In Our Time - Moses Mendelssohn

Episode Date: March 22, 2012

Melvyn Bragg and his guests discuss the work and influence of the eighteenth-century philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A prominent figure at the court of Frederick the Great, Mendelssohn was one of the most significant thinkers of his age. He came from a humble, but culturally rich background and his obvious intelligence was recognised from a young age and nurtured by the local rabbi where he lived in the town of Dessau in Prussia. Moses's learning earned him the sobriquet of the 'German Socrates' and he is considered to be one of the principal architects of the Haskala, the Jewish Enlightenment, and widely regarded as having helped bring Judaism into the mainstream of European culture. Mendelssohn is perhaps best remembered today for his efforts to bring Jewish and German culture closer together and for his plea for religious toleration.With:Christopher ClarkProfessor of Modern European History at the University of CambridgeAbigail GreenTutor and Fellow in History at the University of OxfordAdam SutcliffeSenior Lecturer in European History at King's College, London Producer: Natalia Fernandez.

Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello. In 1763, the philosopher Immanuel Kant entered an essay competition organised by the Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin. His effort was highly commended by the judges, but he came second. The man who beat him to the top prize worked in a silk factory.

His name was Moses Mendelssohn. Mendelsohn, grandfather of the composer Felix, was one of the most brilliant thinkers of the 18th century. He was a literary critic and philosopher whose works were translated into all the major European languages. Mendelssohn was also one of the founding figures of modern Judaism, a man who translated the Hebrew scriptures into German, argued powerfully for religious tolerance,

and believed that European Jews should not live apart from the rest of society. His writings exerted considerable influence, and today he is widely regarded as a religious tolerance. one of the key architects of the Jewish Enlightenment. With me to discuss the work of Moses Mendelsohn are Christopher Clark, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Cambridge, Abigail Green, tutor and fellow in history at Brazenose College, Oxford, and Adam Sutcliffe, Senior Lecturer in European History at King's College, London.

Chris Clark, are we talking about Prussia? Mendelssohn was born in Prussia in 1729. What sort of place was Prussia, before we particularised on him? Well, in 1729 when Mendelsohn was born, Prussia is a pretty unremarkable place. It's not the powerhouse it will later become, and there are very few signs of its later remarkable career in German and world history. It's a fairly poor composite monarchy. The heartland of Prussia is the province known as Brandenburg around the city of Berlin, but there's a sprinkle of other provinces as well all the way from near the French border up to the Baltic coast.

So this is a typical 18th century composite monarchy, but not. a very distinguished place by German standards, far poorer and less culturally interesting than, for example, neighboring Saxony to the south. The king was a man by the name of Frederick William I, the first, who's become known in history as the soldier king. He basically shut down all the cultural activities at his court when he came to power in 1713.

He sent off all the, he fired all the castratti and the sopranos and the chocolate makers and the masters of ceremonies and effectively shut down the court as a cultural institution in order to invest the revenues of the state in the army. So Prussia becomes known in the 1720s and 30s as a place with a sort of hypertrophic, huge military establishment which is being built up by this king who is obsessed with the military. All that changes in 1740 when his son, Frederick II,

who we know among other things as Frederick the Great, comes to the throne. And Mendelssohn is living in the city of Desau, about 80 miles south west of Berlin. Can you tell us something about his childhood? Yeah. Desau is the capital of a small Protestant principality called Unhalt, or sometimes Unhout Desau.

It's tucked in between Brandenburg, Prussia, and Saxony to the south. Desau is a little town, and it had a very small Jewish community, just a few dozen families. But it wasn't a place without significance from the point of view of its Jewish culture. there was a local Jewish press, which is already doing quite distinguished things, including, among other things,

republishing for the first time in 200 years the works of the great medieval sage Maimonides. And so there are the beginnings of a kind of Jewish, an expansion of Jewish learning, which are coming out of this tiny little town, an extraordinary achievement, really. And one of the people at the center of that achievement is David Franklin, Rabbi Frankl, who is in fact the instructor of the young Mendelsohn. Mendelso's background itself, Mendelsso's. Well, Mendelsohn grows up in very modest circumstances. His father is someone called a shul klopfer.

He's a man whose job it is to go about the houses of the Jewish community early in the morning, knocking on doors and rousing the faithful to prayer. In addition to that, he does odd jobs as a Torah scribe. He teaches small children elementary teaching in Bible and Hebrew. This is not an activity which brings in much in the way of income. The family is very, very poor, but of course it's culturally rich. And when David Frankel becomes the rabbi, he takes to Mendelsohn, he spots this clever young man. He does.

