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Updated: June 21, 2025
Wessely the poet and Linda the mathematician more than once expressed surprise at the amount of learning many of the poor immigrants were found to possess.
In 1771, according to Wessely, the mountain-peak Piz, near Alleghe in the province of Belluno, slipped into the bed of the Cordevole, a tributary of the Piave, destroying in its fall three hamlets and sixty lives. Wessely records several other more or less similar occurrences in the Austrian Alps.
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.
The unaccustomed ear of the Jew of that period was struck by these powerful sounds of rhymed biblical speech which exhibited greater elegance and harmony than the Mosaïd of Wessely, the Jewish Klopstock.
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.
Like Wessely, Levinsohn remained on strictly orthodox ground in his writings, and in the name of traditional religion itself he attacks superstition, and urges the obligatory study of the Hebrew language, the pursuit of the various branches of knowledge, and the learning of trades.
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.
Who knows that this is more than a temporary political move?" "And we pious Jews," put in Dr. Herz, smiling, "you forget, Herr Wessely, we are not so easily schooled. We have never forgiven our Mendelssohn for saying our glorious religion had accumulated cobwebs. It is the cobwebs we love, not the port."
Wessely wrote also several important works on questions in Hebrew grammar and philology. 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.
"Wait, wait!" said an eager-eyed man; "the laws of the Emperor Joseph will change all that once the Jews of Vienna are forced to go to school with the sciences, they will become an honored element of the nation." Mendelssohn shook a worldly-wise head. "Not so fast, my dear Wessely, not so fast. Your Hebrew Ode to the Austrian Emperor was unimpeachable as poetry, but, I fear, visionary as history.
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