CHAPTER XXXVII.
MOSES MENDELSSOHN.
1. Early Days in Dessau.—Under a very humble roof, in a very poor little street in Dessau, there was born, on September 29, 1729, to a certain Mendel and his wife, a weakly boy, who was destined to work a wonderful change in the position and circumstances of the Jews of Germany. Not much fit for such a task did this ghetto baby seem, for, delicate from thefirst, his poor little body soon grew both stunted and deformed. The father was a [a]סוֹפֵר], or scribe, getting his modest living by transcribing portions of the Law on parchment for Mezuzoth and Tephilin, and this professional connection with the fount of learning made him perhaps more eagerly anxious even than were Jewish parents generally that their children should ‘get wisdom and get understanding.’ [a]לֶחֶם לְפִי הַטָּף], food for the little ones, in its literal sense, was often hard to get, but food for their minds was always at hand, and free to the poorest Jewish parent. So by the time little Moses Mendel—or Mendelssohn, as he came to be called—was five years old, it was taken as a matter of course that he should attend the Talmud Torah School. But the mornings were bleak, and the tiny student was weak and frail, so the mother would wrap him up first in an old cloak of her own, and the father, before he began his day’s work, would carry the bright-eyed and not very heavy bundle to the neighbouring class-room. The little lad was diligent and sweet-tempered, and high hopes soon began to be entertained of his powers and abilities. He soon got his remove from the lower school to the higher class, which was taught by the distinguished scholar Rabbi Frankel, and very early began to indulge the desire that when he grew up, he, in his turn, might become a learned Rabbi like his dear master. The parents did not very heartily second this ambition on the part of their little son. Times were hard in the ghetto, and Rabbis were many. Though a greatly respected, it was a poorly paid profession, whereas as a hawker, or a pedlar, a boymight begin to pick up a living by the time he was [a]בַּר מִצְוָה]. In 1742, before Moses was thirteen, Rabbi Frankel received the appointment of Chief Rabbi of Berlin, and went to take up his residence in Berlin. With Frankel’s departure from Dessau a stop was put to the boy’s learning, and, as it seemed, to his hopes, for now that his master was gone, again and more strongly his parents urged upon him to use his books only as a holiday task, and to make trading the serious business of his life. But it was of no use. The boy was bent upon becoming a scholar. Day after day, and often far on into the night, he would be with his beloved books, forgetting, in their company, all aches and pains or hunger, and desiring no other interest or amusement.His favourite volume was Maimonides’ [a]מוֹרֶה נְבוּכִים], Guide to the Perplexed,[60] which he patiently puzzled out, and read and re-read, till something of the spirit of the large and liberal-minded author seemed to have entered into the delicate deformed body of the patient little student. Long years after, he would often laughingly call his hump a legacy from Maimonides. ‘Maimonides,’ he would say, ‘spoilt my figure in my youth, and ruined my digestion; but still,’ he would add more seriously, ‘I dote upon him; for if those long hours spent with him, instead of at play, weakened my body, they at the same time gave strength to my soul. Maimonides may have stunted my stature, but he developed my mind.’ And so, in the narrow little room, he would sit and read and think, till his pale cheeks grew hot, and his whole frame thrilled with dreams and longings—he too would live to become a Guide to the Perplexed among his people.
2. Goes to Berlin.—As Frankel passed out of Dessau, he saw his young pupil standing on a little hill just outside the town, watching, with streaming eyes, for a last glimpse of him. The kind-hearted master caught up the little fellow in his arms, said good-bye once more, and soothed him with hopes of meeting again in Berlin. The boy resolved to make that hope a reality, and the poor parents, when they saw how earnest was their child’s desire, ceased at last to oppose it. They gave him their blessing, and put what they could—it was very little—in his pocket, and, with a very slender wallet slung on his crooked shoulders, some six months after Frankel had left Dessau, Moses Mendelssohn set out for Berlin.
