“I have made the acquaintance of Rabbi Tiktin. With what reverence I used to stand and look at the mail-clad names of the Tiktins on the first pages of רי''פים {Hebrew: Rifim}![12] As Charlemagne in his iron armor kept all intruders at a becoming distance, so the dignity of those theologic knights seemed to me to be enhanced by the long beards and the imposing Spanish canes[13] and the Talmudic dust. There was I sitting next to a descendant of those rabbinical נפילים {Hebrew: Nefilim}.[14] Ah! what a falling-off there has been! _Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis._ To be sure, there is still the stately stature, still the Spanish cane. But the _ensemble_, a something not to be defined in words, is missing. Next to the rabbi, _nolentes volentes_, I place Dr. Geiger, a spare little man. Why he was so very kind to me I do not know. Of Hirsch we have not yet spoken, and probably shall not speak. But to what depths we have sunk! In the presence of fifty Jews, headed by a רב {Hebrew: Rav}, Dr. Freund[15] dares utter words like “rabbinically erratic inferences.” Cicero and Plato, then, are to be read as antidotes to rabbinical perversions. Zounds! And to-day Geiger delivered his first lecture on the Mishna. The Mishna is a collection of _religious notions, as they were formed and developed from the Exile to R. Jehuda Hanassi_. What insane logic!” When, in March, 1843, the stiff-necked, tenacious champion of an effete form of Judaism, the lion-warrior Solomon Tiktin, last representative of a race of Talmudic heroes, wounded to the quick by his defeat, was removed from the scene by death, Geiger stood at the zenith of his fame. Since many a day no rabbi’s name had been so well-known as Geiger’s in all the extent of German Jewry, none was so frequently mentioned. In Silesia there was no more popular rabbi, and in Breslau his word was potent, influential, and feared by his adversaries. His scientific eminence was generally acknowledged; his eloquence dominated the pulpit no less than the minds of his hearers. Who dared attack him was badly used, and bore ridicule as well as injury from the fray.