defiance. But the rabbinate, as well as the secular authorities of the community did not wish to exert the rigor of the Rabbinical law against him, in order not to drive him to an extreme measure, i. e., into the arms of the Church. What harm might not the conversion to Christianity of so remarkable a youth entail in a newly-founded community, consisting of Jews with Christian reminiscences! What impression would it make on the Marranos in Spain and Portugal? Perhaps the scandal caused by Da Costa's excommunication, still fresh in men's memories, may have rendered a repetition impracticable. The rabbis, therefore, privately offered Spinoza, through his friends, a yearly pension of a thousand gulden on condition that he take no hostile step against Judaism, and show himself from time to time in the synagogue. But Spinoza, though young, was of so determined a character, that money could not entice him to abandon his convictions or to act the hypocrite. He insisted that he would not give up freedom of inquiry and thought. He continued to impart to Jewish youths doctrines undermining Judaism. So the tension between him and the representatives of Judaism became daily greater; both sides were right, or imagined they were. A fanatic in Amsterdam thought that he could put an end to this breach by a dagger-stroke aimed at the dangerous apostate. He waylaid Spinoza at the exit from the theatre, and struck at the philosopher with his murderous weapon. But the latter observed the hostile movement in time, and avoided the blow, so that only his coat was damaged. Spinoza left Amsterdam to avoid the danger of assassination, and betook himself to the house of a friend, likewise persecuted by the dominant Calvinistic Church, an adherent of the sect of the Rhynsburgians, or Collectants, who dwelt in a village between Amsterdam and Ouderkerk. Reconciliation between Spinoza and the synagogue was no longer to be thought of. The rabbis and the secular authorities of the community pronounced the greater excommunication upon him, proclaiming it in the Portuguese language on a Thursday, Ab 6th (July 24th), 1656, shortly before the fast in memory of the destruction of Jerusalem. The sentence was pronounced solemnly in the synagogue from the pulpit before the open Ark. The sentence was as follows:

"The council has long had notice of the evil opinions and actions of Baruch d'Espinosa, and these are daily increasing in spite of efforts to reclaim him. In particular, he teaches and proclaims dreadful heresy, of which credible witnesses are present, who have made their depositions in presence of the accused."

All this, they continued, had been proved in the presence of the elders, and the council had resolved to place him under the ban, and excommunicate him.

The usual curses were pronounced upon him in presence of scrolls of the Law, and finally the council forbade any one to have intercourse with him, verbally or by writing, to do him any service, to abide under the same roof with him, or to come within the space of four cubits' distance from him, or to read his writings. Contrary to wont, the ban against Spinoza was stringently enforced, to keep young people from his heresies.

Spinoza was away from Amsterdam, when the ban was hurled against him. He is said to have received the news with indifference, and to have remarked that he was now compelled to do what he would otherwise have done without compulsion. His philosophic nature, which loved solitude, could easily dispense with intercourse with relatives and former friends. Yet the matter did not end for him there. The representative body of the Portuguese community appealed to the municipal authorities to effect his perpetual banishment from Amsterdam. The magistrates referred the question, really a theological one, to the clergy, and the latter are said to have proposed his withdrawal from Amsterdam for some months. Most probably this procedure prompted him to elaborate a justificatory pamphlet to show the civil authorities that he was no violator or transgressor of the laws of the state, but that he had exercised his just rights, when he reflected on the religion of his forefathers and religion generally, and thought out new views. The chain of reasoning suggested to Spinoza in the preparation of his defense caused him doubtless to give wider extension and bearing to this question. It gave him the opportunity to treat of freedom of thought and inquiry generally, and so to lay the foundation of the first of his suggestive writings, which have conferred upon him literary immortality. In the village to which he had withdrawn, 1656–60, and later in Rhynsburg, where he also spent several years, 1660–64, Spinoza occupied himself (while polishing lenses, which handicraft he had learned to secure his moderate subsistence) with the Cartesian philosophy and the elaboration of the work entitled "The Theologico-Political Treatise." His prime object was to spread the conviction that freedom of thought can be permitted without prejudice to religion and the peace of the state; furthermore, that it must be permitted, for if it were forbidden, religion and peace could not exist in the state.

The apology for freedom of thought had been rendered harder rather than easier for Spinoza, by the subsidiary ideas with which he crossed the main lines of his system. He could not philosophically find the source of law, and transferred its origin to might. Neither God, nor man's conscience, according to Spinoza, is the fountain of the eternal law which rules and civilizes mankind; it springs from the whole lower natural world. He made men to a certain extent "like the fishes of the sea, like creeping things, which have no master." Large fish have the right, not only to drink water, but also to devour smaller fish, because they have the power to do so; the sphere of right of the individual man extends as far as his sphere of might. This natural right does not recognize the difference between good and evil, virtue and vice, submission and force. But because such unlimited assertion on the part of each must lead to a perpetual state of war of all against all, men have tacitly, from fear, or hope, or reason, given up their unlimited privileges to a collective body, the state. Out of two evils – on the one hand, the full possession of their sphere of right and might, tending to mutual destruction, and its alienation, on the other – men have chosen the latter as the lesser evil. The state, whether represented by a supreme authority elected for the purpose, such as the Dutch States General, or by a despot, is the full possessor of the rights of all, because of the power of all. Every one is bound by his own interest to unconditional obedience, even if he should be commanded to deprive others of life; resistance is not only punishable, but contrary to reason. This supreme power is not controlled by any law. Whether exercised by an individual, as in a monarchy, or by several, as in a republic, it is justified in doing everything, and can do no wrong. But the state has supreme right not merely over actions of a civil nature, but also over spiritual and religious views; it could not exist, if everyone were at liberty to attack it under the pretext of religion. The government alone has the right to control religious affairs, and to define belief, unbelief, orthodoxy, and heresy. What a tyrannical conclusion! As this theory of Spinoza fails to recognize moral law, so it ignores steadfast fidelity. As soon as the government grows weak, it no longer has claim to obedience; everyone may renounce and resist it, to submit himself to the incoming power. According to this theory of civil and religious despotism, no one may have an opinion about the laws of the state, otherwise he is a rebel. Spinoza's theory almost does away with freedom, even of thought and opinion. Whoever speaks against a state ordinance in a fault-finding spirit, or to throw odium upon the government, or seeks to repeal a law against its express wish, should be regarded as a disturber of the public peace. Only through a sophistical quibble was Spinoza able to save freedom of thought and free expression of opinion. Every man has this right by nature, the only one which he has not transferred to the state, because it is essentially inalienable. It must be conceded to everyone to think and judge in opposition to the opinion of the government, even to speak and teach, provided this be done with reason and reflection, without fraud, anger, or malice, and without the intention of causing a revolution.

On this weak basis, supported by a few other secondary considerations, Spinoza justified his conflict with Judaism and his philosophical attacks upon the sacred writings recognized by the Dutch States. He thought that he had succeeded in justifying himself before the magistrates sufficiently by his defense of freedom of thought. In the formulation of this apology it was apparent that he was not indifferent to the treatment which he had experienced from the college of rabbis. Spinoza was so filled with displeasure, if not with hatred, of Jews and Judaism, that his otherwise clear judgment was biased. He, like Da Costa, called the rabbis nothing but Pharisees, and imputed to them ambitious and degraded motives, while they wished only to secure their treasured beliefs against attacks. Prouder even than his contemporaries, the French and English philosophers, of freedom of thought, for centuries repressed by the church, and now soaring aloft the more powerfully, Spinoza summoned theology, in particular, ancient Judaism before the throne of reason, examined its dogmas and archives, and pronounced sentence of condemnation upon his mother-faith. He had erected a tower of thought in his brain from which, as it were, he wished to storm heaven. Spinoza's philosophy is like a fine net, laid before our eyes, mesh by mesh, by which the human understanding is unexpectedly ensnared, so that half voluntarily, half compulsorily, it surrenders. Spinoza recognized, as no thinker before, those universal laws, immutable as iron, which are apparent in the development of the most insignificant grain of seed no less than in the revolution of the heavenly bodies, in the precision of mathematical thought as in the apparent irregularity of human passions. Whilst these laws work with constant uniformity, and produce the same causes and the same phenomena in endless succession, the instruments of law are perishable things, creatures of a day, which rise, and vanish to give place to others: here eternity, there temporality; on the one side necessity, on the other chance; here reality, there delusive appearances. These and other enigmas Spinoza sought to solve with the penetration that betrays the son of the Talmud, and with logical consecutiveness and masterly arrangement, for which Aristotle might have envied him.

The whole universe, all individual things, and their active powers are, according to Spinoza, not merely from God, but of God; they constitute the infinite succession of forms in which God reveals Himself, through which He eternally works according to His eternal nature – the soul, as it were, of thinking bodies, the body of the soul extended in space. God is the indwelling, not the external efficient cause of all things; all is in God and moves in God. God as creator and generator of all things is generative or self-producing nature. The whole of nature is animate, and ideas, as bodies, move in eternity on lines running parallel to or intersecting one another. Though the fullness of things which have proceeded from God and which exist in Him are not of an eternal, but of a perishable nature, yet they are not limited or defined by chance, but by the necessity of the divine nature, each in its own way existing or acting within its smaller or larger sphere. The eternal and constant nature of God works in them through the eternal laws communicated to them. Things could, therefore, not be constituted otherwise than they are; for they are the manifestations, entering into existence in an eternal stream, of God in the intimate connection of thought and extension.

What is man's place in this logical system? How is he to act and work? Even he, with all his greatness and littleness, his strength and weakness, his heaven-aspiring mind, and his body subject to the need of sustenance, is nothing more than a form of existence (Modus) of God. Man after man, generation after generation, springs up and perishes, flows away like a drop in a perpetual stream, but his nature, the laws by which he moves bodily and mentally in the peculiar connection of mind and matter, reflect the Divine Being. Especially the human mind, or rather the various modes of thought, the feelings and conceptions of all men, form the eternal reason of God. But man is as little free as things, as the stone which rolls down from the mountain; he has to obey the causes which influence him from within and without. Each of his actions is the product of an infinite series of causes and effects, which he can scarcely discern, much less control and alter at will. The good man and the bad, the martyr who sacrifices himself for a noble object, as well as the execrable villain and the murderer, are all like clay in the hands of God; they act, the one well, the other ill, compelled by their inner nature. They all act from rigid necessity. No man can reproach God for having given him a weak nature or a clouded intellect, as it would be irrational if a circle should complain that God has not given it the nature and properties of the sphere. It is not the lot of every man to be strong-minded, and it lies as little in his power to have a sound mind as a sound body.

On one side man is, to a certain extent, free, or rather some men of special mental endowments can free themselves a little from the pressure exercised upon them. Man is a slave chiefly through his passions. Love, hate, anger, thirst for glory, avarice, make him the slave of the external world. These passions spring from the perplexity of the soul, which thinks it can control things, but wears itself out, so to speak, against their obstinate resistance, and suffers pain thereby. The better the soul succeeds in comprehending the succession of causes and effects and the necessity of phenomena in the plan of the universe, the better able is it to change pain into a sense of comfort. Through higher insight, man, if he allows himself to be led by reason, can acquire strength of soul, and feel increased love to God, that is, to the eternal whole. On the one hand, this secures nobility of mind to aid men and to win them by mildness and benevolence; and creates, on the other, satisfaction, joy, and happiness. He who is gifted with highest knowledge lives in God, and God in him. Knowledge is virtue, as ignorance is, to a certain extent, vice. Whilst the wise man, or strictly speaking, the philosopher, thanks to his higher insight and his love of God, enjoys tranquillity of soul, the man of clouded intellect, who abandons himself to the madness of his passions, must dispense with this joyousness, and often perishes in consequence. The highest virtue, according to Spinoza's system, is self-renunciation through knowledge, keeping in a state of passiveness, coming as little as possible in contact with the crushing machinery of forces – avoiding them if they come near, or submitting to them if their wild career overthrows the individual. But as he who is beset by desires deserves no blame, so no praise is due the wise man who practices self-renunciation; both follow the law of their nature. Higher knowledge and wisdom cannot be attained if the conditions are wanting, namely, a mind susceptible of knowledge and truth, which one can neither give himself, nor throw off. Man has thus no final aim, any more than the eternal substance.

Spinoza's moral doctrines – ethics in the narrower sense – are just as unfruitful as his political theories. In either case, he recognizes submission as the only rational course.

With this conception of God and moral action, it cannot surprise us that Judaism found no favor in Spinoza's eyes. Judaism lays down directly opposite principles – beckons man to a high, self-reliant task, and proclaims aloud the progress of mankind in simple service of God, holiness, and victory over violence, the sword, and degrading war. This progress has been furthered in many ways by Judaism in the course of ages. Wanting, as Spinoza was, in apprehension of historical events, more wonderful than the phenomena of nature, and unable as he therefore was to accord to Judaism special importance, he misconceived it still further through his bitterness against the Amsterdam college of rabbis, who pardonably enough, had excommunicated him. Spinoza transferred his bitterness against the community to the whole Jewish race and to Judaism. As has been already said, he called the rabbis Pharisees in his "Theologico-Political Treatise" and in letters to his friends, and gave the most invidious meaning to this word. To Christianity, on the contrary, Spinoza conceded great excellencies; he regarded Judaism with displeasure, therefore, detected deficiencies and absurdities everywhere, while he cast a benevolent eye upon Christianity, and overlooked its weaknesses. Spinoza, therefore, with all the instinct for truth which characterized him, formed a conception of Judaism which, in some degree just, was, in many points, perverse and defective. Clear as his mind was in metaphysical inquiries, it was dark and confused on historical ground. To depreciate Judaism, Spinoza declared that the books of Holy Scripture contain scribes' errors, interpolations, and disfigurements, and are not, as a rule, the work of the authors to whom they are ascribed – not even the Pentateuch, the original source of Judaism. Ezra, perhaps, first collected and arranged it after the Babylonian exile. The genuine writings of Moses are no longer extant, not even the Ten Commandments being in their original form. Nevertheless, Spinoza accepted every word in the Bible as a kind of revelation, and designated all persons who figure in it as prophets. He conceded, on the ground of Scripture, that the revelation of the prophets was authenticated by visible signs. Nevertheless, he very much underrated this revelation. Moses, the prophets, and all the higher personages of the Bible had only a confused notion of God, nature, and living beings; they were not philosophers, they did not avail themselves of the natural light of reason. Jesus stood higher; he taught not only a nation, but the whole of mankind on rational grounds. The Apostles, too, were to be set higher than the prophets, since they introduced a natural method of instruction, and worked not merely through signs, but also through rational conviction. As though the main effort of the Apostles, to which their whole zeal was devoted, viz., to reach belief in the miraculous resurrection of Jesus, were consistent with reason! It was only Spinoza's bitterness against Jews which caused him to depreciate their spiritual property and overrate Christianity. His sober intellect, penetrating to the eternal connection of things and events, could not accept miracles, but those of the New Testament he judged mildly.

In spite of his condemnatory verdict on Judaism, he was struck by two phenomena, which he did not fully understand, and which, therefore, he judged only superficially according to his system. These were the moral greatness of the prophets, and the superiority of the Israelite state, which in a measure depend on each other. Without understanding the political organization, in which natural and moral laws, necessity and freedom work together, Spinoza explains the origin of the Jewish state, that is, of Judaism, in the following manner: When the Israelites, after deliverance from slavery in Egypt, were free from all political bondage, and restored to their natural rights, they willingly chose God as their Lord, and transferred their rights to Him alone by formal contract and alliance. That there be no appearance of fraud on the divine side, God permitted them to recognize His marvelous power, by virtue of which He had hitherto preserved, and promised in future to preserve them, that is, He revealed Himself to them in His glory on Sinai; thus God became the King of Israel and the state a theocracy. Religious opinions and truths, therefore, had a legal character in this state, religion and civic right coincided. Whoever revolted from religion forfeited his rights as a citizen, and whoever died for religion was a patriot. Pure democratic equality, the right of all to entreat God and interpret the laws, prevailed among the Israelites. But when, in the overpowering bewilderment of the revelation from Sinai, they voluntarily asked Moses to receive the laws from God and to interpret them, they renounced their equality, and transferred their rights to Moses. Moses from that time became God's representative. Hence, he promulgated laws suited to the condition of the people at that time, and introduced ceremonies to remind them always of the Law and keep them from willfulness, so that in accordance with a definite precept they should plough, sow, eat, clothe themselves, in a word, do everything according to the precepts of the Law. Above all, he provided that they might not act from childish or slavish fear, but from reverence for God. He bound them by benefits, and promised them earthly prosperity – all through the power and by the command of God. Moses was vested with spiritual and civil power, and authorized to transmit both. He preferred to transfer the civil power to his disciple Joshua in full, but not as a heritage, and the spiritual power to his brother Aaron as a heritage, but limited by the civil ruler, and not accompanied by a grant of territory. After the death of Moses the Jewish state was neither a monarchy, nor an aristocracy, nor a democracy; it remained a theocracy. The family of the high-priest was God's interpreter, and the civil power, after Joshua's death, fell to single tribes or their chiefs.

