proclivities. So also his eighteenth-century replica, the Marquis de Sade, combined with his abominations an impassioned hatred of the Christian religion.
What is the explanation of this craze for magic in Western Europe? Deschamps points to the Cabala, "that science of demoniacal arts, of which the Jews were the initiators," and undoubtedly in any comprehensive review of the question the influence of the Jewish Cabalists cannot be ignored. In Spain, Portugal, Provence, and Italy the Jews by the fifteenth century had become a power; as early as 1450 they had penetrated into the intellectual circles of Florence, and it was also in Italy that, a century later, the modern Cabalistic school was inaugurated by Isaac Luria (1533-72), whose doctrines were organized into a practical system by the Hasidim of Eastern Europe for the writing of amulets, the conjuration of devils, mystical jugglery with numbers and letters, etc. Italy in the fifteenth century was thus a centre from which Cabalistic influences radiated, and it may be that the Italians who indoctrinated Gilles de Rais had drawn their inspiration from this source. Indeed Eliphas Lévi, who certainly cannot be accused of "Anti-Semitism," declares that "the Jews, the most faithful trustees of the secret of the Cabala, were almost always the reat masters of magic in the Middle Ages," and suggests that Gilles de Rais took his monstrous recipes for using the blood of murdered children "from some of those old Hebrew grimoires (books on magic), which, if they had been known, would have sufficed to hold up the Jews