6/A?0 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND BY ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, D. D., M. A. Author of "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages," "Chapters on Jewish Literature," etc. PHILADELPHIA THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA 1920 BY THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA PREFACE Wayfarers sometimes use by-paths because the highways are closed. In the days of Jael, so the author of Deborah's Song tells us, circuitous side- tracks were the only accessible routes. In the un- settled condition of Israel those who journeyed were forced to seek their goal by roundabout ways. But, at other times, though the open road is clear, and there is no obstacle on the way of com- mon trade, the traveller may of choice turn to the by-ways and hedges. Not that he hates the wider track, but he may also love the less frequented, narrower paths, which carry him into nooks and glades, whence, after shorter or longer detours, he reaches the highway again. Not only has he been refreshed, but he has won, by forsaking the main road, a fuller appreciation of its worth. Originally writtermn 1913 for serial publication, the papers collected in this volume were designed with some unity of plan. Branching off the main line of Hebraic development, there are many by- paths of the kind referred to above by-paths lead- ing to pleasant places, where it is a delight to linger 5 2093288 PREFACE for a while. Some of the lesser expressions of the Jewish spirit disport themselves in those out-of-the- way places. Though oft neglected, they do not deserve to be treated as negligible. None can surely guide another to these places. But the first qualification of a guide, a qualification which may atone for serious defects, is that he him- self enjoys the adventure. In the present instance this qualification may be claimed. For the writer has turned his attention chiefly to his own favor- ites, choosing books or parts of books which ap- pealed to him in a long course of reading, and which came back to him with fragrant memories as he set about reviewing some of the former inti- mates of his leisure hours. The review is not formal; the method is that of the causerie, not of the essay. Some of the books are of minor value, curiosities rather than masterpieces; in others the Jewish interest is but slight. Yet in all cases the object has been to avoid details, except in so far as details help even the superficial observer to get to the author's heart, to place him in the history of literature or culture. Not quite all the authors noted in this volume were Jews the past tense is used because it was felt best to include no writers living when the volume was compiled. It seemed, 6 PREFACE however, right that certain types of non-Jewish workers in the Hebraic field ought to find a place, partly from a sense of gratitude, partly because, without laboring the point, the writer conceives that as all cultures have many points in common, so it is well to bear in mind that many cultures have con- tributed their share to produce that complex entity the Jewish spirit. Complex yet harmoni- ous, influenced from without yet dominated by a strong inner and original power, the Jewish spirit reveals itself in these by-paths as clearly as on the main line. But, though some such general idea runs through the volume, it was the author's intention to interest rather than instruct, to suggest the importance of certain authors and books, perhaps to rouse the reader to probe deeper than the writer himself has done into subjects of which here the mere surface is touched. The writer could have added indefinitely to these papers, but this selection is long enough to argue Against extending it, at all events for the present. Having decided to stray into the by-paths, it sometimes became necessary to resist the tempta- tion to turn to the main road. This necessity ac- counts for another fact. Fewer books are treated 7 PREFACE of the older period. For the older period is domi- nated by Bible and Talmud, and these were ex hypothesi outside the range. So, too, the scho- lastic masterpieces and the greater products of mysticism and law are passed over. Yet, though the writer did not consciously start with such a de- sign, it will be seen that accidentally a great fact or two betray themselves. One is that, in the Jew- ish variety, technical learning can never be wholly dissociated from what we more commonly name literature. Some books which, at first sight, are merely the expression of scholarly specialism are seen, on investigation, to belong to culture in the aesthetic no less than in the rational or legal sense. Again, there becomes apparent the vital truth that Jewish thought, dependent as it always has been on environment, is also independent. For we see how Jews in the midst of Hellenistic absolutism re- mained pragmatical, how under the medieval devo- tion to a stock-taking of the past Jews were to a certain extent creative, and how the modernist ten- dency to disintegration was resisted by an impulse towards constructiveness. But, to repeat what has already been indicated, the author had no such grave intentions as these. Many of the papers appeared in a popular weekly, 8 PREFACE the London Jewish World, the editor of which kindly conceded to the writer the privilege of col- lecting them into a book. Some, however, were specially written for this volume. All have been considerably revised, in the effort to make them more worthy of the reader's attention. The writer feels that this effort, despite the valuable help ren- dered by Dr. Halper while the proofs were under correction, has been imperfectly successful. The papers can have little in them to deserve attention. Nevertheless there is this to be urged. Some of the topics raised are apt to be ignored. Yet it is not only from the outstanding masterpieces of litera- ture that we may learn wisdom and derive pleasure. " A small talent," said Joubert, " if it keeps within its limits and rightly fulfils its task, may reach the goal just as well as a greater one." This remark may be applied to what may seem to many the minor products of genius or talent. Hence, be they termed minor or major, the books discussed in this volume were worthy of consideration. Beyond doubt most of them belong to the category of the significant and some of them even attain the rank of the epoch-making. And so, without fur- ther preface, these papers are offered to those familiar as well as to those unfamiliar with the 9 PREFACE works themselves. For to both classes may be ap- plied the Latin poet's invocation: " Now learn ye to love that loved never; and ye that have loved, love anew." 10 CONTENTS PAGE PREFACE 5 PART I THE STORY OF AHIKAR 17 PHILO ON THE " CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " 24 JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION 32 CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME 39 THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS 46 THE LETTER OF SHERIRA 53 NATHAN OF ROME'S DICTIONARY 60 THE SORROWS OF TATNU 67 PART II IBN GEBIROL'S " ROYAL CROWN " 77 BAR HISDAI'S " PRINCE AND DERVISH " 84 THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH 91 A PIYYUT BY BAR ABUN 97 ISAAC'S LAMP AND JACOB'S WELL 102 " LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN " 108 DE Rossi's " LIGHT OF THE EYES " 116 GUARINl4f&D LUZZATTO 122 HAHN'S NOTE BOOK 129 LEON MODENA'S " RITES " 136 PART III MENASSEH AND REMBRANDT 147 LANCELOT ADDISON ON THE BARBARY JEWS 153 THE BODENSCHATZ PICTURES 160 11 CONTENTS PAGE FIRST JEWISH PLAY 166 ISAAC PINTO'S PRAYER-BOOK 171 MENDELSSOHN'S " JERUSALEM " 178 HERDER'S ANTHOLOGY 184 WALKER'S " THEODORE CYPHON " 191 HORACE SMITH or THE " REJECTED ADDRESSES " 199 PART IV BYRON'S " HEBREW MELODIES " 207 COLERIDGE'S " TABLE TALK " 214 BLANCO WHITE'S SONNET 230 DISRAELI'S " ALROY " 226 ROBERT GRANT'S " SACRED POEMS " 233 GUTZKOW'S " URIEL ACOSTA " 240 GRACE AGUILAR'S " SPIRIT OF JUDAISM " 247 ISAAC LBESER'S BIBLE 254 LANDOR'S " ALFIERI AND SALOMON " 260 PART V BROWNING'S " BEN KARSHOOK " 269 K. E. FRANZOS' " JEWS OF BARNOW " 276 HERZBERG'S " FAMILY PAPERS " 283 LONGFELLOW'S " JUDAS MACCABJEUS " 290 ARTOM'S SERMONS 297 SALKINSON'S " OTHELLO " 303 " LIFE THOUGHTS " OF MICHAEL HENRY 311 THE POEMS OF EMMA LAZARUS 319 CONDER'S " TENT WORK IN PALESTINE " 325 12 CONTENTS PAGE KALISCH'S "PATH AND GOAL" 333 FRANZ DELITZSCH'S " IRIS " 340 " THE PRONAOS " OF I. M. WISE 347 A BAEDEKER LITANY 353 IMBER'S SONG 359 INDEX 365 13 ILLUSTRATIONS PAGE MENASSEH BEN ISRAEL 148 TITLE-PAGE OF THE FIRST EDITION OF BYRON'S " HEBREW MELODIES " 208 GRACE AGUILAR 248 ISAAC LEESER 254 EMMA LAZARUS 320 ISAAC MAYER WISE 348 NAPHTALI HERZ IMBF.R 360 PART I PART I THE STORY OF AHIKAR We are happily passing out of the critical ob- session, under which it was a sign of ignorance to attribute a venerable age to the records of the past. All the old books were written yesterday, or at earliest the day before ! Facts, however, are stub- born; and facts, as they come to light, justify and re-affirm our fathers' faith in the antiquity of the world's literature. The story of Ahikar is a good illustration. In the course of the Book of Tobit more than once Achiachar or Ahikar is mentioned. These allusions are verbal only, but in one scene the refer- ence is more precise. The pious Tobit on his death- bed bids hi^son " consider what Nadab (Nadan) did to Achiachar, who brought him up " ( 14. 10). What did Nadan do, and who was Ahikar? It is only withhi recent years that a complete answer has become possible to these questions. The older commentators on the Apocrypha were much wor- ried by the allusion, and had to be content with the a 17 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND blindest guesses. Some versions of Tobit had, in place of the words quoted above, the following: " Consider how Aman treated Achiachar, who brought him up." Hence the suggestion arose that the reference was to Haman and Mordecai. But the Book of Esther does not hint that Mordecai had " brought up " Haman, and was then repaid by the latter's ingratitude. But in 1880, G. Hoffmann discovered the clue. He recognized that Tobit's references were paral- leled in a story found in Aesop's Fables and in the Arabian Nights, but much more fully recorded in the Story of Ahikar preserved in several versions, such as Syriac, Arabic, and Armenian. The story, briefly told in those fuller records, is as follows : The hero is Ahikar. The name probably means something like My Brother is Precious, or A Brother of Preciousness, or possibly (as Dr. Hal- per suggests) A Man of Honor. -He was grand vizier of Sennacherib, the king of Assyria. Noted for wisdom as for statesmanship, he rose to a position of the highest dignity and wealth. But he had no son. He, accordingly, adopted his infant nephew Nadan, and reared him with loving care. He furnished him with eight nurses, fed him on honey, clothed him in fine linen and silk, and 18 THE STORY OF AHIKAR made him lie on choice carpets. The boy grew big, and shot up like a cedar; whereupon Ahikar started to teach him book-lore and wisdom. Na- dan was introduced to the king, who readily agreed to regard the youth as his minister's son, and made promise of future favors to one in whom his faithful vizier was so much interested. The narra- tive then breaks off to give in detail the wise maxims which Ahikar sought to instil into Nadan; maxims which have parallels in many literatures, including the rabbinic. Now, Ahikar was grievously mis- taken in the character of his nephew. Nadan seemed to listen to his uncle's wisdom, but all the while considered his monitor a dotard and a bore. The young man began to reveal his true disposi- tion; his cruelties to man and beast were such that Ahikar protested, and offended Nadan by prefer- ring a brother of the latter. Nadan, in revenge, plotted Ahikadfs downfall. By means of forged letters, the old vizier was condemned for treachery, though the executioner, mindful of a similar act of mercy previously shown to himself, secretly spared Ahikar's life. Nor was the day distant when Sen- nacherib bewailed the loss of Ahikar's services. Menacing messages came from Egypt of a kind which it needed an Ahikar to deal with. To the 19 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND king's joy, Ahikar was brought out from his hiding-place; he was again taken to court, and despatched to Egypt. Here, once more, the narrative is interrupted to tell the details of these Egyptian experiences; how Ahikar satisfied the Pharaoh's plan of " raising a castle betwixt heaven and earth " by placing boys on the backs of eaglets, and how he countered the puzzling questions of the Egyptian sages. Thus, bidden to weave a rope out of sand, he bored five holes in the eastern wall of the palace, and when the sun entered the holes he sprinkled sand in them, and " the sun's furrow (path) began to appear as if the sand were twined in the holes." Then, again, the king of Egypt ordered that a broken upper millstone should be brought in. " Ahikar," said the king, " sew up for us this broken mill- stone." Ahikar, who throughout tells his story in the first person, was not daunted. " I went and brought a nether millstone, and cast it down be- fore the king, and said to him : My lord the king, since I am a stranger here, and have not the tools of my craft with me, bid the cobblers cut me strips from this lower millstone which is the fellow of the upper millstone ; and forthwith I will sew it to- gether." The king laughed. Ahikar scored all 20 THE STORY OF AHIKAR round, and returned home to Assyria laden with the revenues of Egypt. The third part of the story relates how Nadan was given over to Ahikar. His uncle bound him with iron chains, and " struck him a thousand blows on the shoulders and a thousand and one on his loins "; and while Nadan was thus imprisoned in the porch of the palace door, living on " bread by weight and water by measure," being compelled willy-nilly to listen, Ahikar proceeded with further lessons in wisdom. " My son," he says, " he who does not hear with his ears, they make him to hear with the scruff of his neck." Then there follow many wonderful parables, which (as with the maxims) are similar to those in many literatures. " Thereat," ends the tale, " Nadan swelled up like a bag, and died. And to him that doeth good, what is good shall be recompensed; and to him that doeth evil, wtat is evil shall be rewarded. But he that diggeth a pit for his neighbor, filleth it with his own stature. And to God be glory, and His mercy be upon us. Amen." What was the original of this story? Nothing in the romance of its incidents, or in the marvel of the spread of it and its maxims and its incorporated fables throughout the folk-lore of humanity, ex- 21 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND cceds the dramatic fact that a large fragment of the tale, in Aramaic, has been found in Egypt among other Jewish papyri of the fifth century be- fore the Christian era ! The discovery proves many things, among them two being most significant. First, the Ahikar story is far older than people used to think, and thus the theory that the story of Ahikar was invented to explain the reference in Tobit is once for all disproved. Second,, it is at least tenable that the original language was Ara- maic and the story Jewish. Here, at all events, we have unquestionable evidence that there must have been among the Jews, nearly 2,400 years ago, an impulse towards that species of popular tale which so deeply affected the literature and poetry of the world. Ahikar, it has even been suggested, is the ultimate source of at least one of the New Testa- ment parables. But, more generally, now that we know that the story of Ahikar was at so early a date current among JCAVS, we shall be more plausi- bly able to justify the belief, long ago held by some, that Aesop and other similar collections of fables do truly come from Jewish originals. At any rate, ancient Jewish parallels must have been in circu- lation. 22 THE STORY OF AHIKAR So much for the main results of the discovery. Small details of interest abound. Tobit bade his son : " Pour out thy bread and thy wine on the graves of the righteous (4. 17)." All sorts of changes have been suggested in the text. But the saying is found in the versions of Ahikar, and may be accepted as genuine. It is not necessarily a pagan rite; it has analogy with the funeral meal which long prevailed (and still prevails) as a Jew- ish custom. Even more interesting seems another detail (of the Syriac Version), which the writers on the books of Ahikar and Tobit have overlooked. When Tobit's son starts on his quest, his dog goes with him. This is a remarkable touch. Nowhere else in ancient Jewish literature does the dog ap- pear as man's companion. Nowhere else? Yes, in one other place in the story of Ahikar. " My son," says the vizier to Nadan, " strike with stones the dog that has left his own master and followed after thee." jftere we see the dog regarded as a comrade, to be forcibly discouraged if he show signs of infidelity. There must have been a period, therefore, when the olden Jews considered the dog in a light quite other than that which afterwards became usual. 