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Between Judaism and German Enlightenment: Recent Work on Moses Mendelssohn in English
Author(s) -
Gottlieb Michah
Publication year - 2010
Publication title -
religion compass
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.113
H-Index - 1
ISSN - 1749-8171
DOI - 10.1111/j.1749-8171.2009.00185.x
Subject(s) - enlightenment , judaism , haskalah , german , literature , classics , religious studies , jewish literature , philosophy , art , theology , jewish studies , linguistics
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.