1. Alexander, Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (Philadelphia, 1973), pp. 514–552;Google Scholar see also Altmann's introduction and commentary to Mendelssohn, Moses, Jerusalem, trans. Arkush, Allan (Hanover, N.H., 1983).Google ScholarGuttmann, Julius, “Mendelssohn's Jerusalem and Spinoza's Theologico-Political Treatise,” in Studies in Jewish Thought, ed. Alfred, Jospe (Detroit, 1981), pp. 361–386.Google ScholarRawidowicz, Simon, “The Philosophy of Jerusalem,” in Studies in Jewish Thought, vol. 2 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1971), pp. 70–117.Google ScholarRotenstreich, Nathan, “Mendelssohn and the Political Idea,” in Jubilee Volume in Honor of Mordecai Kaplan [Hebrew] (New York, 1953), pp. 237–248.Google Scholar

2. Mendelssohn, , Jerusalem, pp. 89–90. I have employed both the Arkush translation and the German original, found in Gesammelte Schriften: Jubilaumsausgabe, vol. 8 (Stuttgart, 1983), pp. 99–204.Google Scholar

3. Heinemann, Isaak, Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot in Jewish Literature, vol. 2 [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1956), pp. 9–46.Google Scholar My differences with Heinemann will become clear in what follows. See also the brief and often simplistic treatment byMorgan, Michael, “History and Modern Jewish Thought: Spinoza and Mendelssohn on the Ritual Law,” Judaism 30 (1981): 467–478.Google Scholar Finally, see the valuable discussion by Amos Funkenstein, who like the present author finds Mendelssohn's theory of signs in Jerusalem “the most original and fertile part of the book.” Funkenstein, Amos, “The Political Theory of Jewish Emancipation from Mendelssohn to Herzl,” in Deutsche Aufklarung und Judenemanzipation (Tel Aviv, 1979), pp. 18–22. This paper bears the imprint of discussions with Funkenstein and with my students Zachary Braiterman, James Hyman, and Arthur Kiron, to all of whom I am grateful.Google Scholar

4. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 104.

5. Altmann, Mendelssohn, pp. 545–546.

6. Ibid, p. 552.

7. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 89

8. For the polemical background, see Altmann, Mendelssohn.

9. See in particular the essays by Guttmann and Rotenstreich cited above.

10. Cited by Mendelssohn in Jerusalem, pp. 86–87.

11. Ibid, p. 85.

12. Ibid, p. 87.

13. Ibid, p. 99.

14. Ibid, pp. 100–102.

15. Ibid, pp. 102–104.

16. Ibid, p. 36.

17. See Ibid, pp. 94–96, for the famous dispute with Lessing on the question of whether human progress toward perfection is inevitable.

18. Ibid, pp. 66–68. Rawidowicz points out that Mendelssohn himself expresses elsewhere the view attributed by him to a “skeptic” who, if a teacher of religion were to raise the dead, would “still know no more about eternal truth than I did before.” Ibid, p. 98. See Rawidowicz, “Philosophy of Jerusalem,” p. 91.

19. Mendelssohn thus takes the famous midrash about God's revelation at Sinai coming in seventy languages simultaneously to mean that the revelation was beyond language altogether.

20. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 102.

21. Altmann, Mendelssohn, pp. 48–49, 545. See also Moses Mendelssohn, “Uber die Sprache,” in Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 6:2, pp. 3–23.

22. Vico wrote that concerning “the origin of languages and letters… there are as many opinions as there are scholars who have written on the subject.” SeeVico, Giambattista, The New Science (Ithaca, N.Y., 1968), p. 138Google Scholar (bk. 2, chap. 4, par. 428). See pp. 138–153. For Hobbes's views, seeHobbes, Thomas, Leviathan (Harmondsworth, 1968), pp. 100–109 (pt. 1, chap. 4). On Mendelssohn's debt to Hobbes, see Funkenstein, “Political Theory,” pp. 18–19.Google Scholar

23. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, “Discourse on the Origin and Foundations of Inequality,” in The First and Second Discourses (New York, 1964), pp. 119, 121, 126.Google Scholar

24. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 104–107. I say “more or less” because Mendelssohn allows for what we might call “pre-concepts” preceding their attachment to signs. Thus Mendelssohn writes (p. 105) that without signs “man can scarcely remove himself one step from the sensual“ the “scarcely” allowing for the thought process preceding signs.

