The Mendelssohn Myth and Its Method

Abstract

For the past century and a half the scholarly interpretation of Moses Mendelssohn has been locked into a mythopoeic method of Germanification. Ever since the 1843-45 edition of his works, Mendelssohn has been presented by scholars primarily, if not exclusively, as a German thinker, that is, a prominent figure of the Berlin Aujkldrung and the preeminent Jewish intellectual of his day who wrote in German. That he also wrote in Hebrew has always been acknowledged, yet scholars have consistently ignored or marginalized those works by failing to take account of their contents. This practice has been flagrant, albeit excusable among those scholars who wrote about Mendelssohn the Aujkldrer, for they assumed that knowledge of his Hebrew works was irrelevant. It has been egregious and, I would submit, unjustifiable among those who wrote about him as a Jewish thinker or who aimed to give a comprehensive interpretation of his thought. Many scholars who were competent Hebraists and knew, or at least knew of, the Hebrew works nonetheless acquiesced to the Germanifying myth. One would have expected that the Jubilee edition (Jubildumsausgabe; 1929-38; 1971) of Mendelssohn's works would have altered this situation by making his Hebrew writings available, but this has not been the case. The mythopoeic method has shown remarkable tenacity in continuing to shape the scholarship. Although there were biographies of Mendelssohn written during his lifetime and shortly after his death, and friends and admirers continued to publish articles about him in the first decades of the nineteenth century,