ator_ (E.H. Lindo, 1841, etc.).

SPINOZA.

Graetz.--V, 4.

J. Freudenthal.--_History of Spinozism_, _J.Q.R._, VIII, p. 17.

HEBREW DRAMAS.

Karpeles.--_Jewish Literature and other Essays_, p. 229.

Abrahams.--_Jewish Life in the Middle Ages_, ch. 14.

Graetz,--V, pp, 112 [119], 234 [247].

CHAPTER XXV

MOSES MENDELSSOHN

Mendelssohn's German Translation of the
Bible.--Phaedo.--Jerusalem.--Lessing's "Nathan the Wise."

Moses, the son of Mendel, was born in Dessau in 1728, and died in Berlin
in 1786. His father was poor, and he himself was of a weak constitution.
But his stunted form was animated by a strenuous spirit. After a boyhood
passed under conditions which did little to stimulate his dawning
aspirations, Mendelssohn resolved to follow his teacher Fraenkel to
Berlin. He trudged the whole way on foot, and was all but refused
admission into the Prussian capital, where he was destined to produce so
profound an impression. In Berlin his struggle with poverty continued,
but his condition was improved when he obtained a post, first as
private tutor, then as book-keeper in a silk factory.

Berlin was at this time the scene of an intellectual and aesthetic
revival dominated by Frederick the Great. The latter, a dilettante in
culture, was, as Mendelssohn said of him, a man "who made the arts and
sciences flourish, and made liberty of thought universal in his realm."
The German Jews were as yet outside this revival. In Italy and Holland
the new movements of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century had
found Jews well to the fore. But the "German" Jews--and this term
included the great bulk of the Jews of Europe--were suffering from the
effects of intellectual stagnation. The Talmud still exercised the mind
and imagination of these Jews, but culture and religion were separated.
Mendelssohn in a hundred places contends that such separation is
dangerous and unnatural. It was his service to Judaism that he made the
separation once for all obsolete.

Mendelssohn effected this by purely literary means. Most reformations
have been at least aided by moral and political forces. But the
Mendelssohnian revival in Judaism was a literary revival, in which moral
and religious forces had only an indirect influence. By the aid of
greater refinement of language, for hitherto the "German" Jews had not
spoken pure German; by a widening of the scope of education in the
Jewish schools; by the introduction of