O mercy, love and grace!
“For there our greater Temple stands
With greater glory blest
And there redeemed from alien lands,
Brought back at last by God’s own hands,
His Israel finds her rest.”
Here the translator remarks:
(p. 177) note i.: “How many sighs and prayers have gone up from the dispersed children of Zion in Russian Poland, in Galicia, in Roumania and by the old broken wall of Jerusalem in these latter days! What longing for this ‘antepast of Heaven’ that Joseph here speaks of! What passionate desire for that time, when the children of Zion should no longer have to sing ‘the Lord’s song in a strange land’! Is this century to see the Zionists in possession again of their Holy City—their longed-for Salem, the ‘Vision,’ the ‘Foundation,’ the ‘Inheritance’ of Peace, as expositors have variously entitled it? Who can say? From a practical point of view the prospect somehow fails to charm; but when I view it in theory, it seems as if the justice of the world as well as the justice of the Eternal One would be nobly consummated by such a termination to an earthly pilgrimage of nigh two thousand years.”
The anonymous author proceeds to describe the old-new home, and the people, new-born in benevolence, piety and purity, with their national distinctiveness, and the two tables of the Law. Thus, with all his honest and deep Christian convictions and belief in the final triumph of his religious ideas, he recognizes the right of the Jewish nation to have their country and to remain faithful to their traditions. This strange romance, after all sorts of philosophical reflections and sketches of various adventures in Sicily and elsewhere, comes back to Zion to sing the songs of the Old Testament in Latin verse in a way which shows that the author had the rhythm and atmosphere of Biblical poetry to perfection, and also that his views were much more in harmony with the notions of that time than with modern conceptions. The whole work is inspired by great enthusiasm for Israel’s glory, and abounds with sympathy and admiration for the Jewish nation.