the role of the Messiah. The Rabbis, alarmed at the gloomy prospect of a
repetition of the pseudo-Messianic movements which time and again had
shaken the Jewish world to its foundations, launched the ban against
him. His fate was sealed by his ingenious imitation of the Zohar,
written in Aramaic, of which only fragments have been preserved. Obliged
to leave Italy, Luzzatto wandered through Germany, and took up his abode
at Amsterdam. He enjoyed the gratification of being welcomed there by
literary men among his people as a veritable master. At Amsterdam he
wrote his last works. But he did not remain there long. He went to seek
Divine inspiration at Safed in Palestine, the far-famed centre of the
Kabbalah. There he died, cut off by the plague at the age of forty.

Such was the sad life of the poet, a victim of the abnormal surroundings
in which he lived. Under more favorable conditions, he might have
achieved that which would have won him universal recognition. His main
distinction is that he released the Hebrew language forever from the
forms and ideas of the Middle Ages, and connected it with the circle of
modern literatures. He bequeathed to posterity a model of classic
poetry, which ushered in Hebrew humanism, the return to the style and
the manner of the Bible, in the same way as the general humanistic
movement led the European mind back upon its own steps along the paths
marked out by the classic languages. No sooner did his work become known
in the north countries and in the Orient than it raised up imitators.
Mendes and Wessely, leaders of literary revivals, the one at Amsterdam,
the other in Germany, are but the disciples and successors of the
Italian poet.

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CHAPTER II