It is truer to say that on the whole the Jews began at this period to abandon as hopeless the attempt to find a place for themselves in the general life of their country. Perhaps they even ceased to desire it. Their children were taught without any regard to outside conditions, they spoke and wrote a jargon, and their whole training, both by what it included and by what it excluded, tended to produce isolation from their neighbours. Moses Mendelssohn, both by his career and by his propaganda, for ever put an end to these conditions; he more than any other man. Born in the ghetto of Dessau, he was not of the ghetto. At the age of fourteen he found his way to Berlin, where Frederick the Great, inspired by the spirit of Voltaire, held the maxim that "to oppress the Jews never brought prosperity to any government." Mendelssohn became a warm friend of Lessing, the hero of whose drama _Nathan the Wise_ was drawn from the Dessau Jew. Mendelssohn's _Phaedo_, on the immortality of the soul, brought the author into immediate fame, and the simple home of the "Jewish Plato" was sought by many of the leaders of Gentile society in Berlin. Mendelssohn's translation of the Pentateuch into German with a new commentary by himself and others introduced the Jews to more modern ways of thinking. Two results emanated from Mendelssohn's work. A new school of scientific study of Judaism emerged, to be dignified by the names of Leopold Zunz (q.v.), H. Graetz (q.v.) and many others. On the other hand Mendelssohn by his pragmatic conception of religion (specially in his _Jerusalem_) weakened the belief of certain minds in the absolute truth of Judaism, and thus his own grandchildren (including the famous musician Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy) as well as later Heine, Börne, Gans and Neander, embraced Christianity. Within Judaism itself two parties were formed, the Liberals and the Conservatives, and as time went on these tendencies definitely organized themselves. Holdheim (q.v.) and Geiger (q.v.) led the reform movement in Germany and at the present day the effects of the movement are widely felt in America on the Liberal side and on the opposite side in the work of the neo-orthodox school founded by S. R. Hirsch (q.v.). Modern seminaries were established first in Breslau by Zacharias Fränkel (q.v.) and later in other cities. Brilliant results accrued from all this participation in the general life of Germany. Jews, engaged in all the professions and pursuits of the age, came to the front in many branches of public life, claiming such names as Riesser (d. 1863) and Lasker in politics, Auerbach in literature, Rubinstein and Joachim in music, Traube in medicine, and Lazarus in psychology. Especially famous have been the Jewish linguists, pre-eminent among them Theodor Benfey (1809-1881), the pioneer of modern comparative philology; and the Greek scholar and critic Jakob Bernays (1824-1881).