7 - Mendelssohn

Summary

Moses Mendelssohn was born in Germany in 1729 and like Spinoza received a traditional Jewish education, to which was added liberal doses of Maimonides. Like Spinoza, he achieved a high level of secular education and produced philosophical and literary work which had a very wide circulation among readers of all faiths. Mendelssohn was an important figure in the German Enlightenment, although not an uncritical member of that movement. He advocated that the Jewish community acquire German, abandon Yiddish and enter as far as possible into the civil life of German society. This was not to be at the cost of religion, though, which he maintained as vitally important. Mendelssohn had a dual role to perform. In the first place he had to persuade the Germans that the Jews were capable of performing an acceptable role within Germany, and that the restrictions which lay upon them should be removed. He tried to accomplish this by producing work in German prose of an excellent standard and by entering into a whole range of intellectual debates where one's religious provenance was irrelevant. He hoped in this way to demonstrate to German society that it was possible to combine Jewishness with the ordinary civil and intellectual virtues of German life. On the other hand, he had to persuade the Jewish community to reconcile its religion with ordinary civil life, to learn the secular language of German and to enter into the concerns of the modern European. One of the routes to this emancipation of the Jewish community was taken by Mendelssohn to be the translation of the Bible into German, a task which he performed in an exceptionally interesting way.