Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn (born September 6, 1729, Dessau, Anhalt [Germany]—died January 4, 1786, Berlin, Prussia) was a German-Jewish philosopher, critic, and Bible translator and commentator who also greatly contributed to the efforts of Jews to assimilate to the German bourgeoisie.

The son of an impoverished scribe named Menachem Mendel Dessau, he was known in Jewish circles as Moses Dessau but wrote as Mendelssohn, from the Hebrew ben Mendel (“the Son of Mendel”). His own choice of the German name Mendelssohn over the Hebrew equivalent reflected the same acculturation to German life that he advocated for other Jews. In 1743 he moved to Berlin, where he studied the thought of the English philosopher John Locke and the German thinkers Gottfried von Leibniz and Christian von Wolff.

In 1750 Mendelssohn became tutor to the children of the silk manufacturer Issak Bernhard, who in 1754 took Mendelssohn into his business. The same year, he met a major German playwright, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, who had portrayed a noble Jew in his play Die Juden (1749; “The Jews”) and came to see Mendelssohn as the realization of his ideal. Subsequently, Lessing modeled the central figure of his drama Nathan der Weise (1779; Nathan the Wise, 1781) after Mendelssohn, whose wisdom had caused him to be known as “the German Socrates.” Mendelssohn’s first work, praising Leibniz, was printed with Lessing’s help as Philosophische Gespräche (1755; “Philosophical Speeches”). That year Mendelssohn also published his Briefe über die Empfindungen (“Letters on Feeling”), stressing the spiritual significance of feelings.

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Philosophy 101

In 1763 Mendelssohn won the prize of the Prussian Academy of Arts in a literary contest; and as a result King Frederick the Great of Prussia was persuaded to exempt Mendelssohn from the disabilities to which Jews were customarily subjected. Mendelssohn’s winning essay compared the demonstrability of metaphysical propositions with that of mathematical ones and was the first to be printed under his own name (1764). His most celebrated work, Phädon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele (1767; “Phaedo, or on the Immortality of the Soul”), defended the immortality of the soul against the materialism prevalent in his day; his title reflects his respect for Plato’s Phaedo.

In 1771 Mendelssohn experienced a nervous breakdown as the result of an intense dispute over Christianity with the Swiss theologian Johan Kaspar Lavater, who two years earlier had sent him his own translation of a work by his compatriot Charles Bonnet. In his dedication, Lavater had challenged Mendelssohn to become a Christian unless he could refute Bonnet’s arguments for Christianity. Although Mendelssohn deplored religious controversy, he felt compelled to reaffirm his Judaism. The strain was relaxed only when he began a translation of the Psalms in 1774. He next embarked on a project designed to help Jews relate their own religious tradition to German culture—a version of the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, written in German but printed in Hebrew characters (1780–83).

At the same time, he became involved in a new controversy that centered on the doctrine of excommunication. The conflict arose when his friend Christian Wilhelm von Dohm agreed to compose a petition for the Jews of Alsace, who originally had sought Mendelssohn’s personal intervention for their emancipation. Dohm’s Über die bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781; “On the Civil Improvement of the Jews”) pleaded for emancipation but, paradoxically, added that the state should uphold the synagogue’s right to excommunicate its members. To combat the resulting hostility to Dohm’s book, Mendelssohn denounced excommunication in his preface (1782) to a German translation of Vindiciae Judaeorum (“Vindication of the Jews”) by Manasseh ben Israel. After an anonymous author accused him of subverting an essential part of Jewish law, Mendelssohn wrote Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum (1783; “Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism”). This work held that force may be used by the state to control actions only; thoughts are inviolable by both church and state.

A final controversy, revolving around allegations that Lessing had supported the pantheism of Benedict de Spinoza, engaged Mendelssohn in a defense of Lessing, while he wrote his last work, Morgenstunden (1785; “Morning Hours”), in support of the theism of Leibniz. His collected works, which fill seven volumes, were published in 1843–45.

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Through his own example Mendelssohn showed that it was possible to combine Judaism with the rationalism of the Enlightenment. He was accordingly one of the initiators and principal voices of the Haskala (“Jewish Enlightenment”), which helped bring Jews into the mainstream of modern European culture. Through his advocacy of religious toleration and through the prestige of his own intellectual accomplishments, Mendelssohn did much to further the emancipation of the Jews from prevailing social, cultural, political, and economic restrictions in Germany. His son Abraham was the father of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.