Mendelssohn, or fidelity beyond rationality

The age of the Enlightenment thought of itself as a time of rupture with the dark world of prejudice, thanks to the advent of a human subject capable of judging for himself according to the universal norms of reason. Emancipated from the authorities that claim to dictate how to think, the human being can — thereby — lay claim to an equality of right with any other being likewise endowed with reason. He may be a Christian and invited to take the necessary distance with respect to his faith; he may also be a Jew and called to the same approach with respect to Judaism. If humanity is one, the call ought to resonate in the same way in every ear, whatever its provenance.

The famous article that Kant published in December 1784 in the Berlinische Monatsschrift, “An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?” (Was ist Aufklärung?), is emblematic of such a call to emancipation. “Sapere aude! Have the courage to make use of your own understanding.” Such is, Kant announces, “the motto of the Enlightenment.”¹ Mendelssohn’s article, published two months earlier in the same review — “On the Question: What Does It Mean to Enlighten?” (Was heisst aufklären?) — strikes one, by contrast, with its prudence. Whereas Kant refuses the theme — current at the time — of the abuse of the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn writes that the “abuse of the Enlightenment weakens the moral sense, leads to hardness, egoism, irreligion and anarchy.”² For Kant, the free and public use of reason is the sole vector for the propagation of the Enlightenment, and it will push back the carapace of prejudice, whereas, for Mendelssohn, the “virtuous partisan of the Enlightenment will proceed with prudence and precaution, and will prefer to tolerate prejudice rather than to drive out at the same time the truth that is so solidly attached to it.”³

While being a convinced Aufklärer, become a philosopher renowned throughout Europe from the publication of Phaedon in 1767, Mendelssohn resists the universal calls to emancipation addressed to each individual, inviting him to join the community of equals, abstraction made of every consideration of provenance. This resistance must be interpreted in relation to the philosophical current to which Mendelssohn attached himself,⁴ but it also refers back to Mendelssohn’s singularity within the German Enlightenment. The “German Plato,” or the “Socrates of Berlin,” was also “Herr Moyse, great Jewish savant of Berlin.”⁵ The qualification in itself was not necessarily malevolent; it underscored only the fact of belonging to another nation, in an age when the Jews of Berlin were a minority — protected for the richest, tolerated for the others, but all privileged in relation to the mass of the Jews of eastern Prussia, who were forbidden residence in the capital. At the same time, according to Dominique Bourel, Mendelssohn was always seen “on almost every front defending Judaism in all its grandeur and density, using his intelligence and his credit to improve the condition of his brethren.”⁶ And so Mendelssohn’s resistance to the call of emancipation may receive a further illumination. For when the group from which the individual is invited to abstract himself has been disparaged, scorned and set apart for centuries, the full response to this call risks passing for the confirmation of such scorn. The name of this resistance may be “fidelity.” It is not here merely a question of the problem of the relations between faith and reason, or between religion and philosophy, which is at the center of the German Enlightenment in general and of Mendelssohn’s philosophy in particular. In this direction, he establishes the absence of contradiction between Judaism — “the religion of my fathers” — and the attitude consisting in recognizing “no other eternal truths than those which can be not only comprehensible to human reason, but also expounded and verified by human powers.”⁷ However, the mention “religion of my fathers” does not refer only to the rational truths it may eventually include, but also to a bond that holds us back, that is of the order of debt, and the rupture of which would entail a feeling of betrayal. What weight can notions such as those of debt or betrayal have for those who wish to be receptive to the call of emancipation? Conversely, from what point on is the one who remains under the grip of this resistance led to let his salutary distance turn into a warrant given to oppression? Such questions are, in Mendelssohn, linked to a conception of historical truth, distinct from rational truth, for it depends not on the exercise of the understanding alone but on human testimony or narrative. Here it will be necessary to distinguish two types of histories: those that our own people recount to us, and those that others recount to themselves.

