ABSTRACT
Moses Mendelssohn, as Jewish thinker, has always been the object of controversy and this is almost as true of the contemporary world as of the past. The translation and interpretation of the Pentateuch, produced under Mendelssohn’s aegis and with his co-operation is one significant testimony to this endeavour. In fact, Mendelssohn was also able to anticipate and propound a future Judaism reconstructed on the ruins of the past. Writing in the early 1780s he could envisage a pattern that would hold good for the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in terms both of doctrine and practice. Mendelssohn could look forward to this separation with all the more alacrity because ‘Judaism’, at least in the terms of his definition, was already ideally constituted to enter the new world of burgeoning secularization. Mendelssohn’s reading of Jewish history, however, eliminates this theme entirely. Subsequent to the destruction of the Temple, his reading of Judaism is, as it were, ‘stateless’.
