HAIFA, Israel — The struggle for equal rights for Jews began with the writings of the philosopher and educator Moses Mendelssohn. In his book Jerusalem (1783) he described his version of Jewish life: one must be a Jew who observes the commandments and an enlightened German; Jews are a cultural, religious, but not a national group. Much of his family did not live up to his moral imperative: four of his six children and eight of his nine grandchildren were baptized.
Among the constellation of brilliantly emancipated Jews, the star of the composer, conductor and pianist Felix Mendelssohn, grandson of the philosopher, shone brightly. He was a widely educated, financially secure man, surrounded by the strong support of his parents, wife, uncle, brother, and sisters. He was an expert in literature and philosophy, a strong gymnast, a good swimmer and fencer, an experienced horseman, a skilled dancer and a handsome man, a devoted husband and loving father and an unusually kind, sensitive and benevolent man. He was a successful and celebrated musician in life, unlike many prominent fellow composers who earned only posthumous fame. He was a romantic. His “Concerto in E minor for Violin and Orchestra,” written in 1844, is saturated with the spirit of romanticism, full of lyricism, grace, tunefulness, and beauty. The successful and celebrated Felix Mendelssohn burned through 38 years in the fire of his creativity.
The romantic sentiments of German Jews during the struggle for emancipation, which colored their hopes for equality, were overshadowed by bouts of German nationalism. The University of Würzburg made history not only because of its 13 Nobel laureates, but also because of the Jewish pogroms instigated by its students. During an academic ceremony, a mob of students attacked an old professor who called for equal rights for Jews. The students were joined by small merchants, small business rivals of the Jews.
On August 2, 1819, in Würzburg, a mob of workers, artisans, merchants, and students stormed stores owned by Jews. The rioters beat the Jews with shouts of “Hep-Hep, Death to the Jews!” (“Hep-Hep! Jude verreck!” The verb verreck – to die – refers only to animals), looted and destroyed stores. The shouts of “Hep-Hep” come from the Latin abbreviation Hierosolyma est Perdita, (Jerusalem has fallen) and echoed the shouts of the Roman soldiers besieging Jerusalem in 70 and the Crusader slogan they shouted during the Crusades. Two Jews were killed, about 20 wounded. The authorities suppressed the riots to prevent the massacre. About 400 Jews of the city were forced to flee and live for several days in the surrounding villages in huts, like their ancestors upon leaving Egypt. The pogroms spread to other towns and villages in Bavaria, and from there to the center and southwest of Germany. Such persecution of the Jews had not been seen since the Middle Ages. On August 18, 1819, Friedrich Schlegel, writer and philosopher, wrote to his wife Dorothea, daughter of Moses Mendelssohn and aunt of the composer Felix Mendelssohn, that the events taking place were a return to the dark Middle Ages. Mendelssohn was 10 years old in 1819. As the young musician was walking down a Berlin street, a young Christian boy spat in his face and said: “Hep- Hep, Jew!”
On March 21, 1816, 7-year-old Felix Mendelssohn was baptized as a Lutheran. His father Abraham and mother Leah were baptized in 1822. Moses Mendelson’s eldest son, the banker Abraham Mendelson, decided to be baptized and, secretly from his mother, raised his children in the Protestant faith, the majority religion. He sweetened his departure from the faith of his fathers with the glory of a son-composer: “I used to be my father’s son, now I am my son’s father.” Abraham and Leah’s entire family began to carry the double Mendelssohn-Bartholdy surname with the intention of eventually removing the Jewish part of the surname. Abraham Mendelssohn took the last name Bartholdy, which was to replace the last name Mendelssohn. In a letter to his son, Abraham convinced Felix that adopting the surname Bartholdi demonstrated a break with the traditions of his father Moses, a religious Jew, and an adherence to an advanced Christian culture: “There cannot be a Christian Mendelson just as there cannot be a Jewish Confucius.” Abraham regarded Judaism as “an obsolete, distorted and self-destructive religion.” He justified baptism “because Christianity is the religion of most civilized people.”
Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy took his new religion seriously. He wrote much church music, hymns, chorales, cantatas, and oratorios. The Jewish origin of the plot of Elijah betrayed the composer’s deep immersion in the Tanakh. Of the main character in the oratorio Mendelssohn wrote: “I think of Elijah as a true prophet – the kind of prophet we could use today – strong, passionate, furious, sad and even unkind as he clashes with the court crowd and our entire depraved world.” The composer believes that Elijah is “the kind of [prophet] we could use right now.” It is as if he is opening the door to Elijah the prophet, like the Jews at the Passover meal. The unfinished oratorio Moses has the line, “The Lord will help Israel and save his chosen people.” In his works on biblical themes one could sense the mimicry, the imitation by which the baptized Jews masked their national traits and borrowed the spirit and creative handwriting of another people.
As early as 1835, the 26-year-old Mendelssohn was appointed Kapellmeister of the Gewendhaus Symphony Orchestra in Leipzig. In 1843 he founded and directed the Leipzig Academy of Music. Here he performed Bach’s Matthäuspassion, which had been forgotten for almost a century. Mendelssohn proudly told his friend, the pianist Ignatz (Isaac) Moscheles, also a baptized Jew, in London: “An artist and a Jew has discovered this great Christian work for humanity.”
Wagner pioneered racial antisemitism: “No matter how many good words were spoken about the just necessity of Jewish equality, when actually confronted with the Jews we never ceased to feel a most sincere antipathy toward them; […] we were perplexed by the inevitable need to free art from Jewish oppression; […] the Jewish gift of contemplation has never been great enough to produce great artists from among them. […] And just as Jewish jargon is a mixture of words and constructions with a surprising lack of expression, so in the work of the Jewish composer the various forms and characteristics of style of all times and all composers are woven together, and in their close series, in the mottled chaos, we find echoes of all schools. […] The incapacity lies in the very spirit of our art, striving for a different, purely artistic life that hardly exists for it now. This inability becomes clear in the artistic activity of the peculiarly gifted composer Mendelssohn. […] And Mendelssohn himself senses the limits beyond which creative, productive capacity ceases for him. […] Mendelssohn’s creative efforts to make vague, insignificant ideas find not only interesting but mind-blowing expression have actively contributed to the promiscuity and arbitrariness of our musical style.”
Wagner, for the first time in the history of antisemitism, did not distinguish between the baptized Jews of Mendelssohn and Heine and the Jews who had not changed their faith, Rothschild and Meyerbeer. He put aside the conflict between Judaism and Christianity and brought to the forefront the confrontation between Germans and Jews.
In 1842, Mendelssohn wrote the famous “Wedding March” for Shakespeare’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” He had a dream: he was a German composer, the author of Christian music, the new Bach, the spiritual son of one of Germany’s most German and Protestant composers. Mendelssohn was a romantic, and his dreams were tinged with light colors. But he was haunted from his childhood by a black winter picture from Berlin: the spitting in his face of a Christian youth who called him a Jew and issued the pogrom cry “Hep-Hep.” In 1833, the composer received another blow. The Berlin Academy of Music refused to accept Mendelssohn as director, preferring him to Karl Friedrich Rungenhagen, who was far inferior to the composer in every way.
Although Mendelssohn was a Protestant, he was proud of his descent from a great grandfather he had never seen. He initiated the publication by Heinrich Brockhaus of the Complete Works of Moses Mendelssohn, sponsored by the composer’s uncle, the philosopher’s son, Joseph Mendelssohn, who remained Jewish. In a letter to his sister Rebekah, Felix rebukes her for lashing out against a disagreeable relative: “What do you mean by saying that you are not hostile to Jews? I hope it was a joke. […] It’s really nice of you not to despise your family. Isn’t it?” Felix did not give up the surname Mendelssohn in favor of the surname Bartholdy imposed on his family by baptism. The spiritual duality reflected in the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy double surname in his writings was evident in him. He was a German, Christian composer, the father of five Germans, but he was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn and retained the Jewish surname Mendelssohn, under which he entered music history.
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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.