Moses Mendelssohn was dubbed a “second Spinoza,” but his impact on Jewish—and European—life was much greater. A rabbinical scholar from a humble Yiddish-speaking home in Dessau, he made his way to Berlin and taught himself European culture, mastering German, French, English, Greek and Latin. Under Frederick the Great, Prussia was emerging as an economic, military and intellectual powerhouse, and with the support of elite Christians, Mendelssohn established himself as a renowned essayist and a major theoretician of the German Enlightenment.
Like other advocates of Jewish equality at the time, Mendelssohn saw legal emancipation as going hand in hand with internal reform. He called upon Jews to renounce those customs—notably usury—that gave them a bad name. He belittled Yiddish as a “jargon” that “has contributed more than a little to the uncivilized bearing of the common man,”3 and he urged Jews to speak German, embrace German culture and German patriotism. At the same time he called for and encouraged a revival of classical Hebrew. His German translation of the Hebrew Bible was banned by the rabbis, who also resisted his attempts to reform Jewish education. He argued for an end to the communal and commercial licenses enjoyed by a minority of Jews, but for which the majority took the blame.
Mendelssohn blended caution and boldness. “I am a member of an oppressed people that finds itself compelled to appeal to the good will of the authorities for protection and shelter,” he reminded readers. In 1763 the king granted Mendelssohn, then aged thirty-five, the status of Protected Jew (Schutz-Jude)—under which he was permitted to continue to live and work in Berlin. His discretion and reluctance to engage in full-tilt public combat over the Jews now make him seem, to some, an Uncle Tom, overeager to make concessions to the enemy. But for Mendelssohn, Jewish emancipation—and his own intellectual freedom—required a change in the place of religion in general in society. “I hate all religious disputes, especially those conducted before the eyes of the public,” he explained. “Experience teaches that they are useless. They produce hatred rather than clarification.”4
In 1769 he was called upon to defend and define himself by the Protestant cleric-scientist Johann Kasper Lavater, who challenged Mendelssohn either to refute what Lavater considered the rationalist arguments for Christianity or to convert. Mendelssohn was affronted by Lavater’s demand: “Among all the heretics known to him personally, I cannot be said to be his one and only friend.” He acknowledged that Judaism like Christianity and other religions was swathed in a “pestilential vapor of hypocrisy and superstition.” In particular, he sought to rid rabbinism of the tradition of disputatious “pilpul,” which he regarded as a “a sterile sort of acumen.” He could see little benefit in extending its competitive spirit into Christian—Jewish relations. As for himself, he intended to “change the world’s despicable image of the Jew not by writing disputatious essays but by living an exemplary life.”5
In Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, published in 1783, three years before his death, Mendelssohn subjects clericalism (of whatever denomination) to corrosive scrutiny, while at the same time arguing that Judaism has a place in the modern world. He reminds the reader how shocking is “that inadmissible idea of the eternality of punishment in hell—an idea the abuse of which has made not many fewer men truly miserable in this life than it renders, in theory, unhappy in the next.”6 Conflict between state and religion gives rise to “immeasurable evils,” but worse comes when the two are in agreement: “for they seldom agree but for the purpose of banishing a third moral entity, liberty of conscience, which knows how to derive some advantage from their disunity.”7 Both religions and states should be stripped of coercive, punitive powers over citizens’ minds. If beliefs, or rituals, are forced on individuals, they cease to be truly religious:
Reader! To whatever visible church, synagogue or mosque you may belong! See if you do not find more true religion among the host of those excommunicated than among the far greater host of those who excommunicated them.8
As someone who believed that “not a single point in the entire sum of human knowledge . . . is to be placed beyond question,”9 Mendelssohn asked of Judaism the same question he asked of Christianity. He argued that Judaism was based on laws, rules of life, not a revealed theology, and to that extent was in conformity with reason and had a right to be considered a distinct faith with its own merits. He believed the Hebrew Bible was “an inexhaustible treasure of rational truths,” but that with the destruction of the temple, and the end of the ancient Judaean state, many of its prescriptions no longer pertained. “The civil bonds of the nation were dissolved” and as a result Judaism “as religion, knows no punishment, no other penalty than the one the remorseful sinner imposes on himself.” As for “the Mosaic constitution” adumbrated in the Torah, “it has disappeared, and only the Omniscient knows among what people and in what century something similar may be seen.” Mendelssohn kept the sabbath, observed kashrut (Jewish dietary laws) and attended synagogue, but dispensed with customs he considered relevant only to the Hebrews’ ancient experience as a nation-state. “Adapt yourselves to the morals and constitution of the land to which you have been removed,” he advised his fellow sons of Jacob, “but hold fast to the religion of your fathers, too.”10
Mendelssohn’s life overlaps by thirty years that of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Chasidism. Both were products of the intersection of Jewish life with the larger historical forces of migration and modernity (and the very different ways these were experienced in Germany and in eastern Europe). Yet where the Baal Shem Tov is considered a touchstone of Jewish folk authenticity, entirely intrinsic to Jewry, Mendelssohn is tainted with cosmopolitan inauthenticity, seen as extrinsic to Jewishness (after all, his grandchildren converted to Christianity). The Baal Shem Tov, whatever his merits as a storyteller and dispenser of proverbial wisdom, and his significance as the progenitor of an enduring religious movement, never once raised his voice for the freedom of Jewry from legal oppression, a public cause to which Mendelssohn was unwaveringly steadfast.
In Sunday school we certainly never learned the name Zalkind Hourwitz, though we should have. Born in 1751 in a Polish village, he somehow made his way to Paris and in 1774 was living in a hovel on the Rue St Denis, one of a small, impoverished community of about 1,000 Parisian Jews—all present in the city on sufferance, since the fourteenth-century edict of expulsion had never been overturned. Later, Hourwitz recalled that he learned his ABCs from a Hebrew—German dictionary, and that at the age of twenty-two he was unfamiliar with the use of a fork. He makes his first appearance in print in 1783, responding to criticisms of the alleged ill-behavior of Polish Jews: “The Polish, French, English, Irish and Portuguese, are they all responsible for the massacres and regicides committed by some scoundrels of their nation? . . . Why not permit the same equity to the Jews?”11 What’s bracing even now in Hourwitz’s advocacy for the Jews was his insistence that Jews have as much right to be rogues and fools as members of any other group. In the context of a debate in which it was widely assumed that Jews collectively required either vindication or reform, his unapologetic and realistic response to criticisms of Jews (and ethnic or national groups in general) was a liberating step forward, one that many in Europe and North America have yet to take.
In 1787, the Royal Society of Arts and Sciences in Metz posed a question for a public