ISRAEL’S MARTYRDOM
IF there are ranks in suffering, Israel takes precedence of all the nations; if the duration of sorrows and the patience with which they are borne ennoble, the Jews can challenge the aristocracy of every land; if a literature is called rich in the possession of a few classic tragedies—what shall we say to a National Tragedy lasting for fifteen hundred years, in which the poets and the actors were also the heroes?
LEOPOLD ZUNZ, 1855.
COMBINE all the woes that temporal and ecclesiastical tyrannies have ever inflicted on men or nations, and you will not have reached the full measure of suffering which this martyr people was called upon to endure century upon century. It was as if all the powers of earth had conspired—and they did so conspire—to exterminate the Jewish people, or at least to transform it into a brutalized horde. History dare not pass over in silence these scenes of wellnigh unutterable misery. It is her duty to give a true and vivid account of them; to evoke due admiration for the superhuman endurance of this suffering people, and to testify that Israel, like his ancestor in the days of old, has striven with gods and with men, and has prevailed.
H. GRAETZ.