admiration first from Jews and then from the intellectual community. In
1763, he won the Berlin Academy essay contest, thus launching a career as a
philosopher. After the publication of his first bestseller, a study of aesthetics
called Phaedon, he was nicknamed “the German Socrates” and became part of
the intellectual elite of Berlin despite his Jewishness.
His friendship with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, above all, came to symbol-
ize the possibility of a religiously neutral friendship between a Jew and a
Christian. Lessing, a leading voice of the German Enlightenment, expressed a
sympathetic and favorable attitude toward Jews. In 1754, his play Die Juden
told of a German aristocrat who, upon being saved from robbers by an anony-
mous stranger, offers the stranger his daughter’s hand in marriage – not
realizing that the stranger is a Jew. The daughter, whose youthful spirit repre-
sents Lessing’s hope for a future enlightened society, is unable to comprehend
why the fact that the heroic stranger is a Jew should make any difference.
In 1779, Lessing published Nathan the Wise. This play, a take on Boccacio’s
“Parable of the Three Rings,” portrays Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as
three siblings who received a ring from their king-father, Saladin. Each son
tries to prove that his ring is the only authentic one. Nathan, the spokesman
for Judaism and modeled after Mendelssohn, is the voice of enlightenment
and religious tolerance. During the course of the play, Nathan takes in a
Christian girl and raises her as neither Jew nor Christian but in the religion of
reason. Unlike Voltaire, Lessing at no point has Mendelssohn/Nathan aban-
don Judaism. This stirred Mendelssohn to believe in the possibility of a true
rapprochement between Jews and Gentile intellectuals.
Of course, Nathan was a highly idealized version of Mendelssohn. Most
Jews were not Mendelssohns, just as most Christians were not Lessings. The
disparity between Lessing’s idealized vision of what Jews could be and the
reality of German Jewry would point to the difficulty of bringing to fruition
a program of change aimed at integrating Jews into mainstream society.
Integrating Mendelssohn, court Jews, or the handful of atypical acculturated
German Jews was no problem; integrating the mass of unacculturated Jews
was far more challenging.
Still, his friendship with Lessing convinced him of the possibility of rap-
prochement between Jews and Christians. This belief was put to the test
twice during the 1770s. In 1772, the duke of Mecklenburg-Schwerin, con-
cerned that individuals who only appeared to be dead might mistakenly be
thought actually dead, passed a law that required a three-day waiting period
between death and burial. For local Jews, this posed a problem, as Jewish law
required same-day burial. In response to their protest, the duke agreed to
repeal the law if the Jews could demonstrate that same-day burial was an
integral part of Judaism. When he was informed that same-day burial did not
stem from a fundamental principle of Judaism, he let his new law stand.
The Jews turned for advice and assistance to Mendelssohn and to Jacob
Emden. Mendelssohn gave two answers, one to the duke and the other to the
148 The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880