Among these immigrants were two who may justly be regarded as the conducting medium through which the Haskalah currents were transmitted from Germany to Russo-Poland:  Solomon Dubno, the indefatigable laborer in the province of Jewish science, and Solomon Maimon, the brilliant but unfortunate philosopher, both of them teachers in the house of Mendelssohn.

Solomon Dubno (1738-1813) was all his life a bee in search of flowers, to turn their sweetness into honey.  Having exhausted the knowledge of his Volhynian instructors, he went to Galicia, where he became proficient in Hebrew grammar and Biblical exegesis.  Thence, attracted by its rich collection of books, he left for Amsterdam, where he spent five years in study and research.  Finally he settled in Berlin, and earned a livelihood by teaching among others the children of Mendelssohn.  The gentle disposition and profound learning of the Polish emigrant made a favorable impression on the Berlin sage, who invited him to participate in his translation of the Bible, which revolutionized the Judaism of the nineteenth century more than the Septuagint that of the first century.  The result was the Biur (commentary), which he, together with his countryman, Aaron Yaroslav, also a teacher, wrote on several books of the Bible.  Comparatively few of Dubno’s works have been published, but judging from such as are known we may safely pronounce him a master of the Massorah and a scholar of unusual attainments.  Of his poems Delitzsch says that they are “in the truest sense Hebrew in expression, Biblical in imagery and subject-matter, medieval in rhyme and rhythm, and in general genuinely Jewish in manner of treatment,”—­laudation which this exacting critic bestowed on no other Hebrew poet of his time.  It was mainly through the endeavors of Dubno that Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch, later regarded with suspicion, was everywhere bought and studied eagerly.[23]

One better known to the outside world than Dubno, and who has engraved his name forever on the history of theology and philosophy, was Solomon Maimon (Nieszvicz, Lithuania, 1754—­Niedersiegersdorf, Silesia, 1800).  In his famous autobiography is mirrored the lot of hundreds of his countrymen who, like him, left their homes and hearths, their nearest and dearest, and led a wretched and miserable existence, all because they were anxious to be ma’amike be-hakmah ("delvers in knowledge"), as he himself might have said, and avail themselves of the opportunities for acquiring the truth and wisdom unattainable in their own land.

But Maimon was doomed to suffer abroad even more than at home.  He was one of those unfortunates whose sufferings are regarded as well-deserved.  His exceptional ability was never to develop to its fullest capacity.  Great injustice has been done to him, not only by the rabid orthodox, who denied him a grave in their cemetery, but even by the enlightened historian Graetz.  Fortunately he left behind him his Lebensgeschichte, among the best of its kind in German literature, in which, with the frankness of a Rousseau, he described the events of his short and checkered career.[24]