shapes and guises, and represented
as the highest aim of life. Woman's virtues, yea, even her vices, were
invested with exaggerated importance. Woman became accustomed to think
that she could be neither faithful nor faithless without turning the
world topsy-turvy. She shared the fate of all objects of excessive
adulation: flattery corrupted her. Thus it came about that love of woman
overshadowed every other social force and every form of family
affection, and so spent its power. The Jews were the only ones sane
enough to subordinate sexual love to reverence for motherhood. Alexander
Weill makes a Jewish mother say: 'Is it proper for a good Jewish mother
to concern herself about love? Love is revolting idolatry. A Jewess may
love only God, her husband, and her children.' Granny (_Alt-Babele_) in
one of Kompert's tales says: 'God could not be everywhere, so he created
mothers.' In Jewish novels, maternal love is made the basis of family
life, its passion and its mystery. A Jewish mother! What an image the
words conjure up! Her face is calm, though pale; a melancholy smile
rests upon her lips, and her soulful eyes seem to hide in their depths
the vision of a remote future."

This is a correct view. Jewish poetry is interpenetrated with the breath
of intellectual love, that is, love growing out of the recognition of
duty, no less ideal than sensual love. In the heart of the Jew love is
an infinite force. Too mighty to be confined to the narrow limits of
personal passion, it extends so as to include future generations.

Thus it happened that while in Christian poetry woman was the subject of
song and sonnet, in Jewish poetry she herself sang and composed, and her
productions are worthy of ranking beside the best poetic creations of
each generation.

The earliest blossoms of Jewish poetry by women unfolded in the
spring-like atmosphere of the Renaissance under the blue sky of Italy,
the home of the immortal trio, Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio. The
first Jewish women writers of Italian verse were Deborah Ascarelli and
Sara Copia Sullam, who, arrayed in the full panoply of the culture of
their day, and as thoroughly equipped with Jewish knowledge, devoted
their talents and their zeal to the service of their nation.

Deborah Ascarelli of Rome, the pride of her sex, was the wife of the
respected rabbi Giuseppe Ascarelli, and lived at Venice in the beginning
of the seventeenth century. She made a graceful Italian translation o