23 PHILO ON THE "CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " Much depends on the mood of the hour. Maimonides, in his Eight Chapters and in the opening section of his Code, acutely remarks that though excess in any moral direction is vicious, nevertheless it may be necessary for a man to practise an extreme in order to bring himself back from the other extreme into the middle path of virtue. Or, to use another phrase of the same philosopher, it is with the soul as with the body. To adjust the equilibrium it is proper to apply force on the side opposite to that which is over- balanced. Hence it is not surprising to find Philo speaking, as it were, with two voices on the subject of the ascetic life. In the Alexandria of his day there was at one time prevalent a cult of self-renuncia- tion. This cult had special attraction for the young and fashionable. They joined ascetic socie- ties, and, in the name of religion, abandoned all participation in worldly affairs. Philo denounced these boyish millionaire recluses in fine style. 24 PHILO ON THE " CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " Wealth was not to be abused, true ; it was, however, to be used. " Shun not the world, but live well in it," he cried. Do not avoid the festive board, but behave like gentlemen over your wine. It is all beautifully said, though I have modernized Philo's terms somewhat. " Be drunk with sobriety " is, however, one of Philo's very own phrases. But there is this other side to consider. Alexan- dria was the very hotbed of luxury and extrava- gance. People speak about the inequalities of modern civilization, and seem to imagine that it is a new thing for a slum and a palace to exist side by side. But this was exactly the condition in Alexan- dria at about the beginning of the Christian era. Its busy and gorgeous bazaars, as Mr. F. C. Cony- beare has said, blazed with products and wares imported and designed to tickle the palates and adorn the persons of the aristocracy. The same marts had another aspect, narrow and noisy, foul with misery ama disease. Wealth and vice rubbed shoulders. Passing through such scenes, Philo might well be driven to see the superiority of ascet- icism over indulgence. Religion after all is renun- ciation. Idolatry, said Philo, dwarfs a man's soul, Judaism enlarges it. Idolatry may be compatible with " strong wine and dainty dishes," Judaism 25 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND prefers a meal of bread and hyssop. In speaking thus, Philo reminds us of the Pharisaic saying: " A morsel with salt shalt thou eat, and water drink by measure, thou shalt sleep upon the ground, and live a life of painfulness, the while thou toilest in the Torah " (Pirke Abot 6. 4.). The asso- ciation of " plain living " with " high thinking " could not be more emphatically expressed. Few scholars nowadays doubt the Philonean authorship of the treatise " On the Contemplative Life." Conybeare, Cohn and Wendland have convinced us all, or nearly all, that the work is really Philo's. At first sight, no doubt, it was easier to suppose that the book was not his. It seems too cordial in its praise of seclusion, and comes too near the monastic spirit. But the Essenes were Jewish enough, and Philo's Therapeutae are essentially like the Essenes. " Therapeutae " is a Greek word which literally means " Servants," and was used to denote " Worshippers of God." The community of Therapeutae, according to Philo's description, was settled upon a low hill overlooking Lake Mareotis, not far from Alexandria. We need not go into details. These people adopted a severely simple life, each dwelling alone, spending the day in his private " holy room," passing the hours 26 PHILO ON THE " CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " without food, but occupied with the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms. On the Sabbath, how- ever, they abandoned their isolation, and met in common assembly, to listen to discourses. The " common sanctuary " was a double enclosure, divided by a wall of three or four cubits, so as to separate the women from the men. Women formed part of the audience, " having the same zeal and following the same mode of life," all practising celibacy. Men and women alike, or at least the most zealous of them, well-nigh fasted throughout the week, " having accustomed themselves, as they say the grasshoppers do, to live upon air; for the song of these, I suppose, assuages the feeling of want." Their Sabbath meal was held in common, for they regarded " the seventh day as in a manner all holy and festal," and, therefore, " deem it wor- thy of peculiar dignity." The diet, however, " com- prises nothing expensive, but only cheap bread; and its relish is sajf, which the dainty among them pre- pare with hyssop; and for drink they have water from the spring." For, continues Philo, " they propitiate the mistresses Hunger and Thirst, which nature has set over mortal creatures, offering noth- ing that can flatter them, but merely such useful food as life cannot be supported without. For this 27 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND reason they eat only so as not to be hungry, and drink only so as not to thirst, avoiding all surfeit as dangerous and inimical to body and soul." There is only one relaxation of this severity. No wine is brought to table, but such of the more aged as are " of a delicate habit of life " are permitted to drink their water hot. Of course, the main tendency of Judaism has been in another direction. Fascinating though Philo's picture of the community of Therapeutae is, yet it cannot be felt to be a model for ordinary men and women. From time to time, indeed, Jews (like the disciples of Isaac Luria) followed much the same course of life. But most have been un- willing or unable to accept such an ideal as worthy of imitation. It is not at all certain that Philo meant it to be a model; anyhow, as we have seen, he was not always in the same mood. Judah ha-Levi opens the third part of his Khazari with just this distinction between the ideal circumstances, under which the ascetic life may be admirable, and the normal conditions, under which it is culpable. " When the Divine Presence was still in the Holy Land among the people capable of prophecy, some few persons lived an ascetic life in deserts " with good results. But nowadays, continues Judah 28 PHILO ON THE " CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " ha-Levi, " he who in our time and place and people, 'whilst no open vision exists' (I Samuel 3. i), the desire for study being small, and persons with a natural talent for it absent, would like to retire into ascetic solitude, only courts distress and sick- ness for soul and body." The real pietist, he con- cludes, is not the man who ignores his senses, but the man who rules over them. And this was really the view of Philo also, as we find it in his other works. " The bad man," he says, " treats pleasure as the summum bonum, the good man as a neces- sity, for without pleasure nothing happens among mortals." And so he counsels men to follow the avocations of ordinary life, and not to disdain am- bition. " In fine, it is necessary that they who would concern themselves with things divine should, first of all, have discharged the duties of man. It is a great folly to thinlf we can reach a comprehension of the greater when we are unable to overcome the less. Be first known by your excellence in things human, in order that you may apply yourselves to excellence in things divine." (I take these quota- tions from C. G. Montefiore's brilliant Florilegium Philonis, which he ought to reprint.) Philo un- doubtedly thought more highly of the contempla- tive than of the practical life. But in this last 29 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND passage he gets very near the truth when he treats the former as only noble when it is based on the latter. It is another aspect of the rabbinic truth that " not study but conduct " is the end of virtue. Philo does not contradict this truth ; he offers to our inspection the reverse side of the same shield. One other point remains. The reader of Philo's eulogy of the Contemplative Life must be struck by the gaiety of these ascetics. Again and again Philo speaks of their joyousness. They " compose songs and hymns to God in divers strains and meas- ures." There is nothing morose about them. They build up the edifice of virtue on a foundation of continence, but it is a cheerful devotion after all. Above all is the music, the singing. They have " many melodies " to which they sing old songs or newly written poems. One sings in solo, and then they all " give out their voices in unison, all the men and all the women together " joining in " the catches and refrains," and " a full and harmonious symphony results." Philo grows ecstatic. " Noble are the thoughts, and noble the words of their hymn, yea, and noble the choristers. But the end and aim of thought and words and choristers alike is holiness." And this summary ought to be appli- cable to every form of Jewish life, to those phases 30 PHILO ON THE " CONTEMPLATIVE LIFE " particularly which reject the excesses of asceticism. " Serve the Lord with joy," says the hundredth Psalm. True we must have the joy; but we must also not omit the service. 31 JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION " Buffon, the great French naturalist," as Mat- thew Arnold reminds us, " imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all answer to at- tacks made upon him." This attitude of digni- fied silence has often been commended. In one of his wisest counsels, Epictetus recommended his friends not to defend themselves when at- tacked. If a man speaks ill of you, said the Stoic, you should only reply : " Good sir, you must be ignorant of many others of my faults, or you would not have mentioned only these."- An older than Epictetus gave similar advice. Sennacherib's emissary, the Rabshakeh, had insolently assailed Hezekiah; "but the people held their peace, for the king's commandment was : Answer him not " (II Kings 1 8. 36). On this last text a fine homily may be found in a printed volume of the late Simeon Singer's Sermons. Mr. Singer illustrated his counsel of restraint by a reference to Josephus. Apion more than 1,800 years ago had traduced the Jews, and Josephus demolished his slanders in " as powerful a piece of controversial literature as is to be found." " But," continued the preacher, " note 32 JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION the irony of the situation. But for Josephus' reply, Apion would long have been forgotten " ; not his name, but certainly the details of his typical anti- Semitism. This fact, however, does not carry with it the conclusion that Josephus rendered his people an ill- service. There are two orders of Apologetics the destructive and the constructive. Apologia was originally a legal term which denoted the speech of the defendant against the plaintiff's charges. As we know abundantly well from the forensic giants of the classical oratory such as Demos- thenes and Cicero these defences were largely made up of abuse of the other side. Josephus was an apt pupil of these masters. His abuse of Apion leaves nothing to the imagination; everything is formulated, and with scathing particularity. Jose- phus, it is true, does not seem to have been unjust. Rarely, if ever, has an out-and-out anti-Semite pos- sessed a pleasing personality. Apion was a gram- marian of note, but there is much evidence as to his unamiable characteristics. The emperor Tibe- rius, who knew a braggart when he saw one, called Apion " cymbalum mundi " a world-drum, mak- ing the universe ring with his ostentatious garru- lity. Aulus Gellius records his vanity ; Pliny accuses 3 33 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND him of falsehood and charlatanism. Josephus was, therefore, not going beyond the facts when he de- scribes him as a scurrilous mountebank. It cannot be denied, moreover, that Josephus scores heavily against his opponent, in solid argument as well as in verbal invective. If the Jewish historian made Apion immortal, it was a deathless infamy that he secured for him. Certainly, too, Josephus successfully rebuts Apion's specific libels : the most silly of them, how- ever, antedated Apion and survived him. Tacitus, indeed, seems to have gathered his own weapons out of Apion's armory, and the Roman repeats the Alexandrian's libel that in Jerusalem an ass was adored. Those who are interested in this legend of ass-worship may turn to a learned article by Dr. S. Krauss in the Jewish Encyclopedia (vol. ii, p. 222). It has been suggested that the charge arose from a confusion between the Jews and cer- tain Egyptian or Dionysian sects. Others believe that at bottom there lies a misunderstanding of the " foundation-stone," which, according to talmudic tradition, was placed in the ark during the second temple. The upper millstone was called by the Greeks " the ass," for its tedious turning resembled an ass's burdensome activity. But, be the explana- 34 JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION tion what it may, the ignorance of a professed expert such as Apion was inexcusable. Yet, most grimly amusing of all Apion's charges is his repetition of the ever-recurrent libel that the Jews were haters of their fellow-men. Never was there a more per- fect illustration of Aesop's fable of the wolf and the lamb : the hated transformed into the haters ! Apion was a fine type of lover. Off to Rome went he, leading the Alexandrian deputation against the Jews (who were championed by Philo) , denouncing them to the Caesar, and using every artifice to incite the imperial animosity. With a heart bitter with hostility, Apion would be a fitting assailant of the " haters of mankind." It is one of the curiosities of fate that, apart from what Josephus has told of him, Apion is best remembered as the author or transmitter of the story of Androcles and the lion. Apion was neither the first nor the last to have a kindlier feeling for a wild beast than for a fellow- man. To all the points adduced by Apion Josephus makes a triumphant answer. But his book, termed rather inaptly Against Apion, would not deserve its repute merely because it demolished a particu- larly malignant opponent. The book really be- longs to Apologetic of the second of the two orders 35 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND distinguished above. Higher far than the destruc- tive Apologetic is the constructive, which rebuts a falsehood, not by denouncing the liar, but by pre- senting the truth. " Great is truth, and it will pre- vail," is the maxim of an ancient Jewish book (I Esdras 4. 