ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book has been a long footnote to the story with which it began: a small Jew walked into a lecture hall, was reviled and mocked, and left as an accepted intellectual, embraced by the most famous philosopher of the German Enlightenment. Though the elements for exclusion inverted as described them in the book are there philosophy, human behavior, physiognomical judgment, hagiography unlike in the story, the modern Ugly is not mitigated by Kantian approval. The Ugly was used to break down the kind of intellectual elevation Mendelssohn thought ugliness could bring. The discussion of ugliness framed by the religious critique of moral aesthetics and then by an increasingly nefarious system of cultural perceptions of physicality expresses the range of Enlightenment sentiments, concerns, and anxieties. The unfortunate ending that, for Mendelssohn's contemporaries, beautified Jews seemed available only in theory.
