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 byorder 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 tomake 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.
BOOK IV.
1591–1885.
DAWN.
[a]עַד שֶׁיָּפוּחַ הַיּוֹם וְנָסוּ הַצְּלָלִים]
SONG OF SOL. ii. 17.
‘Who counts the billows, when the shore is won?’
CHAPTER XXXI.
DAWN.
1. Beginning of Better Days in Holland.—At last, after the thick darkness and the waning stars, some faint streaks of dawn began slowly to appear. It was on ugly, flat, Dutch marshes that the new light of liberty first tremblingly broke, and its unaccustomed rays touched the sluggish canals and solid bridges of the ancient city of Amsterdam into a beauty that had been lacking to the picturesque minarets of Spain, and gave to the respectable Dutch burghers a dignity that is somehow absent from the stateliest of Spanish grandees. It was in 1591 that the first small settlement of Jews was made in Holland, and these earliest settlers were Marannos from Spain. Religious intolerance in the Peninsula had grown no less fierce since the days of Torquemada, and under the gloomy fanatic Philip II., the widower of our poor, mercilessQueen Mary, all the worst terrors and persecutions of the Inquisition had been revived. The New Christians, or Marannos, as the disguised Jews of Spain and Portugal were called, felt, under Philip’s sway, less secure than ever from suspicion and its terrible consequences. Emigration seemed their only chance of safety, but, as of old, there was small choice of safe asylum. England and France were still closed against declared Jews; the Popes and princes of Italy were hostile to them; Germany was cruelly inhospitable; and Turkey sounded very foreign and very far off to these cultivated and somewhat self-indulgent Marannos. At last in their straits they bethought themselves of brave little Holland, whose people had fought as sturdily to guard their shores from the inroads of Inquisitors as from the inroads of the ocean,and had made of their enemy, the sea, an ally against the Spaniards.[44] In the States which had revolted from the cruel supremacy of Spain, and had struggled so heroically for national and religious independence, there seemed to be a certainty of freedom of conscience being accorded to all citizens. The Marannos had come to be very tired and very impatient of their masks, worn though they were amid the palms and the orange groves. And so it came to pass that, at the end of the sixteenth century, a little party of Spanish Jewish refugees made this fresh experimentfor life, and were most kindly and generously received by the Protestant inhabitants of the new republic of the Netherlands.