41 ) , a maxim well known in substance to Josephus himself (Antiquities, xi. 3). "Who ever knew truth put to the worse in a free and open encounter? " asks Milton. If we once give up con- fidence in the unconquerable power of truth to win in the end, we have already made an end of human hope. Apologetic, then, of the better type attaches itself to this belief in the inherent virtue of truth. It meets the enemy not with weapons similar to his own, but with a shield impervious to all weapons. Josephus can sustain this test. Judged by the constructive standard, the treatise Against Apion is a masterpiece. That the Jews were an ancient people with an age-long record of honor, and not a race of recent and disreputable upstarts, Josephus proves by citations from older writers who, but for these citations, would be even less known than they now are. It is not, however, on such argu- ments that Josephus chiefly rests his case. The external history of the Jews, their glorious par- ticipation in the world's affairs these are much. 36 JOSEPHUS AGAINST APION But there is somthing which is far more. " As for ourselves, we neither inhabit a maritime country, nor delight in commerce, nor in such intercourse with other men as arises from it; but the cities we dwell in are remote from the sea, and as we have a fruitful country to dwell in, we take pains in cul- tivating it. But our principal care of all is to edu- cate our children well, and to observe the laws, and we think it to be the most necessary business of our whole life to keep that religion that has been handed down to us " ( i. 12). This passage is famous both for its denial of the supposed natural bent of Jews to commerce and for its assertion that education is the principal purpose of Jewish endeavor. Jo- sephus, especially in the second book of his Apology, expounds Judaism as life and creed in glowing terms. This exposition is one of our main sources of information for the Judaism of the first century of the Christian era. His picture of life under the Jewish law is a panegyric, but praise is not always partiality. Is it an exaggerated claim that Josephus makes on behalf of Judaism? Surely not. "I make bold to say," exclaims Josephus in his perora- tion, " that we are become the teachers of other men in the greatest number of things, and those the most excellent. For what is more excellent 37 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND than unshakable piety ? What is more just than obe- dience to the laws? And what is more advantageous than mutual love and concord, and neither to be divided by calamities, nor to become injurious and seditious in prosperity, but to despise death when we are in war, and to apply ourselves in peace to arts and agriculture, while we are persuaded that God surveys and directs everything everywhere. If these precepts had either been written before by others, or more exactly observed, we should have owed them thanks as their disciples, but if it is plain that we have made more use of them than other men, and if we have proved that the original inven- tion of them is our own, let the Apions and Molos, and all others who delight in lies and abuse, stand confuted." There were grounds on which contemporary Jews had just cause for complaint against Josephus. He lacked patriotism. But only in the political sense. When Judea was invaded, he did not stand firm in resistance to Rome. But when Judaism was calumniated, he was a true patriot. He stands high in the honorable list of those who championed the Jewish cause without thought of self. Or, rather, such self-consciousness as he displays is communal, not personal. When he pleads his people's cause, his pettinesses vanish, he is every inch a Jew. 38 CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME Favorable remarks on Hebrew literature are very rare in the Greek writers. One of the most significant is contained in the ninth section of Longinus' famous treatise on the Sublime. This Greek author it will soon be seen why the name Caecilius and not Longinus appears in the title of this article analyses sublimity of style into five sources: i) grandeur of thought; 2) spirited treatment of the passions; 3) figures of thought and speech; 4) dignified expression; 5) majesty of structure. Longinus points out that the first two conditions of sublimity depend mainly on natural endowments, whereas the last three derive assist- ance from art. It is when illustrating the first of the five ele- ments that our author refers to the Bible. The most important of all conditions of the Sublime is " a certain lofty cast of mind." Such sublimity is " the image of greatness of soul." As he beauti- fully says: " It is only natural that their words should be full of sublimity, whose thoughts are full of majesty." Longinus, accordingly, refuses to 39 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND praise without reserve Homer's picture of the " Battle of the Gods " : A trumpet sound Rang through the air, and shook the Olympian height, Then terror seized the monarch of the dead, And, springing from his throne, he cried aloud With fearful voice, lest the earth, rent asunder By Neptune's mighty arm, forthwith reveal To mortal and immortal eyes those halls So drear and dank, which e'en the gods abhor. An impious medley, Longinus terms this, a per- fect hurly-burly, terrible in its force fulness, but overstepping the bounds of decency. (I take these and other phrases from Mr. H. L. Havell's fine translation). Far to be preferred are those Homeric passages which " exhibit the divine nature in its true light as something spotless, great, and pure." He instances the lines in the Iliad on Poseidon, though there does not seem much to choose between them and the passage condemned above. But then follows the remarkable para- graph which is the reason why I have chosen Longinus for a place in this gallery: " And thus also the lawgiver of the Jews, no ordinary man, having formed an adequate conception of the Supreme Being, gave it adequate expression in the 40 CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME opening words of his Laws: God said: Let there be light, and there was light; let there be earth, and there was earth." Few will dispute that this passage in Genesis be- longs to the sublimest order of literature. It is of the utmost interest that Longinus (whoever he was) should have recognized this fact. Whoever he was whether the true Longinus, or an unknown rhetorician of the first century. Whether it be- longs to the age of Augustus or Aurelian, it is equally noteworthy that the Greek writer should have admitted that the sublime might be exhibited by Moses as well as by Homer. It is quite clear, however, that Longinus did not take his quotation from the Hebrew Bible itself or from the Greek translation. Had he known the Bible, he must have made much fuller use of it. Read his analysis of the sublime quoted above. He could, and would, have illustrated every one of his five conditions from the Bible, had he been acquainted with it. Moreover, the quotation from Genesis is inexact. There is no text: God said: Let there be earth, and there was earth. Obviously, as Theodore Reinach points out, the reference is taken from the sense, not the words, of Genesis I. 9 and 10. Longinus, therefore, either knew it from hearsay, 41 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND or he had found the quotation in the course of his reading. This latter suggestion was made as long ago as 1711 by Schurzfleisch how Matthew Arnold would have jibed at a man with such a name com- menting on the Sublime! Longinus quotes a previ- ous treatise on the Sublime by a certain Caecilius. His predecessor, says Longinus, wasted his efforts " in a thousand illustrations of the nature of the Sublime," while he failed to define the subject. Be that as it may, Longinus quotes Caecilius several times, especially for these very illustrations. It is by no means improbable, then, that Longinus' reference to Genesis was derived from Caecilius, who may have paraphrased from memory rather than have quoted with the Bible before him. Now, Suidas informs us that Caecilius was reported to be a Jew. Reinach (Revue des Etudes Juices, vol. xxvi, pp. 36-46) has provided full ground for ac- cepting the information of Suidas, which is now generally adopted as true. Caecilius belonged to the first century of the current era, and, born in Sicily, the offspring of a slave, he betook himself as a freedman to Rome, where he won considerable note as a writer on rhetoric. The Characters of the Ten Orators was 42 CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME one of his most important books; several histories are ascribed to him ; and, as we have seen, he wrote a formal treatise on the Sublime, which gave rise to the better-known work attributed to Longinus. It is not clear whether Caecilius was a born Jew or a proselyte. Probably the theory that best fits the facts is that of Schurer. We may suppose that the rhetorician's father was brought to Rome as a Jewish slave by Pompey, and was then sold to a Sicilian. In Sicily, the son, who bore the name Archagathos, received a Greek education, and was freed by a Roman of the Caecilius clan. The freedman would drop his own name, and adopt the family name of his benefactor, according to com- mon practice. Schurer offers a very acute, and I think conclusive, argument against the view that Caecilius was a convert to Judaism. A proselyte would have exhibited much more zeal for his new faith. In the works of Caecilius, I may add, his Judaism seems more a reminiscence than a vital factor. It is, on the whole, more likely that he came of Jewish ancestry than that he was himself a new-made Jew. Reinach contends that because he was a proselyte, Caecilius knew the Bible only superficially, and hence arose his misquotation of Genesis. Is that a probable view to take? If we 43 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND conceive, with Schiirer, that the father of Caecilius, a born Jew, had passed through such vicissitudes, being carried a slave from Syria to Rome, trans- ferred into an alien environment in Sicily, we can well understand that the son would possess but a superficial memory of the Bible. On the other hand, a proselyte would have become a devotee to the Scriptures, the beauties of which had burst upon his mind for the first time. He would not misquote. The chief Jewish translators of the Bible into Greek (apart, of course, from the oldest Alex- andrian version) were, curiously enough, proselytes to Judaism. Perhaps it would be too far-fetched to suggest that Caecilius had a particular reason to remember the first chapter of Genesis. His orig- inal name, Archagathos, is not a bad translation of the Hebrew " very good " (fob meod) which oc- curs prominently in the story of the Creation. Unfortunately, none of the works of Caecilius is preserved. We know him only by a few frag- ments. Plutarch described him as " eminent in all things," yet neither Schiirer in his earlier editions, nor Graetz in any edition, placed him where he ought to be to use Reinach's phraseology in the phalanx of the great Jewish Hellenists, with Aris- tobulus, Philo, and Josephus. Caecilius was the 44 CAECILIUS ON THE SUBLIME restorer of Atticism in literature, a piquant role for a Jew to play. Yet it is a part the Jew has often filled. An instructive essay could be written on the services rendered by Hebrews to the spread of Hellenism, not merely in the ancient world, but also in the medieval and modern civilizations. 45 THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS " The plumage," writes Herodotus (ii. 73), " is partly red, partly golden, while the general form and size are almost exactly like the eagle." The Greek historian was describing the phoenix, the fabled bird which lived for five hundred years. According to another version, she then consumed herself in fire, and from the ashes emerged again in youthful freshness. Herodotus likens the phoenix to the eagle, and the reader of some of the Jewish commentaries on the last verse of Isaiah 40 and the fifth verse of Psalm 103 will find refer- ences to similar ideas. In particular to be noted is Kimhi's citation of Sa'adya's reference to the be- lief that the eagle acquired new wings every twelve years, and lived a full century. Such fancies easily attached themselves to Isaiah's phrase and to the psalmist's words: " Thy youth is renewed like the eagle." The biblical metaphors, in sober fact, merely allude to the fullness of life, high flight, and vigor of the eagle; there is nothing whatever that is mythical about them. 46 THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS What passes for one of the most famous de- scriptions of the phoenix is contained in the well- known Greek drama of the Exodus (or rather Exagoge) written by the Jewish poet, Ezekielos. This writer probably flourished rather more than a century before the Christian era. It is commonly supposed that he lived in the capital of the Ptole- mies, in Alexandria; but it has been suggested by Kuiper that his home was not in Egypt, but in Palestine, in Samaria. If that be so, it is a remark- able phenomenon. We should not wonder that a Jew in Alexandria composed Greek dramas on biblical themes, with the twofold object of present- ing the history of Israel in attractive form and of providing a substitute for the heathen plays which monopolized the ancient theatre. But that such dramas should be produced soon after the Macca- bean age in Palestine would imply an unexpected continuity of the influences of Greek manners in the homeland of the Jews. Ere we could accept the theory of a Palestinian origin for Ezekielos, we should need far stronger arguments than Kuiper adduces (Revue des Etudes Juives, vol. xlvi, p. 48, seq.). The drama of the Exodus which was appar- ently written to be performed- follows the biblical 47 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND story with some closeness. We are now, however, interested in a single episode, preserved for us among the fragments of Ezekielos as quoted by Eusebius (Prep. Evangel, ix. 30). A beautiful picture of the twelve springs of Elim and of its seventy palms is followed by a description of the extraordinary bird that appeared there. I take the passage from Gifford's Eusebius (iii, p. 475). A character of the play, after the Greek manner, is reporting to Moses : Another living thing we saw, more strange And marvellous than man e'er saw before, The noblest eagle scarce was half as large; His outspread wings with varying colors shone; The breast was bright with purple, and the legs With crimson glowed, and on the shapely neck The golden plumage shone in graceful curves; The head was like a gentle nestling's formed; Bright shone the yellow circlet of the eye On all around, and wondrous sweet the voice. The king he seemed of all the winged tribe, As soon was proved ; for birds of every kind Hovered in fear behind his stately form; While like a bull, proud leader of the herd, Foremost he marched with swift and haughty step. Gifford has no hesitation in accepting the com- mon identification of this bird with the phoenix. Obviously, however, Ezekielos says nothing of the 48 THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS mythical properties of the bird; he merely pre- sents to us a super-eagle of gorgeous plumage and splendid stature, unnatural but not supernatural. Even the magnificence of the superb bird pictured by Ezekielos is less bizarre than we find it in other authors. Ezekielos' figures sink into insignificance beside those of Lactantius, who tells us that the bird's monstrous eyes resembled twin hyacinths, from the midst of which flashed and quivered a bright flame. If Ezekielos really refers to the phoenix, how does it come into the drama at all? Gifford has this note : " There is no mention in Exodus of the phoenix or any such bird, but the twelve palm-trees (phoenix) at Elim may have sug- gested the story of the phoenix to the poet, just as in the poem of Lactantius. Phoenix 70, the tree is said to have been named from the bird." The word phoenix has, I may add, a romantic history. It means, literally, Phoenician. Now, certain of the Phoenician race were the reputed discoverers and first users of purple-red or crimson dyes. Hence these colors were named after them, Phoenix or Phoenician. The Greek translation, in Isaiah I. 18, renders "scarlet" by Phoenician. The epithet was applied equally to red cattle, to the bay horse, to the date-palm and its fruit. It 4 49 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND was also used of the fabulous bird because of its colorings. Gifford supposes, then, that Ezekielos knowing of the palms reached at Elim in the early wanderings of Israel, introduced the bird into his drama. The palms at Elim are indeed described by this very word (Phoenician) in the Greek trans- lation of the Bible which Ezekielos used (Exodus 15. 27). The lulab is also termed phoenix in the Greek of Leviticus 23. 40. The explanation seems at first sight as plausible as it is clever. But it involves a serious difficulty. For Ezekielos in a previous passage has already described the Phoenician palm-trees at consider- able length. The passage has been partly noted above, but it is musical enough to be worth citing as a whole : See, my Lord Moses, what a spot is found, Fanned by sweet airs from yonder shady grov; For as thyself mayest see, there lies the stream, And thence at night the fiery pillar shed Its welcome guiding light. A meadow there Beside the stream in grateful shadow lies, And a deep glen in rich abundance pours From out a single rock twelve sparkling springs. There, tall and strong, and laden all with fruit, Stand palms threescore and ten ; and plenteous grass, Well watered, gives sweet pasture to our flocks. 50 THE PHOENIX OF EZEKIELOS It seems incredible that the poet who thus de- scribes the palms could then have proceeded to con- fuse the palms with a bird. Ezekielos does not use the epithet Phoenician in his account of the latter. Thus the theory breaks down. How then is the passage to be explained? As it seems to me, in another and simpler way. " There is no mention in Exodus of the phoenix or any such bird," says Gifford. He is right as to the phoenix, but is he right as to " any such bird "? My readers will at once remember the forceful metaphor in the nineteenth chapter of Exodus: " And Moses went up unto God, and the Lord called unto him out of the mountain, saying : ' Thus shalt thou say to the house of Jacob, and tell the children of Israel: Ye have seen what I did unto the Egyptians, and how I bore you on eagles' wings, and brought you unto Myself.' ' The Mekilta in- terprets the words to refer to the rapidity with which Israel was assembled for the departure from Egypt, and to the powerful protection which it afterwards enjoyed. But we may also find in the same words the clue to the poet's fancy. " I bore you on eagles' wings," says the Pentateuch. No doubt the phrases of Herodotus, as well as those of Hesiod, were familiar to Ezekielos. With these 51 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND in mind, he introduced a super-eagle, figuratively mentioned in the book of Exodus, and gave to it substance and life. He personified the metaphor. It would be a perfectly legitimate exercise of poet- ical license. The description is bizarre. But it is not mythological, and it has little to do with the phoenix of fable. 