Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is generally recognized as the first German‐Jewish philosopher. The past forty years have witnessed the appearance of five major book‐length interpretations of Moses ...Mendelssohn in English: Michael Meyer’s The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749–1824 (1967); Alexander Altmann’s Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (1973); Allan Arkush’s Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (1994); David Sorkin’s Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) and Edward Breuer’s The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth‐Century Study of Scripture (1996). These works have generally been guided by a single interpretive question namely whether or not Mendelssohn was able to harmonize his commitment to Judaism with his commitment to Enlightenment. I review these five interpretations of Mendelssohn.
This book is the first comprehensive study on Moses Mendelssohn's (1729-1786) language philosophy. While guiding the reader through the German and Hebrew sections of the oeuvre, a new perspective is ...gained that brings Mendelssohn closer to the skeptical currents of Enlightenment. The dialectics of human and sacred language play a constitutive role for his language theory as well as for his aesthetics and metaphysics, and finally lead into the political idea of a just, social order. Thus, he developed an important alternative to monolingual, national language concepts. Grit Schorch, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg.
Germans have only recently accepted the fact that they belong to a nation of immigrants; officially, they still maintain the myth that migration to Germany began during the economic miracle of the ...1950s. The claim that Moses Mendelssohn was Germany's first migrant is a deliberate intervention into the debate over the role of migrants in German culture. Mendelssohn's significance and the reason that he can function as Germany's first migrant, is that, as an early and eloquent writer on the idea of integration and belonging, he was able to write himself into the center of the discourse about what it meant to be German as that discussion was beginning. His case could leverage a new opening into still contentious and unresolved debates on issues as diverse as the history of migration, the role of religion in national cultures, the limits of tolerance vis-à-vis Others, and the demands that a majority culture can legitimately place on migrant minorities.
Sacks affords a view of a foundational moment in Jewish modernity and forwards new ways of thinking about ritual practice, the development of traditions, and the role of religion in society.
This article argues that Kant's essay on enlightenment responds to Moses Mendelssohn's defense of the freedom of conscience in Jerusalem. While Mendelssohn holds that the freedom of conscience as an ...inalienable right, Kant argues that the use of one's reason may be constrained by oaths. Kant calls such a constrained use of reason the private use of reason. While he also defends the unconditional freedom of the public use of reason, Kant believes that one makes oneself a part of the machinery of the church or state by swearing an oath to and assuming a position within those institutions.
The critical reception of Moses Mendelssohn tends to see tension or even contradiction in his dual commitment to the Enlightenment and to Judaism. Recent reappraisals manifest a continuing need to ...make sense of that tension and of its resonance with tensions in our own thought. In "Mendelssohn's Stutter and the Collisions of Modern Thought," I focus on a little-known text from 1783 in which Mendelssohn presents a theory of stuttering with theoretical resources for thinking about such tensions, without falling into simplistic affirmations either of muddled thinking or of direct creative productivity.
This article discusses the ceremonial laws in Judaism as a language of religion and assesses their role within human self-formation (Bildung). Moses Mendelssohn's groundbreaking account on the ...function of ritual offers both a solution and a threat to this issue: on the one hand the capacity to perform and understand rituals can be seen as a form of self-liberation. At the same time, the general openness to interpretation makes this conception vulnerable to the destructive force of idolatry. With the aid of Ernst Cassirer's Philosophy of Symbolic Forms, this article offers a solution to this problem by showing how ritual functions as a dialogue between the members of a community; a dialogue that carries a distinctively ethical outreach.
Thus far, scholars have discussed the Mendelssohn-Lavater affair from a
perspective: Mendelssohn’s reply to Lavater has been principally read as a defense of toleration. The broader context of ...conversion discourse in eighteenth-century Germany drew little attention. Taking issue with such apologetic-liberal readings, this paper interprets the Lavater affair as a polemical engagement with contemporary heterodox groups that regarded conversion as a necessary precondition for redemption. Mendelssohn’s reply, it argues, was a calculated
on the part of Enlighteners who sought to form a coalition of reason–including the Jewish and the Protestant orthodoxy, enlightened theologians, the state of Prussia and the Jewish financial elite. This coalition would fight Pietistic, Sabbatean, Frankist and other “enthusiastic” groups, for which the notion of
then became metonymic. Thus, the Lavater affair marks a turning point in the cultural, political and economical reconfiguration of eighteenth-century Germany.
Moses Mendelssohn, the author of numerous works on natural theology and ethics, was also the first modern philosopher of Judaism. This book places Mendelssohn’s thought within the context of the ...Leibnizian-Wolffian school, the writings of Kant and Lessing and other major figures of the Enlightenment, and within the age-old tradition of Jewish rationalism. More than any previous treatment of this subject, it questions the extent to which Mendelssohn truly succeeded in reconciling his allegiance to the philosophy of the Enlightenment with his adherence to Judaism.