I mean, the two of them take to each other. It becomes an extremely deep and an abiding relationship between Mendelsohn begins his work with Frankl at the age of only six. And Frankl, who is part of this expansion of cultural and erudite activity in Desaar, teaches him, among other things, he teaches him Maimonides, he greatly deepens his understanding of Hebrew. he introduces an element of contemporary learning into his teaching, which helps to account for the broad horizons, which are so distinctive about Mendelsohn, his broad cultural horizons. And at that time, Mendelsso is speaking Yiddish?

At that time he'd be speaking Yiddish, yeah. Abbega Green, what status did the Jews have in Dessa, where Mendelso was brought up? Well, I think as in all of Germany, this is basically a religious minority with limited civil rights, and their position is fundamentally dependent always on the prince. So in places like Desau where there's a demand for money, it's a court city as well, then you have a court Jew and you get the emergence of a small community around them.

What's a court Jew? A court Jew is a member of the Jewish elite who is basically providing finance for the German states. So you have the emergence of court Jews as key financial propellers of absolutism, really, in 18th century Germany, 17th and 18th. century. So what would the general life be like for someone like Mendelsohn from a poor family, intensely interested in learning, but in a small Jewish community in that city? Well, I think the point about Mendelssohn is he's the first person to be totally a ghetto Jew, but also totally a creative Jew, but a German rather, but the ghetto Jew comes first.

So this is someone who is immersed in traditional Talmudic scholarship. He's learning the Talmud, he's learning Shulhan Arruch. He's following the paths of his tradition. he's living in a Jewish world. But in terms of his liberties, in terms of his rights, what would they consist of? Well, the kind of limitations which were imposed on Jews in 18th century Germany were to do with residence rights and freedom of occupation, freedom of trade, things like property rights. Jews weren't allowed to own property in most parts of Germany.

But it did vary, very much from place to place. Can I be really specific about this? Because I think it is important that the sort of right it had, What rights did he have for movement in and out of the city? What rights did he have with regard to marriage? You've mentioned property rights. Could you go into it a little bit more? In Prussia, when Mendelsohn is born and growing up,

there are limited rights. He wouldn't be able to own property when he arrives in Berlin. Jews aren't necessarily allowed to arrive in Berlin at that time. They're only allowed to go by one gate. He doesn't have residence rights. He has to demonstrate that he, is working with the rabbi he follows to Berlin and that he's got a means of support. At a later point in 18th century, Germany you get Frederick the Great,

creates this general regulation of Jewish status in Prussia, which divides the Jews into six different classes. Depending on their usefulness to the state, they have more or less rights. So if you're very wealthy, you can own a palace on the spree. But if you're at the bottom of that class, I mean at the bottom of the Jewish status in the lowest class, Everything about your life really is fragile. And you mentioned his move to Berlin when he was 14 years old with Frankel, his teacher. How did he make a living and continue his intellectual education in Berlin?

Well, Jewish society had always paid enormous respect to learning and the tradition of learning. And in the Jewish world we see a kind of marriage between Jewish learning and Jewish money. So one of the things you see in traditional communities is that talented studies, of the Talmud and the Torah like Mendelssohn are allowed to follow their rabbi to study in the yeshiva and they'll be supported by different Jewish families within the community so in that sense he wasn't required at that time to support himself it was a communal duty to support him as a charitable enterprise to support learning and obviously this is a talented boy so he goes to Berlin with his rabbi who continues to teach him yes but then he does get a job in a silk factory doesn't he which he has until he does but that's

that is at a later stage. I mean, he arrives in Berlin. I think he's 14 when he arrives in Berlin. And so he has this whole period when he's really just being a student. Okay, Adam Sutley. In Berlin, he meets other intellectuals and Jewish writers. He also meets Lessing. This is a very important meeting for both of them. Can you describe how important Lessing is and then how important the friendship between the two is to both of them? Yes. Godhold Lessing is really one of the most important. intellectuals of the German Enlightenment. He's noted as a dramatist as a progressive thinker, and he's particularly associated with ideas of tolerance, of religious tolerance, and of toleration toward Jews in particular. He's an almost exact contemporary of Mendelsohn. He was born

