Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 13.djvu/714

 680 There were always, it is true, exceptions to the general degradation of the race. The exiles from the Spanish peninsula (who in western Europe were found chiefly in Amsterdam, Bordeaux, Paris, and London, and also in Hamburg and Copenhagen) ware in many cases persons of distinguished culture and intelligence, having been enabled, while protected by their disguise of Christianity, to live a life more worthy of freemen than was that of their oppressed and pillaged brethren in the north. In Germany itself Frederick William, the great elector of Brandenburg (1640 to 1688), was indebted for zealous service to Gompertz and Solomon Elias. Beckman of Frankfort-on-the-Oder obtained permission in 1696 to print the Talmud. In Austria Wolf Schlesinger was personally exempted from the decree which banished the Jews from Vienna in the time of Leopold I. The Oppen- heimers had sufficient influence in Austria to prevent the publication there of Eisenmenger s libels on their race ; the Arnsteins, Sinzheimers, and other families earned the favour of Maria Theresa, and were decorated with titles of nobility. But the general condition of the multitude was shown by the excommunication of Spinoza at Amsterdam, by the rise of the Chasidim and of Frank, and the mar- Ger- vellous history of Sabbathai Zebi. The German Jews grew many, distrustful of their knowledge of their own religion, and instructed their children by the aid of long-ringleted rabbis from Poland, who overspread the country, inculcating con tempt for all except the too subtle dialectics of their peculiar school of disputation. Led by these blind guides, the German Jews continued to speak their own jargon of Hebrew and German, to correspond and even endorse their commercial bills in Hebrew characters, and abandoned the hopeless attempt to enter into the general life of their country. Fortunately the hereditary desire of learning still survived, though the selection of subjects for study helped to isolate them from their happier neighbours. Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), who did so much to induce the Jews to become at one with the spirit of the age, and the Christians to tolerate them, was at three years old taught by his father, a professional copyist of Hebrew religious manuscripts, to repeat the wise sayings of the Talmud. Later on he found in the rabbi Fra nkel, of his native town of Dessau in Anhalt, a capable and en lightened teacher. When Fra nkel was promoted, the young Mendelssohn followed him, at the age of fourteen, to Berlin. In Prussia the condition of the Jews had been comparatively favoured. Forty or fifty respectable families fleeing from persecutions in Austria had been admitted to Berlin towards the end of the 17th century. The colony increased, and was specially patronized in his own grotesque and tyrannical fashion by the half-mad sovereign Frederick William I. Frederick the Great held the maxim that &quot; to oppress the Jews never brought prosperity to any Govern ment,&quot; but his &quot;general privilege,&quot; issued in 1750, while it abolished some old restrictions, was only a halting step in advance. It divided the Jews into two classes, the hereditarily and the personally tolerated. In the first were those who were actually engaged in commerce or who occupied some office in connexion with the synagogue. Their right of abode extended to merely one child of the family. Those who were personally tolerated were men who had means of independent subsistence, though not engaged in commerce, and their right did not descend to their children. The right to residence for a second child of each family of hereditary inhabitants was purchased by the Jews for 70,000 thalers. The restrictions imposed by Frederick on marriage were severe ; poor Jews could not marry at all. No Jew was permitted to own land in fee or to possess more than forty houses. Their business was confined to trade in money or goods. Frederick the Great, penetrated as he was by the sentiments of Voltaire, yet struck out Mendelssohn s name when it was put forward for election into the Berlin Academy. Mendelssohn was with difficulty admitted into Berlin when he presented himself at its gates as a poor boy, having no friend but his teacher Fra nkel. He went into a silk manufacturer s house as teacher to the children, and became a clerk and afterwards a partner in the firm. He formed a warm friendship with Lessing, and inspired the drama of Nathan the Wise, in which the Jew was for the first time in modern literature represented in a benevolent light. He translated the Pentateuch into German, and issued his translation in Hebrew characters, added to it a commentary in Hebrew (incorporating the rational as distinguished from the Aga- distic interpretations of former Hebrew commentators), partly by himself and partly by others, whom he associated with himself, and by this and other works introduced the Jews to modern culture. At the same time he gained a distinguished place in the world of letters by the pure and exalted tone, and the charming style, of his Philosophical Dialogues, his Phcedo, or the Immortality of the Soul, and other works, which showed him to be at the height of the philosophy of that time. He remained warmly attached in feeling and practice to the synagogue, and was requested by the chief rabbi of Berlin, Hirschel Levin, who for a brief period had been chief rabbi in London, to prepare the German digest of the ritual laws of the Jews, which was ordered by Frederick the Great. Every visitor to Berlin, Jew or Gentile, sought to make his acquaintance at a kind of salon which he held in the afternoons. By the great majority of the orthodox Jews the writings of Mendelssohn were received with delight, and it was only by exception (as in Hamburg, Prague, Fiirth, and Poland) that they were fiercely denounced as rationalistic in tendency. The times were favourable to the development to which he led the way. The ideas of the great writers who preceded the French Revolution were teaching the abolition of privilege and of religious persecution. Although neither Voltaire nor Bayle wrote in a kindly spirit of the degraded Hebrew race, the general tendency of their teaching was in the direction of toleration, and so it happened that, just at the moment when the Jews were become more than ever willing and ready to enter into the national life of Germany, the country was being prepared to receive them. The civil restrictions were only gradually abolished ; painful revivals of hatred recurred from time to time, but henceforth the name of Jew grew year by year to mean less a distinction of nationality, and became more exclusively a denomination referring merely to ancestry and religious belief. Among the friends and disciples of Mendelssohn who continued his work were Wessely (the lather of modern Hebrew poetry), David Friedliinder (founder of the Jews Free School in Berlin), Joel Lowe (professor at the Jewish. Wilhelmsclmle in Breslau), Herz Homberg (tutor in the house of Moses Mendelssohn, and inspector of German schools of the Jews in Galicia), Aaron Wolfsohn (teacher at Breslau), Baruch Lindau (writer on physics), Marcus Herz (Mendelssohn s family doctor, whose more famous wife, afterwards converted to Christianity, received at her house a brilliant society, the two Humboldts, Count Bernstorf, Gentz, and Borne), Isaac Euchel (translator of the Jewish prayer-book), Lazarus Bendavid (who was specially concerned with education). All these and others contri buted to the Hebrew periodical Mcasscf (&quot;The Gatherer&quot;), pub lished at Kb nigsberg and Berlin, 1783-1790 ; Breslau, 1794-1797 ; Berlin, Altona, Dessau, 1809-1811. The activity of the literary period which followed appears from the long list of rabbinical reprints, some with valuable notes, or translations, issued immedi ately before the close of the 18th century from the Jews Free School printing-press at Berlin, under the direction of Isaac Satanow. From minimizing differences in religion some were led to give up their distinctive religion altogether, and adopt a nominal, sometimes a real, Christianity, and thus the famous names of Heine, Borne, Edward Gans the jurist, Rahel, the younger Mendelssohn the composer, and Neander