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The pioneer of modern culture among Russian Jews, the founder of Neo-Hebraic literature, spent his life in the midst of a realm of darkness, shunned like an outcast, appreciated by a mere handful of sympathizers. It was only after his death that he was crowned with laurels, when the intellectuals of Russian Jewry were beginning to press forward in close formation.
Simplicity, perspicuity, and conciseness, these he taught by precept and example, and though he was accused of "Germanizing" the Hebrew language, he persisted in his labor until he attained the foremost rank among the neo-Hebraic litterateurs. In Günzburg we find the artistic temperament developed to a degree rare among Hebraists of even more recent years. He wrote only in moments of inspiration.
It bears all the traces of the pseudepigraphic tendency of a period that produced the first works of the Cabala, the Seder Olam Zutta of Rabbi Joshua, and the neo-Hebraic apocalypses. The attempt to write an archaic Hebrew is marred by the presence of Rabbinical and novel terms. Reference to events or things only known to later times is combined with the pretension of an ancient chronicle.
The "titled" inteligenzia, reared in the Russian schools, who had drifted away from Judaism, was now joined by that other intelligenzia, the product of heder and yeshibah, who had acquired European culture through the medium of neo-Hebraic literature, and was in closer contact with the masses of the Jewish people.
Their principal task, however, was the cultivation of the Neo-Hebraic literary style and the rejuvenation of the content of that literature. They were willing to pursue the road of the emancipated Jewry of Western Europe, but only to a certain limit, refusing to cut themselves adrift from the national language or the religious and national ideals.
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. He wrote Shire Tif'eret, "Songs of Glory," an epic in five parts dealing with the Exodus.
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. In this volume solemn odes celebrating events of all kinds alternate with lyrical poems of a philosophical content.
The most substantial product of this movement was the Neo-Hebraic literary renaissance which had already appeared in faint outlines on the sombre background of external oppression and internal obscurantism during the preceding period. The Haskalah, formerly anathematized, was now able to unfold all its creative powers.
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