Until his time, despite the examples set by Satanov and
Levin, Hebrew was stamped with the hallmark of medievalism. Like the
Spanish entertainment in Dryden's _Mock Astrologer_, at which everything
at the table tasted of nothing but red pepper, so the literature of that
day was dominated by the style and spirit of the Talmud and saturated
with its subtleties. Astronomy, philosophy, mathematics, and poetry
swarmed with puns, alliterations, pedantic allusions; they were
overladen with irrelevant notes and interwoven with quaint and strained
interpretations. Guenzburg was the first, with the exception of Erter
perhaps, to try to remedy the evil. "Every writer," he maintained,
"should guard himself against the fastidiousness or stiffness which
results from pedantry, and take great pains not only with the content of
his thoughts, but with the language in which these thoughts are
couched." Simplicity, perspicuity, and conciseness, these he taught by
precept and example, and though he was accused of "Germanizing" the
Hebrew language, he persisted in his labor until he attained the
foremost rank among the neo-Hebraic litterateurs.
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