ith confident hope toward the years that are to be.
That Israel has completely played its role--that it has finished its
service to the world--cannot for a moment entertain. Surely no one who
believes in a philosophy of history, who sees in human history more
than a meaningless and unrelated succession of events, can think that
Israel has been preserved through centuries of discipline for no end
whatever. On the contrary, we must believe that Israel has still a
mission. What that mission is to be we cannot now foretell. We of this
generation are looking upon the breaking down of European
civilization. Some of us hope and expect that when the smoke of battle
has cleared away there will gradually be built up a new and better
social order. In this constructive work of rebuilding, who is better
fitted to take a prominent part than the Jew, with his noble heritage
of ideals, his passion for social justice? Jews may well rejoice as
they reflect upon what individual members of their race have through
literature contributed to the emancipation of the human spirit. And
they may rejoice also in the hope of what Israel may yet accomplish in
the years that are to be.

[Illustration: Signature: Edward Chauncey Baldwin]

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote C: _Song of Songs_, 1:15-2:2.]

[Footnote D: An adequate and sympathetic treatment of Heine's work as
a Jewish poet may be found in _Heinrich Heine als Dichter Judentums_
von Georg J. Plotke (Dresden, 1913).]

[Footnote E: George Gilfillan, _Third Gallery of Literary Portraits_,
p. 360.]

[_The Second in a Series of Sketches of Jewish Worthies_]

Jochanan ben Zakkai

BY ABRAHAM M. SIMON

[Illustration: _ABRAHAM M. SIMON (born in Kalvaria, Russian-Poland, in
1886; came to America in 1904) received his A.B. with honors from
Harvard College in 1910, and his M.A. from the University of
Pennsylvania in 1911. During 1910-11 he was a Fellow in the Dropsie
College for Hebrew and Cognate Learning of Philadelphia, and he spent
the summer of 1911 at the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the
Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris, reading and copying Arabic
manuscripts. In 1913 he won his Ph.D. in Semitics at the University of
Pennsylvania. Mr. Simon was one of the original members of the Harvard
Menorah Society, and read a Hebrew poem_ Ner Yisrael (_"The Light of
Israel"_) _at the dedicatory exercises of the Society._]

The Jewish commonwealth was dissolved; the Jewish nation disrupted.
Jerusal