_Othello_ was done into Hebrew at the suggestion of Perez Smolenskin, himself, of course, a noted pioneer of the new-Hebrew school. Smolenskin was delighted with Salkinson’s performance. “See,” he cried, “how Shakespeare lends himself to Hebrew. While so many are translating into Hebrew works utterly foreign to the Hebraic spirit, here we have one who has chosen a poem which lies near to that spirit.” There is much truth in this contention. English does very readily lend itself to translation into Hebrew, just as is the case when the relation is reversed. No version of the Hebrew Bible, not even Luther’s, has ever approached the English in its fidelity to the soul of the original. But Smolenskin goes on to use another argument, which is somewhat amusing. He draws a picture of the Jewry of his day, and then exclaims: Lo! here are the very conditions presented to us in _Othello_. And he bids his contemporaries to draw a moral from the play, to regulate their conduct by it. I should hardly justify an appreciation of _Othello_ on moral grounds. It is a great psychological drama, and it also touches the pinnacle of romanticism. But a moral? Smolenskin seems to have found in it a warning to men to treat women better. Certainly one would prefer that our Othellos should be a little milder towards their Desdemonas in real life. All this is off the point. Salkinson’s merit lay just in his power to take a work of art, pass it through the crucible of translation, and then bring out the result as a work of art still. Translators are not always traitors. I have said nothing about Salkinson’s _Romeo and Juliet_, because his _Othello_ came first. But in the former he reveals the same qualities. I do not know whom I would place above Salkinson in the list of the best translators into Hebrew. “LIFE THOUGHTS” OF MICHAEL HENRY Michael Henry died in 1875. In the following year a volume of his _Life Thoughts_ was issued. There are twenty-one chapters, all of them reprinted from the series of “Sabbath Readings,” issued by the Jewish Association for the Diffusion of Religious Knowledge. The Association, which, I take pride to remember, was founded by my father, was afterwards transformed into the Jewish Religious Education Board. The Association took a broader view of its function than does the Board; at all events, the discontinuance of the tracts called Sabbath Readings was a deplorable but not irremediable error.