48. _The Mendelssohn Movement._--This notable beginning to the removal of "the ignominy of a thousand years" was causally connected with the career of Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786; q.v.). He found on both sides an unreadiness for approximation: the Jews had sunk into apathy and degeneration, the Christians were still moved by hereditary antipathy. The failure of the hopes entertained of Sabbatai Zebi (q.v.) had plunged the Jewries of the world into despair. This Smyrnan pretender not only proclaimed himself Messiah (c. 1650) but he was accepted in that rôle by vast numbers of his brethren. At the moment when Spinoza was publishing a system which is still a dominating note of modern philosophy, this other son of Israel was capturing the very heart of Jewry. His miracles were reported and eagerly believed everywhere; "from Poland, Hamburg and Amsterdam treasures poured into his court; in the Levant young men and maidens prophesied before him; the Persian Jews refused to till the fields. 'We shall pay no more taxes,' they said, 'our Messiah is come.'" The expectation that he would lead Israel in triumph to the Holy Land was doomed to end in disappointment. Sabbatai lacked one quality without which enthusiasm is ineffective; he failed to believe in himself. At the critical moment he embraced Islam to escape death, and though he was still believed in by many--it was not Sabbatai himself but a phantom resemblance that had assumed the turban!--his meteoric career did but colour the sky of the Jews with deeper blackness. Despite all this, one must not fall into the easy error of exaggerating the degeneration into which the Jewries of the world fell from the middle of the 17th till the middle of the 18th century. For Judaism had organized itself; the _Shulhan aruch_ of Joseph Qaro (q.v.), printed in 1564 within a decade of its completion, though not accepted without demur, was nevertheless widely admitted as the code of Jewish life. If in more recent times progress in Judaism has implied more or less of revolt against the rigors and fetters of Qaro's code, yet for 250 years it was a powerful safeguard against demoralization and stagnation. No community living in full accordance with that code could fail to reach a high moral and intellectual level.