Religious Freedom and Toleration in Moses Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem

Abstract

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) is the most important Jewish German Enlightenment thinker. In 1783, Mendelssohn published the book Jerusalem or about Religious Power and Judaism. In this treatise he discussed the concept of religious toleration and justified it by providing a number of important different reasons for it. He also argued that Judaism is the religion of reason and defended Jewish belief and practices. He thus combined a universal Enlightenment claim with the focus on a particular religion. This chapter discusses Mendelssohn’s contribution to the history of toleration against the background of his biography and his intellectual context, most importantly the English discussion about toleration that he found in Locke’s A Letter Concerning Toleration in Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. As a Jewish philosopher, living and working in eighteenth-century Prussia, Mendelssohn could not favor too narrow of a junction between religion and state and was thereby defending a Lockean secular state. But as a political philosopher, he knew well that a sharp separation in the Lockean manner or in an even more radical, anti-religious way, was also limited and deeply problematic. His secular liberalism is, as will be shown, deeply religious.