Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: 3.?RABBI CHANANEL. FROM early morning Ephraim sat with the Pole, named Rabbi Chananel, who struck out with his pupil an unusual course of instruction. The common course being to study the natural meaning of the Bible, together with the odd additions of the commentators, or, beginning with the Talmud, to deduce its meaning from that, the Pole likewise pursued a method for centuries unused in the Jewish schools, which in our days has been revived under the name of the Hamiltonian system. He did not, however, omit meanwhile, according to the. prcedent of the Spanish and Italian Jews, to expound therewith the fundamental rules of grammar. This study was with the Polish-German Jews almost universally in bad repute, for a fine tact had often led the guardians of orthodoxy unconsciously to hit the nail on the head: so soon as one learned to dissect and put together again the words and sentences of Holy Scripture according to the rules of grammar, gradually the heavenly glory which floated over all, melted away; for after that every word no longercontained in itself a hundredfold hidden significance; the simple and natural sense with its local and temporary applications stood out in full view. Rabbi Chananel wrote also an elegant Hebrew; he had, after the manner of the liberals of that day, made divers poetical essays in that language and adapted rhyme and rhythm of the classic forms to the Oriental speech; Ephraim, too, soon succeeded in composing a little Hebrew poem; this artificial poetry could not, however, any more than that which sprang up simultaneously on Christian-German ground, put forth any fresh blossoms from the depths of the soul; one only manufactured artificial flowers on which there rested no enamel of emotional life. Without any genuine stir of soul or spirit had …
