The Letter and the Law: A Brief Introduction

Abstract

When Moses Mendelssohn published Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism in 1783, he believed he had resolved, once and for all, the problem of ecclesiastical and civil law that had plagued modern theories of the state from Hobbes onward. Religion, as he defined it, was a matter of personal conviction that could be neither compelled nor punished by the state. Civil law, by contrast, was a contract that one entered into to secure rights-most notably, the right to have personal convictions without the interference of the state. Mendelssohn's treatise had immediate implications for minority communities that had been denied the protection of the law on the grounds that their religious convictions were not consistent with the doctrine of the state, which was invariably the religious persuasion of the Elector or ruler. Yet Mendelssohn's interest extended beyond the minority groups then living in Prussia, where he himself resided as an auJferordentlicher Schutzjude, aJew granted permission to live in a region but denied the possibility of passing this privilege on to his children. Mendelssohn sought to articulate a formal principle for the separation of church and state, a principle that would insure that neither institution infringed on the other within their specified domains. It was in this context that Mendelssohn expanded the notion of religion to include any reasonable conviction regarding eternal truths, even the conviction that God did not exist at all, which had surprising currency in the eighteenth century. Yet Mendelssohn's defense of religion in general as an exercise of mind opened him up to attacks against his faith in particular, Judaism,