also in 1729, in Saxony. And like Mendelssohn, he comes to Berlin in the 1740s. And for loosely similar reasons, he's attracted by this new intellectual environment under Frederick the Great that Chris was just talking about. He wants to make his reputation in the literary and philosophical world of Berlin. It takes him a few years to meet Mendelssohn. They meet in 1754 and they're introduced by one of those other small group of Jews making contact outside the Jewish community in Berlin at the time, a man called Aaron Solomon Gumpets. Already before they're meeting in 1754, Lessing, shown an interest in Jewish themes. He wrote a play in 1749 called the Juden, the Jews. And in that play, perhaps inspired by his early friendship with Gumpets,

he presents a counter-stereotypical virtuous Jew on stage who rescues a baron who's hijacked by the Baron wrongly assumes Jews, and this traveller who only at the end of the play reveals himself as a Jew, rescues him and unmasks the robbers for his general love of humanity. The play isn't published until 1754, the year that the two men meet, and immediately at that point, Mendelssohn is useful for Lessing to hold up Mendelsohn to his critics and say to those, and this was argued, that the play was simply incredible because no such Jew could exist. Jews were not virtuous inherently. He said, I've met this new friend. He is the epitome of a wise, virtuous philosophical Jew. His name is Mendelsohn, and he in fact asks Mendelsohn to write a rebuttal to one of the critics to the play. He goes on to help Mendelsohn in his publishing, introduces him to other people, and they have a very fertile intellectual exchange. and a very public friendship throughout their lives. You give slightly the impression now that, Adam,

that there's a sort of almost a political motive driving Lessing, and yet you then talk about their long friendship. Is it both? I think it was both. That's quite a delicate question to gauge. I think it certainly was true that his friendship with Mendelsohn enabled Lessing, in a sense, to walk the walk of, toleration and openness to Jews

rather than simply talk the talk as he already was doing. But I think the friendship was genuine. Their letters that we have are extremely passionate. They're replete with references to friendship by both the two men toward the other. Can we just backtrack a little bit? Lessing's depiction of a virtuous Jew

did cause a big stir. People really thought this was not possible. We've got to get into that mindset then. Here was their great champion intellectual saying, not only is it possible, here is a living example of it. And so you have to change your minds about this completely. Absolutely. And throughout his life, as we'll be discussing,

Mendelsohn is repeatedly challenged by others to convert to Christianity. His status as a philosophical Jew rising in his intellectual stock through his career is a puzzle to many. But Lessing helps Mendelsohn and various. Mendelsohn is getting married. he has several children, he's still living a tight, very regular Jewish life. But with Lessing's help, as I understand it, he published his first major work which expressed his philosophical interests,

and I don't know if he became known as the German Socrates. Can you tell us about that early work? Yes. Well, his first work is called Philosophical Dialogues, and it's published in 1555, it's Lendell's Lessing who gets it published as a gift to his journal, new friend. Mendelson's quite surprised by that. It's written in dialogue form and the conversations might, to a significant extent, echo actual conversations that Lessing and Mendelsohn had,

centering around the status of the philosophy of Spinoza, who is another Jew from the 17th century, who lived in Amsterdam and was expelled from the Jewish community of Amsterdam in the 1650s for his heretical views. The crux, the crux. The crux, the, the crux. The crux, of Spinoza's philosophy is that he equated God with nature. And this caused a huge stir. It was seen by most people as effectively atheism, because the difference between God and the world of creation was denied by him. But a number of people saw it as a very radical and exciting and pantheistic philosophy that was distinct from atheism. And Mendelssohn, in a quite cautious way, tries to rehabilitate Spinoza. And give him a certain status and thereby also give another Jew an important status in the history of Western philosophy. And then he's moving on. He's established himself in already at that time a quite remarkable way.

And then he writes Fyden. This is one of his best-known books. This is 1767. Can you tell us why that was significant for him and for everybody who read it? Well, Fidon is an extraordinary text. I mean, it starts off reading a bit like just like a retranslation of the original Fidon's, Plato's. Fidelon, which narrates the death of Socrates, but also dwells at great length on the subject of the

subject of the immortality of the soul. But what Mendelsohn does is he makes Socrates speak like an 18th century philosopher. He introduces into his language and arguments, the language and arguments of Leibniz and Wolf, two rationalist luminaries of the German high enlightenment. And what Fyden is basically doing, what Mendelsohn's Fyton is doing, is making a case for the immortality of the soul. In particular the notion that the soul is one of the imperishable, indivisible substances from which all the cosmos is constructed. It cannot die, it cannot be broken down, it cannot dissolve. It must be immortal. This is a fundamental truth. And drawing that from Leipniz, Mendelsohn explores, uses the dialogue, uses this Socratic form to explore that idea.

