Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn (17291786) is one of the icons of German-Jewish history. The Israeli historian Shmuel Feiner describes not only the private and public career of Mendelssohn and his rise to one of the leading philosophers of his time, but also the disruption of a person who worked as a liberal champion of the Enlightenment and at the same time had to take note of religious prejudices as a Jew He came across both within and outside of his religious community. His life and work identify Mendelssohn as the first real Jewish enlightener. Before him, there had been no thinker whose intellectual development was so closely linked to the dilemmas of contemporary Jewish existence - conflicts that arose from the profound upheaval in modern European society. And no Jewish thinker before him had made respect for human dignity and the preservation of human claims to freedom and happiness into guiding principles in a comparable manner.