52 THE LETTER OF SHERIRA Though all Israelites are brothers, they do not admit that they are all members of the same family. " Of good genealogy " is the proudest boast of the modern, as it was of the talmudic, Jew. It is, ac- cordingly, not wonderful that we find our notabili- ties from Hillel to Abarbanel claiming, or having assigned to them, descent from the Davidic line. Of Sherira the same was said. He ruled over the academy in Pumbeditha during the last third of the tenth century. A scion of the royal house of Judah, he was rightful heir to the exilarchy, yet preferred the socially lower, but academically higher, office of Gaon. The Gaon's sway was religious and scholastic; the exilarch's secular and political. Sherira's ancestry might have given him the latter post, but for the former it was intrinsic, personal worth which qualified him and his famous son Hai. Who shall deny that he made a worthy choice ? Sherira's fame rests less on his general activities as Gaon than on the Letter which he wrote about 53 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND the year 980, in response to questions formulated by Jacob ben Nissim, of Kairuwan. One of these questions retains, and will ever retain, its fascina- tion, although the answer has now no vital interest. Historically the Letter has other claims to con- tinued study. To quote Dr. L. Ginzberg ( Geonica, i, p. 169) : " The lasting value of his epistle for us lies in the information Rabbi Sherira gives about the post-Talmudic scholars. On this period he is practically the only source we have." Without Sherira, the course of the traditional development would be a blank for a long interval after the close of the Talmud. " But," continues Dr. Ginzberg, " we shall be doing Rabbi Sherira injustice if we thought of him merely as a chronologist." And this same competent scholar launches out into the following eulogy of the Gaon: "The theories which he unfolds .... regarding the origin of the Mishnah .... and many other points impor- tant in the history of the Talmud and its problems, stamp Rabbi Sherira as one of the most distin- guished historians, in fact, it is not an exaggeration to say, the most distinguished historian of litera- ture among the Jews, not only of antiquity, but also in the middle ages, and during a large part of mod- ern times." 54 THE LETTER OF SHERIRA This must suffice for the general estimate of Sherira's work. What is of more striking interest is just the one question, the answer to which does not much matter. As Dr. Neubauer formulated the question put to Sherira, it ran thus : " Was the Mishnah transmitted orally to the doctors of the Mishnah, or was it written down by the compiler himself? " Judah the Prince, we know, compiled the Mishnah, but did he leave it in an oral or a documentary form? Was it memorized or set down in script? The answer does not much mat- ter, as I have said, for sooner or later the Mishnah was written out, and it is not of great consequence whether it was later or sooner. And it is as well that Sherira's answer matters little, for we do not know for certain what Sherira's answer was ! Most authorities nowadays believe that the Gaon pro- nounced in favor of the written compilation; but this was not always the case. For Sherira's Letter was current in two versions which recorded oppo- site opinions. In the French form the oral alter- native was accepted, but the Spanish text adopted the written theory. Which was the genuine view of Sherira? There are many reasons for prefer- ring the Spanish version. As Dr. Neubauer points out, " books, letters, and responsa coming from the 55 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND East, reached Spain and Italy before they came to France and Germany." Hence the Spanish text is more likely to be primitive ; while, when the Letter was carried further, it might easily have been altered so as to fall in with the talmudic prohibition against putting the traditional laws into writing. It will, again, come as a surprise to some to note another argument used by Dr. Neubauer in favor of the Spanish text. " From the greater consistency of the Aramaic dialect in the Spanish text, a dialect which, as we know from the Responsa of the Geonim, they used in their writings, it may be con- cluded that this (the Spanish) composition is the genuine one." The Gaonate was able to maintain a pretty thorough Jewish spirit without insisting on the use of Hebrew as the only medium of salva- tion. Actually Dr. Neubauer saw in the more con- sistent Aramaic of the Spanish text an indication of its superior authenticity over what may be called the French text ! But all these points are secondary. The real in- terest lies in this whole conception of an oral book. Tradition necessarily must be largely oral; ideas, maxims, and even defined rules of conduct not only can be, they must be, transmitted by word of mouth. But is there any possibility that a whole, 56 THE LETTER OF SHERIRA elaborate book, or rather series of six books, should be put together and then trusted to memory? A new turn to the discussion was given by Prof. Gil- bert Murray's Harvard Lectures on " The Rise of the Greek Epic." To him the Iliad of Homer ap- pears in the guise of a " traditional book." No doubt the Mishnah belongs to a period separated from Homer by well-nigh a millennium. But the phrase holds. A book can be the outcome of tra- dition, can be carried on by it, expanded and elabo- rated, just as much as an oral code or history or poem. When, then, we speak of a traditional book, it does not necessarily mean that the book was not written down. The written words become precious, and the fact that they are written does not of itself spell finality or stagnation. There never was any danger of such an evil result until the age of printing and stereotyping. Nor can we conceive of a traditional book as the work of one mind. Judah the Prince neither began nor ended the chain of tradition because he wrote the Mishnah. There had been Mishnahs before him, just as there were developments of law after him. Yet, on the other hand, it is not incredible that Judah the Prince's traditional book remained an unwritten book. It is improbable, but not at all 57 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND impossible. A modern lawyer of the first rank must hold in his mind quite as many decisions and principles as are contained in the Mishnah. Macaulay could repeat by heart the whole of the Paradise Lost and much else. Many a Talmudist of the present day must remember vast masses of the traditional Halakah. Before the age of print- ing, before copies of books became common and easily accessible, scholars must have been compelled to trust to their memory for many things for which we can turn to our reference libraries. When Maimonides compiled his great Code, he must have done a good deal of it from memory. Not that men's memories are worse now than they were. But we are now able to spare ourselves. It is not a good thing to use the memory unnecessarily. It should be reserved for essentials. What we can always get from books we need not keep in mind. Besides, in olden times men remembered better not because they had better memories, but because they had less to remember. On the whole, however, it is safer to conclude that Judah the Prince made a contribution to writ- ten literature, that he set down at a particular moment (about 200 C. E.) the traditional book which had been writing itself for many decades, 58 THE LETTER OF SHERIRA partly by the minds of the Rabbis, partly by their pens. He started the book on a new career of humane activity. Sherira and the Geonim were what they were because Judah the Prince was what he was. This is the essential fact about tradition. The more we give of our best to our age, the more chance is there for all future ages to transmit of their best to posterity. 59 NATHAN OF ROME'S DICTIONARY A dictionary may seem an intruder in this gal- lery. The present scries of cursory studies clearly is not concerned with works of technical scholar- ship. But the dictionary by Nathan, son of Jehiel, earns inclusion for two reasons. First, because when one surveys the expressions of the Jewish spirit, it is impossible to draw a line between learn- ing and literature. Secondly, quite apart from this intimate general connection between the scholar and the man of letters, the dictionary of Nathan be- longs specially to the course of culture. Among the Christian Humanists who, at the period of the Reformation, promoted the enlightenment of Europe, were not lacking appreciators of the ser- vices rendered to enlightenment by Nathan's Aruk (to give it its Hebrew title). Nathan (born about 1035 and died in 1106) was an itinerant vendor of linen wares in his youth. He belonged to the family Degli Mansi, an Italian rendering of the Hebrew Anaw or Meek. The latter is still a rare but familiar Jewish surname. Legend has it that the founder of the Degli Mansi 60 NATHAN OF ROME'S DICTIONARY house was one of the original settlers introduced into Rome by Titus. At all events, the family had a long record of literary fame. Like many another merchant-traveller of the Middle Ages, Nathan made use of his earlier wanderings (as he did of his later journeys), to sit at the feet of all the Gamaliels of his age. Many and various were his teachers. He abandoned business when he re- turned to Rome after his father's death. He tells us how he made the arrangements for the inter- ment, and here straightway we perceive that his Aruk is no ordinary dictionary. For in the poem, which he appends as a kind of retrospective pref- ace, he records how sternly he had ever disap- proved of the expenses incurred at Jewish funerals in his time. Protests were vain, but example was more fruitful. In place of the double cerements in common use, he laid his father in his tomb with a single shroud. This, he records, became the model for others to imitate. Death was a frequent visitor in his abode. Of his four sons, none survived the eighth year, one not even his eighth day. Grief did not crush him. " I found sorrow and trouble, then I called on the name of the Lord," he quotes. He proceeded to erect a house of another kind. Not of flesh and blood, but vital with the spirit of 61 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Judaism, his Aruk is a monument more lasting than ten children. In what, then, does the importance of the dic- tionary consist? It is, of course, primarily, what Graetz terms it, " a key to the Talmud." No doubt there were earlier compilations of a similar nature, but Nathan's book was the most renowned of its own age, and became the basis of every sub- sequent lexicon to the Talmud. Gentile and Jew, from Buxtorf to Dalman and from Musafia to Jastrow, employed it as the ground-work of their own lexicographical research. Moreover, it was again and again edited and enlarged; but we are not dealing here with bibliographical details. Suf- fice it to mention the final edition by Alexander Kohut. Kohut began his Aruch Completum while a European Rabbi in 1878, and finished it in New York in 1892. It is remarkable that two of the best modern lexicons to the Talmud (Kohut's in Hebrew and Jastrow's in English) both emanate from America. Besides its value for understanding the text of the Talmud, Nathan's Aruk has earned other claims to fame. Nathan's dictionary marks an epoch, says Vogelstein. Consider the situation. The centre of Jewish authority was leaving Babylon. The last 62 NATHAN OF ROME'S DICTIONARY of the great literary Geonim or Excellencies, as the heads of the Babylonian schools were called died in the year 1038. Europe was replacing Asia as the scene of Jewish life. Was the old tradition to die ? At the very moment of the crisis, three men arose to prevent the chain snapping. They were almost contemporaries, and their works supple- mented each other. There was the Frenchman Rashi the commentator; the Spaniard al-Fasi the codifier; and the Italian Nathan the lexi- cographer. Between them they re-established in Europe the tradition of the Gaonate. The Baby- lonian schools might come and go; they might for a time enjoy hegemony, and then fall into decay; but the Torah must go on forever ! The manner in which this dictionary carried on the tradition is easily told. Much of the lore it contains, explanations of words and of things, must have been orally acquired in direct conversations with those who were personally linked with the older regime. It is again full of quotations of the decisions and customary lore of the Babylonian schools. If on this side the Aruk has almost played out its part for us, it is not because those decisions and customs are less interesting to us than they were to our fathers. But we are now in possession of very 68 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND many of the gaonic writings in their original. We have recovered several of the sources from which Nathan drew. The Egyptian Genizah that won- derfully preserved mass of the relics of Hebrew literature has yielded its richest harvest just in this field. We are getting to know more about the thought and manner of life of the eighth to the eleventh centuries than we know about our own time. But for a long interval men's knowledge of those centuries was largely derived from the Aruk. As a source of information it is not even now super- seded. There still remain authors whose names and works would be lost but for Rabbi Nathan's quotations. Another aspect of the book which makes it so valuable for the history of culture among the Jews is the number of languages which Nathan uses. What an array it is! Kohut enumerates (besides Hebrew and Aramaic) Latin, Greek, Arabic, Slavonic dialects, Persian, and Italian and allied speeches. Nathan cannot have known all these languages well. He certainly had little Latin and less Greek, but he repeated what he had heard from others or read in their books. It is remark- able, indeed, how well the sense of Greek words was transmitted by Jewish writers who were igno- 64 NATHAN OF ROME'S DICTIONARY rant of Greek. They often are not even aware that the words are Greek at all; they suggest the most impossible Semitic derivations; but they very rarely give the meanings incorrectly. This applies less to the Italian than to the German Jewish scholars. I mean that the former had, on the whole, a more intimate acquaintance with the classical idioms. In the case of Nathan's Aruk the languages cited do imply a wide and varied culture. Most interesting is Nathan's free use of Italian. Just as we learn from the glosses in Rashi's commentaries that the Jews of northern France spoke French, so we gather from Nathan's dictionary that the Jews of Rome must have used Italian as the medium of ordinary intercourse. Nathan's Aruk, while, as we have seen, it was a link between the past and his present, was also part of the chain binding his present to the future. Nathan records the tradition as he received it, but he also points forward. Take one of his remarks, which is quoted by Giidemann. There is much in the Talmud on the subject of magic, and Nathan duly explains the terms employed. But he says: " All these statements about magic and amulets, I know neither their meaning nor their origin." Does the reader appreciate the extraordinary sig- < 65 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND nificance of the statement? Nathan, the bearer of tradition, yet sees that the newer order of things also has its claims. Tradition does not consist in the denial of science. And so, though a Gaon like Hai had a pretty considerable belief in demon- ology, Nathan cautiously expresses his scepticism. Even more emphatically, a little later, Ibn Ezra frankly asserted that he had no belief in demons. It may be questioned whether this enfranchisement from demonological conceptions could be matched in non-Jewish thought of so early a date. The Aruk assuredly points forwards as well as back- wards. And all this we derive from a dictionary ! The Aruk obviously belongs to culture as well as to philology if the two things really can be sepa- rated. The study of words is often the study of civilization. Max Miiller maintained that if you could only tell the