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Updated: May 18, 2025
Among the most distinguished of the contributors to Ha-Meassef is the second writer acclaimed poet by popular consent. 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.
Ha-Meassef was succeeded by a progeny of periodical literature, scientific and literary. These collections of essays are of a much more serious character than ever Ha-Meassef attained to. As a rule they display more originality and more scientific depth.
During the course of a whole century, from the appearance of the first issue of Ha-Meassef, in 1784-5, until the cessation of Ha-Shahar, in 1885, Hebrew literature offers the spectacle of a constant conflict between the humanist ideals and Judaism.
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.
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.
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 learned men of the Middle Ages for Ha-Meassef. It were far from the truth to say that Mendes succeeded in rivalling the French and Italian authors whom he set up as models for himself.
Nevertheless he was endorsed and admired by the literary men of his time as the heir of Luzzatto. An enumeration of all the writers and all the scholars who, directly or indirectly, contributed to the work of Ha-Meassef, would be wearisome. Only those who are distinguished by some degree of originality will be set down by name.
From the literary point of view Ha-Meassef is of subordinate interest. Its contributors were devoid of taste. They offered their readers mainly questionable imitations of the works of the German romantic school. The periodical brought no new talent truly worthy of the description into notice. Whatever reputation its principal writers enjoyed had been won before the appearance of Ha-Meassef.
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