Chapters on Jewish Literature/Chapter 25
CHAPTER XXV
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses, the son of Mendel, was born in Dessau in 1728, and died in Berlin in 1786. His father was poor, and he himself was of a weak constitution. But his stunted form was animated by a strenuous spirit. After a boyhood passed under conditions which did little to stimulate his dawning aspirations, Mendelssohn resolved to follow his teacher Fränkel to Berlin. He trudged the whole way on foot, and was all but refused admission into the Prussian capital, where he was destined to produce so profound an impression. In Berlin his struggle with poverty continued, but his condition was improved when he obtained a post, first as private tutor, then as book-keeper in a silk factory.
Berlin was at this time the scene of an intellectual and aesthetic revival dominated by Frederick the Great. The latter, a dilettante in culture, was, as Mendelssohn said of him, “a man who made the arts and sciences flourish, and made liberty of thought universal in his realm.” The German Jews were as yet outside this revival. In Italy and Holland the new movements of the seventeenth and the eighteenth century had found Jews well to the fore. But the “German” Jews—and this term included the great bulk of the Jews of Europe—were suffering from the effects of intellectual stagnation. The Talmud still exercised the mind and imagination of these Jews, but culture and religion were separated. Mendelssohn in a hundred places contends that such separation is dangerous and unnatural. It was his service to Judaism that he made the separation once for all obsolete.
Mendelssohn effected this by purely literary means. Most reformations have been at least aided by moral and political forces. But the Mendelssohnian revival in Judaism was a literary revival, in which moral and religious forces had only an indirect influence. By the aid of greater refinement of language, for hitherto the “German” Jews had not spoken pure German; by a widening of the scope of education in the Jewish schools; by the introduction of all that is known as culture, Mendelssohn changed the whole aspect of Jewish life. And he produced this reformation by books and by books alone. Never playing the part of a religious or moral reformer, Mendelssohn became the Jewish apostle of culture.
The great event of his life occurred in 1754, when he made the acquaintance of Lessing. The two young men became constant friends. Lessing, before he knew Mendelssohn, had written a drama, “The Jews,” in which, perhaps for the first time, a Jew was represented on the stage as a man of honor. In Mendelssohn, Lessing recognized a new Spinoza; in Lessing, Mendelssohn saw the perfect ideal of culture. The masterpiece of Lessing's art, the drama “Nathan the Wise.” was the monument of this friendship. Mendelssohn was the hero of the drama, and the toleration which it breathes is clearly Mendelssolm’s. Mendelssolm held that there was no absolutely best religion any more than there was an absolutely best form of government. This was the leading idea of his last work, “Jerusalem”; it is also the central thought of "Nathan the Wise." The best religion, according to both, is the religion which best brings out the individual’s noblest faculties. As Mendelssohn wrote, there are certain eternal truths which God implants in all men alike, but “Judaism boasts of no exclusive revelation of immutable truths indispensable to salvation.”
What has just been quoted is one of the last utterances of Mendelssohn. We must retrace our steps to the date of his first intimacy with Lessing. He devoted his attention to the perfecting of his German style, and succeeded so well that his writings have gained a place among the classics of German literature. In 1763, he won the Berlin prize for an essay on Mathematical Method in Philosophical Reasoning, and defeated Kant entirely on account of his lucid and attractive style. Mendelssohn’s most popular philosophical work, “Phædo, or the Immortality of the Soul,” won extraordinary popularity in Berlin, as much for its attractive form as for its spiritual charms. The “German Plato,” the “Jewish Socrates,” were some of the epithets bestowed on him by multitudes of admirers. Indeed, the “Phædo” of Mendelssohn is a work of rare beauty.
One of the results of Mendelssohn's popularity was a curious correspondence with Lavater. The latter perceived in Mendelssohn’s toleration signs of weakness, and believed that he could convert the famous Jew to Christianity. Mendelssohn’s reply, like his “Jerusalem” and his admirable preface to a German translation of Manasseh ben Israel’s Vindicia Judeorum, gave voice to that claim on personal liberty of thought and conscience for which the Jews, unconsciously, had been so long contending. Mendelssohn’s view was that all true religious aspirations are independent of religious forms. Mendelssohn did not ignore the value of forms, but he held that as there are often several means to the same end, so the various religious forms of the various creeds may all lead their respective adherents to salvation and to God.
Mendelssohn’s most epoch-making work was his translation of the Pentateuch into German. With this work the present history finds a natural close. Mendelssohn’s Pentateuch marks the modernization of the literature of Judaism. There was much opposition to the book, but on the other hand many Jews eagerly scanned its pages, acquired its noble diction, and committed its rhythmic eloquence to their hearts. Round Mendelssohn there clustered a band of devoted disciples, the pioneers of the new learning, the promoters of a literature of Judaism, in which the modern spirit reanimated the still living records of autiquity. There was certainly some weakness among the men and women affected by the Berlin philosopher, for some discarded all positive religion, because the master had taught that all positive religions had their saving and truthful elements.
It is not, however, the province of this sketch to trace the religious effects of the Mendelssohnian movement. Suffice it to say that, while the old Jewish conception had been that literature and life are coextensive. Jewish literature begins with Mendelssohn to have an independent life of its own, a life of the spirit, which cannot be altogether controlled by the tribulations of material life. A physical Ghetto may once more be imposed on the Jews from without; an intellectual Ghetto imposed from within is hardly conceivable. Tolerance gave the modern spirit to Jewish literature, but intolerance cannot withdraw it.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Moses Mendelssohn.
- Graetz.—V, 8.
- Karpeles—Sketch of Jewish History, p. 93; Jewish Literature and other Essays, p. 293.
- English translations of Phedo, Jerusalem, and of the Introduction to the Pentateuch (Hebrew Review. Vol. 1).
- Other translations of Jerusalem were made by M. Samuels (London, 1838) and by Isaac Leeser, the latter published as a supplement to the Occident, Philadelphia, 5612.
The Mendelssohnian Movement.
- Graetz.—V, 10.