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Whatever Happened to Moses Mendelssohn?

The great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1781) was and remains a perplexing, rather sad, enigma. One of Jewish history's most original philosophers—the expression, "From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses," initially coined to honor Maimonides, was extended by admirers to accommodate this third Moses—he was also a valiant pioneer of European Jewry's struggle for acceptance into the larger society. Yet within a generation after his death he was already an obscure figure, and is now almost entirely forgotten except by academic historians. Despite having been crowned the "Father of the Haskalah" (the Jewish Enlightenment), the alleged father founded no movement or religious denomination and left behind no true ideological heirs.

Relevant Links
Why No Moses Mendelssohn Street?  Allan Arkush, Jewish Review of Books. In one sense the famous philosopher doesn’t deserve the honor; but in another sense perhaps he does.
The Socrates of Berlin  Daniel Dahlstrom, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. A brief biography and timeline, with a concise but accurate and full account of Mendelssohn’s philosophy.
The Jewish Enlightenment  Shmuel Feiner, University of Pennylvania Press. A comprehensive treatment of a major cultural movement, seen in its Jewish and European contexts.

A new short biography by Shmuel Feiner, the world's leading expert on the Haskalah, seems intent on revitalizing Mendelssohn's memory for contemporary Jews. Whether or not it succeeds in this effort, the book unwittingly helps to explain the puzzle of his lost legacy.

Mendelssohn's emergence as a brilliant young philosopher in 18th-century Berlin was greeted with mixed feelings. Many in privileged Gentile circles were bewildered, and a few—most notably the playwright G.E. Lessing—were inspired by the sheer strangeness of this first Jew ever to achieve such high prominence among them. The bewilderment, while mostly benign, occasionally turned ugly, and infamously so in 1769 when Mendelssohn's ostensible friend, the Swiss poet and scientist Johann Kaspar Lavater, publicly and humiliatingly challenged him either to refute Christian doctrine or be baptized. Mendelssohn—who never wavered in his adherence to traditional Jewish observance—managed to acquit himself well enough to end the quarrel, but the incident ushered in a series of painful conflicts in the life of a man who cherished the quiet neutrality afforded him by his intimate circle of fellow philosophers.

Undoubtedly one of the most painful of such episodes occurred in 1771, when Mendelssohn was summoned by King Friedrich II to appear at the monarch's magnificent summer residence in Potsdam in order to meet the foreign minister of Saxony, who had expressed great curiosity about the "Socrates of Berlin." Mendelssohn's very entry into the palace was an unprecedented milestone for Prussian Jewry, which still suffered under the severe restrictions of the king's anti-Jewish legislation. His dramatic arrival was memorably captured by the Polish-German painter Daniel Chodowiecki.

And yet, despite its splendor, the timing of the event was far from ideal, and what transpired at it has been greatly exaggerated by romantic hagiographers. The summons required Mendelssohn to travel to Potsdam on Simhat Torah; consulting Berlin's leading rabbi, he was absolved of the duty to observe the holiday's proscriptions under a rabbinical doctrine allowing minor transgressions for the sake of preserving the always fragile civic peace enjoyed by Diaspora Jews. As if this were not awkward enough, Friedrich himself, just a few months earlier, had vetoed Mendelssohn's induction into the Royal Academy of Science solely on the grounds of his Jewishness. While in Potsdam, Mendelssohn saw neither hide nor hair of the intolerant monarch.

Compounding the hurts from without were buffetings from within the Jewish community. And here a brief consideration of Mendelssohn's two major Jewish works goes a long way toward explaining his lost legacy.

The first is the Biur (1780), Mendelssohn's German translation of and commentary to the Torah. The counterintuitive aim of this project, which rendered Scripture in a language largely unknown to its intended readers, was to enable them to learn that language while engaged in sacred study. Feiner assesses both the translation and the accompanying commentary as a success, but this is highly contestable. As he neglects to note, the most revealing thing about the enterprise was that the text was published entirely in Hebrew characters—since so few Central European Jews at the time could even read a German text.

