it there before its
dissemination by celebrated Arabs. In their zeal to harmonize philosophy
with their religion, and in the lesser endeavor to defend traditional
Judaism against the polemic attacks of a new sect, the Karaites, they
invested the Aristotelian system with peculiar features, making it, as
it were, their national philosophy. At all events, it must be
universally accepted that the Jews share with the Arabs the merit "of
having cherished the study of philosophy during centuries of barbarism,
and of having for a long time exerted a civilizing influence upon
Europe."

The meagre achievements of the Jews in the departments of history and
history of literature do not justify the conclusion that they are
wanting in historic perception. The lack of writings on these subjects
is traceable to the sufferings and persecutions that have marked their
pathway. Before their chroniclers had time to record past afflictions,
new sorrows and troubles broke in upon them. In the middle ages, the
history of Jewish literature is the entire history of the Jewish people,
its course outlined by blood and watered by rivers of tears, at whose
source the genius of Jewish poetry sits lamenting. "The Orient dwells an
exile in the Occident," Franz Delitzsch, the first alien to give loving
study to this literature, poetically says, "and its tears of longing for
home are the fountain-head of Jewish poetry."[6]

That poetry reached its perfection in the works of the celebrated trio,
Solomon Gabirol, Yehuda Halevi, and Moses ben Ezra. Their dazzling
triumphs had been heralded by the more modest achievements of Abitur,
writing Hebrew, and Adia and the poetess Xemona (Kasmune) using Arabic,
to sing the praise of God and lament the woes of Israel.

The predominant, but not exclusive, characteristic of Jewish poetry is
its religious strain. Great thinkers, men equipped with philosophic
training, and at the same time endowed with poetic gifts, have
contributed to the huge volume of synagogue poetry, whose subjects are
praise of the Lord and regret for Zion. The sorrow for our lost
fatherland has never taken on more glowing colors, never been expressed
in fuller tones than in this poetry. As ancient Hebrew poetry flowed in
the two streams of prophecy and psalmody, so the Jewish poetry of the
middle ages was divided into _Piut_ and _Selicha_. Songs of hope and
despair, cries of revenge, exhortations to peace among men, elegies on
every single per