And what's interesting about this is, firstly, it fits into a context of a sort of almost cult-like obsession with Socrates. I mean, there are a lot of. of Socratic dialogues appearing in the 1760s and 70s. Socrates's head can be seen on virtually on the frontispiece of hundreds of books which appear in this era. So it's a sort of moment for a renovation of the engagement with Socrates. But it's interesting to see Mendelsohn at this moment making this case for the immortality of the soul because by doing that he distances himself from the materialism of the extreme Enlightenment. People like de la Métrie, for example, who had said man is nothing but a long elementary tube.

with a sphincter at each end. Now this is a view which Mendelsohn strongly rejects. He says, no, man is about soul, this divine substance of soul. And that's effectively what is doing, distancing himself from materialism, and creating a kind of space of negotiation between the spirit of rational, logical inquiry and fundamental religious truths, fundamental religious beliefs. This seems to be his great mission, which is an extraordinary

I was reading about it. He wants to preserve what he sees, is essential to Judaism, and he wants to splice it with the best of the Enlightenment, which can seem to be antagonistic, not only to Judaism, but to all religions and so on. And so he's made some massive sort of attempt to pull these things together. And he gets involved, although we're told it's quite a malam,

and in several quite serious arguments, Abigail Green, wandered with a Swiss clergyman called Johann Lavater. Could you tell us about that? Yes, well, this was really, I think, the moment when Mendelsso's status as the Enlightenment Jewish philosopher first became politicised. Lavater visited Berlin in 1763 to 4. He visited Mendelssohn's house several times. And apparently on one occasion, he pressed Mendelsohn a bit on what he thought about Christianity.

And Mendelsohn said something quite non-committal. Obviously, he wasn't really very comfortable talking about it. He said, well, he wasn't really very hostile to it. And, you know, he recognised the moral quality of Christ. 1769, Laveter publishes a translation of a work of Christian The theology by someone called Chalbunet. And in the preface, he challenges Mendelsohn, either to embrace Christianity or to recant his Judaism.

This is absolutely fascinating. Why does he want to challenge Mendelssohn? Mendelssohn, is he the man to sort of beat down in this particular argument in Europe? Well, Mendelssohn has a kind of totemic quality as the Enlightenment Jew. And Lavater is basically a millinerian. He thinks all the Jews need to convert for the second coming of Christ. So that's his kind of underlying mission. But I think he feels if he can really engage the Jews' most profound mind

and, you know, demonstrate, actually, that he can't support Judaism, then that will kind of open the floodgates towards the mass conversion that he wants. And it's a public challenge, so Mendelsso can't... What is this precise nature of the challenge, Abelago? What does he say? Well, it's in the preface to this book, so it's published widely and therefore received by the German-speaking reading public. And he asks him to put his case, either to consider, you know, Christianity as merits or to defend his Judaism.

And of course, this sits within a long tradition, actually, of Christians in positions of authority, usually pushing Jews into theological discussion. And Jews always lose these debates. Mendelsohn obviously knows this because the rules of the game are skewed against them. So he doesn't want to enter into this kind of discussion. Rather, he puts a case, first of all, there's a sense. sense that Lavater has really trespassed on the Enlightenment ideal of friendship, and we've seen that this is a very powerful thing, for instance, with the symbolism of the Lessing Mendelsohn friendship. But basically, Mendelsohn argues this is a one-way polemic. Christians are interested in

converting Jews because Christianity claims an exclusive path to redemption, but Jews have no interest in converting Christians, they're not missionary, and they recognize that there might be different monotheistic paths to redemption. So he refuses the challenge, but underpinning it, I think, is a sense of a kind of natural religion which might allow different monotheistic religions to be paths to faith and redemption. But we're into an area here, which is just, it's absolutely fascinating this stuff, Adam Sutcliffe, where a Jewish Enlightenment is taking place inside, alongside the German

