As Mendelssohn, without knowing or desiring it, stimulated Lessing to create an ideal, and through him helped to dispel the bias against Jews, so at the same time, without aiming at it, he inaugurated the spiritual regeneration of his race. The Bible, especially the Pentateuch--the all in all of the Jews--although very many knew it by heart, had become as strange to them, as any unintelligible book. Rabbinical and Kabbalistic expositors had so distorted the simple biblical sense of the words, that everything was found in it except the actual contents. Polish school-masters--there were no others--with rod and angry gestures, instructed Jewish boys in tender youth to discover the most absurd perversities in the Holy Book, translating it into their hateful jargon, and so confusing the text with their own translation, that it seemed as if Moses had spoken in the barbarous dialect of Polish Jews. The neglect of all secular knowledge, which increased with every century, had reached such a pitch that every nonsensical oddity, even blasphemy, was subtly read into the verses of Scripture. What had been intended as a comfort to the soul was changed into a poison. Mendelssohn acutely felt this ignorance and wresting of Bible words, for he had arrived at the enlightened view that Holy Writ does not contain "that which Jews and Christians believe they can find therein," and that a good, simple translation would be an important step towards the promotion of culture among Jews. But in his modesty and diffidence it did not occur to him to employ these means to educate his brethren. He compiled a translation of the Pentateuch for his children, to give them a thorough education and to introduce the word of God to them in an undisfigured form, without troubling (as he observed) "whether they would continue to be compelled, in Saxe-Gotha, on every journey, to pay for their Jewish heads at a game of dice, or to tell the story of the three rings to every petty ruler." It was only at the urgent request of a man whose word carried weight with Mendelssohn, that he decided to publish his translation of the Pentateuch into German (in Jewish-German characters) for Jewish readers. It cost him an effort, however, to attach his name to it.