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Gershom Scholem wrote in 1970: "I deny that there has ever been … a German-Jewish dialogue in any genuine sense whatsoever, i.e. as a historical phenomenon. It takes two to have a dialogue, who listen to each other, who are prepared to perceive the other as what he is and represents, and to respond to him. Nothing can be more misleading than to apply such a concept to the discussions between Germans and Jews during the last 200 years. This dialogue died at its very start, and never took place." (1) Scholem then speaks of the failure of such dialogue as taking place because of behavior of numerous successors of Moses Mendelssohn. It is the thesis of this essay that one can trace such a failure back to the lifetime of Mendelssohn himself. This casts some doubt on propositions that progress in such dialogue took place in the period of the Enlightenment, only to deteriorate later.

In his biography of Moses Mendelssohn, Alexander Altmann relates an anecdote which was reported by Mendelssohn’s son Joseph (Altmann, 1973, 38). When Mendelssohn was about 25 years old, he met Gotthold Lessing, who was to become a close friend of Mendelssohn’s until Lessing died. About the time they first met, Lessing lent Mendelssohn a treatise by Anthony Ashley Cooper, Third Earl of Shaftesbury. When Mendelssohn returned the book, he told Lessing that he liked it very much, and added that he could write that sort of thing himself. This encounter with Shaftesbury appears to have been a formative occurrence in Mendelssohn’s career. With Lessing’s encouragement and help, it led to the first of Mendelssohn’s publications, the Philosophical Dialogues (Philosophische Gespräche, 1755). Altmann remarks that one may assume that the work by Shaftesbury was the dialogue. published in 1709, called The Moralists, or a Philosophical Rhapsody (Shaftesbury, 1964, v. II, 3-158). The style of this work is not dialogue of the sort one finds, for example, in Plato’s dialogues. There is no alternation of speakers, labeled with the speakers’ names. Instead, the piece is written in epistolary form, as a recollection by the author of a dialogue which had taken place.

Mendelssohn and two of his friends were sufficiently enthusiastic about Shaftesbury enlightened religious views to undertake to translate the works of Shaftesbury into German. This project was not carried out, although there is a manuscript in which Mendelssohn presents a translation of Shaftesbury’s Sensus Communis: An Essay on the Freedom of Wit and Humour (1709). (Altmann, 1973, 109) Here Shaftesbury defends the use of wit, humor, irony and ridicule, in conversations about significant subjects, as a means to promoting discourse and getting at some truths. In connection with morals, Shaftesbury includes sensus communis, common sense, as a kind of reasoning. He says: "The truth is, as notions stand now in the world with respect to morals, honesty is like to gain little by philosophy, or deep speculations of any kind. In the main, ‘tis best to stick to common sense and go no farther." (Shaftesbury, 1711 and 1964, 88)

Mendelssohn was intrigued by Shaftesbury’s essay, and as early as 1755, Mendelssohn wrote in a letter to Lessing that "if one saw the difference between the comical and the burlesque, there was some sense in Shaftesbury’s remark that ridicule served as a ‘criterion’ (Prüfstein) of truth." (Altmann, 1973, 109) Shaftesbury had himself, in the beginning of his essay, made such a distinction at some length. One can conjecture from this one reason Mendelssohn and Lessing were such good friends for so long. Lessing was and is still known as a superior playwright, and especially for his play Nathan the Wise (Nathan der Weise, 1779). "Lessing’s youthful comedy The Jews had helped to initiate his friendship with Mendelssohn. His last play, Nathan the Wise, became the crown and glory of their relationship. …… Nathan without Mendelssohn would have been like Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark." (ibid., 569) Many critics have argued that the character of Nathan had more of Lessing than of Mendelssohn in him, but Altmann, with reference to such critics, maintains that Nathan was nevertheless a "Mendelssohnian character".

Mendelssohn’s subsequent use of dialogue, and of wit and irony, in his work Phaedon (1767), a kind of updating of Plato’s dialogue on immortality, made him famous in Germany and elsewhere. It was written, however, more in the style of Plato, rather than of Shaftesbury, and may be taken to be a mark of Mendelssohn’s awakening to Plato in connection with dialogue.

3. A Failure of Dialogue

Let me return now to the quotation from Gershom Scholem with which this essay began, and refer also to a work by Jeffrey Librett in which the quotation appears as an epigraph. Librett takes Scholem to have implied a definition of dialogue which Librett calls a reasonable and commonsense one: "Thus, dialogue for Scholem is comprised of the mutual understanding (or recognition) and response of two independent subjects." (Librett, 2000 p. 3, his italics). The word "mutual" in this definition deserves some emphasis. If one writes "mutual understanding" instead of "mutual understanding", one gets beyond mere understanding. One can take "mutual" to imply some sort of reciprocity, or striving to have something in common, which can be aided by the exercise of tolerance.

In connection with dialogue, Librett contrasts the standpoint of rhetoric with that of philosophy. Rhetoric, he says, is concerned with the language of persuasion, and philosophy with the language of proof. This is reminiscent of the distinction made by Shaftesbury, and later Mendelssohn, between false wit and genuine wit, in connection with laughter as a touchstone of truth.

