labours of associated Christendom. "Every one," says the Talmud, "that is bound to learn is bound also to teach," and the schools both of the East and West attest, by their innumerable rabbis and volumes, the fidelity with which the precept was obeyed. The history of the Talmud and the biography of Hebrew-Spanish literature are treated at some length by Mr. Finn, and to his pages we must refer for many curious anecdotes, and for the singular forms under which the Hebrew intellect manifested itself. More important will it be to mark some of the causes which hindered Jewish literature from becoming, among other elements of medieval cultivation not less grotesque and fanciful than itself, a constituent of the imaginative or discursive mind of modern Eu

rope.

The first, and perhaps the principal cause of separation between the Hebrew and the European mind will be found in the oriental genius of the Sephardim. Acute, suggestive and pliant in whatever related to the practical business of life, the Jews possessed the stubborn and impenetrable temper of the Asiatics in their intellectual pursuits. Believing themselves still subject to a peculiar dispensation, they restricted all knowledge to the Scriptures, the traditions of the elders and the decisions of the schools, and rejected as an alien and impure instrument the empiric and discursive spirit which the Greeks had transmitted to the Teutonic races of Europe. Their system of instruction was based on the patriarchal reverence for age, on the idea of a theocracy or special divine government, and on the preponderance which all orientals assign to speculative over ratiocinative studies. It was didactic from father to son, from teacher to pupil; and thus partaking of the nature of oral teaching, it was necessarily conveyed in the form of proverbs, adages and aphorisms. In consonance with the same ideas, they held that whatever the earlier sages had delivered on morals, on mind, or religious worship, was necessarily the best; and, to borrow an image from a lively writer, "their Janus was one-faced," looking always with reverted eyes. The sciences in which they excelled -grammar, including criticism and philology, physics, especially astronomy and the art of medicine-are those in which the human mind is most patient of rule and precedent, and

to which, accordingly, nearly every eastern nation has made some pretence. But in their nice discrimination of the properties and powers of their own language, the Jews seldom passed into the wider circle of the kindred Semitic dialects; in their physics they made no advances beyond the rude and corrupt system of Ptolemy and the Chaldean observatories; and in medicine, however skilful in acquiring and applying what was known, they claim no discoveries either in anatomy or nosology. The Alexandrian Philo imbibed and reflected the doctrines of Plato and the later academies so successfully, that his Platonism passed into a proverb. But the favourite ethnic author of the Western Jews was Aristotle, whose scientific formula, when diverted (as they were equally by the schoolmen, the Arabs and the Jews,) from their original design of methodizing the conceptions of the intellect, have always proved formidable impediments to the growth of knowledge and the education of the mind. Yet even Aristotle was read by them generally in the version of his Arabian commentators; and so chary were the Jews of directly acknowledging their obligations to Gentile philosophy, that the founder of the Peripatetics was said to have derived his wisdom from a high-priest of Jerusalem, or even to have been of the family of Koliah and the tribe of Benjamin. Among a people whose national life had lost its continuity, and whose exile was marked by "monotony of suffering," a national historian or an epic poet could not be expected to arise. Lyric poetry they cultivated more successfully, for short emotional compositions are the natural utterance of an oppressed and scattered race; and although they never attained to the sublime purity of their original psalmists and prophets, the introduction of metrical laws and the example of their Arabian rulers gave a new impulse to Hebrew song. In physical science the Jews came into more immediate contact with the rest of Europe than in any other department of their various learning and literature. They held the principal chairs in the Mohammedan colleges of Cordova and Seville, and they "taught the geometry, the algebra, the logic, and the che"mistry of Spain in the universities of Oxford and Paris, "while Christian students from all parts of Europe repaired "to Andalucia for such instruction."

"In astronomy," Mr. Finn observes, "they were the teachers of the Moors. When the Gaonim left the Euphrates for the Guadalquivir, or Moses Bar-Maimon removed thence to Cairo, each of these Jews had as bright a firmament to survey as had their prophet Daniel in Babylon, where he was 'master of the astrologers and Chaldeans,' with the tower of Nimrod for his observatory."

It appears from this rapid outline of their intellectual pursuits, that, from the tenth to the thirteenth century, the Jews divided with the Arabs the praise of being the most erudite and cultivated people between the Atlantic and the Euphrates; yet even at the most flourishing epoch of their mental development, the causes which ultimately separated the Hebrew from the European mind are evident. Their learning was encyclopedic, not progressive. They amassed, they methodized, they refined the ethical and physical treasures of the past, but they opened no new fountains of intellectual wealth. Their literature was a carefully cherished exotic, their science a venerable tradition: their inventive genius was enthralled by formal systems, their discursive activity repressed by religious scruples. The ancestral jealousy of Rabbinism was feebly combated by the individual freedom of a Maimonides or an Abru-Esra, and Jewish literature forfeited its birthright of hope by its blind and bigoted fealty to antiquity.

In the following passage Mr. Finn has correctly delineated the general phænomena of Hebrew literature, and in it incidentally includes one of the causes of its remoteness from European sympathies,-the absence of a popular element of sport as the necessary correlate of its pervasive earnestness.

