Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (review)

Book Reviews 155 not? That a general index would have been ofhelp to any. reader of this at least partly successful attempt to arouse renewed interest in an all-but-forgotten yet for his time not uncharacteristic and indeed quite popular Jewish musician goes without saying. Admittedly, Hartmut Wecker recognizes the need for considerably more detailed studies. But even this, his fmal statement, is marred by his fatefully global conceptions. For what he has in mind is conclusive clarification as to whether the social and political factors he believes to have been so crucial for his hero's life and work did actually affect "all Jewish composers of the emancipation and assimilation period in Central Europe." Would that the Jewish diaspora experience were that simple! Alexander L. Ringer School of Music University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, by David Sorkin. Berkeley: University ofCalifornia Press, 1996. 214 pp. $40.00. I remember when I first heard of Moses Mendelssohn. It was in the kitchen of my mother's apartment in Germany where I had switched on the radio in the middle of some kind of literary reading. I did not recognize the author nor had I any sense of his philosophical or religious agenda. What riveted me was the beauty ofthe words and the serene progress of the prose. As it turned out, the reading had been from Morgenstunden (Morning Hours), the work David Sorkin deems "Mendelssohn's ... most sustained philosophical work" (p. 147). Since this first encounter with the German "Socrates" ofthe Berlin Enlightenment ofthe late eighteenth century I have been going through various phases ofenchantment and disenchantment with Mendelssohn. David Sorkin has produced a new study of this seminal figure in modem Jewish thought and history which promises to shed new light on an old problem. Mendelssohn, a typical . figure of a period of transition, is hard to pin down. How much of his work must be understood as a contribution to the philosophical movement of Enlightenment, how much of it should be read as a genuine and authentic contribution to modem Jewish thought? Sorkin's answer is Solomonic. As a rigorous historian, he locates Mendelssohn in the context ofa "religious Enlightenment," paralleled in other religious movements of the time (Protestant, Catholic), that sought a fertile compromise between the Enlightenment ideal of clear and distinct use of reason and language on the one hand and the historical religious tradition on the other. Mendelssohn further appears as an important sociological link between Enlightenment as a phenomenon represented by 156 SHOFAR Fa111997 Vol. 16, No.1 individuals and Enlightenment as a movement involving schools, journals, and whole groups of individuals promoting (in this case) Haskalah on the popular level. I always understood Mendelssohn's Hebrew works as a means by which he thought to promote the truths of the Enlightenment among his Jewish contemporaries. For example, as Sorkin amply documents, Mendelssohn's emphasis on studying Hebrew grammar thorougWy instead ofhaphazardly, or his focusing on biblical texts rather than on the Talmud, indicate the predilections ofsomeone who wishes to educate his fellow Jews in ways conducive to the development of knowledge and skills useful to an enlightened citizen of the world. An even more striking case is Mendelssohn's promotion of "proper" German among the Jews of his time. So far there is nothing novel to Sorkin's careful and well documented introduction to Mendelssohn's Hebrew writings. Yet Sorkin seems to want to persuade us that Mendelssohn's familiarity with Jewish sources and his use ofsuch traditional forms of literary exposition as commentary make Mendelssohn a more authentic Jew than has been hitherto assumed. Assumed by whom, I ask myself. Another such somewhat puzzling claim, reiterated with a certain monotony at every possible juncture, is that Mendelssohn revived the "Andalusian tradition of Jewish thought" (mentioned no less than 14 times in 155 pages, usually in strategic places). This school of thought, according to Sorkin, consists mainly of Jehuda ha Levi, and Mendelssohn's connection to this eleventh/twelfth-century Spanish-Jewish thinker seems to exhaust itself in certain similarities that are never fully explored by Sorkin. It is difficult to shed one's suspicion that...