"The only and just-begotten Son of God, Sabbataï Zevi, Messiah and Redeemer of the people of Israel, to all the sons of Israel, Peace! Since ye have been worthy to behold the great day, and the fulfilment of God's word to the prophets, let your lament and sorrow be changed into joy, and your fasts into festivals; for ye shall weep no more. Rejoice with drums, organs, and music, making of every day a New Moon, and change the day which was formerly dedicated to sadness and sorrow into a day of jubilee, because I have appeared; and fear ye naught, for ye shall have dominion not only over the nations, but over the creatures also in the depths of the sea." Thereat arose a new and stranger commotion throughout all the Ghettos, Jewries, and Mellahs. The more part received the divine message in uproarious jubilation. The Messiah was come, indeed! Those terrible twenty-four hours of absolute fasting and passionate prayer--henceforward to be hours of feasting and merriment! O just and joyous edict! The Jewish Kingdom was on the eve of restoration--how then longer bewail its decay! But the staunchest pietists were staggered, and these the most fervent of the followers of Sabbataï. What! The penances and prayers of sixteen hundred years to be swept away! The Yoke of the Torah to be abolished! Surely true religion rather demanded fresh burdens. What could more fitly mark the Redemption of the World than new and more exacting laws, if, indeed, such remained to be invented? True, God himself was now incarnate on earth--of that they had no doubt. But how could He wish to do away with the laws deduced from the Holy Book and accumulated by the zealous labors of so many generations of faithful Rabbis; how could He set aside the venerated prescriptions of the _Shulchan Aruch_ of the pious Benjamin Caro (his memory for a blessing), and all that network of ceremonial and custom for the zealous maintenance of which their ancestors had so often laid down their lives? How could He so blaspheme? And so--in blind passion, unreasoning, obstinate--they clung to their threatened institutions; in every Jewry they formed little parties for the defence of Judaism. What they had prayed for so passionately for centuries had come to pass. The hopes that they had caught from the _Zohar_, that they had nourished and repeated day and night, the promise that sorrow should be changed into joy and the Law become null and void--here was the fulfilment. The Messiah was actually incarnate--the Kingdom of the Jews was at hand. But in their hearts was a vague fear of the dazzling present, and a blind clinging to the unhappy past.