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citizenship; to “not permit” Jews to think of themselves in particular
ways; to deny Jews “the right” to make certain political or ideological
proclamations.
Mendelssohn’s Theory versus al- Khalidi’s
“Mendelssohn’s Theory”Before attempting to account for the immense power al- Khalidi as-
cribes to “Mendelssohn’s theory,” it is worth considering the extent to
which al- Khalidi’s presentation of the theory corresponds to the views
Moses Mendelssohn actually articulated in his philosophical, political,
and polemical writings. In reality, Mendelssohn never claimed that the
Jews were no longer a “nation” and that they were henceforth merely a
“religion,”^61 even if, as Leora Batnitzky has argued, he “invent[ed] the
modern idea that Judaism is a religion.”^62 In this sense, al- Khalidi’s ren-
dering of Mendelssohn’s theory is not an accurate representation of the
Jewish philosopher’s position. But this is not to say that al- Khalidi (or
his source on this matter) was wholly unjustified in linking the distinc-
tion between Jewish religion and Jewish nationhood to Mendelssohn.^63
A primary assumption of what al- Khalidi labels “Mendelssohn’s the-
ory” is the contention that there is a meaningful distinction between
“religion,” on the one hand, and “nation,” on the other. For Mendels-
sohn, especially in his classic treatise Jerusalem,Or,onReligiousPower
andJudaism (1783), the relevant dichotomous categories were not reli-
gion and nation but rather religion and state. Mendelssohn argued for a
distinction between these latter spheres and insisted that “religion” as
such had no place in affairs of the “state.” He did not see this distinc-
tion as novel to his own day. Rather, he projected it into the biblical
past: once the ancient Israelites accepted a monarch, “state and reli-
gion were no longer the same, and a collision of [civic and religious]
(^61) On the absence from Mendelssohn’s oeuvre of a “direct explicit statement . . . that
the Jews are not a nation, but only a religion,” see Barzilay, “Smolenskin’s Polemic
against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,” 18.
(^62) See Batnitzky, HowJudaismBecameaReligion, 13– 28.
(^63) Nor is this to say that al- Khalidi was the first to make this claim. The early Zion-
ist thinker Peretz Smolenskin (d. 1885) understood Mendelssohn very similarly. Isaac
Barzilay has described the ways in which Smolenskin, who wrote a generation before
al- Khalidi, misunderstands or misrepresents Mendelssohn’s belief in Jewish nationhood.
Though Mendelssohn “can be defended as a believer in Jewish nationhood, it is not
a strong defense,” Barzilay contends, as the claim “is only formally correct, but not
substantially, especially not in the framework of Judaism of Mendelssohn’s own time.”
Barzilay, “Smolenskin’s Polemic against Mendelssohn in Historical Perspective,” 18– 28.