with the race-spirit of which it treats. It must flow with the race-current, not against it, to be of value. Nevertheless, it must epitomize humanity, not racial pettinesses. It must be capable of translations into other idioms for the comprehension of other peoples, in order to stand the test. Perhaps no individual can achieve this in the very near future, but if the tendency flows steadily in this
direction to the end that he should arrive, he will come, beyond a doubt.
There is room for such a literature. The Jewish people are ripe to produce it and the world at large no less to recieve it. Many are in the field. The universal exhibit is already crowded with canvases. But how many true likenesses are there among them?
“ An Appreciation of Leon Gordon ”
A Review
THE work before us fills a long-felt need and both its form and treatment show that the author is possessed of the proper qualifications of a biographer, a mastery of the subject chosen, enthusiasm for it, and a mind ever ready to render judgment according to act and evidence.
The author’s hard road was considerably smoothed for him by his many predecessors in the Hebrew as well as in the German languabes—Brainin, Weisenberg, Karpeles, Klausner ,and others—to whom he acknowledges his indebtedness. If he encountered any difficulty at all it was in the abundance of material. Yet we have here the unmistakable evidence of painstaking industry, sound judgment, and fair rendition from one language into another and the marshaling of information in an attractive, coherent form.
The rule of Sainte-Beuve, was that if you really desire to estimate the genius of an individual, it is not sufficient to dissect his own work only, but must also make a careful study of his period, surroundings, and associates. Mr. Rhine follows this rule and develops the background for his subject with a rich description of conditions in the first decades of 19th-century Russia. the capricious reign of Alexander IJ. with its alternate periods of hope and despair for his Jewish subjects, the reign of his successor, Nicholas I, his Hadrian-like laws for the oppression of the Jews, which
Leon Gordon, an appreciation by Abraham Benedict Rhine, The Jewish Publication Society, Philadelphia, 1910.
aimed to level them with the dust, if not at their total extermination; the sad, monotonous life of the people within the sorrow-laden Ghetto, their daily toils, their superstitions, hopes, fears, joys and sorrows.
If the work possesses many virtues it also hag many serious Haws. Mr. Rhine bears a grudge against Rabbinic Judaism. and while he passes strictures upon Gordon for his criticism of the rabbis, he himself speaks of “the Rabbinical Judaism with its excrescences of superstition and credulity” and the “tremendous weapon which Czar Nicholas placed in the hands of the elders and orthodox leaders,” as if there were any other than orthodos leaders of the Russian Jew.
That Gordon, along with the other “en- lighteners” of his day, believed in the efficacy of education as a cure-all for the ills of his people will be seen from a passag. in his writings. “Our material improvement,’ he writes “depends upon religious reform, our people live on the air,” confounding, of course, cause and effect, as this very air-life of which the poet so bitterly complains, was in reality the effect of the persecutions of the Jew, which excluded him from — the field of all remunerative and honorable occupations and = forced him into the uncertain corners of petty trading and usury. It may be true as the author remarks, that “the attitude of Gordon to wards the rabbis is one of bitter anatagonism,” and we feel constrained to smile incredulously at his story of the rabbi who “pronounced all the meat of the town Tre-