Parenthood, perhaps, is never quite easy, but it was a very difficult duty, and a terribly divided one, for a cultivated man who a century ago desired to bring up his children as good Jews and good citizens. Many a time, it stands on record, when this patient, self-respecting, unoffending scholar took his children for a walk coarse epithets and insulting cries followed them through the streets. No resentment was politic, no redress was possible. ‘Father, is it wicked to be a Jew?’ his children would ask, as time after time the crowd hooted at them. ‘Father, is it good to be a Jew?’ they grew to ask later on, when in more serious walks of life they found all gates but the Jews’ gate closed against them. Mendelssohn must have found such questions increasingly difficult to answer or to parry. Their very talents, which enlarged the boundaries, must have made his clever children rebel against the limitations which were so cruelly imposed. His eldest son Joseph early developed a strong scientific bias; how could this be utilised? The only profession which he, as a Jew, might enter, was that of medicine, and for that he had a decided distaste: perforce he was sent to commercial pursuits, and his especial talent had to run to waste, or, at best, to dilettantism. When this Joseph had sons of his own, can we wonder very much that he cut the knot and saved his children from a like experience, by bringing them up as Christians?
Mendelssohn himself, all his life through, was unswervingly loyal to his faith. He took every disability accruing from it, as he took his own especial one, as being, so far as he was concerned, inevitable, and thus to be borne as patiently as might be. To him, most certainly, it would never have occurred to slip from under a burden which had been laid upon him to bear. Concerning Fromet’s influence on her children records are silent, and we are driven to conjecture that the pretty significance of her name was somewhat meaningless.[35] The story of her wooing suggests susceptibility, perhaps, rather than strength of heart; and it may be that as years went on the ‘blue eyes’ got into a habit of weeping only over sorrows and wrongs which needed a less eloquent and a more helpful mode of treatment.
If Mendelssohn’s wife had been able to show her children the home side of Jewish life, its suggestive ceremonialism, its domestic compensations—possibly her sons, almost certainly her daughters, would have learnt the brave, sweet patience that was common to Jewish mothers. But this takes us to the region of ‘might have been.’ Gentle, tender-hearted Fromet, it is to be feared, failed in true piety, and, the mother anchor missing, the children drifted from their moorings.
The leisure of the years succeeding his marriage was fully occupied by Mendelssohn in literary pursuits. The whole of the Pentateuch was, by degrees, translated into pure German, and simultaneous editions were published in German and in Hebrew characters. This great gift to his people was followed by a metrical translation of the Psalms; a work which took him ten years, during which time he always carried about with him a Hebrew Psalter, interleaved with blank pages. In 1783 he published his Jerusalem,[36] a sort of Church and State survey of the Jewish religion. The first and larger part of it dwells on the distinction between Judaism, as a State religion, and Judaism as the ‘inheritance’ of a dispersed nationality. He essays to prove the essential differences between civil and religious government, and to demonstrate that penal enactments, which in the one case were just and defensible, were, in the changed circumstances of the other, harmful, and, in point of fact, unjudicial. The work was, in effect, a masterly effort on Mendelssohn’s part to exorcise the ‘cursing spirit’ which, engendered partly by long-suffered persecution, and partly by long association with the strict discipline of the Catholic Church, had taken a firm grip on Jewish ecclesiastical authority, and was constantly expressing itself in bitter anathema and morose excommunication. The second part of the book is mainly concerned with a vindication of the Jewish character and a plea for toleration. Scholarly and temperate as is the tone of this work throughout, it yet evoked a good deal of rough criticism from the so-called orthodox in both religious camps—from those well-meaning, purblind persons of the sort who, Lessing declares, see only one road, and strenuously deny the possible existence of any other.