Enlightenment. Let's stick with Germany. It's happening in Scotland, of course. This Jewish Enlightenment called the Haskellar. How was that fitting into the position that Mendelssohn was adopting and being asked to adopt? Yes. Well, Haskellar is the term used, as you say for, the Jewish Enlightenment, which is a movement that, as Chris said earlier, was already beginning in the early 18th century in a number of centres and desal with its printing press was one of them. And in its outset, it was an attempt to expand the curriculum of learning. for Jewish men

beyond what had been really a quite narrow focus on rabbinical commentary on the study of the Talmud in particular, a compendium of rabbinical debates and discussions. And to, while still staying within a Jewish sphere, to engage with particularly a notable medieval Jewish tradition, above all from the medieval Spain,

Maimonides being absolutely central, dealing with logic, abstract philosophy in the Astrotelian tradition, and also opening up. up to contemporary science. In the era of Newton, of course, there are huge changes of foot. And some rabbis are cautiously trying to think about how this might be integrated into a Jewish understanding of the world. So, Medellon is schooled in the early shoots of the Haskellah.

There are others in Berlin who are interested. But he really takes it a step further. What he really starts doing in a serious way is, as you said, Melvin, to integrate his considerable learning in both German philosophy. He's a disciple of Christian Wolf, who's the dominant philosopher in Berlin at the time, himself a disciple of Leibniz. And he was optimism, a view of God's creation as the best of all possible worlds and one for us to appreciate is very important there. He's also interested in

Scottish philosophy and the English philosophy of sentiment that's associated with the Earl of Sharsbury. So what he does in the 1750s, he starts a journal called the Kohelet Musa, which is a model on the spectator from London in the early 18th century. It's a moral weekly trying to engage a community of readers in the appreciation of nature and the appreciation of other people and valorizing an emotional response to other people, sentimental response to the world, which Mendelsohn argues makes us better. And going against the Jewish tradition that we should try to withhold ourselves from the temptations of pleasure, in the world and focus on study, he's saying, no, that fire and brimstone view is all wrong.

Appreciating the beauty of the world and responding to it with our emotions and our sentiments, actually is central to making us our moral people. In his intellectual history, are we trying to go progressively forward, Chris Clark? It might seem surprising to listen to Sir Father, this is happening, and that's happening. But then he decides in the 1770s to translate the Hebrew scriptures into German. Now, where does that fit in with his progress? Yes, this is one of the most influential and widely remarked ventures that Mendelsohn's associated with. It is an extraordinary thing to do.

It's a very ambitious project. And Mendelsohn should be said is not alone. He creates a sort of team, a staff of scholars who work with him. So it's a collective work. It's not just Mendelsohn working on his own. Why does he do it? Well, for various reasons. One is to challenge the hegemony of the Luther Bible and of the Christological readings

of the old, of the Hebrew Bible that are associated with the Luther Bible, the notion that all references, for example, that the tree in the Garden of Eden is in some sense anticipating the cross of Golgotha, this reading back into the Hebrew Bible of Christian meanings. He wants to, as it were, emancipate the Hebrew Bible from those readings. And there was a model around when he started this work, the so-called Verdeheim Bible, a Bible of Christian origin, put together by a rather non-conformist figure called Johann Lohen.

and Schmidt in 1735, he had re-translated the Bible. It was an extremely controversial venture, and one of the things that he had done was to rationalise, to give the Bible a language to put into it, the language of Leibniz and Vorv, to write, if you like, an Enlightenment Bible or enlightened a Bible. And we know that Mendelssohn, as quite a young man, encountered this Bible at the House of a Friend,

and was extremely excited by it, and eventually managed to procure a copy himself. It wasn't easy, it was banned and very expensive, but he got one. So it's an attempt to re-engage with the Hebrew Bible, to bring it into modern German, into an elegant modern German, and he wrote very elegant German,

and to free it from this kind of carapace of Christological Christian readings. How is it received? Because what's part of his purpose to say to his people in his community, his friends in the Jewish community, look, you've got to be on side with this. You have to get on the Enlightenment train in somewhere other than one way is to be to learn it to argue it through German.

