scientific; they occupy themselves with external facts to the neglect of
underlying ideas. On the whole, _Ha-Meassef_ was an engine of
propaganda and polemics rather than a literary production, though the
campaign carried on in its pages against strait-laced orthodoxy and the
Rabbis did not reach the degree of bitterness which was to characterize
later periods--moderation that was due to its most prominent
contributors. Wessely exhorted the editors not to attack religiousness
nor ridicule the Rabbis, and Mendelssohn devoted his articles to minor
points of Rabbinic practice, such as the permissibility of vaccination
under the Jewish law.

The French Revolution precipitated events in an unexpected way. The tone
of _Ha-Meassef_ changed. It held that knowledge and liberty alone
could save the Jews. More aggressive toward the Rabbis than before, it
attacked fanaticism, and gave space to trite poems, glorifying a life,
for instance, in which women and wine played the prominent part (1790).
Six years after its first issue, _Ha-Meassef_ ceased to appear, not
without having materially advanced the intellectual emancipation of the
German Jews and the revival of Hebrew as a secular language. [Footnote:
The first series of _Ha-Meassef_ ran from 1784-1786 (Konigsberg),
and from 1788-1790 (Konigsberg and Berlin). An additional volume began
to appear in 1794, at Berlin and Breslau, under the editorship of Lowe
and Wolfsohn, and was completed in 1797. The second series ran from 1809
to 1811 at Berlin, Altona, and Dessau, under Shalom Hacohen. [Trl.] ] So
important was this first co-operative enterprise in Hebrew letters, that
it imposed its name on the whole of the literary movement of the second
half of the eighteenth century, the epoch of the Meassefim.

Two poets and five or six prose writers more or less worthy of the name
of author dominated the period.