These three men are perfect types of the "submerged Hebrew scholar" of the New York Ghetto. Reicherson is the typical religious teacher; Schwartzberg, the enthusiast, who loves the language like a mistress, and Rosenberg, the cool "man of wisdom," who only cares for the perfection of knowledge. Altho there are several others on the east side who approach the type, they fall more or less short of it. Either they are not really scholars in the old tongue, altho reading and even writing it, or through business or otherwise they have raised themselves above the pathetic point. Thus Dr. Benedict Ben-Zion, one of the poorest of all, being reduced to occasional tutoring, and the sale of a patent medicine for a living, is not specifically a scholar. He writes and reads Hebrew, to be sure, but is also a playwright in the "jargon;" has been a Christian missionary to his own people in Egypt, Constantinople, and Rumania, a doctor for many years, a teacher in several languages, one who has turned his hand to everything, and whose heart and mind are not so purely Hebraic as those of the men I have mentioned. He even is seen, more or less, with Ghetto _literati_ who are essentially hostile to what the true Hebrew scholar holds by--a body of Russian Jewish socialists of education, who in their Grand and Canal Street cafés express every night in impassioned language their contempt for whatever is old and historical.
Then, there are J. D. Eisenstein, the youngest and one of the most learned, but perhaps the least "submerged" of them all; Gerson Rosenschweig, a wit, who has collected the epigrams of the Hebrew literature, added many of his own, and written in Hebrew a humorous treatise on America--a very up-to-date Jew, who, like Schwartzberg, tried to run a Hebrew weekly, but when he failed, was not discouraged, and turned to business and politics instead; and Joseph Low Sossnitz, a very learned scholar, of dry and sarcastic tendency, who only recently has risen above the submerged point. Among the latter's most notable published books are a philosophical attack on materialism, a treatise on the sun, and a work on the philosophy of religion.
It is the wrench between the past and the present which has placed these few scholars in their present pathetic condition. Most of them are old, and when they die the "maskil" as a type will have vanished from New York. In the meantime, tho they starve, they must devote themselves to the old language, the old ideas and traditions of culture. Their poet, the austere Dolitzki, famous in Russia at the time of the revival of Hebrew twenty years ago, is the only man in New York who symbolizes in living verse the spirit in which these old men live, the spirit of love for the race as most purely expressed in the Hebrew literature. This disinterested love for the remote, this pathetic passion to keep the dead alive, is what lends to the lives of these "submerged" scholars a nobler quality than what is generally associated with the east side.