Why are religious tolerance and pluralism so difficult to achieve? Why is
the often violent fundamentalist backlash against them so potent? Robert Erlewine
looks to a new religion of reason for ...answers to these questions. Drawing on
Enlightenment writers Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, and Hermann Cohen, who
placed Christianity and Judaism in tension with tolerance and pluralism, Erlewine
finds a way to break the impasse, soften hostilities, and establish equal
relationships with the Other. Erlewine's recovery of a religion of reason stands in
contrast both to secularist critics of religion who reject religion for the sake of
reason and to contemporary religious conservatives who eschew reason for the sake of
religion. Monotheism and Tolerance suggests a way to deal with the intractable
problem of religiously motivated and justified violence.
This article proposes a theoretical basis for understanding a crucial component
of the maskilic literary approach to Scripture, which many proponents of the
Jewish Enlightenment referred to as ...meliẓah (eloquent or
figurative language). Once a venerated concept, it declined following the late
nineteenth-century neo-romantic critique of Haskalah literature. Beginning with
a brief discussion of Moses Mendelssohn, this article explores these themes by
examining the work of Benedict de Spinoza, Robert Lowth, and Naftali Herz
Wessely. Pursuing a unique mode of interpretation, these four thinkers strongly
affirmed the role of figurative language in Hebrew Scripture, thus promoting an
emphatically rhetorical approach to scriptural language. Mendelssohn, Spinoza,
Lowth, and Wessely believed that figurative language played a constitutive role
in the formation of the anagogical meaning of Scripture and that this meaning
was conflictual and open-ended due to its reliance on persuasion, public
deliberation, and the use of eloquent speech. While scholars have suggested that
maskilim tended to read the Jewish Enlightenment as a movement that either
re-sanctified or desacralized Scripture, this article shows that proponents of
the much-maligned meliẓah literature were keen on showing that
Scripture is not a container of philosophical knowledge. For them, what made
Scripture sacred was not its truth—which could be manipulated at will—but its
engagement in an often inconclusive struggle between sacredness and secularity,
reason and revelation, mythical and philosophical conceptions of God.
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The essay explores Moses Mendelssohn's concept of natural religion by contrasting it with the way it was understood by his contemporaries. An examination of key aspects-the role of pagans, knowledge ...transfer, the possible redundancy of revealed religion, and Judaism's attitude toward "unphilosophical" knowledge-suggests that Mendelssohn's view was not only shaped through direct and indirect reactions to his intellectual surrounding, but also that it employed Christian arguments in order to construct an unapologetic image of Judaism as a universal religion. This view challenged the designation of Christianity as a philosophical religion, and, by extension, the Christian understanding of the Enlightenment Project.
On a l’habitude de présenter Moses Mendelssohn comme le précurseur de la modernité juive. Cette évidence est soumise ici à investigation. Elle conduira à dégager une pré-modernité, « la première ...Aufklärung », dont on trouve les prémisses et les orientations dans le Traité théologico-politique de B. Spinoza, chez Ménashé ben Israël (1604-1657) et chez Simone Simh’a Luzatto (1583-1663). Mendelssohn s’est inspiré de leurs œuvres respectives, même s’il ne les cite pas nommément, comme il ressort d’une lecture attentive et rigoureuse de son Jérusalem ou pouvoir religieux.
This article advances a multistage argument regarding the position of language in early modern Jewish thought, suggesting that a significant number of early Hasidic sources advocate a striking ...redefinition of the so-called holy tongue (leshon ha-kodesh) as the sacred potential of all human language. The writings of three Jewish thinkers on leshon ha-kodesh—Kalonymous Kalman Epstein of Kraków (1754–1823), Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86), and Moshe Sofer of Pressburg (1782–1839)—reveal much about responses, including anxiety, influence, and confident rejection, to changes in the world around the authors and illustrate how similar reactions emerged in very different places. Rather than seeking to chart direct influence, this article attempts to isolate and interrogate the genealogies of discourse regarding sacred speech, thus reading Hasidic sermons, maskilic writings, and rabbinic texts in multiple intellectual and historical contexts to reveal their full richness and innovation.
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Culled from a set of expert dialogues delivered by specialists at a conference in 2009, this volume addresses various topics in Mendelssohn's mathematics and philosophy, including analysis of his ...discussions with Spinoza, Wolff Baumgarten, Lambert, and Kant.
Moses Mendelssohn famously penned his Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power and Judaism in response to a public challenge. Mendelssohn had declared “ecclesiastical power” to be a contradiction in terms, ...and had thus come out strongly against the use of coercion in religious life, and against the ban of excommunication by rabbinic authorities, in particular. In the anonymously published The Search for Light and Right, August Cranz defies Mendelssohn to explain how he could reconcile this liberal view of religion with his continued commitment to—and his insistence that Jews were still obligated to observe—Jewish law. “As reasonable as all you say about religious power may be, to just that degree it contradicts the faith of your fathers . . . and the principles of its church . . . expressly set down in the books of Moses,” Cranz argues. “The theocratic ruling staff drove the whole people . . . with force and punishment.” True, Cranz concedes, exile reduced the capacity of Jewish authorities to enforce Jewish law, “but these ecclesiastical laws are there even if their exercise is no longer a must.” Cranz challenges Mendelssohn to explain his apparently irreconcilable commitments: “How can you persist in the faith of your fathers and shake the whole structure by clearing away its cornerstones, dear Mr. Mendelssohn, when you contest the ecclesiastical law given as divine revelation through Moses?”
Professor Altmann quotes widely from personal letters and other contemporary documents in this biographical study of one of the most celebrated figures of the German Enlightenment. A considerable ...amount of the primary source material is offered in English translation.
