David Franco Mendes דוד פראנקו מנדיש

Born at Amsterdam on 13 August 1713, died there on 10 October 1792. A merchant by trade who gave himself to Hebrew letters and Talmud. From 1735 a pupil of the Ramchal during his Amsterdam years; this is the direct line of transmission. From 1769 a member of the Amsterdam Jewish literary society Amadores das Musas, and at various times honorary secretary of the Sephardi community.

Gemul Atalyah is a Hebrew historical drama on the model of Racine's Athalie (Amsterdam, 1770), reprinted at Vienna in 1800 and Warsaw in 1860. Memorias do estabelecimento e progresso dos judeos portuguezes... nesta famosa citade de Amsterdam is a Portuguese chronicle of Amsterdam Sephardi history down to 1772, compiled in 1769–72 by the community's own secretary with access to the ma'amad's records; it lay in manuscript for two centuries and appeared only in 1975. From 1784 he wrote in Ha-Me'assef — poems and lives of Spanish and Portuguese Jews.

A correction that reverses the usual order: in the middle of the eighteenth century the European centre of Hebrew letters was Amsterdam, not Berlin. The Ramchal's Layesharim Tehillah (1743), the Amadores das Musas (1769), Gemul Atalyah (1770) — all of it precedes Ha-Me'assef. And Franco Mendes himself should not be enrolled among the Berlin maskilim: he was an observant Sephardi communal officer writing in a Sephardi-Italian belletristic idiom, and he shared none of Ha-Me'assef's programme of religious reform.