United States or Vietnam ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !


In many places, especially in the Ukraine, the seat of learning that had suffered most from the ravages of the Cossacks, the state of morals sank very low, owing to the teaching of Jacob Querido, the self-proclaimed son of the pseudo-Messiah Shabbataï Zebi, "that the sinfulness of the world can be overcome only by a super-abundance of sin."

Metaphorically, the Bible characterizes the fool as a man "without a heart," and it is probably in the same sense that modern Arabs describe the brute creation as devoid of hearts. The fox in the narrative just given knew better. Not so, however, the lady who brought a curious question for her Rabbi to solve. The case to which I refer may be found in the Responsa Zebi Hirsch.

The antinomian crisis thus produced meets us in the careers of many who, like Sabbatai Zebi, assumed the Messianic role. Jewish mysticism, starting as an ascetic corrective to the conventional hedonism, lost its ascetic character and degenerated into licentiousness.

Furthermore, she makes some translations of the titles of Hebrew books cited, and enters a correction of an apparently erroneous statement of fact on p. 215. There Maimon writes as though the Zohar had been promulgated after Sabbatai Zebi. George Eliot notes: "Sabbatai Zebi lived long after the production of the Zohar. He was a contemporary of Spinoza.

Moses de Leon belonged to the fourteenth century." This remark shows that George Eliot knew Graetz's History, for it is he who brought the names of Spinoza and Sabbatai Zebi together in two chapter headings in his work. Besides, Graetz's History was certainly in George Eliot's library; it was among the Lewes books now at Dr. Williams's.

As by magic he attracted to himself a tremendous company of adherents in the East and in the West. The harassed people tossed to and fro like a fever patient, and raved about political re-birth. Its delirious visions still further heated its agitated blood. It came to its senses but slowly. Not even the apostasy and death of Sabbatai Zebi sufficed to sober all his followers.

In the second half of the seventeenth century, mysticism reached its zenith in Turkey, the country in which, had stood the cradle of the "practical Kabbala." The teachings of Ari, Vital, and the school established by them spread like wildfire. Messianic extravagances intoxicated the baited and persecuted people. In Smyrna appeared the false Messiah, Sabbatai Zebi.

At the instigation of a number of students of the Yeshibah Tree of Life, the doors of that noble institution were closed , to open again after two years of untiring efforts on the part of its self-sacrificing dean, the renowned Naphtali Zebi Judah Berlin. But at the worst this was the result of mistaken zeal for the cause of Haskalah.

The Lithuanian Jews, to whom the Talmud was as dear as ever, could not countenance a movement sprung, as they believed, from the seed sown by Shabbataï Zebi, an opponent of the Talmud, and by Jacob Frank, at whose instigation the Bishop of Kamenetz ordered the Talmud to be publicly burnt.

Kantor, and Dr. A. Poriess, the last of whom was the author of an excellent treatise on physiology in Hebrew. The productions of these writers did more for the spread of enlightenment than all the exhortations of the reformers. Of litterateurs, the novelist Braudes, and the poets Menahem M. Dolitzki and Zebi Schereschewsky, etc., made their first appearance in the columns of Ha-Shahar.