ABSTRACT
The roots of Jewish thought during the Enlightenment go back to seventeenth-century Holland where a number of Jewish thinkers attempted to view the Jewish tradition in the light of the new scientific conception of the world. For Spinoza the function of religion was to provide a framework for ethical action. Spinoza's rational reflections on theological matters provided the background to the philosophical enquiries of the greatest Jewish thinker of the Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn. The distinction Mendelssohn drew between natural religion and the Jewish faith was based on logically necessary truth; contingent truths such as the laws of nature; and temporal truths that occur in history. Moses Mendelssohn was the most important thinker of the Haskalah; he worked for freedom of conscience of religion. The Israelites possess a divine legislation, laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life, instruction in the will of God as to how they should conduct themselves in order to attain temporal and eternal felicity.
