As far as Odessa was concerned, the seeds of enlightenment had been carried hither from neighboring Galicia by the Jews of Brody, who formed a wealthy merchant colony in that city.  As early as 1826 Odessa saw the opening of the first Jewish school for secular education, which was managed at first by Sittenfeld and later on by the well-known public worker Bezalel Stern.  Among the teachers of the new school was Simha Pinsker, who subsequently became the historian of Karaism.  This school, the only educational establishment of its kind during that period, served in Odessa as a center for the “Friends of Enlightenment.”  Being a new city, unfettered by traditions, and at the same time a large sea-port, with a checkered international population, Odessa outran other Jewish centers in the process of modernization, though it must be confessed that it never went beyond the externalities of civilization.  As far as the period under discussion is concerned, the Jewish center of the South can claim no share in the production of new Jewish values.

While yielding to Odessa in point of external civilization, Vilna surpassed the capital of the South by her store of mental energy.  The circle of the Vilna Maskilim, which came into being during the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, gave rise to the two founders of the Neo-Hebraic literary style:  the prose writer Mordecai Aaron Ginzburg (1796-1846) and the poet Abraham Baer Lebensohn (1794-1878).

Ginzburg, born in the townlet Salant, in the Zhmud region, [1] lived for some time in Courland, and finally settled in Vilna.  He managed to familiarize himself with German literature, and was so fascinated by it that he started his literary career by translating and adapting German works into Hebrew.  His translation of Campe’s “Discovery of America” and Politz’ Universal History, as well as his own history of the Franco-Russian War of 1812, compiled from various sources, were, as far as Russia is concerned, the first specimens of secular literature in pure Hebrew, which boldly claimed their place side by side with rabbinic and hasidic writings.  In that juvenile stage of the Hebrew renaissance, when the mere treatment of language and style was considered an achievement, even the appearance of such elementary books was hailed as epoch-making.

[Footnote 1:  Zhmud, or Samogitia, is part of the present government of Kovno.  Compare Vol.  I, p. 293, n. 1.]

The profoundest influence on the formation of the Neo-Hebraic style must be ascribed to two other works by the same author, Kiriai Sefer, [1] an epistolary manual containing specimens of personal, commercial, and other forms of correspondence (Vilna, 1835, and many later editions), and Debir, [2] a miscellaneous collection of essays, consisting for the most part of translations and compilations (Vilna, 1844).  Ginzburg’s premature death in 1846 was mourned by the Vilna Maskilim as the loss of a leader in the struggle for the Neo-Hebraic renaissance, and they gave expression to these sentiments in verse and prose.  Ginzburg’s autobiography (Abi-’ezer, 1863) and his letters (Debir, Vol.  II., 1861) portray the milieu in which our author grew up and developed.