Thus lived and labored the first of the Maskilim, an idealist from beginning to end.  Persecution did not embitter, nor poverty depress him.  And when he passed away quietly (February 12, 1860) in the obscure little town in which he had been born, and which has become famous through him, it was felt that Russia had had her Mendelssohn, too.  Strange to say, he little suspected the tremendous influence he exerted upon the Haskalah movement, but was quite sanguine of the success of his fight for “truth and justice among the nations.”  His work he modestly summed up in the epitaph which was inscribed on his tombstone at his request: 

  Out of nothing God called me to life. 
  Alas, earthly life has passed, and I must
  Sleep again on the bosom of Mother Nature. 
  Witness this stone.  I fought with God’s
  Foes, not with a Sword, but with the Word;
  I fought for Truth and Justice among the Nations
  And Zerubbabel and Efes Dammim testify thereto.

Contemporaneous with Isaac Baer Levinsohn, and hardly less distinguished and influential, was Mordecai Aaron Guenzburg (ReMAG, Salanti, Kovno, December 3, 1795—­Vilna, November 5, 1846).  His family had been prominent in many walks of life since the fourteenth century, and, whether in the land of the Saxons or of the Slavs, represented the cream of the Jewries in which they lived.  His father was a Maskil of great repute, who had written several treatises, in Hebrew, on algebra, geometry, optics, and kindred subjects.  He sought to supplement his son Mordecai Aaron’s heder education with a knowledge of secular sciences.  But at that time and in that place not many were the books, outside the Talmud, accessible to a lad eager for learning, the only ones available being such as the Josippon, Zemah David, and Sheerit Yisrael on Jewish History, the Sefer ha-Berit, and a Hebrew translation of Mendelssohn’s Phaedon on general philosophy.  But the precocious and clear-minded youth did not need much to stimulate his love for history and his inclination to philosophy, and his intellectual development continued in spite of the untoward circumstances in which he happened to be placed.

Though he was “given” in marriage at a very early age, the proverbial “millstone” weighed but lightly upon the neck of young Guenzburg.  He never discontinued the habit of secluding himself in his study for hours, sometimes for days, at a time, and there writing down his thoughts in painstaking penmanship.  These productions, with all their crudity, promised, according to a keen critic, the flowers which would one day “ripen into delicious fruit, not only pleasant to the sight but also delicious to the taste.”  In fact, even his religious views underwent but slight modification in later and maturer years.  Ceremonial laws, or minhagim, were to him a social compact among the members of a sect.  He who transgresses them is, eo ipso,