CHAPTERS ON JEWISH LITERATURE

BY
ISRAEL ABRAHAMS, M.A.
_Author of "Jewish Life in the Middle Ages"_


PHILADELPHIA
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

COPYRIGHT, 1899, BY
THE JEWISH PUBLICATION SOCIETY OF AMERICA

The Lord Baltimore Press
BALTIMORE, MD., U.S.A.




PREFACE


These twenty-five short chapters on Jewish Literature open with the fall
of Jerusalem in the year 70 of the current era, and end with the death
of Moses Mendelssohn in 1786. Thus the period covered extends over more
than seventeen centuries. Yet, long as this period is, it is too brief.
To do justice to the literature of Judaism even in outline, it is
clearly necessary to include the Bible, the Apocrypha, and the writings
of Alexandrian Jews, such as Philo. Only by such an inclusion can the
genius of the Hebrew people be traced from its early manifestations