This constitution offered many advantages. The civil rulers could not turn the law to their own advantage, nor oppress the people, for the Law was the province of the sacerdotal order – the sons of Aaron and the Levites. Besides, the people were made acquainted with the Law through the prescribed reading at the close of the Sabbatical year, and would not have passed over with indifference any willful transgression of the law of the state. The army was composed of native militia, while foreigners, that is, mercenaries, were excluded. Thus the rulers were prevented from oppressing the people or waging war arbitrarily. The tribes were united by religion, and the oppression of one tribe by its ruler would have been punished by the rest. The princes were not placed at the head through rank or privilege of blood, but through capacity and merit. Finally, the institution of prophets proved very wholesome. Since the constitution was theocratical, every one of blameless life was able through certain signs to represent himself as a prophet like Moses, draw the oppressed people to him in the name of God, and oppose the tyranny of the rulers. This peculiar constitution produced in the heart of the Israelites an especial patriotism, which was at the same time a religion, so that no one would betray it, leave God's kingdom, or swear allegiance to a foreigner. This love, coupled with hatred against other nations, and fostered by daily worship of God, became second nature to the Israelites. It strengthened them to endure everything for their country with steadfastness and courage. This constitution offered a further advantage, because the land was equally divided, and no one could be permanently deprived of his portion through poverty, as restitution had to be made in the year of jubilee.

Hence, there was little poverty, or such only as was endurable, for the love of one's neighbor had to be exercised with the greatest conscientiousness to keep the favor of God, the King. Finally, a large space was accorded to gladness. Thrice a year and on other occasions the people were to assemble at festivals, not to revel in sensual enjoyments, but to accustom themselves to follow God gladly; for there is no more effectual means of guiding the hearts of men than the joy which arises from love and admiration.

After Spinoza had depicted Israel's theocracy quite as a pattern for all states, he was apparently startled at having imparted so much light to the picture, and he looked around for shade. Instead of answering in a purely historical manner the questions, whence it came that the Hebrews were so often subdued, and why their state was entirely destroyed; instead of indicating that these wholesome laws remained a never realized ideal, Spinoza suggests a sophistic solution. Because God did not wish to make Israel's dominion lasting, he gave bad laws and statutes. Spinoza supports this view by a verse which he misunderstood. These bad laws, rebellion against the sacerdotal state, coupled with bad morals, produced discontent, revolt, and insurrection. At last matters went so far, that instead of the Divine King, the Israelites chose a human one, and instead of the temple, a court. Monarchy, however, only increased the disorder; it could not endure the state within the state, the high-priesthood, and lowered the dignity of the latter by the introduction of strange worship. The prophets could avail nothing, because they only declaimed against the tyrants, but could not remove the cause of the evils. All things combined brought on the destruction of the divine state. With its destruction by the Babylonian king, the natural rights of the Israelites were transferred to the conqueror, and they were bound to obey him and his successors, as they had obeyed God. All the laws of Judaism, nay, the whole of Judaism, was thereby abolished, and no longer had any significance. This was the result of Spinoza's inquiry in his "Theologico-Political Treatise." Judaism had a brilliant past, God concluded an alliance with the people, showed to them His exalted power, and gave them excellent laws; but He did not intend Israel's preëminence to be permanent, therefore He also gave bad laws. Consequently, Judaism reached its end more than two thousand years ago, and yet it continued its existence! Wonderful! Spinoza found the history of Israel and the constitution of the state excellent during the barbarism of the period of the Judges, while the brilliant epochs of David and Solomon and of King Uzziah remained inexplicable to him. And, above all, the era of the second Temple, the Maccabean epoch, when the Jewish nation rose from shameful degradation to a brilliant height, and brought the heathen world itself to worship the one God and adopt a moral life, remained to Spinoza an insoluble riddle. This shows that his whole demonstration and his analysis (schematism) cannot stand the test of criticism, but rests on false assumptions.

Spinoza might have brought Judaism into extreme peril; for he not only furnished its opponents with the weapons of reason to combat Judaism more effectually, but also conceded to every state and magistrate the right to suppress it and use force against its followers, to which they ought meekly to submit. The funeral piles of the Inquisition for Marranos were, according to Spinoza's system, doubly justified; citizens have no right on rational grounds to resist the recognized religion of the state, and it is folly to profess Judaism and to sacrifice oneself for it. But a peculiar trait of Spinoza's character stood Judaism in good stead. He loved peace and quiet too well to become a propagandist for his critical principles. "To be peaceable and peaceful" was his ideal; avoidance of conflict and opposition was at once his strength and his weakness. To his life's end he led an ideally-philosophical life; for food, clothing, and shelter, he needed only so much as he could earn with his handicraft of polishing lenses, which his friends disposed of. He struggled against accepting a pension, customarily bestowed on learned men at that time, even from his sincere and rich admirers, Simon de Vries and the grand pensionary De Witt, that he might not fall into dependence, constraint, and disquiet. By reason of this invincible desire for philosophic calm and freedom from care, he would not decide in favor of either of the political parties, then setting the States General in feverish agitation. Not even the exciting murder of his friend John de Witt was able to hurry him into partisanship. Spinoza bewailed his high and noble friend, but did not defend his honor, to clear it of suspicion. When the most highly cultivated German prince of his time, Count-Palatine Karl Ludwig, who cherished a certain affection for Jews, offered him, "the Protestant Jew," as he was still called, the chair of philosophy in the University of Heidelberg under very favorable conditions, Spinoza declined the offer. He did not conceal his reason: he would not surrender his quietude. From this predominant tendency, or, rather, from fear of disturbance and inconveniences and from apprehension of calling enemies down upon him, or of coming into collision with the state, he refused to publish his speculations for a long time. When at last he resolved, on the pressure of friends, to send "The Theologico-Political Treatise" to press, he did not put his name to the work, which made an epoch in literature, and even caused a false place of publication, viz., Hamburg, to be printed on the title-page, in order to obliterate every trace of its real authorship. He almost denied his offspring, to avoid being disturbed.

As might have been foreseen, the appearance of "The Theologico-Political Treatise" (1670), made an extraordinary stir. No one had written so distinctly and incisively concerning the relation of religion to philosophy and the power of the state, and, above all, had so sharply condemned the clergy. The ministers of all denominations were extraordinarily excited against this "godless" book, as it was called, which disparaged revealed religion. Spinoza's influential friends were not able to protect it; it was condemned by a decree of the States General, and forbidden to be sold – which only caused it to be read more eagerly. But Spinoza was the more reluctant to publish his other writings, especially his philosophical system. With all his strength of character, he did not belong to those bold spirits, who undertake to be the pioneers of truth, who usher it into the world with loud voice, and win it adherents, unconcerned as to whether they may have to endure bloody or bloodless martyrdom. In the unselfishness of Spinoza's character and system there lurked an element of selfishness, namely, the desire to be disturbed as little as possible in the attainment of knowledge, in the happiness of contemplation, and in reflection upon the universe and the chain of causes and effects which prevail in it. A challenge to action, effort, and resistance to opposition lay neither in Spinoza's temper, nor in his philosophy.

In this apparently harmless feature lay also the reason that his most powerful and vehemently conducted attacks upon Judaism made no deep impression, and called forth no great commotion in the Jewish world. At the time when Spinoza threw down the challenge to Judaism, a degree of culture and science prevailed in the Jewish-Portuguese circle, unknown either before or after; there reigned in the community of Amsterdam and its colonies a literary activity and fecundity, which might be called classical, if the merit of the literary productions had corresponded with their compass. The authors were chiefly cultivated Marranos, who had escaped from the Spanish or Portuguese prisons of the Inquisition to devote themselves in free Holland to their faith and free inquiry. There were philosophers, physicians, mathematicians, philologists, poets, even poetesses. Many of these Marranos who escaped to Amsterdam had gone through peculiar vicissitudes. A monk of Valencia, Fray Vincent de Rocamora (1601–1684), had been eminent in Catholic theology. He had been made confessor to the Infanta Maria, afterwards empress of Germany and a persecutor of the Jews. One day the confessor fled from Spain, reached Amsterdam, declared himself as Isaac de Rocamora, studied medicine at the age of forty, and became the happy father of a family and president of Jewish benevolent institutions. The quondam monk, afterwards Parnass (president of the community), was also a good poet, and wrote admirable Spanish and Latin verses.

Enrique Enriquez de Paz of Segovia (1600–1660), the Jewish Calderon, had a very different career. Having entered the army while young, he behaved so gallantly that he won the order of San Miguel, and was made captain. Besides the sword, he wielded the pen, with which he described comic figures and situations. Enriquez de Paz, or, as he was styled in his poetical capacity, Antonio Enriquez de Gomez, composed more than two and twenty comedies, some of which were put upon the stage at Madrid, and, being taken for Calderon's productions, were received with much applause. Neither Mars nor the Muses succeeded in protecting him against the Inquisition; he could escape its clutches only by rapid flight. He lived a long time in France. His prolific muse celebrated Louis XIV, the queen of France, the powerful statesman Richelieu, and other high personages of the court. He bewailed in elegies his misfortunes and the loss of his country, which he loved like a son, step-mother though she had been to him. Although blessed by fortune, Enriquez de Paz felt himself unhappy in the rude north, far from the blue mountains and mild air of Spain. He lamented:

"I have won for myself wealth and traveled over many seas, and heaped up ever fresh treasures by thousands; now my hair is bleached, my beard as snowy white as my silver bars, the reward of my labors."

He lived in France, too, as a Christian, but proclaimed his sympathy with Judaism by mourning in elegiac verses the martyrdom of Lope de Vera y Alarcon. Finally he settled down in the asylum of the Marranos, whilst his effigy was burnt on the funeral pile at Seville. There had been again a great auto-da-fé (1660) of sixty Marranos, of whom four were first strangled and then burned, whilst three were burned alive. Effigies of escaped Marranos were borne along in procession, and thrown into the flames – amongst them that of the knight of San Miguel, the writer of comedies. A new-Christian, who was present at this horrible sight, and soon after escaped to Amsterdam, met Gomez in the street, and exclaimed excitedly: "Ah! Señor Gomez! I saw your effigy burn on the funeral pile at Seville!" "Well," he replied, "they are welcome to it." Along with his numerous secular poems, Enriquez Gomez left one of Jewish national interest in celebration of the hero-judge Samson. The laurels which the older Spanish poet Miguel Silveyra, also a Marrano, whom he admired, had won by his epic, "The Maccabee," haunted him until he had brought out a companion piece. To the blind hero who avenged himself on the Philistines by his very death, Gomez assigned verses which expressed his own heart:

"I die for Thy holy word, for Thy religion,
For Thy doctrine, Thy hallowed commandments,
For the nation adopted by Thy choice,
For Thy sublime ordinance I die."

Another point of view is presented by two emigrant Marranos of this period, father and son, the two Pensos, the one rich in possessions and charity, the other in poetical gifts. They probably sprang from Espejo, in the province of Cordova, escaped from the fury of the Inquisition, and at last settled, after many changes of residence, as Jews in Amsterdam. Isaac Penso (died 1683) the elder, a banker, was a father to the poor. He spent a tithe of the income from his property on the poor, and distributed, up to his death, 40,000 gulden. His decease aroused deep regret in the community of Amsterdam. His son (Felice) Joseph Penso, also called De la Vega from his mother's family (1650–1703), was a rich merchant, and turned his attention to poetry. A youth of seventeen, he awoke the long-slumbering echo of neo-Hebraic poesy, and caused it to strike its highest note. Joseph Penso boldly undertook a most difficult task; he composed a Hebrew drama. Since Immanuel Romi had written his witty tales in verse, the neo-Hebraic muse had been stricken with sterility, for which the increasing troubles of the times were not alone to blame. Moses da Rieti and the poetic school of Salonica composed verses, but did not write poetry. Even the greatest of Jewish poets, Gebirol and Jehuda Halevi, had produced only lyric and didactic poetry, and had not thought of the drama. Joseph Penso, inspired by the poetical air of Spain, the land of his birth, where Lope de Vega's and Calderon's melodious verses were heard beside the litany of the monks and the cry of the sacrificial victims, transferred Spanish art forms to neo-Hebraic poetry. Penso happily imitated the various kinds of metre and strophe of European poetry in the language of David and Isaiah.

One may not, indeed, apply a severe standard to Joseph Penso's drama, but should endeavor to forget that long before him Shakespeare had created life-like forms and interests. For, measured by these, Penso's dramatic monologue and dialogue seem puerile. However free from blame his versification is, the invention is poor, the ideas commonplace. A king who takes a serious view of his responsibilities as ruler is led astray, now by his own impulses (Yezer), now by a coquette (Isha), now by Satan. Three other opposing forces endeavor to lead him in the right way – his own judgment (Sechel), divine inspiration (Hashgacha), and an angel. These are the characters in Penso's drama "The Captives of Hope" (Asiré ha-Tikwah). But if one takes into consideration the object which Penso had in view, viz., to hold up a mirror to Marrano youths settled at Amsterdam, who had been used to Spanish licentiousness, and to picture to them the high value of a virtuous life, the performance of the youthful poet is not to be despised. Joseph Penso de la Vega composed a large number of verses in Spanish, occasional poetry, moral and philosophical reflections, and eulogies on princes. His novels, entitled "The Dangerous Courses" (los Rumbos peligrosos), were popular.

Marrano poets of mediocre ability were so numerous at this time in Amsterdam, that one of them, the Spanish resident in the Netherlands, Manuel Belmonte (Isaac Nuñes), appointed count-palatine, founded an academy of poetry. Poetical works were to be handed in, and as judges he appointed the former confessor, De Rocamora, and another Marrano, who composed Latin verses, Isaac Gomez de Sosa. The latter was so much enraptured of Penso's Hebrew drama, that he triumphantly proclaimed, in Latin verse:

"Now is it at length attained! The Hebrew Muse strides along on high-heeled buskin safe and sound. With the measured step of poetry she is conducted auspiciously by Joseph – sprung from that race which still is mostly in captivity. Lo! a clear beam of hope shines afresh, that now even the stage may be opened to sacred song. Yet why do I praise him? The poet is celebrated by his own poetry, and his own work proclaims the praise of the master."

Another of the friends of the Jewish dramatist was Nicolas de Oliver y Fullana (Daniel Jehuda), poet, and colonel in the Spanish service; he was knighted, entered the service of Holland, and was an accurate cartographer and cosmographer. There was also Joseph Szemach (Sameh) Arias, a man of high military rank, who translated into Spanish the work of the historian Josephus against Apion, which controverted the old prejudices and falsehoods against Jews. This polemic was not superfluous even at this time. Of the Jewish Marrano poetesses, it will suffice to name the fair and gifted Isabel Correa (Rebecca), who twined a wreath of various poems, and translated the Italian popular drama, "The True Shepherd" (Pastor Fido, by Guarini) into beautiful Spanish verse. Isabel was the second wife of the poet-warrior, De Oliver y Fullana.

Of a far different stamp was the Marrano Thomas de Pinedo (Isaac, 1614–1679) of Portugal, educated in a Jesuit college at Madrid. He was more at home in classical than in Jewish antiquity, and applied himself to a branch of study little cultivated in Spain in his time, that of ancient geography. He, too, was driven out of Spain by the Inquisition, and deemed himself fortunate to have escaped unhurt. The philologist De Pinedo dwelt later on in Amsterdam, where he printed his comprehensive work. He composed his own epitaph in Latin.

