Note (return) — Chapter II

The story of Maimon, as I have said, is the story of many of the peripatetic apostles of Haskalah, and his experience was more or less also theirs. Issachar Falkensohn Behr (or Bär Falkensohn, 1746-1796?), without funds, friends, or rudimentary knowledge of the subjects necessary for admission into a public school, left his native city of Zamosez with the determination to enter the university of "Little Berlin," as Königsberg was called. Too poor to carry out his plan, he tramped to Berlin. Through the influence of his relatives and countrymen, Israel Moses Halevi and Daniel Jaffe, he was introduced to Mendelssohn, and was enabled to devote himself systematically to the study of German, the alphabet of which he had learned from Wolff's treatise on mathematics, and to French, Latin, physics, philosophy, and medicine. In a very short time he mastered them all, especially German. His Gedichte eines polnischen Juden (Mitau and Leipsic, 1772) caused no little stir among the poets. Lessing and Goethe, close observers of symptoms of enlightenment among the Jews, expressed themselves differently as to the real merit of the collection; but both concurred with Boie, who, writing to Knebel, the friend of Goethe, remarked concerning them, "You are right; the Jewish nation promises much after it is once awakened."29