Mendelssohn

Mendelssohn, MOSES, philosopher, was born 6th September 1729, at Dessau. From his father, whose name was Mendel, a Jewish schoolmaster and scribe, he received his first education; and in his thirteenth year he proceeded to Berlin, where, amid very indigent circumstances, he contrived to learn Latin and modern languages, and to apply himself to the study of philosophy, into which early readings, chiefly of Maimonides' Moreh Nebochim, had initiated him already. After many years of comparative poverty he became the partner of a rich silk-manufacturer, whose children he had educated. The intimate friend of men like Lessing, Sulzer, Nicolai, he, directly and indirectly, contributed in a vast degree to the abolition of the disgraceful laws and brutal prejudices against the Jews. On the other hand, he acted in the most beneficial manner on his own co-religionists, by rousing them from the mental apathy with which they regarded in his day all that had not a distinct reference to religion, and by waging fierce war against their own religious and other prejudices. He died 4th January 1786, and Ramler wrote the following epitaph on him: 'True to the religion of his forefathers, wise as Socrates, teaching immortality, and becoming immortal like Socrates.' He was the prototype of Lessing's Nathan, and was called a 'second Moses.' He was a diligent student of Locke, Shaftesbury, and Pope: a zealous defender of enlightened Monotheism, and, in spite of Lessing, strongly anti-Spinozist. His principal works are a volume on Pope as a philosopher, along with Lessing (1755), on the Sensations (1755), on Evidence in Metaphysics (1763); Phaedon (1767), a dialogue on the immortality of the soul in the manner of Plato; Jerusalem (1783), a defence of Judaism as a religion; Morgenstunden, essays in refutation of Pantheism and Spinozism. His works were edited in 1845 (8 vols.), and again in 1880 (2 vols.). See the Life by Kayserling (2d ed. 1887).