Among Mendelssohn’s young contemporaries three are pre-eminent as representatives of the new Hebrew culture: Herz, Ben David, and Maimon. Herz was Kant’s favourite pupil and distinguished himself as a popular exponent of his master’s philosophy. Ben David was a mathematician and a student of Kant’s philosophy. On the latter subject he lectured at the University of Vienna and afterwards in Berlin. Maimon was a Polish Jew who had inherited restlessness of body from his fathers and restlessness of mind from the writings of his great namesake Maimonides. He wandered over the limitless and cheerless desert of Negation, sought to slake his thirst at the mirage of the Cabbala, or to forget it in the mysticism of the “Pious,” and finally, at the age of five-and-twenty, quitting home and family with the readiness characteristic of the born vagrant, he arrived in Berlin, unwashed, unkempt, and untaught in any tongue but his native jargon of Germano-Polish Hebrew. Some time afterwards, however, he became famous by the publication of an Autobiography--a work worthy to stand beside Rousseau’s _Confessions_ in one respect at least: its unsparing and almost savage unreserve. Its sincerity was doubted by George Eliot and by other critics also. But Schiller and Goethe were both impressed by this work, and Maimon was honoured with the latter poet’s acquaintance. Gradually there was formed in the capital of Prussia a wide circle of intellectual Jews and Jewesses, which stood in strong contrast to the proud and stupid nobility on the one hand and to the homely and stupid _bourgeoisie_ on the other. Between these two frigid zones spread the Jewish class of men and women rich in money and brains, cultivating French literature, wit, and infidelity. Mendelssohn’s house was at first the centre of this circle, and after his death it was succeeded by that of Herz, whose own brilliancy was eclipsed by that of his wife. In her salon were to be met more celebrities than at Court. Mirabeau was captivated by the gifted Jewess’s charm, and little by little even the wives of distinguished men began to acknowledge the beautiful Henrietta’s attraction. Another literary salon was at the same time opened by a Jewish lady in Vienna, and it attained an equal degree of social success. These are only a few examples of that spiritual emancipation which accelerated the political emancipation of Israel in Europe. It is true that the intoxication of freedom produced a certain amount of frivolity, immorality, and blind imitation of Gentile vice; for many Jews and Jewesses, having once broken loose of the Synagogue, drifted into profligacy. But where there is much ripe fruit there must always be some that is rotten.