Chapter XXX: The Darkness Visible

=1. Deterioration of Character.=――The effects of all the evil treatment which we have traced, began to be clearly manifest in the Jewish character. The ravages on Jewish life and on Jewish property were not the worst results of these ages of persecution. The real injury done to the Jews went far deeper than any amount of outrage or wrong might inflict on an individual. ‘Few natures,’ writes the Laureate, ‘are of such fine mould, that if you sow therein the seed of hate, it blossoms charity.’ Jewish nature is of ‘fine mould,’ or under such a course of manuring, and such a season of neglect, it might well have become altogether overrun with rank weeds. Seeds once planted can, nevertheless, only follow the law of nature, and blossom and bear fruit according to their kind. Forced into secret and sordid ways, denied hope, aim, or ambition of any worthy sort, contemptuously shunned when they were not actively hunted, ‘protected’ by princes and persecuted by priests, what wonder if Jews at last became ‘degraded,’ never indeed to the level of what they were thought, but something undoubtedly below the level of what they should have been? Agur’s prayer was a wise one. ‘Give me, O Lord,’ he says, ‘neither poverty nor riches: lest I be full, and deny Thee; or lest I be poor, and steal.’ Jews, for generations, were subject to the extreme of both the temptations which Agur prayed against. The cultivated Marannos of Spain yielded to the one; they were ‘full,’ and for continued wealth and ease they denied their God. The ignorant clippers of coin in England yielded to the other temptation; they were poor, and stole.

The higher ideals which keep men straight were sometimes lost sight of in the gloom. Honour and honesty came often to be regarded as impossible virtues. Life was so uncertain that it grew unduly dear, and men and women, in their terror, became, not unseldom, selfish and cowardly. Instances crop up in contemporary records, though they are happily rare, of Jews being denounced and betrayed by Jews. The carefully guarded secret of a co-religionist’s hidden hoards would now and again be disclosed to the enemy, as a means of averting the ‘evil eye’ from a too close scrutiny into the traitor’s own concerns. Men were even found capable of owning to untrue accusations, and of inventing stories of never-designed plots, with the object of gaining favour and ‘protection’ for themselves and their families. Under the terrible conditions of their life, the very virtues of the Jews turned to vices. The old Jewish characteristics of steadfastness, and prudence, and intelligence, seemed to take new and lower forms; for bare life’s sake, the loyal, large-minded Jew learnt to be narrow, and secret, and cunning. There was such awful need to be rich. Rich Jews could gain at best a lofty tolerance, and for poor Jews there must have seemed no cause nor excuse for living at all. Money-getting became the one absorbing pursuit of the race, the one ambition of life, the one possible protection against cruel and tortured death. And the money got, it brought no leisure, no gracious possibilities with it of refinement or of culture. To toil for wealth which they might not openly enjoy, and to passionately believe in a religion which they might not openly profess, was the portion of the Jews for centuries. It was a sort of suffering which sapped at the very roots of self-respect, and which inevitably resulted in defects of bearing and of conduct. The outcast Jew learnt to stoop where he should have stood upright, and to swagger and to push when standing room was grudgingly allotted him. He came by degrees to merit, in his outward aspect, some of the contempt which he had never earned, and in this sadly changed aspect of the heirs of the prophets, the darkness of the ‘dark ages’ was made visible.

=2. Atmospheric Conditions.=――Nothing, again, perhaps shows more plainly the density of the darkness than the extraordinary light which was cast upon it in the seventeenth century by a baleful shooting star, which rose like a rocket in the East, just as the dawn was beginning to break in the Western world. The miserable condition of the Jews had by this time a little shaken their faith. They had been martyrs, and mute inglorious martyrs, for so long. They suffered, among other things, from suppressed religion. Their faith in God was as fervent as ever, but the fervour, denied any honoured and open expression, had come to be of a dangerous and an emotional sort. This spiritual weakness, such as it was, did not lead them, however, in the direction of doubt, but of credulity. They did not think that the Lord’s ‘hand was shortened,’ that it could not ‘save,’ but they grew over-eager to see it stretched out on their behalf, and far too ready to welcome any sorry impostor by way of Saviour. As had happened before the fall of Jerusalem, and again before the coming of Barcochba, the very air that was breathed by unhappy Jews seemed full of portent and prophecy, and a ‘Messiah’ was almost bound to appear in response to the wild and superstitious hopes in which they indulged. And when, at length, such a one came forward, he found he had marvellously little to do to keep up the character.

