Chapter I: HAVE never been able to understand how it is that a language spoken

by perhaps more than half of the Jewish race should be regarded with such horror, as though it were a crime. Six million speakers are sufficient to give historic dignity to any language! One great writer alone is enough to make it holy and immortal. Take Norwegian. It is the language of only two million people. But it has become immortal through the great literary achievements of Ibsen. And even though Yiddish cannot boast of so great a writer as Ibsen, it has reason to be proud of numerous smaller men――poets, romancers, satirists, dramatists.

The main point is that Yiddish incorporates the essence of a life which is distinctive and unlike any other. There is nothing of holiness in any of the outer expressions of life. The one and only thing holy is the _human soul_, which is the source and fount of all human effort.

ISRAEL ZANGWILL, 1906.

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THERE is probably no other language in existence on which so much opprobrium has been heaped as on Yiddish. Such a bias can be explained only as a manifestation of a general prejudice against everything Jewish.

LEO WIENER, 1899.

RUSSO-JEWISH EDUCATION

AMONG the Jews of Poland and Russia there was no learned estate, not because there were no scholars, but because the people itself was a nation of students. The ideal type for the Russian Jew was the _Lamdan_, the scholar. The highest ambition of the Russian Jew was that his sons, and if he had only daughters, that his sons-in-law should be _Lomdim_; and the greatest achievement of a man’s life was his ability to provide sufficiently for them, so that, relieved from economic cares, they might devote themselves unrestrictedly to Jewish learning. To be sure, this learning was one-sided. Yet it was both wide and deep, for it embraced the almost boundless domain of religious Hebrew literature, and involved the knowledge of one of the most complicated systems of law. The knowledge of the Hebrew prayers and the Five Books of Moses would not have been sufficient to save the Russian Jew from the most terrible opprobrium――that of being an _Am-Haaretz_, an ignoramus. The ability to understand a Talmudic text, which demands years of preparation, was the minimum requirement for one who wanted to be of any consequence in the community.