I cannot refrain from mentioning here a small incident which illustrates the present position excellently. I visited one of the classes of the Hilfsverein school at Jaffa during the German reading lesson. The pupils were puzzled by the word _aufheben_, and the teacher tried to explain it by German synonyms, which they equally failed to understand. At last the teacher’s patience was exhausted, and he exclaimed angrily, in pure Sephardic pronunciation, “_levatel_!” All the pupils understood at once! Footnote 85: [A Hebrew school of Arts and Crafts in Jerusalem.] THE SUPREMACY OF REASON (TO THE MEMORY OF MAIMONIDES) (1904) At last, after the lapse of seven hundred years,[86] the anniversary of Maimonides’ death has been raised to the dignity of an important national day of memorial, and has been honoured throughout the Diaspora. In earlier centuries our ancestors do not appear to have remembered that so-and-so many hundred years had passed since the death of Maimonides; still less did they make the anniversary a public event, as we do now, although they were in much closer sympathy with Maimonides than we are—or, to be more correct, _because_ they were in much closer sympathy with him than we are. They did not feel it necessary to commemorate the death of one whom in spirit they saw still living among them—one whose advice and instruction they sought every day in all their difficulties of theory and practice, as though he were still in their midst. In those days it was almost impossible for an educated Jew (and most Jews then were educated) to pass a single day without remembering Maimonides: just as it was impossible for him to pass a single day without remembering Zion. In whatever field of study the Jew might be engaged—in _halachah_,[87] in ethics, in religious or philosophical speculation—inevitably he found Maimonides in the place of honour, an authority whose utterances were eagerly conned even by his opponents. And even if a man happened to be no student, at any rate he would say his prayers every day, and finish his morning prayer with the “Thirteen Articles”: how then could he forget the man who formulated the Articles of the Jewish religion?