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Three recent books elaborate and further this account of the Jewish Enlightenment. Jonathan Hess' intellectual history Germans, Jews and the Claims of Modernity and Michael Mack's more philosophically driven German Idealism and the Jew: The Inner Anti-Semitism of Philosophy and German Jewish Responses position Mendelssohn at the heart of Haskalah. Shmuel Feiner's well-researched The Jewish Enlightenment claims that Mendelssohn has been "unjustly accorded status of father or founder of Haskalah," and seeks to displace him from that perch by presenting a comprehensive and variegated history of an array of maskilim. A fourth work, Judaism and Enlightenment by Adam Sutcliffe, is a historical account of the place and role of Judaism, and particularly Baruch Spinoza, in the minds of 17th- and early 18th-century non-Jewish Enlightenment intellectuals. What is common to all four texts is the claim that the Haskalah, in its attempt to negotiate multiple tensions—to reform and radicalize, to remain pious while broaching the Enlightenment spirit of universalism and tolerance—enacted a quintessential drama of modernity.

Hess' Germans, Jews, and the Claims of Modernity vividly captures the precarious ambivalence of Mendelssohn's station—that is, just how much difficult stretching was required in order to challenge both normative German notions of Jewish emancipation and Jewish tradition itself. Hess' emphasis is not, however, on the philosophical coherence of Mendelssohn's arguments. Particularly when it comes to his account of German-Jewish dialogue, Hess highlights the way differences in political, economic, and social power influence the shape of Mendelssohn's conversation:

The notion that Germans and Jews might have entered into dialogue in some neutral social space where all power relations were suspended assumes that there could have been at least some basic level of formal equality between participants. For Jews intervening in the emancipation debates, it was precisely the absence of this possibility that was so striking.

Thus, Hess cites Mendelssohn in a private letter to his cousin lamenting the restraint he needed to show in the Lavater affair: "God knows that it was not easy for me to make myself withdraw from the dispute…If it had depended on me alone, I would have wanted to give an entirely different response." Indeed, Hess' remarkable chapter on the fantastical plan of the famous German Orientalist Johann David Michaelis to deport Germany's Jews to an empty "sugar island" of the Caribbean—at once restoring "sugar island Jews" to their ancient Israelite roots of manual labor while alleviating Germany's dependence on European colonial powers for its sugar—speaks to the precarious status of Germany's Jews, even at the height of the Enlightenment. For Michaelis, the Jews were not German enough to be integrated fully into Germany, but German enough so that their forced labor represented indigenous German efforts at self-sufficiency.

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