3. How he fares there.—There were no railways in those days, and if there had been, Moses Mendelssohn had no money to pay even third-class fare. He walked the many and weary miles which lay between Dessau and Berlin, and it was a very tired and foot-sore little lad who, at the close of the fifth day’s tramp, presented himself for admission at the Jews’ gate of the city. The porter at the gate, used as he was to shabby figures, looked doubtfully at the poor, dusty, crippled boy, and it was only when Mendelssohn said that he knew Rabbi Frankel, and wanted to see him, that the man let him through. And when Frankel saw the penniless little student, whom he had inspired with such difficult devotion, the kind-hearted scholar was touched and puzzled too, but he quickly resolved that, so far as in him lay,the uphill path of knowledge should be made smooth to those determined little feet. Meanwhile the bread-and-butter question was very pressing. Moses explained enthusiastically and sincerely enough that he wanted nothing beyond bread and water, and a straw pallet to sleep on, and the master responded a little drily that even such small luxuries as these were not to be had for any length of time out of the three silver groschen, about equal to ninepence of our money, which were left at the bottom of his wallet. However, the difficulty got solved, as difficulties mostly do when boys are thoroughly in earnest, and for a good object. Frankel settled to give him his dinner on Sabbaths and festivals, and a kind-hearted Jewish gentleman, Bamberger by name, promised to supply two everyday meals, and to let the boy sleep in an attic in his house. That was three dinners a week provided for, and on the remaining four days, by dint of economy and imagination, he supplied himself with quite a series of satisfying meals. He would earn a trifle by doing copying work, then he would buy a big loaf, and notch the bread at once into divisions, so much, or rather so little, for each dinner and each breakfast, so as to prevent the possibility of his appetite, and means of satisfying it, outrunning his purse. It often resulted in a close race. Poverty and poor feeding, however, were fortunately no new experiences to him. Still, poverty encountered all by himself in a great city full of strangers, was a harder thing than poverty as his kind loving mother had let him feel it. But he met it bravely and uncomplainingly, and, best ofall, with unfailing good humour. He never took a kindness as his due, nor thought that his talents gave him a right to claim toll from his richer brethren. ‘Because I want to drink at the well,’ he would say, in his pretty poetic fashion, ‘am I to expect every one to hurry to fill my cup from his pitcher? No; I must draw the water for myself, or else I must go thirsty.’ And in this way he preserved his self-respect, and those who had the great pleasure of helping him, received, in the boy’s cheerful, grateful use of his opportunities, quite as much benefit as they gave.
4. Seed-time.—He worked very hard, and the first thing he set himself to thoroughly learn was the German language. Germany had shown herself but a harsh stepmother to her adopted Jewish children; but he wisely thought if the children would cease to whimper in exasperating and half-understood dialect, if they would plead, or even on occasion scold back again, in the same good guttural German as their neighbours used, there was a better chance of their gaining for themselves a respectful hearing. It was scarcely a safe branch of learning, for the poor oppressed Jews of that period were so afraid of any encroachment on their Judaism, that not only was the study of the Law their favourite study, but any other was looked upon with jealous fear, and even in some cases prohibited by authority. But Moses Mendelssohn had no selfish object in his overmastering desire for knowledge. He meant to be a good Jew and a good German citizen at one and the same time, and to show his people how that could be done.The first writing work he did was translating parts of the Bible and the Prayers into good German. He might have made translations which would have found a ready sale among scholars, but he chose to do unpaid work, which would at best find but a very limited market, in order that his people might get to know the language of the country in which they lived, through the only books which there was any likelihood of their studying. He never lost sight of the one set purpose of his life—to be a guide to the perplexed, to help the people from darkness into light. There is a royal road to learning, and they are kings who tread it disinterestedly, desiring to minister to the needs of their fellow-men. Some such kings carry burdens, and some bear lamps, and most are unrecognised as they trudge along, but nevertheless that road to learning is always royal. Moses Mendelssohn, poor and deformed as he was, and hemmed in by prejudice, found books to read and teachers to instruct him, and by the time he was one-and-twenty, was not only a good Hebrew scholar, which was a matter of course to a self-respecting Jew in those days, but an excellent mathematician and a fair classic, with an accurate and grammatical knowledge of the language and literature of his native country, and a tolerable mastery of French and of English.
