attitude was expressed most vividly in 1781 by Christian Dohm. According
to Dohm, a disproportionate number of Jews engaged in moneylending not
because they were doing Satan’s work, but, more logically, because they were
excluded from everything else. He argued further that since Jewish flaws were
the result of the moral inferiority of Judaism, Jews could be improved by
eliminating or modifying those aspects of Judaism that precipitated moral
inferiority, without discarding Judaism entirely. To this end, he favored the
retention of rabbinic authority, albeit in truncated form, as the surest means
to lead the Jews down the proper moral and civic path. He further argued
that improving the condition of Jews would make them better subjects, and
help them serve the state more effectively. To be sure, Dohm did not envision
the political emancipation of Jews, but rather their civic amelioration; while
Jews would not enjoy the same privileges as non-Jews, they would be freed of
burdensome restrictions on residence, occupation, and travel.
The most visible and vocal Jewish respondent to Dohm and other advocates
of the civic improvement of German Jews was Moses Mendelssohn (1728–86),
grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and the founder of an intellec-
tual movement known as the Berlin Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment.
Haskalah was once portrayed by historians as a prototypical Jewish response to
the changes of the eighteenth century, but recent scholarship has increasingly
emphasized the exceptional nature of Mendelssohn and the Berlin Haskalah.
In particular, historians have juxtaposed Mendelssohn’s program of change
with a concurrent and in some places preexisting process of change in western
Europe and Italy. The specific changes brought about by the program and
process were largely similar: a positive evaluation of secular education; changes
in language, manners, and dress; laxity in religious observance; and frequent
recourse to non-Jewish courts. Yet the unselfconscious manner in which these
changes took place in western Europe and Italy was more representative of
European Jewry than Mendelssohn’s self-conscious attempt to transform the
Jews of Berlin and the German States.
Mendelssohn was, in this regard, more important as a symbol of the possi-
bilities of Jews transforming themselves and being transformed by the state
than as an agent of such changes; and the Haskalah was in effect a transitional
movement between eighteenth-century traditional Judaism and nineteenth-
century progressive Judaism. His initial impact was limited to the immediate
environs of Berlin. Further east, in the Habsburg Monarchy and Poland,
though, Jews would be inspired by Mendelssohn’s writings and life. The cel-
ebrated case of Solomon Maimon, a Polish Jew who fled westward from “the
world of Talmudic darkness” to study at the feet of Moses Mendelssohn, epit-
omized Mendelssohn’s real impact. Half a century later, Mendelssohn would
resonate even more among the adherents of the Galician and Russian
Haskalah movements.
Born in Dessau, Mendelssohn received a traditional Jewish upbringing and
education. In 1743, he moved to Berlin, where his intellectual gifts won
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 147