The Modern Era
The modern era in Judaism can be studied on at least two levels—the political and the philosophical—for until the Jews of western Europe had achieved a certain degree of political emancipation, they were unable to fully acculturate within European society or benefit from the intellectual revolutions of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.
For centuries, Jewish life in the West was characterized by both physical and cultural containment, the most visible symbol of which was the Jewish Quarter of many cities (or Ghetto, as it was known after the sixteenth century), where Jews were forced to reside. By law, Jews were also restricted to certain trades and professions, especially money lending, but by the late eighteenth century many of these restrictions began to be removed. As more prosperous and highly educated Jews were permitted to intermingle (and, increasingly, intermarry) with their Christian contemporaries, Judaism itself began to change.Moses Mendelssohn
No better example of this pivotal transformation in Jewish life can be found than Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786), the son of a Torah scribe and the principal representative for his time of the Age of Enlightenment (referred to in Hebrew as the Haskalah). Because Jews were not yet permitted to attend universities, Mendelssohn was largely self-taught in modem philosophy and several European languages. Before long, his philosophical writings began to attract the attention of non-Jews within his native Germany and beyond. His impact on the Jewish community was just as profound, and through his translation of the Hebrew Bible into modern German and his various other publications, Mendelssohn became one of the most effective advocates for educational reform and the modernization of Jewish intellectual life.
What Mendelssohn is best remembered for today, however, is his eloquent defense of religious freedom, coupled with a defense of the Jewish faith, in a volume entitled Jerusalem (1783).
In this polemical masterwork, Mendelssohn entered a plea on behalf of religious tolerance and in defense of the integrity of Judaism. He argued that all higher religions share certain common beliefs (such as the existence of a benevolent Creator God or the immortality of the soul) and that because Judaism also held such beliefs, it was as much an expression of the “common religion of humanity” as Christianity or Islam.What was distinctive to Judaism, Mendelssohn proposed, was not so much its belief system as its sacred legislation—its Torah, understood here strictly as divinely revealed law—and its emphasis on doing God’s will rather than professing correct ideas about God or the afterlife. The essence of Judaism, Mendelssohn insisted, was orthopraxy (correct conduct), and not orthodoxy (correct beliefs). This interpretation of Judaism, it should be noted, was not acceptable to more conservative religious authorities, but it did appeal to more secularized Jewish readers who were prepared, in the next generation to cariy the logic of Mendelssohn’s argument even further and to attempt to transform the belief structure of Judaism in more radical ways.