Mordecai Plungian (Plungiansky) (1814–1883), was born in Plunge, Lithuania, he became learned in talmudic and rabbinical literature; later, he was attracted to the Haskalah and studied foreign languages. In his biography of R. Manasseh b. Joseph of Ilya, Ben Porat (1858), Plungian dissociated himself from extremist Haskalah ideology as well as from unenlightened Orthodoxy. This work angered the religious elements, and Plungian backed down and destroyed the manuscript of the second part.

He wrote for the journals Kerem Hemed, Ha-Maggid, Ha-Karmel, and Ha-Shahar and also wrote poetry. His writings include: Kerem Shelomo, a commentary in two parts on Ecclesiastes (1857) and the Song of Songs (1877); Tel-Piyyot (on the Mishnah, 1849); Shevet Eloha (on blood libels, 1862); and Or Boker (part of a large work on the reading of the Torah, 1868).

The blood libel, in the various forms it assumed and the tales with which it was associated, is one of the most terrible expressions of the combination of human cruelty and credulity. No psychological or sociological research can convey the depths to which the numerous intentional instigators of such libels, and the more numerous propagators of this phantasmagoria, sank. It resulted in the torture, murder, and expulsion, of countless Jews, and the misery of insults. The Jew had only to refer to himself, his upbringing, laws, way of life, and attitude to other people and to cruelty, to perceive the falsity and baselessness of these allegations.