IN the autumn of 1804 a 22-year-old resident of Hamburg named Moses b. Mendel Frankfurt (1782–1861) sought out a recent arrival from Berlin, the ageing and venerable Naphtali Herz Wessely (1725–1805). Approaching his eightieth birthday, Wessely had moved from Berlin to spend what would be the last year of his life in the care of his daughter. The author of more than half a dozen books and countless essays and poems, he was widely recognized as one of the main catalysts of the Haskalah, second in stature only to Moses Mendelssohn. The young Frankfurt came from a family that had long admired both these early Jewish Enlightenment figures, and Wessely's move to Hamburg naturally attracted his attention. Some years later, when Frankfurt had occasion to discuss Wessely in his own writings, he recalled his encounters with the Berlin maskil with warm admiration.

As one might expect, Frankfurt's depiction of Wessely and his contribution to the linguistic and cultural enlightenment of European Jewry was highly appreciative. Writing for a nineteenth-century audience that was only vaguely familiar with the lives and accomplishments of the early Enlightenment figures, he began by sketching Wessely's life in broad strokes: his birth in Hamburg, his moves to Amsterdam and Copenhagen, and, in 1774, his relocation to Berlin. He highlighted Wessely's literary and scholarly contribution, stressing his talents in the fields of poetry and Hebrew language, and noting how his writings differed—qualitatively as well as substantively—from those of Mendelssohn. The most noteworthy aspect of this presentation, however, was the fact that it managed to avoid the uncritical and gauzy hagiography of many contemporary writings about the early maskilim. Frankfurt's biographical essay, in fact, was striking in its depiction of Wessely as an isolated and misunderstood figure with few friends or supporters, increasingly ignored by the members of the Jewish community in Berlin. In Frankfurt's account, the unfortunate situation appeared to have been precipitated in part by Wessely's castigation of his fellow Jews for their sinful deprivations and petty jealousies, which only managed to gain him their enmity.