ats over them; and Jewish hearts in America are loyal like
ours, and sustained by steadfast faith in the Messianic time when our
hopes and ideals, our aims and dreams, will be realized. There is but
one Judaism the world over, by the Jordan and the Tagus as by the
Vistula and the Mississippi. God bless and protect it, and lead it to
the goal of its glorious future!

To all Jewish hearts beyond the ocean, in free America, fraternal
greetings!

GUSTAV KARPELES

BERLIN, Pesach 5652/1892.

CONTENTS

A GLANCE AT JEWISH LITERATURE

THE TALMUD

THE JEW IN THE HISTORY OF CIVILIZATION

WOMEN IN JEWISH LITERATURE

MOSES MAIMONIDES

JEWISH TROUBADOURS AND MINNESINGERS

HUMOR AND LOVE IN JEWISH POETRY

THE JEWISH STAGE

THE JEW'S QUEST IN AFRICA

A JEWISH KING IN POLAND

JEWISH SOCIETY IN THE TIME OF MENDELSSOHN

LEOPOLD ZUNZ

HEINRICH HEINE AND JUDAISM

THE MUSIC OF THE SYNAGOGUE

A GLANCE AT JEWISH LITERATURE

In a well-known passage of the _Romanzero_, rebuking Jewish women for
their ignorance of the magnificent golden age of their nation's poetry,
Heine used unmeasured terms of condemnation. He was too severe, for the
sources from which he drew his own information were of a purely
scientific character, necessarily unintelligible to the ordinary reader.
The first truly popular presentation of the whole of Jewish literature
was made only a few years ago, and could not have existed in Heine's
time, as the most valuable treasures of that literature, a veritable
Hebrew Pompeii, have been unearthed from the mould and rubbish of the
libraries within this century. Investigations of the history of Jewish
literature have been possible, then, only during the last fifty years.

But in the course of this half-century, conscientious research has so
actively been prosecuted that we can now gain at least a bird's-eye view
of the whole course of our literature. Some stretches still lie in
shadow, and it is not astonishing that eminent scholars continue to
maintain that "there is no such thing as an organic history, a logical
development, of the gigantic neo-Hebraic literature"; while such as are
acquainted with the results of late research at best concede that
Hebrew literature has been permitted to garner a "tender aftermath."
Both verdicts are untrue and unfair. Jewish literature has developed
organically, and in the course of its evolution it has had its
spring-tide as well as its season of deca