Jerusalem oder uber religiose Macht und Judentum: Vorrede zu Mannaseh Ben Israels "Rettung der Juden"

Abstract

Mendelssohn, Moses. Jerusalem oder uber religiose Macht und judentum: Vorrede zu Mannaseh Ben Israels Rettung der juden. Ed. David Martyn. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag, 2001.172 pp. euro15.50 paperback. This new edition of Mendelssohn's texts from 1782 and 1783 is most welcome for three principle reasons: the importance for cultural and philosophical history of the texts that are being made available here in an affordable format; the significant differences between this edition and the best one otherwise available on a relatively broad basis (i.e. in university libraries-the jubilaumsausgabe); and finally the informative usefulness and interpretive perspicacity of Martyn's Afterword. The two texts by Mendelssohn reedited here are crucial for any understanding both of his own development and of his influence on various wider debates during his lifetime and subsequently. The first of these texts, Mendelssohn's Preface to the Dutch Rabbi Manassah Ben Israel's plea (from 1656) for a tolerant attitude toward the Jews in England, entitled Salvation of the Jews, introduces the German translation (by the young Markus Herz) of Ben Israel's text in 1782. The Preface is important because it includes what was then a widely shocking argument. At the time, it had been hitherto broadly believed in the Christian world that judaism was an essentially political religion, and even that the political particularism of judaism was what crucially distinguished it from the universal and consequently apolitical or suprapolitical character of Christianity (the latter asserting itself most proactively in Mendelssohn's milieu in its Enlightenment form as one or another variety of rationalistic Lutheranism). The argument in the Preface that stuns those who hold such a view of judaism as essentially political is Mendelssohn' s suggestion that, even if the Jews should be given rights to full citizenship, their religion should not be endowed with any political power. (On this point, Mendelssohn is taking issue with Christian Wilhelm Dohm, who defends the notion of a Jewish right of excommunication in the context of his progressive proposal of German-Jewish emancipation, Uber die burgerliche Verbesserung der juden, to which the German translation of Ben Israel's text is appended.) Now, when shortly after the publication of Mendelssohn's Preface August Friedrich Cranz (anonymously) repeats the infamous aggression against Mendelssohn that had earlier been committed by Lavater (1769), provoking Mendelssohn to either prove the superiority of judaism over Christianity or convert (Cranz hereby implying that Mendelssohn has already all but converted by renouncing all claims to Jewish political power), Mendelssohn writes Jerusalem (1783) in response. …