[Footnote 1:  See next note.]

[Footnote 2:  Both titles are derived from the message in Josh. 15. 15, according to which Debir, a city in the territory of the tribe of Judah, was originally called Kiriat Sefer, “Book City.”]

Abraham Baer Lebensohn, [1] a native of Vilna, awakened the dormant Hebrew lyre by the sonorous rhymes of his “Songs in the Sacred Tongue” (Shire Sefat Kodesh, Vol.  I., Leipsic, 1842).  In this volume solemn odes celebrating events of all kinds alternate with lyrical poems of a philosophical content.  The unaccustomed ear of the Jew of that period was struck by these powerful sounds of rhymed biblical speech which exhibited greater elegance and harmony than the Mosaid of Wessely, the Jewish Klopstock. [2] His compositions, which are marked by thought rather than by feeling, suited to perfection the taste of the contemporary Jewish reader, who was ever on the lookout for “intellectuality,” even where poetry was concerned.  Philosophic and moralizing lyrics are a characteristic feature of Lebensohn’s pen.  The general human sorrow, common to all individuals, stirs him more deeply than national grief.  His only composition of a nationalistic character, “The Wailing of the Daughter of Judah,” seems strangely out of harmony with the accompanying odes which celebrate the coronation of Nicholas I. and similar patriotic occasions, although the “Wailing” is shrewdly prefaced by a note, evidently meant for the censor, to the effect that the poem refers to the Middle Ages.  At any rate, the principal merit of the “Songs in the Sacred Tongue” is not to be sought in their poetry but rather in their style, for it was this style which became the basis of Neo-Hebraic poetic diction, perfected more and more by the poets of the succeeding generations.

[Footnote 1:  He assumed the pen-name “Adam,” the initials of Abraham Dob (Hebrew equivalent for Baer) Mikhailishker (from the town of Mikhailishok, in the government of Vilna, where he resided for a number of years).  See later, p. 226.]

[Footnote 2:  The author refers to Naphtali Hirz Wessely (d. 1805), an associate of Mendelssohn in his cultural endeavors.  He wrote Shire Tif’eret, “Songs of Glory,” an epic in five parts dealing with the Exodus.  The poem was patterned after the epic Der Messias of his famous German contemporary Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock, who, in turn, was influenced by Milton.]

Ginzburg and Lebensohn were the central pillars of the Vilna Maskilim circle, which also included men of the type of Samuel Joseph Fuenn, the historian, Mattathiah Strashun, the Talmudist, the censor Tugendhold, the bibliographer Ben-jacob, N. Rosenthal, in a word, the “radicals” of that era—­for the mere striving for the restoration of biblical Hebrew and for elementary secular education was looked upon as bold radicalism.  The same circle made an attempt to create a scientific periodical after the pattern