y, this again followed by
vigorous rejuvenescence.

Such opinions are part and parcel of the vicissitudes of our literature,
in themselves sufficient matter for an interesting book. Strange it
certainly is that a people without a home, without a land, living under
repression and persecution, could produce so great a literature;
stranger still, that it should at first have been preserved and
disseminated, then forgotten, or treated with the disdain of prejudice,
and finally roused from torpid slumber into robust life by the breath of
the modern era. In the neighborhood of twenty-two thousand works are
known to us now. Fifty years ago bibliographers were ignorant of the
existence of half of these, and in the libraries of Italy, England, and
Germany an untold number awaits resurrection.

In fact, our literature has not yet been given a name that recommends
itself to universal acceptance. Some have called it "Rabbinical
Literature," because during the middle ages every Jew of learning bore
the title Rabbi; others, "Neo-Hebraic"; and a third party considers it
purely theological. These names are all inadequate. Perhaps the only one
sufficiently comprehensive is "Jewish Literature." That embraces, as it
should, the aggregate of writings produced by Jews from the earliest
days of their history up to the present time, regardless of form, of
language, and, in the middle ages at least, of subject-matter.

With this definition in mind, we are able to sketch the whole course of
our literature, though in the frame of an essay only in outline. We
shall learn, as Leopold Zunz, the Humboldt of Jewish science, well says,
that it is "intimately bound up with the culture of the ancient world,
with the origin and development of Christianity, and with the scientific
endeavors of the middle ages. Inasmuch as it shares the intellectual
aspirations of the past and the present, their conflicts and their
reverses, it is supplementary to general literature. Its peculiar
features, themselves falling under universal laws, are in turn helpful
in the interpretation of general characteristics. If the aggregate
results of mankind's intellectual activity can be likened unto a sea,
Jewish literature is one of the tributaries that feed it. Like other
literatures and like literature in general, it reveals to the student
what noble ideals the soul of man has cherished, and striven to realize,
and discloses the varied achievements of man's intellectual pow