Fending Off Idolatry: Ceremonial Law in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

Fending Off Idolatry:

Ceremonial Law in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

In a 1923 letter to Martin Buber published under the title "Concerning the Law," Franz Rosenzweig asks:

Did any Jew prior to [the Western Orthodoxy and the liberalism of the reformers of the nineteenth century] really think—without having the question put to him—that he was keeping the Law, and the Law him, only because God imposed it upon Israel at Sinai? Actually faced by the question, he might have thought of such an answer; and the philosophers to whom the question has been put because they were supposedly 'professional' thinkers, have always been fond of giving this very reply. From Mendelssohn on, our entire people has subjected itself to the torture of this embarrassing questioning; the Jewishness of every individual has squirmed on the needle point of a "why" [und als von Mendelssohn ab unser ganzes Volk sich der Folter all dieser wahrhaft peinlichen Fragen unterzog und das Judesein jedes Einzelnen nun auf der Nadelspitze eines Warum tanzte, da mochte es an der Zeit sein]. Certainly, it was high time for an architect to come and convert this foundation into a wall behind which the people, pressed with questions, could seek shelter. But for those living without questions, this reason for keeping the Law was only one among others and probably not the most cogent. No doubt the Torah, both written and oral was given Moses on Sinai but was it not created before the creation of the world? Written against a background of shining fire in letters of somber flame? And was not the world created for its sake? And did not Adam's son Seth found the first House of Study for the teaching of the Torah? And did not the patriarchs keep the Law for half a millennium before Sinai?"¹

Forced by Lavater and others to "subject" himself "to the torture" of an "embarrassing questioning," Moses Mendelssohn tries in Jerusalem, published in 1783, to construct for himself and for his fellow Jews a space larger than "the needle-point of a 'why,'" "die Nadelspitze eines Warum." Mendelssohn's book was more a response to Christians challenging Judaism than an address to fellow Jews, and it is this "Christian dictation" or "Diktat"² that rendered his sketches of Judaism "somewhat oblique, asymmetrical or, to quote von Brinckmann's 1789 expression in a letter to Schleiermacher, not quite 'kosher.'"³ It is well known that beyond the attacks of Mendelssohn's own time, the broader and even more challenging context for his work had been marked out by Spinoza. Moses Mendelssohn was, in Allan Arkush's words, "the first major Jewish thinker to seek to come to terms with the problems resulting from the Spinozist critique of Judaism."⁴ Mendelssohn scholars are in agreement in their assessment that he failed in this attempt.⁵ According to Niewöhner, however, the primary goal of Jerusalem was an altogether different and far more practical one. Niewöhner shows convincingly that Mendelssohn's Jerusalem betrays only a second-hand familiarity with Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus, namely, through the "detour" of Wolff's Theologia Naturalis and Bayle's interpretation of Spinoza.⁶ As a consequence, Jerusalem needs to be read not as "a philosophy of Judaism" but a "political treatise intended to enable the Jews to subordinate their jurisdiction to the common law, without having to deny their orthodox way of life as Jews."⁷ In this regard, Jerusalem was indeed addressed to Jews, but also to the Christian authorities. Jeffrey Librett's careful reading points in a similar direction:

If Mendelssohn argues in Jerusalem both that orthodox Judaism is utterly compatible with rationality and that Jews should not have the right to excommunicate other Jews, then he is clearly countering tendencies toward assimilation and conversion from within, that is, on the basis of the Jews' free renunciation of Judaism, as well as from without.⁸

Within...