ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century, a new stratum of intellectuals had emerged in Western European society, especially in France, in England, and in the Protestant German states, largely of middle-class origin, but detached from the mass of the burghers as well as from kings and nobles, and held together not by the tenets of a religious credo but by a belief in the universality of reason. Several currents combined in this new development. Natural law established the right of every person to the unhampered enjoyment of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; utilitarian ethics identified the good with the useful; the philosophy of the enlightenment postulated the supremacy of human nature in the abstract over the limitations imposed by concrete events and allegedly accidental historical circumstances. It is incontestable that the rise of this new grouping of detached intellectuals is coincidental with the rise of the bourgeoisie that is, the middle classes, but this observation does not dispose of the fact that the free artist and writer soon found himself cast in the role of antagonist to the forces that had nurtured him. The members of the new stratum were not even drawn exclusively from the commonalty; some came from the ranks of the nobility and even the clergy, attracted as they were, by the vision of the emerging unity of mankind. If that vision was to be taken seriously, it is obvious that the Jews had to be included in it—they had to be accepted as equals on philosophical grounds. It follows, moreover, that they were to be accepted as human beings, not as Jews. As the Gentile intellectual had to free himself from encrusted historical prejudices, so was his Jewish counterpart expected to shed his “ancient superstitions,” as they were now called, when he wished to be included in the brave new world of pure reason. Among the first detached individuals of this kind was the philosopher Spinoza, who 112was indeed an antagonist of rabbinic Judaism and consequently ostracized by the Jewish community of Amsterdam. But when the movement came to fruition in the eighteenth century, the focal point was Berlin. Typical is the case of Aron Salomon Gumpertz, a grandson of Glueckel von Hameln, who studied medicine at the University of Frankfurt a.d. Oder, an exceedingly rare occurrence at the time. Gumpertz was accepted into the company of such literary men as Gottsched, Nikolai, Mauperthuis, the Marquis d’Argent and others, and he gave French and English lessons to Moses Mendelssohn. The significance of Mendelssohn’s position must be appreciated in this context. Gumpertz was the scion of a wealthy Berlin family and hence was in a position to start at least from the margin of respectability, but that a hunchbacked Jew from the ghetto, like Mendelssohn, should show himself to be a master of elegant prose and philosophical reasoning seemed to border on the miraculous. There were further complications. On the one hand, Mendelssohn’s intimacy with Lessing, one of the principle figures of the German enlightenment, stands as the prototypical example of a genuine friendship between Jew and Gentile, not of conventional give-and-take relationship between a princely overlord and his faithful advisor. On the other hand, Mendelssohn was aware of the notion that prevailed among enlightened intellectuals that “natural religion” was incompatible with the ritualistic exclusiveness and the supposedly superannuated usages of the Jews. Consequently, he felt constrained to justify his continued adherence to the faith of his ancestors by the assertion that the principles of reason were inherent in the precepts of Judaism and that no contradiction was therefore implied in being a Jew and a philosopher at the same time. To the question why Jewish identity had to be continued when philosophy offered the same answer on a more inclusive basis, he resorted to what was essentially a historical argument, namely, that the observance of Jewish law was a special obligation of the “House of Jacob.” Mendelssohn had the Sinaitic revelation in mind, but from the vantage point of a later generation it is evident that his concern was with the preservation of the Jewish people. Surely, a people should not be offered liberty at the price of suicide. But it is likewise true that the aim of the emancipation of the Jews was the dissolution of Jewish peoplehood. Where the Church had failed, philosophy was to triumph. A new area of conflict opened up, if the Jews insisted on remaining Jews.