Yes, I mean he's trying to, he's creating a sort of alloy, a cultural alloy, which is going to bring traditional Jewish learning into a lasting conversation with the Christian, the German, the Gentile cultural environment. So that really is very important. He also wants to promote knowledge of German among Jews because the Lingufranca still is Yiddish, which is a dialectal form of German, but he sought as really an unworthy language for serious discussion. So he wanted to use the Bible,

which he prints in a German translation, but in Hebrew characters, to make it accessible to those who can read only the Hebrew script, to promote German, which will open up the world of learning to his fellow Jews. And that instrumental use of the Holy Word to extend knowledge of a secular language is part of what gets him to very hot water

with various rabbis after the... Well, exactly, it is controversial because it's delivering a very enlightened understanding of what the scriptures are about and that's not so much obvious in the translation itself but in the Bior, in the body of commentaries which Mendelsohn oversees the production of. He doesn't write them all himself,

and what emerges is a typically late 18th century enlightened vision of God's place in world history. I mean, for example, God appears in the commentary to Mendelsohn's Bible translation as an inaugurative presence, somebody who was there at the beginning of things, but who is not intervening in history, in human history after that point. And this was already a very controversial way of framing the content of scriptures. Not unlike Newton saying he set the clockwork going and then let it go. It is exactly the Newtonian God. It's the cosmic clockmaker. Abigail Green, I seem to be coming to you again for an argument.

Not with me. Wouldn't dare, but Mendelssohn. There's a significant dispute known as the Vesley affair. What's the nature of that argument? Well, in some ways it comes out of the controversy which we've already seen over Mendelsohn's Beor because what's beginning to emerge is that the Enlightenment-Haskola project

is coming up against traditional rabbinic authority in the Jewish world. Vesley has contributed to the Bior. He's an early enlightened figure as well in Berlin. And partly as a result of this internal dynamic, but also in response to the beginnings of debate in the non-Jewish world about the position of Jews in society, Vesely publishes something called Divray Shalombe Emmet,

words of peace and truth, in which he proposes a radical review of the traditional Jewish education curriculum and what he wants to put is he wants secular learning to be at the base and then the kind of traditional Talmudic learning will build on top of that and he's particularly scathing about the ideal of the Talmudic scholar he says you better have secular learning because it's based on reason with reason without Talmudic learning than Talmudic learning without secular learning and understandably this gets him into very hot water. He, the

book is condemned by several leading rabbis in Eastern Europe in their pulpits and a huge controversy emerges which spreads across Europe, particularly involving the community of Berlin. And Mendelsohn takes a part in it. So he is one of seven leading figures within the Berlin community who aren't necessarily religious authorities, who write to a community in Lissa, where one of the leading rabbis who attacked Vesley is based to say, look, you've got to control this person, or will invoke the Polish authorities. So there's a big standoff and in the end, in fact, the rabbi in Berlin himself

flees the city. He can't cope with the clash between the Orthodox World War view and this increasingly ideological, enlightened position which Veseli is putting forward. So it's the moment of partition really between Jews who embrace the modern world and traditional rabbinic authority.

And in a sense, Mendelsohn, Chris Clark, please correct me, In a sense, he's absolutely epicenter of that, isn't he? I mean, he doesn't flee. He tries to more than hold it together. He tries to splice it together. And by 17 and 80, we're talking about Jewish emancipation as well. So that's feeding it, isn't it?

Yes, I mean, as we've been hearing, Mendelsohn's entire life and his capacity to walk the walk of a new kind of Jewish identity open to its secular and non-Jewish environment is a kind of argument for emancipation. and his persona, his totemic function, is an argument for emancipation for the removal, rather, of these civic inequalities that burden the juries of German Europe, or in fact of Europe in general. And so, you know, it starts with that style that he represents.

And by the 1780s, he's involved himself directly in the debate around emancipation. I mean, there are various ministers within the Prussian state who know Mendelsohn, who started pressuring the king to start living. these inequalities without much success, it must be said. But in 1781, Mendelssohn Wendt, Dorm, a functionary in the Prussian state, to write a piece on this subject. And Dorm does so, and it becomes an extremely famous signal essay called on the civic improvement of the Jews, in which Dorm says, you know, yes, I recognize that, you know, the Jews are a very special group, but he says, if there are features of the Jews that you

don't like, you have to recognize that this is the consequence of centuries of Christian oppression. It's we who've pushed the Jews into the various sectors of the economy that they occupy by preventing them from owning property, by preventing them from living where they please, and so on. We've created this distorted image of ourselves, and Jews have exactly the same capacity to become happy, flourishing individuals and to become useful and citizens who will profit their environment as everybody else. That's the argument he makes. And it's an extremely influential essay. It's translation to many languages and becomes quite famous in its own right.

