Mendelssohn and the State

Mendelssohn and the State

In some ways, Mendelssohn is the classic that modern Jewish philosophy never had. The case of his reception has paradigmatic significance for understanding the limits and challenges faced by philosophy, German Studies, and Jewish Studies. In particular, it raises the methodological question of how to address a body of work that has been systematically marginalized and whose critical significance, rendered largely invisible by traditional scholarship, still awaits recognition. The critical study of Mendelssohn therefore also presents us with the task of recovering, reexamining, and rethinking what research and scholarship have so effectively eclipsed. As the critical edition of Mendelssohn's complete works approaches completion almost eight decades after its first volumes appeared, the completion of the Jubiläumsausgabe signals more than anything else the need for a new edition. Ironically, the history of this edition underscores the fate of an author whose claim to classic status has remained, from Mendelssohn's time onward, a matter of denial. In this respect, the Mendelssohn edition has become historical even before its completion and thus serves as a case study of the complicated, if not conflicted, story of the Jewish and German reception of Mendelssohn.

Mendelssohn, however, has always resisted his placement in the world of German and Jewish letters as two separate spheres, but his resistance to this two-world scheme was paid for with an obscurity that seemed curiously at odds with his status as a figure celebrated during his lifetime for the clarity of his thought and exposition. To view him as a messenger between two worlds, as is often argued, is to ignore his critical trajectory as a thinker firmly grounded in different intellectual traditions, which he also helped to shape in no small measure. Mendelssohn's theoretical grasp reaches well beyond the idea of a separate and distinctly identifiable German and Jewish culture. Both the idea of a "symbiosis"—associated with liberal hope, if not delusion—and its failure—a diagnosis ratified by post-Holocaust hindsight—are based on a two-world theory that ignores the larger historical and cultural contexts in which the German and Jewish traditions developed and interacted in the first place. Critical attention to Mendelssohn instead forces us to see his thought as the intellectual trajectory of an early cosmopolitan citizen who did not shy away from a discourse on national difference because his concerns lay deeper. The title of the book for which he is best known, Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism, signals his approach with eloquent succinctness. With the pointed prophetic reference in its title the book introduces an alternative notion of universalism as a dialogue with alterity, a theory that still awaits recognition. Concluding with the citation of Zechariah 8:19, the book highlights the intertextual reference of the title Jerusalem and spells out its alternative approach to universalism. Imagining Jerusalem as a tangible particular that represents the hope for a universal that would not cancel particularity, the passage in Zechariah 8:20–23, to which the citation points, challenges the two-world theory as metaphysical and cultural paradigm.¹ To comprehend Mendelssohn as a man standing between or straddling two worlds is to superimpose an anachronistic schema that describes the problem of German-Jewish relations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, but obscures an understanding of the historical Mendelssohn.

Even before Mendelssohn moved to Berlin, he lived in Dessau, which is to say not on a Jewish island in a German world, but in a place where he experienced the vibrant conjunction of cultures intersecting in creative and often inspiring ways. For what else were the "German" and the "Jewish" worlds of the time than highly dynamic signifiers at a historical moment when modern national and religious cultures and traditions were being reinvented? Reducing Mendelssohn's challenge and problematic to a German-Jewish dilemma is not only simplistic but also turns a blind eye to the multifaceted impetus of his whole agenda. Behind the "German" and the...