IV
He had been strange and solitary from childhood, this saintly son of the Smyrniote commission agent. He had no playmates, none of the habits of the child. He would wander about the city's steep bustling alleys that seemed hewn in a great rock, or through the long, wooden-roofed bazaars, seeming to heed the fantastically colored spectacle as little as the garbage under foot, or the trains of gigantic camels, at the sound of whose approaching bells he would mechanically flatten himself against the wall. And yet he must have been seeing, for if he chanced upon anything that suffered—a child, a lean dog, a cripple, a leper—his eyes filled with tears. At times he would stand on the brink of the green gulf and gaze seawards long and yearningly, and sometimes he would lie for hours upon the sudden plain that stretched lonely behind the dense port.
In the little congested school-room where hundreds of children clamored Hebrew at once he was equally alone; and when, a brilliant youth, he headed the lecture-class of the illustrious Talmudist, Joseph Eskapha, his mental attitude preserved the same aloofness. Quicker than his fellows he grasped the casuistical hair-splittings in which the Rabbis too often indulged, but his contempt was as quick as his comprehension. A note of revolt pierced early through his class-room replies, and very soon he threw over these barren subtleties to sink himself—at a tenderer age than tradition knew of—in the spiritual mysticisms, the poetic fervors, and the self-martyrdoms of the Cabalistic literature. The transmigrations of souls, mystic marriages, the summoning of spirits, the creation of the world by means of attributes, or how the Godhead had concentrated itself within itself in order to unfold the finite Many from the infinite One; such were the favorite studies of the brooding youth of fifteen.
"Learning shall be my life," he said to his father.
"Thy life! But what shall be thy livelihood?" replied Mordecai Zevi. "Thy elder brothers are both at work."
"So much more need that one of thy family should consecrate himself to God, to call down a blessing on the work of the others."
Mordecai Zevi shook his head. In his olden days, in the Morea, he had known the bitterness of poverty. But he was beginning to prosper now, like so many of his kinsmen, since Sultan Ibrahim had waged war against the Venetians, and, by imperilling the trade of the Levant, had driven the Dutch and English merchants to transfer their ledgers from Constantinople to Smyrna. The English house of which Mordecai had obtained the agency was waxing rich, and he in its wake, and so he could afford to have a scholar-son. He made no farther demur, and even allowed his house to become the seat of learning in which Sabbataï and nine chosen companions studied the Zohar and the Cabalah from dawn to darkness. Often they would desert the divan for the wooden garden-balcony overlooking the oranges and the prune-trees. And the richer Mordecai grew, the greater grew his veneration for his son, to whose merits, and not to his own diligence and honesty, he ascribed his good fortune.
"If the sins of the fathers are visited on the children," he was wont to say, "then surely the good deeds of the children are repaid to the fathers." His marked reverence for his wonderful son spread outwards, and Sabbataï became the object of a wistful worship, of a wild surmise.
Something of that wild surmise seemed to the father to flash into his son's own eyes one day when, returned from a great journey to his English principals, Mordecai Zevi spoke of the Fifth Monarchy men who foretold the coming of the Messiah and the Restoration of the Jews in the year 1666.
"Father!" said the boy. "Will not the Messiah be born on the ninth of Ab?"