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Not the least important aspect of this study is its thoroughgoing engagement with both aspects of Moses Mendelssohn’s life-long project—German Enlightenment philosophy and Jewish thought. Michah Gottlieb has succeeded admirably in granting his readers a sustained look into how Mendelssohn struggled to bring both sides together into a dialogue (not to say a synthesis). In so doing, Gottlieb has pushed Mendelssohn scholarship to a new level—one where Maimonides actually interacts with Leibniz and Jacobi through (of course) the theologicalpolitical thought of Spinoza. More than any other recent text on Mendelssohn, Gottlieb’s does justice to both the Jewish and philosophical aspects of Mendelssohn’s thought. Gottlieb’s argument can be stated as follows: As an exemplar of the ‘moderate enlightenment’, Mendelssohn holds that belief in a providential deity is compatible with reason (2); this co-ordination of reason and revelation is of ethical and political (rather than metaphysical and epistemological) concern (2). Being a question of practice rather than theory, Mendelssohn is attempting to show the relation between (a) philosophy and Jewish law and (b) the co-ordination of Judaism and philosophy within the larger context of German society. Briefly, Mendelssohn’s abiding project (as shown specifijically within the context of the Pantheism controversy) amounts to “a debate over competing visions of how best to promote human flourishing in the modern world” (2). Mendelssohn’s controversy concerns his decisive departure from the medieval mind-set which held that joining European society necessitated becoming Christian (5). In sharp contrast, Mendelssohn believed that “one could be both a European and a Jew without compromise” (5). But if German Jews need not compromise in their striving to become European, perhaps Judaism as such—as well as enlightened thought (philosophically or politically construed)—undergoes a modifijication. Pace Allan Arkush, Gottlieb does not believe Mendelssohn to be a Deist who constructs an exoteric version of Judaism which allowed Jews to be citizens with a clean conscience (8). Pace David Sorkin, Gottlieb does not view Mendelssohn as a traditionalist who employs German Enlightenment thought to support a pre-modern version of Judaism (8). Instead, Gottlieb opts for something of a mean in holding that “Mendelssohn is so fijirmly convinced of the truth of both Judaism and of the German Enlightenment that he simply cannot imagine a contradiction between them. To bridge any apparent gaps between the two, Mendelssohn does what all theologians do; namely he adopts a selective attitude toward the Jewish tradition, drawing on sources that reflect his deep-seated commitments and ignoring or marginalizing

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Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn’s Theological-Political Thought, Michah Gottlieb, Oxford University Press, 2011. 209 pp. cl. ISBN: 978-0-19-539894