=1. Early Days in Dessau.=――Under a very humble roof, in a very poor little street in Dessau, there was born, on September 29, 1729, to a certain Mendel and his wife, a weakly boy, who was destined to work a wonderful change in the position and circumstances of the Jews of Germany. Not much fit for such a task did this ghetto baby seem, for, delicate from the first, his poor little body soon grew both stunted and deformed. The father was a סוֹפֵר, or scribe, getting his modest living by transcribing portions of the Law on parchment for _Mezuzoth_ and _Tephilin_, and this professional connection with the fount of learning made him perhaps more eagerly anxious even than were Jewish parents generally that their children should ‘get wisdom and get understanding.’ לֶחֶם לְפִי הַטָּף, food for the little ones, in its literal sense, was often hard to get, but food for their minds was always at hand, and free to the poorest Jewish parent. So by the time little Moses Mendel――or Mendelssohn, as he came to be called――was five years old, it was taken as a matter of course that he should attend the Talmud Torah School. But the mornings were bleak, and the tiny student was weak and frail, so the mother would wrap him up first in an old cloak of her own, and the father, before he began his day’s work, would carry the bright-eyed and not very heavy bundle to the neighbouring class-room. The little lad was diligent and sweet-tempered, and high hopes soon began to be entertained of his powers and abilities. He soon got his remove from the lower school to the higher class, which was taught by the distinguished scholar Rabbi Frankel, and very early began to indulge the desire that when he grew up, he, in his turn, might become a learned Rabbi like his dear master. The parents did not very heartily second this ambition on the part of their little son. Times were hard in the ghetto, and Rabbis were many. Though a greatly respected, it was a poorly paid profession, whereas as a hawker, or a pedlar, a boy might begin to pick up a living by the time he was בַּר מִצְוָה. In 1742, before Moses was thirteen, Rabbi Frankel received the appointment of Chief Rabbi of Berlin, and went to take up his residence in Berlin. With Frankel’s departure from Dessau a stop was put to the boy’s learning, and, as it seemed, to his hopes, for now that his master was gone, again and more strongly his parents urged upon him to use his books only as a holiday task, and to make trading the serious business of his life. But it was of no use. The boy was bent upon becoming a scholar. Day after day, and often far on into the night, he would be with his beloved books, forgetting, in their company, all aches and pains or hunger, and desiring no other interest or amusement. His favourite volume was Maimonides’ מוֹרֶה נְבוּכִים, Guide to the Perplexed,[60] which he patiently puzzled out, and read and re-read, till something of the spirit of the large and liberal-minded author