1 – Two arguments to justify Judaism

Jerusalem, that “charter of modern Judaism,”⁸ is the response Mendelssohn finally agreed to give, in 1783, to a series of injunctions addressed to him as early as 1770, shortly after the publication of Phaedon. Johann Kaspar Lavater, a mystical and irrationalist Lutheran pastor, seized on the pretext of a work, recently translated into German, by the Swiss Charles Bonnet, in order to demand of Mendelssohn that he refute this book — supposed to have established that the Christian doctrine of revelation and miracles is scientifically founded — or that he convert to Christianity. The injunction having been made publicly, Mendelssohn, who confesses to detesting “religious controversies, and above all those that unfold in public,”⁹ nonetheless responds in a letter published the same year (Schreiben an den Herrn Diaconus Lavater zu Zürich) and immediately followed by a reply from Lavater. Ten years later, in 1780, Herz Cerf Berr addresses Mendelssohn so that he might plead the cause of the Jews of Alsace, unjustly defamed in an affair of forged receipts. Rather than write himself, Mendelssohn persuades a young high Prussian functionary, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, to draft the treatise Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden [On the Civic Improvement of the Jews], in which Dohm demands that the Jews be “put completely in possession of the same rights enjoyed by the other citizens.”¹⁰ It was, however, a disagreement with Dohm — concerning the right the rabbis would have to exclude certain members of the community — that pushed Mendelssohn to preface the publication in German of the plea that Menasseh Ben Israel, rabbi of Amsterdam, had addressed to Cromwell in 1656 so that he might grant the Jews the right to return to England. The question of the rabbinical right of exclusion gave rise to the publication of an anonymous pamphlet, whose author turned out to be a certain August Cranz. According to him, to renounce such a right amounted to renouncing Judaism. He then took up the challenge once issued by Lavater and demanded of Mendelssohn a complete explanation. He must at last declare: I am a Jew, I am a Christian, or I am neither one nor the other.

I have mentioned these episodes only to give an idea of the system of constraints within which Mendelssohn had to clear his path in order to make himself heard. He has no illusions about his position. He knows he is an exception among his own people, and that he is not the equal of those to whom he addresses himself:

“I am a member of an oppressed people who must implore the benevolence of the dominant nation that it grant them protection and safeguard, which are not given everywhere and never without certain restrictions. My coreligionists willingly forgo the liberties accorded to the other children of humanity, and they are content when they are tolerated and protected. They must not consider this a benefaction on the part of the nation that accepts them on tolerable conditions, for residence is still refused them in many States. Is it not true that, according to the laws of your native city, it has never been possible for your circumcised friend to pay you a visit in Zurich?”¹¹

Under such conditions, Mendelssohn’s margin is narrower than that of any Christian whatsoever. In Jerusalem, he sets himself two tasks. To justify his adherence to Judaism without appearing to claim, at least publicly, that Christianity is false, all while situating himself within the framework of the argumentation of the Aufklärung, on the one hand. As Sylvain Zac writes: “he must prove that he is a Jew not because he was born a Jew, but by a reflected and motivated engagement of which he can render an account at any moment of his existence.”¹² By inscribing himself within the jusnaturalist tradition, the framework of the political thought of the Aufklärung, he must also, on the other hand, plead the cause of the “civil reunion” of Jews and Christians within the Prussian State — which would not go so far as to transform the Jews into “brother(s) and fellow citizen(s),” but which would at least consider them as “fellow(s) and cohabitant(s) of the country,” without demanding of them that they abandon their cult.¹³ However, Mendelssohn does not use the same arguments to justify the reasons for his refusal to convert — which concerns the speculative content of Judaism — and the persistence of the Jewish cult — which concerns its legislative or ritual aspect. The justification for this difference comes from the fact that in each case one is not dealing with the same type of truth, according to the distinction made by Leibniz between truths of reason and truths of fact.