real history of words you would thereby be telling the real history of men. He carried the idea absurdly far; but Nathan's Aruk is a striking instance of at least the partial truth of the great Sanskrit scholar's contention. THE SORROWS OF TATNU Tatnu has a weird sound. But it is not the title of a fetich ; it is not a personal name ; it is not even a word at all. It is, indeed, a figure; but the figure it stands for is numerical. The letters which com- pose the Hebrew combination Tatnu amount to 856 (taw = 400; f*ra> = 4OO; nun = $o; waw = 6) . It represents a date. To transpose it from the era anno mundi to the current era, it is necessary to add 240. This brings us to 1096, the year of the First Crusade. If Tatnu is no person, neither do its sorrows form a book. They constitute rather a library of narratives, small in size but great in substance. They are hardly literary, yet they belong to the masterpieces of literature. Their story is recorded with few ornaments of style, but their simple, poignant directness is more effective than rhetoric. Martyrdom needs no tricks of the word-artist; it tells its own tale. The Historical Commission for the History of the Jews in Germany had but a brief career, though it has revived under the newer title of the Gesamt- 67 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND archiv. The Commission aimed at two ends: to introduce to Jewish notice information about the Jews scattered in Christian sources, and to make accessible to Christians facts about themselves con- tained in Jewish authorities. From 1887 to 1898, the Commission was actively at work, and among the books it published were two valuable volumes dealing with the martyrologies of the Jews. For the first time, these narratives were adequately edited. The pathetic records of sufferings endured in the Rhine-lands and elsewhere stand, for all time, ready to the hand of the historian. The first moral to be extracted from these rec- ords is the certainty that war is an evil. No one can dispute the noble motives of the crusaders. The unquenchable enthusiasm which led high and low to forsake their homes and engage in eastern ad- ventures, the unflinching courage with which the dangers of battle and the hardships and privations of wearisome campaigns were borne, the trans- parent singleness of purpose which animated many a soldier of the cross all these factors tend to cover the sordid truth with a glamor of idealism and chivalry. But the wars of the Crusades were tainted with savagery, and if so what wars can be clean? The barbarities inflicted in Europe on the 68 THE SORROWS OF TATNU Jews color with a red and gruesome haze the hero- isms performed against Mohammedans in Asia. War, it is said, brings to the fore some of the finest qualities of human nature. Exactly, but the war of man against nature calls for the exercise of the same qualities. The heroism of the coal-mine is as great from every point of view as the heroism of the battlefield* And the battlefield from first to last is the scene of human nature at its lowest as well as at its highest. Nor is the battlefield the whole of war. Those who persuade themselves that war, though an evil, is not an unmixed evil, will find in the Sorrows of Tatnu and allied books a rather useful corrective to their complacency. When in 1913 I re-read Neubauer and Stern's volume (1892) and Dr. Salfeld's magnificent edi- tion of the Nuremberg Martyrology (1898) it was not long before the outbreak of the European war I was so moved that I sent a donation to the Peace Society. Quite a nice thing to do, some will urge, but is it worth while, for such an end, to rake up these miserable tales? The whole of this class of literature was long neglected because of a similar feeling. Stobbe, who rendered such conspicuous service to the Jewish cause, was actuated by the identical sentiment, when he wrote that it would be 69 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND " a grim and a thankless task " to enter fully into the sufferings of the Jews in the medieval period. But the Commission above referred to took another view ; it printed the texts and circulated them in the completest detail. Now it depends entirely on the purpose with which such remorseless crimes are as remorselessly dragged to the light of day. If the desire is to revive bitterness, then it is a foul desire which ought to be crushed. And not only if this be the desire, if it prove to be the consequence, if as a result of such re-publication animosity is re- kindled, then the re-publication is to be condemned. But in the case of the Sorrows of Tatnu, neither the motive nor the consequence is of this character. Salfeld gave us his edition of these monuments of the Jewish tribulations, " den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre"; to honor the dead, to in- spire the living. Neither he nor any other Jewish writer wishes to play the part of Virgil's Misenus, who was skilled in " setting Mars alight with his song" (Martem accendere cantu) . The heroism of the sufferers, not the brutality of the aggressors, is the theme of the Jewish historian who deals with the Sorrows of Tatnu and of many another year; not the lurid glow of the bloodshed, but the white light of the martyrdom; not the pain, but the tri- 70 THE SORROWS OF TATNU umph over it; not the infliction, but the endurance unto and beyond death. These aspects of the story ought, indeed, to be told and retold " to honor the dead, to inspire the living." Closely connected with this thought is another. The Commission, be it remembered, was a Jewish body, appointed by the Deutsch-Israelitische Gemeindebund in 1885. But Graetz was not ap- pointed a member. (Comp. the Memoir in the Index Volume of Graetz's History of the Jews, Philadelphia, 1898, p. 78). Why did the leaders of Berlin Jewry ignore Graetz, the man who, above all others, had stirred the conscience of Europe by his vivid pictures of the medieval persecution so poignantly illustrated in the Sorrows of Tatnu? That was the very ground for excluding Graetz. There is no doubt but that Graetz's method of writing Jewish history was somewhat roughly handled at about the period named. This assault came from two sides. Treitschke, the German and Christian, attacked Graetz as anti-Christian and anti-German, and used citations from Graetz to support his propaganda of academic anti-Semitism. Certain Jews, on the other hand, felt that, though Treitschke was wrong, Graetz was too inclined to regard the world's history from a partisan and 71 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND sectarian point of view. Whether or not this was the reason for the exclusion of Graetz from the Commission, what is interesting to note is the fact that the Commission, when it came to grips with the records, produced quite as emphatic an exposure of the medieval persecution as Graetz himself. It is, in brief, impossible for any student of the rec- ords to do otherwise. The Commission included among its members some (conspicuously L. Geiger) who subsequently proved to be the strongest anti-Zionists. The duty and the desire to honor the dead for the inspiration of the living are not restricted to any one section of our community. There is nothing nationalistic or anti-nationalistic in our common sympathy with the Sorrows of Tatnu, in our common impulse to turn those sorrows to vital account in the present. In a soft age it is well to be reminded that Judaism is above all synonymous with hardihood. Thus these memories are cherished because " the blood of the martyr is the seed of the church." This magnificent thought originated with Tertullian, though the precise phrase is not his. The idea con- veyed by these oft-quoted words must be carefully weighed, lest we make of it a half-truth instead of a truth. No institution is founded on its dead, it is 72 THE SORROWS OF TATNU its living upholders who alone can support it. We tell these stories of the dead, because, in their day, they, living, recognized that to save themselves men must sometimes sacrifice themselves. To pay, as the price of life, the very thing that makes life worth living is an ignoble and futile bargain. The Sorrows of Tatnu, regarded as the expression of this conviction, are converted from an elegy into a papan. But the song is discordant unless we, who sing it, are also prepared to act it, in our own way and in our own different circumstances. Den Toten zur Ehre, den Lebenden zur Lehre. PART II PART II IBN GEBIROL'S " ROYAL CROWN " Authors are not invariably the best critics of their own work. Was Solomon Ibn Gebirol, who was born in Andalusia, perhaps in Malaga, in the earlier part of the eleventh century, just when he regarded as the crown of all his writings the long poem which he called the " Royal Crown " (Kcter Malkut) ? Some will always doubt his judgment. Plausibly enough, preference may be felt for sev- eral of his shorter poems, particularly " At Dawn I Seek Thee " (which Mrs. R. N. Salaman trans- lated for the Routledge Mahzor) or " Happy the Eye that Saw these Things " (paraphrased by Mrs. Lucas in her Jewish Year) . Ibn Gebirol was, however, sound in his opinion. One line in the " Royal Crown " is the finest that he, or any other neo-Hebraic poet, ever wrote. Should God make visitation as to iniquity, cries Ibn Gebirol, then " from Thee I will flee to Thee." Nieto interpreted : " I will fly from Thy justice to Thy clemency." But the line needs no interpre- tation. In his Confessions (4. 9) Augustine says: 77 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND " Thee no man loses, but he that lets Thee go. And he that lets Thee go, whither goes he, or whither runs he, but from Thee well pleased back to Thee offended ? " A great passage, but Ibn Gebirol's is greater. It is a sublime thought, and its author was inspired. He must have felt this when he named his poem. For the title comes from the Book of Esther, and the Midrash has it that, when the queen is described as donning the robes of royalty, the Scripture means to tell us that the holy spirit rested on her. It has been said (among others, by Sachs and Steinschneider) that the " Royal Crown " is sub- stantially a versification of Aristotle's short treatise " On the World." This is in a sense true enough. The " Royal Crown " is largely physical, and to modern readers is marred by its long paragraphs of obsolete astronomical conceptions, which go back, through the Ptolemaic system, to Aristotle. Moreover, Aristotle, in his treatise cited above, anticipated Ibn Gebirol in the motive with which he directed his ancient readers' attention to the elements and the planets. " What the pilot is in a ship, the driver in a chariot, the coryphaeus in a choir, the general in an army, the lawgiver in a city that is God in the world " (De Mundo, 6). 78 IBN GEBIROL'S " ROYAL CROWN " This saying of Aristotle is indeed Ibn Gebirol's text. But the Hebrew poet owes nothing else than the skeleton to his Greek exemplar. The style with its superb application of biblical phrases, a method which in al-Harizi is used to raise a laugh, but in Ibn Gebirol at every turn rouses reverence is as un-Greek as are the spiritual intensity of thought and the moral optimism of outlook. Our Sephardic brethren were wiser than the Ashkenazim in their selections for the liturgy. Why the Ashkenazim have neglected Ibn Gebirol and ha-Levi in favor of Kalir will always remain a mystery. The Sephardim did not include all that they might have done from the Spanish poets, but the Ashkenazic Mahzor has suffered by the loss of such masterpieces as Judah ha-Levi's " Lord ! unto Thee are ever manifest my inmost heart's de- sires, though unexpressed in spoken words." But most of all is our loss apparent in the omission of the " Royal Crown " from the Kol Nidre service. In Germany, the Ashkenazim have been better ad- vised. The Rodelheim Mahzor and the Michael Sachs edition both include the poem in their volumes for the Atonement Eve. Sachs (unlike de Sola) omits the astronomical sections in his fine German rendering, and wisely, for the " Royal Crown " 79 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND notably illustrates the Greek epigram : " part may be greater than the whole." On the other hand, in his famous Religiose Poesie der Juden in Spanien, Sachs includes the omitted cosmology. There is a difference between our attitudes to a poem as a work of literature and to the same poem as an in- vocation or prayer. Sachs the scholar refused to mutilate the " Royal Crown," but as a liturgist (though he printed all the Hebrew) he took liber- ties with it. Sachs and de Sola were not the only translators of the " Royal Crown." In fact, to name all who have turned Ibn Gebirol's work into modern lan- guages would need more space than is here avail- able. In her Jewish Year, Mrs. Lucas to name the most recent of Ibn Gebirol's translators has exquisitely rendered a large part of the poem. I do not propose to quote from it, as Mrs. Lucas' book is available at a small cost. And we shall, it is to be hoped, not have too long to wait for Mr. Israel Zangwill's promised rendering. What is it that appeals to us in Ibn Gebirol's poetry? Dr. Cowley attributes his charm to " the youthful freshness " of his verses, " in which he may be compared to the romantic school in France and England in the early nineteenth century." This 80 IBN GEBIROL'S " ROYAL CROWN " same feature was also detected by al-Harizi a better critic than poet. In fact, it was his apprecia- tion of Ibn Gebirol's " youthful freshness " that led him to assert that the poet died before his thir- ties had been completed. Al-Harizi treats Ibn Gebirol's successors as his imitators. There is a large element of truth in this. One fact only need be quoted in evidence. Ibn Gebirol entitled his longest poem the " Royal Crown " (partly, no doubt, because of the frequent comparison of God to the King in the Scriptures). Now, the title " Royal Crown " passed over to designate a type of poem. We find several versifiers who later on wrote " Royal Crowns," just as we speak of an orator uttering a " Jeremiad " or a " Philippic." Heine, supreme among the modern Romantics in Germany, recognized this same freshness of inspi- ration in this freshest of the Spanish Hebrew poets : a pious nightingale singing in the Gothic medieval night, a nightingale whose Rose was God these are Heine's phrases. Gustav Karpeles again and again claims that Ibn Gebirol was the first poet thrilled by " that pecu- liar ferment characteristic of a modern school " a ferment which the Germans name Weltschmerz. Clearly, Karpeles made a good point by showing 6 81 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND that Schopenhauer of whom it may be doubted whether he despised women or Jews more heartily the apostle of Weltschmerz, had as a predecessor, eight centuries before his time, the de- spised Jew, the " Faust of Saragossa." This is another of Karpeles' epithets for Ibn Gebirol, who spent, indeed, some years in Saragossa, but had little of the Faust in him. If, however, we at- tribute to Ibn Gebirol the feeling of Weltschmerz, we must be cautious before we identify his sense of the " world's misery " with modern pessimism. Ibn Gebirol's was, no doubt, a lonely and even melancholy life. But though he often writes sadly, though he would have sympathized with William Allingham's sentiment: Sin we have explained away, Unluckily the sinners stay; yet the final outcome of his realization of human failings and human pain was hope and not despair. And this I say not because Ibn Gebirol appreciated the humor of life as well as its miseries. It is not his humorous verses on which I should base my be- lief in his optimism. For I regard as the epitome, or rather, essential motive of the " Royal Crown," the lines : 82 IBN GEBIROL'S " ROYAL CROWN " Thou God, art the Light That shall shine in tke soul of the pure ; Now Thou art hidden by sin, by sin with its cloud of night. Now Thou art hidden, but then, as over the height, Then shall Thy glory break through the clouds that obscure, And be seen in the mount of the Lord. It is not pessimism but hope that speaks of the clearer vision to be won hereafter. One need not love this world less because one loves the future world more; belief in continuous growth of the soul is the most optimistic of thoughts. Critics who term Ibn Gebirol a pessimist make the common mistake of confounding despair with earnestness. Your truest optimist may be the most serious of men, just as sorrow may be at its purest, its strong- est, in association with hope. BAR HISDAFS " PRINCE AND DERVISH " The " moral " is a tiresome feature about cer- tain types of allegory; we prefer that a story should tell us its own tale. Why end off with a " moral " ? As Dr. Joseph Jacobs wrote in his edition of Cax- ton's Aesop (p. 148) : "It seems absurd to give your allegory, and then, in addition, the truth which you wish to convey. Either