Page:Hebrew tales; selected and translated from the writings of the ancient Hebrew sages (1917).djvu/17

Rh His fame, however, rests chiefly upon his delightfully written "Hebrew Tales," of which two editions were printed in London, in the year 1826, one in New York, in 1847, and another in Edinburgh, in 1863. Four separate editions appeared in German, and one or two stories were published in French.

Three tales were furnished for the collection by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who appears to have been somewhat of a Hebraist, since he figures as the translator of a dirge, from the Hebrew of Hurwitz, into English. Coleridge had already inserted them in The Friend, and they constitute the second, third, and fourth, in the present volume.

That this admirable anthology had a distinct purpose to serve may be gleaned from the author's prefatory "Essay on the still-existing remains of the Hebrew Sages . . .," which had already appeared as a separate tract in the same year. It is unquestionably a "Tendenzschrift," apologetic and expostulatory in tone, designed to defend and expound the writings and traditions of the Rabbis, whose "instructive parables and tales . . . are so many miniature paintings of the habits, manners, and modes of thinking, of an ancient people at a remote period of antiquity" ("Essay," London ed., 1826, p. 81).

Inasmuch as it is no longer necessary to