Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet ‘the Socrates of Berlin’. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as compatible with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn’s complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn’s two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent.
About the author
David Sorkin is Lucy G. Moses Professor in the Department of History, Yale University. His other books include ‘Haskalah’ (Jewish Enlightenment) (2000), and The Religious Enlightenment: Protestants, Jews and Catholics from London to Vienna (2008).
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