Mendelssohn Moses (1729–86), German philosopher known as ‘the Jewish Socrates.’ He began as a Bible and Talmud scholar. After moving to Berlin he learned Latin and German, and became a close friend of Lessing, who modeled the Jew in his play Nathan the Wise after him. Mendelssohn began writing on major philosophical topics of the day, and won a prize from the Berlin Academy in 1764. He was actively engaged in discussions about aesthetics, psychology, and religion, and offered an empirical, subjectivist view that was very popular at the time. His most famous writings are Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God, 1785), Phaedon (Phaedo, or on the Immortality of the Soul, 1767), and Jerusalem (1783).
He contended that one could prove the existence of God and the immortality of the soul. He accepted the ontological argument and the argument from design. In Phaedo he argued that since the soul is a simple substance it is indestructible. Kant criticized his arguments in the first Critique. Mendelssohn was pressed by the Swiss scientist Lavater to explain why he, as a reasonable man, did not accept Christianity. At first he ignored the challenge, but finally set forth his philosophical views about religion and Judaism in Jerusalem, where he insisted that Judaism is not a set of doctrines but a set of practices. Reasonable persons can accept that there is a universal religion of reason, and there are practices that God has ordained that the Jews follow. Mendelssohn was a strong advocate of religious toleration and separation of church and state. His views played an important part in the emancipation of the Jews, and in the Jewish Enlightenment that flowered in Germany at the beginning of the nineteenth century.
See also JEWISH PHILOSOPHY. R.H.P.