Jews of Mecklenburg-Schwerin. To the duke, he justified same-day burial
with a combination of religious justification and reason. He assured the duke
that although the literal observance of the Mosaic laws of burial had ceased,
the spirit of the law remained binding according to rabbinic law. Moreover,
because certainty of death was required according to Jewish law, there was no
need to wait.
To the Jews, Mendelssohn sent a letter with a scolding tone that subjected
the religious law in question to reasonable arguments. The rabbis,
Mendelssohn pointed out, often made exceptions to the same-day burial rule,
even for minor reasons such as a close relative of the deceased having to travel
a great distance. If they made exceptions for minor reasons, logically they
should make an exception for something more pressing, such as a ducal law.
Mendelssohn, though, did not know that the Jews had also approached
Emden. The latter rebuked Mendelssohn for his response, arguing that med-
ical science was not grounds for changing Jewish law, and that Jews were
prohibited from adopting the ways of the Gentiles. Mendelssohn was
rebutted, but the two remained friends.
A year later, Mendelssohn was challenged by Johann Kaspar Lavater, a
Swiss Calvinist clergyman, who issued a friendly challenge to Mendelssohn
that he refute Christianity entirely or become a Calvinist. Mendelssohn
refused to enter into a Jewish–Christian polemic, finding such a challenge to
be irrelevant. For Mendelssohn, the burial controversy and the Lavater affair
represented the lingering notion that Jews and Christians were ultimately
separated from one another by outdated Jewish and Christian views. These
events also turned Mendelssohn’s attention from philosophy to write two
Jewish texts: his Biur, which was a translation of the Pentateuch into
Yiddish-Deutsch, along with his commentary; and Jerusalem, a two-part
philosophical treatise. In part 1 of Jerusalem, Mendelssohn argued for the sep-
aration of church and state, that religion was a private matter, and that the
Jewish communal right of herembe abolished. In part 2, he reconsidered
Spinoza’s definition of Judaism as an amalgam of natural law and dogma, and
instead defined Judaism as being made up of three parts: eternal truths,
which coincided with Spinoza’s natural law; historical truths, which included
the traditional notion of covenant and chosenness; and revealed legislation,
which coincided with Spinoza’s dogma. Unlike Spinoza, Mendelssohn
regarded all three components as equally essential to Judaism.
Ultimately, this definition of Judaism allowed Mendelssohn to respond to
enlightened Christians like Lavater, who argued that truly enlightened Jews
would abandon Judaism for Christianity. To such claims, Mendelsson retorted
that since, historically, Christianity is built on Judaism, if you deride Judaism
as irrational and antiquated, you must make the same claim about Christianity;
conversely, if you remain Christian, you must accept Mendelssohn as an
enlightened Jew. “If it be true,” he wrote in Jerusalem, “that the cornerstones of
my house are dislodged, and the structure threatens to collapse, do I act wisely
The age of enlightenment and emancipation, 1750–1880 149