Moses Mendelssohn and the Haskalah
There came up out of Dessau a hunched scholar, his back bent from a childhood spent over the page, and he set his face toward Berlin. The gatekeeper of the Rosenthaler Tor wrote in his ledger that on the sixth day of…
Biblical Narrative
There came up out of Dessau a hunched scholar, his back bent from a childhood spent over the page, and he set his face toward Berlin. The gatekeeper of the Rosenthaler Tor wrote in his ledger that on the sixth day of the month Elul in the year five thousand five hundred and three, there entered the city six oxen, seven swine, and one Jew named Moses. The Jew walked through the gate alone, with a single book under his arm, and the kingdom of Prussia did not yet know that a third Moses had come.
He learned the German tongue in secret, then Latin, then Greek, then the philosophy of Wolff and Leibniz. The Christian scholars of Berlin came to his door — Lessing, Nicolai, the great minds of the German Enlightenment — and they sat with him as equals. He did not lay aside his tefillin. He did not eat at their tables what was forbidden. He kept the Sabbath in a city that worked on the Sabbath. And in his heart he said: a Jew may walk in the wisdom of the nations and remain a Jew.
He took the Five Books of Moses and rendered them into pure German, that the children of Israel locked in the broken Yiddish of the ghetto might step into the language of the kingdom and not lose their Torah on the way. He set beside the German a new Hebrew commentary, the Bi'ur, that the path back would also remain open. The orthodox of Frankfurt and Altona thundered against him; the rabbis cursed his translation; some communities burned it. But the youth read it by candlelight, and a wind began to move.
When the Christian preacher Lavater pressed him in the year five thousand five hundred and thirty-nine to convert or to refute Christianity in public, he answered with restraint and with wounded dignity, and he wrote afterward the book Jerusalem, in which he said: the state may compel the deed, but no power on earth may compel the conscience. Religion belongs to the heart and to God alone. So spoke Moses Mendelssohn, and from his table descended both the path of emancipation and the path of assimilation, and the Jewish world has not stopped arguing which of them was the legacy.
Adopt the customs and the constitution of the land in which you find yourself, but be steadfast also in the faith of your fathers.Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem (1783)
Archaeology · History · Genetics
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the central figure of the Berlin Haskalah, the Jewish counterpart to the German Aufklarung. David Sorkin's Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (California, 1996) and Allan Arkush's Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (SUNY, 1994) supply the dominant scholarly accounts. Born in Dessau to a Torah scribe, Mendelssohn moved to Berlin in 1743 to follow his teacher Rabbi David Frankel; he supported himself first as a tutor and later as bookkeeper and partner in the Bernhard silk firm.
His philosophical reputation in the Christian republic of letters rested on prize essays and on Phadon (1767), a German rewriting of Plato's dialogue on the immortality of the soul that went through fifteen editions and earned him the epithet the German Socrates. He was elected to the Berlin Academy in 1771, but Frederick the Great vetoed the appointment because Mendelssohn was a Jew. The episode crystallized for European intellectuals the contradiction between Enlightenment universalism and the legal disabilities still imposed on Jews.
Mendelssohn's Jewish program had three pillars. First, the German Pentateuch translation (Berlin, 1780–1783), printed in Hebrew letters with a Hebrew commentary called the Bi'ur, edited with Solomon Dubno, Naphtali Herz Wessely and Aaron Jaroslav. Second, the campaign for civil emancipation, articulated in the preface to his German edition of Manasseh ben Israel's Vindiciae Judaeorum (1782) and developed by his colleague Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der Juden (1781). Third, the philosophical treatise Jerusalem, oder uber religiose Macht und Judentum (1783), which argued that Judaism is revealed legislation rather than revealed doctrine, and therefore compatible with universal natural religion.
The traditionalist response was severe. Rabbi Ezekiel Landau of Prague condemned the Bi'ur in 1779; Rabbi Raphael Cohen of Altona issued a herem; the Vilna Gaon's circle treated the new German-reading youth as a danger to the chain of tradition. Yet within a generation the Haskalah had spread from Berlin to Konigsberg, Breslau, Vienna and ultimately to Galicia and Russia, where the movement took its sharpest form in the journals Ha-Me'asef (1783) and later Ha-Shahar (1868). The historian Shmuel Feiner's The Jewish Enlightenment (Pennsylvania, 2004) traces the institutional spread.
Mendelssohn's project was to demonstrate that a Jew could be at once fully a German citizen and fully a Jew — and the failure of that project to convince Christian Europe is the unfinished business of modern Jewish history.Shmuel Feiner, The Jewish Enlightenment (2004)