In the short period of two years Judeo-German literature lost four of its most prominent writers: in 1891 there passed away the veteran poet, Michel Gordon; the next year J. L. Gordon followed him; and soon after death gathered in Dick and Zederbaum. Without having himself produced any works of a permanent value, without having in any way accelerated or retarded the course of its literature, Zederbaum is peculiarly identified with its development and has on two important occasions in the history of the Jews of Russia served as a crystallizing body for the literary forces in the vernacular. He was born in 1816, and in his youth enjoyed the intimate friendship of Ettinger and Aksenfeld. He had fostered the budding talents of Abramowitsch and Linetzki at a time when the efforts of the first disciples of the Haskala were about to be crowned by a success they had hardly dreamed would be realized so soon. And he lived to see all his hopes crushed in the occurrences of 1881, when his race was threatened to be cast back into darkness more dense than at his birth. During a lifetime thus rich in momentous experiences, he has in his person reflected the succession of events as far as they affected his race. In 1861 he founded a Hebrew periodical, the _Hameliz_, as a mouthpiece of the more advanced ideas of culture for that restricted class of the learned and educated who still clung to the sacred language as the only medium for the advancement of worldly knowledge. But he felt that the time had come when the masses who, on the one side, could not be reached by that ancient tongue, and who, on the other, had not yet had an opportunity of a Russian instruction, must be approached directly in their own mother-tongue. So, two years later, he started the Judeo-German supplement to his Hebrew weekly, the _Kol-mewasser_, which was for ten years the rallying ground of all who could wield a Judeo-German pen. Then the Government interfered in the publication, and for another decade there was no periodical published in Russia in that language. Nor was that to be regretted, for its usefulness had become very small. The Russian schools were crowded with Jewish young men and women, and there was not a science or an art to which the Jews had not given a large contingent, and this vanguard of the new culture, even if it had not broken with the traditions of the past, could be reached only by means of the Russian language. To fall in line with these changed conditions, Zederbaum founded two Russian periodicals for the discussion of Jewish affairs.