Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism () is a book written by Moses Mendelssohn, which was first published in 1783 – the same year when the Prussian officer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published the second part of his Mémoire Concerning the amelioration of the civil status of the Jews.; Engl. transl.: . Moses Mendelssohn was one of the key figures of Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah) and his philosophical treatise, dealing with social contract and political theory (especially concerning the question of the separation between religion and state), can be regarded as his most important contribution to Haskalah. The book which was written in Prussia on the eve of the French Revolution, consisted of two parts and each one was paginated separately. The first part discusses "religious power" and the freedom of conscience in the context of the political theory (Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, Thomas Hobbes), and the second part discusses Mendelssohn's personal conception of Judaism concerning the new secular role of any religion within an enlightened state. In his publication Moses Mendelssohn combined a defense of the Jewish population against public accusations with contemporary criticism of the present conditions of the Prussian Monarchy.
Historical background
In 1763 some students of theology visited Moses Mendelssohn in Berlin because of his reputation as a man of letters, and they insisted that they wanted to know Mendelssohn's opinion about Christianity. Three years later one of them, the Swiss Johann Caspar Lavater, sent him his own German translation of Charles Bonnet's Palingénésie philosophique, with a public dedication to Mendelssohn. In this dedication he charged Mendelssohn with the decision to follow Bonnet's reasons by converting to Christianity or to refute Bonnet's arguments. The very ambitious priest Lavater published his dedication to Mendelssohn and Mendelssohn's response together with other letters which were dated to the year 1774—including a prayer of Dr. Kölbele "baptizing two Israelites as a consequence of the Mendelssohn dispute". He abused the reputation of Mendelssohn and of his letters about religious tolerance to fashion himself as a kind of Christian Messiah of contemporary Judaism, disregarding the Haskalah as a conversion to Christianity.Sammlung derer Briefe, welche bey Gelegenheit der Bonnetschen philosophischen Untersuchung der Beweise für das Christenthum zwischen Hrn. Lavater, Moses Mendelssohn, und Hrn Dr. Kölbele gewechselt worden [Collection of those letters which have been exchanged between Mr. Lavater, Moses Mendelssohn, and Mr. Dr. Kölbele on occasion of Bonnet's investigation concerning the evidence of Christianity], (Google Books).
This intrigue was transferred to the times of the medieval Crusades in the allegorical drama Nathan der Weise of Mendelssohn's friend Gotthold Ephraim Lessing: Lessing replaced the young priest Lavater with the historical figure Saladin who appeared as the tolerant hero of the Crusades in the perspective of contemporary enlightened historiography. The motive of Nathan who replied with the ring parable, was taken from Boccaccio's "Decamerone" and Lessing intended to create his drama as a monument of tolerance and enlightenment dedicated to Moses Mendelssohn. Lessing was an open-minded and modern type of freemason and he himself had a public theological dispute (the so-called ) about the historical truth of the New Testament with the orthodox Lutheran Hauptpastor Johann Melchior Goeze in Hamburg during the 1770s. Finally he was banned in 1778 by Charles I, Duke of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Lessing's new way to ask about the fundament of a certain religion and to regard its efforts on religious tolerance was intended as a reflection of the current political practice.
In 1782, after the declaration of the so-called "Toleranzpatent" in the Habsburg monarchy under Joseph II and the realization of the «lettres patentes» in the French Monarchy under Louis XVI, religion and especially the Jewish emancipation became a favorite subject of private debates in Alsace–Lorraine and these debates were often followed by publications of Christian clerics and Abbés.. Mendelssohn's Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism may be regarded as his contribution to the debate.
During the 1770s, Mendelssohn was frequently asked to act as a mediator by Jews in Switzerland and Alsace – and once Lavater supported Mendelssohn's intervention. About 1780, there was another antisemitic intrigue in Alsace, when François Hell accused the Jewish population of exhausting the peasants. The contemporary Alsatian Jews had no permission to buy land, but they often existed as innkeepers and moneylenders in rural areas.; (Google Books). Moses Mendelssohn was asked by Herz Cerfberr, the communal leader of the Alsatian Jews, to react with a Mémoire about the legal discrimination of the Jewish population as it was common practice of the Prussian administration. Moses Mendelssohn arranged a Mémoire by the Prussian officer and freemason Christian Wilhelm von Dohm in which both authors tried to relate the confirmation of the unenlightened condition with a demand for a general improvement of the civil condition.Christian Konrad Wilhelm von Dohm: Über die Bürgerliche Verbesserung der Juden ("Concerning the amelioration of the civil status of the Jews"), 1781 and 1783. The autograph is now preserved in the library of the Jewish community (Fasanenstraße, Berlin) – ; Engl. transl.: .
