His claim to fame, however, consists in the influence he exerted upon Russian Jews. Like Levinsohn, he was a constructive force. In his younger days, he had inveighed against the benighted rabbis and the antiquated garb, but moderation came with discretion. He would not sweep away by force the accumulation of hundreds of years. Judaism needed reforms of some sort, but these could not be brought about by the Russo-German-doctor-rabbis, men who could rede the seven riddles of the world, but whose knowledge of their own people and its spiritual treasures was close to the zero point. "For a rabbi," writes he, "Torah must be the integer, science the cipher. Had Aristotle embraced Judaism, notwithstanding his unparalleled erudition, he would still remain a sage, never become a rabbi." But he was as little satisfied with the exclusively Talmudistic rabbis. "O ye modern rabbis," he calls out in one of his essays, in which he stigmatizes Lilienthal's plans as the "gourd of Jonah," "you who stand in the place of seer and prophet of yore, is it not your duty to rise above the people, to intervene between them and the Government? And how can you expect to accomplish it, if the language and regulations of our country are entirely unknown to you?"
The impress Günzburg left upon Hebrew literature is of special importance. Until his time, despite the examples set by Satanov and Levin, Hebrew was stamped with the hallmark of medievalism. Like the Spanish entertainment in Dryden's Mock Astrologer, at which everything at the table tasted of nothing but red pepper, so the literature of that day was dominated by the style and spirit of the Talmud and saturated with its subtleties. Astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and poetry swarmed with puns, alliterations, pedantic allusions; they were overladen with irrelevant notes and interwoven with quaint and strained interpretations. Günzburg was the first, with the exception of Erter perhaps, to try to remedy the evil. "Every writer," he maintained, "should guard himself against the fastidiousness or stiffness which results from pedantry, and take great pains not only with the content of his thoughts, but with the language in which these thoughts are couched." Simplicity, perspicuity, and conciseness, these he taught by precept and example, and though he was accused of "Germanizing" the Hebrew language, he persisted in his labor until he attained the foremost rank among the neo-Hebraic litterateurs.
In Günzburg we find the artistic temperament developed to a degree rare among Hebraists of even more recent years. He wrote only in moments of inspiration. At times he passed weeks and months without penning a line, but when once aroused he wrote unceasingly until he finished what he had begun. He was careful in the choice of his words, careful in the choice of his books, and would recommend nothing but the best. "I may not have genius enough," he would say, "to distinguish between better and best, but I do not lack common sense, to differentiate tares from weeds." Above all, he possessed a sense of honor, the greatest stimulus, as he maintained, to noble endeavors. "For as marriage is necessary to perpetuate the race, and food to sustain the individual, so is honor to the existence of the superior man."
Of the fifty years of his active life more than one-half was spent in literary labor. His books obtained a wide circulation, and, though they were rather expensive, became rare soon after their publication. Yet, strange to say, this eminent Hebraist seldom, if ever, lauds the beauties of the "daughter of Eber" (Hebrew) like his fellow-Maskilim since the days of the Meassefim, nor does he even think it incumbent on a Jew to be conversant with it.
Three periods have passed over me—he writes to a friend—since I dedicated myself to Hebrew. As a youth I loved it as a Jewish lad loves his betrothed, not because he is enamored of her charms, but because his parents have chosen her for him; as I grew older, I continued to love it as a Jewish man loves his wife, not because of real affection, but because she is the only one he knows; now that I am old, I still love her, as an elderly Jew loves his helpmate: he is aware that she lacks many of the accomplishments of which more educated women can boast, but, for all that, remembering her faithfulness in the past, he loves her also in the present, and loves her till he dies.
Günzburg was different from most of his contemporaries in another respect. He was a voluminous writer, but only a few of his books and essays bear on what we now call Jewish science. Zunz, Geiger, and Jost, seeing that Judaism was gradually losing its hold upon their Jewish countrymen, resorted to exploring and narrating, in German, the wonderful story of their race, in the hope of renewing its ebbing strength. Levinsohn, living amid a different environment, deemed it best to convince his fellow-Jews that secular knowledge was necessary, and religion sanctioned their pursuit thereof. Günzburg, the man of letters, determined to teach through the vehicle of Hebrew the true and the beautiful wherever he found it. He felt called upon to reveal to his brethren the grandeur of the world beyond the dingy ghetto, to tell them the stories not contained in the Midrash, Josippon, or the biographies of rabbis and zaddikim. He translated Campe's Discovery of the New World, compiled a history of ancient civilization, and narrated the epochal event of the nineteenth century, the conflict between Russia and France. He taught his fellow-Jews to think correctly and logically, to clothe their thoughts in beautiful expressions, and revealed his innermost being to them in his autobiography, Abi'ezer. As a writer he appears neither erudite nor profound. 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." But he was elegant, cultured, intelligent, honorable; one who joined a feeling heart to a love for art; a Moses who struck from the rock of the Hebrew tongue refreshing streams for those thirsting for knowledge; a most amiable personality, and an altogether unusual character during the century-long struggle between light and darkness in the Jewry of Russia.
Perez Ben Mosheh Smolenskin, 1842-1885
(Notes, pp. [318-322].)