excluded from the sect, as he who disregards the social code, though not immoral, is ostracized from society.  This led him to the logical conclusion that every Jew must comply with the customs of his people, though his opinion as to their moral value may differ from that of the rest.  He believed in freedom of thought, but would not concede freedom of action or even of expression, and would say with Bolingbroke, “Freedom belongs to a man as a rational creature, he lies under the restraint as a member of society.”

At these conclusions, Guenzburg arrived only after a long, severe, though silent, struggle in the seclusion of his closet.  His active mind would not at first surrender unconditionally to the coercion of custom.  But his conception of ceremonialism served him in good stead on many an occasion in his eventful life.  Being an expedient to preserve harmony, it may and must vary with change of conditions.  Accordingly, Guenzburg always accommodated himself to his environment.  In Vilna he subscribed to the regulations of the Shulhan ’Aruk, in Mitau he quickly and completely became Germanized.  Such adaptability rendered him conspicuous wherever he went, and as early as 1829 his name was included among the learned of Livonia, Esthland, and Courland in the Biographical Dictionary then published by Recke and Napyersky.

His claim to fame, however, consists in the influence he exerted upon Russian Jews.  Like Levinsohn, he was a constructive force.  In his younger days, he had inveighed against the benighted rabbis and the antiquated garb, but moderation came with discretion.  He would not sweep away by force the accumulation of hundreds of years.  Judaism needed reforms of some sort, but these could not be brought about by the Russo-German-doctor-rabbis, men who could rede the seven riddles of the world, but whose knowledge of their own people and its spiritual treasures was close to the zero point.  “For a rabbi,” writes he, “Torah must be the integer, science the cipher.  Had Aristotle embraced Judaism, notwithstanding his unparalleled erudition, he would still remain a sage, never become a rabbi.”  But he was as little satisfied with the exclusively Talmudistic rabbis.  “O ye modern rabbis,” he calls out in one of his essays, in which he stigmatizes Lilienthal’s plans as the “gourd of Jonah,” “you who stand in the place of seer and prophet of yore, is it not your duty to rise above the people, to intervene between them and the Government?  And how can you expect to accomplish it, if the language and regulations of our country are entirely unknown to you?”