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Authors attributed their work to others, instead of claiming the product of others as their own. Levinsohn's Hefker Welt, in Yiddish, and Sayings of the Saints and Valley of the Dead, in Hebrew, belong to this category. But the deep student did not persist long in this species of diversion. As the name indicates, it was intended as a defence against the blood, or ritual murder, accusation.
Levinsohn's object in writing his Bet Yehudah was the reverse. The impetus came from without the Jewish camp. The book represents the author's views on certain Jewish problems propounded by his Christian friend, Prince Emanuel Lieven, just as Mendelssohn's Jerusalem was written at the instigation of Lavater.
All these efforts support Levinsohn's claim to the title of Founder of a modern Jewish Science in Russia, though his scholarly achievements cannot be classed with those of his German and Galician fellow-writers, such as Rapoport, Zunz, Jost and Geiger. Levinsohn stood entirely aloof from the propaganda of bureaucratic enlightenment which was carried on by Lilienthal in the name of Uvarov.
Somewhat later Levinsohn wrote other apologetic treatises, defending the Talmud against the attacks contained in the book Netibot 'Olam published in 1839 by the London missionary M'Caul. Levinsohn's great apologetic work Zerubbabel, which appeared several years after his death, was equally dedicated to the defence of the Talmud.
Levinsohn's life was a continuous struggle against an insidious disease, which kept him confined to his bed, and prevented him from accepting any prominent position. But though, as he said, he had "neither brother, wife, child, nor even a sound body," he impressed his personality upon Russian Jewry as no one else, save the Gaon, had before him.
In return for their copyright they received a number of copies of their books, which they were at liberty to dispose of as best they could. Now, while Levinsohn's copies of his Bet Yehudah were still at the publisher's, a fire broke out, and most of them were consumed. The Te'udah be-Yisraël had been prompted by a desire to prove the compatibility of modern civilization with Judaism.
Levinsohn's project was partly instrumental in prompting the grievous law of 1836, which raised a cry of despair in the Pale of Settlement, ordering a revision of the entire Hebrew literature by Russian censors. Levinsohn's action would have been ignoble had it not been naive.
It was the right word in the right time and place. In Zaslav, Volhynia, this monstrous libel had been revived, and popular fury rose to a high pitch. Several years later the Damascus Affair stirred the Jewish world to determined action, designed to stamp it out once for all. To wage war against this superstitious belief seems to have fallen to the lot of several of Levinsohn's family.
The book was finished in 1823, but, owing to Levinsohn's pecuniary circumstances, it remained unpublished till 1828. Meanwhile it circulated in manuscript among the leading Maskilim of Russia, Austria, and Germany, and established its author's reputation wherever it was read. Levinsohn was one of those who understand the persuasive power of the still small voice of sweet reasonableness.
We cannot apply to his works what we may safely say of Elijah Vilna's and Levinsohn's, that "there is solid metal enough in them to fit out whole circulating libraries, were it beaten into the usual filigree."
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