It was left for a Russian Jew at the end of the nineteenth century to see and paint hell in colors not attempted by any one since the days of Dante; Dante spoke of the hell in the after-life, while Rosenfeld sings of the hell on earth, the hell that he has not only visited, but that he has lived through. Another twenty-five years, and the language in which he has uttered his despair will be understood in America but by few, used for literary purposes probably by none. But Rosenfeld's poetry will survive as a witness of that lowermost hell which political persecutions, religious and racial hatred, industrial oppression have created for the Jew at the end of this our enlightened nineteenth century. IX. PROSE WRITERS FROM 1817-1863 The beginning of this century found the Jews of the Russian Empire living in a state bordering on Asiatic barbarism. Ages of persecution had reduced the masses to the lowest condition of existence, had eliminated nearly all signs of civilized life in them, and had succeeded in making them the outcasts they really were. Incredibly dirty in their houses and uncleanly about their persons, ignorant and superstitious even beyond the most superstitious of their Gentile neighbors, dishonest and treacherous not only to others, but even more to their own kind, they presented a sad spectacle of a downtrodden race. The legislators made the effects of the maltreatment of previous lawgivers the pretext for greater oppression until the Jews bade fair to lose the last semblance of human beings. One need only go at this late hour to some small town, away from railroads and highways, where Jews live together compactly, in order to get an idea of what the whole of Russia was a century ago, for in those distant places people are still living as their grandfathers did. Only here and there an individual succeeded in tearing himself away from the realm of darkness to become acquainted with a better existence by means of the Mendelssohnian Haskala. In spite of the very unfavorable conditions of life, or rather on account of them, the Jews, although averse to all instruction, passed the greater part of their lives, that were not given to the earning of a livelihood, in sharpening their wits over Talmudical subtleties. When they came in contact with the learning in Germany, their minds had been trained in the unprofitable but severe school of abstruse casuistry, and they threw themselves with avidity on the new sciences, surpassing even their teachers in the philosophic grasp of the same. Such a man had been Salomon Maimon, the Kantian scholar; such men were later those followers of the Haskala who were active in the regeneration of a Hebrew literature, with whom we have also become acquainted in former chapters through their efforts of enlightening the masses; foremost of them, however, was J. B. Levinsohn, who wrote but little in Judeo-German. He was to the Jews of Russia what Mendelssohn had been half a century