reform 459
which emerged in Germany in the century after his death to claim him
as an inspiration.^3
It is ironic that the ideas propounded by the Christian philosopher
Immanuel Kant, who had been beaten by Mendelssohn in the essay
competition in Berlin in 1763, were to have a greater influence than
those of Mendelssohn on the future of Judaism. Kant’s philosophical
innovation was to deny altogether the possibility of knowledge in the
areas of metaphysics to which Spinoza and Mendelssohn devoted their
reasoning. For Kant, demonstrative knowledge is possible only for the
world of sense perception, and the existence of God can therefore only
be postulated by reason, as the necessary condition for the possibility of
the ‘distribution of happiness in exact proportion to morality’. True reli-
gion for Kant is ethical religion, an ideal approached most nearly by the
idealized, spiritualized, love- based teachings of Christianity.^4
Kant became a close friend of Mendelssohn, but he followed Spinoza
in seeing Judaism as failing to reach the heights required of true religion
because it required only external obedience to the laws and not an inner
moral conviction, and the attraction of his philosophy to Jews on the
route to emancipation resided precisely in the replacement of the Juda-
ism to which they were accustomed by a deeply moral religious
commitment free of ritual and communal ties. Hence the devotion
to Kant of the wayward former hasid Solomon Maimon, whose dis-
illusioned comments about Hasidism were quoted in Chapter 15.
Maimon’s Transcendental Philosophy took the form of explanatory
observations on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, ‘just as this system
unfolded itself to my mind’. It is remarkable that Maimon had the self-
confidence, albeit towards the end of his life, to send the manuscript of
his Transcendental Philosophy to Kant himself. In the course of his,
mostly poverty- stricken, journeys around Europe, Maimon was a rab-
binic child prodigy in Sukoviborg in Poland and then a guest of Count
Adolf Kalkreuth in his residence near Freistadt in Silesia, before spend-
ing some years in the circle of Moses Mendelssohn and eventually being
forced to leave Berlin because of his dissolute life. A desperate attempt
in Hamburg to persuade a Lutheran pastor to convert him to Christian-
ity failed when Maimon confessed that he did not believe in Christian
doctrines. Kant at least is said to have appreciated the insights of his
follower, stating that no one else had understood his philosophy as well.
Nonetheless, when Maimon died in 1800 he was buried outside the
Jewish cemetery, defined as a heretical Jew.^5
Maimon was not the only Jewish thinker to immerse himself in the