We must not leave unmentioned a personage celebrated at that time perhaps beyond his deserts, Jacob Jehuda Leon (Templo, 1603–1671). If not a Marrano, he was of Marrano descent, and resided first at Middelburg, then at Amsterdam, and was more an artist than a man of science. Leon devoted himself to the reproduction of the first Temple and its vessels, as they are described in the Bible and the Talmud. He executed a model of the Temple on a reduced scale (3 yards square, 1½ in height), and added a concise, clear description in Spanish and Hebrew. Work of so unusual a character attracted extraordinary notice at a time when every kind of antiquarian learning, especially biblical, was highly prized. The government of Holland and Zealand gave the author the copyright privilege. Duke August of Brunswick, and his wife Elizabeth, wished to possess a German translation of Leon's description, and commissioned Professor John Saubert, of Helmstädt, to undertake it. While corresponding with the author so as to ensure thoroughness, he was anticipated by another man who brought out a German translation at Hanover. This circumstance caused great annoyance to Professor Saubert. Templo, as Leon and his posterity were surnamed from his work in connection with the Temple, engaged in controversies with Christian ecclesiastics on Judaism and Christianity, and published a translation of the Psalms in Spanish.

In this cultivated circle of Spinoza's contemporaries were two men who lived alternately at Hamburg and Amsterdam, David Coen de Lara and Dionysius Musaphia, both distinguished as philologists, but not for much besides. With their knowledge of Latin and Greek they explained the dialect of the Talmud, and corrected errors which had crept into the earlier Talmudical lexicons. David de Lara (1610–1674) was also a preacher and writer on morals; but his efforts in that direction are of small value. He associated too much with the Hamburg preacher, Esdras Edzardus, who was bent on the conversion of the Jews. The latter spread the false report that De Lara was almost a Christian before he died. Dionysius (Benjamin) Musaphia (born about 1616, died at Amsterdam, 1676), a physician and student of natural science, was up to the date of the monarch's death in the service of the Danish king Christian IV. He was also a philosopher, and allowed himself to question various things in the Talmud and the Bible. Nevertheless he held the office of rabbi at Amsterdam in his old age.

Much more important than the whole of this circle was Balthasar Orobio de Castro (1620–1687). He also sprang from Marrano parents, who secretly continued to cling to Judaism, in that they abstained from food and drink on the Day of Atonement. In this meager conception of Judaism, Orobio was brought up. Endowed with clear intellect, he studied the decayed and antiquated philosophy still taught in Spanish academies, and became professor of metaphysics in the University of Salamanca. This fossilized philosophy appears neither to have satisfied him nor to have brought him sufficient means of subsistence, for he applied himself in riper years to the study of medicine. In this pursuit Orobio was more successful; he gained a reputation at Seville, was physician to the duke of Medina-Celi, and to a family in high favor with the court, and amassed considerable wealth. He was a happy husband and father, when the Inquisition cast its baleful glance upon him. A servant, whom he had punished for theft, had informed against him. Orobio was seized, accused of Judaism, and thrown into a narrow, gloomy dungeon, where he had not room to move, and where he spent three years (about 1655–1658).

At first he filled up his time with philosophical subtleties, as pursued at the Spanish universities. He undertook to defend a thesis, acting at the same time in imagination as the opponent, who interposes objections, and as the judge, who sums up and sifts the arguments. By degrees his mind grew so perplexed that he often asked himself, "Am I really Don Balthasar Orobio, who went about in the streets of Seville, and lived in comfort with his family?" His past seemed a dream, and he believed that he had been born in prison, and must die there. But the tribunal of the Inquisition brought a change into his empty dream-life. He was ushered into a dark vault, lighted only by a dull lamp. He could hardly distinguish the judge, the secretary, and the executioner, who were about to deal with his case. Having been again admonished to confess his heresy, and having again denied it, the hangman undressed him, bound him with cords, which were fastened to hooks in the wall, brought his body into a swinging movement between the ceiling and the floor, and drew the cords so tight, that the blood spurted from his nails. His feet, moreover, were strongly bound to a small ladder, the steps of which were studded with spikes. Whilst being tortured, he was frequently admonished to make confession, and was threatened, in case he persisted in denial, with the infliction of still more horrible pains, for which, though they caused his death, he would have to thank his own obstinacy, not the tribunal. However, he survived the torture, was taken back to prison to allow his wounds to heal, then condemned to wear the garb of shame (San Benito), and was finally banished from Spain. He betook himself to Toulouse, where he became professor of medicine in the university. Although respected in his new position, Orobio could not long endure the hypocrisy. He went to Amsterdam, publicly professed the Jewish religion, and assumed the name of Isaac (about 1666). No wonder that he became a bitter opponent of Christianity, which he had learnt to know thoroughly. He became an adherent of Judaism from conviction, proved himself a courageous and able champion of the religion of his fathers, and dealt such powerful blows to Christianity as few before him, so that a distinguished Protestant theologian (Van Limborch) felt compelled to reply to Orobio's attacks.

All these cultivated youths and men, the soldier-poets Enriquez Gomez, Nicholas de Oliver y Fullana, and Joseph Arias, and the writers Joseph Penso, Thomas de Pinedo, Jacob Leon, David de Lara, and Dionysius Musaphia, knew of Spinoza's attacks upon Judaism, and undoubtedly read his "Theologico-Political Treatise." Isaac Orobio associated with Spinoza. Yet the blows by which the latter strove to shake Judaism did not cause the former to waver in their convictions. This is the more remarkable, as simultaneously, from another side, Judaism was covered with shame, or, what comes to the same thing, its followers everywhere in the East and West, with few exceptions, became slaves to a delusion which exposed them to the ridicule of the world, and enveloped them for the first time in the darkness of the Middle Ages.

Without suspecting it, Spinoza possessed in the East an ally, diametrically his opposite, who labored to disintegrate Judaism, and succeeded in throwing the whole Jewish race into a turmoil, which long interfered with its progress. Sabbataï Zevi was at once Spinoza's opposite and his ally. He possessed many more admirers than the philosopher of Amsterdam, became for a space the idol of the Jewish race, and has secret adherents even to the present time. Sabbataï Zevi (born Ab 9, 1626, died 1676), of Smyrna, in Asia Minor, was of Spanish descent, and became the originator of a new Messianic frenzy, the founder of a new sect. He owed the attachment which he inspired even as a youth, not to his qualities of mind, but to his external appearance and attractive manner. He was tall, well formed, had fine dark hair, a fine beard, and a pleasant voice, which won hearts by speech and still more by song. But his mind was befogged by reason of the predominance of fancy; he had an enthusiastic temperament and an inclination to what was strange, especially to solitude. In boyhood Sabbataï Zevi avoided the company and games of playmates, sought solitary places, and what usually has charms for the young did not attract him. He was educated by the current method. In early youth he studied the Talmud in the school of the veteran Joseph Eskapha, a staunch Talmudist of Smyrna, but did not attain to great proficiency. The more was he attracted by the confused jumble of the Kabbala. Once introduced into the labyrinth of the Zohar, he felt himself at home therein, guided by Lurya's interpretation. Sabbataï Zevi shared the prevailing opinion that the Kabbala can be acquired only by means of asceticism. He mortified his body, and bathed very frequently in the sea, day and night, winter and summer. Perhaps it was from sea-bathing that his body derived the peculiar fragrance which his worshipers strongly maintained that it possessed. In early manhood he presented a contrast to his companions because he felt no attraction to the female sex. According to custom Sabbataï Zevi married early, but avoided his young, good-looking wife so pertinaciously, that she applied for divorce, which he willingly granted her. The same thing happened with a second wife.

This aversion to marriage, rare in the warm climate of the East, his assiduous study of the Kabbala, and his ascetic life, attracted attention. Disciples sought him, and were introduced by him to the Kabbala. Twenty years old he was the master of a small circle. He attached disciples to himself partly by his earnest and retiring manner, which precluded familiarity, partly by his musical voice, with which he sang in Spanish the Kabbalistic verses composed by Lurya or himself. Another circumstance must be added. When Sultan Ibrahim ascended the throne, a violent war broke out between Turkey and Venice, which made the trade of the Levant unsafe in the capital. Several European, that is, Dutch and English, mercantile houses in consequence transferred their offices to Smyrna. This hitherto insignificant city thereby acquired importance as a mart. The Jews of Smyrna, who had been poor, profited by this commercial development, and amassed great riches, first as agents of large houses, afterwards as independent firms. Mordecai Zevi, Sabbataï's father, from the Morea, originally poor, became the Smyrna agent of an English house, executed its commissions with strict honesty, enjoyed the confidence of the principals, and became a wealthy man. His increasing prosperity was attributed by the blind father to the merit of his Kabbala-loving son, to whom he paid such great reverence, that it was communicated to strangers. Sabbataï was regarded as a young saint. The more discreet, on account of his folly, declared him to be mad. In the house of his English principal, Mordecai Zevi often heard the approach of the millennium discussed, either he himself or some of his people being enthusiastic believers in the apocalypse of the Fifth Monarchy. The year 1666 was designated by these enthusiasts as the Messianic year, which was to bring renewed splendor to the Jews and see their return to Jerusalem. The expectations heard in the English counting house were communicated by Mordecai Zevi to the members of his family, none of whom listened more attentively than Sabbataï, already entangled in the maze of the Luryan Kabbala, and inclined to mistake enthusiastic hopes for prosaic fact. What if he himself were called upon to usher in this time of redemption? Had he not, at an earlier age than any one before, penetrated to the heart of the Kabbala? And who could be more worthy of this call than one deeply immersed in its mysteries?

The central point of the later Kabbala was most intense expectation of the Messiah; Lurya, Vital, and their disciples and followers proclaimed anew, "The kingdom of heaven is at hand." A peculiar redemption was to precede and accompany it – the redemption of the scattered elements of the original soul (Nizuzoth) from the fetters of original evil, the demon nature (Kelifoth), which, taking a hold on men through the fall of the angels or divine elements, held them in captivity, impeded their upward flight, and necessitated the perpetual transmigration of souls from body to body. As soon as the evil spirit was either consumed, annihilated, rendered powerless, or at least existed by itself without admixture of the divine, then the Kabbalistic order (Olam ha-Tikkun) would prevail, streams of mercy would pour forth without let or hindrance upon the lower world through the channels of the Sefiroth, and fructify and miraculously quicken it. This work of redemption can be accomplished by every truly pious man (Zaddik), who having an enlightened soul, and being initiated into the Kabbala, stands in close union with the world of spirits, comprehends the connection between the upper and lower world, and fulfills all religious exercises (Kewanoth) with concentrated devotion and with due regard to their influence upon the higher powers. Still more effectually the Messiah, the son of David, will accomplish the annihilation of demoniacal powers and the restoration of lost souls, or rather the collection of the scattered elements of the universal soul of Adam. For to the Messiah, in whom dwells a pure, immaculate soul, are unfolded the mysterious depths of the higher worlds, essences, and divine creation, even the Divine Being Himself. The Messiah of the seed of David would, to a certain extent, be the original man (Adam Kadmon) incarnate, part of the Godhead.

This Luryan mysticism dazzled the bewildered brain of the Smyrna youth, and produced such confusion and giddiness, that he thought he could easily usher in this spiritual redemption, which would be immediately followed by that of the body. In what manner this haughty wish to play the part of a Messiah germinates and breaks forth in enthusiastic minds, is an impenetrable riddle. Sabbataï Zevi was not the first to believe himself able to reverse the whole order of the world, by mystical hocus-pocus, and partly to succeed in the endeavor. Certain it is that the extravagant notions entertained by Jews and Christians with regard to the near approach of the time of grace worked upon Sabbataï's weak brain. That book of falsehoods, the Zohar, declared that in the year of the world 5408 (1648) the era of redemption would dawn, and precisely in that year Sabbataï revealed himself to his train of youthful companions as the Messianic redeemer. It happened in an apparently insignificant manner, but the mode of revelation was of great import to the initiated. Sabbataï Zevi uttered the full four-lettered name of God in Hebrew (Jhwh, the Tetra-grammaton) without hesitation, although this was strictly prohibited in the Talmud and by the usage of ages. The Kabbalists attached all sorts of mystical importance to this prohibition. During the dispersion of Israel, the perfection of God Himself was to a certain extent destroyed, on account of the sinfulness of men and the degradation of the Jewish people, since the Deity could not carry out His moral plan. The higher and lower worlds were divided from each other by a deep gulf; the four letters of God's name were parted asunder. With the Messianic period of redemption the moral order of the world, as God had laid it down in the plan of the universe, and the perfection and unity of God would be restored. When Sabbataï Zevi permitted himself to pronounce the name of God in full, he thereby proclaimed that the time of grace had begun with him.

However, despite his pious, mystical life, he had too little authority at the age of two and twenty for the rabbis to allow an infraction of the existing order of things, which might lead to further inroads. When Zevi's pretensions became known some years later, the college of rabbis, at their head his teacher Joseph Eskapha, laid him and his followers under a ban. Many bickerings ensued in the community, the particulars of which are not known. Finally he and his disciples were banished from Smyrna (about 1651). The Messianic delusion appeared to have been extinguished, but it smouldered on, and broke out again, about fifteen years later, in a bright, consuming flame. This persecution, far from terrifying Sabbataï Zevi, gave him a sense of his dignity. The idea of a suffering Messiah had been transplanted from Christianity to Judaism; it was the accepted view that humiliation was the precursor of the Messiah's exaltation and glorification. Sabbataï believed in himself, and his disciples, amongst them Moses Pinheiro, a man of mature age, highly esteemed for scientific acquirements, shared the belief with tenacity. If the Messiah had been obliged to beg his way through the world, his illusion would not have long held its ground. But Sabbataï was richly provided with means, he could maintain his independence and his presumed dignity, and win adherents to his cause. At first, however, he kept himself in concealment, did not say much about his Messiahship, and thereby escaped ridicule. Whither he betook himself after his banishment from his native city is not quite certain; probably to the Turkish capital, where dwelt the largest Jewish community, in which were so many clean and unclean elements, that everyone could find companions for plans and adventures. Here he made the acquaintance of a preacher, Abraham Yachini, who confirmed him in his delusion. Yachini stood in high repute on account of his talent as a preacher. He was a needy and artful fellow, and made neat transcriptions for a Dutch Christian, who dabbled in Oriental literature. From selfish motives or delight in mystification, and to confirm Sabbataï Zevi in his delusion, Yachini palmed off upon him an apocryphal manuscript in archaic characters, which he alleged bore ancient testimony to Sabbataï's Messiahship.

"I, Abraham, was shut up for forty years in a cave, and wondered that the time of miracles did not make its appearance. Then a voice replied to me, 'A son shall be born in the year of the world 5386 (1626), and be called Sabbataï. He shall quell the great dragon: he is the true Messiah, and shall wage war without weapons.'"

This document, which the young fanatic himself appears to have taken for a genuine revelation, became later on the source of many mystifications and impostures. However, it appeared inadvisable to the dupe and the deceiver that he should appear in Constantinople. Salonica, which had always paid homage to mysticism, seemed a more suitable field for Kabbalistic extravagances. Here, therefore, Sabbataï resided for some time, gained adherents, and came forward with greater boldness. Here he enacted one of his favorite scenes, by which he afterwards worked upon the imagination of the Kabbalists. He prepared a solemn festival, invited his friends, sent for the sacred book (Torah), and intimated to those present, that he was about to celebrate his mystical marriage with it. In the language of the Kabbala this meant that the Torah, the daughter of heaven, was to be united indissolubly with the Messiah, the son of heaven, or En-Sof. This scene displeased the discreet rabbis of Salonica, and they decreed his banishment. Thence he betook himself to the Morea, probably to relatives and friends of his father, and resided for some time at Athens, where at that time there was a Jewish community. When the Jews of this region heard of the sentence pronounced upon him, they gave him no encouragement. This opposition, far from discouraging him, only served to make him bolder; he probably regarded his sufferings as necessary for the glorification of the Messiah.

At last, after long wandering, a prospect of realizing his dream presented itself at Cairo. In the Egyptian capital there was a Jewish mint-master and tax-farmer, with the title of Saraph-Bashi, similar to the Alabarchs at Alexandria in earlier ages. At that time (after 1656) the office was held by Raphael Joseph Chelebi, of Aleppo, a man of great wealth and open-handed benevolence, but of unspeakable credulity, and ineradicable propensity to mysticism and asceticism. Fifty learned Talmudists and Kabbalists were supported by him, and dined at his table. Everyone who sought his compassion found help and relief in his need. While riding in the royal chariot, and appearing in splendid robes, he wore sackcloth underneath, fasted and bathed much, and frequently at night scourged himself. Samuel Vital, a son of Chayim Calabrese, superintended his constant penances according to the Kabbalistic precepts of Lurya (Tikkun Lurya). These were intended, as has been stated, to hasten the coming of the Messiah. To be in Cairo and not to make Raphael Joseph's acquaintance was an inconceivable course for a Kabbalist. Sabbataï Zevi thus came into his circle, and won his confidence the sooner, as, owing to his independent position, he did not desire anything of him. He appears to have partially revealed his Messianic plans to Raphael. He had grown older, maturer, and wiser, and knew how to make men amenable to his wishes. The Apocalyptic year, 1666, was drawing near, and it was important to use the auspicious moment.

