Mendelssohn, Moses, 1729-1786

Moses Mendelssohn was an internationally renowned philosopher of the Enlightenment while remaining an observant Jew who defended Judaism and advocated for Jewish civil rights.

Moses Mendelssohn was born in 1729 in the German hamlet of Dessau, the son of a Torah scribe, and received a traditional Talmudic education. His mother Bela Rachel Sara was descended from an illustrious line of rabbis. At age 14, Moses Mendelssohn followed his rabbi to Berlin, then a cultural hub flourishing under the enlightened (but nevertheless anti-Semitic) monarch Frederick the Great. In Berlin, Mendelssohn encountered a group of early enlightened scholars who introduced him to philosophy and science. One of the first Christians Mendelssohn encountered upon arriving in Berlin was the playwright and critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. They formed a lifelong friendship on the basis of their commitment to the principles of tolerance, free inquiry, and rational religion; the protagonist in Lessing's well-known play Nathan der Weise was likely based upon Moses Mendelssohn.

Although Moses Mendelssohn's mother tongue was Yiddish, he came to be celebrated for his German literary style. He attained international fame as a philosopher without ever attending university and was a prolific writer who published works in both German and Hebrew. Two of his most renowned works, in addition to his translations of the Bible into German, were Phädon oder Über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, published in 1767 and Jerusalem, oder Über religiöse Macht und Judentum, published in 1783, which advocated the separation of church and state.

He achieved unprecedented fame in Jewish and Christian literary circles, while remaining steadfast in his commitment to orthodox observance and fighting tirelessly for Jewish civil rights. He also aroused opposition. Many Christians could not understand how someone so generous and learned could remain a Jew and called on him to convert to Christianity. One such person was the Swiss pastor Johann Kaspar Lavatar. Some traditionalist Rabbis opposed his German Bible translation because they saw it as leading Jews to embrace German culture and abandon Judaism.

Mendelssohn married Fromet Gugenheim and together they had ten children, six of whom survived early childhood. The conversion to Christianity of several of Mendelssohn's children led later generations to debate whether this reflected a flaw in his perception of Judaism.

(Much of the text of this biographical note is based upon the 2011 LBI exhibition "Moses Mendelssohn: Conversation and the Legacy of the Enlightenment.")

Moses Mendelssohn (6 September 1729[note 1] – 4 January 1786) was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature. Through his writings on philosophy and religion he came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond. His involvement in the Berlin textile industry formed the foundation of his family's wealth.

His descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn; Felix's son, chemist Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy; Fanny's grandsons, Paul and Kurt Hensel; and the founders of the Mendelssohn & Co. banking house. Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau. His father's name was Mendel, but Moses and his brother Saul were the first to adopt the surname Mendelssohn ("Mendel's son").Mendel was an impoverished scribe — a writer of Torah scrolls — and his son Moses in his boyhood developed curvature of the spine. Moses' early education was provided by his father and by the local rabbi, David Fränkel, who, besides teaching him the Bible and Talmud, introduced to him the philosophy of Maimonides. In 1743 Fränkel received a call to Berlin, and a few months later Moses followed him.[3] Moses, age 14, "entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were allowed to pass."[4] "Mendelssohn enrolled in Frankel's exacting seminary, where the program consisted of unending rote repetitions of early medieval texts, interpretations thereof, elaborations of Talmudic law, and copious commentary accumulated over the centuries."[5] A refugee Polish Jew, Israel Zamosz, taught him mathematics,[6] and a young Jewish physician taught him Latin. He was, however, mainly self-taught. He learned to spell and to philosophize at the same time (according to the historian Graetz). With his scanty earnings he bought a Latin copy of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and mastered it with the aid of a Latin dictionary. He then made the acquaintance of Aaron Solomon Gumperz, who taught him basic French and English. In 1750, a wealthy Jewish silk-merchant, Isaac Bernhard,[7] appointed him to teach his children. Mendelssohn soon won the confidence of Bernhard, who made the young student successively his bookkeeper and his partner.[3]

It was possibly Gumperz who introduced Mendelssohn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1754, who became one of his greatest friends. It is said that the first time Mendelssohn met Lessing, they played chess. In Lessing's play Nathan the Wise Nathan and the character Saladin first meet during a game of chess. Lessing had recently produced the drama Die Juden, whose moral was that a Jew can possess nobility of character. This notion was, in the contemporary Berlin of Frederick the Great, generally ridiculed as untrue. Lessing found in Mendelssohn the realization of his dream. Within a few months, the two became closely intellectually allied. Lessing also brought Mendelssohn to public attention for the first time: Mendelssohn had written an essay attacking Germans' neglect of their native philosophers (principally Gottfried Leibniz), and lent the manuscript to Lessing. Without consulting the author, Lessing published Mendelssohn's Philosophical Conversations (Philosophische Gespräche) anonymously in 1755. In the same year there appeared in Danzig (now Gdańsk, Poland) an anonymous satire, Pope a Metaphysician (Pope ein Metaphysiker), which turned out to be the joint work of Lessing and Mendelssohn.[3] Mendelssohn became (1756–1759) the leading spirit of Friedrich Nicolai's important literary undertakings, the Bibliothek and the Literaturbriefe, and ran some risk (which Frederick's good nature mitigated) by criticizing the poems of the King of Prussia. In October 1763 the king granted Mendelssohn, but not his wife or children, the privilege of Protected Jew (Schutzjude), which assured his right to undisturbed residence in Berlin.[3][9] Mendelssohn died on 4 January 1786 as the result (it was thought at the time) of a cold contracted while carrying a manuscript (his reply to Jacobi, titled To Lessing's Friends (An die Freunde Lessings)) to his publishers on New Year's Eve; Jacobi was held by some to have been responsible for his death.[8] He was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Berlin.[18] The translation of the Hebrew inscription on his gravestone (see picture below, right) reads: H[ere] r[ests] / the wise R[eb] Moses of Dessau / born on the 12th of Elul 5489 [6 September 1729] / died on Wednesday the 5th of Shevat [4 January] / and buried the next morning on Thursday 6th/ 5546 [5 January 1786] / M[ay] H[is] S[oul be] B[ound up in the] B[ond of eternal] L[ife][19] Although the cemetery was largely destroyed during the Nazi era, after German reunification, in 2007-2008, it was reestablished with monuments to its past, including a recreation of Mendelssohn's gravestone. Mendelssohn had six children, of whom only his second-oldest daughter, Recha, and his eldest son, Joseph, retained the Jewish faith.[24] His sons were: Joseph (founder of the Mendelssohn banking house and a friend and benefactor of Alexander von Humboldt), Abraham (who married Lea Salomon and was the father of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn), and Nathan (a mechanical engineer of considerable repute). His daughters were Brendel (later Dorothea; the wife of Simon Veit and mother of Philipp Veit, subsequently the mistress, and then wife, of Friedrich von Schlegel), Recha and Henriette, all gifted women. Recha's only grandson (son of Heinrich Beer, brother of the composer Giacomo Meyerbeer), was born and educated as a Jew, but died very young, together with his parents, apparently from an epidemic.[citation needed] Joseph Mendelssohn's son Alexander (d. 1871) was the last male descendant of Moses Mendelssohn to practice Judaism.[14]