es within
it, was headed towards the healthy progress of Judaism. The most
substantial product of this movement was the Neo-Hebraic literary
renaissance which had already appeared in faint outlines on the sombre
background of external oppression and internal obscurantism during the
preceding period. The Haskalah, formerly anathematized, was now able to
unfold all its creative powers. What in the time of Isaac Baer Levinsohn
had been accomplished stealthily by a few isolated conspirators of
enlightenment in some petty society in Vilna or in some out-of-the-way
town like Kamenetz-Podolsk was now done in the full light of the day.
Instead of a few stray writers, the harbingers of the new literature,
there now appeared this literature itself, new both in form and content.
The restoration of the Hebrew language to its biblical purity and the
removal of the linguistic excrescences of the later rabbinic idiom
became for some writers an end in itself, for others a weapon in the
fight for enlightenment. _Melitzah_, a conventionalized style, which,
moving strictly within the confines of the biblical diction, endeavored
to adapt the form of an ancient language to the content of a modern
life, became the fashion of the day.

In point of content rejuvenated Hebrew literature was of necessity
elementary. Mental restlessness and naiveness of thought were not
conducive to the development of that "science of Judaism" which had
attained to such luxurious growth in Germany. The Hebrew writers of
Russia during that period had no means of propagating their ideas,
except through the medium of poetry, fiction, or journalism. The results
of historic research were squeezed into the mould of a poem or novel, or
it furnished the material for a press article, in which the Jewish past
was considered from the point of view of the present. Objective
scientific investigation could find no place, and the little that was
accomplished in that direction did not bear the character of a living
account of the past, but was rather in the nature of crude
archaeological material. At the same time, as the crest of the social
progress was rising, the border-line between poetry and fiction, on the
one hand, and topical journalism, on the other, was gradually
obliterated. The poet or novelist was often turned into a fighter, who
attacked the old order of things and defended the new.

Even before the first blush of dawn, when every one in Russia was yet
groaning u