s to their
moral value may differ from that of the rest. He believed in freedom of
thought, but would not concede freedom of action or even of expression,
and would say with Bolingbroke, "Freedom belongs to a man as a rational
creature, he lies under the restraint as a member of society."

At these conclusions, Guenzburg arrived only after a long, severe, though
silent, struggle in the seclusion of his closet. His active mind would
not at first surrender unconditionally to the coercion of custom. But
his conception of ceremonialism served him in good stead on many an
occasion in his eventful life. Being an expedient to preserve harmony,
it may and must vary with change of conditions. Accordingly, Guenzburg
always accommodated himself to his environment. In Vilna he subscribed
to the regulations of the _Shulhan 'Aruk_, in Mitau he quickly and
completely became Germanized. Such adaptability rendered him conspicuous
wherever he went, and as early as 1829 his name was included among the
learned of Livonia, Esthland, and Courland in the Biographical
Dictionary then published by Recke and Napyersky.

His claim to fame, however, consists in the influence he exerted upon
Russian Jews. Like Levinsohn, he was a constructive force. In his
younger days, he had inveighed against the benighted rabbis and the
antiquated garb, but moderation came with discretion. He would not sweep
away by force the accumulation of hundreds of years. Judaism needed
reforms of some sort, but these could not be brought about by the
Russo-German-doctor-rabbis, men who could rede the seven riddles of the
world, but whose knowledge of their own people and its spiritual
treasures was close to the zero point. "For a rabbi," writes he, "Torah
must be the integer, science the cipher. Had Aristotle embraced Judaism,
notwithstanding his unparalleled erudition, he would still remain a
sage, never become a rabbi." But he was as little satisfied with the
exclusively Talmudistic rabbis. "O ye modern rabbis," he calls out in
one of his essays, in which he stigmatizes Lilienthal's plans as the
"gourd of Jonah," "you who stand in the place of seer and prophet of
yore, is it not your duty to rise above the people, to intervene between
them and the Government? And how can you expect to accomplish it, if the
language and regulations of our country are entirely unknown to you?"

The impress Guenzburg left upon Hebrew literature is of special
importance. Until his time, de