The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) | Page 6

They seem crooked and twisted. Yet we know them to be straight....
"Verily, man's heart is like the ocean ceaselessly agitated by the
battling winds. As the waves roll forward and backward in perpetual
motion, so our hearts are stirred by never-ending pain and trouble, and
as our emotions sway our will, so our senses suffer change within us.
We see only what we desire to see, hear only what we long to hear,
what our imagination conjures up." (Act II, scene i.)
This philosophy of externalism and of the impotence of the human
mind threw the poet, believer and devotee of the Kabbalah, into a most
dangerous mysticism. He continued to write for some time: an
imitation of the Psalms; a treatise on logic, _Ha-Higgayon_, not
without value; another treatise on ethics, Mesilat Yesharim ("The Path
of the Righteous"); and a large number of poetic pieces and Kabbalistic
compositions, the greater part of which were never published; and this
enumeration does not exhaust the tale of his literary achievements.
[Footnote: The greater part of Luzzatto's works have never been
published.] Then his powers were used up, the tension of his mind
increased to the last degree; he lost his moral equilibrium. The day

came when he strayed so far afield as to believe himself called to play
the rôle of the Messiah. The Rabbis, alarmed at the gloomy prospect of
a repetition of the pseudo-Messianic movements which time and again
had shaken the Jewish world to its foundations, launched the ban
against him. His fate was sealed by his ingenious imitation of the Zohar,
written in Aramaic, of which only fragments have been preserved.
Obliged to leave Italy, Luzzatto wandered through Germany, and took
up his abode at Amsterdam. He enjoyed the gratification of being
welcomed there by literary men among his people as a veritable master.
At Amsterdam he wrote his last works. But he did not remain there
long. He went to seek Divine inspiration at Safed in Palestine, the
far-famed centre of the Kabbalah. There he died, cut off by the plague
at the age of forty.
Such was the sad life of the poet, a victim of the abnormal surroundings
in which he lived. Under more favorable conditions, he might have
achieved that which would have won him universal recognition. His
main distinction is that he released the Hebrew language forever from
the forms and ideas of the Middle Ages, and connected it with the
circle of modern literatures. He bequeathed to posterity a model of
classic poetry, which ushered in Hebrew humanism, the return to the
style and the manner of the Bible, in the same way as the general
humanistic movement led the European mind back upon its own steps
along the paths marked out by the classic languages. No sooner did his
work become known in the north countries and in the Orient than it
raised up imitators. Mendes and Wessely, leaders of literary revivals,
the one at Amsterdam, the other in Germany, are but the disciples and
successors of the Italian poet.
* * * * *
CHAPTER II
IN GERMANY
THE MEASSEFIM
The intellectual emancipation of the Jews in Germany anticipated their

political and social emancipation. That is a truth generally
acknowledged. Long secluded from all foreign ideas, confined within
religious and dogmatic bounds, German Judaism was a sharer in the
physical and social misery of the Judaism of Slavic countries. The
philosophic and tolerant ideas in vogue at the end of the eighteenth
century startled it somewhat out of its torpor. In the measure in which
those ideas gained a foothold in the communities, conditions, at least in
the larger centres, took on a comfortable aspect, with more or less
assurance of permanent well-being. The first contact of the ghetto with
the enlightened circles of the day gave the impetus to a marked
movement toward an inner emancipation. Associations of Maskilim
("intellectuals") were formed at Berlin, Hamburg, and Breslau. "The
Seekers of the Good and the Noble" (_Shohare ha-Tob
weha-Tushiyah_) should be mentioned particularly. They were
composed of educated men familiar with Occidental culture, and
animated by the desire to make the light of that culture penetrate to the
heart of the provincial communities. These "intellectuals" entered the
lists against religious fanaticism and casuistic methods, seeking to
replace them by liberal ideas and scientific research. Two schools,
headed respectively by the philosopher Mendelssohn and the poet
Wessely, had their origin in this movement--the school of the
_Biurists_, deriving their name from the _Biur_, a commentary on the
Bible, and the school of the _Meassefim_, from _Meassef_,
"Collector." [Footnote: A specimen of the Biur appeared at Amsterdam,
in 1778, under the title _'Alim le-Terufah_.] The former defended
Judaism against the enemies from without, and combated the prejudices
and the ignorance of the