Moses Mendelssohn, Founder of a Modern Judaism

No street in Jerusalem bears the name of Moses Mendelssohn¹. This symbol indicates the present lack of interest in the mentor of the Jewish Enlightenment, the Haskalah. The Hebrew translation of his great book, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, is today unobtainable and barely legible², whereas it is available in all the European languages.

Mendelssohn is also at the origin of a great intellectual and social adventure, that of German Judaism, decimated by our century in Europe but whose present importance it would not be difficult to demonstrate, both in the USA and in Israel. It is not impossible that one of the missing pieces of present-day Jewish thought is precisely that philosophical gesture which the Jewish Enlightenment was, at a time when no one — or almost no one — any longer questions its great victory, namely Emancipation. We have available today in France two recent works that offer an excellent presentation of a singular life and a fertile thought³.

Born in 1729 in Dessau — the same year as Lessing, who would immortalize him in Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise) in 1779 — he died in Berlin in 1786, a few months before his king, Frederick II, an enlightened philosopher but very little inclined toward Jews. Mendelssohn’s activity is inseparable from the spiritual climate and the economic realities of Prussia, which was becoming at that time a modern state, anticipating in its grandeur the nineteenth century. Berlin, where Mendelssohn arrives in 1743, is a multicultural capital in which the Huguenots bring a ferment of humanism and impose, by their very presence, tolerance. A dreaded literary critic, a philosopher recognized by his peers — among them Kant — a religious thinker, one can hardly believe, while working on the complete edition of his works now nearing completion in Germany (more than 30 volumes), that German was not his mother tongue and that he had to learn it as he did French, Latin, English, and Greek. Son of an obscure Sofer [scribe], raised in the Heder [Jewish elementary school], he discovers Maimonides very early and annotates the Guide for the Perplexed. He launches one of the first journals in Hebrew, Koheleth Mussar, before beginning a career as a philosopher, in the wake of Leibniz, marked by the great successes that were the Philosophical Dialogues (1755), the Phädon (1767), and the Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, 1783). His Treatise on Evidence won first prize in the speculative philosophy section of the Berlin Academy in 1763, ahead of Kant, at the time a young professor at Königsberg, who had to content himself with an honorable mention. This is the period when he would receive, at last, the “privilege” of residing in Berlin, thanks to the eloquent Marquis d’Argens, great friend of the king and academician:

“A philosopher who is a bad Catholic begs a philosopher who is a bad Protestant to grant the privilege to a philosopher who is a bad Jew. There is in all this too much philosophy for reason not to be on the side of the request.”

The wavering marquis would carry the day, and on 29 October 1763 Mendelssohn, who had long signed simply “the son of Mendel,” would become a Prussian subject while remaining an orthodox Jew! His correspondence — some 800 letters have been preserved — shows him in dialogue with the leading minds of his time. After having victoriously resisted a demand for conversion in 1769, made by the Swiss but exalted pastor Lavater, he sets about various translations of the Holy Scripture. The Psalms in German (1783) and above all the Pentateuch, Sefer Netivot ha-Shalom (1780–1783), in Hochdeutsch [High German], but in Hebrew characters, five magnificent volumes flanked by a commentary in Hebrew, the Biur, perfectly traditional and… very little studied to this day.

His masterwork, Jerusalem, contains nothing less than the charter of modern Judaism, clearly establishing the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy, pleading for the separation of state and religion, and advocating an almost universal tolerance. Kant, for that matter, was not mistaken about it, having “admired its penetration, its subtlety, and its intelligence.” He added: “I consider this book the proclamation of a great reform — slow, to be sure, in its instauration and its progress — which will concern not only your nation but others as well. You have managed to reconcile your religion with a freedom of conscience such as one would not have thought possible on its part, and of which no other religion can boast. You have at the same time set forth the necessity of an unlimited freedom of conscience with respect to every religion, in a manner so thorough and so clear that on our side too the Church will at last have to ask itself how to purify its religion of all that can oppress the conscience or weigh upon it.” The nerve of the Mendelssohnian proof is the following:

“Judaism glories in no exclusive revelation of eternal truths indispensable to happiness; it is not a revealed religion in the sense in which one is accustomed to take that term. A revealed religion is one thing, a revealed legislation is another.”⁴

In other words, Judaism knows at first, in a first moment, only the truths of reason shared by all; then, the commandments of the Torah concern only the Jews; they are of course inviolable, and they are added as a special and sacred heritage. Mendelssohn remained observant all his life. Free in his opinions, subject to no philosophical creed, the Jew could therefore perfectly integrate himself into modern Europe while remaining himself. “The voice that made itself heard on Sinai on that great day did not say: ‘I am the Eternal your God, the necessary and autonomous being who is all power and omniscience, the one who rewards men according to their acts in a future life.’” In that case, indeed, Mendelssohn comments, it would then be only “the universal human religion, not Judaism.”

The Jew thus has nothing to sacrifice; his religion and even his culture are not at odds with modernity. Of course Mendelssohn’s mental universe is that of the harmony of faith and reason, the universe before the French Revolution and before Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Far from advocating assimilation without remainder, as his detractors and even some of his own children claimed, he thought he was offering, with this enlightened Judaism, precisely a guarantee against the double sin of dissolution and ghettoization.

His reflection on the emancipation of the Jews accompanied that of the senior Prussian official Christian Wilhelm Dohm, whose On the Civic Improvement of the Jews (1781) was very quickly translated into French (1782), then augmented by a second volume (1783). Read by Malesherbes, plundered by Mirabeau — Mendelssohn’s first French biographer — this work was one of the bases of discussion for the Jewish policy of the French Revolution. Mendelssohn even intervened in the French translation to limit the political and civil importance of the rabbis, then prefaced the German version of Menasseh ben Israel’s Vindiciae Judaeorum (Justice for the Jews)⁵. In it he develops his own theses, taken up in detail in Jerusalem, on the separation of State and Religion. Always inclined to salute the culture of the Talmud and of the rabbis, he intended to limit the latter’s exorbitant civil and social power. It is striking to observe that all the components of later German Judaism attempted to claim him during the nineteenth century. No one called into question his apology for learning the language of the community in which one wishes to live, nor the acceptance of its political rules, and even less his respect for other confessions. We are therefore indeed in the presence of a great thinker of Jewish humanism, mindful of Judaism as of the culture of others, and whose use of enlightened reason guards against all the excesses of the irrational and of chauvinism.

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