Christian Wolff had sought to show that Christianity was the bearer of a natural religion whose universal contents — the existence of God, Providence and the immortality of the soul — were directly accessible to reason. Mendelssohn takes up this perspective for Judaism, whose fundamental dogmas likewise cover those of natural religion: “a single, eternal divinity, who governs the universe according to His unlimited will and who sees the most secret thoughts of men so as to reward their actions according to their merit, not here but in a future.” Access to these truths is interior; they are “written in the soul with a writing that is legible and comprehensible in all times and in all places.”¹⁴ In other words — and here Mendelssohn follows Spinoza — these truths do not constitute the content of the revelation at Sinai; it is not from there that they draw their force of conviction. “Whom can the voice of thunder and the sound of the drum convince of these eternal salvific truths?” he writes.¹⁵ From this Mendelssohn can, on the one hand, respond to the injunction to convert: if it is made in the name of rationality, it is useless, inasmuch as Judaism does not teach specific metaphysical truths — it is a matter of two distinct orders of reality. It is because Jews are men before being Jews that, like every human being capable of thought, they can accede to such universal truths. Moreover — another consequence — if the recognition of the fundamental truths of natural religion depends on reason, then reasons alone — and not fear or hope, which act upon the impulse of desire — are capable of acting on the faculty of knowing. No State, no Church has any competence over convictions. Contrary to Dohm, this holds also for the Synagogue. By continuing to claim the power to excommunicate, the Jews would only be gathering up the crumbs of power left to the persecuted by the persecutor; they would only be copying the model proposed by the oppressor, and would manifest nothing but their own impotence: when one cannot take revenge against the oppressor, the spirit of vengeance turns back upon oneself, and one comes to exclude and persecute one another.¹⁶

Such arguments doubtless justify the decision not to convert to Christianity, by relying on universal notions. One might, therefore, interpret Mendelssohn’s approach as a call to abandon the Jewish liturgy in favor of a universalist reformulation of its creed — which is precisely what happened in the very generation that succeeded him. If, on the one hand, as Mendelssohn shows in Phaedon, the knowledge of eternal truths — and in particular the immortality of the soul — is immediately transposed into a disposition to do good, and if, on the other hand, such dispositions are found among all peoples, why continue to be an adherent of Judaism? Is a natural religion not enough? Now this is precisely what Mendelssohn wants to avoid. It is the distinction, taken up from Leibniz, between rational truth and historical truth or truth of fact that will allow Mendelssohn to justify the maintenance of the cult.

2 – Revelation as historical truth: the histories our own people recount to us

If the specificity of Judaism does not reside in a particular doctrinal content, it resides in a legislation — a system of commandments and prohibitions that address themselves not to man’s reason but to his faculty of acting — and in the tradition of Talmudic commentary. The bedrock of this whole is the revelation at Sinai, which did not unveil a natural religion and eternal truths but a positive religion. The divine word was, at that moment, a particular word, addressed to a particular people at a moment in time. It is attested as a historical truth: like all historical events, it occurred once and will never be reproduced, whereas metaphysical truths remain identical in eternity. If a revelation were to take place once more, even were it due to the same author, it would be a second revelation, distinct, as an event, from the first.

From a purely rational point of view, does this suffice? This is what S. Zac asks, when he writes:

“A revelation is not a historical fact like the others. It is a privileged fact, first because it commands a historical development and gives it a meaning, and then because it is a miraculous event signifying a supernatural manifestation of God in history here and now, and consequently a rupture of historical determinism contrary to the laws of nature. But then a rationalist like Mendelssohn ought to pose the question of the possibility of miracles.”¹⁷

Mendelssohn’s friends showed some reluctance on reading these theses. How could they “admit the authenticity of the Jewish revelation,” S. Zac continues, “when they call into question, in the name of reason, the Christian revelation”?¹⁸

The prescriptive character of the event proceeds, according to Mendelssohn, from a dimension of trust, productive of a “moral certitude,” distinct from rational certitude and, we would add, less solid than it. If revelation is a historical truth, it supposes a gap between the direct witnesses and those who will receive it on the basis of their narrative. And we are inclined to believe what we are told all the more as we trust the narrator: “The prestige of the narrator and his credibility are the only evidence in matters of history. Without testimony, we can be persuaded of no historical truth. Without authority, the truth of history disappears along with the fact itself.”¹⁹ On what, then, will it depend that the Jews continue to observe the commandments? On trust in the word of the fathers, which supposes the recognition of their authority. This word can take effect only if the structures of transmission of this trust are maintained. Mendelssohn develops in this regard a theory of the apparatuses of study in Judaism, in which each person is a living writing teaching the other virtue.²⁰ Likewise, the oral commentary on the law institutes a living bond from man to man, thus uniting “theory and life, wisdom and activity, speculation and social intercourse.”²¹ Contrary to rational certitude, which contains in itself its own truth and pertains to the interior liberty of each, this dimension supposes a social — communitarian, one would say nowadays — apparatus. Without necessarily wishing to overlook rational certitude, it directs attention toward a register of dependence that is not to be analyzed solely as a relation of domination to be overturned. Mendelssohn enunciates this dimension as the fact of a birth that binds the individual and appeals to his fidelity. A fidelity that concerns not humanity as a whole, but in this instance only the Jews. Taking up on his own account a rabbinical principle, he writes: “He who is not born into the law need not bind himself to the law; but he who is born into the law must live according to the law and die according to the law.”²²

To understand Mendelssohn’s position, one may compare it with that of Lessing, such as it appears in Nathan the Wise. While it is generally acknowledged that Lessing was thinking of his friend Mendelssohn in composing the character of Nathan, Nathan and Mendelssohn are very different from one another. Mendelssohn remains a practicing Jew, whereas Nathan is very little Jewish in this sense. Through this character, Lessing wishes to show that, in all religions, there can be privileged souls ahead of their time. Nathan has taught Recha, his adoptive daughter, that God belongs to no one, but that He has sown a “grain of reason” in the souls of men, thanks to which we know His existence without letting ourselves be led astray by the “illusions” about God propagated by the positive religions that each finds on the “clod of earth” where he was born. Recha was “created and raised to become the jewel of every house, of every faith.”²³ That it is a Jew who manifests these human qualities of reason and virtue allows Lessing to denounce the Christian dogmatism represented at the start by the Templar and above all by the patriarch, holder of the political authority of the Church and a declared obscurantist.²⁴ In the end, Lessing blurs all identities the better to underscore human unity: differences are but differences of “color, dress, bearing,” and they are negligible. Recha, Nathan’s daughter, is in reality a Christian whom he took in as a child. Not quite Christian, in fact: her mother — who is also the mother of the Templar, who thus turns out to be Recha’s brother — is German, but her father is none other than Assad, the brother of Sultan Saladin… In sum, Recha–Blanda von Filnek and the Templar–Curd von Filnek are German by their mother (née von Stauffen) and Muslim by their father (Assad, alias Wolf von Filnek).

In the scene where Saladin asks Nathan to teach him “which faith, which law (has) seemed to him more luminous,” just after the parable of the rings, Nathan could be Mendelssohn explaining that the three religions were founded on historical tradition. He added: “Whose good faith does one least doubt? That of one’s own people, is it not? Of those of our blood? Of those who from childhood have given us proofs of their love? How could I believe my fathers less than you do yours?”²⁵

But Lessing is not Mendelssohn: he would like to surpass this dependence that we did not choose (“neither you nor I chose our people”) in order to affirm the autonomy of the individual, which would culminate in the choice he might make of his fathers. One might also interpret the play as a reflection on paternity. There is no mother in the narrative; there are only fathers and children. Nathan’s wife and his seven children were massacred by the Christians. Recha–Blanda’s mother is dead. Nathan, although he is not her progenitor, can he be recognized as Recha’s father? Yes, Lessing answers, and he justifies this recognition in two ways. By giving primacy to education over nature, on the one hand: the educator is compared to the artist giving form to a block of matter that a slave would have abandoned on the deserted shore of life; thus, “in spite of the Christian who begot her, Recha’s true father is — will remain for eternity — the Jew.” By subordinating paternity to the choice of the child, on the other hand: to Recha’s question, “Does blood alone make the father?”, Saladin answers: no, blood does not make the father, “take me as a father.” In the same vein, Nathan says to the Templar: “would the brother of my daughter not be my child too, from the moment he wills it?”²⁶ Nature is not determining: just as, not having chosen our people, we can extract ourselves from it in order to consider ourselves and consider the other as a man, so too, despite the hereditary determinations, we can choose our fathers, affiliate ourselves voluntarily to ancestors. This autonomization alone would permit the bond of friendship with another man — which is what each is before being Jew or Christian.