Rather than with witty versus serious language, Librett is, however, more concerned with what he calls figural versus literal language. A longstanding discussion in this context has revolved around claims by Christians that Jews, in general, have not seen or admitted the underlying spiritual content of the Mosaic laws as given in the written Torah and the halakhah, the Jewish laws derived from the Torah and found in the Talmudic writings. Christians, his argument goes, often claim that the way Hebrew scriptures are interpreted and acted on by Jews has been superseded by way of Jesus Christ. Christians contrast the literal, the written laws and duties, with the figural or spiritual, i. e., interpretations and revisions of the laws made on the basis of the career, revelations, nature and divinity of Jesus Christ. There is special emphasis on characterizations of Jewish religion as devoted to the ‘letter of the law,’ with emphasis on the word letter, an attitude which can be traced back to works of the apostle Paul. This is contrasted with Christian attitudes that only in Christianity does one finds the ‘spirit’ underlying the writings of Moses and the prophets. Librett cites Mendelssohn as an example of a person who argued against such Christian interpretations of the foundations of the practice of Judaism, and discusses at length several of Mendelssohn’s works bearing on this, especially the late works of 1783. (Librett, 2000, Ch. 1 & 2).

In the career of Moses Mendelssohn, there occurred when he was about 40 years old an affair which was a turning point in his career. This was precipitated by a clumsy attempt initiated in 1869 by an erstwhile acquaintance of his, Johann Caspar Lavater, a Christian theologian, to get Mendelssohn to convert to Christianity. A detailed account of the contention that arose between Mendelssohn, Lavater and numerous others can be found in Altmann’s biography, especially in Chapter 3 called "Turning Point: The Lavater Affair". Suffice it to say here that a long-time friend of Mendelssohn’s, the publisher Christoph Nicolai, said many years after the affair "that chagrin at having been forced out of the tranquil mode of his existence had affected Mendelssohn’s health and led to the severe illness that eventually became the cause of his premature death." (Altmann, 1963, 234)

It strikes me that Mendelssohn’s chagrin was at least in part brought on by a recognition that his valiant attempts at reasonable and polite Jewish-Christian dialogue, over a period of some 15 years, had in important and disturbing ways failed, beginning with the Lavater affair. Lavater and Mendelssohn had engaged in some personal dialogue about relations of Judaism and Christianity some 6 years before Lavater’s unwise call for Mendelssohn’s conversion, and in part what upset Mendelssohn about this call was the way Lavater made use of what took place at the earlier time. Furthermore, there were considerable unpleasant interchanges during the Lavater affair between a number of people who became involved in the affair. Mendelssohn and Lavater behaved quite well toward each other, but others were not so polite. In Librett’s phrase, dialogue here resulted in a kind of "monological violence" (Librett, 2000, 3)

After the Lavater affair, Mendelssohn turned to other kinds of writing, such as his translation of the written Torah, and a commentary on Exodus. In one of his last works, Jerusalem (1783), an eloquent plea for separation of church and state, one finds a passage redolent of his early devotion to Jewish-Christian dialogue. Speaking of written, as contrasted with spoken communication, he says: "The diffusion of writings and books which, through the invention of the printing press, has been infinitely multiplied in our days, has transformed man. …… However, like every good which can come to man here below, it has also had, incidentally, many evil consequences, which are to be attributed partly to its abuse, and partly also to the necessary condition of human nature. We teach and instruct one another only through writings; we learn to know nature and man only from writings. …… The preacher does not converse with his congregation; he reads or declaims from a written treatise. The professor reads his written lectures from the chair. Everything is dead letter; the spirit of living conversation has vanished." (Mendelssohn, 1783 and 1983, 103) Still, the Mendelssohn-Lavater affair grew out of personal dialogue. Perhaps Lavater had taken his conversations with Mendelssohn too seriously?

Many hypotheses have been made about causes of the all-too-evident failures of Jewish-Christian dialogues and relations in relatively recent times. Such relations are sometimes said to have improved during the period of the European Enlightenment and the Jewish Haskalah, but deteriorated beginning in the 19^th century, and accelerating during the later 19^th century. In the light of Mendelssohn’s experiences, one may wonder just how much progress in these relations was made during the Haskalah, notwithstanding Mendelssohn’s fame, his association with Lessing, and his formal recognition by Frederick the Great of Prussia.

(1) Scholem is quoted by Jeffrey Librett in an epigraph (Librett, 2000, xv), who cites an article by Scholem in Judaica 2. 1970, 7-11, entitled "Wider den Mythos vom deutsch-jüdischen Gespräch," published in English as "Against the Myth of the German-Jewish-Dialogue," in On Jews and Judaism in Crisis, ed. Werner Dannhauser, 1976, 61-64. Jeffrey Librett is at present Associate Professor of German at Loyola University of Chicago, in the USA.

 

Altmann, Alexander, Moses Mendelssohn, A Biographical Study. (1973) Tuscaloosa, AL, USA. University of Alabama Press.

Librett, Jeffrey S., The Rhetoric of Cultural Dialogue: Jews and Germans from Moses Mendelssohn to Richard Wagner and Beyond. (2000) Stanford, CA, USA. Stanford University Press.

Mendelssohn, Moses, Philosophical Writings, edited by Daniel O. Dahlstrom. (1997) Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press.

Mendelssohn, Moses, Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783; translated into English by Allan Arkush, introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann, 1983) Hanover, NH, USA and London, England. Published for Brandeis University Press by the University Press of New England.

Shaftesbury, Third Earl of (Anthony Ashley Cooper), Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Edited by John M. Robertson. (1964; originally published in 1711) New York, NY and Indianapolis, IN. The Bobbs-Merrill Company.