your fable makes its point or it does not. If it does, you need not re- peat your point; if it does not, you need not give your fable. To add your point is practically to confess the fear that your fable has not put it with sufficient force." And yet it seems probable that some of the world's stories would never have been circulated so widely but for their morals. When, in the thir- teenth century, Abraham Bar Hisdai, of Barcelona, produced his Prince and Dervish, his motive was not to tell a tale but to point a moral. He had a poor opinion of his age. Little wonder! Among the delectable episodes which he witnessed was the burning of some of the works of Maimonides by 84 BAR HISDAI'S " PRINCE AND DERVISH " monks, instigated thereto by anti-Maimonist Jews. He made his protest. But it was not this experi- ence that predisposed him to castigate his contem- poraries. His language, in the preface to his Prince and Dervish, is vague. The most definite thing is its grim earnestness. His chance had come. An Arabic book had happened to fall under his notice, and it seemed to him the very thing ! So he translated it into Hebrew. And beautiful Hebrew it is. Bar Hisdai was a master of the style known as rhymed prose. With him, however, it is hardly prose; it is poetry. It is not nearly so unmetrical in form as is usual in this genre. There is a lilt about his unrhythms, a regularity not so much of syllables as of stressed phrases; and these are marks of verse. Still it is prose, as one clearly perceives when Bar Hisdai, following the rules of the game, introduces snatches which are professedly poetical. Bar Hisdai, perhaps unfortunately, did more than translate. He considered his original badly ar- ranged, he says; so he re-arranged the material. Possibly, then, he added to it stories taken from other sources. A rather piquant problem, for in- stance, is presented by the inclusion of a version of the parable of the sower, which in Bar Hisdai's original must have been drawn from the New Tes- 85 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND tament. Assuredly Bar Hisdai did not derive it from the latter source directly; we are quite uncer- tain, however, as to the indirect route by which it reached him. This is, I repeat, a little unfortunate, because it complicates the problem as to the nature of the Arabic on which he drew. The gain of the book as a collection of tales carries with it loss from the point of view of literary history. Now what was the book which he called by the title usually rendered Prince and Dervish? Bar Hisdai names it " King's Son and Nazirite " (Ben ha-Melek we-ha-N azir) . By Nazirite he means ascetic, and Dervish is a fair reproduction which we owe to W. A. Meisel (1847). A Dervish is not the same as the biblical Nazirite, inasmuch as the former devoted himself to a much wider range of austerities than the latter. But Bar Hisdai un- doubtedly intends his Nazirite to be identical with the Dervish type. How comes he to use the word in this extended sense ? The answer is easily found. Bar Hisdai was a hero-worshipper, and the object of his cult was David Kimhi, the famous gram- marian of Provence. Almost pathetic is Bar Hisdai's admiration for Kimhi. Now the latter, in his Hebrew dictionary (included in the Miklol) defines the verb nazar as meaning " to abstain from 66 BAR HISDAI'S " PRINCE AND DERVISH " eating and drinking and pleasures" (compare Zechariah 7. 3). This was not a new idea, for the same interpretation is given by Rashi (loc. cit.), and is adumbrated in the talmudic use of the verb. But I doubt whether Bar Hisdai would have em- ployed the noun but for Kimhi's emphatic defini- tion. The Hebrew title, which is Bar Hisdai's own in- vention, well fits the contents. Briefly, these con- sist of a framework into which are built a number of fables. An Indian king, fearing that his son will become a devotee of the ascetic life, places him (like Johnson's Rasselas) in a beautiful palace, where he is kept ignorant of human miseries. But he comes under the influence of a hermit (the Nazirite), v/ho impresses on the prince the vanity of life, and converts him (despite the king's active hostility) to the new way of thinking. It is in the course of this narrative that the fables and parables are introduced. Obviously, however, Ibn Hisdai was much impressed by the narrative as such. " No king nor king's son, but a slave of slaves was I until thou didst set me free to understand and obey God's Law " thus does Ibn Hisdai's romance sum up the moral at its close, the speaker being the prince, and the one addressed the Nazirite. 87 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND A most significant point to be noted is that India is the scene of the story. In 1850 Stein- schneider discovered the truth. And a surprising truth it is. The same story was known to medieval Christians as the Romance of Earlaam and Josa- phat. But the whole is nothing more or less than an account of the life of Buddha, the great Indian saint, the founder of a religion. Jews, Moham- medans, and Christians revelled in the story with- out having a notion as to its original significance. Nothing so brings races and creeds together as a good tale. The folk are united by their common interest in the same lore. Mr. Zangwill, in his beautiful poem prefixed to Dr. Jacobs' edition of Earlaam and Josaphat, looks deeper, and finds in the general admiration for this legend a symbol of the universal identity of men's aspirations for the ideal. Was Barlaam truly Josaphat, And Buddha truly each? What better parable than that The unity to preach The simple brotherhood of souls That seek the highest good ; He who in kingly chariot rolls, Or wears the hermit's hood! BAR HISDAI'S " PRINCE AND DERVISH " Bar Hisdai felt nothing of this religious cosmo- politanism. But he realized that devotion to a spiritual ideal was a lesson he might profitably present to his age in the guise of allegory. If, however, Bar Hisdai chose the story for its moral, his readers we may be certain swallowed the moral because of the story rather, one should say, the stories. It is remarkable that the Hebrew version is much fuller in its parables, containing, as Dr. Jacobs estimates, no less than ten not found in the other versions. Even Bar Hisdai must, after all, have been drawn to the parables as such, else why add to their number? At all events, so far as his readers went, the Prince and Dervish made its appeal by its stories rather than by its doctrines. And what stories they are ! Several of the world's classics are in Barlaam, the sources of more than one of the best known dramas of later ages, some of the favorite parables of the world, immortal as human life itself. Bar Hisdai omits the caskets, which Shakespeare used in the Merchant of Venice, and the " Three Friends " (wealth, family, good deeds), the last of which alone accompanies a man to the grave, the plot of that famous morality play, Everyman. The omission is curious, for both of these tales are found in the Midrash. But Bar BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Hisdai gives us the original of King Cophetua the beggar-maid who weds the king. Bar Hisdai alone gives us the story of " The Robbers' Nemesis " the two who plot to rob the traveller, but, envying each the other his share in the spoil, each poisons the other rascal's food, and the travel- ler escapes. He also alone tells of the " Greedy Dog," who, in his anxiety to attend two wedding breakfasts on the same day, misses both. But we cannot go through all. One other, found only in Bar Hisdai, is thus summarized by Dr. Jacobs : A king, hunting, invites a shepherd to eat with him in the heat of the day : Shepherd: I cannot eat with thee, for I have already promised another greater than thee. King: Who is that? Shepherd: God, who has invited me to fast. King: But why fast on such a hot day? Shepherd: I fast for a day still hotter than this. King: Eat to-day, fast to-morrow. Shepherd: Yes, if you will guarantee that I shall see to-morrow. Such stories are sure to see many a to-morrow. And among the best records of them, among the most notable repertoires of the world's wit and wisdom, Bar Hisdai's Prince and Dervish has a sure place. 90 THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH Sarajevo, scene of the crime which led to the outbreak of the European War, has its more pleas- ant associations. The place is forever connected with the history of Jewish art, and in particular with the illumination of the Passover Home- Service or Haggadah. Wonderful in the old sense of the word that is to say, astonishing is the fact that, though the Sarajevo Haggadah was printed a good many years ago (in 1898), there have been no imitations. The splendid Russian publication of Stassof and Giinz- burg certainly came more recently (1905), but it cannot be compared with the Hungarian work of Miiller and Von Schlossar. " L'Ornement Hebreu " is scrappy; the " Haggada von Sarajevo," though it includes many selections from other manuscripts, is a unity. In one point, however, the Russians were right. For a Jewish illuminative art we must look rather to masoretic margins than to full-page pictures* The former must be characteristically Jewish, the latter, though found in Hebrew litur- gies and scrolls, are often non- Jewish types. This 91 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND is clearly shown by the famous picture in the Sarajevo Haggadah wherein is probably depicted the Deity resting after the work of creation. But for all that, the Sarajevo book must remain supreme as an introduction to Jewish art, so long as it con- tinues to be the only completely reproduced Hebrew illuminated manuscript of the Middle Ages. One would like to hope that it will not always retain this unique position. The Crawford Hag- gadah (now in the Rylands Library, Manchester) is certainly older, and, in my judgment, finer. It is true that the editors of the Sarajevo manuscript claim that theirs is the most ancient illuminated Haggadah extant. They admit that the text of the Crawford Haggadah is older by at least half-a- century, but assert that the full-page pictures be- long to the fifteenth century, thus falling two centuries after the text. I altogether contest this statement. But even if it were conceded, never- theless the beauty of the Crawford Haggadah con- sists just in the text, in the beautiful margins, full of spirited grotesques and arabesques, no doubt (like the Sarajevo manuscript itself) produced in Spain under strong North French influence. Mr. Frank Haes executed a complete photograph of the Crawford manuscript, and it ought undoubt- THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH edly to be published. As I write, I have before me two pages of Mr. Haes' reproduction the dayyenu passage; nothing in Jewish illuminated work can approach this, unless it be the rather inferior, but very beautiful, British Museum manuscript of the same type. The editors of the Sarajevo Haggadah were ill-advised in omitting to repoduce the whole of the text of their precious original. It is in the text that the genuine excel- lence of the Jewish manuscripts is to be found. But the Sarajevo Haggadah gives us too much that is delightful for us to cavil over what it does not give. Here we have, in the full-page drawings, depicted the history of Israel from the days of the Creation, the patriarchal story, Joseph in Egypt, the coming of Moses, the Egyptian plagues, the exodus, the revelation, the temple that is yet to be. Very interesting is the picture of a synagogue. This late thirteenth (or early fourteenth) century sketch evidently knows nothing of the now most usual ornament of a synagogue the tablets of the deca- logue over the ark. On this subject, however, I have written elsewhere, and as my remarks have been published, I can pass over this point on the present occasion. I have mentioned above the strik- ing attempt to depict the Deity, but it is equally 93 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND noteworthy that in the revelation picture no such attempt is made. Into Moses' ear a horn conveys the inspired message ; but the artist does not intro- duce God. At least, one hopes not. We pre- fer to regard the figure at the top of the mountain as Moses, and it is not difficult to account in that case for the figure standing rather lower up the hill, also holding the tablets. We must assume that this under figure is Aaron, though it is not recorded that he received the tablets from his brother. There is another possibility. In the medieval illuminations it was a frequent device to express various parts of a continuous scene in the same drawing. Thus the Sarajevo artist may have intended to show us Moses in two positions, and though the method lacks perspective, the effect is not devoid of realistic power. That this is prob- ably the true explanation of the Sinai scene is sug- gested by another Jacob's dream. Here we see Jacob asleep (with one angel descending, another higher up ascending the ladder the artist has not troubled himself with the problem as to how the angels contrived to cross one another). But we also see Jacob awake, on the same picture, for he is anointing the Beth-el stone and converting it into an altar. 94 THE SARAJEVO HAGGADAH Certainly the drawings, sadly though they lack proportion, are realistic. Especially is this true of the portrayal of Lot's wife transformed into a pillar of salt. Disproportionate in size, for she is taller than Sodom's loftiest pinnacles, yet the artist has succeeded in suggesting the gradual stiffening of her figure: we see her becoming rigid before our eyes. There is clearly much that modern artists might learn from these medieval gropings towards realism. Some artists have already learned much. It is quite obvious, for instance, that Burne-Jones must have steeped himself in the suggestive mysticism of the Middle Ages before he painted his marvellous Creation series. The paral- lel between his series and the series in the Sarajevo Haggadah is undeniable. Though he never saw this Haggadah, he was well acquainted with similar work in the Missals. Just as Keats evolved his theory as to the identity of truth and beauty from a Greek vase, so the pre-Raphaelites re-told on vases what they read in their moments of communion with the medieval spirit. And this leads to what must be my last word now on this Hebrew masterpiece. If a Burne-Jones can thus imitate, why not a Solomon or a Lilien? The latter has now produced a series of illustrations to 95 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND the Bible, but we want something less coldly classic, something more warmly symbolic. It was indi- cated above, with regret, that Mr. Haes' photo- graphs of the Crawford Haggadah are still unpublished. But over and above reproductions of extant works, we need new works. Now the Jewish artist who illustrates a Bible ought not to be content to illustrate anything but a Hebrew text. And if a Bible be for several reasons out of the question, why should we not have a new Hagga- dah, written by a living Jewish artist, who shall, from a close study of olden models, do for us what Burne-Jones did? that is, extract from the mys- ticism of a by-gone age those abiding truths which our contemporary age demands of its art. A PIYYUT BY BAR ABUN Not every one named Solomon was Ibn Gebirol. The medieval poets often signed their verses by an acrostic. Now, when a poem has the signature of a particular name, the natural tendency has been to ascribe it to the most famous bearer of the name. Of all the poetical Solomons, Ibn Gebirol was, be- yond question, the greatest. Zunz was the first who clearly discriminated between the various authors called by the same personal name. The hymn "Judge of all the Earth" (Shofet Kol ha-Arez} was certainly by a Solomon; Zunz iden- tifies him with the Frenchman Solomon, son of Abun. This Solomon is described as " the youth " (ha-Na'ar), perhaps in the sense that there was a " senior " poet of the same name. According to Zunz, again, Solomon bar Abun's period of active authorship lay presumably between the years 1170 and 1190. (Liter aturgeschichte der synagogalen Poesie, p. 311.) Of all his works the piyyut we are considering is by far the most popular. A spirited rendering of the poem, by Mrs. R. N. Salaman, may be found 7 n? BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND in the Routledge Mahzor so ably edited in pait by her father. (See the Day of Atonement, morning service, page 86.) Three stanzas had, however, long before been published by Mrs. Henry Lucas in her Jewish Year (p. 44). Some years ago the same gifted translator completed the whole of the hymn, and her version is now printed here in full. I say " in full," though there is a longer form of the poem containing six verses. Zunz, however, only assigns five verses to the original, and the sixth verse is probably an unauthorized addition. It repeats the idea of the second verse, and also disturbs the acrostic signature. This piyyut or hymn must have been designed for the New Year. True, in the only " German " Mahzor known to many, the poem is included among the Selihot for the Day of Atonement. Though, however, Solo- mon bar Abun's masterpiece is fairly suitable for the Fast, it is not altogether appropriate for that occasion. The " German " rite, accordingly, is well advised when it also employs the piyyut for the day before New Year. Even more to be com- mended are those liturgies the Yemenite and some of the " Spanish " which appoint the poem for the New Year itself. That is obviously its true place. With its opening phrase, " Judge of all the 98 A PIYYUT BY BAR ABUN earth," the hymn declares its character. It was written for the Day of Judgment that is, for the New Year's Day. Moreover, these initial words are taken from Abraham's intercession for the sin- ners of Sodom (Genesis 18. 