it happens that what was read with pleasure at its first appearance is accepted as eagerly to-day, and the books that were issued from the printing presses of the sixteenth century may be found in almost unchanged hundredth editions, except as to the language, printed in 1898 in Wilna or Warsaw. Time and space are entirely annihilated in the folklore of the Russian Jews. Here one finds side by side the quaint stories of the Talmud of Babylonian, Persian, Egyptian origin, with the Polyphemus myth of the Greeks, the English 'Bevys of Hamptoun,' the Arabic 'Thousand and One Nights.' Stories in which half a dozen motives from various separate tales have been moulded into one harmonious whole jostle with those that show unmistakable signs of venerable antiquity. Nowhere else can such a variety of tales be found as in Judeo-German; nor is there any need, as in other literatures, to have recourse to collections of the diligent searcher; one will find hundreds of them, nay thousands, told without any conscious purpose in the chapbooks that are annually issued at Wilna, Lemberg, Lublin, and other places. Add to these the many unwritten tales that involve the superstitions and beliefs of a more local character, in which the Slavic element has been superadded to the Germanic base, and the wealth of this long-neglected literature will at once become apparent to the most superficial observer.[24] These stories have dominated and still dominate the minds of the women and children among the Russian, Roumanian, and Galician Jews. For them there exists a whole fantastic world, with its objects of fear and admiration. There is not an act they perform that is not followed by endless superstitious rites, in which the beliefs of Chaldea are inextricably mixed with French, Germanic, or Slavic ceremonies. To pierce the dense cloud of superstition that has involved the Mosaic Law, to disentangle the ancient religion from the rank growth of the ages, to open the eyes of the Jews to the realities of this world, and to break down the timeless and spaceless sphere of their imaginings--that has been the task of the followers of the Mendelssohnian Reform for the last one hundred years. In the pages of the Judeo-German works that they have produced to take the place of the story books of long ago, one meets continually with lists of superstitions that they are laboring to combat, with the names of books that they would fain put in an index expurgatorius.