5. Harvest.—He had given lessons for some time in the family of a Mr. Bernhardt, a prominent member of the Berlin synagogue, and in 1750 this gentleman proposed to the learned young man to become resident tutor to his children. This Mr. Bernhardt was a kind man as well as a rich and a cultured one,and as tutor in his house Mendelssohn found both congenial occupation and welcome leisure. He was teacher by day, student by night, and author at odd half-hours. At the end of three or four years of this work, Mr. Bernhardt offered Mendelssohn the position of bookkeeper in his silk manufactory, with some especial emoluments and responsibilities attached to the office. It was a splendid opening, and Mendelssohn gladly and gratefully accepted it. It gave him leisure and independence, and in due time wealth, for as the years went on he came to be a manager, and finally a partner in the house. He did not sink into a mere business man, but the money gave him the means wherewith to indulge his taste for books, to enjoy the society of clever and cultivated people, and to send, too, many a welcome gift to the old home in Dessau.
6. Nathan der Weise.—Mendelssohn’s tastes had very early drawn him into the outer literary circle of Berlin, which at this time had its head-quarters in a sort of club which met to play chess, and to discuss politics and philosophy. His good manners soon overcame any lingering social prejudices, and he was already quite a popular member, when the poet Lessing, coming to Berlin in 1754, was welcomed to these gatherings as an honoured guest. Very soon an intimacy grew up between the author, whose reputation was already high, and the struggling young Jewish student. The intimacy ripened into a lifelong friendship. Lessing was on the road to become a great author, and Mendelssohn was the first Jew he had ever known. The German author andthe German Jew grew very soon to be real friends, and by-and-by Lessing wrote a play, which is now the most celebrated of his works. It is called ‘Nathan the Wise.’ The hero, Nathan, is a Jew, and Mendelssohn was Lessing’s model for Nathan. ‘Let me make a nation’s ballads, and I care not who makes their laws,’ once said a keen statesman; and the ballads, and the plays, and the literature of a country undoubtedly have an immense influence on its people’s thought and action. A Jew of the Nathan der Weise type was an altogether new experience for the Germans,and the ‘divine lessons’[61] which the drama teaches had been hitherto undreamt of in their philosophy. They put on their spectacles, as a matter of course, to commentate and to criticise the text, but by-and-by they took them off again, to study it in the original. Lessing had sketched his Jew from the life, and there were quantities of such hitherto neglected and misunderstood models on all sides about them. Other Lessings among Christians began to look for, and to find, other Mendelssohns among Jews.
7. Literary Successes.—And presently Mendelssohn grew famous. He wrote a great deal, and Lessing was godfather to his first book; and then they brought out together a little work called ‘Pope as a Metaphysician.’ A year or two later, Mendelssohn gained the prize which the Academy of Berlin offered for the best essay on the problem ‘Are Metaphysics susceptible of Mathematical Demonstration?’ Kant, the great German philosopher, was one of the competitors whom Mendelssohn distanced in this contest.Together with Lessing and one or two other friends, he brought out for some years a serial called ‘Literatur-Briefe,’ a sort of literature, science, and art review. The works, however, by which he is best known are his ‘Jerusalem’ and his ‘Phædon.’ ‘Jerusalem,’ published in 1783, is a sort of comprehensive survey of Judaism in its religious and its national aspect. ‘Phædon,’ published in 1767, is an eloquent summary of all that religion and reason and experience urge in support of our belief in the immortality of the soul. In less than two years ‘Phædon’ ran through three editions, and it was quickly translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, Danish, and Hebrew. He paraphrased the whole of the Pentateuch into pure German, and made a metrical translation of the Psalms. He translated, too, Manasseh ben Israel’s famous Vindiciæ Judæorum into German, and published it with a very eloquent preface in 1782. Another literary enterprise, which brought him more notice than he cared for, was a correspondence with a too zealous Swiss minister named Lavater, who, with a keen eye to conversion, sought to draw Mendelssohn into a public religious discussion on the relative merits of Judaism and Christianity. Mendelssohn hated controversy, and, moreover, had a sincere conviction that no cause, and certainly no religious cause, is ever forwarded by it. ‘It is by character, and not by controversy,’ as he wrote, ‘that Jews can shame the bad opinion that may be held of them.’ Nevertheless, when the choice, between standing to his colours or sneaking behind them, was forced upon him, we may be sure that he did not take refuge in anycomfortable compromise.Like the three who were not ‘careful’[62] of their answer, even under fear of the fiery furnace, he too testified to the truth, and had no dread. The correspondence ended with a sincere apology from Lavater, and an added respect for Mendelssohn.