He betook himself to Jerusalem, perhaps under the delusion that in the Holy Land a miracle would take place to confirm his greatness. The community at Jerusalem was at that time in every way poor and wretched. Besides being ground down by the oppressions and extortions of Turkish officials, it suffered because the supplies from Europe were exhausted on account of the constant massacres of the Jews in Poland. The consequence was that the best men emigrated, leaving the government of the community to thorough-going Kabbalists, devoted adherents of Lurya and Vital, or to a licentious set, who followed the impulses of bare-faced selfishness. There were at that time very few men of repute and authority in Jerusalem. A Marrano physician named Jacob Zemach appears to have stood at their head. He had leapt, so to speak, in one bound from a Portuguese church into the nest of Kabbalists at Safet, and there, as later at Jerusalem, had become an unconscious tool for the mystifications practiced by Vital. Abraham Amigo, a Talmudist of the second or third rank, had similar aims. A man of some importance, to be sure, was Jacob Chages (1620–1674), who had migrated from Italy to Jerusalem, and who wrote Spanish well. Chages, however, had no official position, but lived the life of a recluse in an academy, which two brothers named Vega, of Leghorn, had founded for him. The thoughtless credulity of the people of Jerusalem of that time is instanced by the gross deception practiced upon them by Baruch Gad, one of their alms-collecting emissaries, which they, the learned and the unlearned, not only credited, but swore to as true. Baruch Gad had gone on a begging journey to Persia, where he pretended that he had experienced many adventures, and had been saved by a Jew of the tribe of Naphtali, who had given him a Kabbalistic letter from one of the "Sons of Moses" at the miraculous river Sabbation. It contained much about the riches, splendor, and daily miracles of the Sons of Moses, and said that they were momentarily awaiting the commencement of the Messianic epoch as a signal for coming forth. This story, certified by a circular, was brought by Baruch Gad to Jerusalem, where it found unquestioning credence. When the community of Jerusalem had fallen into great want in consequence of the Cossack massacre, ten so-called rabbis, Jacob Zemach at their head, sent to Reggio to their envoy Nathan Spira, of Jerusalem, a copy of this document from the Sons of Moses, which was kept in careful custody. It was to serve as a bait to draw more abundant alms.

The miracle which Sabbataï Zevi was expecting for himself in the Holy City was present in the credulity and mania for miracles on the part of the people of Jerusalem, who were inclined, like the lowest savages, to accept any absurd message as a divine revelation, if only it was brought before them in the right manner. At first the Smyrna enthusiast kept himself quiet, and gave no offense. He lived according to the precepts of the Kabbala, imposed the severest mortifications on himself, and often stayed by the graves of pious men in order to draw down their spirits. Thereby, aided by his pleasing, attractive, and reverential behavior and taciturn manner, he gradually gathered round him a circle of adherents who had blind faith in him. One of his devoted followers related with credulous simplicity, that Sabbataï Zevi shed floods of tears in prayer. He sang Psalms the whole night with his melodious voice, while pacing the room now with short, now with long strides. His whole conduct was out of the ordinary groove. He was also wont to sing coarse love songs in Spanish, with a mystical meaning, about the emperor's fair daughter Melisselda, with her coral lips and milk-white skin, as she rose out of the bath. Sabbataï used another means to win hearts. When he showed himself in the streets he distributed sweet-meats of all sorts to the children, who in consequence ran after him, and he thus gained the favor of their mothers.

An incident brought his eccentric ideas nearer their realization. The community at Jerusalem was sentenced by one of the pachas or some minor official to one of those oppressive exactions which frequently carried torture or death in their train. The impoverished members rested their hopes solely on Raphael Joseph Chelebi at Cairo, known to have the means and inclination to succor his afflicted brethren, especially the saints of Jerusalem. A messenger was to be sent to him, and Sabbataï Zevi was universally regarded as the most fitting, particularly as he was a favorite with the Saraph-Bashi. He undertook this task willingly, because he hoped to get the opportunity to play the part of saviour of the Holy City. His worshipers date from this journey to Egypt the beginning of his miraculous power, and assert that he accomplished many miracles at sea. Sabbataï however traveled not by water, but by land, by way of Hebron and Gaza, probably joining a caravan through the desert. He excited so much attention that all the Jews of Hebron, in order to observe him, refrained from sleep during the night of his stay. Arrived at Cairo, he immediately received from Chelebi the sum required for the ransom of the community at Jerusalem, and, besides, an extraordinarily favorable opportunity presented itself to confirm his Messianic dreams.

During the massacre of the Jews in Poland by Chmielnicki, a Jewish orphan girl of about six was found by Christians, and put into a nunnery. Her parents were dead, a brother had been driven to Amsterdam, the whole community broken up and put to flight, and no one troubled himself about the forsaken child, so that the nuns of the convent regarded the foundling as a soul brought to them and gave her a Christian conventual education. The impressions received in the house of her parents were so lively, that Christianity found no entrance into her heart; she remained faithful to Judaism. Nevertheless, her soul was nourished by fantastic dreams induced by her surroundings, and her thoughts took an eccentric direction. She developed into a lovely girl, and longed to escape from the cloister. One day she was found by Jews, who had again settled in the place, in the Jewish cemetery. Astonished at finding a beautiful girl of sixteen lightly clad in such a position, they questioned her, and received answer that she was of Jewish extraction, and had been brought up in a convent. The night before, she said, she had been bodily seized by her father's ghost, and carried out of bed to the cemetery. In support of her statement, she showed the women nail-marks on her body, which were said to come from her father's hands. She appears to have learnt in the convent the art of producing scars on her body. The Jews thought it dangerous to keep a fugitive from the convent in their midst, and sent her to Amsterdam. There she found her brother. Eccentric by nature and excited by the change in her fortunes, she continually repeated the words, that she was destined to be the wife of the Messiah, who was soon to appear. After she had lived some years in Amsterdam under the name of Sarah, she came – it is not known for what purpose – by way of Frankfort-on-the-Main to Leghorn. There, as credible witnesses aver, she put her charms to immoral use, yet continued to maintain that she was dedicated to the Messiah, and could contract no other marriage. The strange history of this Polish girl circulated amongst the Jews, and penetrated even to Cairo. Sabbataï Zevi, who heard of it, gave out that a Polish-Jewish maiden had been promised to him in a dream as his spiritual wife. He sent a messenger to Leghorn, and had Sarah brought to Cairo.

By her fantastical, free, self-confident behavior and by her beauty, Sarah made a peculiar impression upon Sabbataï and his companions. He himself was firmly convinced of his Messiahship. To Sabbataï and his friends the immoral life of this Polish adventuress was not unknown. This also was said to be a Messianic dispensation; he had been directed, like the prophet Hosea, to marry an unchaste wife. No one was so happy as Raphael Joseph Chelebi, because at his house the Messiah met his bride, and was married. He placed his wealth at the disposal of Sabbataï Zevi, and became his most influential follower. The warm adhesion of so dignified, respected, and powerful a man brought many believers to Sabbataï. It was rightly said, that he had come to Egypt as a messenger, and returned as the Messiah. For, from this second residence at Cairo dates his public career. Sarah, also, the Messiah's fair bride, brought him many disciples. Through her a romantic, licentious element entered into the fantastic career of the Smyrna Messiah. Her beauty and free manner of life attracted youths and men who had no sympathy with the mystical movement. With a larger following than when he started, Sabbataï returned to Palestine, bringing two talismans of more effective power than Kabbalistic means – Sarah's influence and Chelebi's money. At Gaza he found a third confederate, who helped to smooth his path.

At Jerusalem there lived a man named Elisha Levi, who had migrated thither from Germany. The Jews of the Holy City dispatched him to all parts of the world with begging letters. Whilst he was roaming through northern Africa, Amsterdam, Hamburg, and Poland, his son Nathan Benjamin Levi (1644–1680) was left to himself, or the perverse education of that time. He developed, in the school of Jacob Chages, into a youth with superficial knowledge of the Talmud, acquired Kabbalistic scraps, and obtained facility in the high-sounding, but hollow, nonsensical Rabbinical style of the period, which concealed poverty of thought beneath verbiage. The pen was his faithful instrument, and replaced the gift of speech, in which he had little facility. This youth was suddenly raised from pressing poverty to opulence. A rich Portuguese, Samuel Lisbona, who had moved from Damascus to Gaza, asked Jacob Chages to recommend a husband for his beautiful, but one-eyed daughter, and he suggested his disciple Nathan Benjamin. Thus he became connected with a rich house, and in consequence of his change of fortune, lost all stability, if he had had any. When Sabbataï Zevi, with a large train of followers, came to Gaza on his way back from Cairo, posing as the Messiah, and accepted as such by the crowds gathering about him, Nathan Ghazati (i. e., of Gaza) entered into close relationship with him. In what way their mutual acquaintance and attachment arose is not explained. Sabbataï's disciples declared that Nathan had dug up a part of the ancient writing, wherein Zevi's Messiahship was testified. It is probably nearer the truth, that Sabbataï, to convince Ghazati of his mission, palmed off on him the spurious document received from Abraham Yachini. At any rate Nathan became his most zealous adherent, whether from conviction or from a desire to play a prominent part, can no longer be discerned in this story, in which simple faith, self-deception, and willful imposture, border so close on one another.

After Nathan Ghazati and Sabbataï had become acquainted, the former a youth of twenty, the latter a man of forty, prophetic revelations followed close upon one another. Ghazati professed to be the risen Elijah, who was to pave the way for the Messiah. He gave out that he had received a call on a certain day (probably the eve of the Pentecost, 1665), that in a year and a few months the Messiah would show himself in his glory, would take the sultan captive without arms, only with music, and establish the dominion of Israel over all the nations of the earth. The Messianic age was to begin in the year 1666. This revelation was proclaimed everywhere in writing by the pretended prophet of Gaza, with the addition of wild fantasies and suggestive details. He wrote to Raphael Joseph acknowledging the receipt of the moneys sent by him, and begging him not to lose faith in Sabbataï; the latter would certainly in a year and some months make the sultan his subject and lead him about as a captive. The dominion would be entrusted to Nathan, until he should conquer the other nations without bloodshed, warring only against Germany, the enemy of the Jews. Then the Messiah would betake himself to the banks of the river Sabbation, and there espouse the daughter of the great prophet, Moses, who at the age of thirteen would be exalted as queen, with Sarah as her slave. Finally, he would lead back the ten tribes to the Holy Land, riding upon a lion with a seven-headed dragon in its jaws. The more exaggerated and absurd Nathan's prophetic vaporings were, the more credence did they find. A veritable fit of intoxication took possession of nearly all the Jews of Jerusalem and the neighboring communities. With a prophet, formerly a shy youth, proclaiming so great a message, and a Messiah, more profoundly versed in the Kabbala than Chayim Vital, who could venture to doubt the approach of the time of grace? Those who shook their heads at this rising imposture were laughed to scorn by the Sabbatians.

The rabbinical leaders of the Jerusalem community were unfavorably struck by this Messianic movement, and sought to stifle it at its birth. It was sufficient to prejudice them against Sabbataï that he stood in the foreground, and put them in the shade. He is said to have distributed the money from Egypt according to his own discretion, and in the division to have unduly favored his own followers. Jacob Chages and his college threatened him with the heaviest excommunication if he should persist in his course. Sabbataï Zevi appears to have cared little for this, especially as a ban could have no effect if the community was on his side. Even Moses Galante, the son-in-law of Jacob Chages, esteemed as an authority in the Holy Land, regarded him with respect, although, as he afterwards declared, he did not believe in him unconditionally. Sabbataï Zevi saw clearly that Jerusalem was not the right place for his plans, as the rabbis would place obstacles in his way. Nathan Ghazati thereupon proclaimed in an ecstasy that Jerusalem had lost its importance as the sacred city, and that Gaza had taken its place. At Smyrna, his native city – an important gathering-place for Europeans and Asiatics – Sabbataï thought he could obtain greater success. His rich brothers prepared a good reception for him by the distribution of money amongst the poor and needy, and Nathan's extravagant prophetic letters had kindled the imagination of the people. But before he left Jerusalem, Sabbataï took care to dispatch active missionaries of a fanatical and fraudulent character, to predict his Messianic appearance, excite men's minds, and fill them with his name. Sabbataï Raphael, a beggar and impostor from the Morea, enlarged in mountebank fashion on the Messiah's greatness; and a German Kabbalist, Matathias Bloch, did the same in blind simplicity.

Thus it came to pass that when Sabbataï Zevi left Jerusalem – of his own accord, as he pretended, banished, as others said – he was at once received in triumph in the large Asiatic community of Aleppo. Still greater was the homage paid him in his native city (autumn 1665). The ban pronounced against him was not remembered. He was accompanied by a man of Jerusalem, Samuel Primo, who became his private secretary, and one of his most zealous recruiting agents. Samuel Primo understood the art of investing trifles with an air of official seriousness and by a flowery style to give world-wide importance to the Messianic imposture. He alone remained sober in the midst of the ever-increasing fanaticism, and gave aim and direction to the enthusiasts. Primo appears to have heralded Sabbataï's fame from conviction; he had a secret plan to be accomplished through the Messiah. He appears to have made use of Sabbataï more than to have been employed by him. Sabbataï had tact enough not to announce himself at once at Smyrna as the Messiah; he commanded the believing multitude not to speak of it until the proper time. But this reserve, combined with other circumstances – the ranting letters of Nathan, the arrival of some men of Jerusalem who brought him the homage of the Holy City (though without being commissioned to do so), the severe mortifications which the people inflicted on themselves, to atone for their sins and become worthy of the coming of the Messiah – all this worked upon the minds of the multitude, and they could scarcely wait for the day of his revelation. He had the Kabbalists on his side through his mystical utterances. At length Sabbataï Zevi declared himself publicly in the synagogue, with blowing of horns, as the expected Messiah (New Year, September, or October, 1665), and the multitude shouted to him, "Long live our King, our Messiah!"

The proverb that a prophet is least honored in his own country was for once belied. The madness of the Jews of Smyrna knew no bounds. Every sign of honor and enthusiastic love was shown him. It was not joy, but delirium to feel that the long-expected Messiah had at last appeared, and in their own community. The delirium seized great and small. Women, girls, and children fell into raptures, and proclaimed Sabbataï Zevi in the language of the Zohar as the true redeemer. The word of the prophet, that God at the end of the world will pour forth his spirit upon the young, appeared fulfilled. All prepared for a speedy exodus, the return to the Holy Land. Workmen neglected their business, and thought only of the approaching kingdom of the Messiah. The confusion in men's brains showed itself in the way in which the Sabbatians of Smyrna strove to merit a share in the time of grace. On the one hand, they subjected themselves to incredible penances – fasted several days in succession, refrained from sleep for nights, in order that, by Kabbalistic prayers (Tikkunim) at midnight, they might wipe away their sins, and bathed in extremely cold weather, even with snow on the ground. Some buried themselves up to the neck in the soil, and remained in their damp graves until their limbs were stiff with cold. On the other hand, they abandoned themselves to the most extravagant delight, and celebrated festival after festival in honor of the Messiah, whenever Sabbataï Zevi showed himself – always with a large train of followers – or walked through the streets singing Psalms, "The right hand of the Lord is exalted, the right hand of the Lord bringeth victory," or preached in a synagogue, and proved his Messiahship by Kabbalistic interpretations of Scripture. He showed himself only in procession in public, waved a fan to cool himself, and whoever was touched with it was sure of the kingdom of heaven. The delirious joy of his followers knew no bounds. Every word of his was repeated a thousand times as the word of God, expounded, exaggerated, and intensified. All that he did was held as miraculous, published, and believed. The madness went so far that his adherents in Smyrna and elsewhere, as at Salonica, that Kabbalist hot-bed of old, married their children of twelve, ten, and even younger, to one another – seven hundred couples in all – that, according to Kabbalistic ideas, they might cause the souls not yet born to enter into life, and thereby remove the last obstacle to the commencement of the time of grace.

