By Shmuel Feiner
The “German Socrates,” Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was once the main influential Jewish philosopher of the eighteenth and 19th centuries. A Berlin star and an enormous determine within the Enlightenment, respected by way of Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities universal to Jews of his time whereas formulating the philosophical foundations of a latest Judaism fitted to a brand new age. His so much influential books integrated the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that cleared the path for generations of Jews to grasp the language of the bigger culture.
Feiner’s e-book is the 1st that gives a whole, human portrait of this interesting man—uncommonly modest, conscious about his job as an highbrow pioneer, wise, regularly Jewish, but completely conversant with the area round him—providing a bright experience of Mendelssohn’s lifestyle in addition to of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a number one pupil of Jewish highbrow historical past, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a pal (Mendelssohn’s long-standing friendship with the German dramatist Gotthold Ephraim Lessing used to be noticeable as a version for Jews and non-Jews worldwide), as a tireless suggest for his humans, and as an both indefatigable spokesman for the paramount significance of highbrow independence.
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Sample text
Gumpertz was six years older than Mendelssohn, a son of one of the distinguished families of the economic elite, and a keen intellectual. Years after the death of this admired friend of his youth, Mendelssohn wrote that to Gumpertz alone he owed everything he had achieved in the sciences. Gumpertz developed Mendelssohn’s propensity for science and philosophy and set before him the model of the knowledge-hungry intellectual. It was he who guided Mendelssohn along the road to the ultimate ideal of scholar and philosopher: together they encountered the writings of Christian scholars, attended gymnasium lessons when Mendelssohn was sixteen, corresponded with various intellec28 FROM DESSAU TO BERLI N tuals, and sought entrée into Berlin’s scholarly circles.
Admiration of Spinoza in the eighteenth century was problematic since he had been accused of instigating a master plot against religious faiths; the name Spinoza had become synonymous with heresy. In the view of the historian Jonathan Israel, for instance, Spinoza’s philosophy, especially his criticism of religion and his pantheism—in shorthand Deus sive Natura, God or Nature—nourished the radical European Enlightenment and agitated the intellectual milieu for decades. Even Mendelssohn, who throughout his life resisted atheistic notions, admitted that Spinoza’s pantheism was finally a tragic mistake and sought to divorce his sentiments about religion from his exemplary philosophy.
It might be thought that the young man from Dessau, a bachelor in his early twenties, who lived as an ascetic scholar, sacrificing himself for philosophical study, had substituted intellectual passion for sensual and erotic feelings. ” Conversely, in the third letter of “On Sentiments” Mendelssohn presented a theory that included among its autobiographical elements a description of “how I prepare myself to enjoy something pleasurable”: I contemplate the object of the pleasure, I reflect upon all sides of it, and strive to grasp them distinctly.