And Mendelsohn follows up with his republication of the Vindikia Yudai Udaorum, the 17th century essay by Manasse bin Israel, in the preface of which he also makes a renewed case for emancipation. But I think it's important to note that Dumb doesn't see the civil emancipation of the Jews as something which can happen overnight because he recognises that there are real problems attached to them. So what he envisages a kind of gradual process whereby the Jews will be given more, civil rights, but in return they have to become

more like the Germans, particularly through modern education. Adam Sartcliffe, Mendelsohn then published his book, Jerusalem, which is a very important book, can you take us... Yes, well, connecting to the story so far, Mendelso's very happy with

Dome's publication by and large, but he disagrees with Dome on one quite important point. Dome thinks that rabbis should still retain some legal authority over their communities. And Mendelso, because of all the problems he's been having in the Vesley affair over his Bible translation with rabbis attempting to expel from Jewish communities,

those who voice opinions they, the rabbis, don't approve of, thinks that really has to be brought to an end. He writes a piece critiquing rabbinical authority. A Christian then, who publishes anonymously, but his name we know now as August Kranz, who's an admirer of Mendelsohn very much and of his efforts within the Jewish community, writes a challenge to Mendelsohn to really come out more forcefully and reject rabbinical authority. And then Kranz goes on to say that if he did this, wouldn't he essentially be undermining the entire basis of Judaism based on the compulsory nature of Jews being in a Jewish community and following the Jewish law? And having done that, mightn't he just as well become a Christian. This is a very uncomfortable challenge for Mendelsohn.

He feels he really now finally needs to. address the big question that people have really been fascinated by throughout his life. How does he integrate his life as a religiously observant Jew with his enlightenment philosophy? So Jerusalem is his answer to that question. And he argues that Judaism, unlike Christianity, is not a religion of dogma. All you have to believe as a Jew are a set of natural truths that are true for everybody and they're accessible through reason.

And this distinguishes it from Christianity, which in the Trinity and the Virgin Birth, most notably do have dogmas, he believes, that are irrational, but which you have to believe as a Christian. What Judaism is beyond that is simply a set of practices, laws that Jews need to do, things they do, but don't have beliefs attached to them, and which help them to live a good and moral life.

It's also a plea for toleration as well, very centrally. And again, you were to say something, but can I ask you to, after you've said what you were to say, could you tell us what the effect Jerusalem had? The effect of, in a way, Jerusalem, I think Jerusalem is Mendelssohn's statement, but it doesn't have the big impact that he wants it to have, because by then, in a way, the debate has moved on, and that's what I'd be going to say, really, that Mendelsso is engaging with a debate with the Christian world about the position of Jews in it, but he's also engaging in a debate with the Jewish world, partly with the rabbi, who he doesn't think should be expelling people on the basis of what they're publishing, but also with pressures for religious reform and to move away actually from this model of traditional observance, which he's defending. And I think that's because the Jewish world is already moving in that direction, and these internal debates are not so interesting really to the Christian world.

That's perhaps why it doesn't have the impact that he would have wished. Mendelssohn's friend Lessing and that friendship had continued. Lessing dies. Did that leave Mendelssohn, not only intellectually, Beirav, but more exposed in society, Adam Sartlev. Could you take us there? Yes, absolutely it does. And what happens is soon after Lessing's death in 1781, a mutual friend of theirs, Friedrich Jakobi, asserts that Lessing had revealed to him, Yacobi, that Lessing had in fact been a spinazist, which in Jacobi's view is tantam out to atheism. So he's challenging the friendship with Lessing by saying that despite his great intimacy with Mendelssohn, in fact he had been hiding from Mendelssohn throughout his life his innermost religious beliefs or lack of religious beliefs, but had revealed them to Jacobi. And intertwined with that challenge about Lessing's belief is the raising of a whole set of questions about pantheism,

which for Jacobi's half atheism. Did Mendelssohn believe that Jacobi was telling the truth that he, Lessing, had virtually deceived him. He seemed to believe it, but it's hard to be sure if he believed it within himself. It would have been very discourteous for him to accuse Jacobi of lying. Part of the difficulty here is

Mendelsohn must be very polite with Jacobi. He wants philosophy to be a terrain of politeness and good manners and civility between all comers, Jewish or Christian. Jacobi nominally ascribed to that too, but in fact, the very challenge was a violation of manners, and he's quite aggressive towards Mendelsohn. and this escalates as the squabble between them in the mid-1780s continues.

