Silliness and Sanctimony

A Prussian-born maskil from Halle, Aaron Halle-Wolfsohn joined Moses Mendelssohn’s circle in Berlin. He edited Mendelssohn’s German Bible translation and produced his own translations of and commentaries on scripture. Wolfsohn was an editor of the Hebrew journal Ha-me’asef, to which he also contributed. He embraced the educational ideas of the Enlightenment in his pioneering Hebrew primer, Avtalyon, and as a teacher at the Königliche Wilhelmsschule, a Jewish public school in Breslau (now Wroclaw, Poland). Wolfsohn’s Laykhtzin und fremelay has been called one of the first modern Yiddish plays, although it relies heavily on German dialogue to promote a maskilic message.