Excerpt from The Messiah Idea in Jewish History The belief in the coming of the Messiah, the treasured hope of the Jew throughout all the centuries of misery and persecution, is regarded by most Jewish thinkers as a dog ma of Judaism. Some of them, indeed, would not make this belief essential to Juda ism. They consider it merely as a branch, or corollary to others more important, but almost all agree that the belief in the coming of a Messiah is an important feature of Judaism. The nature and limitations of this dogma, however, remained unsettled, the Jewish authorities differing widely in their conception of it, according to the intellectual and material position of the people at their respective times. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.