And it culminates when in 1785, Yaobi publishes the correspondence between the two men on this matter without asking for Mendelssohn's permission. This makes Mendelsohn very upset indeed, and he rushes to write a rebuttal. You raise it, Adam, but I'll take it round table, come back to you. It became known as a pantheistic controversy, which of course spread, Coleridge took it over to.

country, but let's stick where we are there. Can you just tell us a bit more about that? Well, I mean, I think it's emblematic of the situation that Mendelsohn's in. I mean, he's tried to, as, you know, he's tried to redraw the boundary between the spirit of rational, philosophical inquiry and the, and a continuing attachment to religious, certain fundamental religious beliefs, which Mendelsohn, as Adam was saying, Mendelsohn believes are entirely reconcilable with reason. There's nothing unreasonable about the belief in God or the immortality of the soul in Mendelsohn's view. So he's tried to establish to redraw the border, but the border is constantly moving. I mean, there are all sorts of forces at work on this,

and people, there are many who feel that Mendelso's gone too far, others feel that he hasn't gone far enough, and he's a sort of lightning rod for arguments about this because of his extremely exposed status. I think the essence of the argument about pantheism that Mendelso introduces and then many others pick up in the Spinoza Renaissance of the late 18th, early 19th century, is that the problem with Spinoza isn't that he was an atheist, that he was excluding God, but that he was, there was too much God in his belief.

Another writer, Nivalis, calls him a God-intoxicated man. And it's on that basis that pantheism becomes very much valorized in the romantic movement. Towards the end of this controversy, Mandelson dies. Some people think he dies as a consequence of it. But how did the Jewish Enlightenment continue without him? I think in Berlin itself, it radicalises in a dramatic way in parallel with efforts to promote the civil emancipation of the Jews. So you get a move towards radical religious reform. But more broadly, I think you would have to say that it disseminates across Europe gradually,

most notably perhaps into Russia and Central Europe in the mid-19th century where you are, the emergence of a Hebrew Haskala rather than a German Haskala. We saw that the Bior is about translating the Bible into German. The Hebrew Haskala wasn't about merging Jewish society with German society, which was really the initiative in Berlin, but rather about creating a way of being modern in a more national Jewish context. So that's a different form the Enlightenment takes. And the divide with the Orthodox world becomes ever more acute.

What is his legacy, Chris? Well, his legacy His legacy is a very divided one, I think, and there's still controversy around the meaning of Mendelssohn. For some, he represents the first biography of Mendelsohn, which came out two years after his death in 1788 by Isaac Oikl, who describes him as a light and a model. It was the first biography ever to be written in modern Hebrew.

So there's that kind of Mendelssohn cult, the sort of the Mendelssohn fans. But he has many critics as well. is, you know, Peretz-Smoletsk, the late 19th century Hebrew scholar who said that he felt Mendelsohn had thrown out the baby with the bathwater, that there wasn't enough Jewish tradition, enough Jewish belief left in Mendelso. He was too much a man of the Enlightenment. So, in other words, it's a complex and a controversial legacy.

I think one mustn't forget that totemic quality, the quality of voice that Mendelsohn had. First of all, the warmth of his personality, the immense charm and likability of the man, almost everybody was drawn into that, even people like La Fata, you know, who... And so that, I think, remains this totan, this man who is a symbol of change and transformation.

I think it's important to remember that soon after Mendelton's death in 86, the French Revolution happens, and that changes the world, especially for Jews, it unleashes really the high phase of Jewish emancipation, and the next generation of Jews have a whole set of possibilities open to them, although there's a rollback. for some of them in the 19th century, that the previous generation didn't have. So there's a lot of conversions, including four of Mendelsso's six surviving children, who actually convert to Christianity,

and that's something that critics of Mendelssohn have pointed to to say that his view of Judaism wasn't really viable. I think Mendelsohn's fundamentally important as well as a kind of symbol of the problematic German-Jewish relationship, because initially he was embraced by Jews as a German thinker and an example of how possible it was to be Jewish, but also German and to contribute to German philosophy and the world of German letters. But more recently, since the Holocaust, people are rediscovering the Jewish Mendelssohn

and his Hebrew writing works and the extent to which he was still rooted in that traditional world. So that problematic relationship, which defined his life, I think it also defines his legacy. Well, thank you all very much. I thought that was terrific. Thank you, Abigail Green, Adam Sutcliffe and Chris Clark. Next week we'll be talking about the history of the measurement of time. Thanks for listening. Thank you for listening to this Radio 4 podcast. If you've enjoyed it, you might like to try others like it,

such as Start the Week or Thinking Aloud, which are both available from the Radio 4 website.