25. Rousseau, Discourses, p. 124.

26. Ibid, p. 220, citingVossius, Isaac, De Poematum Cantu el Viribus Rythmi (Oxford, 1673).Google Scholar

27. Vico, New Science, p. 138. In a passage of great importance to Mendelssohn, Vico defends his contention that scholars err if they regard the origin of letters as a question separate from the origin of languages by noting that –‘character’… means idea, form, model; and certainly poetic characters came before those of articulate sounds,” i.e., alphabetic characters. Scholars had failed to understand “how the first nations thought in poetic characters, spoke in fables, and wrote in hieroglyphs.”

28. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 105.

29. Ibid, p. 102.

30. Ibid, pp. 105“115. Quotation on p. 113. “Gentoos” and “shastas” were common eighteenth-century terminology for Hindus and their sacred writings.

31. Ibid, pp. 117–118.

32. Ibid, pp. 72–73, and see the final part of the present essay.

33. Ibid, pp. 84–87.

34. Ibid, p. 85.

35. Spinoza, Benedict de, A Theological-Political Treatise (New York, 1951), chap. 4, pp. 59–62.Google Scholar

36. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 128–131.

37. Altmann, notes to Jerusalem, p. 232. Rawidowicz tries to defend Mendelssohn by portraying him, quite unconvincingly, as naive with regard to the import of his words. See Rawidowicz, “Philosophy of Jerusalem,” P. 108.

38. Kant, Immanuel, Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone (New York, 1960). Kant cites Mendelssohn, and misreads him in a fashion which can only be intentional, on p. 154.Google Scholar

39. Spinoza, p. 61. I focus on Maimonides in the present essay rather than Spinoza because Mendelssohn's relation to the Tractatus has been treated exhaustively in Guttmann, “Mendelssohn's Jerusalem,” nicely supplemented by Morgan, “History and Modern Jewish Thought.” See notes 1 and 3 above

40. Maimonides, Moses, The Guide of the Perplexed, trans. Pines, Shlomo, vol. 2 (Chicago, 1963), bk. 2, chap. 31.Google Scholar

41. Ibid, bk. 3, chaps. 25–49. The heart of the discussion comes in chaps. 27–29.

42. Twersky, Isadore, Introduction to the Code of Maimonides (New Haven, 1980), p. 386. On Maimonides′ approach as a whole to ta′amei ha-mitzvot, both in the Mishneh Torah and the Guide, see Twersky, pp. 371–459.Google Scholar

43. Maimonides, Guide, pp. 518, 527 (bk. 3, chaps. 29, 32). On the notion of accommodation, see Twersky, Code, pp. 389–391, andFunkenstein, Amos, Theology and the Scientific Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton, 1986), chap. 4.Google Scholar

44. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 119. For Maimonides′ use of Deuteronomy 4:5–8, see Twersky, Code, pp. 381–385.

45. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 119.

46. Ibid, p. 102. Heinemann does not parse the explanation of the mitzvot in part 2 of Jerusalemin light of the skepticism concerning language evinced there and even more so in part 1, with the result that Mendelssohn emerges from his reading as a thoroughly traditional figure urging us to seek out the meaning of observance in order to fill it with proper intention. The text, I believe, is far more nuanced, and its import more radical even than Mendelssohn himself may have realized. One certainly cannot say, with Heinemann (Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot, p. 22) that Mendelssohn “believed in the Oral Law with perfect faith, and as we have mentioned, considered this faith among the fundamental principles of Judaism.” The entire thrust of Mendelssohn's essay is to make such a statement about belief in doctrine and fundamental principles virtually meaningless.

47. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 66.

