Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn was born at Dessau in Anhalt, the son of a poor Jewish copyist of sacred scrolls. He first studied the Torah, the Talmud, and the philosophical and theological writings of the medieval Jewish philosopher Maimonides. Mendelssohn went to Berlin in 1745, where he learned German and Latin while living in severe poverty. In 1750, he was hired as a tutor in the household of Isaak Bernhard, a wealthy Jewish textile manufacturer, and eventually became a bookkeeper and then a partner in Bernhard's firm. He soon made the acquaintance of prominent Berlin intellectuals, including Thomas Abbt, C. F. Nicolai, and G. E. Lessing (who became his close friend). Despite the fact that Mendelssohn was in his teens before he became acquainted with German, his writing style in the language is exemplary in its evocativeness, directness, and lucidity.

Mendelssohn's first important philosophical writings appeared in 1755 and gained him an immediate reputation as "the Jewish Socrates." In 1764, his treatise on evidence in the metaphysical sciences won a prize from the Berlin academy. Perhaps the philosophical work best known in his lifetime was "Phaedo," or on the "Immortality of the Soul" (1767), an attempt to bring the Socratic defense of immortality up to date in a dialogue similar to Plato's. Mendelssohn's great work "Jerusalem," a political-religious discourse on Judaism and its position in history, is a rationalist plea for religious and political tolerance, advocating the political disestablishment of religion and the political and civil equality of all citizens regardless of religion.

Mendelssohn was one of the leading philosophers of the German Enlightenment and the most able of the Berlin "popular philosophers" of the 1770's and 1780's. Although he and Kant were on opposite sides of many issues in metaphysics and never met, they greatly respected each other's work. In 1764, in a review of one of Kant's metaphysical essays, Mendelssohn predicted that