Heroes of Enlightened Faith: Moses Mendelssohn

FP has been reading Hans Kung’s Judaism: Between Yesterday and Tomorrow, and highly recommends it. It is more readable than On Being a Christian, and it is full of golden nuggets of fine writing. Here is Thomas Mann speaking up for Enlightenment values while describing Germany in 1945 and, some fear, the U.S. in 2005. The Germans, Mann wrote, were then “a people of the Romantic counter-reformation against the intellectualism and rationalism of the Enlightenment.” Doesn’t anti-intellectual, Romantic counter-reformation describe many of the extremists we have been describing in our series on the Christian Right?

We don’t want to just be negative, so today we begin a new feature: Heroes of Enlightened Faith. We will honor religious leaders, past and present, who value dialogue and understanding between faith traditions and humility about discerning God’s will for themselves and others. We are proud to make Moses Mendelssohn our first hero of enlightened faith. A true giant of the Enlightenment, Kung writes that Mendelssohn was “the initiator, symbol and idol of the 'Haskalah,' the Jewish Enlightenment. Moses Medelssohn, close friend of Lessing, was the proto-type for Lessing's Nathan the Wise. Wikipedia picks up the story.

Mendelssohn publish(ed) his most important contribution to the problems connected with the position of Judaism in relation to the general life. This was the Jerusalem (1783; Eng. trans. 1838 and 1852). It is a forcible plea for freedom of conscience, described by Kant as "an irrefutable book." Its basic thrust is that the state has no right to interfere with the religion of its citizens. Kant called this "the proclamation of a great reform, which, however, will be slow in manifestation and in progress, and which will affect not only your people but others as well." 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. The test of religion is its effect on conduct. This is the moral of Lessing's Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise), the hero of which is undoubtedly Mendelssohn. The parable of the three rings is the epitome of the pragmatic position. One direct result of this pragmatism was unexpected. Having been taught that there is no absolutely true religion, Mendelssohn's own descendants—a brilliant circle, of which the musician Felix was the most noted—left the Synagogue for the Church.

But Moses Mendelssohn remained a very loyal and devoted Jew, who improved the social and legal relationships between Christians and Jews, and recognized the need for "a correct biblical Hebrew and a German translation of the Pentateuch and the Psalms." Further, as Kung writes, "by the thoroughly humanistic style in which as a convinced Jew he argued for tolerance, humanity and good taste."