=3. A Shooting Star: Sabbatai Zevi (1626‒1676).=――Smyrna, in Turkey, was the birthplace of the wretched impostor who, for some three years in the latter half of the seventeenth century, ‘made,’ as an old chronicler expresses it, ‘a madness among the Jews.’ The father of Sabbatai Zevi was a merchant, and in no wise remarkable. The son was something of a scholar, and gained a certain amount of unwelcome prominence in his youth by propounding some rather startling religious theories, an exploit which led to his being banished from the city by order of the authorities of the synagogue. Before his exile he was twice married and twice divorced. We do not know what effect these domestic experiences may have had on his character, but we hear of him next (1664) at Jerusalem, interesting himself greatly in all Jewish questions, and finding in a certain Jew of the place, named Nathan, an enthusiastic listener to all his wild plans. Whether the sight of the fallen city may have inspired Sabbatai with a genuine and passionate desire to help in its restoration, or whether he was a conscious impostor from the very first, and only influenced by the desire of revenge on the Smyrna synagogue, it is difficult to decide. It is not easy to think that, within the very walls of Jerusalem, a Jew could plan a deliberate imposture on his nation. In his actions, however, it is certain, Sabbatai was never honest. Quite suddenly he proclaimed himself the Messiah of the Jews, appointed Nathan his prophet, and proceeded to predict the very date when he, Sabbatai Zevi, should be acknowledged sole monarch of the universe, with the capital and head-quarters of his kingdom fixed in a restored and beautified Jerusalem.

=4. How the News was received.=――The news of a Messiah having arisen spread like wildfire through all the cities of Turkey. Business of every sort was suspended, and men and women abandoned their ordinary occupations, and gave themselves up entirely to what they called good works. Believing that they were about ‘to inherit all things,’ rich and poor alike refused to labour. Those who had led self-indulgent lives now fasted and scourged themselves, and became so lavish in their charity, and were so urgent to make amends, that the beggars had an extremely good time. There must have been something very persuasive about Sabbatai Zevi, for a certain Samuel Pennia who began by making a strenuous stand against all this folly, ended by becoming a violent convert to it. Sabbatai presently went to his birthplace, Smyrna. In that city early recollections stirred some of the people to just sufficient doubt to make them ask their old townsman to perform a miracle in proof of his Messiahship. Sabbatai, says the same old chronicle, ‘was horribly puzzled for a miracle,’ but his effrontery was equal to the credulity of his dupes. In an audience before the cadi or judge of the city, Sabbatai suddenly and gravely exclaimed, ‘See you not a pillar of fire?’ Many of the crowd, in the hysterical excitement of the moment, really believed that they saw something of the sort, and those who did not see were silent, hardly liking to proclaim their want of faith or their defective sight. Sabbatai was triumphant, and men who refused to acknowledge him were actually, in some cases, excommunicated by the synagogues.

=5. The Sultan interferes.=――But an end was coming to this extraordinary imposture. The Sultan of Turkey, Mahomed IV., thought it time to put a stop to the tumult and confusion which the man was creating in his dominions. So when Sabbatai, shortly after the visit to Smyrna, made a mission, as he would have called it, to Constantinople, he was seized by order of the sultan upon his arrival, and imprisoned in a dungeon. It was an unpleasant experience for Sabbatai, and it made a very great difference in his way of looking at things, but on his infatuated followers, strange to say, his reverse of fortune made little or no impression. In a dungeon or in a palace, as martyr or as prince, they believed in their Messiah. Poor deluded people, there is something very pathetic about their enthusiasm; it seems to suggest so plainly how few objects in life they must have had worthy of belief or of reverence.

=6. Sabbatai resigns his Pretensions.=――The sultan was quite determined to make an end of all this madness. At the end of two months he demanded a miracle of Sabbatai as the price of his release from prison. But it was to be a miracle of the sultan’s own choosing this time. Sabbatai was to be stripped naked, archers were to shoot at him, and his ‘divine’ flesh was to remain proof against their arrows. Now, two months in an uncomfortable dungeon had considerably sobered Sabbatai Zevi. He was not the sort of stuff of which heroes are made, and he had not the slightest ambition to be a martyr. All his audacity ebbed away from him, and he, of course, refused the test. Then, like the coward he was, seeing the game was up, and tired perhaps of the whole thing, he owned that he was nothing but a very commonplace charlatan, who had traded on the credulity of his countrymen.

=7. Becomes a Convert to Mahomedanism.=――The confession, humiliating as it was to Sabbatai, did not altogether satisfy the wise sultan. He wanted to make an example of the cheat, and to show his dupes what a poor creature they had believed in. So the sultan said that as Sabbatai had proved himself so bad a Jew, he must try if he could do better as a Mahomedan. Quite cheerfully Sabbatai consented to conversion, and had the effrontery to add that to be a Turk had long been his ambition! And as a Turk, and a rather popular one, this impostor continued to live, and it was in the rather mixed character of a ‘Jew-Turk’ that, some ten years later (1676), he died.