In this respect Moses Mendelssohn proved in his book Jerusalem which was published in the same year, that the "amelioration" of the civil status of the Jews could not be separated from an urgent need to modernize the Prussian Monarchy as a whole. The reason, why Moses Mendelssohn as one of the most recognized philosophers of Haskalah was from the Kingdom of Prussia, has to be understood by the fact that the state of Jewish emancipation there was on the lowest level in comparison with the neighbour countries. So the Jewish population was more forced to assimilate than in other countries during the 19th century: The Hohenzollern Monarchy followed with their edicts into the footsteps of the Habsburg monarchy—with 10 years delay. In 1784, one year after the publication of Mendelssohn's book Jerusalem, the administration of the Habsburg monarchy prohibited rabbinic jurisdiction and submitted the Jewish population to its own jurisdiction, but with an inferior legal status.Wolfgang Häusler described also the ambiguous effects of the "Toleranzpatent" in his chapter Das Österreichische Judentum, in . This first step of the monarchy was expected to be done in a direction towards intolerance. In 1791 the National Assembly of the French Revolution declared the full civil rights for the Jewish population of the French Republic (Déclaration des droits de l'homme et du citoyen).
Moses Mendelssohn's treatise "On Religious Power" and its composition
Moses Mendelssohn was a highly educated scholar and teacher, who devoted much effort to the German translation of classical Hellenic and Roman philosophers and poets as a young man, and he became a very famous and influential philosopher of Haskalah. His book Jerusalem oder über religiöse Macht und Judentum can be regarded as one of the main works of Jewish Enlightenment. Mendelssohn addressed political authorities directly on the question of religious unity:
Rulers of the earth! [...] union of faiths is not tolerance, it is directly opposed to true forbearance! For the sake of your happiness and ours, do not lend your mighty influence to transform any eternal truth, without which civil happiness can exist, into law. Do not transform any religious opinion that is indifferent to the state into a national ordinance!
Often this text which explains the real subject of "amelioration" in Dohm's defense, is still underestimated as a contribution to philosophy—probably because it was directly connected with the historical situation and the social conditions of the author's life. On the other hand, a lot of historians concerned about Haskalah criticized the heroic image about Moses Mendelssohn in which he appears as the starting point of Jewish enlightenment without any respect to earlier attempts around the beginning of the 18th century.
Regarding the present accusations and complaints concerning the current state of Judaism as a modern Christian prejudice which just had replaced the medieval ones (like poisoning fountains, ritual slaughtering of Christian children on Pessah etc.),Moses Mendelssohn offered 1782 a little history of antisemitism in his preface to his German translation of Mannaseh ben Israel's "Salvation of the Jews" (Vindiciae Judaeorum translated as "Rettung der Juden"; Engl. transl.: ). his subject of amelioration was the religion and especially the one which has to be separated from the state.
The two parts of his books have no titles except Erster and Zweiter Abschnitt ("first" and "second section"), and the first one treated clearly the contemporary conflicts of the state and the second those of religion. In the first the author developed his political theory towards a utopia of a just and tolerant democracy, which he identified with the political attempt of the Mosaic Law: therefore the title "Jerusalem". In the second part he worked out a new pedagogic charge which every religion has to fulfill in the private sector. It was reduced to it, because the tolerant state should be separated from any religion. Hence the Mosaic law and the traditional practice of jurisdiction was no longer the business of Judaism, if there would be a tolerant state. Instead the new charge of religion would be the education of just and tolerant citizens. The book as a whole summarizes Moses Mendelssohn's critic concerning the contemporary conditions of the Prussian Monarchy and the legal status of the different religions, which finally means the civil status of its inhabitants according to their faith—the subject of Christian Wilhelm von Dohm's Mémoire.
The philosophical issue (first part)
Mendelssohn's concept of political theory has to be understood from the historical situation in Prussian Monarchy and he formulated his theory before Kant. In 1771 he was also chosen by Johann Georg Sulzer, who wanted him as a member of the philosophical department at the Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. But Sulzer's call was prohibited by Frederick the Great. The royal intervention clearly showed the borders of enlightenment and tolerance within Prussian monarchy, as far as the separation between religion and state was concerned.There is no doubt about the fact that Prussia profited a lot, allowing Protestant and Jewish immigrants to settle down in its territories.
In 1792 Immanuel Kant used in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft a conventional theological argument about the inferiority of the Mosaic law which would violently force mankind to a moral attitude, so it could not be really understood as a religion.
Despotism (Spinoza and Montesquieu)
Moses Mendelssohn opened the first part of his treatise which was published in 1783, with a very similar understanding of religion, but he chose as political example the "Roman Catholic despotism". Although his description of the conflict between state and religion as a conflict between common sense and religion was very close to that of Baruch Spinoza in his Tractatus theologico-politicus, Mendelssohn mentioned Spinoza only briefly,The relation was studied thoroughly by Julius . by a comparison of his merits in metaphysics that corresponded to Hobbes' in the field of moral philosophy. Montesquieu's more recent political theory remarked a change in the contemporary situation, when this conflict caused finally the decline of the church and also hopes and fears about the expected end of the ancient régime: