17
Reform
Moses Mendelssohn, the first Jew to retain allegiance to traditional
Judaism while simultaneously emerging as one of the leading figures of
the European Enlightenment, first became famous in Germany in 1763,
when his Treatise on Metaphysical Evidence won the essay competition
of the Berlin Royal Academy (beating into second place the entry by his
older contemporary, Immanuel Kant). Nicknamed ‘the German Socrates’,
Mendelssohn had tried to demonstrate through reason what he saw as
the fundamental truths of natural religion – the immortality of the soul,
and the existence and providence of God. It was a remarkable achieve-
ment at the age of thirty- four for the son of a Torah scribe from Dessau,
who had been educated in Talmud and medieval Jewish philosophy. He
was self- taught in German, Greek, Latin, French and English, as well as
in the writings of John Locke, Christian Wolff and Leibniz.^1
From the reception accorded to Mendelssohn’s work it is clear that in
these early years his main readers were not Jews and that the significance
of his thought was taken to lie in its underpinning of all religion. But
fame brought hostility, and in 1769 the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar
Lavater, who had just published his German translation of La Palingén‑
ésie philosophique of Charles Bonnet, challenged Mendelssohn either to
refute Bonnet or to accept Christianity. Mendelssohn was not a natural
polemicist, but once challenged he felt compelled to respond with an
affirmation of his commitment to his ancestral religion on the grounds
that, unlike the limitation of salvation to believers within Christianity,
Judaism held that salvation is possible for all. This image of Judaism as
a religion of tolerance, permitting freedom of conscience, was expressed
most forcibly in 1782– 3 in his classic work Jerusalem, or, On Religious
Power and Judaism:
At least pave the way for a happy posterity toward that height of culture,
toward that universal tolerance of man for which reason still sighs in vain!