rabbis dared not attack him openly, because he had only followed the emperor in his ideas. They appear therefore to have incited certain Polish rabbis to condemn his circular letter and excommunicate him. Although the zealots were without support from Berlin, they continued in their heretic-hunting, causing the pulpits to re-echo with imprecations against Wessely; and in Lissa his letter was publicly burnt. He had the bitter experience of standing alone in this conflict. None of his adherents publicly sided with him, although he was contending for a just cause by noble methods and in a most becoming manner. Mendelssohn did not like such disputes, and at this time was suffering too much, bodily and mentally, to take part. Thus Wessely had to conduct his own defense. He published a second letter (April 24), supposed to be addressed to the Trieste congregation, in which he again dwelt upon the importance of regular instruction, and of the abolition of old practices, and disproved the charges against him. Gentle and forbearing as he was, he avoided retorting severely upon his opponents; but he permitted words of censure against orthodoxy and the one-sided, perverse Talmudic tendency to slip from him. It was, indeed, the irony of history, that the most orthodox among the followers of Mendelssohn, without wishing it, opened fire on Rabbinism, as the Kabbalist Jacob Emden had given the first violent blow to the Kabbala. By and by, several Italian rabbis of Trieste, Ferrara, and Venice, spoke in favor of Wessely, and recommended culture, although they were unable to bridge over the chasm between it and Rabbinism. Wessely was victorious; and the opposing rabbis laid down their arms. Schools for regular instruction arose here and there, even in Prague. But the strict Talmudists were right. Their suspicions foreboded the future more truly than Mendelssohn's and Wessely's confidence. The old rigid form of Judaism could no more assert itself. Both these men, who had felt so much at ease in the old structure, and wished only to see it cleansed here and there from cobwebs and fungus growths, contributed to sap its foundations.