What might not Luzzatto have accomplished if he could have liberated his mind from the extravagant follies of the Kabbala! But it held him captive, and drew him not long after the completion of his drama (about 1744) to Palestine. Here he hoped to be able to follow unmolested the inspirations of his excited fancy, or play the _rôle_ of a Messiah. From Safet, too, he continued his communications with his band of disciples; but before he could commence operations he fell a victim to the plague, in the fortieth year of his age. His body was buried in Tiberias. The two greatest modern Hebrew poets, Luzzatto and Jehuda Halevi, were to rest in Hebrew soil. Even the tongues of the slanderous Jews of Palestine, to whom Luzzatto, with his peculiarities, must have seemed an enigma, could only speak well of him after his death. Nevertheless he sowed bad seed. His Italian followers reintroduced the Kabbala into Italy. His Polish disciple, Yekutiel of Wilna, whose buffooneries had first got him into trouble, is said to have led an adventurer's life in Poland and Holland, playing scandalous tricks under the mask of mysticism. Another Pole, Elijah Olianow, who belonged to Luzzatto's following, and proclaimed him as Messiah and himself as his Elijah, did not enjoy the best of reputations. This man took part in the disgraceful disorders which broke out in Altona after Luzzatto's death, and which, again stirring up the Sabbatian mire, divided the Jews of Europe into two hostile camps. The foul pool which for centuries, since the prohibition of free inquiry and the triumph of its enemy the Kabbala, had been in process of formation in Judaism was, with perverse stupidity, being continually stirred up, defiling the pure and the impure. The irrational excitement roused by the vain, false Messiah of Smyrna was not suppressed by the proscription of Chayon and the Polish Sabbatians, but showed a still more ill-favored aspect, forcing its way into circles hitherto closed against it. The rabbis, occupied with the practical and dialectical interpretation of the Talmud, had hitherto refused admission to the Kabbala on equal terms, and only here and there had surreptitiously introduced something from it. They had opposed the Sabbatian heresy, and pronounced an anathema against it. But one influential rabbi espoused its cause, invested it with importance, and so precipitated a conflict which undermined discipline and order, and blunted still more the sense of dignity and self-respect, of truth and rectitude. The occasion of the conflict was the petty jealousy of two rabbis. Its true origin lay deeper, in intellectual perversity and the secret dislike on the one hand to the excess of ritualistic observances, and on the other to the extravagances of the Kabbala. The authors of this far-reaching schism--two Polish rabbis of Altona--each unconsciously had taken a step across the threshold of orthodoxy. Diametrically opposed to each other in faculties and temperament, they