[Footnote 2: Both titles are derived from the message in Josh. 15. 15, according to which Debir, a city in the territory of the tribe of Judah, was originally called Kiriat Sefer, "Book City.">[
Abraham Baer Lebensohn, [1] a native of Vilna, awakened the dormant Hebrew lyre by the sonorous rhymes of his "Songs in the Sacred Tongue" (Shire Sefat Kodesh, Vol. I., Leipsic, 1842). In this volume solemn odes celebrating events of all kinds alternate with lyrical poems of a philosophical content. The unaccustomed ear of the Jew of that period was struck by these powerful sounds of rhymed biblical speech which exhibited greater elegance and harmony than the Mosaïd of Wessely, the Jewish Klopstock. [2] His compositions, which are marked by thought rather than by feeling, suited to perfection the taste of the contemporary Jewish reader, who was ever on the lookout for "intellectuality," even where poetry was concerned. Philosophic and moralizing lyrics are a characteristic feature of Lebensohn's pen. The general human sorrow, common to all individuals, stirs him more deeply than national grief. His only composition of a nationalistic character, "The Wailing of the Daughter of Judah," seems strangely out of harmony with the accompanying odes which celebrate the coronation of Nicholas I. and similar patriotic occasions, although the "Wailing" is shrewdly prefaced by a note, evidently meant for the censor, to the effect that the poem refers to the Middle Ages. At any rate, the principal merit of the "Songs in the Sacred Tongue" is not to be sought in their poetry but rather in their style, for it was this style which became the basis of Neo-Hebraic poetic diction, perfected more and more by the poets of the succeeding generations.
[Footnote 1: He assumed the pen-name "Adam," the initials of Abraham Dob
(Hebrew equivalent for Baer) Mikhailishker (from the town of
Mikhailishok, in the government of Vilna, where he resided for a number
of years). See later, p. 226.]
[Footnote 2: The author refers to Naphtali Hirz Wessely (d. 1805), an associate of Mendelssohn in his cultural endeavors. He wrote Shire Tif'eret, "Songs of Glory," an epic in five parts dealing with the Exodus. The poem was patterned after the epic Der Messias of his famous German contemporary Gottlieb Friedrich Klopstock, who, in turn, was influenced by Milton.]
Ginzburg and Lebensohn were the central pillars of the Vilna Maskilim circle, which also included men of the type of Samuel Joseph Fünn, the historian, Mattathiah Strashun, the Talmudist, the censor Tugendhold, the bibliographer Ben-jacob, N. Rosenthal, in a word, the "radicals" of that era—for the mere striving for the restoration of biblical Hebrew and for elementary secular education was looked upon as bold radicalism. The same circle made an attempt to create a scientific periodical after the pattern of similar publications in Galicia and Germany, In 1841 and 1843 two issues of the magazine Pirhe Tzafon, "Flowers of the North," appeared in Vilna, under Fünn's editorship. The volumes contained scientific and publicistic articles as well as poems, contributed by the feeble literary talents which were then active in the Hebrew literary and educational revival in Russia—all of them efforts of not very high merit. But even these poor hot-house flowers were fated to be nipped in the Northern chill. The ruthless Russian censorship scented in the unassuming magazine of the Vilna Maskilim a criminal attempt to publish a Hebrew periodical. Such an undertaking required an official license from the central Government in St. Petersburg, and the latter was not in the habit of granting licenses for such purposes.
In Vilna, as in Odessa, the coterie of local Maskilim formed the mainstay of Lilienthal, the apostle of enlightenment, in, his struggle with the orthodox. In the year 1840, prior to Lilienthal's arrival, when the first intimation of Uvarov's plans reached the city of Vilna, the local Maskilim responded to the call of the Government in a circular letter, in which the following four cardinal reforms were emphasized:
1. The transformation of the Rabbinate through the establishment of rabbinical seminaries, the appointment of graduates from German universities as rabbis, and the formation of consistories after the pattern of Western Europe.
2. The reform of school education through the opening of secular schools after the model of Odessa and Riga and the training of new teachers from among the Maskilim.
3. The struggle with the fiends of obscurantism, who stifle every endeavor for popular enlightenment.
4. The improvement of Jewish economic life by intensifying agricultural colonization, the establishment of technical and arts and crafts schools, and similar measures.