Summary
Jewish philosopher whose Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (1783), engaging John Locke’s “Letter Concerning Toleration”, is the source from which A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler recovers a Jewish republican tradition of public, collective, law-centred practice (A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, PDF p.24, p.52).
Details
- Jerusalem was written in response to August Friedrich Cranz’s anonymous 1782 pamphlet challenging Mendelssohn over Jewish ecclesiastical law and excommunication, in a debate opened by Christian Wilhelm Dohm’s On the Civil Improvement of the Jews, whose endorsement of a Jewish power of excommunication Mendelssohn rejected (PDF p.52-54).
- Mendelssohn distinguishes action from conviction — “Action accomplishes what duty demands, and conviction causes that action to proceed from the proper source, that is, from proper motives” (J, 40, quoted PDF p.54) — but holds that the link between inner conviction and outward action cannot be known, so religious authority must not regulate belief by excommunication (PDF p.54-56).
- Against a separate eternal realm: “man’s eternality is merely an incessant temporality” (J, 39, quoted PDF p.56); the finite lifetime is itself a resource — “Time constitutes a part of our property, and the man who uses it for the common good may hope for compensation from the public purse” (J, 60–61, quoted PDF p.57).
- Judaism, for Mendelssohn as Tucker reads him, “knows of no revealed religion in the sense in which Christians understand this term” (J, 95, quoted PDF p.59); what was revealed was legislation — “laws, commandments, ordinances, rules of life” (J, 97, quoted PDF p.59) — to those present, an historical truth depending on testimony.
- Tucker describes him parenthetically as “both a congregational rabbi and an academic philosopher for most of his working life” (PDF p.57); the work offers no support for that description in the pages read, and it is recorded as Tucker’s claim only (see the source page’s Open questions).
Related pages
A Brief Genealogy of Jewish Republicanism: Parting Ways with Judith Butler, John Locke, Ceremonial law, Jewish republicanism