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Updated: June 1, 2025
Montefiore, while in Russia, urged Levinsohn to defend his people against their traducers, and the bed-ridden sage, almost blind and hardly able to hold a pen, finally consented. What Zerubbabel accomplished, can be judged from the fact that in the second Hebrew edition of McCaul's Old Paths are omitted many of the calumnies and aspersions of the first edition, published in 1839.
"I've got some goods." The old man stared at him speechless with surprise that any one could be so impudent as to take him for the head of the firm. "Oh, you're looking for Mr. Levinsohn," he said searchingly, "indeed?" "Ay, I've got some goods I want to sell." Now the old man understood. "And you must see him, himself it's a matter of life and death eh?
His profound scholarship, the gentleness and sincerity of his writings, earned for him the respect of even the most orthodox. Ahijah ha-Shiloni is a defense of Talmudic Judaism against its Christian detractors. The contemporaries of Levinsohn exaggerated the importance of the literary part of his work.
No one else in the whole world can buy those goods from you, or the shaft'll break and the rags'll fall out and break to pieces, and Heaven knows what! So you must see Mr. Levinsohn himself." He looked the rag and bone man up and down, almost bursting with scorn. "Well, I shouldn't mind seeing him himself," Lars Peter patiently said.
Indeed, as Levinsohn remarks, the wonder is that, despite the fiendish persecution they endured, these unfortunates should have preserved a spark of love of knowledge. Yet a little later it was to burst into flame again and bring light and warmth to hearts crushed by "man's inhumanity to man."
Nothing could prevent the liberty principles espoused by the Jews of Western Europe from being smuggled into the Pale, to leaven the sad, serried masses. A sluggish process of fermentation set in, and culminated in the literary activity of Isaac Beer Levinsohn and of the Wilna reformers of the second and fourth decades of the nineteenth century. They were the harbingers of approaching spring.
Though there is a similarity in the causes that produced the two books, there is a marked difference in their methods. Mendelssohn treats his subject as an impartial non-Jewish philosopher might have done. He is frequently too reserved, for fear of offending. Levinsohn, in Greek-Catholic Russia, is strictly frank. He is conscious of the difficulties under which he is laboring.
The only merit the latter were willing to concede to Levinsohn was that of an apologist who defended Judaism against the attacks of non-Jews. During the epidemic of ritual murder trials, the rabbis of Lithuania and Volhynia addressed a request to Levinsohn to write a book against this horrid libel. At their suggestion he published his work Efes Damim, "No Blood!"
Petersburg had no more use for the Jewish friends of enlightenment. Broken in health, chained to his bed for half a lifetime, without means of subsistence, lonely amidst a hostile orthodox environment, Levinsohn time and again addressed to St.
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