But the harmonic curve of the woes of Israel was not to be broken. The Osmanli, who had filled Europe with the fame and the terror of their arms a few generations before, began to decay as soon as they ceased to conquer. An essentially nomad race, the Turkish found a sedentary life pernicious to its vigour. The Sultans sank into the soft dissipations of the harem, leaving women and eunuchs to rule the Empire and Janissaries to defend it. The Jews had reason to lament the decline of their lords. The yoke of tyranny began to weigh heavily upon their necks. Their opulence attracted the rapacity of the Pashas, and their impotence encouraged it. Fanaticism followed greed, and the Jews, among other forms of oppression to which they were subjected, were marked off from the true believers by a black turban—a badge which may still be seen in Turkey, as a survival of a necessity that exists no longer.
In that age of darkness and tribulation the hope of the Messiah flamed up again. In the middle of the seventeenth century the promised Redeemer made his appearance among the Turkish Jews in the person of Sabbataï Zebi, born at Smyrna in 1626. Sabbataï’s boyhood was spent in solitude and prayer; his early youth in Cabbalistic mysticism, in self-mortification and in a self-denial all the easier because Sabbataï was one of those happy, or unhappy, mortals who are born blind to the temptations of the flesh and to its joys. His strange life and even stranger ideas soon excited attention. Some pronounced the young man mad and others inspired. He regarded himself as the Messiah, and revealed himself as such in the year 1648, which, mystics had foretold, was to see the first dawn of the Redemption. The Synagogue excommunicated Sabbataï for his presumption. But many believed in the handsome and eccentric youth. Sabbataï’s belief in his own Messianic mission and the devotion of his disciples were confirmed by persecution. Banished from Smyrna, the prophet wandered to Stamboul and Salonica, gaining adherents, and he took care that the year 1666, which had been fixed as that of the Messianic era, should find him in Jerusalem. That city both by virtue of its traditions and owing to the condition of its Jewish inhabitants—impoverished by extortion and ground down by oppression—afforded an environment eminently favourable to miraculous display. Thence Sabbataï journeyed forth in triumph to Aleppo, and finally returned to his native city, where his new glory made the Synagogue forget his earlier condemnation and disgrace. At Smyrna the enthusiasm of Sabbataï’s followers reached the height of frenzy. The Messiah’s fame and the madness of his disciples spread to the furthest corners of the earth—Venice, Leghorn, Avignon, Amsterdam, London. The Rabbis of Prague and Hamburg were suspected by the Orthodox of being secret adherents of the Prophet of Smyrna, and excommunicated each other as heartily as if they were Christian sectarians. In all these centres of Judaism the Kingdom of Heaven was believed to have come, the belief being shared by Christian Millennarians, and the Western Jews abandoned themselves to an extravagance of excitement scarcely compatible with elementary sanity. At Hamburg the synagogue was converted into a theatre of corybantic exaltation, wherein stately Spanish cavaliers and grey-bearded men of business might be seen hopping, jumping and twirling solemnly about with the scroll of the Law in their arms. Not less remarkable was the behaviour of believers in the East. In Persia the Jews refused to till their fields or to pay tribute, for, they said, the Messiah had come. From all these quarters homage and treasure poured into the court of Sabbataï, who now was universally hailed as King of Kings, and signed himself, or allowed his scribes to do so, “I, the Lord, your God, Sabbataï Zebi.”
But the Messiah’s reign was brief and his end inglorious. Sabbataï resolved to repair to Constantinople that he might proclaim his advent from the very capital of the East. He was not unexpected. In the Straits of the Dardanelles Turkish officers arrested him, and took him fettered to Stamboul. The landing-place was crowded with a multitude of believers and others, all eager to behold the man who had filled the world with so singular an epidemic. Among the latter class of spectators was a pasha who welcomed the Redeemer with a vigorous slap in the face. The treatment subsequently meted out to poor Sabbataï was in harmony with this reception. He was thrown into prison, and nothing but the Grand Vizier’s unwillingness to create a new martyr saved him from death. Finally he was summoned before the Sultan. After a short audience, the Messiah issued forth from the Padishah’s presence a turbaned Mohammedan, and his name was Mehmed Effendi.
But even this catastrophe failed to break the spell which Sabbataï’s personality had cast over the minds of men. The masses clung to the hope which he had raised for ages after his death. Some of his adherents, including his wife, imitated his example and embraced Islam. The sect of these Hebrew Mohammedans, under the name of Dunmehs, or Converts, still endures at Salonica and other cities of the Ottoman Empire, and among them the belief prevails that Sabbataï is not really dead. They form a body apart, knit together by ties of consanguinity, detested by their former brethren in the faith as a sect of apostates and suspected by their new brethren as a sect of hypocrites.
The further decay of the Ottoman Empire, which brought humiliation to the conquerors and kindled the desire for national rehabilitation among their Christian subjects, however, brought peace and commercial prosperity to the Jews. ♦1717♦ Lady Mary Wortley Montague, in her account of the policy and the manners of the Turks in the eighteenth century, gives a glowing description of the Jewish colony of Adrianople.
“I observed,” she says, “that most of the rich tradespeople are Jews. That people are in incredible power in this country. They have many privileges above all the natural Turks themselves, and have formed a very comfortable commonwealth here, being judged by their own laws. They have drawn the whole trade of the empire into their hands, partly by the firm union amongst themselves, partly by the idle temper and want of industry of the Turk. Every Bassa has his Jew, who is his homme d’affaires; he is let into all his secrets and does all his business. No bargain is made, no bribes received, no merchandizes disposed of, but what passes through his hands. They are the physicians, the stewards, and the interpreters of all the great men. You may judge how advantageous this is to a people who never fail to make use of the smallest advantages. They have found the secret of making themselves so necessary that they are certain of the protection of the Court whatever Ministry is in power. Even the English, French, and Italian merchants, who are sensible of their artifices, are, however, forced to trust their affairs to their negotiation, nothing of trade being managed without them, and the meanest among them being too important to be disobliged, since the whole body take care of his interests with as much vigour as they would those of the most considerable of their members. They are, many of them, vastly rich.”
At the present moment the Jews, thanks to the profound incompetence and sloth of the Turks, the unpopularity, disunion and unrest of the Christian rayahs, and their own superior ability and concord, thrive in many parts of the Sultan’s dominions, still preserving the speech of their Spanish persecutors.
A few of the refugees from Spain found their way into France and England, while some of those who were subsequently persecuted in Portugal drifted to Holland. But a large number of Spanish Jews set sail for Italy.
CHAPTER XII
THE RENAISSANCE
While Popes and Emperors waged a fierce warfare against each other for the heritage of the Roman Caesars, the democratic spirit of the Italian people grew in safe obscurity, deriving fresh vitality from the feud between those two great enemies of freedom. The Emperor’s defeat saved Italy from political servitude, and the Pope’s victory came too late to endanger intellectual liberty. The people who claimed the right to act as they pleased were a fortiori ready to vindicate their right to think what they pleased. Thus free thought, which was stunted by the Popes of Rome in the far-off lands of the North, flourished under the very shadow of St. Peter’s throne. It was natural that it should be so. They who sit nearest the stage are least liable to be duped by scenic devices. The Italians were too near the Holy See to be impressed by its tricks or to be terrified by its theatrical thunder. They had seen Gregory VII. as an illiterate Tuscan lad playing in his father’s workshop, and they had known Innocent III. as plain Signor Lothario, son of the Count of Segni. No one is a demigod to his own parishioners.