Moses Mendelssohn
German Jewish Enlightenment philosopher (1729–1786), born in Dessau into a modest Jewish family, permanently marked by a childhood illness that deformed his back and weakened his health, self-taught, learning Latin, French, English and mathematics on his own after arriving in Berlin at just fourteen, where he worked as a tutor and bookkeeper while educating himself philosophically, going on in 1763 to win a prize from the Prussian Academy of Sciences in a competition in which he faced, and beat, the young Immanuel Kant. A close friend of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing from youth — a relationship that directly inspired the title character of Lessing's play Nathan the Wise, a Jewish sage embodying tolerance and universal wisdom — Mendelssohn became the first great Jewish philosophical figure fully integrated into German Enlightenment discourse, earning the byname 'German Socrates' for his work Phädon, or On the Immortality of the Soul (1767), a modernised Platonic dialogue rationally defending the soul's immortality, which brought him immediate European fame. Generally regarded as the father of the Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment), Mendelssohn undertook as the central project of his life the reconciliation of fidelity to Jewish religious tradition with the universal values of Enlightenment reason, arguing in Jerusalem, or On Religious Power and Judaism (1783) for a radical separation between state and religion and for absolute religious tolerance, while contending that Judaism, unlike Christianity, does not demand assent to revealed dogmas but only observance of a revealed law, and is therefore fully compatible with rational freedom of conscience. His German translation of the Torah, accompanied by a commentary (Biur), exerted decisive influence on the cultural and linguistic modernisation of Central European Jewish communities, while his involvement in the Pantheism Controversy, sparked by Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi's accusation that the late Lessing had secretly been a Spinozist, marked a decisive intellectual episode in the development of post-Kantian German idealism.