Moses Mendelssohn's Living Script: Philosophy, Practice, History, Judaism by Elias Sacks (review)

The goal of Elias Saks's first book is a noble one: to correct systematic misunderstandings of Moses Mendelssohn's Jewish theology and to rehabilitate the "Father of modern Judaism" as an object of rigorous scholarly attention. Citing critical responses to Mendelssohn dating from the latter's immediate reception in the eighteenth century all the way to the present day, Saks delineates the troubled reception of Mendelssohnian religious thought: Mendelssohn's ideas about Judaism are expressed across many kinds of writings (metaphysical, theological, historical, epistolary) written in German and Hebrew to a wide variety of audiences. As a result, Mendelssohn's individual works are too often studied in isolation, with reference only to their particular contexts and not with reference to Mendelssohn's entire oeuvre. On the other hand, those who do study Mendelssohn's entire corpus struggle to reconcile the diverse agendas of his individual works into single body of thought, for which reason Mendelssohn is often labelled inconsistent or non-rigorous.

With the broad goal of rehabilitating Mendelssohn as a consistent thinker, Saks takes as a test case Mendelssohn's particularly perplexing arguments about the advantages of Jewish practice: in Mendelssohn's most canonical works (the prize-winning 1763 Essay and the 1783 Jerusalem) appear the ostensibly contradictory arguments that (a) theoretical knowledge of God is available to reason a priori in the same way as geometric proofs, (b) Jewish dogma in particular prescribes a set of practical rituals that enable individuals to maintain faith in God, and (c) unwavering trust in the Hebrew texts of Judaism and their Rabbinic hermeneutic tradition are essential to the maintenance of faith in God. Since the first appearance of these works, readers have disagreed about which Mendelssohn is dominant (the universalist metaphysician or the committed Jew?) and about how Mendelssohn can claim to be so committed to the textual tradition of Judaism amid seventeenth- and eighteenth-century critical Biblical scholarship that so effectively reduced the Masoretic and Talmudic texts to products of their historical conditions. Saks intervenes in this confused and oversimplifying reception history by reconstructing from a wide range of Mendelssohn's major and lesser works (all of which Saks reads in the original tongues) the latter's largely implicit philosophy of history: over time, the dominant philosophical models through which humans understand the world change and develop, leading us at times closer to, at times astray from universal metaphysical truths, like that of God's nature, and causing us to reinterpret historical texts. By attributing to Mendelssohn this extraordinarily creative and well-argued-for philosophical position, Saks can reconcile the other Mendelssohnian points that have traditionally troubled readers: a practice-based religion like that of Judaism is most equipped to weather philosophical flux over time, since Judaism is rooted in performed ritual (not credal statements fixed in language), which triggers reflection on universal truths.

This compelling reinterpretation unfolds with a level of precision and a range of methodologies that do justice to Mendelssohn. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 generously articulate the problem of Jewish practice that has vexed Mendelssohn's interpreters. Chapter 4 demonstrates how Mendelssohn's philosophy of history is present in even his minor works. Finally, in a brilliant display, chapter 5 posits the intellectual history of Mendelssohn's philosophy of history, progressing from Voltaire through Hume and Spinoza, and contrasts Mendelssohn's views to those of his contemporaries like Lessing.

There are a few aspects one hopes to see improved in future editions of this book. Readers of German and Rabbinic Hebrew will find that Saks includes original-language citations of Mendelssohn's words too sparingly and arbitrarily; such readers will be compelled to collate original texts with the English translations provided by Saks even at the most crucial and philological moments of the book's analysis. One also might have wished for even brief discussion of Mendelssohn's well-known intellectual debt to Plato, in particular to...