Bernard Sachs intellectual practice in South Africa was outstanding not only in and of itself but also as symbolic of the Talmudic intellectual tradition that  Central and Eastern European Jews as immigrants to the country in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century brought to the country. The mass migration of Jews from that part of the world was due to poverty and pogroms they experienced for centuries from the time of the Renaissance. Jewish immigrants came mainly from Lithuania and Latvia. New African intellectuals of the New African Movement such as Bernard Sachs or Ray Alexander who arrived as young children or as teenagers in the country, or those born in the country as children of immigrants such as Ruth First or Nadine Gordimer, represent or represented this tradition of deep learning and reverence for the written word. Bernard Sachs was undoubtedly a central part of this tradition as indicated by the fact that by the age of six or seven as he informs us in his two autobiographies Multitude of Dreams (1949) and Mist of Memory (1973) he could red The Torah in Hebrew no less in an environment in which Yiddish was his first language and the Latvian language as his second language. Bernard Sachs exemplified this absolute reverence for written word in his practice as editor The South African Opinion (later known as Trek), a bi-monthly political and literary review, which was launched in November 1934 and was at its helm for nearly twenty years. What partly made The South African Opinion such a brilliant journal was that its literary editor was Herman Charles Bosman, arguably the best South African short story writer in the twentieth century. V. S. Naipaul in his recent travelogue on Africa, The Masque Of Africa: Glimpses Of African Belief (2010) designates Bosman as the best South African writer. Besides the Talmudic tradition he espoused or represented in his intellectual excellence, perhaps what also made Bernard Sachs such an effective editor was the combination in his intellectual outlook of Communism (Karl Marx, Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky) and European high literary culture in the form of Marcel Proust, Leo Tolstoy, T. S. Eliot. Though he eventually became disillusioned with Communism and resigned from the Communist Party of South because of the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, he retained his ideological allegiance to the Left; from this moment of disillusionment with politics, the journal became totally concerned with literary matters. From the high quality contribution to the journal from the premier intellectuals of the time such as, Joseph Sachs (art historian) R. F. Alfred Hoernlé (liberal philosopher), Edward Roux (author of the legendary book Time Longer Than Rope [1948]), not to mention Herman Charles Bosman, it is clear that Bernard Sachs was always in search excellence where he could find it in South Africa. What assisted him in maintaining and retaining his high standards of critical evaluation was his periodic overseas visits to United States and Europe, the bearer of standards regarding modernity. What made it possible for Sachs to attract excellent thinkers and writers as contributors was that he was a good writer in his own right; his aforementioned biographies are characterized by ethically clean prose, the short stories contributed to the journal are stylistically attractive and intellectually engaging. Even more impressive are the intellectual portraits, whether of artists or writers, and the travelogues contributed to the journal across two decades and eventually assembled in two volumes of Personalities and Places (1959, 1965). Some of the personalities portrayed in the first volume of the series could be mentioned here: E. S. Solly Sachs, Sarah Gertrude Millin, Nadine Gordimer, Herman Charles Bosman, Athol Fugard, Lionel Abrahams, Ellen Hellman, Lippy Lipshitz. Perhaps the reason why this volume was dedicated to Lionel Abrams, the editor of the Purple Renoster journal which ran from the late 1950s to the 1970s, however haphazardly, was their deep mutual admiration for Bosman besides their life long intellectual friendship. In 1981 Lionel Abrahams wrote a major essay on Herman Charles Bosman that appeared in his journal that nearly rivaled the 80-page monograph by Berhard Sachs that initially appeared in The South African Opinion on the passing away of their master in 1951 and later assembled in Herman Charles Bosman As I Knew Him (1971). All of this testifies to the fact that the great Afrikaner short story writer was a point of reference for many white South African writers in their engagement with modernity.  The last important thing to be mentioned about Bernard Sachs is that although he had been disillusioned with politics for decades when the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 occurred, he reentered politics at the spur of the moment with a short book of profound reflections on the tragedy that closes with an extraordinary interview with Nadine Gordimer: Road to Sharpeville (1961). This book in a way reflects the Talmudic intellectual tradition that played such a profound role in the cultural history of South Africa in the twentieth century.