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Civilization;” for Wise, as for most
Americans of his day, nineteenth-
century America offered men an
opportunity to dispense with the
incubi of the past; it is no wonder
that progress-minded Wise be
came chief organizer and promot
er of the Reform movement in
American Jewish life. The versa
tile Wise also published a comic
German-language drama in 1858:
•‘Der Maskierte Liebhaber” (“The
Masked Lover”). Around the same
time, in 1857, Wise’s Cincinnati
colleague, Rabbi Max Lilienthal,
published a volume of poems —
also in German. Three years later,
in 1860, Jo'shua Falk published the
first Hebrew rabbinic work to be
printed in America.
The works noted by Rabbi Le
vine deal with a wide variety of
subjects: liturgy, poetry, travel,
history, novels, drama, music,
theology, religious and social po
lemics, political affairs, belles-let
tres, Bible, Hebrew grammar, etc.
The predominant ethnic origins of
American Jewry a century ago
are reflected in the fact that a
large number of the items listed
are in German; a few are in Heb
rew, fewer yet in Yiddish. All
these works indicate the role of
Jews in American intellectual life
and are relevant to a study of
nineteenth-century American Jew
ish history; they range from Cyn
thia Bullock’s exotic poem, “Mus-
ings on a Jewish Passover,” pub
lished in 1852, to Solomon Nunes
Carvalho’s account of his expe
riences, on Col. John C. Fremont’s
last western exploratory expedi
tion “(Incidents Of Travel and
Adventure in the Far West,” pub
lished in 1857), to the appearance
in 1872 of the weekly Hatsofe, the
first Hebrew periodical to be pub
lished in America.
Rabbi Levine mentions some
curious items: In 1867, one Solo
mon Cohen, published a twenty-
three page tract eulogizing Bish
op Steven Elliot of Georgia. Dur
ing the same decade, Thomas John
Dibdin published a forty-four
page “romantic melo-drama” en
titled Ivanhoe; or, The Jew’s
Daughter (shades of Sir Walter
Scott!). Phebe Ann Hanaford, in
1871, published a volume of po
ems, including one which dealt
with the return of the Jews to
Palestine. A Christian conversion-
ist tract, entitled Value of Sym
bolism and published in Cincin
nati in 1872, employed the Kab-
bala, Jewish mystic tradition, “for
missionary purposes.”
Rabbi Levine’s An American
Jewish Bibliography is the second
such work to be published by the
American Jewish Archives. The
first in the Archives’ monographic
series was Jewish Americana, pub
lished in 1954. Both are note
worthy results of the historical
research being pursued on the
campus of the Hebrew Union Col-
lege-Jewish Institute of Religion
in Cincinnati.
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Author Tells Her Story
Anita Engle, whose column “A
Mother in Israel” has been ap
pearing widely in the Anglo-Jew-
ish press of the United States in
recent years, has just published a
book, by the Hogarth Press of
London, called THE NILI SPIES,
a fascinating story of one of the
most intriguing chapters in the
history of the yishuv in Palestine.
In the course of our correspon
dence, I asked Anita how she
came upon the theme, an epic
whose deeper significance has not
yet been fully essayed, and this
was her reply:
One morning six years ago, I
walked through a gateway and
into the old Aaronsohn homestead
in Zichron Yaacov. There were
two buildings before me, one on
the left, and one on the right of
the rectangular courtyard. I stood
for a moment, trying to decide
which one to go to. It was a choice
which not only changed the course
of my career as a writer, but has
created reverberations which will
be felt by Zionist historians for
years to come.
The turreted, creeper-covered
The Southern Israelite
house on the left was the one
which the famliy had set aside as
a memorial, for here Aaron
Aaronsohn, the world-famed agri
culturist, had worked and studied,
and here his sister, the tragic
Sarah, had died. If I had gone
there I would have found either
no guide at all, or a little Zichro-
nite of about 18, who reluctantly
handed out a few details, all the
time making one feel that she was
bored stiff and wished you’d stop
intruding on her important busi
ness of writing letters, or gossip
ing with the neighbour’s daughter.
Like so many people before and
since, I would have gone away
chilled, and hardly any wiser than
I came.
But something impelled me to
knock at the door of the pink,
shady house on the right of the
path, the private home of the fam
ily, as I found out later, and
usually barred to the public.
Through the screen door I could
see an enormous, tousled-headed
women sitting at a writing desk in
a far corner.
"I’ve come to get the story of
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