Moses Mendelssohn: The Berlin Dreamer

By Alex Gordon

HAIFA, Israel — In 1783, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing’s play “Nathan the Wise” premiered at the Berlin Theater. The play was a literary and theatrical sensation and a shock to Germany, and perhaps to the entire Christian world. Hitherto Jews had been considered and portrayed as immoral and despicable people. Lessing’s character Nathan, a resident of Jerusalem during the Crusade, is an intelligent, noble, far-sighted man. Lessing’s play was banned in Frankfurt and Vienna and soon went off the stage. It was only 18 years later that it was staged at the Weimar Theatre (1801) by Goethe and Schiller, but by that time the author and his friend, the prototype of the protagonist, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, were no longer alive.

Lessing argues through Nathan that what matters in religion is not faith but moral behavior. His character voices the principles of the Enlightenment: tolerance, fraternity, and love for all mankind, not just fellow believers and tribesmen. Even Voltaire’s Candide did not provoke as much fury in German Christian society as Nathan the Wise. The reaction of the Jews to the play was just the opposite. They saw on the stage of the German theater a proud Jew with independent views, a representative of an ancient culture. They mistakenly thought that the play was almost a bill of civil rights, although it was only a literary work, a moral anomaly, a rare deviation from German attitudes toward the Jewish people. Nathan’s prototype, Moses Mendelssohn, heir to a rich Jewish culture, a swarthy hunchback of short stature, became the ruler of the German intellectual elite.

Moses Mendelssohn (1729 – 1786), son of a Torah scribe, philosopher, and thinker, defeated his famous colleague Immanuel Kant in a competition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Ihe Academy awarded Mendelssohn first prize for his essay “Testimonies in the Metaphysical Sciences” (Kant received second prize). The religious Jew Moses Mendelssohn, who was not educated at German universities, captivated the great German writers and thinkers: Lessing and Kant, Schiller and Goethe, bowed before his talent.

Goethe visited Berlin in May 1778 and “did not meet any poet, but only Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn was for Kant “the most important person.” Kant wanted “to keep in constant touch with such a man of such a mild and lively character and such a bright head.” The Prussian Academy of Sciences unanimously elected Mendelssohn, the “German Socrates,” as academician, but Frederick the Second did not approve the election. The president of the Academy, the famous French mathematician and astronomer Pierre-Louis de Mauperthuis submitted a second request for Mendelssohn’s election, but the king vetoed it. Mauperthuis stated that the only thing Mendelssohn lacked to join the Academy was foreskin.

In his book “Jerusalem” (1783), Mendelssohn presented a version of Jewish life consistent with Enlightenment ideas: one could be an observant Jew and an enlightened German. He believed that Jews were a cultural, religious, but not a national group. Mendelssohn continued to observe the commandments of the religion, but demanded a change in orthodox Judaism. In his view, Orthodox Jews were losing their creative impulse and were too busy with passive self-pitying instead of action. He criticized Jews and antisemites. To the Jews he said, “Accept the customs and laws of the country in which you live, but hold fast to the faith of your fathers.” To those who opposed the Jews he said, “You tie our hands and accuse us of not being able to move them.” He demanded that Jews dress like Germans and insisted on limiting the power of rabbis. He criticized the Jewish establishment for neglecting secular education. He believed that only religious education for young people weakened the nation. He was convinced that isolation from the new was doing German Jews great harm.

Mendelssohn believed that Jews could no longer be a nation within a nation. An adherent of the precepts of the Jewish religion, Mendelssohn believed that orthodox Jewishness prevented the people from becoming full members of civilized society and that the Jews could not afford to become petrified in their national development. In his view, traditional Jewry was losing its creative potential by closing itself off to the Jewish environment. According to Mendelssohn, genuine faith “recognizes no authority but logical conviction, […] rationalism is the way to happiness.” Rationalism, in his view, does not allow Jews to be detached from the cultural values of the non-Jewish world. Mendelssohn argued that the isolation of Jewry from German culture impoverishes not only Jews but also Germans.

When his book “Jerusalem” appeared, Kant wrote that the author was a unique thinker, for he was able to think simultaneously about the benefits of the German and Jewish peoples. After the publication of Jerusalem, Mendelssohn received a letter full of praise from Kant, in which he expressed his belief that such free-thinking, deep and original thinking did not exist in any other religion. Kant felt that Mendelssohn was far ahead of all Christian ideologues. He expressed the hope that Christian churches would follow the example of Moses Mendelssohn, the ideologue of Judaism.

In “Jerusalem,” Mendelssohn demanded the separation of religion from the state. This restored the Jewish communities in Germany against him, who weighed Mendelssohn’s excommunication along the lines of the Amsterdam community that expelled Spinoza. Mendelssohn’s fame, however, was so great that the rabbis dared not ostracize him.

The Jewish enlightenment, Haskalah, advocated a synthesis of Jewish culture in the world. The idea was that a Jew could remain a Jew and enjoy the civil rights of his country of residence, but this required opening the community to non-religious education. Mendelssohn not only demanded the inclusion of secular sciences in the curriculum of young people, but also believed that only the most gifted boys should study the Mishnah and Talmud. Almost everything he wrote in German and Hebrew during the last 17 years of his life was intended to reform Jewish life in Germany. He called for the replacement of sacred texts in Yiddish with texts in Hebrew. He believed that crude translations into Yiddish distorted the beautiful poetics and depth of the original Hebrew. He persuaded the Jews to revive Hebrew and at the same time to use German, which he believed would liberate, uplift Jews and lead them out of the ghetto. He translated the Bible into his contemporary German (1778). German Jews, including his own children, rejected Hebrew and gravitated toward German. By translating the Bible into German he wanted to acquaint his children with the Book.

Mendelssohn was the forerunner of Jewish liberalism, which was the result of the desire of Jews to shed the traditional image of the inhabitant of the locality or ghetto, who read and studied one single book, the one and only Book. Jewish liberalism had two conflicting objectives: 1) to “improve” and “modernize” the Jew by showing his “normality” and “equality” to non-Jews, and 2) not to lose the actual essence of Jewishness, which, by definition, must not be altered. In Germany, Jewish liberalism became associated with Reformism in Judaism and then with indifference to religion and with the sanctioned 1876 law of withdrawal from the Jewish community without obligation to join another religious community. Jewish liberalism began with the Haskalah movement, which reconsidered traditional national values and freed itself from what was considered “medieval” in Judaism. Calls for the assimilation of Jewish culture in the world gave rise to the assimilation of German Jews in German society. Mendelssohn’s liberalism led to radical and most likely unexpected and unpleasant results: four of his six children and eight of his nine grandchildren were baptized.

The German nationalists believed that the Jews were participating in a masquerade, dressing up as Germans, playing the role of patriots and stealing the fatherland from them. They were not interested in the second part of the tragic equation — the withdrawal of Jews from their national home, the abandonment of the solidarity and community that served to protect Jews from an alien and hostile environment. Enlightenment and emancipation individualized the Jew, denying him a desirable self and depriving him of a national “we,” a collective being. The dual way of life led to a double defeat for Jews. Non-Jewish society treated rising, masking, mimicking Jews with mistrust and dislike. Jews began to treat their people worse and worse.

The Jewish world of tradition, community, locality, ghetto, which had protected the Jew, was crumbling. The Jew found himself alone with an alien and hostile non-Jewish world. He cut off his roots and turned himself into a man of nowhere, a wannabe imitator of German culture. Even the great poet Heinrich Heine was rejected by many Germans as a national poet. The bifurcation of the soul of the people required by Moses Mendelssohn to normalize Jewish life created the illusion of equality.

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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.