Moses Mendelssohn (1729—1786)
Mendelssohn came out of the Eastern environment, trained in the tradition of Talmud and observance, but yearning for the new bright world of the Enlightenment. Behind Lessing’s celebrated picture of him in Nathan the Wise, there stands the frail figure of a little hunchbacked Jew, who came to Berlin as a poor student and who became the new Socrates of the Western world.
He became a philosopher whose essays were placed alongside those of Kant, a classical scholar and outstanding stylist surrounded by an admiring Christian world; and he remained a traditional Jew, following the precepts and observances of Eastern European Jewry. How could he reconcile the two worlds? The answer he gave, which reconciled reason with faith, made him the father figure of modem traditionalism—and of modern Reform Jewish life. ‘I recognize no eternal truths except those which cannot only be conceived but also be established and verified by human reason,’ he declared in his Jerusalem.12 Filled with admiration for the Enlightenment and its teachings, he saw his surroundings as a world which had, through God-given reason, achieved knowledge of the truth which Jews had been granted long ago, in the Bible. The truths of the Bible were accessible to the universal human mind. Yet there was also revelation: the special instructions given to the Jews in the Bible, the customs, ceremonies and observances were a particular revelation to the Jews as a priest-people, to be kept by them in obedience to God’s will. Jews could thus partake of the modem world of rationalism, and still remain true to their heritage.Yet how could the Jews, still half in the ghetto, enter this modern world? They did not understand the language, and non-Jewish texts were not permitted by the rabbis. Mendelssohn’s answer was to translate the Pentateuch into German, written in Hebrew letters—a ‘Rosetta Stone’ enabling the Jews to enter the new culture through its language. He and his disciples established free schools for the next generation, and fought for political rights for his generation.
His Jerusalem argued for freedom of thought, and insisted that the individual and not the state must decide what to believe (since Judaism was revealed practice, not dogma). Jews could thus be rational, traditionally observantcultured Europeans. For a moment, in a rational, tolerant world, this was an approach which could work for at least some individuals. But the world changed, and so did the Jew.Not every Jew yearned for emancipation. Some would have remained in their secure enclave; but Napoleon and other factors in European history swept away those enclaves, and attacked medieval religious institutions—the Church and the Synagogue. The ghetto walls were destroyed, to be replaced soon enough by invisible walls. European Jews had various options now. They could re-establish the old traditionalism, particularly in Eastern Europe, where great Jewish scholars rebuilt the walls of Halachah as a bulwark against modernism. They could try to be traditional and modern. ‘Be a Jew in your home and a mensch (a cultured human being) in the street’ was taught in the East and West. A new term emerged—‘neo-Orthodoxy’—describing an enlightened traditionalism as taught by Samson Raphael Hirsch. But that, too, was assimilation. The Revolutionary Assembly in Paris had listened to the statement: ‘To the Jew as a human being, everything; to the Jew as ajew, nothing!’ And it did not occur to many Jews and Christians that one could really be a Jew in the street, or that an abstract definition of humanity might give way to the reality of a living Jewish people who had emerged out of their seclusion. Mendelssohn achieved this; but he was the exception to the rule.