Dreamers of the Ghetto Part 14

He went to the door and bolted it. Then he took up the second pistol.

Irrelevantly he noted the "G." graven on it. Gabriel! Gabriel! What memories his old name brought back! There were tears in his eyes. Why had he changed to Uriel? Gabriel! Gabriel! Was that his mother's voice calling him, as she had called him in sunny Portugal, amid the vines and the olive-trees?

Worn out, world-weary, aged far beyond his years, beaten in the long fight, despairing of justice on earth and hopeless of any heaven, Uriel Acosta leaned droopingly against his beloved desk, put the pistol's cold muzzle to his forehead, pressed the trigger, and fell dead across the open pages of his _Exemplar Humanae Vitae_, the thin, curling smoke lingering a little ere it dissipated, like the futile spirit of a pa.s.sing creature--"a wind that pa.s.seth away and cometh not again."

THE TURKISH MESSIAH

SCROLL THE FIRST

I

In the year of the world five thousand four hundred and eight, sixteen hundred and forty-eight years after the coming of Christ, and in the twenty-third year of his own life on earth, Sabbata Zevi, men said, declared himself at Smyrna to his disciples--the long-expected Messiah of the Jews. They were gathered together in the winter midnight, a little group of turbaned, long-robed figures, the keen stars innumerable overhead, the sea stretching sombrely at their feet, and the swarming Oriental city, a black mystery of roofs, minarets, and cypresses, dominated by the Acropolis, asleep on the slopes of its snow-clad hill.

Anxiously they had awaited their Prophet's emergence from his penitential l.u.s.tration in the icy harbor, and as he now stood before them in naked majesty, the water dripping from his black beard and hair, a perfect manly figure, scarred only by self-inflicted scourgings, awe and wonder held them breathless with expectation.

Inhaling that strange fragrance of divinity that breathed from his body, and penetrated by the kingliness of his mien, the pa.s.sionate yet spiritual beauty of his dark, dreamy face, they awaited the great declaration. Some common instinct told them that he would speak to-night, he, the master of mystic silences.

The _Zohar_--that inspired book of occult wisdom--had long since foretold this year as the first of the epoch of regeneration, and ever since the shrill ram's horn had heralded its birth, the souls of Sabbata Zevi's disciples had been tense for the great moment. Surely it was to announce himself at last that he had summoned them, blessed partakers in the greatest moment of human and divine history.

What would he say?

Austere, silent, hedged by an inviolable sanct.i.ty, he stood long motionless, realizing, his followers felt, the Cabalistic teaching as to the Messiah, incarnating the G.o.dhead through the primal Adam, pure, sinless, at one with himself and elemental Nature. At last he raised his luminous eyes heavenwards, and said in clear, calm tones one word--

YAHWEH!

He had uttered the dread, forbidden Name of G.o.d. For an instant the turbaned figures stood rigid with awe, their blood cold with an ineffable terror, then as they became conscious again of the stars glittering on, the sea plas.h.i.+ng unruffled, the earth still solid under their feet, a great hoa.r.s.e shout of holy joy flew up to the s.h.i.+ning stars. "_Mess.h.i.+ach! Mess.h.i.+ach!_ The Messiah!"

The Kingdom was come.

The Messianic Era had begun.

II

How long, O Lord, how long?

That desolate cry of the centuries would be heard no more.

While Israel was dispersed and the world full of sin, the higher and lower worlds had been parted, and the four letters of G.o.d's name had been dissevered, not to be p.r.o.nounced in unison. For G.o.d Himself had been made imperfect by the impeding of His moral purpose.

But the Messiah had p.r.o.nounced the Tetragrammaton, and G.o.d and the Creation were One again. O mystic transport! O ecstatic reunion! The joyous shouts died into a more beatific silence.

From some near mosque there broke upon the midnight air the solemn voice of the _mueddin_ chanting the _adan_--

"G.o.d is most great. I testify that there is no G.o.d but G.o.d. I testify that Mohammed is G.o.d's Prophet."

Sabbata s.h.i.+vered. Was it the cold air or some indefinable foreboding?

III

It was the day of Messianic dreams. In the century that was over, strange figures had appeared of prophets and martyrs and Hebrew visionaries. From obscurity and the far East came David Reubeni, journeying to Italy by way of Nubia to obtain firearms to rid Palestine of the Moslem--a dark-faced dwarf, made a skeleton by fasts, riding on his white horse up to the Vatican to demand an interview, and graciously received by Pope Clement. In Portugal--where David Reubeni, heralded by a silken standard worked with the Ten Commandments, had been received by the King with an answering pageantry of banners and processions--a Marrano maiden had visions of Moses and the angels, undertook to lead her suffering kinsfolk to the Holy Land, and was burnt by the Inquisition. Diogo Pires--handsome and brilliant and young, and a Christian by birth--returned to the faith of his fathers, and, under the name of Solomon Molcho, pa.s.sed his brief life in quest of prophetic ecstasies and the pangs of martyrdom. He sought to convert the Pope to Judaism, and predicting a great flood at Rome, which came to pa.s.s, with destructive earthquakes at Lisbon, was honored by the Vatican, only to meet a joyful death at Mantua, where, by order of the Emperor, he was thrown upon the blazing funeral pyre. And in these restless and terrible times for the Jews, inward dreams mingled with these outward portents. The _Zohar_--the Book of Illumination, composed in the thirteenth century--printed now for the first time, shed its dazzling rays further and further over every Ghetto.

