ABSTRACT
Salomon Maimon's most relevant book is his Autobiography. It was originally edited by Karl Philipp Moritz, the well-known writer of the German Enlightenment, whose Bildungsroman, Anton Reiser, represents the rationalistic counterpart to Wilhelm Meister. In reality, Maimon's autobiography is the documentary result of an eastern Jew's attempt to penetrate the rational cultural world of the German bourgeoisie just before 1800. Maimon's life takes one of the forms characteristic of the attempt by eastern Jews to break through to Western Europe. One path to the West was the more or less forceable demand for social equality, of which Ferdinand Lassalle was an example. Another drew on the powerful craving for conquest on the part of the cultural heritage of idolized Western Europe; so it was in the case of Salomon Maimon. Maimon's childhood memories tremble with the derision of Jewish family life everywhere apparent in his Christian environment.
