sourced story
c. 1750s-1786General source · 2 sourcesWell documented

Moses Mendelssohn Sparks the Haskalah

A poor scribe's son becomes a European celebrity and argues Jews can be both observant and modern

On the timeline · around c. 1750s-1786 · Early Modern and EmancipationEarly Modern and EmancipationModern JudaismMoses Mendelssohn Sparks the Haskalah165017001750180018501900

Quick facts

Born
1729, Dessau
Berlin Academy prize essay
1763
Key work
German translation of the Torah (the Biur)
Died
1786

What happened

Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau in 1729 to a poor family, the son of a scribe, and moved to Berlin as a teenager to study with Rabbi David Frankel. There he taught himself German philosophy and literature alongside his traditional Jewish education, and by the 1750s and 1760s had become, in the words of the Jewish Museum Berlin, the engine of the Berlin Enlightenment, winning the Berlin Academy's prize essay competition in 1763. Mendelssohn translated the Torah into German, written in Hebrew characters, to give Yiddish-speaking Jews access to German language and culture, and he argued publicly that Jews should be granted civil rights as fellow inhabitants of the countries they lived in while still holding fast to their ancestral religion. His example and his advocacy for Jewish educational reform helped launch the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment, a movement that spread across Central and Eastern Europe over the following century.

Why it matters

The Haskalah pushed a large part of European Jewry toward secular education, integration into surrounding national cultures, and religious reform, developments that led directly to the Reform Jewish movement, fed into the political emancipation battles being fought in France and elsewhere in the same decades, and later fed the intellectual currents that produced political Zionism as well.

How we know

Mendelssohn's writings, correspondence, and translations survive and are held by institutions including the Jewish Museum Berlin, which draws on his own published essays, letters, and the historical record of his advocacy before Prussian and other authorities.

Sources

See something wrong? . Corrections with a source get fixed fastest.

Part of a timelineHistory of Judaism26 events · A small highland people, a book that outlasted every empire that tried to erase it, and a faith that survived exile twice and built a state a third timeView all →