Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings and ideas on Jews and the Jewish religion and identity were a central element in the development of the Haskalah, or 'Jewish Enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
"Divine religion ... does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love. It draws no avenging sword, dispenses no temporal goods, assumes no right to any earthly possessions, and claims no external power over the mind. Its weapons are reason and persuasion; its strength is the divine power of truth."
"The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence. The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him."
"Mendelssohn was an extraordinary human being, who came to Berlin at fourteen educated only in rabbinical and talmudic literature but who by twenty-five had mastered all the main European languages and literatures and was making deeply original contributions to aesthetics. I think that he recognized the complexity of aesthetic experience and the diversity of our possible sources of pleasure in art more fully than Kant ever did."
