[Footnote 1:  See on this expression above, p. 148 et seq.]

Several years after the publication of his “Love of Zion,” when social currents had begun to stir Russian Jewry, Mapu began his five volume novel of contemporary life, under the title ’Ayit Tzabua’, “The Speckled Bird,” or “The Hypocrite” (1857-1869).  In his naive diction, which is curiously out of harmony with the complex plot in sensational French style, the author pictures the life of an obscure Lithuanian townlet:  the Kahal bosses who hide their misdeeds beneath the cloak of piety; the fanatical rabbis, the Tartuffes of the Pale of Settlement, who persecute the champions of enlightenment.  As an offset against these shadows of the past, Mapu lovingly paints the barely visible shoots of the new life, the Maskil, who strives to reconcile religion and science, the misty figure of the Jewish youth who goes to the Russian school in the hope of serving his people, the profiles of the Russian Jewish intellectuals, and the captains of industry from among the rising Jewish plutocracy.

Toward the end of his life Mapu returned to the historical novel, and in the “Transgression of Samaria” (Ashmat Shomron, 1865) he attempted to draw a picture of ancient Hebrew life during the declining years of the Northern Kingdom.  But this novel, appearing as it did at the height of the cultural movement, failed to produce the powerful effect of his Ahabat Zion, although its charming biblical diction enraptured the lovers of Melitzah. [1]

[Footnote 1:  An imitation of the biblical Hebrew diction.  Compare p. 225.]

The noise of the new Jewish life, with its constantly growing problems, invaded the precincts of literature, and even the poets were impelled to take sides in the burning questions of the day.  The most important poet of that era, Judah Leib Gordon (1830-1892), who began by composing biblical epics and moralistic fables, soon entered the field of “intellectual poetry,” and became the champion of enlightenment and a trenchant critic of old-fashioned Jewish life.  As far back as 1863, while active as a teacher at a Crown school [1] in Lithuania, he composed his “Marseillaise of Enlightenment” (Hakitzah ’ammi, “Awake, My People").  In it he sang of the sun shedding its rays over the “Land of Eden,” where the neck of the enslaved was freed from the yoke and where the modern Jew was welcomed with a brotherly embrace.  The poet calls upon his people to join the ranks of their fellow-countrymen, the hosts of cultured Russian citizens who speak the language of the land, and offers his Jewish contemporaries the brief formula:  “Be a man on the street and a Jew in the house,” [2] i.e., be a Russian in public and a Jew in private life.

[Footnote 1:  See on the Crown schools pp. 74 and 77.]

[Footnote 2:  Heye adam be-tzeteka, wihudi be-oholeka.]

Gordon himself defined his function in the work of Jewish regeneration to be that of exposing the inner ills of the people, of fighting rabbinical orthodoxy and the tyranny of ceremonialism.  This carping tendency, which implies a condemnation of the whole historic structure of Judaism, manifested itself as early as 1868 in his “Songs of Judah” (Shire Yehudah), in strophes radiant with the beauty of their Hebrew diction: