A Rational Religion: The Judaism of Moses Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn is as important a figure in the history of European philosophy as he is in that of Jewish thought¹. In France and Germany, foundations bear his name; in Berlin and Dessau museums honour him and prizes celebrate him. He naturally has a collection of studies dedicated to himself and his family, who form part of the cultural aristocracy of Prussia!

Our own country has not stood apart, echoing the Comte de Mirabeau, who evoked him in these terms: “A man cast by nature into the bosom of a debased horde, born without any kind of fortune, with a feeble and even infirm temperament, a timid character, a perhaps excessive gentleness, chained all his life to an almost mechanical profession, raised himself to the rank of the greatest writers that this century has seen born in Germany. Among the first, if not the first, he gave to a language that was not even his own, clarity, cadence, grace, energy. The Germans have conferred upon him the title of modern Plato; a public monument is destined for him in the fatherland that his successes—where the laws were lacking—have won for him. More remarkable still by his virtues than by his talents, he influenced his nation and perhaps to a certain point the country where fate had fixed him, through the ascendancy of a profound reason and of a conduct so pure that bigotry and calumny have not even tarnished it… This man, this Jewish philosopher deserves some curiosity”². Indeed, he is a recognised philosopher, a redoubtable literary critic, a translator of the Bible, and finally at the origin of a political effect: the emancipation of the Jews in Europe. His work—around thirty volumes in Hebrew and German—now complete, serves all these fields, and several disciplines. This is also what has protected him somewhat from hasty exegetes and from those who absolutely insisted on driving him under the Caudine Forks of a European eighteenth century diffracted into another “gang of four”: Montesquieu, Rousseau, Diderot, and Voltaire. He was actually familiar with their works—he even translated Jean-Jacques Rousseau—but he is first of all a representative of the Aufklärung, something other than the French Enlightenment. His influence in the Jewish and even Hebraic world is today the object of studies contextualised by those bearing on the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment.

Coming from Dessau, where he was born in 1729 in Anhalt, he settled in Berlin in 1743, which was rapidly to become a great intellectual metropolis. Born the same year as Lessing, who immortalised him in Nathan der Weise (Nathan the Wise), he died in 1786, like the King of Prussia, Frederick II, the so-called “Philosopher King,” but more accurately a Judeophobe.

He published in 1755 Philosophische Gespräche (Philosophical Dialogues), Briefe über die Empfindungen (Letters on the Sensations), as well as a translation of Rousseau’s Second Discourse (1756), and then won—ahead of Kant, who had to settle for a runner-up’s mention in 1763—the prize of the class of speculative philosophy of the Royal Academy of Sciences and Belles-Lettres of Berlin: the question posed by the text was the following: “It is asked whether metaphysical truths in general, and the first principles of natural theology and morality in particular, are susceptible of the same evidence as mathematical truths, and, in case they are not, what is the nature of their certainty, to what degree it may attain, and whether this degree suffices for conviction.”

The stupefaction obviously exceeded German academic circles, but it was his Phaedon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (Phaedo, or On the Immortality of the Soul, 1767) that assured him his immense European reputation as early as the eighteenth century; it was translated into nearly ten languages during the century of its publication. The aim was to use the eponymous Socratic dialogue to combat the materialism and atheism that were very much present in Berlin, where it is known that Frederick had assembled philosophers. It was also necessary to demonstrate the immortality of the soul afresh, using the German philosophy of the time. It was also one of the first works written in German at a time when the thinkers of the period were publishing chiefly in Latin or in French.

Mendelssohn is also at the origin of the creation of the German philosophical lexicon. His style was very quickly appreciated, since Kant wrote in the preface to his Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science (1783): “It is certainly not given to everyone to write with as much subtlety and yet also as much charm as David Hume, or with as much profundity and at the same time as much elegance as Moses Mendelssohn.”

He was then at the centre of mid-century German philosophy when a fanatic Swiss chiliast, Johann Kaspar Lavater, quite astonished to encounter such a soul, asked him in 1769, more or less in roundabout fashion, to convert. This debate inflamed Germany and many took Mendelssohn’s side! It was of course a quasi-organic shock for Mendelssohn, who took a long time to recover from it. While continuing his work as philosopher and prose writer, he begins to translate the Bible, or rather the books of the Torah. It was not, he thought, fitting that these German versions and commentaries on Judaism should remain solely in the hands of Christian Hebraists—even when professors and Protestants, often excellent orientalists besides. Mendelssohn offers a new translation in High German with Hebrew letters between 1778 and 1783, also offering a new version of the Psalms (1783), this time in Latin characters. Since the Jews had to integrate, they had to learn German; for that purpose, the Bible was an ideal vehicle for a community still largely orthodox. He did even more: he flanked his translation with commentaries, in Hebrew, by his own pen and by certain collaborators, whom he did not hesitate at times to chide! It is also his attraction to Hebrew that led him not to attack, but to be wary of, Yiddish, wishing to write either in Hebrew or in German, but without a “mixture of languages”—which ensured him an ambivalent reputation in the history of subsequent Jewish literature. As well as a saying attributed to him but which he never uttered: “Be a Jew at home and a citizen outside,” which actually comes from Gordon.

His last great deed is his active participation in the reflection on the political emancipation of the Jews. He will be read, and used, by the abbé Henri Grégoire, Zalkind Hourwitz, and the lawyer Claude-Antoine Thiery, who will share the famous prizes of the competition of the Academy of Metz in 1787³. He collaborates very closely with a senior Prussian official, Christian Wilhelm von Dohm, Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (On the Civic Improvement of the Jews, 1781/1783)⁴. He shows very clearly that there is no question of abandoning the respect of the law for a hypothetical tolerance that ill conceals a will to conversion, in the longer term!

Before his precipitate death, he completed a treatise of metaphysics, Morgenstunden. Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (Morning Hours. Lectures on the Existence of God), part of which sought to save his friend Lessing, who had been accused by the Christian philosopher and theologian Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi of Spinozistic sympathies—still a veritable death sentence at the time. And since Lessing—who had died in 1781, the year of the Critique of Pure Reason—could not defend himself, a new polemic was thus born: the debate on pantheism, which saw Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and many others enter the lists. The Aufklärung and the Enlightenment—in short, reason—were done for, and Romanticism was taking its place.

Several texts now available in French are important for attempting to summarise his religious thought: the reply to Lavater, the exchange with Rabbi Jacob Emden, and the introduction to the translation of the Bible, Or li-netiva, Light upon the Path (Ps. 110, 105)⁵. And of course Jerusalem. Religious Power and Judaism (1783)⁶, which had also impressed Mirabeau!

“Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem, whose second part contains very curious developments on the Jewish religion, or, if one prefers, on the manner in which he conceived it, deserves to be translated into all the languages of Europe” (cited p. 28).

Mendelssohn’s Hebrew correspondence is fascinating: first of all by his use of this language, he opens the path of the Hebrew Haskala—which was no small matter. How was one to use the ancient Scripture—that of the Bible, which he continued to believe inspired, of the Talmuds and of the Responsa—to develop a thought born with and in the modern world, without repeating ad nauseam the (constructed) opposition between Jerusalem and Athens? The same wager will be found again at the founding of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 1925, where it was very quickly necessary to translate a series of works that the founders still read in the original language, but which had to be made available without delay to the new generations. Among the themes on which he exchanges, notably with Rabbi Jacob Emden, one of the great authorities of the time, is that of Noahidism, which has recurred down to our own day.

What is striking, first of all, is the stupefying knowledge that Mendelssohn had of tradition, which he made discreet use of in his “German” works. Next he cites Maimonides, the tutelary philosopher of the Enlightenment and of the Haskala, who teaches that the pious of the nations must “accept the seven Noahide commandments and accomplish them for the reason that the Holy One, blessed be He, prescribed them to them in the Torah; that he made known to us, through the intermediary of Moses, that the Noahides received the order from time immemorial.” The letter of 26 October 1773 is signed your humble Moses of Dessau. Let us recall that the Noahides refer to Genesis 2,16.

For Maimonides: “Whoever accepts the seven commandments, takes care to accomplish them, is a pious one of the nations, he has a part in the world to come; on the condition, however, that he accept and accomplish them because the Holy One, blessed be He, prescribed them (to the Noahides) in the Torah and that he made known to us through the intermediary of Moses that the Noahides received the order from time immemorial.” (pp. 71-72).

The best-known passage of Jerusalem is the following: It is true, I recognise no other eternal truths than those that can be not only comprehensible by human reason, but also expounded and verified by human forces. (…) I believe that Judaism knows no revealed religion in the sense in which the Christians understand it. The Israelites have a divine legislation: laws, injunctions, commandments, rules of life, teaching of the will of God concerning the manner in which they must behave in order to obtain temporal and eternal felicity (…), but to us have not been revealed doctrines, salvific truths, or reasonable universal axioms. The Eternal revealed the latter to us, as to other men, at all times, through nature and things, never through speech and written signs (pp. 122-123).

