Overcoming Tolerance: Mendelssohn and Augustine on Judaism and Christianity

Abstract

Moses Mendelssohn is frequently credited with being the first great modern Jewish thinker. It is argued that Mendelssohn gained this title by virtue of his commitment to establishing Judaism's commensurability with the Enlightenment project as it was conceived by eighteenth century German thinkers such as Leibniz and Wolff. It is the central claim of this essay that, so read, Mendelssohn's work has been underappreciated for its contribution to the changing face of Jewish-Christian relations. If, I argue, Mendelssohn's body of work lays the groundwork for a pluralist society, such a pluralist society presupposes an active role for both Judaism and Christianity as agents of cultural education. Mendelssohn undoubtedly issues a bold critique of Christianity throughout his work. However, a careful analysis of his overall attitude regarding religion's role in the public square points to a constructive proposal emergent from Mendelssohn's writings for a Jewish-Christian partnership in the labor of education and cultural critique. Of course, this is not the same as suggesting that Mendelssohn's model for Jewish-Christian partnership is one that Christians would accept as authentic to their selfunderstanding.1 To render Mendelssohn's model credible, a case needs to be made that Mendelssohn's construct of Christianity is recognizable to Christians. In the second half of the essay, I will attempt to demonstrate a family resemblance between Mendelssohn's account of Christianity as emancipatory culture and the account of Christianity as the praxis of self-cultivation through the exercise of reading found in the work of St. Augustine. At stake is not only the possibility of a working partnership between Jews and Christians in a pluralist environment, but