The activity of Sabbataï Zevi in electrifying the minds of simple believers, now by public pomp and pageantry, now by silent retirement, was supplemented by Sarah, his wife, who by her loose conduct worked on the passions of the male population. The bonds of chastity, drawn much tighter among Eastern Jews than in Europe, were broken. The assembling of persons of both sexes in great multitudes, hitherto unheard of, was a slight innovation. In Messianic transports of delight men and women danced with one another as if mad, and in mystical fervor many excesses are said to have been committed. The voice of censure and caution was gradually silenced; all were drawn into the vortex, and the unbelievers were rendered harmless. The rabbi Aaron de la Papa (died 1674), an aged and respectable man, who at first spoke against this Messianic madness, and pronounced the ban against its originator, together with other rabbis, was publicly reviled in a sermon by Sabbataï, removed from office, and obliged to leave Smyrna.

Most unworthy was the behavior of the rabbi Chayim Benvenisti (1603–1673), a very considerable authority on the Talmud, and of astonishing learning, who, because he was a literary opponent of De la Papa, not only suffered the latter's removal from office, but allowed himself to be appointed in his place by Sabbataï. Though at first harshly disposed towards the new Messiah, he became a believer, and led the multitude by his authority. The latter were instigated by Sabbataï to bloodthirsty fanaticism. Because a noble, rich, and respected man in Smyrna, Chayim Penya, who had liberally supported Chayim Benvenisti, opposed the widespread delusion with obstinate incredulity, he was suddenly attacked in the synagogue, persecuted, and nearly torn to pieces by the raging multitude. Sabbataï Zevi, the pretended incarnation of piety, commanded the synagogue to be broken open and the vile heretic to be seized. But when Penya's daughters, likewise attacked by the madness, fell into raptures, and prophesied, the father had no choice but to put a good face upon the wretched business. He also assumed the air of a zealous adherent. After Penya's subjugation Sabbataï Zevi became sole ruler in the community, and could lead the Jewish population at will for good or for evil. In this humor which lasted for some months, the Jews of Smyrna feared their tyrants, the Turkish cadis, very little; if they offered to check the prevailing tendency, they were induced by rich presents to remain inactive.

These events in the Jews' quarter at Smyrna made a great sensation in ever-widening circles. The neighboring communities of Asia Minor, many members of which had betaken themselves to Smyrna, and witnessing the scenes enacted in that town, brought home exaggerated accounts of the Messiah's power of attraction and of working miracles, were swept into the same vortex. Sabbataï's private secretary, Samuel Primo, took care that reports of the fame and doings of the Messiah should reach Jews abroad. Nathan Ghazati sent circulars from Palestine, while the itinerant prophets, Sabbataï Raphael and Matathias Bloch, filled the ears of their auditors with the most marvelous accounts of the new redeemer. Christians also helped to spread the story. The residents, the clerks of English and Dutch mercantile houses, and the evangelical ministers, reported the extraordinary occurrences in Smyrna, and though they scoffed at the folly of the Jews, could not withhold half-credulous sympathy. Did they not see with their own eyes the ecstasies, and hear with their own ears the predictions, of the prophets and prophetesses of Sabbataï Zevi, the true redeemer? On the exchanges in Europe men spoke of him as a remarkable personage, and eagerly awaited news from Smyrna or Constantinople. At first the Jews were dazed by the reports that suddenly burst upon them. Was the long cherished hope, that one day the oppression and shame of Israel would be removed, and that he would return in glory to his home, at length to be realized? No wonder that nearly everywhere scenes similar to those in Smyrna were repeating themselves, that men's minds were filled with credulity, accepting mere rumors as accredited facts, or that wild excitement, ascetic living, and almsgiving to the needy, by way of preparation for the time of the Messiah, were followed here and there by prophetic ecstasies. Not only the senseless multitude, but nearly all the rabbis, and even men of culture and philosophical judgment, fell a prey to this credulity.

At that time not a single man of weight and importance recognized that the primary source of all these phenomena lay in the Kabbala and the Zohar. Jacob Sasportas, originally from Africa, had lived in Amsterdam and London and, at this time, was in Hamburg. He was born about 1620, and died 1698. A man of courage and keen penetration, whose word had weight through his Talmudical learning, Sasportas from the first combated this Messianic rage with passionate warmth. He was unwearied in sending letter after letter to the various communities and their guides in Europe, Asia, and Africa, to unmask the gross deceptions practiced, and to warn against the sad consequences. But even he was entangled in the snares of the Kabbala, and adopted its principles. On the ground of this spurious philosophy, thoroughgoing enthusiasts were more in the right than half-hearted adherents. Spinoza, who might have scattered this thick mist with his luminous ideas, was not only estranged from Judaism and his race, but even hostile to them, and regarded the prevailing perplexities with indifference or malice.

The accounts of Sabbataï Zevi and the Messianic excitement either came direct, or in a roundabout way by Alexandria, to Venice, Leghorn, and other Italian cities.

Venice was led by the bigoted Kabbalist Moses Zacut, Spinoza's very uncongenial fellow-student, who had formed the design of migrating from Amsterdam through Poland to Palestine, but stopped short in Venice. Far from opposing the delusion of the multitude, he encouraged it, as did the rabbinate of Venice. The news from Smyrna had most striking effect upon the great and the lesser Jerusalem of the North. The prophet of Gaza, who was not devoid of sober calculation, had directed his propagandist circulars to the most considerable and the richest communities – Amsterdam and Hamburg. These entered into close relationship with the new Messianic movement. The Jews of Amsterdam and Hamburg received confirmation of the extraordinary events at Smyrna from trustworthy Christians, many of whom were sincerely rejoiced thereat. Even Heinrich Oldenburg, a distinguished German savant in London, wrote to his friend Spinoza (December, 1665): —

"All the world here is talking of a rumor of the return of the Israelites, dispersed for more than two thousand years, to their own country. Few believe it, but many wish it… Should the news be confirmed, it may bring about a revolution in all things."

The number of believers in Amsterdam increased daily among the Portuguese no less than among the Germans, and numbers of educated people set the example; the rabbis Isaac Aboab and Raphael Moses D'Aguilar, Spinoza's fellow-student Isaac Naar, and Abraham Pereira, one of the capitalists of Amsterdam and a writer on morals in Spanish, all became believers. Even the semi-Spinozist Dionysius Musaphia became a zealous adherent of the new Messiah. In Amsterdam devotion to the new faith expressed itself in contradictory ways – by noisy music and dancing in the houses of prayer, and by gloomy, monkish self-mortification. The printing presses could not supply enough copies of special prayer-books in Hebrew, Portuguese and Spanish, for the multitude of believers. In these books penances and formulas were given by which men hoped to become partakers in the kingdom of the Messiah. Many Sabbatian prayer-books (Tikkunim) printed Sabbataï's likeness together with that of King David, also the emblems of his dominion, and select sentences from the Bible. In confident expectation of speedy return to the Holy Land, the elders of one synagogue introduced the custom of pronouncing the priestly blessing every Sabbath.

At Hamburg, the Jews went to still greater lengths of folly, because they wished to make a demonstration against the bigoted Christians, who in many ways tormented them with vexatious restrictions, and when possible compelled them to listen to Christian sermons. Whoever entered the synagogue, and saw the Jewish worshipers hop, jump, and dance about with the roll of the Law in their arms, serious, respectable men withal, of Spanish stateliness, had to take them for madmen. In fact, a mental disease prevailed, which made men childish; even the most distinguished in the community succumbed to it.

Manoel Texeira, also called Isaac Señor Texeira, was born about 1630, and died about 1695. Some months before the death of his father, Diego Texeira, a Marrano nobleman who had emigrated from Portugal and settled at Hamburg, Manoel became resident minister, banker, and confidant of Christina, former queen of Sweden. She valued him on account of his honesty, his noble bearing, and his shrewdness. She exchanged letters with him on important affairs, conferred with him on the political interests of Europe, and credited him with deep, statesmanlike views. During her residence at Hamburg she took up her abode in Manoel Texeira's house, to the vexation of the local ecclesiastical authorities – who were hostile to the Jews – and remained quite unconcerned, although the Protestant preachers censured her severely from the pulpits. Men of the highest rank resorted to Texeira's house, and played with him for high stakes. This Jewish cavalier also belonged to Sabbataï's adherents, and joined in the absurd dances; as also the skillful and famous physician Bendito de Castro (Baruch Nehemiah), now advanced in years, for a time the physician of the queen during her residence in Hamburg. De Castro was at that time director of the Hamburg community, and by his order the Messianic follies were practiced in the synagogue. Jacob Sasportas, who because of the outbreak of the plague in London at that time resided in Hamburg, used serious arguments and satire against this Messianic delusion; but he could not make his voice heard, and only just escaped rough handling by the Sabbatians. The community recently established in London in the reign of Charles II, which had elected Jacob Sasportas as chief rabbi, was no less possessed with this craze. It derived additional encouragement from contact with Christian enthusiasts who hoped to bring about the millennium. Curious reports flew from mouth to mouth. It was said, that in the north of Scotland a ship had appeared, with silken sails and ropes, manned by sailors who spoke Hebrew. The flag bore the inscription, "The Twelve Tribes or Families of Israel." Believers living in London in English fashion offered wagers at the odds of ten to one that Sabbataï would be anointed king at Jerusalem within two years, and drew formal bills of exchange upon the issue. Wherever Jews dwelt, news of the Kabbalistic Messiah of Smyrna penetrated, and everywhere produced wild excitement. The little community of Avignon, which was not treated in the mildest manner by the papal officers, prepared to emigrate to the kingdom of Judah in the spring of the year 1666.

If Sabbataï Zevi had not hitherto firmly believed in himself and his dignity, this homage from nearly the whole Jewish race must have awakened conviction. Every day advices, messengers, and deputations came pouring in, greeting him in most flattering terms as king of the Jews, placing life and property at his disposal, and overwhelming him with gifts. Had he been a man of resolute determination and strength of will, he might have obtained results of importance with this genuine enthusiasm and willing devotion of his believers. Even Spinoza entertained the possibility, with this favorable opportunity and the mutability of human things, that the Jews might re-establish their kingdom, and again be the chosen of God. But Sabbataï Zevi was satisfied with the savor of incense. He cherished no great design, or rather, he lived in the delusion that men's expectations would fulfill themselves of their own accord by a miracle. Samuel Primo and some of his confidants appear, however, to have followed a fixed plan, namely, to modify the Rabbinical system, or even to abolish it. That was in reality implied in the reign of the Messiah. The fundamental conception of the Zohar, the Bible of the Kabbalists, is that in the time of grace, in the world of order (Olam ha-Tikkun), the laws of Judaism, the regulations concerning lawful and forbidden things, would completely lose their significance. Now this time, the Sabbatians thought, had already begun; consequently, the minute ritualistic code of the Shulchan Aruch ought no longer to be held binding. Whether Sabbataï himself drew this conclusion, is doubtful. But some of his trusted adherents gave this theory prominence. A certain bitterness towards the Talmud and the Talmudic method of teaching prevailed in this circle. The Sabbatian mystics felt themselves confined by the close meshes of the Rabbinical network, and sought to disentangle it loop by loop. They set up a new deity, substituting a man-god for the God of Israel. In their wanton extravagance the Kabbalists had so entirely changed the conception of the deity, that it had dwindled away into nothing. On the other hand, they had so exalted and magnified the Messiah, that he was close to God. The Sabbatians, or one of them (Samuel Primo?), built on this foundation. From the Divine bosom (the Ancient of Days), they said, a new divine personage had sprung, capable of restoring the order in the world intended in the original plan of Divine Perfection. This new person was the Holy King (Malka Kadisha), the Messiah, the Primal Man (Adam Kadmon), who would destroy evil, sin, and corruption, and cause the dried-up streams of grace to flow again. He, the holy king, the Messiah, is the true God, the redeemer and saviour of the world, the God of Israel; to him alone should prayers be addressed. The Holy King, or Messiah, combines two natures – one male, the other female; he can do more on account of his higher wisdom than the Creator of the world. Samuel Primo, who dispatched circulars and ordinances in the name of the Messianic king, often used the signature, "I, the Lord, your God, Sabbataï Zevi." Whether the Smyrna fanatic authorized such blasphemous presumptuousness cannot be decided, any more than whether in his heart he considered the Jewish law null and void. For, although some Sabbatians, who uttered these absurdities, pretended to have heard them from his own lips, other disciples asserted that he was an adherent of traditional Judaism.

The truth probably is that Sabbataï Zevi, absorbed in idle ruminating, accepted everything which the more energetic among his followers taught or suggested. They began the dissolution of Judaism by the transformation of the fast of the tenth of Tebeth (Asara be-Tebeth) into a day of rejoicing. Samuel Primo, in the name of his divinity, directed a circular to the whole of Israel in semi-official form:

"The first-begotten Son of God, Sabbataï Zevi, Messiah and Redeemer of the people of Israel, to all the sons of Israel, Peace! Since ye have been deemed worthy to behold the great day and the fulfillment of God's word by the prophets, your lament and sorrow must be changed into joy, and your fasting into merriment, for ye shall weep no more. Rejoice with song and melody, and change the day formerly spent in sadness and sorrow, into a day of jubilee, because I have appeared."

So firmly rooted in men's minds was faith in Sabbataï Zevi, that the communities which the letter reached in time discontinued this fast, although they believed that they could enter into the kingdom of the Messiah only by strict abstinence. The staunch orthodox party, however, was shocked at this innovation. They could not conceive the Messiah as other than a pious rabbi, who, if possible, would invent fresh burdens. A thousand times had they read in the Zohar, and repeated to one another, that in the time of the Messiah the days of mourning would be changed into days of feasting, and the Law in general would be no longer binding; but when words were changed into deeds, horror seized them. Those rabbis who before had regarded the movement half incredulously, or had not interfered with the penances and deeds of active benevolence to which many of the Sabbatians had felt prompted, thereby giving silent assent, now raised their voice against the law-destroying Messiahship. There began to be formed in every large community a small party of unbelievers (Kofrim), chiefly men learned in the Talmud, who desired to guard the established religion against attacks and disruption.

Rabbinical Judaism and the Kabbala, hitherto in close confederation, began to be at variance with each other; this doubtful ally showing herself at last in her true form as the enemy of Rabbinism. But this sobering discovery, that the Kabbala was a serpent nursed into life by the rabbis themselves, was recognized only by a few. They still remained true to her, imputing the growing hostility to the Shulchan Aruch to Sabbataï and his aiders and abettors. It was too late, their voices were drowned in shouts of joy. Solomon Algazi, and some members of the Smyrna rabbinate who shared his opinions, tried to oppose the abolition of the fast, but were nearly stoned to death by the multitude of believers, and were obliged, like Aaron de la Papa, to leave the city in haste.

But the Messiah was at last forced to tear himself out of his fool's paradise and the atmosphere of incense in Smyrna, in order to accomplish his work in the Turkish capital – either because his followers compelled him to put his light, not under a bushel, but upon it, that the world at large might see it, or because the cadi could no longer endure the mad behavior of the Jews, and did not wish to bear the sole responsibility. It is said that the cadi gave Sabbataï Zevi three days to go to Constantinople and appear before the highest Turkish authorities. In his delusion, Zevi perhaps believed that a miracle would fulfill the prophecies of Nathan Ghazati and other prophets, that he would easily be able to take the crown from the sultan. He prepared for his journey. Before he left Smyrna, he divided the world among his six-and-twenty faithful ones, and called them kings and princes. His brothers, Elijah and Joseph Zevi, received the lion's share; the former was named king of kings, the latter king of the kings of Judah. To his other faithful followers he disclosed, in Kabbalistic language, which soul of the former kings of Judah or Israel dwelt in each of their bodies, that is, had passed into them by transmigration. Among the better known names were those of the companion of his youth, Isaac Silveira, and Abraham Yachini at Constantinople, who had imparted to him the art of mysticism. Raphael Joseph Chelebi could least of all be passed over; he had been the first firm supporter of the Messiah, and was called King Joash. A Marrano physician, who had escaped from Portugal, and was his devoted adherent, received the crown of Portugal. Even his former opponent Chayim Penya received a kingdom of his own. A beggar, Abraham Rubio of Smyrna, was likewise raised to a throne, under the name of Josiah, and was so firmly convinced of his approaching sovereignty that he refused large sums for his imaginary kingdom.

