s over separation from friends and kin, weeps over the
shortness of life and the rapid approach of hoary age--all in polished
language, sometimes, however, lacking euphony. Even when he strikes his
lyre in praise and honor of his people Israel, he fails to rise to the
lofty heights attained by his mates in song.

With Yehuda Charisi, at the beginning of the thirteenth century, the
period of the epigones sets in for Spanish-Jewish literature. In
Charisi's _Tachkemoni_, an imitation of the poetry of the Arab Hariri,
jest and serious criticism, joy and grief, the sublime and the trivial,
follow each other like tints in a parti-colored skein. His distinction
is the ease with which he plays upon the Hebrew language, not the most
pliable of instruments. In general, Jewish poets and philosophers have
manipulated that language with surprising dexterity. Songs, hymns,
elegies, penitential prayers, exhortations, and religious meditations,
generation after generation, were couched in the idiom of the psalmist,
yet the structure of the language underwent no change. "The development
of the neo-Hebraic idiom from the ancient Hebrew," a distinguished
modern ethnographer justly says, "confirms, by linguistic evidence, the
plasticity, the logical acumen, the comprehensive and at the same time
versatile intellectuality of the Jewish race. By the ingenious
compounding of words, by investing old expressions with new meanings,
and adapting the material offered by alien or related languages to its
own purposes, it has increased and enriched a comparatively meagre
treasury of words."[11]

Side by side with this cosmopolitanism, illustrated in the Haggada,
whose pages prove that nothing human is strange to the Jewish race, it
reveals, in its literary development, as notably in the Halacha, a
sharply defined subjectivity. Jellinek says: "Not losing itself in the
contemplation of the phenomena of life, not devoting itself to any
subject unless it be with an ulterior purpose, but seeing all things in
their relation to itself, and subordinating them to its own boldly
asserted _ego_, the Jewish race is not inclined to apply its powers to
the solution of intricate philosophic problems, or to abstruse
metaphysical speculations. It is, therefore, not a philosophic race, and
its participation in the philosophic work of the world dates only from
its contact with the Greeks." The same author, on the other hand,
emphasizes the liberality, the broad sympa