Moses Mendelssohn and the religious enlightenment

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day who was recognized, in the phrase "from Moses unto Moses there was none like Moses," as the legitimate successor to the medieval Moses Maimonides. At the same time, Mendelssohn was one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet "the Socrates of Berlin." Because of his eminence in both spheres, Mendelssohn has been treated as a symbol of the modern Jewish predicament: the conflict between Jewish tradition and secular culture. Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment presents a new interpretation of Mendelssohn's work. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn's complete writings, treating the German and the often neglected Hebrew writings as a single corpus. By showing that Mendelssohn's well-known German pronouncements on Judaism and religion take on a different meaning when they are read in the context of his entire body of work, Sorkin argues that Mendelssohn's two spheres of endeavor were entirely consistent.