"Hebrew literature has at all times maintained a rigid gravity, as if the talent of language were a donation which involves too deep a responsibility in its use to be in anywise trifled with. Most Asiatic nations are sober in their discourse, but pre-eminently so the Jews: they were a serious people when at home, and their later writers have constantly abstained from topics which do not in their opinion lead to happiness here and hereafter. In this we see a wide contrast to the prevalent habits of Christendom. The Jews were ever a reading and a writing people, but their books have no enervating tendency. Fairies, ghosts, genii, and that disregard of heavenly providence and suffering virtue which forms the staple of modern fiction, are all unknown within the pale of the Hebrew alphabet. True it is that grievous mistakes and follies have found their way into Jewish writings, but they were believed by their authors to be serious truth. When they

trifled with the Bible they were gravely deluded, and when they touched upon unearthly contemplations their objects were burning seraphs and ministering angels."

6

The author of 'Sephardim' cites several examples of the laborious trifling and grave delusions of the Rabbis. But as Philo, by allegorical interpretations, attempted to reconcile the profane science of his own age with the Mosaic narrative of the Creation and Fall, so the modern Jews affirm that all such passages are to be understood figuratively. And when the Jews are peculiarly reproached with trifling, it should be remembered that their poets and rabbis of the middle ages were contemporary with the Scotists and Thomists, with the pseudo-platonism and peripateticism of Christendom. The subtile and interminable distinctions of the schoolmen are not less "grave delusions" than the almost parallel "decisions" of the Talmud; and volumes, once the text-books of Oxford and the Sorbonne, contain "puerilities " as strange and pitiable as the legends and conversations of the Agadoth.' The essential difference between them is, that in the medieval æra Christianity was commencing its mission of civilization, and the strange intellectual forms which then prevailed were merely instruments and preludes to higher manifestations of thought and art, and, as instruments, were thrown aside, so soon as their task of preparation was accomplished. In Judaism, on the contrary, they were final ends, and, self-centred and unproductive, they generated an enthusiasm of the most worthless character, inflaming the fancy and exciting the understanding, at the expense of the nobler faculties of reason and imagination; and as, at various intervals, a Maimonides and a Mendelssohn have ineffectually endeavoured to snap the yoke of Rabbinism, so neither was it the "profound," the "resolute," and the "seraphic" doctors who emancipated the European mind from a similar burden, but the municipal institutions, the popular poetry, and the uncontrollable artistic feelings of Christendom which forced their way through the dense mists of scholasticism, and, taking for their exponents Savonarola or Luther, Dante or Michel Agnolo, Petrarca or Raffaelle, established the great bases of modern civilization. The following specimens of rabbinical trifling are taken from the 'Agadoth' and the 'Sceptre of Judah.' R. Siphré says—

"Once, when I was in a ship, we saw a fish with elegant horns, and upon them this inscription, I am a very small specimen of the creatures that inhabit the deep.' This fish measured three hundred leagues, but was swallowed up in one mouthful by the leviathan."

"Bar Juchné is a bird whose extended wings invariably occasion total eclipses of the sun. Once a choice egg fell from her nest and destroyed three hundred and fifteen noble cedars and inundated sixty-nine populous villages."

And this is a specimen of both text and comment:—

*

"There was a frog as large as sixty houses, but it was swallowed up by a serpent; this again was devoured by a crow, which flew up with it into a tree." And again, "A piece of iron fell into the sea, and was seven years reaching the bottom. This fable of the frog denotes the science of natural history, which celebrates the divine workmanship with a loud and sonorous voice the size of sixty houses are the sixty parts of nature: the serpent devouring the frog is astronomy, on account of its circles, &c.: the crow is theology, according to Canticles i. 5, 'I am black, but comely.' The fable of the iron falling into the sea denotes the human mind, which resembles iron in its capacity for sharpness: the seven years are the seven liberal sciences, which the most acute perception cannot sound in a whole life."

Some parts of the 'Agadoth,' however, contain less puerile fictions, and admit of worthier comments.

"A man saw the sea with such monstrous billows, as to have intervals of three hundred miles. One wave," it immediately follows, "raised its voice, and called to its companion, Hast thou left anything in the world which thou hast not overflowed? Come and let us destroy it. But it replied, Come and see the power of thy Lord, I could not overpass the sand one hair's-breadth; for it is written, Fear ye not me, saith the Lord? Will ye not tremble at my presence, which have placed the sand for the bound of the sea, by a perpetual decree, that it cannot pass it?'"

Moses Bar-Maimon, born at Cordova in 1131, called Rambam from the initials of his names, and Maimonides by the Christians, was the greatest ornament of Jewish literature. Eichhorn assigns him the highest rank among the Rabbis, and Scaliger says of him, "Primus fuit inter Hebræos qui nugari desiit." He was well versed, and wrote with equal facility in Hebrew, Chaldee, Greek and Arabic, and his writings, of which a list will be found in Sephardim,' embrace a singular variety of subjects. His admirers, especially among the later and more enlightened Jews, proclaimed him a second Moses; and some of the best productions of modern Hebrew scholars are comments upon the works of Bar-Maimon. Different por