Philosopher, literary critic, and biblical scholar, born in Dessau, EC Germany. He studied at Berlin and became the partner to a silk manufacturer. A zealous defender of enlightened monotheism, he was an apostle of deism. His major works include Phädon (1767), on the immortality of the soul; Jerusalem (1783), which advocates Judaism as the religion of reason; and Morgenstunden (1785) which argues for the rationality of belief in the existence of God.
Moses Mendelssohn (September 6, 1729 – January 4, 1786) was a German Jewish philosopher. He was an important Jewish figure of the 18th century, and to him is attributable the renaissance of European Jews, Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment. He was also the grandfather of the great composer Felix Mendelssohn.
Youth
He was born in Dessau. His father's name was Mendel and he later took the surname Mendelssohn ("son of Mendel").
His life was a struggle against crushing poverty, but his scholarly ambition never relaxed. Mendelssohn soon won the confidence of Bernhard, who made the young student successively his book-keeper and his partner.
Gumperz or Hess rendered a conspicuous service to Mendelssohn and to the cause of enlightenment by introducing him to Gotthold Lessing in 1754. Mendelssohn actually met Lessing over the chessboard, just as the latter afterwards makes Nathan the Wise and Saladin meet over the chess-board.
The Berlin of the day—the day of Frederick the Great—was in a moral and intellectual ferment. Lessing was the great liberator of the German mind. Lessing found in Mendelssohn the realization of his dream. Mendelssohn owed his first introduction to the public to Lessing's admiration. The former had written in lucid German an attack on the national neglect of native philosophers (principally Gottfried Leibniz), and lent the manuscript to Lessing. Without consulting the author, Lessing published Mendelssohn's Philosophical Conversations (Philosophische Gespräche) anonymously in 1755. In the same year there appeared in Gdańsk an anonymous satire, Pope a Metaphysician (Pope ein Metaphysiker), which turned out to be the joint work of Lessing and Mendelssohn.
Prominence in philosophy and criticism
From this time Mendelssohn's career was one of ever-increasing brilliance. In the year following his marriage Mendelssohn won the prize offered by the Berlin Academy for an essay on the application of mathematical proofs to metaphysics; In October 1763 the king granted Mendelssohn the privilege of Protected Jew (Schutz-Jude)—which assured his right to undisturbed residence in Berlin.
As a result of his correspondence with Abbt, Mendelssohn resolved to write on the Immortality of the Soul. Modelled on Plato's dialogue of the same name, Mendelssohn's work possessed some of the charm of its Greek exemplar. What most impressed the German world was its beauty and lucidity of style—features to which Mendelssohn still owes his popularity as a writer.
Support for Judaism
So far, Mendelssohn had devoted his talents to philosophy and criticism; Lavater was one of the most ardent admirers of Mendelssohn. In the preface to a German translation of Bonnet's essay on Christian Evidences, Lavater publicly challenged Mendelssohn to refute Bonnet or if he could not then to "do what wisdom, the love of truth and honesty must bid him, what a Socrates would have done if he had read the book and found it unanswerable". Bonnet resented Lavater's action, but Mendelssohn was bound to reply, though opposed to religious controversy. As he put it: "Suppose there were living among my contemporaries a Confucius or a Solon, I could, according to the principles of my faith, love and admire the great man without falling into the ridiculous idea that I must convert a Solon or a Confucius."
Mendelssohn shared his pragmatism with Lessing; it is probable that the latter was indebted to Mendelssohn. The consequences of Lavater's intrusion into Mendelssohn's affairs were that the latter resolved to devote the rest of his life to the emancipation of the Jews. Among them secular studies had been neglected, and Mendelssohn saw that he could best remedy the defect by attacking it on the religious side. Mendelssohn added a new section to this chapter by his German translation of the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible. This work called was called the Bi'ur (1783)--the explanation--and also contained a commentary, only the volume on Exodus having been written by Mendelssohn himself. Although Mendelssohn was one of the first great champions of Jewish emancipation in the 18th century, he was a staunchly religious Jew in practice and in belief. Mendelssohn himself published a German translation of the Vindiciae Judaeorum by Menasseh Ben Israel.
The excitement caused by these proceedings led Mendelssohn to publish his most important contribution to the problems connected with the position of Judaism in relation to the general life. Mendelssohn asserted the pragmatic principle of the possible plurality of truths: that just as various nations need different constitutions—to one a monarchy, to another a republic, may be the most congenial to the national genius—so individuals may need different religions. This is the moral of Lessing's Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), the hero of which is undoubtedly Mendelssohn, and in which the parable of the three rings is the epitome of the pragmatic position.
Later years and legacy
Despite this, Mendelssohn's theory was, for him, a strengthening bond to Judaism. For he maintained that Judaism was less a "divine need, than a revealed life." In the first part of the 19th century, the criticism of Jewish dogmas and traditions was associated with a firm adhesion to the older Jewish mode of living.
In Mendelssohn's remaining years, he progressed in fame, numbering among his friends many of the greatest men of the age. His Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (Morning hours or lectures about God's existence) appeared in 1785, and he died as the result of a cold contracted while carrying to his publishers in 1786 the manuscript of a vindication of his friend Lessing, who had predeceased him by five years.
Mendelssohn had six children, of whom only Joseph retained the Jewish faith. His sons were: Joseph (founder of the Mendelssohn banking house, and a friend and benefactor of Alexander Humboldt), whose son Alexander (d.
Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Moses MendelssohnThis article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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