polemics of the sixteenth
century. For instance, Jacob ben Elias, of Fano, in his "Shields of
Heroes," a small collection of songs in stanzas of three verses,
ventures to attack the weaker sex, for which Judah Tommo of Porta Leone
at once takes up the cudgels in his "Women's Shield." At the same time a
genuine song combat broke out between Abraham of Sarteano and Elias of
Genzano. The latter is the champion of the purity of womanhood, impugned
by the former, who in fifty tercets exposes the wickedness of woman in
the most infamous of her sex, from Lilith to Jezebel, from Semiramis to
Medea. An anonymous combatant lends force to his strictures by an
arraignment of the lax morals of the women of their own time, while a
fourth knight of song, evidently intending to conciliate the parties,
begins his "New Song," only a fragment of which has reached us, with
praise, and ends it with blame, of woman. Such productions, too, are a
result of the Renaissance, of its romantic current, which, as it
affected Catholicism, did not fail to leave its mark upon the Jews,
among whom romanticists must have had many a battle to fight with
adherents of traditional views.

Meantime, neo-Hebraic poetry had "fallen into the sear, the yellow
leaf." Poetry drooped under the icy breath of rationalism, and vanished
into the abyss of the Kabbala. At most we occasionally hear of a polemic
poem, a keen-edged epigram. For the rest, there was only a monotonous
succession of religious poems, repeating the old formulas, dry bones of
habit and tradition, no longer informed with true poetic, religious
spirit. Yet the source of love and humor in Jewish poetry had not run
dry. It must be admitted that the sentimentalism of the minneservice,
peculiar to the middle ages, never took root in Jewish soil. Pale
resignation, morbid despair, longing for death, unmanly indulgence in
regret, all the paraphernalia of chivalrous love, extolled in every key
in the poetry of the middle ages, were foreign to the sane Jewish mind.
Women, the object of unreasoning adulation, shared the fate of all
sovereign powers: homage worked their ruin. They became accustomed to
think that the weal and woe of the world depended upon their constancy
or disloyalty. Jews alone were healthy enough to subordinate sexual love
to reverence for maternity. Holding an exalted idea of love, they
realized that its power extends far beyond the lives of two persons, and
affects the well-being of genera