BiblioVault - Books about Mendelssohn, Moses

Jerusalem

Or on Religious Power and Judaism

Moses Mendelssohn

Brandeis University Press, 1983

A classic text of enduring significance, Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783) stands as a powerful plea for the separation of church and state and also as the first attempt to present Judaism as a religion eminently compatible with the ideas of the Enlightenment. Allan Arkush’s new translation, drawing upon the great strides made by Mendelssohn research in recent decades, does full justice to contemporary insights into the subject while authentically reflecting a distinguished eighteenth-century text. Alexander Altmann’s learned introduction opens up the complex structure and background of Mendelssohn’s ideas. His detailed commentary, keyed to the text, provides references to literary sources and interpretations of the philosopher’s intent.

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Jewish Universalisms

Mendelssohn, Cohen, and Humanity’s Highest Good

Jeremy Fogel

Brandeis University Press, 2023

An original and comprehensive comparison of the universalisms of two major modern Jewish philosophers.

Any version of universalism relevant to a more attentive, pluralistic, and postcolonial outlook would balance the urgent current need for a universalistic perspective with the desire to maintain the richness of human diversity. The modern Jewish philosophers who sought to partake in the Enlightenment’s universalistic vision while maintaining their distinct identities as members of a religious minority within Europe offer insightful answers.

Jewish Universalisms analyzes how two major figures, Moses Mendelssohn and Hermann Cohen, dealt with the perceived tension between the universal values characteristic of the Enlightenment and aspects of Judaism often depicted as particularistic and parochial. Jeremy Fogel joins this lively debate in modern Jewish philosophy, offering a comparative examination of these thinkers and analyzing their worldviews from an innovative axiological perspective. Fogel writes that to gain a precise understanding of how Mendelssohn and Cohen argued for the concordance of Judaism and universalism, one must first seek out what they delineated as ultimately valuable. Then one can work out how that highest good, and the method of valuation it sustains, are universal.

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Last Works

Moses Mendelssohn. Translated by Bruce Rosenstock

University of Illinois Press, 2012

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the central figure in the emancipation of European Jewry. His intellect, judgment, and tact won the admiration and friendship of contemporaries as illustrious as Johann Gottfried Herder, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, and Immanuel Kant. His enormously influential Jerusalem (1783) made the case for religious tolerance, a cause he worked for all his life.

Last Works includes, for the first time complete and in a single volume, the English translation of Morning Hours: Lectures on the Existence of God (1785) and To the Friends of Lessing (1786). Bruce Rosenstock has also provided an historical introduction and an extensive philosophical commentary to both texts.

At the center of Mendelssohn's last works is his friendship with Lessing. Mendelssohn hoped to show that he, a Torah-observant Jew, and Lessing, Germany's leading dramatist, had forged a life-long friendship that held out the promise of a tolerant and enlightened culture in which religious strife would be a thing of the past.

Lessing's death in 1781 was a severe blow to Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn wrote his last two works to commemorate Lessing and to carry on the work to which they had dedicated much of their lives. Morning Hours treats a range of major philosophical topics: the nature of truth, the foundations of human knowledge, the basis of our moral and aesthetic powers of judgment, the reality of the external world, and the grounds for a rational faith in a providential deity. It is also a key text for Mendelssohn's readings of Spinoza. In To the Friends of Lessing, Mendelssohn attempts to unmask the individual whom he believes to be the real enemy of the enlightened state: the Schwärmer, the religious fanatic who rejects reason in favor of belief in suprarational revelation.

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Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn

Leo Strauss

University of Chicago Press, 2012

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86) was the leading Jewish thinker of the German Enlightenment and the founder of modern Jewish philosophy. His writings, especially his attempt during the Pantheism Controversy to defend the philosophical legacies of Spinoza and Leibniz against F. H. Jacobi’s philosophy of faith, captured the attention of a young Leo Strauss and played a critical role in the development of his thought on one of the fundamental themes of his life’s work: the conflicting demands of reason and revelation.

Leo Strauss on Moses Mendelssohn is a superbly annotated translation of ten introductions written by Strauss to a multi-volume critical edition of Mendelssohn’s work. Commissioned in Weimar Germany in the 1920s, the project was suppressed and nearly destroyed during Nazi rule and was not revived until the 1960s. In addition to Strauss’s introductions, Martin D. Yaffe has translated Strauss’s editorial remarks on each of the passages he annotates in Mendelssohn’s texts and brings those together with the introductions themselves. Yaffe has also contributed an extensive interpretive essay that both analyzes the introductions on their own terms and discusses what Strauss writes elsewhere about the broader themes broached in his Mendelssohn studies.

Strauss’s critique of Mendelssohn represents one of the largest bodies of work by the young Strauss on a single thinker to be made available in English. It illuminates not only a formerly obscure phase in the emergence of his thought but also a critical moment in the history of the German Enlightenment.

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Spinoza's Modernity

Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine

Willi Goetschel

University of Wisconsin Press, 2004

Spinoza’s Modernity is a major, original work of intellectual history that reassesses the philosophical project of Baruch Spinoza, uncovers his influence on later thinkers, and demonstrates how that crucial influence on Moses Mendelssohn, G. E. Lessing, and Heinrich Heine shaped the development of modern critical thought. Excommunicated by his Jewish community, Spinoza was a controversial figure in his lifetime and for centuries afterward. Willi Goetschel shows how Spinoza’s philosophy was a direct challenge to the theological and metaphysical assumptions of modern European thought. He locates the driving force of this challenge in Spinoza’s Jewishness, which is deeply inscribed in his philosophy and defines the radical nature of his modernity.

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