But if so, why the need for a translation? Mendelssohn maintained that it would modernize the study of the Torah while simultaneously liberating Jews from their dependence on translations into Yiddish, a language he detested. To this, his contemporary Ezekiel Landau, the chief rabbi of Prague, while respectful of Mendelssohn personally, responded that the real effect of introducing the Biur into the Jewish schools of Bohemia would be to force teachers "to spend most of the time explaining German grammar, and consequently the young student will remain devoid of Torah learning." Feiner, who unfairly dubs Landau a "fanatic," believes his fear was unfounded, but a compelling argument can be made to the contrary.

A different problem lay in the commentary, in whose composition Mendelssohn had the collaboration of leading figures of the Haskalah. While focusing on the grammatical and philological plain sense of the text, the commentary refuses in principle to yield any ground to the emerging critical-historical study of the Bible. Moreover, in cases where the rabbinic tradition is irreconcilable with the plain meaning of the text, Mendelssohn always defers to the former. Thus, the work sent a maddeningly mixed message. On the one hand, unsurprisingly, the Orthodox denounced it at birth; on the other hand, its strict adherence to traditional exegesis would, within less than a generation, make it useless to the leaders of the German Reform movement. Even had it been more open to modern methods of Biblical study, its very form—German in Hebrew transliteration—rendered it archaic by the early 19th century.

Then there is Jerusalem (1783), Mendelssohn's late-life summary of his philosophy of Judaism, heralded by Feiner as his "most important, influential, and enduring work." Yet it, too, was a product of its fleeting time, a pained response to public pressure from Mendelssohn's deist German friends to abandon his commitment to traditional Jewish law in the name of fidelity to his own principles of religious freedom and rationalism. In Jerusalem, Mendelssohn endeavors to reconcile these two equally passionate commitments. The result is a moving personal testimony, but the balance he strives to establish is at best terribly awkward. Ultimately, it would require Jews to bifurcate their very existence—by adapting fully to European culture and thought in public while restricting their parochial religious practices and beliefs to the synagogue and home.

As Feiner notes, this problem in Mendelssohn's thought was evident long before he wrote Jerusalem, and had already led him into troubling gestures of accommodation. Bowing to Gentile pressure to jettison particularist beliefs, he had, for instance, repudiated the notion of a messianic national Jewish return to the land of Israel, asserting that this was one of those "contradictory religious opinions" that a Jew reserves only "for  synagogue and prayer."

Little wonder, then, that the much later catchphrase coined by the Hebrew poet, Judah Leib Gordon, "Be a Jew in your tent and a man on the street," has so often been misattributed to Mendelssohn; it pithily captures the argument at the center of Jerusalem, a book that the historian Michael Meyer has aptly characterized as "above all a personal defense of Mendelssohn's own existence and the goals of his life." It is precisely for this reason that Jerusalem was doomed to have little, if any, impact upon the generation of Mendelssohn's own children, to say nothing of subsequent generations of German Jews.

Many in those subsequent generations adopted a thoroughly Reformed Judaism. Many others chose to be baptized as Christians. In a tragic but telling irony, all of Mendelssohn's grandchildren ended up in the latter category. Among them was the famous composer Felix, who was advised by his father to drop the Mendelssohn name since, thanks to their progenitor's notoriety, "there can no more be a Christian Mendelssohn than there can be a Jewish Confucius."

And here we come to the heart of the Mendelssohn enigma, and to the extreme divide between the acclaim accorded him by modern Jewish historians—he is the subject of many hundreds of academic studies—and his almost total obscurity in the consciousness of even most informed Jews. For Israelis in particular, the issue is not that he denied the national identity of the Jews outright, but that he would have had it something that dared not speak its name in public. (In today's Jerusalem, the capital of a country packed with avenues and boulevards named after Jewish historical figures both major and obscure, there is no Moses Mendelssohn Street.) As for Diaspora Jews, they have long taken for granted the fruits of Mendelssohn's and others' lifelong struggle to attain tolerance and civic rights for his people, while his willingness to accept all kinds of social limitations in exchange for such basic human rights must appear, in today's light, disappointing if not craven.

Unfairly damned in his own day by the Orthodox as a Reformer, which he was not; ignored by the Reformers as a relic of old-world piety on account of his idiosyncratic and seemingly irrational insistence on full halakhic observance; scorned by Yiddishists for his disdain of their beloved language, and by Zionists for what they regarded as a shamefully closeted and muted nationalism, Mendelssohn, despite Shmuel Feiner's noble efforts at rehabilitation, sadly speaks for no Jews today.

