The importance of Die Juden is to be found, as we have seen, in its anticipation of Nathan der Weise. Sometimes the identity of thought is strikingly close. In the fourth act of Nathan occurs this dialogue:
Friar: Nathan! Nathan! You are a Christian! By God, you are a Christian! There never was a better Christian!
Nathan: We are of one mind! For that which makes me, in your eyes, a Christian, makes you, in my eyes, a Jew!
Compare (as Niemeyer has done) the exchanges in Die Juden:
Baron: How estimable would the Jews be if they were all like you!
Traveller: And how admirable the Christians, if they all possessed your qualities!
A Tsar is said to have repeated pretty much the baron’s speech to Sir Moses Montefiore. It is not recorded that the latter made the traveller’s reply.
Edmund Burke, in one of his speeches on America, protested that it was impossible to draw up “an indictment against a whole people.” He forgot the frequency with which such indictments are drawn up against the Jews. Now if there was one thing that more than the rest roused Lessing’s anger, it was just this tarring of all Jews with one brush. One can conceive the glee with which Lessing wrote the passage in which the baron commits this very offence, unconscious of his peculiarly unfortunate faux pas, for he has no notion yet that the traveller is a Jew:
Baron: It seems to me that the very faces of the Jews prejudice one against them. You can read in their eyes their maliciousness, deceit, perjury. Why do you turn away from me?
Traveller: I see you are very learned in physiognomies—I am afraid, sir, that mine....