The leisure of the years succeeding his marriage was fully occupied by Mendelssohn in literary pursuits. The whole of the Pentateuch was, by degrees, translated into pure German, and simultaneous editions were published in German and in Hebrew characters. This great gift to his people was followed by a metrical translation of the Psalms; a work which took him ten years, during which time he always carried about with him a Hebrew Psalter, interleaved with blank pages. In 1783 he published his _Jerusalem_,[36] a sort of Church and State survey of the Jewish religion. The first and larger part of it dwells on the distinction between Judaism, as a State religion, and Judaism as the ‘inheritance’ of a dispersed nationality. He essays to prove the essential differences between civil and religious government, and to demonstrate that penal enactments, which in the one case were just and defensible, were, in the changed circumstances of the other, harmful, and, in point of fact, unjudicial. The work was, in effect, a masterly effort on Mendelssohn’s part to exorcise the ‘cursing spirit’ which, engendered partly by long-suffered persecution, and partly by long association with the strict discipline of the Catholic Church, had taken a firm grip on Jewish ecclesiastical authority, and was constantly expressing itself in bitter anathema and morose excommunication. The second part of the book is mainly concerned with a vindication of the Jewish character and a plea for toleration. Scholarly and temperate as is the tone of this work throughout, it yet evoked a good deal of rough criticism from the so-called orthodox in both religious camps--from those well-meaning, purblind persons of the sort who, Lessing declares, see only one road, and strenuously deny the possible existence of any other.