And I am probably expected to give some account of the state of society in which Nachman grew up. I regret that I must ask to be excused from doing so. I cannot consent to take the reader to Krochmal’s land. And if I might venture to give him my humble advice, I should only say, “By all means stop at home.” Goethe may be right about the poet, but his remark does not apply to the case of the scholar. It may be true, as some think, that every great man is the product of his time, but it certainly does not follow that he is the product of his country. Nor could I name any other country of which Krochmal was the product. Many a city no doubt boasted itself a town full of “_Chakhamim_ and _Sopherim_”(24) as the Hebrew phrase is, or, as we would express it, “a seat of learning,” full of scholars of the ancient and modern schools. But neither these ancient scholars nor the modern were of a kind to produce a real scholar and an enlightened thinker like Krochmal. There were many men who knew by heart the whole of the Halachic works of Maimonides, the Mishnah, and even the whole of the Babylonian Talmud. This is very imposing. But if you look a little closer, you will find that with a few exceptions—such as the school of R. Elijah Wilna—these men, generally speaking, hardly deserve the name of scholars at all. They were rather a sort of studying engines. The steam‐engine passes over a continent, here through romantic scenery, there in the midst of arid deserts, by stream and mountain and valley, always with the same monotonous hum and shriek. So these scholars went through the Talmud with never changing feelings. They did not rejoice at the description which is given in tractate _Biccurim_(25) of the procession formed when the first‐fruits were brought into the Holy Temple. They were not much saddened when reading in tractate _Taanith_(26) of the unhappy days so recurrent in Jewish history. They were not delighted by the wisdom of _Seder Nezikin_,(27) which deals with civil law; nor were they vexed of _Seder Taharoth_,(28) which treats of the laws of cleanliness and uncleanliness, that by their exaggeration gave cause to much dissension in the time of the Temple. The pre‐Talmudic literature, such as the _Siphra_, _Siphré_, and _Mechilta_(29)—the only existing means of obtaining an insight into the Talmud—were altogether neglected. All that these readers cared for was to push on to the end, and the prayer recited at the close was of more importance to them than the treatise they had perused.