Moses Mendelssohn walked from Dessau to Berlin as a teenager, following a rabbi who had taught him Hebrew, Talmud, and Maimonides. In Berlin he taught himself Latin, Greek, French, and English, and entered the republic of letters through the door of philosophy. He befriended Lessing, won a prize essay contest that Kant also entered, and became one of the most celebrated thinkers in the German-speaking world — while remaining an observant Jew in a city where Jews were still legally restricted to the margins. His Phaedo, modeled on Plato, argues for the immortality of the soul in the language of Leibnizian metaphysics. His Jerusalem argues that religious institutions have no right to coerce belief; civil society and religious community must be separated. He launched the Haskalah — the Jewish Enlightenment — writing in Hebrew to bring the tools of European reason into traditional Jewish life. Lessing based the wise Nathan in his play Nathan the Wise on him. He died at fifty-six, exhausted, still arguing for toleration.
Born the son of a poor Torah scribe in Dessau, he followed his teacher to Berlin at fourteen, arriving on foot — a frail, hunchbacked boy who would become the city's most celebrated philosopher.
Words
“The state gives orders and coerces; religion teaches and persuades.”