tions unborn. Such love, intellectual
love, which Benedict Spinoza was the first to define from a scientific
and philosophic point of view, looks far down the vistas of the future,
and gives providential thought to the race.

While humor and romanticism everywhere in the middle ages appeared as
irreconcilable contrasts, by Jews they were brought into harmonious
relationship. When humor was banished from poetry, it took refuge in
Jewish-German literature, that spiritual undercurrent produced by the
claims of fancy as opposed to the aggressive, all absorbing demands of
reason. Not to the high and mighty, but to the lowly in spirit, the
little ones of the earth, to women and children, it made its appeal, and
from them its influence spread throughout the nation, bringing
refreshment and sustenance to weary, starved minds, hope to the
oppressed, and consolation to the afflicted. Consolation, indeed, was
sorely needed by the Jews on their peregrinations during the middle
ages. Sad, inexpressibly sad, was their condition. With fatal
exclusiveness they devoted themselves to the study of the Talmud.
Secular learning was deprecated; antagonism to science and vagaries
characterized their intellectual life; philosophy was formally
interdicted; the Hebrew language neglected; all their wealth and force
of intellect lavished upon the study of the Law, and even here every
faculty--reason, ingenuity, speculation--busied itself only with highly
artificial solutions of equally artificial problems, far-fetched
complications, and vexatious contradictions invented to be harmonized.
Under such grievous circumstances, oppression growing with malice,
Jewish minds and hearts were robbed of humor, and the exercise of love
was made a difficult task. Is it astonishing that in such days a rabbi
in the remote Slavonic East should have issued an injunction restraining
his sisters in faith from reading romances on the Sabbath--romances
composed by some other rabbi in Provence or Italy five hundred years
before?

Sorrow and suffering are not endless. A new day broke for the Jews. The
walls of the Ghetto fell, dry bones joined each other for new life, and
a fresh spirit passed over the House of Israel. Enervation and decadence
were succeeded by regeneration, quickened by the spirit of the times, by
the ideas of freedom and equality universally advocated. The forces
which culminated in their revival had existed as germs in the preceding
century. Silentl