458 A History of Judaism
Reward and punish no doctrine, tempt and bribe no one to adopt any
religious opinion! Let everyone be permitted to speak as he thinks, to
invoke God after his own manner or that of his fathers, and to seek eternal
salvation where he thinks he may find it, as long as he does not disturb
public felicity and acts honestly toward the civil laws, toward you and his
fellow citizens.
Like Spinoza a century earlier, Mendelssohn advocated a separation
of religion from the state. The personal interests of disenfranchised Jews
in Christian societies coincided neatly with Enlightenment values of
individual conscience. For Mendelssohn, as for Spinoza, true religion
consists in rational and moral truths available to all. But to Mendelssohn
(unlike Spinoza) the special characteristics of Judaism derive from
revealed law, whose purpose is to preserve the purity of religious con-
cepts when they are assailed by idolatry. He urged his fellow Jews to
appreciate that the issue is as vital now as in the past:
And even today, no wiser advice than this can be given to the House of
Jacob. Adapt yourselves to the morals and the constitution of the land to
which you have been removed; but hold fast to the religion of your fathers
too. Bear both burdens as well as you can! It is true that, on the one
hand, the burden of civil life is made heavier for you on account of the
religion to which you remain faithful, and, on the other hand, the climate
and the times make the observance of your religious laws in some respects
more irksome than they are. Nevertheless, persevere, remain unflinchingly
at the post which Providence has assigned to you, and endure everything
that happens to you as your lawgiver foretold long ago.^2
The immediate impact of Mendelssohn on German Jewry was less
through the specific arguments of his religious philosophy than through
his example, as a famous German who remained loyal to his Judaism.
His translation of the Torah into German (written in Hebrew charac-
ters), with a Hebrew commentary which combined exegesis of the plain
sense in the medieval Jewish tradition with aesthetic comments (thus
modernizing Bible study in a fashion less revolutionary than Spinoza’s
critique), was much read. Mendelssohn’s continuing publication of
Hebrew writings, such as a commentary on Ecclesiastes published in
1768, alongside German philosophical works, and his willingness to use
his influence for the benefit of Jewish communities in Germany and
Switzerland, combined with his own strict adherence to traditional Jew-
ish religious behaviour to enable all the different strands of Judaism