moned before the Lord Fairfax
at Whitehall, that "he was of the race of the Jews."[464] It is true
that the Levellers were by profession Christian, but after the manner of
the Bavarian Illuminati and of the Christian Socialists two centuries
later, claiming Christ as the author of their Communistic and
equalitarian doctrines: "For Jesus Christ, the Saviour of all Men, is
the greatest, first, and truest Leveller that ever was spoken of in the
world." The Levellers are said to have derived originally from the
German Anabaptists; but Claudio Jannet, quoting German authorities,
shows that there were Jews amongst the Anabaptists. "They were carried
away by their hatred of the name of Christian and imagined that their
dreams of the restoration of the kingdom of Israel would be realized
amidst the conflagration."[465] Whether this was so or not, it is clear
that by the middle of the seventeenth century the mystical ideas of
Judaism had penetrated into all parts of Europe. Was there then some
Cabalistic centre from which they radiated? Let us turn our eyes
eastward and we shall see.

Since the sixteenth century the great mass of Jewry had settled in
Poland, and a succession of miracle-workers known by the name of
Zaddikim or Ba'al Shems had arisen. The latter word, which signifies
"Master of the Name," originated with the German Polish Jews and was
derived from the Cabalistic belief in the miraculous use of the sacred
name of Jehovah, known as the Tetragrammaton.

According to Cabalistic traditions, certain Jews of peculiar sanctity or
knowledge were able with impunity to make use of the Divine Name. A
Ba'al Shem was therefore one who had acquired this power and employed it
in writing amulets, invoking spirits, and prescribing cures for various
diseases. Poland and particularly Podolia--which had not yet been ceded
to Russia--became thus a centre of Cabalism where a series of
extraordinary movements of a mystical kind followed each other. In 1666,
when the Messianic era was still believed to be approaching, the whole
Jewish world was convulsed by the sudden appearance of Shabbethai Zebi,
the son of a poulterer in Smyrna named Mordecai, who proclaimed himself
the promised Messiah and rallied to his support a huge following not
only amongst the Jews of Palestine, Egypt, and Eastern Europe, but even
the hard-headed Jews of the Continental bourses.[466] Samuel Pepys in
his Diary refers to the bets made amongst the Jews in London o