Sabbataï Zevi appears purposely to have started on his Messianic journey to Constantinople exactly at the beginning of the mystic year 1666. He was accompanied by some of his followers, his secretary Samuel Primo being in his train. He had announced the day of his arrival at Constantinople, but circumstances proved false to him. The ship in which he sailed had to contend with bad weather, and the voyage was prolonged by weeks. Since the sea did not devour him, the Sabbatians composed marvelous stories describing how the storm and the waves had obeyed the Messiah. At some place on the coast of the Dardanelles the passengers of the weather-beaten vessel were obliged to land, and there Sabbataï was arrested by Turkish officers, sent to take him prisoner. The grand vizir, Ahmed Coprili, had heard of the excitement of the Jews in Smyrna, and desired to suppress it. The officers had strict orders to bring the pretended redeemer in fetters to the capital, and therefore hastened to meet the ship by which he came. According to orders, they put him in fetters, and brought him to a small town in the neighborhood of Constantinople, because the eve of the Sabbath was near. Informed by a messenger of his arrival at Cheknese Kutschuk, his followers hastened from the capital to see him, but found him in a pitiable plight and in chains. The money which they brought with them procured him some alleviation, and on the following Sunday (February, 1666), he was brought by sea to Constantinople – but in how different a manner to what he and his believers had anticipated! However, his coming caused excitement. At the landing-place there was such a crowd of Jews and Turks who desired to see the Messiah, that the police were obliged to superintend the disembarkation. An under-pasha commissioned to receive him welcomed the man-god with a vigorous box on the ear. Sabbataï Zevi is said, however, to have wisely turned the other cheek to the blow. Since he could not play the part of the triumphant, he at least wished to play that of the suffering Messiah with good grace. When brought before the deputy-vizir (Kaimakam), Mustapha Pasha, he did not stand the first test brilliantly. Asked what his intentions were, and why he had roused the Jews to such a pitch of excitement, Sabbataï is said to have answered that he was nothing more than a Jewish Chacham, come from Jerusalem to the capital to collect alms; he could not help it if the Jews testified so much devotion to him. Mustapha thereupon sent him to a prison in which insolvent Jewish debtors were confined.

Far from being disappointed at this treatment, his followers in Constantinople persisted in their delusion. For some days they kept quietly at home, because the street boys mocked them by shouting, "Is he coming? is he coming?" (Gheldi mi, Gheldi mi.) But they soon began again to assert that he was the true Messiah, and that the sufferings which he had encountered were necessary, a condition to his glorification. The prophets continued to proclaim the speedy redemption of Sabbataï and of all Israel. A Turkish dervish filled the streets of Constantinople with prophecies of the Messiah, whose enemies said that Sabbataï's followers had bribed him. Thousands crowded daily to Sabbataï's place of confinement merely to catch a glimpse of him. English merchants whose claims were not satisfied by their Jewish debtors applied to the Messiah. An order in his handwriting, admonishing defaulters to do justice to their creditors, as otherwise they would have no share in his joy and glory, had the best effect. Samuel Primo took care that most fabulous accounts should reach the Jews of Smyrna and those at a distance, of the reverence paid the Messiah by the Turkish authorities. At heart, he wrote, they were all convinced of his dignity. The expectations of the Jews were raised to a still higher pitch, and the most exaggerated hopes fostered to a greater degree. It was looked upon as a palpable miracle that summary Turkish justice allowed him, the rebellious Jew, to live. Did not this act of mercy prove that he was feared? The Turkish government in fact seems to have stood in awe of the Jewish Messiah. The Cretan war was impending, which demanded all the energy of the half-exhausted Turkish empire. The prudent grand vizir, Ahmed Coprili, did not like to sentence him to death, thus making a fresh martyr, and causing a desperate riot among the Jews. Even the Turks, charmed by Sabbataï's manner, and deceived by extraordinary miraculous manifestations, especially by the prophecies of women and children, joined the ranks of his worshipers. It seemed to Coprili equally dangerous to leave Sabbataï, during his absence at the war, in Constantinople, where he might easily add fuel to the ever-increasing excitement in the capital. He therefore commanded, after Sabbataï had been imprisoned in Constantinople for two months – from the beginning of February to April 17 – that he be taken to the castle of the Dardanelles at Abydos, where state-prisoners were wont to be kept in custody. It was a mild confinement; some of his friends, among them Samuel Primo, were allowed to accompany him thither. The Sabbatians called this fortress by a mystical name, the Tower of Strength (Migdal Oz).

If Sabbataï Zevi had doubted himself for a moment, his courage rose through his change of abode, the respectful clemency shown him by the divan, and the steady and increasing devotion of the Jews. He felt himself the Messiah again. On his arrival at the castle of the Dardanelles on April 19, the day of preparation for the Passover, he slew a Paschal lamb for himself and his followers, and ate it with the fat, which is forbidden by the laws of the Talmud. He is said, while doing so, to have used a blessing which implied that the Mosaic, Talmudic, and Rabbinical law was abrogated – "Blessed be God, who hath restored again that which was forbidden." At Abydos he held regular court with the large sums of money which his brothers and his rich adherents sent him with lavish hand. His wife Sarah, who was allowed to remain with him, demeaned herself as the Messianic queen, and bewitched the multitude by her charms. From the Turkish capital a number of ships conveyed his followers to the castle of the Dardanelles. The fare on vessels rose in consequence daily. From other countries and continents, too, crowds of Jews streamed to the place of his captivity, in the hope to be deemed worthy of beholding him. The governor of the castle reaped advantage thereby, for he charged the visitors entrance money, and raised it to fifteen or thirty marks a head. Even the inhabitants of the place profited, because they could earn high prices for board and lodging. A veritable shower of gold poured into Abydos. The impression which these facts, industriously circulated and exaggerated, made on the Jews in Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the effect which they produced, are indescribable. With few exceptions all were convinced of Sabbataï's Messiahship, and of a speedy redemption, in two years at the latest. They argued that he had had the courage to go to the Turkish capital, although he had openly proclaimed the dethronement of the sultan, yet had not forfeited his life, but had been left in a sort of mock imprisonment. What more was needed to confirm the predictions of prophets of ancient and modern times? The Jews accordingly prepared seriously to return to their original home. In Hungary they began to unroof their houses. In large commercial cities, where Jews took the lead in wholesale business, such as Amsterdam, Leghorn, and Hamburg, stagnation of trade ensued. In almost all synagogues his initials, S and Z, were posted up with more or less adornment. Almost everywhere a prayer for him was inserted in the following form: "Bless our Lord and King, the holy and righteous Sabbataï Zevi, the Messiah of the God of Jacob." In Europe the eyes of all communities were directed to Amsterdam, the representatives of which adhered to the movement most enthusiastically. Every post-day which brought fresh letters was a holiday for them. The Amsterdam Jews showed their joy openly, and were afraid neither of the Christian population nor of the magistrates. Isaac Naar, of Amsterdam, and the rich Abraham Pereira, prepared themselves for a journey to the Messiah, and the former ironically announced it to the unbelieving Jacob Sasportas. The Hamburg community always imitated that of Amsterdam, or went beyond it. The council introduced the custom of praying for Sabbataï Zevi, not only on Saturday, but also on Monday and Thursday. The unbelievers were compelled to remain in the synagogue and join in the prayer with a loud Amen. And all this was done at the suggestion of the educated physician Bendito de Castro. The believers went so far as to threaten their opponents if they ventured to utter a word of censure against Sabbataï. At Venice, on the Sabbath, a quarrel broke out between the Sabbatians and their opponents, and one of the latter nearly lost his life. When Sabbataï was asked how the Kofrim (unbelievers) should be dealt with, he, or Samuel Primo, answered that they might be put to death without ado, even on the Sabbath; the executors of such punishment were sure to enjoy eternal bliss. A learned Talmudist at Buda, Jacob Ashkenazi of Wilna, whose son and grandson became zealous persecutors of the Sabbatians, was guided by the decision, and declared a member of the community worthy of death, because he would not say the blessing for Sabbataï Zevi. In Moravia (at Nikolsburg) there were such violent dissensions and tumults in consequence of the craze about the Messiah, that the governor of the province was obliged to post up notices to calm men's minds. At Salee, in the north-western part of Africa, the ruling Emir Gailan (Gailand) ordered a persecution of the Jews, because they too openly displayed the hope of their coming redemption.

Many Christians shared the delusive faith in the new Messiah, and the weekly tidings from the East concerning Sabbataï Zevi and his doings made an overwhelming impression on them. At Hamburg, for example, pious Protestants betook themselves to the proselytizing preacher Esdras Edzard, and asked him what was to be done:

"We have certain accounts, not only from Jews, but also from our Christian correspondents at Smyrna, Aleppo, Constantinople, and other places in Turkey, that the new Messiah of the Jews does many miracles, and the Jews of the whole world flock to him. What will become of the Christian doctrine and the belief in our Messiah?"

The attention bestowed by educated classes of Christians upon the extraordinary events, which were published as news of the day, in turn enhanced the credulity of the Jews. In short, every circumstance tended to increase the deception. Only Jacob Sasportas raised his warning voice against the imposture. He sent letters in all directions, here to point out the absurdity of current rumors, there to collect exact information. He failed to obtain striking evidence of Sabbataï's, or Nathan's, roguery. Forged letters and documents were the order of the day; conscientiousness and uprightness had utterly disappeared. Thus the mist of false belief grew thicker and thicker, and one was no longer able to get at the truth.

For three months, from April to July, Sabbataï had been leading the life of a prince in the castle of the Dardanelles, intent only upon his own apotheosis. Either from caprice or at Samuel Primo's suggestion, he declared the fast of the 17th Tammuz to be abolished, because on this day he had realized his Messianic character. Was this a mere freak, or was it done with the intention of accustoming his adherents to the abolition of Rabbinical Judaism? At all events, he appointed the 23d of Tammuz (July 25th), a Monday, to be kept as a strict Sabbath. More than four thousand Jews, men and women, who happened to be at Abydos, celebrated this new Sabbath with great scrupulousness. Sabbataï, or his secretary, sent circulars to the communities directing them to celebrate the next fast, the ninth of Ab, his birthday, as a festival by a special service, with Psalms specially chosen, with eating of choice meats, and the sound of the harp and singing. He is said to have contemplated the annulling of all the Jewish festivals, even the Day of Atonement, and the introduction of others in their stead. But before this could be done, he was guilty in his pride of an act of folly which caused the whole fabric to collapse.

Among the many thousand visitors from far and near, two Poles from Lemberg made a pilgrimage to him, to confirm their faith and feast on his countenance. One was Isaiah, son of a highly-esteemed Rabbinical authority, the aged David Levi (Ture Zahab), and grandson of the no less celebrated Joel Serkes; the other, his half-brother, Leb Herz. From these two Poles Sabbataï heard that in the distant land from which they came, another prophet, Nehemiah Cohen, was announcing the approach of the Messiah's kingdom, but not through Sabbataï. He gave Isaiah Levi a laconic letter to take to his father, in which he promised the Jews of Poland revenge for the massacre by the Cossacks, and peremptorily ordered Nehemiah to come to him with all speed. He laid so much stress on Nehemiah's coming, that he made his followers eager for his arrival. The two Poles traveled back delighted to Lemberg, and everywhere told of the splendor amid which they had seen the Messiah. Nehemiah was ordered to hasten to Sabbataï, and he was not deterred by the length of the journey. When he arrived at Abydos at the beginning of September, he was immediately admitted to an audience which lasted several days. The Polish prophet and the Smyrna Messiah did not laugh in one another's faces, like two augurs, but carried on a grave discussion. The subject of their mystical conversation remained unknown, as may be imagined. It was said to concern the forerunner of the Messiah – the Messiah of Ephraim – whether or not he had appeared and perished, as had been predicted. Nehemiah was not convinced by the long argument, and did not conceal the fact. On this account, the fanatical Sabbatians are said to have secretly made signs to one another to do away with this dangerous Pole. He fortunately escaped from the castle, betook himself forthwith to Adrianople, to the Kaimakam Mustapha, became a Mahometan, and betrayed the fantastic and treasonable designs which Sabbataï Zevi cherished, and which, he said, had remained unknown to the government, only because the overseer of the castle of Dardanelles had an interest in the concourse of Jews.

The Kaimakam conveyed the intelligence to the sultan, Mahomet IV, and the course to be pursued with regard to Sabbataï was maturely considered, the mufti Vanni being also admitted to aid the deliberations. To make short work with the rebellious schemer appeared impracticable to the council, particularly as Mahometans also followed him. If he should fall as a martyr, a new sect might arise, which would kindle fresh disturbances. Vanni, a proselytizing priest, proposed that an attempt be made to bring Sabbataï over to Islam. This advice was followed, and the sultan's physician (Hakim Bashi), a Jewish renegade, by name Guidon, was employed as the medium. A messenger suddenly appeared at Abydos, drove away the Jews, who were besieging the Messiah with homage, conveyed him to Adrianople, and brought him first to the Hakim Bashi, who, as a former co-religionist, would be able to convert him the more easily. The physician represented to him the dreadful punishment that would inevitably befall him – he would be bound, and scourged through the streets with burning torches, if he did not appease the wrath of the sultan by adopting Islamism. It is not known whether this call to apostatize from Judaism cost the conceited Messiah great mental conflict. He had not much manly courage, and Judaism, in its existing form, was perhaps dead for him. So he adopted Guidon's advice. The following day (Elul 13, September 14, 1666) he was brought before the sultan. He immediately cast off his Jewish head-dress, in sign of contempt; a page offered him a white Turkish turban and a green instead of the black mantle which he wore, and so his conversion to the Mahometan religion was accomplished. When his dress was changed, it is said that several pounds of biscuit were found in his loose trousers. The sultan was highly pleased at this termination of the movement, gave him the name of Mehmed Effendi, and appointed him his door-keeper – Capigi Bashi Otorak – with a considerable monthly salary; he was to remain near the sultan. The Messiah's wife, Sarah, the Polish rabbi's fair daughter of loose behavior, likewise became a Mahometan, under the name of Fauma Kadin, and received rich presents from the sultana. Some of Sabbataï's followers also went over to Islam. The mufti Vanni instructed them in the Mahometan religion. Sabbataï is said to have married a Mahometan slave, in addition to his wife Sarah, at the command of the mufti. Nehemiah Cohen, who had brought about this sudden change, did not remain in Turkey, but returned to Poland, took off the turban, and lived quietly without breathing a word of what had happened. He disappeared as suddenly as he had come forward. The ex-Messiah impudently wrote, some days after his conversion, to his brothers at Smyrna: "God has made me an Ishmaelite; He commanded, and it was done. The ninth day of my regeneration." Nearly at the same time the rabbis and presidents of schools at Amsterdam assembled, and sent a letter of homage to Sabbataï Zevi, to testify their belief in and submission to him. The semi-Spinozist Dionysius (Benjamin) Musaphia, vexed at not being invited, wrote a separate letter to Sabbataï Zevi, signed by himself and two members of the school (Elul 24th). A week later, twenty-four distinguished men of Amsterdam sent another letter of homage to the apostate Messiah. At their head was Abraham Gideon Abudiente. Did these letters reach the Mahometan Mehmed Effendi? At Hamburg, where likewise his conversion was not suspected, the blessing was five times pronounced over the renegade Sabbataï, on the Day of Atonement (October 9, 1666).

But when the rumor of his apostasy went the rounds of the communities, and could no longer be denied, confidence was succeeded by a bewildering sense of disenchantment and shame. The highest representative of Judaism had abandoned and betrayed it! Chayim Benvenisti, the rabbi of Smyrna, who had invested the false Messiah with authority from motives far from honorable, almost died of shame. Mahometans and Christians pointed with scorn at the blind, credulous Jews. The street boys in Turkey openly jeered at Jewish passers-by. But this ridicule was not all. So widespread a commotion could not die out and leave no trace. The sultan thought of destroying all the Jews in his empire, because they had formed rebellious plans, and of ordering all children under seven to be brought up in Islamism. The newly converted Mahometan, Mehmed Effendi, in order to revenge himself, is said to have betrayed his own plans, and the consent of the Jews thereto. Two councilors and the sultana-mother are reported to have dissuaded the sultan from his design by the observation that the Jews ought to be regarded as having been misled. Fifty chief rabbis, however, because they had neglected their duty in teaching the people, were to be executed – twelve from Constantinople, twelve from Smyrna, and the remaining twenty-six from the other communities in Turkey. It was regarded as a special miracle that this resolution remained a dead letter, and that the Jews did not even have to pay a fine. The division in the communities might have had even worse consequences, if the unbelievers had heaped scorn and mockery upon the late devotees. But the colleges of rabbis in the East interposed, and sought to appease and reconcile, and threatened to excommunicate any one who, by word or deed, offended a former Sabbatian.

