I dedicated myself to Hebrew. As a youth I loved it as a Jewish
lad loves his betrothed, not because he is enamored of her
charms, but because his parents have chosen her for him; as I
grew older, I continued to love it as a Jewish man loves his
wife, not because of real affection, but because she is the only
one he knows; now that I am old, I still love her, as an elderly
Jew loves his helpmate: he is aware that she lacks many of the
accomplishments of which more educated women can boast, but, for
all that, remembering her faithfulness in the past, he loves her
also in the present, and loves her till he dies.

Guenzburg was different from most of his contemporaries in another
respect. He was a voluminous writer, but only a few of his books and
essays bear on what we now call Jewish science. Zunz, Geiger, and Jost,
seeing that Judaism was gradually losing its hold upon their Jewish
countrymen, resorted to exploring and narrating, in German, the
wonderful story of their race, in the hope of renewing its ebbing
strength. Levinsohn, living amid a different environment, deemed it best
to convince his fellow-Jews that secular knowledge was necessary, and
religion sanctioned their pursuit thereof. Guenzburg, the man of letters,
determined to teach through the vehicle of Hebrew the true and the
beautiful wherever he found it. He felt called upon to reveal to his
brethren the grandeur of the world beyond the dingy ghetto, to tell them
the stories not contained in the Midrash, _Josippon_, or the biographies
of rabbis and zaddikim. He translated Campe's _Discovery of the New
World_, compiled a history of ancient civilization, and narrated the
epochal event of the nineteenth century, the conflict between Russia and
France. He taught his fellow-Jews to think correctly and logically, to
clothe their thoughts in beautiful expressions, and revealed his
innermost being to them in his autobiography, _Abi'ezer_. As a writer he
appears neither erudite nor profound. We cannot apply to his works what
we may safely say of Elijah Vilna's and Levinsohn's, that "there is
solid metal enough in them to fit out whole circulating libraries, were
it beaten into the usual filigree." But he was elegant, cultured,
intelligent, honorable; one who joined a feeling heart to a love for
art; a Moses who struck from the rock of the Hebrew tongue refreshing
streams for those thirsting for knowledge; a most amiable perso