Mendelssohn, by contrast, assumes this dependence as the limit of what we can choose, as that which is given to us, transmitted, prior to our reasonable decision, and which obligates not our reason but our sense of duty, of debt. He remains attached to Jewish orthodoxy in a manner that is not entirely justifiable rationally. His thought is marked by a dualism “that he upheld more for reasons of personal loyalty than by logic.”²⁷ There is thus a virtue of fidelity, which can go so far as to put in abeyance the demands of the critical appropriation of that to which we wish to remain faithful.

3 – The possible abuse of the Enlightenment: the histories others recount to themselves

Because they rest on testimony, historical truths are, however, fragile. To be sure, the bond seems to escape the human will — “what God has bound, man cannot unbind,” writes Mendelssohn, paraphrasing a passage from the Gospels. But, on the other hand, the heritage of revelation depends on the perennity of transmission and on the maintenance of the bond of authority by which the sons take example from the fathers. This is why Mendelssohn issues to his brethren the following injunction: “accommodate yourselves to the mores and the constitution of the country where you find yourselves, but hold unshakably to the religion of your fathers. Bear both burdens as well as you can!” The price to be paid for the abandonment of this religion is guilt: “If one of us passes over to the Christian religion, I do not understand how he can thereby liberate his conscience and believe himself thus freed from the yoke of the law.”²⁸ However, the word of the fathers does not thereby acquire the status of a rational certitude; it pertains to the category of historical truths, and it holds only insofar as there persists an unbroken relation of trust, itself buttressed by the permanence of a communal bond.

Not drawing its force from rational certitude, the word of the fathers may be ranged under the more general category of pre-judgment, in the sense of a judgment that asks not to be judged but to be accepted as valid. And the reasons for accepting it may be of a nature other than those that establish rational certitude. In order to justify to Lavater his refusal to polemicize against the Christian religion, Mendelssohn returns to a conclusion one would be tempted to draw from the Aufklärung: one must combat publicly the religious opinions or prejudices that one holds to be false. For him, on the contrary, not all prejudices are noxious to the same degree. There is a truth “solidly attached” to prejudice, he will write in What Does It Mean to Enlighten? If all that stokes fanaticism, hatred of the human, persecution and moral libertinism must be combated, one must recognize that certain principles, while being criticizable or even false from the point of view of rationality, nonetheless constitute the bases on which a people builds the system of its moral and social doctrine. Although they pertain to prejudice, to combat such doctrines would be to “overturn the ground without protecting the building, in order to find out whether it is solid.”²⁹ Mutatis mutandis, this argument applies to Judaism. By extending too far the grip of the rational critique of their religious principles, would the Jews not risk being cast into the void, losing their interpretive frameworks, and being delivered without bearings to the whirlwind of assimilation?³⁰

