This is a Chronicle of Dreamers, who have arisen in the Ghetto from its
establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up in our own day.
Some have become historic in Jewry, others have penetrated to the ken of the
greater world and afforded models to illustrious artists in letters, and but
for the exigencies of my theme and the faint hope of throwing some new light
upon them, I should not have ventured to treat them afresh; the rest are
personally known to me or are, like "Joseph the Dreamer," the artistic
typification of many souls through which the great Ghetto dream has passed.
Artistic truth is for me literally the highest truth: art may seize the essence
of persons and movements no less truly, and certainly far more vitally, than a
scientific generalization unifies a chaos of phenomena. Time and Space are only
the conditions through which spiritual facts straggle. Hence I have here and
there permitted myself liberties with these categories. Have I, for instance,
misplaced the moment of Spinoza's obscure love-episode—I have only followed his
own principle, to see things sub specie æternitatis, and even were his latest
Dutch editor correct in denying the episode altogether, I should still hold it
true as summarizing the emotions with which even the philosopher must reckon.
Of Heine I have attempted a sort of composite conversation-photograph,
blending, too, the real heroine of the little episode with "La Mouche." His own
words will be recognized by all students of him—I can only hope the joins with
mine are not too obvious. My other sources, too, lie sometimes as plainly on
the surface, but I have often delved at less accessible quarries. For instance,
I owe the celestial vision of "The Master of the Name" to a Hebrew original
kindly shown me by my friend Dr. S. Schechter, Reader in Talmudic at Cambridge,
to whose luminous essay on the Chassidim, in his Studies in Judaism, I have a
further indebtedness. My account of "Maimon the Fool" is based on his own (not
always reliable) autobiography, of which I have extracted the dramatic essence,
though in the supplementary part of the story I have had to antedate slightly
the publication of Mendelssohn's "Jerusalem" and the fame of Kant. In fine, I
have never hesitated to take as an historian or to focus and interpret as an
imaginative artist. […]
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