Allan Nadler is professor of religious studies and director of the program in Jewish studies at Drew University.

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COMMENTS

S. on December 6, 2010 at 11:33 am (Reply)
>As he neglects to note, the most revealing thing about the enterprise was that the text was published entirely in Hebrew characters—since so few Central European Jews at the time could even read a German text.

Learning the alphabet is a small matter. Learning the language, no small matter. Generations of Eastern European Jews learned German through the Be'ur, and no doubt many in Germany learned Hochdeutsch this way as well.
S. on December 6, 2010 at 11:39 am (Reply)
>On the one hand, unsurprisingly, the Orthodox denounced it at birth; on the other hand, its strict adherence to traditional exegesis would, within less than a generation, make it useless to the leaders of the German Reform movement. Even had it been more open to modern methods of Biblical study, its very form—German in Hebrew transliteration—rendered it archaic by the early 19th century.

Another thing to consider is that the commentary was in Hebrew, which is not how Nadler presents it here. Also, not long after its initial publication Mendelssohn's German in Hebrew letters had been transcribed into regular German letters.
Nachum on December 6, 2010 at 4:02 pm (Reply)
“On the one hand, unsurprisingly, the Orthodox denounced it at birth”

Simply untrue. It was widely used by the Orthodox. *Some* Orthodox didn’t get around to condemning it until about fifty years later; they were largely ignored.

“its very form—German in Hebrew transliteration—rendered it archaic by the early 19th century.”

That’s why later editions wrote the German in German letters.

“repudiated the notion of a messianic national Jewish return to the land of Israel, asserting that this was one of those “contradictory religious opinions” that a Jew reserves only “for synagogue and prayer.”"

Sounds not unlike R’ Hirsch, eh? Or Charedim in general. Or Zionists outside of Israel. :-)

“Unfairly damned in his own day by the Orthodox as a Reformer”

There were no “Reformers” in his day.

The rest of the paragraph is nonsensical. Reformers liked to claim him; Yiddishists and Zionists were pretty much unaware of him.
Nachum on December 7, 2010 at 12:50 am (Reply)
By the way, it's a silly argument, but there is a Mendelssohn street in Jerusalem. :-)
Ron Kean on December 7, 2010 at 2:41 am (Reply)
Alexander Altman wrote the best book on Mendelssohn. He called it a 'biographical study'. It was not a biography because Mendelssohn was actually 2 people. He acted like a gentile to gentiles and acted like a Jew to Jews.

His great uncle, the patriarch of the family, promoted a Sabbatian whose philosophy was to do the opposite of mitzvas as a sign of messianic redemption. It probably rubbed off on the whole family. He left Dessau and went to Berlin as a youth and settled with maskilim - the original assimilationists and probable Sabbatians themselves.

After the 30 Years War, religion was discredited and the gentile intellectual class wanted to be inclusive. Mendelssohn was the perfect symbol of inclusion since he valued assimilation. In order to still live with Jews, he had to look like one so he obeyed the laws. But Sabbatians hid the belief that observance ended with Sabbatai Tzvi and they only practiced ritual for show. So he acted like a Jew to Jews but acted like a gentile to gentiles. Hence the 'biographical study'.

That both his children and grandchildren converted to Christianity demonstrates his insincerity with Judaism. His very popular books on the then current 'natural' philosophy-popular with gentiles-brought many public accusations of being a deist or at least not being a Jew. It hurt him.

The Biur was not meant to teach Torah but German. The book Jerusalem was confusing at best. He may have mediated some imperial decree but court Jews had done that for centuries. He was no Mordechi.

He was a proponent of Deism which taught that God was indifferent whereas we believe that God is wrathful. He taught about a strange God rather than the God of Israel and deserves his legacy. Read Sorkin, Scholem, and Altman for the details.
Gary B. on December 7, 2010 at 5:15 am (Reply)
How silly and yet how academic to conclude that Moses Mendelssohn "speaks for no Jews today." While the Gestapo left his grave marker standing in the Stadtmitte graveyard, now we have a professor of religious studies tearing that down, albeit metaphorically in print.

Shall there be an article one day entitled, "Whatever Happened to Allan Nadler?" Would this be understood to be "a perplexing, rather sad, enigma?" Having stood by Mendelssohn's marker, I'd say his reputation and example speaks quite loudly from across the years.

