EUROPE, RELIGIONS AND STATE MODERNITY: MENDELSSOHN’S VISION

Abstract

Religious ideas and beliefs not only suggest spiritual life, but inspire everyday life, the collective psyche. As for the elites, they can be better understood by the acknowledgement of both discontinuity (due to time and vocabulary) and continuity of their spiritual and cultural preoccupations. Moses Mendelssohn asserted a side of modernity without distancing from community culture limited to its own set of values. He was not free in relation to the traditions and history of his own community, and especially to religious dogma. In fact, Mendelssohn, in his own philosophy, associated the principles of the Old World to those of the new reality. On one hand, he was enticed by emancipation, civism and modernity, and on the other by the preservation of Jewish identity according to the ancient myths. Even if he was an enlightened spirit in the way he regarded the integration of Jews or social emancipation in general, Mendelssohn was not an advocate of interferences (of inter-culturality). He was not a successor of those free, open and creative Marranos of the fifteenth century – Spanish Jews converted to Christianity, preserving a part of old Judaic practices – and neither a follower of Spinoza’s new philosophy. Not incidentally, Voltaire better understood human nature, being a humanist in all aspects. The freedom of conscience could not and still cannot ignore the diversity of people and human groups, and neither can the associations or interferences among them who, in modernity, needed to cohabitate and cooperate, not only in order to survive, but to generate universal values.