What relation Isaac Pinto was to the Hazan we have no means of telling. Joseph’s father was named Isaac, but this can scarcely have been our translator. An Isaac Pinto died in 1791, aged seventy; he may be (as Mr. Kohut suggests) the translator in question; in 1766 he would have been in his forty-fifth year. Steinschneider thought that he was identical with the author of a work against Voltaire (Amsterdam, 1762) and other treatises. “But,” as Mr. Kohut argues, “this versatile author lived at Bordeaux, while our translator was in all probability a resident of New York.” Mr. L. Hühner accepts this identification, and adds the possibility that this same Isaac Pinto was settled in Connecticut as early as 1748. More certain is it that Isaac Pinto is the same who appears in the earliest minute-book of the New York Congregation Shearith Israel as a contributing member and seat-holder (1740, 1747, and 1750). Isaac Pinto was certainly living in New York in 1773. Ezra Stiles was president of Yale from 1778 till 1795, and in his diary he makes many references to Jews, as is well known from the publications of the American Jewish Historical Society. Under date June 14, 1773, Stiles has this entry: “In the forenoon I went to visit the Rabbi (Carigal)--discoursed on Ventriloquism and the Witch of Endor and the Reality of bringing up Samuel. He had not heard of Ventriloquism before and still doubted it. He showed me a Hebrew letter from Isaac Pinto to a Jew in New York, in which Mr. Pinto, who is now reading Aben Ezra, desires R. Carigal’s thoughts upon some Arabic in Aben Ezra.” Prof. Jastrow, from whose essay I cite the last sentence, adds: “As late as April 14, 1790, Stiles refers to a letter received from Pinto, whom he speaks of as ‘a learned Jew in New York,’ regarding a puzzling Hebrew inscription found by Stiles in Kent in the fall of 1789. Unfortunately there is no other reference to this supposed Hebrew inscription, on which Pinto was unable to throw any light.” Stiles does not seem to have provided sufficient data. We would fain know more of this Isaac Pinto. But the glimpses we get of him are enough to satisfy us that he was a man of uncommon personality. MENDELSSOHN’S “JERUSALEM” Of a hundred who discuss Moses Mendelssohn’s conception of Judaism, perhaps barely five have read _Jerusalem_, the book in which that conception is most lucidly expressed. It is a common fate with certain literary masterpieces that they are read in their own day and talked about by posterity. The fame of Mendelssohn, moreover, underwent something like an eclipse during the last generation. To paraphrase what Antony said of Cæsar, but yesterday his word might have stood against the world; now, none so poor as to do him reverence.