In 1777, Frederic the Second desired to judge for himself whether Jewish ecclesiastical authority clashed at any point with the State or municipal law of the land. A digest of the Jewish Code on the general questions, and more especially on the subject of property and inheritance, was decreed to be prepared in German, and to Mendelssohn was intrusted the task. He had the assistance of the Chief Rabbi of Berlin, and the result of these labours was published in 1778, under the title of Ritual Laws of the Jews. Another Jewish philosophical work (published in 1785) was Morning Hours.[37] This was a volume of essays on the evidences of the existence of the Deity and of conclusions concerning His attributes deduced from the contemplation of His works. Originally these essays had been given in the form of familiar lectures on natural philosophy by Mendelssohn to his children and to one or two of their friends (including the two Humboldts) in his own house, every morning. In the same category of more distinctively Jewish books we may place a translation of Manasseh Ben Israel’s famous Vindiciæ Judæorum, which he published, with a very eloquent preface, so early as 1781, just at the time when Dohm’s generous work on the condition of the Jews as citizens of the State had made its auspicious appearance. Although this is one of Mendelssohn’s minor efforts, the preface contains many a beautiful passage. His gratitude to Dohm is so deep and yet so dignified; his defence of his people is so wide, and his belief in humanity so sincere; and the whole is withal so short, that it makes most pleasant reading. One small quotation may perhaps be permitted, as pertinent to some recent discussions on Jewish subjects. ‘It is,’ says he, ‘objected by some that the Jews are both too indolent for agriculture and too proud for mechanical trades; that if the restrictions were removed they would uniformly select the arts and sciences, as less laborious and more profitable, and soon engross all light, genteel, and learned professions. But those who thus argue conclude from the present state of things how they will be in the future, which is not a fair mode of reasoning. What should induce a Jew to waste his time in learning to manage the plough, the trowel, the plane, etc., while he knows he can make no practical use of them? But put them in his hand and suffer him to follow the bent of his inclinations as freely as other subjects of the State, and the result will not long be doubtful. Men of genius and talent will, of course, embrace the learned professions; those of inferior capacity will turn their minds to mechanical pursuits; the rustic will cultivate the land; each will contribute, according to his station in life, his quota to the aggregate of productive labour.’
As he says in some other place of himself, nature never intended him, either physically or morally, for a wrestler; and this little essay, where there is no strain of argument or scope for deep erudition, is yet no unworthy specimen of the great philosopher’s powers. Poetic attempts too, and mostly on religious subjects, occasionally varied his counting-house duties and his more serious labours; but although he truly possessed, if ever man did, what Landor calls ‘the poetic heart,’ yet it is in his prose, rather than in his poetry, that we mostly see its evidences. The book which is justly claimed as his greatest, and which first gave him his title to be considered a wide and deep-thinking philosopher, is his Phædon.[38] The idea of such a work had long been germinating in him, and the death of his dear friend Abbt, with whom he had had many a fruitful discussion on the subject, turned his thoughts more fixedly on the hopes which make sorrows bearable, and the work was published in the year following Abbt’s death.
The first part is a very pure and classical German rendering of the original Greek form of Plato, and the remainder an eloquent summary of all that religion, reason, and experience urge in support of a belief in immortality. It is cast in the form of conversation between Socrates and his friends—a choice in composition which caused a Jewish critic (M. David Friedländer) to liken Moses Mendelssohn to Moses the lawgiver. ‘For Moses spake, and Socrates was to him as a mouth’ (Ex. iv. 15). In less than two years Phædon ran through three German editions, and it was speedily translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Hebrew. Then, at one stride, came fame; and great scholars, great potentates, and even the heads of his own community, sought his society. But fame was ever of incomparably less value to Mendelssohn than friendship, and any sort of notoriety he honestly hated. Thus, when his celebrity brought upon him a polemical discussion, the publicity which ensued, notwithstanding that the personal honour in which he was held was thereby enhanced, so thoroughly upset his nerves that the result was a severe and protracted illness. It came about in this wise: Lavater, the French pastor, in 1769, had translated Bonnet’s Evidences of Christianity into German; he published it with the following dedication to Moses Mendelssohn:—
‘Dear Sir,—I think I cannot give you a stronger proof of my admiration of your excellent writings, and of your still more excellent character, that of an Israelite in whom there is no guile; nor offer you a better requital for the great gratification which I, some years ago, enjoyed in your interesting society, than by dedicating to you the ablest philosophical inquiry into the evidences of Christianity that I am acquainted with.
‘I am fully conscious of your profound judgment, steadfast love of truth, literary independence, enthusiasm for philosophy in general, and esteem for Bonnet’s works in particular. The amiable discretion with which, notwithstanding your contrariety to the Christian religion, you delivered your opinion on it, is still fresh in my memory. And so indelible and important is the impression which your truly philosophical respect for the moral character of its Founder made on me, in one of the happiest moments of my existence, that I venture to beseech you—nay, before the God of Truth, your and my Creator and Father, I beseech and conjure you—to read this work, I will not say with philosophical impartiality, which I am confident will be the case, but for the purpose of publicly refuting it, in case you should find the main arguments, in support of the facts of Christianity, untenable; or should you find them conclusive, with the determination of doing what policy, love of truth, and probity demand—what Socrates would doubtless have done had he read the work and found it unanswerable.
‘May God still cause much truth and virtue to be disseminated by your means, and make you experience the happiness my whole heart wishes you.