Resting on the fragility of a bond of trust when it is a matter of the histories our own people recount to us, historical truth also arouses Mendelssohn’s mistrust when these histories refer to the histories others recount to themselves. For reasons that pertain to his experience as a member of a defamed people, he knows to what extent the trust placed in the authority of the witness can convey truth just as much as falsehood. In the preface to Menasseh Ben Israel’s work, Mendelssohn dwells at length on the persistence of prejudice; he reminds his enlightened contemporaries of the mechanism of rumor, how in the age of the Enlightenment one is still afraid that the Jews will poison the wells, or again how one believes one knows that Count Leibarzt was poisoned by his Jewish physician Lippold. And how does one know it? Because, Mendelssohn writes, “it has been said so often, the writers of chronicles have repeated it so much, that the most reasonable man could not but make suppositions about the authenticity of this affair and hold the story to be true.”³¹ Thus a testimony can be false, but its repetition, its inscription in the chronicles, can render it plausible, and it will be held to be true. Moreover, prejudice is plastic: it adapts itself to each epoch by molding itself into every new formulation. Such is the extreme situation to which the trust placed in others can lead. Mendelssohn is, as a Jew, too well aware of the persistence of such mechanisms, of their effects maintained even in the “most reasonable” man, to place his trust in history. The fragility of prejudice with regard to rational certitude does not prevent its force when it is sustained by a trust toward the one who conveys it. Thus, in Jerusalem, Mendelssohn expresses his disagreement with the fine idea of his friend Lessing concerning the education of the human race, and thereby with his faith in a historical progress. The metaphor of educating history supposes that one agree to consider the human race as if it were “a single person,” susceptible of being led, like an individual, toward perfection or happiness, whereas it is, strictly speaking, composed of a multitude of persons. According to Mendelssohn, there is no overall progression, only “small oscillations”; every advance is always followed by a regression. “The result remains identical,” above all on the moral plane: there is as much good and evil in every epoch, neither more nor fewer virtuous or vicious individuals. Humanity does not become more moral; it becomes neither more nor less happy. “Each makes his way along his own path through life”; each must seek his way independently of the whole, seek perfection at his own level, even if it means being but a meteor whose passage over the earth brings no improvement to the whole.³²

After Mendelssohn, “Jewish philosophy” will be, according to G. Bensussan, traversed by the dilemma of a “double impossibility, which signifies itself <…> in the articulation of the necessity of having to question the traditional religious practices and the necessity of having to recognize their enduring force beyond their rational critical grasp.”³³ This last demand is present in Mendelssohn, and it pertains to the fidelity that also leads him to limit the first questioning — even though he does not hesitate to defend the necessity of reforms of the Jewish cult, and even though he urges that one no longer consider as prescriptive the rules supposing life in Judea, the temple, and the institution of the priests.³⁴ Fidelity, as Mendelssohn enunciates it, also supposes — as we have seen — the maintenance of the structures of authority and of transmission. The equilibrium he attempted to maintain was, however, very quickly undermined, as Leo Strauss would indicate, much later, apropos of religious Zionism: “What will those Jews do who cannot believe as their ancestors believed?” There remains, then, fidelity, but understood solely as a moral posture. Leo Strauss continues: “It is necessary to accept one’s past. This means that, of this undeniable necessity, one must make a virtue. The virtue in question is fidelity, loyalty, piety in the old Latin sense of the word pietas. The necessity of taking this step follows from the sole alternative, which is to deny one’s origin, one’s past, one’s heritage. A solution that is possible only by means of a shameful act is a shameful solution.”³⁵ An individual moral posture that would no longer be sustained by a social structure, from the moment when — a consequence of political emancipation — priority is demanded for citizen allegiance.

Without being able — or wishing — like Mendelssohn always to buttress fidelity on something other than the perennity of the cult, we can, on the basis of his history, recognize situations that — all proportions kept — still concern us. Do we not at times encounter circumstances in which we decide to put our criticisms in abeyance? To be sure, we formulate them, but we feel a reluctance to express them publicly, when they join a chorus of malevolent criticisms of the group to which, despite citizen equality, we feel bound by channels of fidelity other than those of the cult. A very uncomfortable position, all the more so as it is often accompanied by an impossibility of identifying with the communal consensus, even by a feeling of total estrangement, or even of profound disagreement with regard to what is defended there, in private but above all in public. At what moment does the weight of fidelity tip over into consent to the intellectual oppression that structures the minority group, the guarantor of the transmission of its common history? At what moment, contrary to Mendelssohn, must one take the risk of saying what seems to us true or just, even if certain wolves might be tempted to seize on our words in order to make us howl along with them?

Notes