He is perfectly conscious of this novelty: “I fear that this will astonish and seem new and harsh to certain readers. One has never paid attention to this difference; one has taken a supernatural legislation for a supernatural religious revelation, and one has spoken of Judaism as if it were simply an older revelation of religious propositions and doctrines necessary to salvation.” Let us recall that the precepts are the following: prohibition of murder, of idolatry, of blasphemy, of sexual relations with close relatives, of the consumption of a limb still living, and a duty: to install a legal system in order to have the laws respected. He therefore establishes a difference between eternal truths (necessary or contingent) and temporal, historical truths. To make sure we have understood, he underlines: “I therefore do not believe that the forces of human reason are insufficient to persuade it of the eternal truths indispensable to human felicity, and, consequently, that God had to reveal them to it in a supernatural manner” (p. 128).

Therefore “according to the concepts of true Judaism, all the inhabitants of the earth are called to felicity; and the means to obtain it are as widespread as humanity itself, administered with the same clemency as the means of sheltering oneself from hunger and other natural needs” (p. 129). His religious thought also founded a theory of tolerance unique in his time: “Judaism prides itself on no exclusive revelation of eternal truths indispensable to happiness; it is not a revealed religion in the sense in which one usually takes this term. A revealed religion is one thing, a revealed legislation is another.” His illustration is clear: “The voice that made itself heard on Sinai on that great day did not say: ‘I am the Eternal thy God, the necessary and autonomous being who is all-powerful and omniscient, the one who rewards men according to their acts in a future life.’ This concerns universal human religion, not Judaism. (…)” (p. 133). It may even concern philosophy. “The divine voice cried out: ‘I am the Eternal thy God, who brought thee out of Egypt, a house of bondage.’ A historical truth on which the legislation of this people was to be built, and according to which laws were to be revealed: commandments, prescriptions; but no eternal religious truth” (p. 134). One never says: you must believe or not believe, but you must do or not do. And non-Jews must respect the commandments of the Noahides and will therefore also be saved.

A consequence is then obvious: “Ancient Judaism has no symbolic books, no articles of faith. No one was to swear on symbols, no one was sworn to articles of faith; we have no idea of what is called a religious oath, and according to the spirit of true Judaism we must consider such an oath as inadmissible.” And we know the different catalogues proposed by Maimonides, Crescas, Albo, Abrabanel. None is more than a description or a mnemonic device for a prayer (Yigdal). But a debate was launched which long occupied (down to today?) the thinkers of Judaism: does it have dogmas?⁷

He then proposes an interpretation of ceremonial law as “a kind of living writing that awakens the spirit and the heart (it is) full of meaning and ceaselessly provokes observation and gives rise and occasion to oral teaching” (p. 110).

Thus his religious thought is characterised by two moments: doctrines and propositions that are eternal truths, historical truths containing the foundation of the national bond, and prescriptions, laws, precepts, and rules of life for Judaism. One last caveat:

“And even today, no wiser counsel can be given to the tribe of Jacob than this: come to terms with the customs and constitution of the country where you find yourselves, but hold unshakably to the religion of your fathers. Bear both burdens as best you can!” And as if he had wished to speak to a great part of his family, who abandoned Judaism: “In reality, I do not see how those who are born into the tribe of Jacob can rid themselves of the law in any manner whatsoever that would be scrupulous.”

Kant was very impressed by this book, as he confided to one of his disciples: “Mr. Friedländer will tell you how much, in reading your Jerusalem, I admired its penetration, subtlety, and intelligence. I consider this book to be the proclamation of a great reform—slow indeed in its institution and progress—which will concern not only your nation, but others as well. You have been able to reconcile your religion with such a liberty of conscience as one would never have thought possible from it, and of which no other can boast. You have at the same time expounded the necessity of an unlimited liberty of conscience with regard 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 conscience or weigh upon it; which cannot fail at last to unite men with regard to the essential points of religion” (letter of 16 August 1783).

The following year, they will find themselves once again in a situation of dialogue, replying within a few weeks’ interval to the question that was a cardinal moment of the century, on the meaning and the practice of the Enlightenment.⁸

It is in fact a double orthodoxy—to Judaism and to the thought of Leibniz—that founded an originality!

Not only does Mendelssohn save universalism without renouncing the notion of election (Eli Schonfeld), but he can also harmonise without difficulty the demand and the pride of reason with the reasoned and well-founded practice of the commandments. This is still his message today.