Tatnu has a weird sound. But it is not the title of a fetich; it is not a personal name; it is not even a word at all. It is, indeed, a figure; but the figure it stands for is numerical. The letters which compose the Hebrew combination Tatnu amount to 856 (_taw_ = 400; _taw_ = 400; _nun_ = 50; _waw_ = 6). It represents a date. To transpose it from the era _anno mundi_ to the current era, it is necessary to add 240. This brings us to 1096, the year of the First Crusade. If Tatnu is no person, neither do its sorrows form a book. They constitute rather a library of narratives, small in size but great in substance. They are hardly literary, yet they belong to the masterpieces of literature. Their story is recorded with few ornaments of style, but their simple, poignant directness is more effective than rhetoric. Martyrdom needs no tricks of the word-artist; it tells its own tale. The Historical Commission for the History of the Jews in Germany had but a brief career, though it has revived under the newer title of the _Gesamtarchiv_. The Commission aimed at two ends: to introduce to Jewish notice information about the Jews scattered in Christian sources, and to make accessible to Christians facts about themselves contained in Jewish authorities. From 1887 to 1898, the Commission was actively at work, and among the books it published were two valuable volumes dealing with the martyrologies of the Jews. For the first time, these narratives were adequately edited. The pathetic records of sufferings endured in the Rhine-lands and elsewhere stand, for all time, ready to the hand of the historian. The first moral to be extracted from these records is the certainty that war is an evil. No one can dispute the noble motives of the crusaders. The unquenchable enthusiasm which led high and low to forsake their homes and engage in eastern adventures, the unflinching courage with which the dangers of battle and the hardships and privations of wearisome campaigns were borne, the transparent singleness of purpose which animated many a soldier of the cross--all these factors tend to cover the sordid truth with a glamor of idealism and chivalry. But the wars of the Crusades were tainted with savagery, and if so what wars can be clean? The barbarities inflicted in Europe on the Jews color with a red and gruesome haze the heroisms performed against Mohammedans in Asia. War, it is said, brings to the fore some of the finest qualities of human nature. Exactly, but the war of man against nature calls for the exercise of the same qualities. The heroism of the coal-mine is as great from every point of view as the heroism of the battlefield. And the battlefield from first to last is the scene of human nature at its lowest as well as at its highest. Nor is the battlefield the whole of war. Those who persuade themselves that war, though an evil, is not an unmixed evil, will find in the Sorrows of Tatnu and allied books a rather useful corrective to their complacency.