the Bible. Comparatively few of Dubno's works have been published, but
judging from such as are known we may safely pronounce him a master of
the Massorah and a scholar of unusual attainments. Of his poems
Delitzsch says that they are "in the truest sense Hebrew in expression,
Biblical in imagery and subject-matter, medieval in rhyme and rhythm,
and in general genuinely Jewish in manner of treatment,"--laudation
which this exacting critic bestowed on no other Hebrew poet of his time.
It was mainly through the endeavors of Dubno that Mendelssohn's
Pentateuch, later regarded with suspicion, was everywhere bought and
studied eagerly.[23]

One better known to the outside world than Dubno, and who has engraved
his name forever on the history of theology and philosophy, was Solomon
Maimon (Nieszvicz, Lithuania, 1754--Niedersiegersdorf, Silesia, 1800).
In his famous autobiography is mirrored the lot of hundreds of his
countrymen who, like him, left their homes and hearths, their nearest
and dearest, and led a wretched and miserable existence, all because
they were anxious to be _ma'amike be-hakmah_ ("delvers in knowledge"),
as he himself might have said, and avail themselves of the opportunities
for acquiring the truth and wisdom unattainable in their own land.

But Maimon was doomed to suffer abroad even more than at home. He was
one of those unfortunates whose sufferings are regarded as
well-deserved. His exceptional ability was never to develop to its
fullest capacity. Great injustice has been done to him, not only by the
rabid orthodox, who denied him a grave in their cemetery, but even by
the enlightened historian Graetz. Fortunately he left behind him his
_Lebensgeschichte_, among the best of its kind in German literature, in
which, with the frankness of a Rousseau, he described the events of his
short and checkered career.[24]