There is a saying in the Talmud “Nothing exists of which there is not some indication in the Torah.” These words are often quoted, and some modern authors have pressed them so far as to find even the discoveries of Columbus and the inventions of Watt and Stephenson indicated in the Law. This is certainly misapplied ingenuity. But it is hardly an exaggeration to maintain that there is no noble manifestation of real religion, no expression of real piety, reverence, and devotion, to which Jewish literature would not offer a fair parallel. Thus it will hardly be astonishing to hear that Jewish literature has its Boswell to show, more than three centuries before the Scottish gentleman came to London to admire his Johnson, and more than four centuries before the Sage of Chelsea delivered his lectures on Hero Worship. And this Jewish Boswell was guided only by the motives suggested to him in the old Rabbinic literature. In this literature the reverence for the great man, and the absorption of one’s whole self in him, went so far that one Rabbi declared that the whole world was only created to serve such a man as company.(106) Again, the fact that, in the language of the Rabbis, the term for studying the Law and discussing it is “to attend” or rather “to serve the disciples of the Wise” may also have led people to the important truth that the great man is not a lecturing machine, but a sort of living Law himself. “When the man,” said one Rabbi, “has wholly devoted himself to the Torah, and thoroughly identified himself with it, it becomes almost his own Torah.” Thus people have not only to listen to his words but to observe his whole life, and to profit from all his actions and movements. This was what the Jewish Boswell sought to do. His name was Rabbi Solomon, of St. Goar, a small town on the Rhine, while the name of the master whom he served was R. Jacob, the Levite, better known by his initials Maharil, who filled the office of Chief Rabbi in Mayence and Worms successively. The main activity of Maharil falls in the first three decades of the fifteenth century. Those were troublous times for a Rabbi. For the preceding century with its persecution and sufferings—one has only to think of the Black Death and its terrible consequences for the Jews—led to the destruction of the great Schools, the decay of the study of the Law, and to the dissolution of many congregations. Those which remained lost all touch with each other, so that almost every larger Jewish community had its own _Minhag_ or ritual custom.(107) It was Maharil who brought some order into this chaos, and in the course of time his influence asserted itself so strongly that the rules observed by him in the performing of religious ceremonies were accepted by the great majority of the Jewish communities. Thus the personality of Maharil himself became a standing Minhag, suppressing all the other Minhagim (customs).