Naphtali Hirz (Hartwig) Wessely[note 1] (Yiddish: נפתלי הירץ וויזעל, romanized: Naftali Hirtz Vizel; 9 December 1725 – 28 February 1805) was a German-Jewish Hebraist and educationist.
After a brief sojourn in Kraków, Reis settled in Amsterdam, where he acquired great wealth, and where he, in 1671, was one of the signers of a petition to the Dutch government requesting permission to erect a synagogue.
Together with his younger son Moses (Naphtali Hirz's father), Reis later settled in Wesel on the Rhine, whence the family name "Wessely" originated.
In the synagogue at Wesel (destroyed during Kristallnacht) preserved some ritual paraphernalia presented to it by Moses Reis Wessely, who, upon the advice of the Prince of Holstein, whose purveyor he was, removed to Glückstadt, then the capital of Sleswick.
He even risked his reputation for piety by publishing a manifesto in eight chapters, entitled Divrei Shalom ve-Emet ('Words of Peace and Truth'), in which he emphasized the necessity for secular instruction, as well as for other reforms, even from the points of view of the Mosaic law and the Talmud.
(Paris, 1792), into Italian by Elia Morpurgo [fr] (Goerz, 1793), and into German by David Friedländer under the title Worte der Wahrheit und des Friedens (Berlin, 1798).
His rivals, however, were finally pacified through the energetic intervention of the Italian rabbis, as well as by Wessely's pamphlets Meḳor Ḥen, in which he gave evidence of his sincere piety.
As a scholar he contributed, by his profound philological researches, to the reconstruction of the language of the Bible, though his work is marred by prolixity and by his refusal to admit shades of meaning in synonyms.