Although men's minds were calmed for the moment, it was long before peace was restored. After the first surprise at Sabbataï's conversion was over, his zealous followers, especially at Smyrna, began to recover. They could not persuade themselves that they had really been running after a shadow. There must be, or have been, some truth in Sabbataï's Messianic claims, since all signs so entirely agreed. The Kabbalists easily got over objections. Sabbataï had not turned Mahometan; a phantom had played that part, while he himself had retired to heaven or to the Ten Tribes, and would soon appear again to accomplish the work of redemption. As at the time of the origin of Christianity mystical believers (Docetæ) interpreted the crucifixion of Jesus as a phantasm, so now thorough-going mystics explained Sabbataï's apostasy from Judaism. Others, such as Samuel Primo, Jacob Faliachi, Jacob Israel Duchan, who had designed, through him, to bring about the fall of Rabbinical Judaism, and would not abandon their plan lightly, still clung to him. The prophets, who had been manifestly proved false through his conversion, were most interested in remaining true to him. They did not care quietly to renounce their functions and withdraw into obscurity, or be laughed at. The prophets residing at Smyrna, Constantinople, Rhodes, and Chios were silenced; but the itinerant prophets, Nathan Ghazati and Sabbataï Raphael, did not choose to abdicate. The former had remained in Palestine during Sabbataï's triumph in order to be paid homage on his own account. After the deception was unmasked he regarded himself as no longer safe; he made preparations to go to Smyrna, and continued to send out his mystical, bombastic letters. From Damascus he warned the Jews of Aleppo by letter not to allow themselves to be discouraged by strange circumstances in their belief in the Messiah; there was a deep mystery shortly to be revealed; but wherein the mystery consisted could not yet be disclosed. By these circulars the credulous were confirmed afresh in their delusion. In Smyrna many synagogues continued to insert the blessing for Sabbataï in their prayers. Hence the rabbis were obliged to interfere vigorously, especially the rabbinate of the Turkish capital. They laid under a ban all who should even pronounce the name of Sabbataï, or converse with his followers, and threatened to hand them over to the secular arm. Nathan Ghazati, in particular, was excommunicated, and everyone warned against harboring him or approaching him (Kislev 12, December 9, 1666). These sentences of excommunication were so far effectual that Nathan could not stay anywhere for any length of time, and even in Smyrna he could remain only a short time in secret at the house of a believer. But the rabbis were not able entirely to exorcise the imposture. One of the most zealous Sabbatians, probably Samuel Primo, who was ready in invention, threw out a more effective suggestion than that of the mock conversion. All had been ordained as it had come to pass. Precisely by his going over to Islam had Sabbataï proved himself the Messiah. It was a Kabbalistic mystery which some writings had announced beforehand. As the first redeemer Moses was obliged to reside for some time at Pharaoh's court, not as an Israelite, but to all appearance an Egyptian, even so must the last redeemer live some time at a heathen court, apparently a heathen, "outwardly sinful, but inwardly pure." It was Sabbataï's task to free the lost emanations of the soul, which pervade even Mahometans, and by identifying them with himself, as it were, bring them back to the fountain-head. By redeeming souls in all circles, he was most effectually furthering the kingdom of the Messiah. This suggestion was a lucky hit; it kindled anew the flame of the imposture. It became a watchword for all Sabbatians enabling them, with decency and a show of reason, to profess themselves believers, and hold together.

Nathan Ghazati also caught up this idea, and was encouraged to resume his part as prophet. He had fared badly so far; he had been obliged secretly to leave Smyrna, where he had been in hiding several months (end of April, 1667). His followers, consisting of more than thirty men, were dispersed. But by this new imposture he recovered courage, and approached Adrianople, where Mehmed Effendi presided, attended by several of his adherents, who as pretended Mahometans lived and made fantastic plans with him. The representatives of the Jewish community at Constantinople and Adrianople rightly feared fresh disturbances from the presence of the false prophet, and desired to get rid of him. Nathan Ghazati, however, relied on his prophecy, which might possibly, he said, be fulfilled at the end of the year. He expected the Holy Spirit to descend upon the renegade Mehmed on the Feast of Weeks (Pentecost), and then he also would be able to show signs and wonders. Until then, he defiantly replied to the deputies, he could entertain no propositions. When the Feast of Weeks was over, the people of Adrianople again urged him to cease from his juggleries. After much labor they obtained only a written promise to keep at a distance of twelve days' journey from the city, not to correspond with Sabbataï, not to assemble people round him, and if by the end of the year the Redeemer did not appear, to consider his prophecies false. In spite of his written promise, this lying prophet continued his agitation, and admonished the Sabbatians in Adrianople to make known their continued adhesion by the suspension of the fast on the 17th of Tammuz. In this city there was a Sabbatian conventicle under the leadership of a former disciple, who stood in close connection with Mehmed Effendi. The rabbinate of Adrianople did not know how to check the mischievous course of this daring sect, and were obliged to have recourse to falsehood. They announced that the renegade had suddenly appeared before the Jewish communal council, had repented of his imposture, and laid the blame on Nathan and Abraham Yachini, who had made him their dupe. In this way the rabbinate succeeded in deceiving the Sabbatians. The effect did not last long. Nathan on the one hand, and Mehmed Effendi's circle on the other, awakened new hope, the number of believers again increased, and they made a special point of not fasting on the 9th of Ab, the birthday of their Messiah. The rabbinates of Constantinople and Smyrna sought to repress this imposture by the old means – excommunication and threats of punishment (end of July) – but with little success. The Sabbatians had a sort of hankering after martyrdom in order to seal their faith. The false prophet renewed his propagandism. He still had some followers, including two Mahometans. At Salonica, the home of a swarm of Kabbalists, he fared badly. The more easily did he find a hearing in the communities of the islands of Chios and Corfu. His hopes were however directed principally to Italy.

Here also confusion continued to reign. The first news of Sabbataï's defection had not been confirmed, as in consequence of the war in Crete the ships of the Christians had been captured by the Turks. Thus the Sabbatians were left free to maintain their faith and denounce the report as false, especially as encouraging letters arrived from Raphael Joseph Chelebi of Cairo and others. The most absurd stories of Sabbataï's power and dignity at the Porte were published in Italy, and found credence. Moses Pinheiro, Sabbataï's old companion, Raphael Sofino at Leghorn, and the Amsterdam fanatics, Isaac Naar and Abraham Pereira, who had gone to Italy to search for the Messiah, had a special interest in clinging to straws; they feared ridicule as dupes. The ignorant mountebank and strolling prophet, Sabbataï Raphael, from the Morea, then residing in Italy, was bent upon deception and fraud, and appears to have reaped a good harvest there. When at last there could be no doubt of Sabbataï's change of religion, Raphael turned his steps to Germany, where, on account of defective postal arrangements and the slight intercourse of Jews with the outer world, they had only a vague idea of the course of events, and took the most foolish stories for truth. Sabbataï Raphael was there regarded as a prophet; but, as he expected greater gain from the rich Amsterdam community, he betook himself thither (September, 1667). Here also the imposture continued. Ashamed that they, the shrewd and educated Portuguese, should have been so signally deceived, they at first placed no faith in the news of Sabbataï's treachery. Even the rabbis Isaac Aboab, Raphael Moses d'Aguilar, and the philosophical sceptic Musaphia, remained staunch. Justly Jacob Sasportas laughed them to scorn, especially Musaphia, on account of his present unshaken faith as contrasted with his former incredulity.

Meanwhile Nathan Ghazati, the prophet of Gaza was pursuing his mischievous course in Italy. Coming from Greece, he landed at Venice (end of March, 1668), but the rabbinate and the council, who had had warning of him, would not allow him to enter the Ghetto. A Sabbatian interceded for him with some Christians of rank, and under such protection he could not be expelled. To cure those who had shared in the delusion, the rabbinate wrung from him a written confession, that his prophecies of Sabbataï Zevi's Messiahship rested on a freak of his imagination, that he recognized them as such, and held them to be idle. This confession was printed with an introduction by the rabbinate of Venice, in order at last to open the eyes of the Sabbatians in Italy. But it was not of much avail. The delusion, resting as it did on the Kabbala, was too deeply rooted. From Venice Ghazati was sent to Leghorn, with the suggestion to render him innocuous there, where Jews enjoyed more freedom; but Nathan Ghazati secretly escaped to Rome, cut off his beard, disguised himself, and is said to have thrown notes written in Chaldee into the Tiber, to bring about the destruction of Rome. The Jews recognized him, and, since they feared danger for themselves on papal soil from his fraudulent absurdities, they procured his banishment. Then he went to Leghorn, and found followers there also. Promising himself more honor and profit in Turkey, or more opportunity to satisfy his restless mind, Nathan returned to Adrianople. He did not pay great regard to word and oath. Nathan Ghazati compiled much Kabbalistic nonsense, but acquired no fame. He is said to have died at Sophia, and to have been laid in a vault dug by himself (1680). Other men appeared at the head of the Sabbatians who far surpassed him, and pursued a definite end.

Sabbataï, or Mehmed Effendi, at this time began his revolutionary chimeras afresh. Immediately after his apostasy he was obliged, under the direction of the mufti Vanni, to acquire Mahometan ways, and guard carefully against any appearance of inclination to Judaism and the Jews. He therefore figured as a pious Mahometan. Gradually he was permitted greater freedom, and to give utterance to his Kabbalistic views about God and the universe. Vanni, to whom much was new, heard his expositions with curiosity, and the sultan also is said to have listened to his words attentively. Probably Sabbataï won over some Mahometans to his Kabbalistic dreams. Weary of quiet, and anxious to play an active part again, he once more entered into close relations with Jews, and gave out that he had been filled anew with the Holy Spirit at Passover (end of March, 1668), and had received revelations. Sabbataï, or one of his aiders and abettors, published a mystical work ("Five Evidences of the Faith," Sahaduta di Mehemnuta) addressed to the Jews and couched in extravagant language, in which the following fantastic views were set forth: Sabbataï had been and remained the true Redeemer; it would be easy to prove himself such, if he had not compassion on Israel, who would have to experience the same dreadful sufferings as the Messiah; and he only persisted in Mahometanism in order to bring thousands and tens of thousands of non-Jews over to Israel. To the sultan and the mufti, on the other hand, he said that his approximation to the Jews was intended to bring them over to Islam. He received permission to associate with Jews, and to preach before them at Adrianople, even in synagogues. Thus he played the part of Jew at one time, of Mussulman at another. If Turkish spies were present, his Jewish hearers knew how to deceive them. They threw away their Jewish headdress, and put on the turban. It is probable that many Jews were seriously converted to Islam, and a Jewish-Turkish sect thus began to form round Sabbataï Zevi. The Jews who had hitherto felt such horror of apostatizing, that only the outcasts amongst them went over to Christianity or Islam, became less severe. They said without indignation that so and so had adopted the turban. Through such jugglery Sabbatians at Adrianople, Smyrna, Salonica, and other cities, even in Palestine, allowed themselves to be confirmed in their obstinate faith in the Messiah. Even pious men, learned in the Talmud, continued to adhere to him.

As though this complication were to become more involved, and the Kabbalistic-Messianic disorder were to be pursued to its utmost limits, a Sabbatian champion unexpectedly appeared in a man of European culture, not wanting in gifts, Abraham Michael Cardoso. He was an original character, a living personification of the transformation of the Portuguese Jews after their expulsion. Born of Marrano parents in a small town of Portugal, Celarico, in the province of Beïra, Miguel Cardoso, like his elder brother Fernando, studied medicine. While the latter devoted himself earnestly to science, Miguel dawdled away his days amidst the luxury of Madrid, sang love-songs with the guitar under the balconies of fair ladies, and paid very little heed to Kabbala or Judaism. What influenced him to leave Spain is not known. Perhaps his more serious and thoughtful brother, who, after making a name in Spain as a medical and scientific author, out of love to Judaism migrated to Venice, where he plunged deeply into Jewish literature, infected him with enthusiasm. Both brothers assumed Jewish names after their return to the religion of their forefathers. The elder, Isaac Cardoso, gave up his name Fernando; the younger took the name of Abraham in addition to that of Miguel (Michael). Both composed verses in Spanish. While the elder brother led a regular life, guided by moral principles and a rational faith, the younger fell under the sway of extravagant fancy and an eccentric manner of living. Isaac Cardoso (born 1615, died after 1680) conferred renown on Judaism, while Abraham Michael Cardoso (born about 1630, died 1706) was a disgrace to it.

The latter lived as a physician at Leghorn, but not flourishing he accepted the position of physician in ordinary to the Bey of Tripoli. His warm-blooded, dissolute nature was a hindrance to his advancement. Contrary to the custom of African Jews, he married two wives, and instead of employing himself with his difficult science, he revolved fantastical schemes. Cardoso appears to have been initiated into the Kabbala and the Sabbatian delusion by Moses Pinheiro, who was living at Leghorn.

He continually had dreams and visions, which increased in frequency after the public appearance of Sabbataï at Smyrna and Constantinople. He communicated his delusion to his wives and domestics, who likewise pretended to have seen all sorts of apparitions. The apostasy of the false Messiah from Judaism did not cure Cardoso of his delusion; he remained a zealous partisan, and even justified the treachery of the Messiah by saying that it was necessary for him to be counted among sinners, in order that he might atone for Israel's sin of idolatry, and blot it out. He sent circulars in all directions, in order to support the Messianic claim of Sabbataï, and figure as a prophet. In vain his more sober brother, Isaac Cardoso, warned and ridiculed him, asking him ironically, whether he had received the gift of prophecy from his former gallantries and from playing the guitar for the fair maidens of Madrid. Abraham Cardoso's frivolity was in no way lessened, he even assumed a didactic tone towards his grave elder brother, who despised the Kabbala as he did alchemy and astrology, and sent him numberless proofs, from the Zohar and other Kabbalistic writings, that Sabbataï was the true Messiah, and that he must necessarily be estranged from Judaism. By his zeal he gained many adherents for the Sabbatian delusion in Africa; but he also made enemies, and incurred dangers. He continued to prophesy the speedy commencement of the Messiah's reign, although often proved false by reality. He put off the event from year to year, performed Kabbalistic tricks, set up a new God for Israel, and at last declared himself the Messiah of the house of Ephraim, until he was rigorously prosecuted by an opponent of these vagaries. Cardoso was driven back to his former uncomfortable position, forced to lead an adventurer's life, and win bread for himself and his family, so to speak, by his delusions, going through all sorts of jugglery, at Smyrna, at Constantinople, in the Greek islands, and at Cairo, and promoting the Sabbatian delusions with his abundant knowledge, eloquent tongue, and ready pen. Thanks to his education in Christian schools, he was far superior to other Sabbatian apostles, and knew how to give an air of rationality and wisdom to nonsense, thus completely blinding the biased, and stultifying even those averse to the Sabbatian movement.

Encouraged by the support of the Jews, continued in spite of his change of religion, Sabbataï persisted in keeping up his character as Messiah, and associated more and more with Jews. His weak brain had been turned by the overwhelming rush of events, and he completely lost balance. At one time he reviled Judaism and the God of Israel with foul words of abuse, and is said even to have informed against Jews as blasphemers of Islam before Turkish magistrates. At other times he held divine service according to the Jewish ritual with his Jewish followers, sang psalms, expounded the Zohar, ordered selections from the Torah to be read on the Sabbath, and frequently chose seven virgins for that purpose. On account of his constant intercourse with Jews, whom he was not able to bring over wholesale to Mahometanism, as he may have boastfully asserted, Mehmed Effendi is said to have fallen into disfavor, forfeited his allowance and been banished from Adrianople to Constantinople. He finally married another wife, the daughter of a man learned in the Talmud, Joseph Philosoph of Salonica. The Turkish patrol having surprised him in a village (Kuru Gisme) near Constantinople, while singing psalms in a tent with some Jews, and the Bostanji Bashi (officer) having reported it, the grand vizir commanded the Kaimakam to banish him to Dulcigno, a small town in Albania, where no Jews dwelt. There he died, abandoned and forsaken, it was afterwards said, on the Day of Atonement, 1676.

Spinoza, who had likewise broken away from Judaism, may well have looked with great contempt on this Messianic craze of his contemporaries. If he had cared to dig the grave of Judaism and bury it, he would have been obliged to recognize Sabbataï Zevi, his private secretary, Samuel Primo, and his prophets, as allies and abettors. The irrationality of the Kabbala brought Judaism much more effectually into discredit than reason and philosophy. It is a remarkable fact that neither the one nor the other could wean the numerous cultured Jews of Amsterdam from the religion of their forefathers, so strongly was it rooted in their hearts. At this time when two forces of Jewish origin were antagonizing Judaism in the East and the West, the Portuguese community, increased to the number of four thousand families, undertook (1671) the building of a splendid synagogue, and after some years finished the huge work, which had been interrupted by war troubles. The dedication of the synagogue (Ab 10, August 2, 1675), was celebrated with great solemnity and pomp. Neither the first Temple of Solomon, nor the second of Zerubbabel, nor the third of Herod, was so much lauded with song and eloquent speech as the new one at Amsterdam, called Talmud Torah. Copper-plate engravings, furnished with inscriptions in verse, were published. Christians likewise took part in the dedication. They advanced money to the Jews in the times of need, and a poet, Romein de Hooghe, composed verses in honor of the synagogue and the Jewish people in Latin, Dutch, and French.

