Lebendige Schrift: Reprasentation und Idolatrie in Moses Mendelssohns Philosophie und Exegese des Judentums (review)

This book is methodologically guided by Jacques Derrida’s Of Grammatology and Roland Barthes’s semiology and participates in both the strengths and weaknesses of those approaches to texts. In language that is often arresting and precise, it jars and reorients one’s reading and thinking, destabilizing what might be termed more conventional interpretations of Mendelssohn’s work. But in point of conceptual lucidity it does not always lead to an advance, and by its refusal to examine what is “outside” the text important considerations with respect to Mendelssohn’s intentions and actions are ignored.

The author constantly reiterates that Mendelssohn’s writings, and his conceptual ization of the practice of writing, translation, and commentary, constitute a form of resistance to established hierarchical cultural traditions in Europe, especially in philos ophy. But reiteration (a term which the author claims is central to Mendelssohn’s “sceptical semiology”) does not quickly clarify the quality of this resistance, and it is only toward the end of the book that this becomes somewhat more comprehensible. Nonetheless, the effort to describe and analyze Mendelssohn’s work through the notion of resistance does lead one, as the author wishes, to rethink many categories of both Jewish and Western thought, including those of representation, truth, text, difference, revelation, and freedom.

Hilfrich argues that Mendelssohn’s writing praxis was unsystematic, shifting from philosophy to exegesis, from Hebrew to German to create an œuvre that is self- consciously transdisciplinary and eclectic. Thus Mendelssohn’s principal writings—the dialogue Phaedon, the translation of the Hebrew Bible, the commentary on Maimonides’ logic and the essay Jerusalem—intermingle the Hebrew and German languages, even transcribing German into Hebrew letters, in an effort to entwine biblical and rabbinic tradition with modern literary and philosophical reflections (p. 33). Mendelssohn performed, or rather lived, a high-wire act (“Seiltänzertum”) which was followed by all those participating in the “German-Jewish dialogue of modernity” (p. 43) up to the time of Kafka, after which the dialogue seems to have broken down. In this way, Hilfrich claims, Mendelssohn carried out resistance to efforts to impose a false, chiliastic unity in the spheres of religion, language, and culture. Furthermore, he resisted the doxa of orthodox as well as heterodox thinking in both Jewish and German culture by highlighting, in various ways, the problematic of otherness—the supreme crisis of the epoch.

Unfortunately the problem of otherness, though frequently mentioned, is not adequately characterized by Hilfrich. Here it would have been helpful, even for the reader who has some acquaintance with Mendelssohn’s work and the history of European and Jewish culture in the Enlightenment period, if Hilfrich had analyzed the crisis in greater specificity and detail. Instead she confines her analysis of the notion of otherness in German-Jewish relations to a dialectical treatment of two texts, the Forschen nach Licht und Recht (1782) by a fairly obscure Christian writer and Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem. The entire political and cultural conjuncture of European Jewry, its political and social otherness, is thus seen through this dialectic, an approach which this reviewer finds less than instructive. Nor is the notion of otherness within the Jewish community explored. Yet the text of Jerusalem, with its themes (among others) of freedom of thought and civil rights for minorities, was addressed not only to Germans and other Europeans, but also to the Jewish people of Prague, Vilna, and elsewhere, who were living and thinking in very different ways from Mendelssohn’s own community in Berlin. Although Hilfrich fleetingly mentions the reception of Mendelssohn’s Bible translation as “not kosher” by some, this point is left undeveloped; surely it is quite important to the thesis of Mendelssohn’s resistance to established authority. In sum, though Hilfrich repeatedly describes Mendelssohn’s work as a political-semiotic project, the political dimension, as a response to the actual situation of communities of Jews in Germany and other parts of Europe, receives...