25), and this is pre- ceded by the announcement of Isaac's birth, an incident which one form of the Jewish tradition connects with the New Year. It must be remem- bered in general that prayers intended originally for one occasion were often transferred to others. Thus the 'Alenu prayer, now used every day, was at first composed for the New Year Musaf. Let us now turn to the poem itself, which, as already stated, is reproduced in the version from the hand of Mrs. Lucas. Judge of the earth, who wilt arraign The nations at thy judgment seat, With life and favor bless again Thy people prostrate at thy feet. And mayest Thou our morning prayer Receive, O Lord, as though it were The offering that was wont to be Brought day by day continually. Thou who art clothed with righteousness, Supreme, exalted over all How oft soever we transgress, Do Thou with pardoning love recall 99 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Those who in Hebron sleep: and let Their memory live before Thee yet, Even as the offering unto Thee Offered of old continually. O Thou, whose mercy faileth not, To us Thy heavenly grace accord; Deal kindly with Thy people's lot, And grant them life, our King and Lord. Let Thou the mark of life appear Upon their brow from year to year, As when were daily wont to be The offerings brought continually. Restore to Zion once again Thy favor and the ancient might And glory of her sacred fane, And let the son of Jesse's light Be set on high, to shine always, Far shedding its perpetual rays, Even as of old were wont to be The offerings brought continually. Trust in God's strength, and be ye strong, My people, and His law obey, Then will He pardon sin and wrong, Then mercy will his wrath outweigh; Seek ye His presence, and implore His countenance for evermore. Then shall your prayers accepted be As offerings brought continually. 100 A PIYYUT BY BAR ABUN When this is sung or declaimed to the appro- priate melody (on which the Rev. F. L. Cohen has much of interest to say in the Jewish Encyclo- pedia, xi, 306), the solemn effect of words and music is profound. The refrain (from Numbers 28. 23), recalls the close association which, even while the sanctuary stood, subsisted between temple sacrifices and synagogue prayers. Since the loss of the shrine, prayer has fulfilled the double function. There are only one or two phrases that need eluci- dation. In the second stanza the words " Those who in Hebron sleep " refer to those of the patri- archs who were buried in Hebron, in the cave of Machpelah. The appeal is made to the merits of the fathers, a subject on which the reader will do well to consult the Rev. S. Levy's essay in his vol- ume entitled " Original Virtue." In the third stanza occurs the phrase " mark of life." This is derived from the ninth chapter of Ezekiel those bearing the " mark " are, in the prophet's vision, to live amid the general destruction. Life the mer- ciful verdict of the Judge, quite as much as the judgment itself is the note of the New Year liturgy. This poem strikes both notes with undeni- able power. 101 ISAAC'S LAMP AND JACOB'S WELL To have one's Hebrew book turned into the cur- rent speech, to have it read part by part in the synagogue by one's fellows as a substitute for ser- mons, is not a common experience. Isaac Aboab enjoyed this honor. His Menorat ha-Maor, or Candelabrum of the Light, written in Spain some- where about the year 1300, according to Zunz, or in France a little before 1400, according to Dr. Efros, became one of the most popular books of the late Middle Ages. Well it deserved the favor which it won. The Talmud, said Aboab, may be used by the learned in their investigations of law. But for the masses, he felt, it has also a message. Aboab was the first (unless Dr. Efros be right in claiming this honor for Israel Alnaqua) to pick out from the Talmud and Midrash, from the gaonic and even later rabbinic writings, passages of every-day morals, ethical principles, secular and religious wisdom. Aboab's work was not, however, a mere hap-hazard collection of detached sentences and maxims. 102 ISAAC'S LAMP AND JACOB'S WELL Zedner (Catalogue, p. 381), does not hesitate to term it a " System of Moral Laws as explained in the Talmud." Indeed, the book is surprisingly systematic. The first, or among the first, of its kind, it is also a most conspicuous example of the due ordering of materials. The very title, also used by Alnaqua, and derived from Numbers 4. 9, was an inspiration. It conveys the idea of " illumination," than which no idea penetrates deeper into the spiritual life. Fanci- fully enough, Aboab continues the metaphor into the main divisions of his book. The Menorah (Candelabrum) of the Pentateuch branched out into seven lamps, and so Aboab's book is divided also into " Seven Lamps." It is strange that he did not carry the metaphor further. He divides each of his " Lamps " into Parts and Chapters, with a Prologue and an Epilogue to each Lamp. The fourth chapter of Zechariah might have given him " olive-trees " for his Prologues, " bowls " for his Epilogues, and " pipes " for his Parts, while " wicks " might have served instead of Chapters. In point of fact, the " Seven Wicks " was the title chosen by Aboab's epitomator, Moses Frankfurt, when he constructed a reduced copy of Aboab's Candelabrum (Amsterdam, 1721). 103 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND To return to Aboab's original work, Lamp I deals with Retribution, Desire, and Passion, Honor, and High-place the motives and ends of moral conduct. In Lamp II is unfolded the rab- binic teaching on Irreverence, Hypocrisy, Profana- tion of the Name, Frivolity as distinct from Joy the causes which impede morality. Then, in Lamp III the largest Lamp of all the seven we have morality at work practically, and are in- structed as to the worth of religious exercises, charitable life, social and domestic virtue, justice in man's dealings with his fellows. Next, in Lamp IV, is unfolded the duty and the great re- ward of studying the Law, as a beautiful corollary to the love and fear of God. Far-reaching in its analysis of the human soul is Lamp V, on Repen- tance. Lamp VI may be described as presenting the good Rule for body and mind, the amenities of life as shown in character. Or perhaps one might better put it that this section shows us how to be gentlemen, clean, wholesome, considerate. Then Lamp VII completes the whole. It sets out the ideals of Humility and Modesty, virtues which are the end, nay, the beginning also, of the noblest human possibilities, for these virtues are first in those wherein man may imitate God. 104 ISAAC'S LAMP AND JACOB'S WELL Appropriately, Aboab follows up his glorious eulogy of Humility with a full confession of his own shortcomings. He knows that his compilation is imperfect. " Some things I have omitted," he explains, " because I have never read them ; others because I have forgotten them." " Some passages I left out," he goes on, " as too abstruse for general reading, others as alien to the purpose of my book, others again because liable to misunderstanding, and liable to do more harm than good." Wise man ! Unfortunately not every imitator of Aboab has displayed the same excellent judgment. The olden Jewish literature is so abundantly full of beauties that it is an ill-service to repeat the few things of lesser value. Aboab's Candelabrum of the Light is in this respect superior to its great rival, Ibn Habib's Well of Jacob. Up to half-a- century ago the two books must have run each other very close as regards the number of editions ; more recently Ibn Habib's book (the 'En Ya'akob) has probably surged ahead. Readers may be re- minded of the difference in method. Ibn Habib takes the talmudic tractates one by one, and ex- tracts from each its haggadic elements. There is no attempt at any other order than that of the Talmud. The Well of Jacob, moreover, includes 105 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND everything, the folk-lore as well as the ethics. To the student, Ibn Habib's service was greater than Aboab's ; the relation is reversed from the point of view of the man or woman in search of vital religion. The Well of Jacob, it must be allowed, is in itself almost as good a title as that which Aboab chose. Ibn Habib himself seems to have used the Hebrew word 'En rather in the sense of " Substance " or " Essence " his work reproduced the " Essence " of the talmudic Haggadah. But Jacob's Well, as the Midrash has it, was the source whence was drawn the Holy Spirit. Despite my personal pref- erence for Aboab's Menorah, it must be freely acknowledged that many generations have quaffed from Ibn Habib's reservoir fine spiritual draughts. And still quaff. For just as Aboab's Lamp still shines, so Jacob's Well has not yet run dry. Over and above the similarity of contents, with all the dissimilarity of method, there is another reason why one thinks of the works of Aboab and Ibn Habib together. Though Aboab wrote con- siderably before Ibn Habib, their books appeared for the first time in print almost simultaneously. Ibn Habib's book came out as the author com- piled it; in point of fact it was the son who 106 ISAAC'S LAMP AND JACOB'S WELL completed the publication, because Jacob Ibn Habib died while the earlier sections of his work were passing through the press. If, as seems prob- able, the Lamp was first kindled in 1511, or 1514, and the Well began to pour its fertilizing streams in 1516, Aboab had the start; but these dates are uncertain. All that we can state with confidence is that both books appeared in print quite early in the sixteenth century, not later than 1516. The earliest editions of both books are scarce, and from a simple cause. Few copies have survived because the owners of the copies wore them out. Read and re-read, thumbed by many hands, by " the Jewish woman, the workman, the rank and file of Israel," the copies were used up by those who treated books as something to hold in the hand and not to keep on a shelf out of reach. My own edition of the Can- delabrum, that of Amsterdam (1739), boasts justly of the excellent paper on which it is printed. None the less does this copy, too, show signs of frequent perusal. The best books were the worst preserved, because they were the best treated. What better treatment of a book can there be than to read it so often that its pages no longer hold to- gether, its margins fray, and its title-page suffers mutilation? 107 " LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN " Does ridicule kill? If it did, then, as fools are always with us, folly would ever possess the flavor of novelty. And yet to-day's fool looks and does very much the same as yesterday's, even though wise men laughed their fill at the latter. Folly, one rather must admit, is immortal. Wise men come and wise men go, but fools go on forever. Wisdom can at most make the fool look foolish for a while. At rare intervals, however, history offers an ex- ample of the slaying power of satire. Idolatry was killed by ridicule. Some people among them Renan, who ought to have known better deny to ancient Israel a sense of humor. But who can doubt that the most effective of the attacks on idol- atry were Elijah's sarcastic invective against the Baal of the populace (I Kings 18. 27) and Isaiah's grim yet droll picture of the carpenter taking some timber and using part of it to bake his bread and the rest to make his god (Isaiah 44. 15 ) ? It is far from our purpose to recite the success, in after ages, of less inspired efforts by satirists. Satire has been termed the " chief refuge of the weak "; it 108 " LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN " has certainly been a weapon by which one, standing alone, has often equalized the odds against him. It would be delightful to give illustrations of the methods by which the various warriors of the pen have used their sword : to contrast a pagan Juvenal and a Hebrew Kalonymos both writing in Rome, but with more than a millennium between them or to revel in the feats of Rabelais' Gargantua ( J 534)> Cervantes' Don Quixote (1605), Pascal's Provincial Letters (1656), and Voltaire's eight- eenth century Candide. We are now concerned with a work and a group of authors who first made Europe laugh in 1515. Ulrich von Hutten and his associates, in their " Letters of Obscure Men " (Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum], did just the right thing at the right moment. What they at- tempted, what they accomplished, will now be told. Cervantes, tilting against the wearisome nonsense of the later romances of chivalry, Pascal exposing even though he did it unfairly the dangers of casuistry, Voltaire plumbing the shallow optimism of Leibnitz, served good ends. But far higher than these was the cause triumphantly upheld by the Letters of Obscure Men. The cause was humanism, another name for intellectual freedom and width of view. 109 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Briefly put, at the crisis in the fortune of the new learning in Europe, when the struggle was at its sharpest between ignorance and enlighten- ment, the vindication of the Talmud became iden- tified with the overthrow of intellectual bigotry. Pfefferkorn wished to burn the Talmud. He was a shady character, and from his first condition as a bad Jew became, in Erasmus' phrase, a worse Chris- tian (" ex scclerato Judaeo sceleratissimus Chris- tianus"). Pfefferkorn hurled against his former coreligionists the usual missiles of abuse. Why is it that the converted Jew is so often a bitter assail- ant of Judaism? Some answer that it is because the renegade must prove that he forsook some- thing execrable. Others would have it that intrin- sic vileness of character is responsible. But is it not more probable that apostate virulence is due simply to ignorance ? And this is the more obnox- ious when the animosity takes the form of an at- tack on literature. " Ignorance, which in matters of morals extenuates the crime, is itself, in matters of literature, a crime of the first order." So said Joubert, and the remark can be freely illustrated from the Pfefferkorns. When a real scholar leaves the synagogue, he is rarely among the anti-Semites. Daniel Chwolson and Paul Cassel in their career as 110 "LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN" Judaeo-Christians were champions of the Jewish cause against such very libels as a Pf efferkorn would circulate. At the beginning of the sixteenth century the defence of Judaism was in equally scholarly hands. But it was not on Jews, whether by race or re- ligion, that reliance was then placed. Reuchlin as all the world knows saw no reason why the Talmud should be condemned, and he expressed his opinion in clear terms. Reuchlin, be it remem- bered, was the most learned German of his age. " By a singular combination of taste and talents this remarkable man excelled at once as a humanist and a man of affairs, as a jurist and a mystic, and, above all, as a pioneer among Orientalists, so that it has been said of him, enthusiastically but not unjustly, that he was the ' first who opened the gates of the East, unsealed the Word of God, and unveiled the sanctuary of Hebrew wisdom.' " (This sentence is quoted from the Introduction to Mr. Francis Griffin Stokes' admirable Latin and English edition of the Letters, to which I cordially commend my readers.) Pfefferkorn rallied to his side the whole force of the Dominican organiza- tion. The issue was long uncertain. Ill BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Truth is usually unable to meet falsehood on equal terms ; the genuine, for the most part, cannot soil its hands with the foul ammunition of impos- ture. Sometimes, however, truth is less squeamish. And so, when Pfefferkorn was engaged in slinging slime at Reuchlin, there was suddenly hurled at his own person an avalanche of mud, under which he and his party sank buried from heel to head. The Letters are remorseless in their