If the contributions of Slavonic Jews to Latin, German, French, Dutch, and English literature were not less considerable at that time than those of the Jews residing in the countries where these languages were respectively used as media, they excelled them in Hebrew literature.  In the renaissance of the holy tongue, they played the most important part from the first.  The striving for knowledge, not for the purpose of obtaining a coveted privilege, but for its own sake, became an irresistible passion, and it was accompanied by an unquenchable desire to disseminate knowledge among the masses, to make learning and wisdom common property.  The Hebrew language being the best vehicle for the purpose, it was soon impressed into the service of Haskalah.  The pioneer Maskilim learned to handle it with ease and clearness that would do credit to a modern writer in a much more developed European language.

From the middle of the fifteenth to the latter part of the eighteenth century, Hebrew literature consisted, if a few scattered books on philosophy, mostly translations from the Arabic, are excepted, mainly of Talmudic disquisitions, written in the rabbinic dialect and in a euphuistic style.  Besides the great Maimuni, there were few able or willing to write Hebrew “as she should be spoke.”  The early German Maskilim, in trying to escape the Scylla of Rabbinism, fell victims to the Charybdis of Germanism.  They possessed originality neither of style nor of sentiment, neither of rhyme nor of reason.  Hebrew poetry was an adaptation of current German poetry.  The very best the period produced, the Mosaide of Wessely, was influenced by and largely an imitation of Klopstock and others.  Like English classic poetry, it is pretty in form but poor in spirit.  The element of nationality, or distinctiveness, the life-giving and soul-uplifting element in all poetry, as Delitzsch justly maintains it to be, was lacking in the German Maskilim, anxious for naturalization as they were.  It was the Slavonic Maskilim who mastered Hebrew in its purity, as it had not been mastered since the day of Judah Halevi.  In those days of transition the diligent student can find, in germ, what was later to develop into the resplendent poetical flowers produced by the Lebensohns, the Gordons, Dolitzky, Schapiro, Mane, and Bialik.

The Slavonic contributors to the Meassef, the first Hebrew literary periodical (1784-1811), were not conspicuous in number, but if quality can compensate for quantity, they made up for it by the value of their articles.  Dubno and Maimon enriched the early issues, the one with poetry, the other with philosophy; and when it began to struggle for its existence, and was on the point of giving up the ghost, Shalom Cohen (1772-1845) came to the rescue, and, as editor, prolonged its existence by a few years.  Among the best articles in the Meassef are those of Isaac Halevi Satanov (1733-1805).  This “conglomeration of contrasts,” whom