kening
which followed proved unmistakably.

For Smolenskin Jews never ceased to be a nation, and to him the Jew who
sought refuge in assimilation was nothing less than a traitor. He was
thus the forerunner of Pinsker, and of Herzl a decade later. Indeed, in
the resurrection of the national hope he was the first to remove the
shroud. According to him, "the eternal people" have every characteristic
that goes to make a nation. Their common country is still Palestine,
loved by them with all the fervor of patriotism; their common language
had never ceased to be Hebrew; their common religion consists in the
basic principles of Judaism, in which they all agree.

You wish--thus he addresses himself to the assimilationists--you
wish to be like the other people? So do I. Be, I pray you, be
like them. Search and find knowledge, avoid and forsake
superstition, above all be not ashamed of the rock whence you
were hewn. Yes, be like the other peoples, proud of your
literature, jealous of your self-respect, hopeful, even as all
persecuted peoples are hopeful, of the speedy arrival of the day
when we, too, shall reinhabit the land which once was, and still
is, our own.

But as the soil of Palestine, however regarded, is at present
inaccessible to Jews as a national entity, the language once spoken in
Palestine is so much the more to be cherished and cultivated by the
exiled people.

You ask me--he calls out again--what good a dead language can do
us? I will tell you. It confers honor on us, girds us with
strength, unites us into one. All nations seek to perpetuate
their names. All conquered peoples dream of a day when they will
regain their independence.... We have neither monuments nor a
country at present. Only one relic still remains from the ruins
of our ancient glory--the Hebrew language. Those, therefore, who
discard the Hebrew tongue betray the Hebrew nation, and are
traitors both to their race and their religion.

No less trenchant and outspoken was he against the serried array of
self-styled "reformers" of Judaism. He could not forgive the German
rabbis and Russian Maskilim for presuming to "dictate" to their
coreligionists what to select and what to reject in matters religious.
The whole movement he condemned as a mere imitation of Protestant
Christianity. To renovate Judaism! What a stigma on a religion that had
endured through the ages, and is ri