Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment

Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet ''the Socrates of Berlin''. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as compatible with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn''s complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn''s two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent.