Abstract
In times of great political unrest and disorientation, societies generally invent and reinvent myths. As unrest and disorientation were among the most striking characteristics of the Weimar ...era, it is not surprising that the bicentenary celebrations of Moses Mendelssohn’s birth, held in 1929, constituted the peak of the Enlightenment philosopher’s popularity as a German-Jewish patron saint. This article argues that the commemoration of Mendelssohn on the eve of catastrophe, four years before the Weimar Republic’s collapse, serves as a particularly precise indicator of ambivalent German-Jewish agency at the time, due to its political, social, and cultural implications. Whereas the bicentenary celebrations—featuring the Republic’s most prominent representatives, state-of-the-art exhibitions, cultural events in prestigious locations, and extensive media coverage—attest to the considerable leeway German Jewry had in shaping social reality, the continuing absence of Mendelssohn in the canon of German poets and thinkers illustrates the limits of German-Jewish agency in the cultural imaginary of the German nation.
While Moses Mendelssohn’s reputation as a modern Socrates is well-known to scholars of eighteenth-century intellectual history, the opposite tendency to orientalise him has received less attention ...than it deserves. The paper discusses some examples, highlighting the interdependence of Greek and Oriental attributions. In their critical reactions to Mendelssohn’s
(1767), a modern version of Socrates’ dialogues on the immortality of the soul, radical Pietist Johann Daniel Müller and Lutheran orthodox theologian Gottfried Joachim Wichmann sought to invalidate the Jewish Enlightener’s case for reason by orientalising him. At the end of the century, the religious tensions inherent in the uses of Greek and Oriental models for different Jewish and Christian denominational positions became visible in Johann Gottfried Schadow’s drawing
(1800), a work commissioned by David Friedländer, whose
(1799) had just caused a stir with its bold statements in the spirit of Deism.
Moses Mendelssohn (1725–1786) is considered the foremost representative of Jewish Enlightenment. In No Religion without Idolatry, Gideon Freudenthal offers a novel interpretation of Mendelssohn's ...general philosophy and discusses for the first time Mendelssohn's semiotic interpretation of idolatry in his Jerusalem and in his Hebrew biblical commentary. Mendelssohn emerges from this study as an original philosopher, not a shallow popularizer of rationalist metaphysics, as he is sometimes portrayed. Of special and lasting value is his semiotic theory of idolatry. From a semiotic perspective, both idolatry and enlightenment are necessary constituents of religion. Idolatry ascribes to religious symbols an intrinsic value: enlightenment maintains that symbols are conventional and merely signify religious content but do not share its properties and value. Without enlightenment, religion degenerates to fetishism; without idolatry it turns into philosophy and frustrates religious experience. Freudenthal demonstrates that in Mendelssohn's view, Judaism is the optimal religious synthesis. It consists of transient ceremonies of a "living script." Its ceremonies are symbols, but they are not permanent objects that could be venerated. Jewish ceremonies thus provide a religious experience but frustrate fetishism. Throughout the book, Freudenthal fruitfully contrasts Mendelssohn's views on religion and philosophy with those of his contemporary critic and opponent, Salomon Maimon. No Religion without Idolatry breaks new ground in Mendelssohn studies. It will interest students and scholars in philosophy of religion, Judaism, and semiotics.
The importance of Mendelssohn’s commentary to Qohelet lies, inter alia, in its influence on nineteenth-century Jewish commentators and more precisely in its reception among eastern and western ...Europe’s Orthodox commentators, who adopted, explicitly or implicitly, his unique form of scriptural interpretation. In this article, I demonstrate unique characteristics in Mendelssohn’s commentary on Qohelet and the ways in which these were adopted by later biblical commentators, shedding light on features of Mendelssohn’s writings, reputation, and influence.
In this essay, I argue that Kant holds one of the following two theses: A promise to do something that violates the moral law (a) is impossible or (b) can be conscientiously broken. On this issue, I ...put Kant in dialogue with Moses Mendelssohn in order to show, against recent suggestions, that Kant's account is distinctly Mendelssohnian.
Mendelssohn's Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism cites a passage from the Psalms as prooftext to demonstrate that one of the key canonical texts-the literary corpus serving as the repository ...for the church songs every German Christian of the period would know by heart and sing in church-supports his central philosophical argument. Mendelssohn does so by offering his own translation of the opening of Psalm 19. With the inclusion of his translation he counteracts the assimilatory force of Luther's canonical rendering. Inserting his own translation that recovers a canonical text as a voice of difference-in this case that of King David-Mendelssohn highlights the dynamics of canonical pressures and liberates an otherwise domesticated voice as that of political emancipation.
Abstract
Moses Mendelssohn’s work on imperfection might cause us to rethink the concepts of truth which follow from the Kantian tradition; he offers an alternative, if repressed, way of thinking ...about truth—one oriented by imperfection, rather than the structure of appearance. Understanding Mendelssohn as a philosopher of imperfection should affect how we read the word ‘truth’ in Modern Jewish philosophy: if imperfection is a fundamental ingredient of human life, then it is not something we must do away with, or annihilate, in order to find truth; it is not an obstacle. Rather—if we, like Mendelssohn, assume that we are incomplete and compromised—any relationship to truth must not seek to overcome imperfection and compromise, but proceed through them.
How the Better Reason Wins Pollok, Anne
Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie,
11/2020, Letnik:
68, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Abstract
This paper considers Mendelssohn’s attempt at a definition of Enlightenment in terms of Bildung, comprising the theoretical element of the enlightenment of reason with the practical ...requirements of culture. To avoid a possible dialectics of enlightenment, where the very methods one uses to enlighten harbour the seeds of new blindness, Mendelssohn advocates considering the lively connections between people, the role of traditions and personal relations in the formation of an individual self, and the connections we should have to our past, present, and future. Thus, his essay from 1784 can be read as an apt defence of a dialogical notion of freedom within the Enlightenment era.
