News travelled slowly in those days. A week later, while Agi Mehmed
Effendi and his wife Fauma Kadin (born Sarah and still called
Melisselda by her adoring husband, the Sultan's door-keeper) were
receiving instruction in the Moslem religion from the exultant Mufti
Vanni, a great Synod of Jews, swept to Amsterdam by the mighty wave
of faith and joy, Rabbis and scholars and presidents of colleges, were
drawing up a letter of homage to the Messiah. And while the Grand
Seignior was meditating the annihilation of all the Jews of the
Ottoman Empire for their rebellious projects, with the forced
conversion of the orphaned children to Islam, the Jews of the world
were celebrating--for what they thought the last time--the Day of
Atonement, and five times during that long fast-day did the weeping
worshippers, rocking to and fro in their grave-clothes, passionately
pronounce the blessing over Sabbataï Zevi, the Messiah of Israel.
Nor did the fame and memory of him perish for generations; nor the
dreamers of the Jewry cease to cherish the faith in him, many
following him in adopting the white turban of Islam.
But by what ingenious cabalistic sophistries, by what yearning
fantasies--fit to make the angels weep--his unhappy followers,
obstinate not to lose the great white hope that had come to illumine
the gloom of the Jewries, explained away his defection; what sects and
counter-sects his appostasy gave birth to, and what new prophets
arose--a guitar-playing gallant of Madrid, a tobacco dealer of
Pignerol, a blue-blooded Christian millionaire of Copenhagen--to
nourish that great pathetic hope (which still lives on) long after
Sabbataï himself, after who knows what new spasms of self-mystification
and hypocrisy, what renewed aspirations after his old greatness and his
early righteousness, what fresh torment of soul and body, died on the
Day of Atonement, a lonely white-haired exile in a little Albanian
town, where no brother Jew dwelt to close his eyelids or breathe
undying homage into his dying ears--is it not written in the chronicles
of the Ghetto?
(_Here endeth the Third and Last Scroll._)