=2. Leopold Zunz.=――Eight years after the death of Mendelssohn, in the person of Leopold Zunz another good, steadfast Jew and great scholar was born to Germany. Mendelssohn had done much to free his people from fetters, both external and internal; from the outward shackles of prejudice and oppression, and from the inward rust of ignorance and superstition. Zunz carried on this work, and, perhaps, in a safer, because in a more purely historic spirit. His aim was to build up, rather than to cast down or cast aside, and to make an ideal for Israel’s future out of the actual of Israel’s past. His knowledge of the national literature was wide and profound, and his memory was as remarkable as his scholarship. He began to write from a very early age, and his celebrated monograph on Rashi[65] was published before he was thirty years old. His most valuable work was an historical review of Jewish ethics,[66] which gives the whole account of the development of the spiritual life of Israel from Biblical days to the present time. This book, which took nine years to write, shows forth the thought and the feeling of a nation of ‘witnesses,’ collecting and presenting their evidence of over a thousand years. Zunz wrote, too, standard works on Jewish literature, under the titles ‘Contributions to History and Literature’[67] (1845), ‘The Synagogue Poetry of the Middle Ages’ (1855), ‘The Rites of the Synagogue Service’ (1859), and ‘History of the Literature of Synagogue Poetry’ (1865). In these works we find a history of the sorrows of the Jewish race, and a delightful account of the poets and the poetry of the Jews of the Middle Ages. Zunz’s mind was as accurate and as full of facts as a dictionary, and yet as charming and as full of fancies as a poem. He lived till this year (1886), and up to the very last preserved his faculties, and added to his friends. Throughout his long life Zunz was faithful to his nation, to his religion, and to his national literature. His immense knowledge of Judaism made him its enthusiastic admirer, and it is as well, perhaps, for lesser scholars, who are greater critics, to recall this fact. Zunz was a cultivated man as well as a theologian and a Talmudist. He had received, and he was one of the first Jews in Germany who were permitted to receive, a university education. And his attitude towards the heroes of the past, at whose oddities it is so impertinently easy to smile, was consistently reverent. Zunz felt―― ‘If these had not walked Their furlong, could we hope to walk our mile?’