The great part of the argument, however, is occupied less with showing the success of Judaism, than the failure of Christianity. Herzberg speaks out; there is no hesitation, no reserve. He never loses his courteous manner, but this formal suavity does not mitigate the truculence of the statements he makes, the severity of the arguments he uses. He is one-sided in that he sets the Church’s failure against the Synagogue’s success, and does not attempt to balance against each other the successes of each and the failures of each. But he is confessedly an advocate and not a judge. It is this that makes his book so valuable. It is an outspoken criticism of modern culture by a well-equipped mind. For to Herzberg, naturally and rightly enough, the Church is typical of Western civilization. Attacking the former, he is assailing the latter, denying the validity of Western--or rather--Germanic, ideals, and disputing their permanent worth. Before pointing out in a sentence the significance of this attitude for the present condition of Jewish thought, one or two other things must be said about the book. There were three German editions in the author’s lifetime, the third appearing in Zurich in 1893. Why was the third issue made in Switzerland and not in Hamburg? In the circular announcing it, Cæsar Schmidt made a remarkable statement. The author had been urged by his friend to soften some parts of it. He refused. Anti-Semitism made the book, in its unaltered shape, the more necessary; but it also made it desirable to issue it in “free Switzerland.” The author would have bettered the book in one sense, had he yielded to his friend’s counsel. Its historical surveys are not unassailable, and its logic is not always perfect. Yet to have modified its polemical tone would have been to destroy its efficacy. Moreover, Herzberg’s friends can have known little of him if they imagined that he would alter even a comma to please them! I met him several times before 1893, and I could have told them that they were wasting their time in giving him advice. He always went his own way; and he would have been the last to complain because that way was a rugged one. The author had this satisfaction: his work was enthusiastically admired by a notable circle of readers. Graetz had a high opinion of it. David Kaufmann, a lad of sixteen at the time of its first appearance, was its ardent eulogist; to him the third edition is inscribed. “You will find your erstwhile darling unchanged; for to change it would be to mangle it”--so writes Herzberg to Kaufmann. One would not talk of changing it now, for one does not mutilate classics.