8. His Home Life.—At the age of thirty-three he had married. We do not know much of his wife beyond the facts that she was young and blue-eyed. The first few years of the marriage were very happy years, spent in a small house in the outskirts of Berlin—for by this time Mendelssohn’s friends had procured for him the privilege, not at that time, nor for long after, generally accorded to Jews, of living in whatever part of the city he liked. It was a modest little house, with a garden. The ornaments were perhaps rather out of proportion in size and number to the rest of the surroundings, but that was hardly the fault of the newly married couple, since one of the smaller vexations imposed on the Jews of that time was the obligation laid on every Jewish bridegroom to treat himself to a large quantity of china for the good of the king’s manufactory. It was, of course, a sort of extra tax legally imposed upon Jews, but the most vexatious part of it was, that neither the tastes of the purchaser nor his wants were ever considered. He had to buy just what the manufactory wanted to sell. In this instance twenty life-sized china apes fell to Mendelssohn’s lot. But the ugly ornaments notwithstanding, Mendelssohn and his wife were very happy. Happierperhaps as husband and wife than, when their children grew up, as father and mother. Parenthood was a very hard task in those days. It is never quite easy, but a century ago, when Jews could not walk the streets without being insulted, when all gates save the Jews’ gate were closed against them, it was terribly difficult to bring up children to be good Jews and good citizens at the same time. Mendelssohn did not altogether succeed with his children. ‘Who is best taught?’ says the Talmud; and it answers, ‘He who has learned first from his mother.’ Mendelssohn’s clever boys and girls never seem to have had that teaching, and this may account in part for the mistakes they made when they grew up. They became impatient of the obstacles and the insults that beset the Jews’ path, and when their turn came to marry and bring up children, they determined to save them all such humiliating experiences by bringing them up as Christians. Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the great musician, was the grandson of Moses Mendelssohn, but he was not a Jew.
9. Last Years.—In 1780 Lessing died, and a friendship of nearly thirty years was thus dissolved. For Mendelssohn, the loss of his friend was a terrible blow, but for the world the work of that memorable friendship was accomplished. It had improved the position of the Jews throughout Europe, for it had made Jew known to Christian, and Christian known to Jew. The hero of Lessing’s play ‘Nathan the Wise’ had come in those thirty years to be a well-known and famous personage, and he, Moses Mendelssohn,and not the shambling pedlar whom they passed contemptuously in the street, was talked of now among cultivated people as ‘a Jew.’ The individual Jew whom they happen to come across is generally accepted by outsiders as a representative of his race, and thus the work that Mendelssohn did by being scholarly and good-mannered and straightforward was, perhaps, even more valuable to his people than his literary services. Mendelssohn himself was an interpretation of Judaism for Christians in as true a sense as his translation of Pentateuch and Psalms was a revelation of their adopted country to the Jews. His brave and sensible efforts for the study of secular subjects, and for the speaking and the writing of pure German, did much to banish the confusing, narrowing influence of a separate jargon among his people, but certainly no less did his loyal, beautiful character go far to silence that noisy, national expression of prejudice which, even to these days, debases the German tongue, making it a dialect among the languages of civilisation. Lessing’s love for his Jewish friend, and the expression of that love in his drama, had smoothed the way and hastened the work which Mendelssohn in his boyhood had longed to accomplish. The work was done when Lessing died; and the remainder of the way which he who was left had to tread alone was fortunately not long.‘Spend in all things else,’ says an American poet,[63]