He was not "orthodox" in belief though eminently so in practice--which is all the Ghetto demands--not from hypocrisy but from ancient prejudice.

Scholarship had not shrivelled up his humanity, for he had a genial fund of humor and a gentle play of satire and loved his neighbors for their folly and narrowmindedness.

Unlike Spinoza, too, he did not go out of his way to inform them of his heterodox views, content to comprehend the crowd rather than be misunderstood by it.

He knew that the bigger soul includes the smaller and that the smaller can never circumscribe the bigger.

Such money as was indispensable for the endowment of research he earned by copying texts and hunting out references for the numerous scholars and clergymen who infest the Museum and prevent the general reader from having elbow room.