Mendelssohn’s Upending of Canonical Appropriation

Abstract

Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism cites a passage from the Psalms as prooftext to demonstrate that one of the key canonical texts—the literary corpus serving as the repository for the church songs every German Christian of the period would know by heart and sing in church—supports his central philosophical argument. Mendelssohn does so by offering his own translation of the opening of Psalm 19. With the inclusion of his translation he counteracts the assimilatory force of Luther’s canonical rendering. Inserting his own translation that recovers a canonical text as a voice of difference—in this case that of King David—Mendelssohn highlights the dynamics of canonical pressures and liberates an otherwise domesticated voice as that of political emancipation.