The secrets reserved for the days of the Messiah had been revealed in it: Elijah, all the celestial conclave, angels, spirits, higher souls, and the Ten Spiritual Substances had united to inspire its composers, teach them the bi-s.e.xual nature of the World-Principle, and discover to them the true significance of the _Torah_ (Law), hitherto hidden in the points and strokes of the Pentateuch, in its vowels and accents, and even in the potential trans.m.u.tations of the letters of its words.

Lurya, the great German Egyptian Cabalist, with Vital, the Italian alchemist, sojourned to the grave of Simon bar Yochai, its fabled author. Lurya himself, who preferred the silence and loneliness of the Nile country to the noise of the Talmud-School, who dressed in white on Sabbath, and wore a fourfold garment to signify the four letters of the Ineffable Name, and who by permutating these, could draw down spirits from Heaven, pa.s.sed as the Messiah of the Race of Joseph, precursor of the true Messiah of the Race of David. The times were ripe. "The kingdom of heaven is at hand," cried the Cabalists with one voice. The Jews had suffered so much and so long. Decimated for not dying of the Black Death, pillaged and murdered by the Crusaders, hounded remorselessly from Spain and Portugal, roasted by thousands at the _autos-da-fe_ of the Inquisition, everywhere branded and degraded, what wonder if they felt that their cup was full, that redemption was at hand, that the Lord would save Israel and set His people in triumph over the heathen! "I believe with a perfect faith that the Messiah will come, and though His coming be delayed, nevertheless will I daily expect Him."

So ran their daily creed.

In Turkey what time the Jews bore themselves proudly, rivalling the Venetians in the s.h.i.+pping trade, and the Grand Viziers in the beauty of their houses, gardens, and kiosks; when Joseph was Duke of Naxos, and Solomon Ashken.a.z.i Envoy Extraordinary to Venice; when Tiberias was turned into a new Jerusalem and planted with mulberry-trees; when prosperous physicians wrote elegant Latin verses; in those days the hope of the Messiah was faint and dim. But it flamed up fiercely enough when their strength and prestige died down with that of the Empire, and the harem and the Janissaries divided power with the Praetorians of the Spahis, and the Jews were the first objects of oppression ready to the hand of the unloosed pashas, and the black turban marked them off from the Moslem. It was a Rabbi of the Ottoman Empire who wrote the religious code of "The Ordered Table" to unify Israel and hasten the coming of the Messiah, and his dicta were accepted far and wide.

And not only did Israel dream of the near Messiah, the rumor of Him was abroad among the nations. Men looked again to the mysterious Orient, the cradle of the Divine. In the far isle of England sober Puritans were awaiting the Millennium and the Fifth Monarchy of the Apocalypse--the four "beasts" of the Babylonian, Persian, Greek, and Roman monarchies having already pa.s.sed away--and when Mana.s.seh ben Israel of Amsterdam pet.i.tioned Cromwell to readmit the Jews, his plea was that thereby they might be dispersed through all nations, and the Biblical prophecies as to the eve of the Messianic age be thus fulfilled. Verily, the times were ripe for the birth of a Messiah.

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-cla.s.s of the ill.u.s.trious Talmudist, Joseph Eskapha, his mental att.i.tude 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 cla.s.s-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 G.o.dhead 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 G.o.d, 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 Sabbata 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 Sabbata became the object of a wistful wors.h.i.+p, 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 princ.i.p.als, 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?"

"Of a surety," replied Mordecai, with beating heart. "He will be born on the fatal date of the destruction of both our Temples, in token of consolation, as it is written; 'and I will cause the captivity of Judah and the captivity of Israel to return, and will build them, as at the first.'"

The boy relapsed into his wonted silence. But one thought possessed father and son. Sabbata had been born on the ninth of Ab--on the great Black Fast.

The wonder grew when the boy was divorced from his wife--the beautiful Channah. Obediently marrying--after the custom of the day--the maiden provided by his father, the young ascetic pa.s.sionately denied himself to the pa.s.sion ripened precociously by the Eastern sun, and the marvelling _Beth-Din_ (House of Judgment) released the virgin from her nominal husband. Prayer and self-mortification were the pleasures of his youth. The enchanting Jewesses of Smyrna, picturesque in baggy trousers and open-necked vests, had no seduction for him, though no muslin veil hid their piquant countenances as with the Turkish women, though no prescription silenced their sweet voices in the psalmody of the table, as among the sin-fearing congregations of the West. In vain the maidens stuck roses under their ear or wore honeysuckle in their hair to denote their willingness to be led under the canopy. But Mordecai, anxious that he should fulfil the law, according to which to be celibate is to live in sin, found him a second mate, even more beautiful; but the youth remained silently callous, and was soon restored afresh to his solitary state.

"Now shall the _Torah_ (Law) be my only bride," he said.

Blind to the beauty of womanhood, the young, handsome, and now rich Sabbata, went his lonely, parsimonious way, and a wondering band followed him, scarcely disturbing his loneliness by their reverential companions.h.i.+p. When he entered the sea, morning and night, summer and winter, all stood far off; by day he would pray at the fountain which the Christians called _Sancta Veneranda_, near to the cemetery of the Jews, and he would stretch himself at night across the graves of the righteous in a silent agony of appeal, while the jackals barked in the lonely darkness and the wind soughed in the mountain gorges.

But at times he would speak to his followers of the Divine mysteries and of the rigorous asceticism by which alone these were to be reached and men to be regenerated and the Kingdom to be won; and sometimes he would sing to them Spanish songs in his sweet, troubling voice--strange Cabalistic verses, composed by himself or Lurya, and set to sad, haunting melodies yearning with mystic pa.s.sion. And in these songs the womanhood he had rejected came back in amorous strains that recalled the Song of Songs, which is Solomon's, and seemed to his disciples to veil as deep an allegory:--