Menashe Mautner, a disabled veteran of the First World War with a wooden leg, fell on the icy pavements of Vienna and lay there three hours vainly as… - Paul Johnson

Yiddish was particularly good at borrowing: from Arabic, from Hebrew-Aramaic, from anything which came its way. On the other hand it contributed: to Hebrew, to English-American. Its chief virtue, however, lay in its internal subtlety, particularly in its characterization of human types and emotions.62 It was the language of street wisdom, of the clever underdog; of pathos, resignation, suffering, which it palliated by humour, intense irony and superstition. Isaac Bashevis Singer, its greatest practitioner, pointed out that it is the only language never spoken by men in power.

In late antiquity, Judaic scholars organized the laws into 613 commandments, consisting of 248 mandatory commandments and 365 prohibitions.

The inquiry begins with Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), who was the first of the modern intellectuals, their archetype and in many ways the most influential of them all.