Where is Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

• In Event: Modern Thought: Mysticism and Rationality

Abstract

Moses Mendelssohn’s JERUSALEM is a curious document. In the entire text Mendelssohn only mentions the city Jerusalem twice: once when he respond's Johann Lavater’s challenge and once when he describes the fall of the city of Jerusalem to the Romans and the subsequent exile. In a closer reading of the text, Mendelssohn's Jerusalem about is an unstable locus. Instead of a place, Jerusalem, in this view, is an idealized vision of several different places at several times co-existing in a singular vision. One meaning Mendelssohn imparts coincides with the ancient city of Jerusalem of the Hebrew Bible and of Josephus, although these views are also ultimately incompatible. Mendelssohn's second meaning concerns an idealized future Jerusalem that exists as part of the upcoming Enlightenment; a Utopian place where Jews might occupy as part of an integral and working part of greater society without assimilating into that society. I conclude, via a text-based analysis based in a genealogical and a historical understanding of the text that Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem is Utopian in the literal meaning of the term, that although Mendelssohn himself was an observant Jew who remained observant through his life, that his understanding of Judaism is naïve. This understanding of Mendelssohn’s work is important because it allows us to contextualize Mendelssohn, a key figure in early Modern Judaism and Early Modern Jewish thought, as a visionary, who had a specific understanding of Judaism that tried to synthesize the meanings of the Enlightenment and of Jewish emancipation but that was ultimately incompatible with both.

Author

• Joel West, University of Toronto