Spinoza lived to see this rejoicing of the community from which he had become a pervert. He happened to be at Amsterdam just at the time. He was engaged in seeing through the press a treatise (Ethics) which reversed the views hitherto prevailing, and the second, enlarged edition of his other work, chiefly directed against Judaism. He may have laughed at the joy of the Amsterdam Jews, as idle; but the building of this synagogue in a city which a hundred years before had tolerated no Jews and had supported a Spanish Inquisition, was loud testimony of the times, and contradicted many of his assertions. He died not long afterwards, or rather, passed gently away as with a divine kiss (February 21, 1677), about five months after Sabbataï Zevi. Against his will he has contributed to the glory of the race which he so unjustly reviled. His powerful intellect, logical acumen, and strength of character are more and more recognized as properties which he owed to the race from which he was descended. Among educated Jews, Isaac Orobio de Castro alone attempted a serious refutation of Spinoza's philosophical views. Though his intention was good, he was too weak to break through the close meshes of Spinoza's system. It was left to history to refute it with facts.

CHAPTER V.
LIGHT AND SHADE

Jews under Mahometan Rulers – Expulsion from Vienna – Jews admitted by Elector Frederick William into the Mark of Brandenburg – Charge of Child-murder in Metz – Milder Treatment of Jews throughout Europe – Christian Champions of the Jews: Jurieu, Oliger Pauli, and Moses Germanus – Predilection of Christians for the Study of Jewish Literature – Richard Simon – Interest taken by Charles XI in the Karaites – Peringer and Jacob Trigland – German Attacks on Judaism by Wülfer, Wagenseil, and Eisenmenger – Circumstances of the Publication of Judaism Unmasked– The Alenu Prayer – Surenhuysius, Basnage, Unger, Wolf, and Toland.

1669–170 °C. E

The princes and nations of Europe and Asia showed great consideration in not disturbing the Messianic farce of the Jews, who were quietly allowed to make themselves ridiculous. A pause had come in the constantly recurring persecution of the Jews, which did not, however, last very long. The regular succession of accusations, vexations, and banishments soon re-commenced. The contrast between the followers of Mahomet and those of Jesus is very striking. In Turkey the Jews were free from persecution, in spite of their great excitement, and absurd dreams of a national Messiah. In Africa, Sid Gailand and later Muley Arshid, sultan of Tafilet, Fez, and Morocco, oppressed the Jews, partly on account of their activity, partly from rapacity. But this ceased with the next sovereign, Muley Ismail. He was a patron of the Jews, and entrusted several with important posts. He had two Jewish advisers, Daniel Toledano of Miquenes, a friend of Jacob Sasportas, a Talmudist and experienced in state affairs, and Joseph Maimaran, likewise from Miquenes.

Within Christendom, on the contrary, Jews were esteemed and treated as men only in Holland; in other states they were regarded as outcasts, who had no rights, and no claim to compassion. Spain again led the way in decreeing banishments. That unfortunate country, becoming more and more depopulated through despotism, superstition, and the Inquisition, was then ruled by a foolish, fanatical woman, the dowager-regent Maria Anna of Austria, who had made her father-confessor, the German Jesuit Neidhard, inquisitor-general and minister with unlimited powers. Naturally, no toleration of other religions could be suffered at this bigoted court. There were still Jews in some parts of the monarchy, in the north-western corner of Africa, in Oran, Maxarquivir, and other cities. Many had rendered considerable services to the Spanish crown, in times of peace and war, against the native Arabs, or Moors, who endured with inward rage the dominion of the cross. The families of Cansino and Sasportas, the former royal interpreters, or dragomans, for the province of Oran, had distinguished themselves especially by their fidelity and devotion to Spain; and their conduct had been recognized by Philip IV, the husband of Maria Anna, in a special letter. Nevertheless, the queen-dowager suddenly ordered the banishment of the Jews from the district, because she could no longer tolerate people of this race in her realm. At the urgent request of Jewish grandees the governor allowed the Jews eight days' grace during the Passover, and admitted that they were banished, not because of misconduct or treason, but simply on account of the regent's intolerance (end of April, 1669). They were obliged to sell their possessions in haste at ridiculous prices. The exiles settled in the district of Savoy, at Villafranca, near Nice.

Like mother, like daughter. At about this time the banishment of Jews from Vienna and the arch-duchy of Austria was decreed at the instigation of the daughter of the Spanish regent, the empress Margaret, an ally of the Jesuits. The emperor did not easily allow himself to be prejudiced against Jews, from whom he derived a certain revenue. The community of Vienna alone, grown to nearly two thousand souls, paid a yearly tax of 10,000, and the country community of 4,000, florins. Including the income from Jews in other places, the emperor received from them 50,000 florins annually. But an empress need not trouble herself about finance; she can follow the inclinations of her heart, and Margaret's heart, filled with Jesuitism, hated Jews profoundly, and her father-confessor strengthened the feeling. Having met with an accident at a ball, she wished to testify her gratitude to heaven which had wonderfully preserved her, and could find no means more acceptable to God than the misery of Jews. More urgently than before she entreated her imperial consort to banish from the capital and the country the Jews, described by her father-confessor as outcasts of hell, and she received his promise. With trumpet-sound it was made known in Vienna (February 14, 1670) that by the emperor's command the Jews were to quit the city within a few months on pain of death. They left no measure untried to avert the stroke. Often before had similar resolutions been recalled by Austrian emperors. The Jews cited the privileges accorded them in writing, and the services which they had rendered the imperial house. They offered large sums of money (there were very rich court Jews at Vienna), used the influence of persons connected with the court, and, after a solemn service in honor of the recovery of the emperor from sickness, presented him as he left the church with a large gold cup, and the empress with a handsome silver basin and jug. The presents were accepted, but the command was not recalled.

At Vienna and at the court there was no prospect of a change of purpose; the Jesuits had the upper hand through the empress and her confessor. The community of Vienna in despair thought to avert the evil by another, roundabout course. The Jews of Germany had felt sincere sympathy for their brethren, and had implored heaven by prayer and fasting to save them. The Jews of Vienna could count confidently upon their zeal. Therefore, in a pitiful letter to the most influential and perhaps the richest Jew of that time, Isaac (Manoel) Texeira, the esteemed agent of Queen Christina, they begged him to exert his influence with temporal and church princes, through them to make Empress Margaret change her mind. Texeira had previously taken active steps in that direction, and he promised to continue them. He had written to some Spanish grandees with whom he stood in close connection to use their influence with the empress's confessor. The queen of Sweden, who, after her romantic conversion to Catholicism, enjoyed great esteem in the Catholic world, led Texeira to hope that, by letters addressed to the papal nuncio, to the empress, and to her mother, the Spanish regent, she might prevent the banishment of the Austrian Jews. The Jews of Rome also did their part to save their threatened brethren. But all these efforts led to nothing. Unhappily there had just been a papal election at Rome after the death of Clement IX, so that the head of the church, though Jews were tolerated in his states, could not be prevailed upon to assume a decided attitude. Emperor Leopold remained firm, and disposed of the houses of the Jews before they had left them. He was only humane enough to order, under pain of severe punishment, that no harm be done to the departing Jews.

So the Jews had to submit to the iron will of necessity, and grasp their pilgrims' staffs. When 1,400 souls had fallen into distress, or at least into an anxious plight, and many had succumbed, the remainder, more than three hundred, again petitioned the emperor, recounting the services of Jews to the imperial house, and showing all the accusations against them to be groundless, at all events not proven. They did not shrink from declaring that to be a Jew could not be called a crime, and protested that they ought to be treated as Roman citizens, who ought not to be summarily expelled. They begged at least for a respite until the next meeting of the Reichstag. Even this petition, in which they referred to the difficulty of finding a refuge, if the emperor, the ruler of half of Europe, rejected them, remained without effect. All had to depart; only one family, that of the court factor, Marcus Schlesinger Jaffa, was allowed to remain in Vienna, on account of services rendered. The Jesuits were full of joy, and proclaimed the praise of God in a gradual. The magistrates bought the Jews' quarter from the emperor for 100,000 florins, and called it Leopoldstadt in his honor. The site of the synagogue was used for a church, of which the emperor laid the corner-stone (August 18, 1670) in honor of his patron saint. A golden tablet was to perpetuate the shameful deeds of the Jews:

"After the Jews were banished, the emperor caused their synagogue, which had been as a charnel-house, to be made into a house of God."

The tablet, however, only proves the mental weakness of the emperor and his people. The Talmud school (Beth ha-Midrash) was likewise converted into a church, and named in honor of the empress and her patron saint.

But this dark picture had also its bright side. A struggling state, which hitherto had not tolerated the Jews, now became a new, though not very hospitable, home, where the Jewish race was rejuvenated. The Austrian exiles dispersed in various directions. Many sought protection in Moravia, Bohemia, and Poland. Others went to Venice and as far as the Turkish frontiers, others turned to Fürth, in Bavaria. Fifty families were received by Elector Frederick William, in the Mark of Brandenburg. This great prince, who laid the solid foundation for the future greatness of the Prussian monarchy, was not more tolerant than other princes of Louis XIV's century; but he was more clear-sighted than Emperor Leopold, and recognized that a sound state of finances is essential to the prosperity of a state, and that Jews retained somewhat of their old renown as financiers. In the Mark of Brandenburg no Jew had been allowed to dwell for a hundred years, since their expulsion under Elector John George. Frederick William himself took the step so difficult for many; he wrote (April, 1670) to his ambassador, Andrew Neumann, at Vienna, that he was inclined to receive into the electoral Mark from forty to fifty prosperous Jewish families of the exiles from Vienna under certain conditions and limitations. The conditions, made known a year later, proved in many points very harsh, but were more favorable than in other Protestant countries, as, for instance, in the bigoted city of Hamburg. The Jews might settle where they pleased in Brandenburg and in the duchy of Crossen, and might trade everywhere without hindrance. The burgomasters were directed to place no impediment in the way of their settlement and not to molest them. Every family had to pay eight thalers a year as a protective tax, a gold florin for every marriage, and the same for every funeral; on the other hand, they were freed from the poll-tax throughout the country. They might buy and build houses, on condition that after the expiration of a term they sell them to Christians. They were not permitted to have synagogues, but could have prayer-rooms, and appoint a school-master and a butcher (Shochet). This charter of protection was valid for only twenty years, but a prospect was held out that it would be prolonged by the elector or his successor. Of these fifty Austrian families, some seven settled in Berlin, and formed the foundation of the community afterwards so large and influential. One step led to another. Frederick William also admitted rich Jews from Hamburg, Glogau, and other cities, and thus communities sprang up at Landsberg and Frankfort-on-the-Oder.

It is evident that Frederick William admitted the Jews purely from financial considerations. But he occasionally showed unselfish goodwill towards some. When he agreed to the quixotic plan of Skytte, a Swedish royal councilor, to found, at Tangermünde in the Mark, a university for all sciences and an asylum for persecuted savants, he did not fail, according to his programme, to admit into this Athens of the Mark, Jewish men of learning, as well as Arabs and unbelievers of every kind, but on condition that they should keep their errors to themselves, and not spread them abroad.

At another spot in Christian Europe a few rays of light pierced the darkness. About the same time that the Jews were expelled from Vienna, a false accusation, which might have had far-reaching consequences, cropped up against the Jews of a city recently brought under French rule. In Metz, a considerable community had developed in the course of a century from four Jewish families, and had appointed its own rabbi since the beginning of the seventeenth century. The Jews of Metz behaved so well that King Louis XIV publicly declared his satisfaction with them, and renewed their privileges. But as Metz at that time still had a German population, narrow guilds continued to exist, and these insisted upon limiting the Jews in their occupations. Thwarted by the magistrates, some of them roused in the populace a burning hatred of the Jews. A peasant had lost a child, and the news was quickly spread that the Jews had killed it to practice sorcery with its flesh. The accusation was brought specifically against a peddler, Raphael Levi. Scraps of paper with Hebrew letters, written by him during his imprisonment, served as proofs of his guilt. A baptized Jew, Paul du Vallié (Vallier, formerly Isaac), son of a famous physician in that district, with the aid of another Jewish convert, translated the scraps to the disadvantage of the accused.

Du Vallié had literally been decoyed into Christianity, and changed into a bitter enemy of his former co-religionists. He had been a good son, adored by his parents. He had also been a pious Jew, and had declared to two tempters who had tried to influence him to apostatize from Judaism that he would sooner be burned. Nevertheless, the priests continued their efforts until they induced him to accept Christianity. The news of his baptism broke the heart of his mother, Antoinette. A touching letter to her son, in French, is still extant, in which she entreats him to return to Judaism. Du Vallié however refused, and proved himself besides to be a bad man and a traitor. He brought false evidence against the poor accused Jew. Accordingly, Raphael Levi was stretched on the rack, and, though he maintained his innocence in the tone of convincing truth, he was condemned by the Metz parliament, and put to death with torture, which he resolutely bore (January, 1670). The parliament intended to continue the persecution. The enemies of the Jews, moreover, caused a document on the subject to be printed and widely circulated, in order to produce the proper effect. But the Metz community found a supporter in a zealous fellow-believer, Jonah Salvador, a tobacco dealer, of Pignerol. He was learned in the Talmud, and a follower of Sabbataï Zevi. Richard Simon, an eager student, sought him out in order to study Hebrew under his guidance. Jonah Salvador managed to interest this Father of the Oratory in the Metz community, and inspired him to draw up a vindication of the Jews respecting child-murder. The tobacco merchant of Pignerol delivered this document to persons at court whose word had weight, and this turned the scale. The king's council ordered the records of the Metz parliament to be sent in, and decided (end of 1671) that judicial murder had been committed in the case of Raphael Levi. Louis XIV ordered that henceforth criminal charges against Jews be brought before the king's council.

Inhuman treatment of Jews, banishment, false accusations against them, and massacres did not actually cease, but their number and extent diminished. This phenomenon was a consequence of the increasing civilization of the European capitals, but a growing predilection for the Jews and their brilliant literature had a share in their improved treatment. Educated Christians, Catholics as well as Protestants, and sober, unbiased men, whose judgment had weight, began to be astonished at the continued existence of this people. How was it that a people, persecuted for ten centuries and more, trampled under foot, and treated like a pack of venomous or noisome beasts – a people without a home, whom all the world treated roughly – how was it that this people still existed – not only existed, but formed a compact body, separate from other peoples, even in its subjection too proud to mingle with more powerful nations? Numerous writers appeared as apologists for the Jews, urging their milder treatment, and appealing earnestly to Christians not to destroy or disfigure this living marvel. Many went very far in their enthusiasm for the Jews. The Huguenot preacher, Pierre Jurieu, at Rotterdam, wrote a book (1685) on "The Fulfillment of Prophecy," in which he expounded the future greatness of the Jews as certain – that God had kept this nation for Himself in order to do great wonders for it: the true Antichrist was the persecution of Jews. A Dane, Oliger (Holger) Pauli, displayed over-zealous activity for the return of the Jewish people to their former country. As a youth, he had had visions of the coming greatness of Israel, in which he also was to play a part. Oliger Pauli was so fond of the Jewish race that, although descended from Christian ancestors of noble rank, he always gave out that he had sprung from Jewish stock. He had amassed millions as a merchant, and spent them lavishly on his hobby, the return of the Jews to Palestine. He sent mystical letters to King William III of England and the dauphin of France to induce them to undertake the assembling and restoration of the Jews. To the dauphin the Danish enthusiast plainly declared that by zeal for the Jews, France might atone for her bloody massacre of St. Bartholomew and the dragonnades. John Peter Speeth of Augsburg, born of Catholic parents at Vienna, went still farther in his enthusiasm for Jews and Judaism. After writing a pamphlet in honor of Catholicism, he went over to the Socinians and Mennonites, and at last became a Jew at Amsterdam, and took the name of Moses Germanus (died April 17, 1702). He confessed that precisely the false accusations against Jews had inspired him with disgust for Christianity.

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