The Political Perfection of Original Judaism: Pedagogical Governance and Ecclesiastical Power in Mendelssohn's Jerusalem
Moses Mendelssohn famously penned his Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power and Judaism in response to a public challenge. Mendelssohn had declared “ecclesiastical power” to be a contradiction in terms, and had thus come out strongly against the use of coercion in religious life, and against the ban of excommunication by rabbinic authorities, in particular. In the anonymously published The Search for Light and Right, August Cranz defies Mendelssohn to explain how he could reconcile this liberal view of religion with his continued commitment to—and his insistence that Jews were still obligated to observe—Jewish law. “As reasonable as all you say [about religious power] may be, to just that degree it contradicts the faith of your fathers . . . and the principles of its church . . . expressly set down in the books of Moses,” Cranz argues. “The theocratic ruling staff drove the whole people . . . with force and punishment.” True, Cranz concedes, exile reduced the capacity of Jewish authorities to enforce Jewish law, “but these ecclesiastical laws are there even if their exercise is no longer a must.” Cranz challenges Mendelssohn to explain his apparently irreconcilable commitments: “How can you persist in the faith of your fathers and shake the whole structure by clearing away its cornerstones, dear Mr. Mendelssohn, when you contest the ecclesiastical law given as divine revelation through Moses?”
Between Judaism and German Enlightenment: Recent Work on Moses Mendelssohn in English
Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is generally recognized as the first German-Jewish philosopher. The past forty years have witnessed the appearance of five major book-length interpretations of Moses Mendelssohn in English: Michael Meyer’s The Origins of the Modern Jew: Jewish Identity and European Culture in Germany 1749–1824 (1967); Alexander Altmann’s Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (1973); Allan Arkush’s Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (1994); David Sorkin’s Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment (1996) and Edward Breuer’s The Limits of Enlightenment: Jews, Germans, and the Eighteenth-Century Study of Scripture (1996). These works have generally been guided by a single interpretive question namely whether or not Mendelssohn was able to harmonize his commitment to Judaism with his commitment to Enlightenment. I review these five interpretations of Mendelssohn.
The Liberalism of Moses Mendelssohn
“Judaism is not Thomas Jefferson.” With this terse epigram, Rabbi Meir Kahane contemptuously brushed off an American television interviewer who betrayed more than a little skepticism, back in the 1980s, about Kahane’s calls for the revocation of Israeli Arabs' citizenship. As odious and indefensible as Kahane’s racist politics were, one has to acknowledge at least the partial validity of his argument. Prior to the Enlightenment, Judaism evinced no recognition of the equal political rights of all men, regardless of their creed or national origin. During the two centuries prior to the advent of Kahane, however, Jewish thinkers of various stripes made strenuous efforts to align themselves with the spirit of modern times. They reinterpreted their religious tradition in the light of the liberal political teachings that had brought them out of the ghetto and had otherwise been so beneficial to themselves as well as others. In the United States, in particular, they succeeded so well at this task that most Jewish viewers of that interview with Kahane must have been shocked and outraged by what sounded to them like a heretical statement. Nevertheless, however much one might wish to believe that Kahane was an isolated representative of a retrograde attitude, one has to admit that he is far from the only spokesman for traditional Judaism who has in recent years sought to drive a wedge between his religion and modern liberal ideas. The Israeli religious right is well stocked with such figures, and their views have been echoed - albeit rather weakly - in the Diaspora as well. In response to their critiques of liberalism, other traditional Jewish thinkers have grappled with the tension between their heritage and currently regnant political ideologies.