Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), of Dessau, came as a boy to Berlin. After a youth filled with hardship he found employment in the house of a manufacturer, first as tutor and then as bookkeeper. His main object was to raise Jews from their intellectual isolation. He translated the Pentateuch, the Psalms and some smaller books of the Bible into correct German, and edited this work with a Hebrew commentary. It soon became popular and was the medium for teaching the young people the German language. He also defended Judaism against various attacks and presented its teaching in a German work, “Jerusalem.” In his work on the Bible, he was assisted by various co-workers, among whom the most prominent is Naphtali Herz Wesel, who called himself Hartwig Wessely (1725-1805). The latter’s epic on the life of Moses, patterned on Klopstock’s “Messias,” was written in elegant Hebrew verse, and became an inspiration to many other writers disgusted with the obscure and artificial style of Rabbinic Hebrew, and having a taste for literary beauty. An organ for such endeavors was presented by the publication of the first Hebrew magazine, “Meassef” (1784). The progress of secular education made Hebrew literature soon disappear in Western Europe, but the influence of Wessely and his disciples made itself very strongly felt in the East of Europe, and particularly in the countries comprising the former kingdom of Poland. Their modern Hebrew writings introduced the young men to the knowledge of history and science, and gave them a taste for secular education and for a western conception of life. Isaac Bär Loewinson (1788-1860) wrote works in defense of Judaism, and advocated secular culture, patriotism, manual trades and the emancipation from mediæval conditions still existing in these countries. Marcus Aaron Guenzburg (1795-1846) worked chiefly as translator of popular works, such as juveniles like Campe’s “Robinson Crusoe.” A more independent character was given to Hebrew literature by Abraham Mapu (1808-1867) who wrote two novels from Biblical life, “The Love of Zion,” and “The Guilt of Samaria,” and another describing the life of the Jew in his Lithuanian home, “The Hypocrite.” Mapu used Biblical Hebrew with great facility and became the father of a new development in Hebrew and later in Yiddish, giving to Jewish literature a high literary character. He was followed by Judah Loew (Leon) Gordon (1833-1892), whose satirical poems not merely possess a value for the ease with which the author handled the Hebrew language, but have been a great force impressing upon the minds of the Jews in Eastern Europe the defects of their intellectual isolation and the shortcomings of Rabbinic teachings. Among the later poets Chayim Nachman Bialik, born 1873, is the most popular. His elegy on the massacre of Kishineff is one of the gems of modern Hebrew literature.