The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) | Page 8

and occupied strictly religious ground until the end. He devoted himself with success to the cultivation of poetry, and completed the work of reform begun by the Italian Luzzatto, to whom, however, he was inferior in depth and originality.
Wessely's poetic masterpiece was Shire Tiferet ("Songs of Glory"), or the Epic of Moses (Berlin, 1789), in five volumes. This poem of the Exodus is on the model of the pseudo-classic productions of the Germany of his day; the influence of Klopstock's _Messias_, for instance, is striking.
Depth of thought, feeling for art, and original poetic imagination are lacking in Shire Tiferet. Practically it is nothing more than an oratorical paraphrase of the Biblical recital. The shortcomings of his main work are characteristic of all the poetry by Wessely. On the other hand, his oratorical manner is unusually attractive, and his Hebrew is elegant and chaste. The somewhat labored precision of his style, taken together with the absence of the poetic temperament, makes of him the Malherbe of modern Hebrew poetry. He enjoyed the love and admiration of his contemporaries to an extraordinary degree, and his chief poem underwent a large number of editions, becoming in course of time a popular book, and regarded with kindly favor even by the most orthodox-- testimony at once to the poet's personal influence upon his co- religionists and the growing importance of the Hebrew language.
Wessely wrote also several important works on questions in Hebrew grammar and philology. The chief of them is _Lebanon_, two parts of which appeared, each separately, under the title _Gan Na'ul_ ("The Locked Garden", Berlin, 1765); the other parts never appeared in print. They bear witness to their author's solid scientific attainments, and it is regrettable that their value is obscured by his style, diffuse to the point of prolixity. Besides, Wessely contributed to the German translation of the Bible, and to the commentary on the Bible, both, as mentioned before, works presided over by Mendelssohn, to whom he was attached by the tie of admiring friendship.
Wessely's chief distinction, however, was his firm character and his love of truth. His high ethical qualities were revealed notably in his pamphlet _Dibre Shalom wa-Emet_ ("Words of Peace and Truth," Berlin, 1781), elicited by the edict of Emperor Joseph II ordering a reform of Jewish education and the establishment of modern schools for Jews. Though well on in years, he yet did not shrink from the risk of incurring the anger of the fanatics. He openly declared himself in favor of pedagogic innovations. With sage-like modesty and mildness, the poet stated the pressing need for adopting new educational methods, and showed them to be by no means in opposition to the Mosaic and Rabbinic conception of the Jewish faith. In the name of _Torat ha-Adam_, the law for man as such, he set forth urgent reforms which would raise the prestige of the Law as well as of the Jews. He hoped for civil liberty, the liberty the Jews were enjoying in England and in the Netherlands. However, this courageous course gained for him the ban of the fanatics, the effect of which was mitigated by the intervention of the Italian Rabbis in favor of Wessely. On the other hand, it made him the most prominent member of the Meassefim circle; he was regarded as the master of the Maskilim.
Among the most distinguished of the contributors to _Ha-Meassef_ is the second writer acclaimed poet by popular consent. David Franco Mendes (1713-1792) was born at Amsterdam, of a family escaped from the Inquisition. Like most Jews of Spanish origin, his family clung to the Spanish language. He was the friend and disciple, and likewise the imitator, of Moses Hayyim Luzzatto. What was true of Eastern Europe, that the Hebrew language prevailed in the ghetto, and had to be resorted to by all who would reach the Jewish masses, did not apply to the countries of the Romance languages. Here Hebrew had little by little been supplanted by the vernacular. Mendes, who paid veritable worship to Hebrew literature, was distressed to see the object of his devotion scorned by his co-religionists and the productions of the classic age of France preferred to it. In the preface to his tragedy, "Athaliah's Recompense" (_Gemul Athaliah_, Amsterdam, 1770), he set himself the task of demonstrating the superiority of the sacred language to the profane languages. Yet this very tragedy, in spite of its author's protestations, is nothing more than a rifacimento of Racine's drama, and rather infelicitous at that, though it must be admitted that Mendes' style is of classic purity, and some of his scenes are in a measure characterized by vivacity of action. His other drama, "Judith", also published at Amsterdam, has no greater merit than "Athaliah's Recompense." Besides these dramas, Mendes wrote several biographical sketches of the