Thank you, Nachum, for some basic corrections from which one may learn.
Alex on December 7, 2010 at 4:30 pm (Reply)
Nachum:

"*Some* Orthodox didn’t get around to condemning it until about fifty years later; they were largely ignored."

Simply wrong. I know of at least one Orthodox (okay, technically an anachronism) Rabbi who condemned the Beur when it was published: Rabbi Pinchas Horowitz, rabbi of Frankfurt am Main.

"Sounds not unlike R’ Hirsch, eh? Or Charedim in general. Or Zionists outside of Israel. :-)"

Wrong again. R' Hirsch, and general Charedi Judaism, rejects the idea of a _non_-messianic return to the Land of Israel - i.e., political Zionism.

"There were no “Reformers” in his day."

There was no formal movement called Reform Judaism yet, it is true. But one can be a "reformer" without being a "Reformer."
Alex on December 7, 2010 at 4:32 pm (Reply)
Gary B.,

The grave markers of thousands of Jews from across Germany were left standing; you can find them at http://www.steinheim-institut.de:50580/cgi-bin/epidat. Does that mean that every one of them speaks for Jews today?
L. Hoffman on December 7, 2010 at 4:35 pm (Reply)
Nachum, the Mendelssohn Street in Jerusalem is not named for Moses Mendelssohn.
S. on December 7, 2010 at 5:41 pm (Reply)
Still, argument by street name is dumb (and ripped from a Haaretz article several months ago).
Gary B. on December 7, 2010 at 7:02 pm (Reply)
"The grave markers of thousands of Jews from across Germany were left standing; you can find them at http://www.steinheim-institut.de:50580/cgi-bin/epidat. Does that mean that every one of them speaks for Jews today?"

Yes, of course. At the minimum, as a reminder. At the maximum, as proof they lived their lives here and were honored here by such markers. (I write from Germany, and have visited many sites, lest this be a next question.)

Let us revisit that the graveyard where Moses Mendelssohn's marker remains intact was descrated by Nazis, and all too many other graves violated. Those markers which can no longer be read speak loudly as well.

The question is rather amazing. Which Jewish gravestones does Alex think do not speak for Jews today, as for tomorrow? Each life has been and remains precious. May this be so l'dor vador.
Alex on December 8, 2010 at 9:08 am (Reply)
Of course their gravestones are reminders that they lived. Very well, then, so is Mendelssohn's. Each of them shows that here was someone who existed, accomplished something or other in life, died, and was remembered fondly by his family. [And at least each of them (or most, anyway) had Jewish descendants, unlike Mendelssohn.]

But apparently, somehow, according to you, these same facts - in and of themselves - mean that no one may say that Mendelssohn's effect on future generations is limited or nonexistent, and that to say so is to "tear that down, albeit metaphorically in print." How so?
Gary B. on December 8, 2010 at 11:25 am (Reply)
Shmuel Feiner's study leading to a work about Mendelssohn is "today," as is Nadler's book review about it, and therefore Nadler's closing statement is falacious as he writes, "Mendelssohn, despite Shmuel Feiner's noble efforts at rehabilitation, sadly speaks for no Jews today."

It seems at least a few Jews in the context of this article and its subject, as well as comments herein are indeed speaking, and about Mendelssohn, his life and times. To which of the "no Jews today" do you refer, sir, in suggesting that "Mendelssohn's effect on future generations is limited or nonexistent?"

Limited? I grant you this. But there have been posts on this site in which Jews have identified themselves as secular, atheist, as well as openly religious, and across quite a diverse field. Which of these should be considered to be "nonexistent" or speak to "no Jews today?"

I am amused to note that Yehudah Mirsky's fine article posted today tells the old tale anew. Which is the authentic voice? Which is the inauthentic voice? And which is to be a "non-existent" voice which speaks to "no Jews today?"

I care to knock over no gravestones, nor consign any Jew who will call himself such to being "non-existent." The world already has enough who will do this to us, that we need not add to their number.
minda on April 22, 2011 at 9:31 am (Reply)
a small consolation

Felix Bartholdy is a footnote to

Felix Batholday-Mendelssohn who is best known as

FELIX MENDELSSOHN

Comments are closed for this article.

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