Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher, born in 1729 in Dessau and died in 1786 in Berlin, who rose from a modest and physically disabled childhood to become one of the most celebrated intellectual figures of his era among both Christian and Jewish readers in German-speaking Europe. Working in the philosophical idiom of the German Enlightenment, he wrote on metaphysics, aesthetics and the philosophy of religion, and his 1783 work Jerusalem argued for a state that would grant full civic rights regardless of religion while allowing religious communities to govern their own internal affairs, an influential early argument for religious toleration and the separation of church authority from civil law. Mendelssohn is remembered above all as a central founding figure of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, encouraging Jewish engagement with secular European culture and learning while also producing an influential German translation of the Hebrew Bible intended to help ease that engagement.