Almost all of them were "self-made men," autodidacts in the truest
sense. Lacking the advantages of secular schools, they culled their
first information from scanty, antiquated Hebrew translations. Maimon
learned the Roman alphabet from the transliteration of the titles on the
fly-leaves of some Talmudic tracts; Doctor Behr, from Wolff's
_Mathematics_. But no sooner was the impetus given than it was followed
by an insatiable craving for more and more of the intellectual manna,
for a wider and wider horizon. "Look," says Wessely, "look at our
Russian and Polish brethren who immigrate hither, men great in Torah,
yet admirers of the sciences, which, without the guiding help of
teachers, they all master to such perfection as to surpass even a
Gentile sage!"[44] Such self-education was, of course, not without
unfavorable results. Never having enjoyed the advantage of a systematic
elementary training, the enthusiasts sometimes lacked the very rudiments
of knowledge, though engaged in the profoundest speculations of
philosophy. "As our mothers in Egypt gave birth to their children before
the mid-wife came," writes Pinsker somewhat later,[45] "even so it is
with the intellectual products of our brethren: before one becomes
acquainted with the grammar of a language, he masters its classic and
scientific literature!"

Steadily though slowly, brighter, if not better, days were coming.
"Thought once awakened shall not again slumber." As Carlyle says of the
French of that period, it became clear for the first time to the
upturned eyes of the Jews, "that Thought has actually a kind of
existence in other kingdoms [than the Talmud]; that some glimmerings of
civilization had dawned here and there on the human species." They begin
to try all things; they visit Germany, France, Denmark, Holland, even
England; learn their literatures, study in their universities, and
contribute their quota to the apologetic, controversial, scientific, and