Excerpt from Jewish Post-Biblical History Through Great Personalities: From Jochanan Ben Zakkai Through Moses Mendelssohn This little book, as any one with even the slightest knowledge of Jewish history and literature will readily see, is in no sense original. It is little more than a compilation of the better-known works on Jewish life and letters in post-Biblical times. If, then, one asks why such a book should be written at all, the answer is that the writer, in many years of experience as a teacher, has found no work on this subject suitable for practical use in the classroom. The books that glow with all the pageantry of history and with the color of a delightful style are lacking, from the point of view of the classroom, in analysis of material and system in presenting facts. The books that display scholarly erudition pile up details to the bewilderment of the average pupil. Accordingly in this book the effort has been to select from the pages of post-Biblical Jewish history the outstanding personalities; to present the life and work of each in such a way as to illustrate the spirit of Judaism in his time; in doing this, to analyze and systematize the complex and abstract subject-matter so that it may offer the fewest difficulties to the pupil's mind; and yet not to sacrifice the warm human interest that should transfigure even the barest outline of "the grandest poem of all time - the history of the Jews." And throughout the history, from beginning to end, it has been the aim to bring out clearly the guiding principles of the Jewish spirit: the Law by which it lives, the hope of the Future towards which it works, and the conception of the universality of religion, in which it follows in the footsteps of its most sublime prophets. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.