=1. Light and Shadows.=――The influence of Mendelssohn did not die out with his death. He had stirred the conscience of the Christians, he had roused the consciousness of the Jews. Things could never again be quite as they had been. But there was a danger in the difference, as there is in all sudden and violent changes of feeling, even when the changes are good and right. Cultivated Jews quickly became quite the fashion in the literary circles of Berlin, and the reception-rooms of Mendelssohn’s daughters, and of Henrietta Herz, the charming wife of a Dr. Marcus Herz, and of several other pleasant, intelligent Jewish women were thronged by the leading men of the day. Christians seemed to find a certain delightful flavour, beyond the charm which is common to all cultivated intercourse, in this new taste of what had been for so long forbidden fruit. And almost as quickly, ambitious Jews and Jewesses grew to be a little intoxicated with their success. Many restrictions, both social and political, were still in force against the race, and these people who were so well received amongst Christians thought that they were liked and admired in spite of their Judaism, whereas they owed to it those very qualities which gained for them this flattering notice. One by one, slowly and shyly at first, they dropped Jewish observances; then, more boldly, they dropped Jewish acquaintances; and lastly, and quite in logical sequence, they dropped their Judaism altogether. It was always, and in every case, from first to last, a sacrifice to selfishness and self-interest. And perhaps the first proud step of ‘hiding themselves from their own flesh’ in their fashionable wrappings of superior cultivation, was quite as wicked as that last distinctly separate step which many took of baptism. Mendelssohn’s daughters were baptized, and his grandchildren; so was Heine the poet in 1825, and Börne the patriot in 1818, and so were a host of minor folks in the first forty years immediately succeeding Mendelssohn’s death. These ‘conversions’ were the deep shadows thrown from the light which Mendelssohn had lovingly and loyally let in upon his people. Yet, nevertheless, the light was ‘good,’ and in time it lost its blinding, dazzling quality. If a prism is put in the way of a ray of sunlight, we get a view of the most beautiful colours, but the experiment needs nice handling. If the prism be not of the right shape, and set at the right angle, instead of added colours we get our ray of light obscured. Some of the Jews of Germany managed with their pushing, self-adjusted prisms to hinder the effects of Mendelssohn’s rays of light. When he himself stood as a prism in the beams, we got _Nathan der Weise_ as a result.