counterfeit and those which are written for Gentile consumption, for then the author, under the restraint of a strange unsympathetic audience, is driven to sacrifice artistic truth to the desire of presenting his own people in a desirable light, to display their good qualities before the "goy," aside from the fact that all the words, thoughts, ideas and actions have to be transplanted from one language to another to the detriment of true delineation and faithful portraiture. That is why we have so many great masters amongst those who treat of the Jew and his life, who write in Hebrew and Yiddish, to whose efforts is due our possession of so many imperishable types, and so very few classics of Jewish life in any European language, not barring even Zangwill in English and Levando in Russian. But while the other writers of Jewish life failed to create masterpieces, the people they created were at least normal creatures possessed of a true human psychology and have invariably conducted themselves as sane, reasoning beings, while our amiable author introduces us to a world of puppets
who move not of their own accord and in line with human sensibilities but after a pre-arranged mechanical plan. He displays before us no people who hope and fear, love and desire, are grateful for a favor shown and can cherish a grudge, who possess the divine qualities of manhood as well as their true meed of selfishness without which no human creature is ever complete and natural, but people who are generous to the point of incredulity and are possessed of that degree of self-abnegation which we can but find, and that but rarely, in the secluded hermit and the cloistered recluse who has completely and forever renounced this world and its vanities.
In passing, it should also be noticed that the translation is very far from being good, that the perspiration of the "mechanic" and his "tool" is evident on every one of its pages. Many of the original German idioms are carried literally over into the English translation, while here and there an untranslatable pun or a witticism is translated into English which makes it lose its entire flavor.
HAROLD BERMAN.
JEWISH EDUCATION IN ANCIENT TIMES
By Professor RICHARD GOTTHEIL, Columbia University, New York.
It is related in the Talmud that upon the occasion of a great drought in Palestine all the pious men wept and prayed for rain. No answer came to their prayers, until a person, insignificant-looking and poor, "prayed to Him who causeth the wind to blow and the rain to fall." An immediate response was given to his prayer and rain fell in plenty. Asked by the thankful and wondering crowd who he was, that his prayers should have prevailed over those of the pious, he answered, "I am a teacher of little children."
The legend is significant in its childlike simplicity; for it emphasizes for us the importance and the weight which Jewish feeling has laid upon the education and the instruc-
*A paper read before the Baltimore Section of the Jewish Women's Council.
tion of the young. In a similar manner in the biblical verse, “Do not touch my anointed ones and do my prophets no harm,” the word Meshihai, pregnant of the highest religious meaning, was interpreted as referring to the school children, and the prophets as referring to their teachers; the one word being that which usually designated the accepted leader to final glory, and the other that which distinguished the great moral leaders of the people. This insistence upon the value of teaching was the necessary outcome of the appreciation placed upon knowledge. For knowledge is necessary in all the walks of life; and the opprobrium with which later Judaism covered the word Am-ha-aretz (the man of ignorance) has its roots deep down within the conscience of the Jew. In his estimate, knowledge has to do not only