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The Jewish Enlightenment The Jewish Enlightenment Shmuel Feiner translated from the Hebrew by Chaya Naor Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 440 pp. $45

Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity Jonathan M. Hess Yale Univ. Press, 2002, 258 pp. $40

German Idealism and the Jew The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses German Idealism and the Jew The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses Michael Mack Univ. of Chicago Press, 2003, 229 pp. $35

Judaism and Enlightenment Judaism and Enlightenment Adam Sutcliffe Cambridge Univ. Press, 2003, 314 pp. $60

In 1769, the Swiss theologian Johann Caspar Lavater publicly challenged Moses Mendelssohn, known throughout Germany to Jew and non-Jew alike as the "German Socrates," to refute logically Christianity's conception of the soul. Lavater ratcheted the stakes of his challenge high: If Mendelssohn could not show the Christian notion to be false, Lavater urged him "to do what Socrates would have done" and convert to Christianity. Though Lavater's challenge was seen as unseemly and out-of-step with the protocol of philosophical discourse of the time, it made explicit what was just under the surface in intellectual and religious circles in Europe, and Germany in particular: Where Christian beliefs and ethics were understood as universally available to anyone regardless of time and place, Judaism was forever circumscribed by the time-bound revelation at Sinai and the enforced practice of a culturally specific code of laws. In the age of Enlightenment, Judaism was a parochial anachronism, a coercive atavism, which universalist winds would eventually dry up and blow away.

The fallout from the "Lavater affair" galvanized the rest of Mendelssohn's career; over the next decade Mendelssohn was increasingly pushed by other Christian intellectuals to justify his Judaism. In response, Mendelssohn wrote his great work on religious tolerance, Jerusalem: Or, On Religious Power and Judaism (1783), which argues that Christianity, in relentlessly insisting to others on the universality of its doctrines, coerces religious belief. Judaism, in fact, in demanding only ritual action but not belief, speaks more precisely to the spirit of the Enlightenment age, embodied by Kant's famous call in his essay, "What Is Enlightenment?" (1784) to "argue as much as you please, but obey." Modern critics, however, have long considered Jerusalem a circumspect text, marked by more than just a tincture of apology. After all, Mendelssohn's depiction of Judaism as a paragon of natural reason, without exclusive religious or doctrinal truths, trades in the rationalist currency of Enlightenment philosophy. On these terms, the Mendelssohn-led Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, appears as a series of philosophical capitulations. It should come as no surprise that Kant himself, whose mint casts Enlightenment coin, saw Jerusalem as "the proclamation of a great reform … a reform that is in store not only for your own people but for other nations as well." Kant eagerly anticipated Mendelssohn's conversion to Christianity.

Mendelssohn had other ideas. He had no intention of giving up Judaism, including the strict practice of its rituals. He wanted to become part of German civic life while remaining a Jew. Yet he also knew that full participation in Germany would necessarily require reforming Judaism's strict rabbinic clericalism. Over the last 20 years, scholars have begun to recast our understanding of both Mendelssohn's and the Haskalah's goals. Instead of seeing the Jewish embrace of Enlightenment discourse and values as uncritically assimilationist, these scholars find in the rhetoric of the maskilim (enlightened Jews) a protest against and an attempt to transform the terms of both Enlightenment philosophical thought and Judaism. On this view, the Haskalah was conducting two quite different conversations at the same time. Its appropriation of rationalist language and concepts led to a critique of Enlightenment philosophical and political discourse on terms immanent to that very discourse. (We need not wait for Hegel and the emergence of German Romanticism for critical reevaluations of Kant's Enlightenment; the Haskalah is a contemporaneous counternarrative.) At the same time, the maskilim were using these very criticisms of the Enlightenment to alter the shape, meaning, and look of Jewish tradition.

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