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  • Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity
  • Brian M. Smollett
Shmuel Feiner, Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity, trans. Anthony Berris (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010). Pp. 237. $25.00.

“Can a people be born in a day?” asked Heinrich Graetz in the introduction to the “Mendelssohnian Epoch” in his great History of the Jews. For Graetz, the most prominent Jewish historian of the nineteenth century, the answer was affirmative. The appearance of the young, hunchbacked Moses Mendelssohn at the gates of Berlin in 1743 signaled a period of rebirth. Mendelssohn, who would bring philosophy “out of the stars and into the homes of men,” revived, according to Graetz, the broken, moribund spirit of European Jewry. Other commentators, such as the nationalist writer Peretz Smolenskin, subsequently reviled Mendelssohn as a man who led his people away from a national identity into assimilationism.

In the century and a half since Graetz and Smolenskin, Mendelssohn scholarship has made significant strides, eschewing both hagiography and demonization. Yet Mendelssohn still has an iconic status in the pantheon of Jewish modernizers. This status is, in part, confirmed by the translation and publication of Shmuel Feiner’s informative and highly readable biography as one of the first editions to the new, Yale University Press Jewish Lives series. Though valuable to both scholars and general readers, Feiner’s work is not intended as a replacement for the thorough, magisterial study of Moses Mendelssohn by Alexander Altmann (1973). It serves instead as a useful supplement to Altmann’s, reflecting and in some ways even harmonizing the last three decades of Mendelssohn scholarship.

Moses Mendelssohn: Sage of Modernity is primarily a narrative work. Neither the English nor the Hebrew edition (2005) contains an introduction or discussion of previous scholarship. Feiner depicts Mendelssohn in context as a thoroughly eighteenth-century man who, like many Jewish residents of Berlin in his day, had adopted the fashions, manners, and intellectual interests of the city’s non-Jewish population. Yet Mendelssohn was also different. Having earned his place as one of the German Enlightenment’s leading lights, he invested an enormous amount of faith in the power of reason to transform hearts, minds, and, eventually, societies. As Feiner reveals, untoward events could at times throw Mendelssohn into deep despair, even bringing on physical maladies. This oscillation between great hope and bitter disappointment serves as a leitmotif in Feiner’s work. The Mendelssohn who by 1780 had secured special protected status in a Berlin that severely restricted its Jewish population and was lauded by intellectuals and princes alike experienced great distress when confronted with stone-throwing youths while on a family stroll along Unter den Linden (3).

By the time the fourteen-year-old Mendelssohn decided to follow his teacher David Fränkel to Berlin, he had already ventured beyond the traditional curriculum of Talmud into the study of Maimonides’ philosophical writings. In Berlin he soon befriended some of the community’s highly learned early Jewish enlighteners (maskilim), including Israel Samoscz and Aaron Gumpertz. With their assistance, Mendelssohn devoted most of the 1740s to the quite daunting task of mastering modern European and classical languages, natural sciences, and philosophy. Feiner, who has highlighted the difference between early and late maskilim, places Mendelssohn in the former category during this period. He moved beyond it when he [End Page 164] entered German intellectual circles in the 1750s. As Feiner explains, “the years 1753 to 1755 were the most important and critical in the shaping of the young Mendelssohn. During those years . . . he finally broke away from his training as a Torah scholar destined to take his place in the religious elite, and instead joined the scholarly elite of Berlin” (37). Perhaps, in reality, this was more of a transition than a “break.” After all, it was Aaron Gumpertz who introduced Mendelssohn into prominent Enlightenment circles and, most importantly, to Lessing, whose friendship, according to Feiner, “was to be one of the sources of Mendelssohn’s social standing and his entrée into Enlightenment social circles” (37).

Feiner’s account of the thirty-two-year-old Mendelssohn’s visit to the court of the illustrious Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschütz in Altona demonstrates the significance of Mendelssohn’s...

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