every line, coupled with his plastic, figurative style, and his
scintillating conceits, which lend vivacity to his presentation, is
bound to charm the reader. Yet, in spite of the racy style, even the
layman will have no difficulty in discovering that it is not a clever
journalist, an artificer of well-turned phrases, who is speaking to
him, but a scholar by profession, whose foremost concern is with
historical truth, and whose every statement rests upon accurate,
scientific knowledge; not a bookworm with pale, academic blood
trickling through his veins, but a man who, with unsoured mien, with
fresh, buoyant delight, offers the world the results laboriously
reached in his study, after all evidences of toil and moil have been
carefully removed; who derives inspiration from the noble and the
sublime in whatever guise it may appear, and who knows how to
communicate his inspiration to others.

The translator lays this book of an accomplished and spirited
historian before the German public. He does so in the hope that it
will shed new light upon Jewish history even for professional
scholars. He is confident that in many to whom our unexampled past of
four thousand years' duration is now _terra incognita_, it will
arouse enthusiastic interest, and even to those who, like the
translator himself, differ from the author in religious views, it will
furnish edifying and suggestive reading. J. F.




PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION