And in their studies, also, a defect from this same feverish fervour of long-repressed religion became manifest. They were so delighted to be able again to openly read their Law and their Talmud, that even in these sober pursuits they grew immoderate. Law and Talmud were not enough for them in their restless mood of repentant energy. Many scholars began eagerly to adopt and to accept the wildest and most fanciful ‘extensions’ in religion and in philosophy. There is a whole branch of Jewish doctrinal study which is called the Kabbala. Grätz describes the Kabbala as a fungous growth which, since the thirteenth century, crept over the body of the Law and of tradition. This Kabbala is a weed of Eastern planting, but amongst Western scholars, in waste places, it got some space to grow. It is a strange combination of faith and philosophy, and its mystical character facilitated the introduction of all sorts of un-Jewish beliefs and superstitions under the name of Kabbala. Thus we have a quantity of so-called Kabbalistic literature, containing a superstitious agglomeration of signs and wonders, which would lead its students to credulous musings on evil spirits, and false prophets, and spurious Messiahs, instead of to earnest belief in the one true God and His servant Moses. It was only minds which had become weakened and debased by Kabbalistic studies that could have believed in such a Messiah as Sabbatai Zevi. That episode in 1666――some ten years later than the date of Spinoza’s banishment and excommunication from the Amsterdam synagogue――is an extreme instance of the tendency of the zeal of superstition. The incident of Uriel da Costa, which had its place in Amsterdam some sixteen years earlier, when Spinoza was a boy of eight, is an instance of the lengths to which even good and cultivated men may be carried by the zeal of intolerance. =3. Spinoza’s Student Days.=――It was in a community shaped by such influences and such experiences, among passionately observant and rigorously conforming Jews, that Baruch Spinoza was brought up. And to make the misunderstanding which came about between him and his congregation more utterly hopeless, Spinoza was a born genius, an original, creative thinker, whilst his masters, and teachers, and elders were only cultivated, and clever, and commonplace. A wide gulf separates knowledge, however great, from genius. The Amsterdam congregation had acquired the one, and Spinoza possessed the other, and this exceptional gift of his was not known, nor guessed at till it was too late.