His modernized
version, lucid and fluent, printed alongside of Ibn Tibbon's, presents a
striking contrast to the stiffness and obscurity of the Provencal
scholar's. Levin was also the first to write in the Yiddish, or
Judeo-German, dialect, for the instruction of the masses, which made him
the butt of more than one satire. But what was generally regarded as a
degrading task was fraught with the greatest consequences to the
Haskalah. To this day Yiddish has continued an important medium for
disseminating culture among Russian Jews, both in the Old World and in
the New.[37]
The century remarkable among other things for encyclopedia
enterprises,--_Chambers' Encyclopedia_ in England, the _Universal
Lexicon_ in Germany, and that wonderful and monumental work, the
_Encyclopedie_ in France--saw, before its close, a similar attempt, in
miniature, in Hebrew and by a Slavonic Maskil. Whether the Hebrew
encyclopedist was influenced by the example of Dr. Tobias Cohn's
_Ma'aseh Tobiah_ mentioned above, or was unconsciously imbued with the
prevailing tendency of the times, it is impossible to tell. In any
event, he resorted to the same means, and presented the Jewish world
with a volume containing a little of every science known, under the
innocent name _The Book of the Covenant_ (_Sefer ha-Berit_, Bruenn,
1797).
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