life wholly cut off from influencing Slavonic Jews and from being
influenced by them. As a lad Mendelssohn was instructed by Israel Moses
Halevi of Zamoscz (ab. 1700-1772). This teacher of his, who is credited
with several inventions, and of whom Lessing says, in a letter to
Mendelssohn, that he was "one of the first to arouse a love for science
in the hearts of Jews," imbued him with love for philosophy. When
Mendelssohn emerged from obscurity, and, despite ill-health and
ignorance, attained culture and breeding, his associate, who was with
him the most important factor in German Haskalah, was the renowned
Naphtali, or Hartwig, Wessely, whose grandfather Joseph Reis had been
among the fugitives from the Cossack massacres in 1648. And when he
became famous, and took his place among the greatest of his age, he
still sought diversion and instruction among the Slavonian Jews, and
boasted of being a descendant of one of them, Moses Isserles of Cracow.
As formerly with the Talmud, the Haskalah seemed, at the time of
Mendelssohn, to be moving from the East westward, through the agency of
the Slavonic Jews pouring perennially into Germany. Positions, from the
lowly melammed's to the honorable chief rabbi's in prominent
communities, were filled almost exclusively by them. The cause of
Judaism seems to have been entrusted to them. Ezekiel Landau, whose
tactful intercession helped greatly to establish peace between the
Emden-Eybeschütz factions, was rabbi of Prague for almost forty years
(1755-1793); the equally prominent, but at first somewhat less liberal
Phinehas Horowitz was rabbi and dean in Frankfort-on-the-Main for over
thirty years (1771-1805); his brother Shmelke, regarded as a saint, was
chief rabbi of Moravia (1775). Another Horwitz, Aaron Halevi, was rabbi
of Berlin, one of those who favored Mendelssohn's translation of the
Pentateuch; while the cultured and profound Talmudist Raphael Hakohen,
whose grandson, Gabriel Riesser, became the greatest champion of Jewish
emancipation Germany has yet produced, was offered the rabbinate of