personalities. But if it be impossible to deny their cruelty and even their occasional coarseness, yet their fame depends less on these scurrilous incidentals than on the essen- tial truth on which they are based. It is the highest merit of satire that it shall not be too obvious. Many who read Gulliver's Travels enjoy it as a tale, and may not even realize that Swift was lampooning the society and institutions of his day. So long as this element in satire is not too subtle, it adds enormously to the merit of the performance. One recalls such stories as the Descent of Man, by Edith Wharton. The hero of that tale is an eminent zoologist, who is moved by the popularity of pseudo-scientific defences of religion to publish an elaborate skit. But he is so successful in concealing his object, that his ' Vital Thing " is mistaken for a supreme example 112 " LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN " of the very type of work he is lashing. The Letters of Obscure Men avoided this danger. They hit the happy mean. They purported to be written by one obscurantist to another, and while the educated at once saw through the dodge, the illiterate (in- cluding Pfefferkorn himself) took them seriously. Within a few months of the appearance of the first series of the Letters, Sir Thomas More (in 1616) wrote to Erasmus: " It does one's heart good to see how delighted everybody is with the ' Epistolae Obscurorum Virorum ' ; the learned are tickled by their humor, while the unlearned deem their teach- ings of serious worth." The foes of humanism the new learning are left to expose themselves, in the confidential correspondence which members of the gang are made to carry on in the most excruci- atingly funny dog-Latin. As Bishop Creighton put it, they are made to " tell their own story, to wander round the narrow circle of antiquated prejudices which they mistook for ideas, display their grossness, their vulgarity, their absence of aim, their laborious indolence, their lives unrelieved by any touch of nobility." No wonder Europe laughed, as it did in the following century at the self-revelation of obscuranists in Pascal's Provin- cial Letters , obviously inspired by the work before s 113 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND us. (Compare Stokes, Epistolae, etc., pp. xlvi, xlix). It is not the least amusing feature in the comedy that Richard Steele actually regarded the Letters of Obscure Men as the correspondence be- tween " some profound blockheads " who wrote " in honor of each other, and for their mutual in- formation in each other's absurdities." (Stokes, p. viii). This fate of being taken seriously befell, in a particularly amusing way, what is perhaps the most amusing of all the Letters. 1 refer to the second epistle in the first series. " Magister Johannes Pelzer " sends his greeting to " Magister Ortwin Gratius," and asks help on a matter which gives him " great searchings of heart." He tells Ortwin how, being lately at a Frankfort fair, he took off his cap and saluted two men, who seemed reputable and looked like Doctors of Divinity. But his com- panion then nudged him and cried: " God-a-mercy, what doest thou? Those fellows are Jews." Magister Pelzer goes on to argue with delicious seriousness as to the nature of his sin, and begs his correspondent's help to decide whether it was " mortal or venial, episcopal or papal." Now when Schudt came to compile his farrago of attacks on the Jews, he actually included this Frankfort inci- 114 "LETTERS OF OBSCURE MEN" dent as an authentic example of " Jewish inso- lence." It was indeed painful for such as Schudt to be unable to discern any difference between a Jew and a gentleman. How the authors of the Letters would have chuckled over Steele and Schudt! Reuchlin had struck a decisive blow in behalf of the Jewish con- tribution to European culture. The Letters drove the blow home. But, after all, the fools were not permanently suppressed. No, ridicule rarely slays folly outright. It scotches the snake, and then in a favorable environment the reptile revives. Just as folly is perennial, so should the lash be kept in constant repair. Anti-Semitism ought not to be allowed to go on its way in our age unscathed by ridicule. We badly need a new Ulrich von Hutten to give us a modern series of Letters of Obscure Men. 115 DE ROSSI'S " LIGHT OF THE EYES " Towards dusk, on a mid-November Friday in the year 1570, Azariah de Rossi descended from his own apartments to those of his married daugh- ter. It was in Ferrara, and for some hours past earth-tremblings had made people anxious. Within an hour of his lucky visit to his child De Rossi's abode was wrecked. To this earthquake, as Zunz suggested in 1841 (Kerem Hemed, vol. v, p. 135), we owe the first attempt by a Jew to investigate critically, and with the aid of secular research, the history of Jewish literature. De Rossi had a fine command of Latin, and though he was less at home with Greek, he had a good working knowledge of it. After the earth- quake, he left his home, and took refuge in a village south of the Po. A Christian scholar, a neighbor in the new settlement, was diverting his rnind from the recent disturbing calamities, by perusing the Letter of Aristeas. There is a rare charm in the scene that followed. Finding some difficulties in the Letter, the Christian turned to the Jew, sug- gesting that they should consult the Hebrew text. 116 DE ROSSI'S " LIGHT OF THE EYES " But De Rossi was, to his chagrin, compelled to ad- mit that there was no Hebrew text ! Such a lament- able deficiency need not, however, continue. In less than three weeks De Rossi had translated the Letter into Hebrew, and with that act the modern study of Jewish records by Jews opens. Chroniclers were once upon a time fond of con- trasting the physique and the intellect of the worthies of former ages. Those were the days, one might almost say, of " kakogenics," if our own is the era of eugenics. So we read of De Rossi that though " well-born " by ancestry, he was " ill- born " in person. Graetz somewhat overcolors the record when he writes of De Rossi thus : " Feeble, yellow, withered, and afflicted with fever, he crept about like a dying man." At all events, he was thin and short, and neglectful of his bodily health. Yet he was not quite the weakling Graetz presents, for he lived to the age of sixty- four (1514-1578). Moreover, he assures us, giving full details of the diet and treatment, that he was thoroughly cured of the malaria, of the ravages of which Italian Jews so frequently complain. As to his " family," that was old enough. The legend ran that four of the families settled by Titus in Rome survived into the Middle Ages ; the stock of the De Rossis 117 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND (min ha-adummim) belonged to one of the famous quartette. The other three were the Mansi, de Pomis, and Adolescentoli groups. This was the man who created modern Jewish " science " to use the term so beloved of our Continental brethren. De Rossi's great work ap- peared as a quarto in November, 1573 (some date it 1574). It was well printed in the pretty square Hebrew type for which Mantua is famous. The author called it Meor 'Enayim, that is, " Light of the Eyes." It was, indeed, an illuminant. Graetz summarily asserts that " the actual results of this historical investigation, for the most part, have proved unsound." Assuredly many of De Rossi's statements are no longer accepted. He was the father of criticism, yet he was often himself un- critical. In his chapter on the antiquity of the Hebrew language, for instance, he remarks: " I have seen among many ancient coins, belonging to David Finzi of Mantua, a silver coin on which, on the obverse, is a man's head round which is in- scribed ' King Solomon ' in Hebrew square letters, while the reverse bears a figure of the temple with the Hebrew legend * Temple of Solomon.' " As Zunz observes, this coin must have been a modern fabrication. In many other points De Rossi erred. 118 DE ROSSI'S " LIGHT OF THE EYES " But some of the " mistakes " for which he is blamed are not his but his critics'. Zunz, like Graetz, had little patience with the Zohar. The literature of the Kabbalah was to both these great scholars " false and corrupt." At this date we are much more inclined to treat the Kabbalah with respect. De Rossi has been justified by later research. Then, again, Zunz categorically includes among De Rossi's blunders his acceptance of the Letter of Aristeas as genuine. But in the year 1904 Mr. H. St. J. Thackeray, in the preface to his new English translation of the Letter, asserts " recent criticism has set in the direction of rehabilitating the story, or at any rate part of it." Here, one can have no hesitation in claiming, De Rossi was right, and his critics wrong. It is pleasing to be able to make this last asser- tion. The Letter of Aristeas purports to tell the story how the Greek translation of the Pentateuch was made in Alexandria. We are not now con- cerned with the story itself. But, as we have al- ready seen, it was this Letter which induced De Rossi to write his book. The book, after a short section on the Ferrara earthquake, in which the author collects much Jewish and non-Jewish seismological lore, goes straight to Aristeas. Now, 119 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND it would be a somewhat unfortunate fact if Jewish criticism began with the acceptance of a forgery, if the father of all our modern scholars (including Zunz himself) had started off with a bad critical mistake. We are spared this anomaly, for though Aristeas may not be as old as it claims (the third century B. C. E.), it is demonstrably older than its assailants made it out to be. De Rossi is far nearer the truth than Graetz. Of course, we do not now turn to De Rossi for our critical nourish- ment. Though editions of the Meor 'Enayim continued to appear as late as 1866 (in fact one of the author's books appeared for the first time in London in 1854), his works are substantially obso- lete. For this reason I am not attempting any close account of their contents. But while it is antiquated in this sense, it is a book of the class that can never become unimpor- tant. For let us realize what De Rossi accom- plished. In the first place he directed Jewish attention to the Jewish literature preserved or writ- ten in Greek. He re-introduced Philo to Jewish notice; not very accurately, it is true, yet he did re-introduce him. Secondly, he showed how much was to be derived from a study of non-Jewish sources. No one, after De Rossi, has for a moment 120 DE ROSSI'S " LIGHT OF THE EYES " thought it possible to deal with Jewish history entirely from Jewish records. Every available material must be drawn on if we are to construct a sound edifice. It is a just verdict of Graetz's that De Rossi's " power of reconstruction was small." But he showed subsequent generations how to build. De Rossi, finally, was not one who regarded Jewish literature merely as the subject matter for research. He was intensely interested in it for its own sake. He was a poet as well as a historian. And this he shows both by his whole style and outlook as well as by the Hebrew and Italian verses that he wrote. He was, indeed, known both as Azariah and as Bonajuto, the latter being the Italian equivalent. X-et us end with this fact: the same man, who in- augurated modern Jewish criticism, added some notable hymns to tije synagogue prayer-book. 121 GUARINI AND LUZZATTO An aristocrat all his life, Guarini was out of place in the court life of Ferrara. He spent his vigor in a vain attempt to accommodate himself to the sixteenth century Italian conditions. Then, broken in strength and fortune, he retired to pro- duce his dramatic masterpiece. Not that the Pastor Fido can be truly termed dramatic. It is much more of a lyric. But just as Banquo, himself no king, was the father of kings, so Guarini, of little consequence as a dramatist, begot famous dramas. For the Faithful Shepherd deeply influenced Euro- pean drama throughout the two centuries which followed its publication in 1590. The Hebraic muse owed much to Guarini. Moses Hayyim Luzzatto (1707-1747) has been the only writer of Hebrew plays whose work counts in the literary sense. Luzzatto derived his whole dramatic inspiration from Guarini. Let no one question this assertion without first comparing La-Yesharim Tehillah and Migdal 'Oz with the Pastor Fido. The characters and scenes, and even more, the style, are closely alike. Nor is this latter 122 GUARINI AND LUZZATTO fact wonderful. John Addington Symonds de- scribes Guarini's work as " a masterpiece of dic- tion, glittering and faultless, like a bas-relief of hard Corinthian bronze." Luzzatto produces the same effect in his Hebrew imitation, using a similar metre as well as similar dramatic conventions. In imitating, however, he re-interprets. Guarini's play is sometimes gross, it is never truly rustic. But a Hebrew poet, moved by such models as the Song of Songs, better knew how to be sensuous with purity; grossness must be anti-pathetic to him. On the other hand, Hebrew poetry is genuinely rustic. The biblical shepherd, whether in scrip- tural history or romance, is the most beloved of heroes. Some of the great characters of the Bible are shepherds: Abraham, Moses, David, Amos, Shulammith but why pile up instances? It is obvious that a Hebrew poet, adopting a rural background for a lyrical drama, must inevitably write with sincerity. He could not, at the same time, fail to write with delicacy. Luzzatto took much from Guarini, but he both refined and adorned what he borrowed. Yet, though it is because of Luzzatto that I am writing of Guarini, nevertheless, Guarini, and not Luzzatto, is my present subject. So I will re-tell 123 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND for the reader the story of the Pastor Fido. Not that it is an easy task. Guarini, who influenced the late Elizabethans, shared, with the best of the lat- ter, the inordinate fancy for complicated plots. Plot is entangled within plot, until we lose sight of the main theme. Luzzatto I find it impossible to keep the Hebrew out ! here simplifies. He hardly gives us a story at all; he provides an allegory, eking out Guarini with Midrash. In the process of disentangling Guarini's intricacies, he somewhat sacrifices the chief merit of his Italian model. Luzzatto's dramatis personae are almost abstrac- tions; they remind us of the figures in morality plays. A Luzzatto drama more resembles Every- man than it does As You Like it. Of Guarini, on the other hand, it may be said, that though he means his characters to represent types, he draws them as individuals. Silvio, to adopt Mr. Symond's sum- maries, is " cold and eager " ; Mirtillo " tender and romantic." Corisca's " meretricious arts " con- trast with and enhance Amarillis's " pure affec- tion"; Dorinda is "shameless." The dramatist, however, be he Luzzatto or Guarini, writes with a distinct tendency. His aim is to set up the country life and the country girl as essentially superior to the city varieties. This motive is as old as satire, 124 GUARINI AND LUZZATTO and as young as the " verses of society." Austin Dobson's Phyllida is all that is sweet and natural, she is a foil to the artificiality of the " ladies of St. James's." Guarini enjoys the honor not of creating the mood, but of bringing it into new vogue. But I am still keeping from the story. The scene is Arcadia. Yearly the inhabitants must sacrifice a young maiden to Diana. Diana had suf- fered through the perfidy of Lucrina; but the Oracle declares : Your Woes, Arcadians! never shall have End, Till Love shall two conjoin of heavenly Race, And till a faithful Shepherd shall amend, By matchless Zeal, Lucrina's old Disgrace. Montano, the priest of Diana, seeks, therefore, to join in marriage his only son, Silvio, to the noble nymph, Amarillis, descended from Pan. But Silvio thought more of hunting than of love. The young shepherd, Mirtillo, becomes enamored of Amarillis, and she of him. The artful Corisca, desiring the shepherd for herself, charges Amarillis with infidelity she is betrothed, though not wedded, to Silvio. Amarillis is sentenced to death. Mirtillo offers himself, and is accepted, as her sub- stitute. Led to the fatal, not the bridal altar, 125 BY-PATHS IN HEBRAIC BOOKLAND Mirtillo's identity is discovered. The shepherd is Montano's son. Let us read the rest in the terms of the " argument " (as given in the 1782 English version) : " On which Occasion, the true Father, bewailing that it should fall to his lot to execute the law on his own blood (for to Montano, as priest, the office of carrying out the sacrificial rite be- longed) is by Tirenio, a blind soothsayer, clearly satisfied by the interpretation of the Oracle itself, that it was not only opposite to the will of the gods that this victim should be sacrificed, but moveover that the happy period (i.