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I mind me he also learnt Latin under thee." "Ay, and now spits out to see me. Fasted forty days for his sin in learning the devil's language." "What converted him?" "That Turkish mountebank, I imagine." "Sabbata Zevi?" "Yes; he still clings to him though the Messiah has turned Mohammedan.
"To the King, our King, Lord of our Lords, who gathers the Dispersed of Israel, who redeems our Captivity, the Man elevated to the Height of all sublimity, the Messiah of the God of Jacob, the true Messiah, the Celestial Lion, Sabbataï Zevi, whose honor be exalted and his dominion raised in a short time, and for ever, Amen.
Demoniacles saw Sabbataï Zevi in heaven with three crowns, one for Messiah, one for King, and one for Conqueror of the Peoples. But the Jerusalem Rabbis remaining sceptical, Nathan proclaimed in an ecstasy that she was no longer the sacred city, the primacy had passed to Gaza.
From the Ancient of Days a new divine being had been given off the Holy King, the Messiah, the Primal Man, Androgynous, Perfect, who would harmonize the jarring chords, restore the spiritual unity of the Universe. Before the love in his eyes sin and sorrow would vanish as evil vapors; the frozen streams of grace would flow again. "I, the Lord your God, Sabbataï Zevi!"
Not this the visionary figure created by the tear-dimmed yearning of the Ghetto; no second Sabbataï Zevi, master of celestial secrets, divine reincarnation, come with signs and wonders to lead back Israel to the Promised Land.
Nathan the Prophet had apprised the Jews of the coming of their King, and the believers welcomed him with every mark of homage, even substituting Sabbataï Zevi for Sultan Mehemet in the Sabbath prayer for the Sovereign, and at the Wailing Place the despairing sobs of the Sons of the Law were tempered by a great hope.
"Give over!" shouted Elias Zevi, one of Sabbataï's brothers. "Be done with sadness, or thou shalt be stoned to death. Hath not the Lord ended our long persecution, our weary martyrdom? Cease thy prayer, or thy blood be on thine own head." Algazi and De la Papa were driven from the city; the Kofrim, as the heretics were dubbed, were obnoxious to excommunication.
It is true, many of the faithful were attracted by Cabbalistic wonders and the strange hope of being saved from a bitter exile by a Messianic Sabbatai Zevi. But these wayward deviations, in reality not so very far removed from orthodox tradition, exhibited only the more clearly the fearsome inner insecurity which a strained formalism in thought and habit bravely attempted to cover.
And, blent with these penances, festival after festival, riotous, delirious, whenever Sabbataï Zevi, with his vast train of followers, and waving a fan, showed himself in the street on his way to a ceremony or to give Cabalistic interpretations of Scripture in the synagogue.
"I am the Messiah's destined bride," she said, and her wild eyes had always an air of waiting. And in the course of years the news of her and of her prophecy travelled to Sabbataï Zevi, and found him at Cairo the morning after he had spoken to the Sphinx in the great silences. And to him under the blue Egyptian sky came an answering throb of romance.
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