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.