Naphtali Herz Wessely

Naphtali Herz Wessely was born in Hamburg in 1725 and spent his childhood in Copenhagen, where his father supplied the court of the King of Denmark. Trained at the yeshiva of Jonathan Eybeschütz, he also read works of literature and science in several European languages. In the service of the Feitel bank, he was called to Amsterdam and then to Berlin, where he became close to Moses Mendelssohn. In 1782, Divrei shalom ve-emet welcomed Joseph II's edict of tolerance and called for opening Jewish schools to secular learning: leading rabbis condemned it and the book was burned in Vilna. He died in Hamburg in 1805.

In the catalogue 1

• Epicשירי תפארתNaphtali Herz Wessely · 1789not translated into EnglishLiteraturePublic domain