"From the icy north country, where the flowers and the sun endure but a few short moons, these halting lines speed with their greeting away from the hoar frost, to the eloquent sage in the southland, enthroned among the wise and extolled by the pious--to the gentle guide whose heart burns, like the sun of his own fair land, with love for the people whence he was hewn, and for the tongue of the Jews." [Footnote: Poems, by J. L. Gordon, St. Petersburg, 1884, I, p. 125.] The "icy north country" was Lithuania, in which the literary movement had just effected a triumphal entry, bringing with it the light of science, and the young poet was Judah Leon Gordon, destined to become the greatest Jewish poet of the nineteenth century. * * * * * Here we arrive at the end of the first part of our essay, devoted in particular to Hebrew literature in Western Europe. For its future we must look to the East. * * * * * CHAPTER IV IN LITHUANIA HUMANISM IN RUSSIA We are in the Jewish country, perhaps the only Jewish country in the world. [Footnote: See Slouschz, _Massa' be-Lita_ ("Journey through Lithuania"), Jerusalem, 1899.] The last to participate in the intellectual movement of European Judaism, the Lithuanian Jews start into view, in the second half of the seventeenth century, as a peculiar social organism, clearly marked as such from its first appearance. The Rabbis and scholars of Lithuania acquired fame without a struggle, and its Rabbinical schools quickly became the busy centres of Talmudic research. The destinies of the Jewish population of Lithuania, so different in character from that of Poland proper, were ruled absolutely by the "Synod of the Four Countries", with Brest, and afterwards Wilna, as headquarters. The revolutions and upheavals to which is due the social and religious decadence of the Polish Jews during the eighteenth century, barely touched this forsaken corner of the earth. Even the Cossack invasion dealt leniently with Lithuania, if the city of Wilna is excepted, and its early annexation by Russia saved the province from the anarchy and excitement which agitated Poland during its latter days. Left to their fate, neglected by the authorities, and forming almost the whole of the urban population, the Jews of Lithuania, in the full glare of the eighteenth century, were in all essentials an autonomous community with Jewish national and theocratic features. The Talmud did service as their civil and religious code. The court of final appeal was a Rabbinical expert, supported by the central synod and the local _Kahal_, and exercising absolute authority over the moral and material interests of those subordinated to his jurisdiction. The study of the Law was carried to the extreme of devotion. To have an illiterate, an _'Am ha-Arez_, a "rustic", in one's family, was considered a pitiable fate.