Between Judaism and German Enlightenment: Recent Work on Moses Mendelssohn in English

Abstract

AbstractMoses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is generally recognized as the first German‐Jewish philosopher. The past forty years have witnessed the appearance of five major book‐length interpretations of Moses Mendelssohn in English: Michael Meyer’s The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749–1824 (1967); Alexander Altmann’s Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (1973); Allan Arkush’s Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (1994); David Sorkin’s Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) and Edward Breuer’s The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth‐Century Study of Scripture (1996). These works have generally been guided by a single interpretive question namely whether or not Mendelssohn was able to harmonize his commitment to Judaism with his commitment to Enlightenment. I review these five interpretations of Mendelssohn.