48. Heinemann claims (but fails to demonstrate) that Mendelssohn relies here on the educational theory articulated by Rousseau in Emile. See Heinemann, Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot, pp. 29, 43.

49. Mendelssohn himself quotes the dictum in Jerusalem, p. 101.

50. Ibid, p. 126. The Jewish Publication Society, closer to the text's apparent meaning, translates, “There is no utterance, there are no words, whose sound goes unheard,” and cites the alternative reading of the final phrase, “their sound is not heard.” Tanakh (Philadelphia, 1985), p. 1126.

51. On Mendelssohn's ambivalent relation to idolatry in the text, see Guttmann, “Mendelssohn's Jerusalem,” pp. 370–377.

52. Hence the dispute with Lessing cited in note 17 above.

53. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 118.

54. Ibid, p. 126.

55. Rotenstreich, “Mendelssohn and the Political Idea,” p. 246.

56. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 118.

57. Morgan points out that to Mendelssohn the mitzvot were not symbolic of particular truths but associated with them in our minds, as a checkered deerstalker hat and magnifying glass are associated with the character Sherlock Holmes. Yes and no: the latter association is far less equivocal than any Mendelssohn would recognize between mitzvah A and truth B. See Morgan, “History and Modern Jewish Thought,” p. 477.

58. Heinemann makes this point well in Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot, p. 17. I believe I do not impute too much prescience to Mendelssohn when I attribute to him the awareness that the meanings of mitzvot would become highly individualized in the emergent modern era, and observance itself far less standard.

59. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 119, 128.

60. Spinoza, Treatise, pp. 245–256.

61. Ibid, p. 56.

62. Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 13, pp. 132–134. The letter is conveniently available in full as an addendum to the Hebrew translation of Jerusalem (Ramat Gan, 1977), pp. 226–228.

63. Compare Heinemann, Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot, pp. 42–43, who notes that the critique applied particularly to Protestantism, which had devalued “ceremonies” relative to the Catholic Church.

64. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 88–89.

65. The phrase is of courseBerger's, Peter. See The Sacred Canopy (Garden City, 1969) and The Heretical Imperative (Garden City, 1980).Google Scholar

66. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 120–122, 132–134.

67. Mendelssohn cites the verse on pp. 101 and 139 of Jerusalem. His disciple Naphtali Herz Wessely had issued his famous pamphlet Divrei Shalom va-Emet [Words of peace and truth] the year before, in 1782, the title based on Esther 9:30.

68. Like Heinemann and unlike Morgan I find great consistency among the three explanations which Mendelssohn provides for the commandments: historical (idolatry), intellectualmoral (the achievement of felicity), and sociological (the preservation of Jewish community). I am not convinced by Mendelssohn's putative history of language, nor am I satisfied particularly given the lack of examples that ceremonies actually lead one to truth. But that would be difficult to demonstrate in any event. One should note that except for the theory of the ceremonial script, Mendelssohn's account is highly traditional. On the history of ta′amei ha-mitzvot, see especiallyUrbach, Ephraim, The Sages [Hebrew] (Jerusalem, 1975), pp. 320–347; and Heinemann, Ta′amei ha-Mitzvot, vol. 1. Mendelssohn's explanations for particular commandments in his Be′ur are utterly traditional at one point (Exod. 23:19) even counseling obedience to a law we cannot understand! See Heinemann, vol. 2, pp. 27–31.Google Scholar

69. For Geiger's views, see, most conveniently,Max, Wiener, ed., Abraham Geiger and Liberal Judaism (Philadelphia, 1962), pp. 113–118, 170–172, 283–293.Google Scholar

70. See, for example,Hirsch's, long and belabored explanation of the prohibition on seething a kid in its mother's milk. The Pentateuch, Translated and Explained by Samson Raphael Hirsch, vol. 2 (London, 1967),Google Scholar at Exodus 23:19. For his symbolic theory of the commandments, see especiallyHirsch, Samson Raphael, The Collected Writings, vol. 3, Jewish Symbolism (New York, 1984).Google Scholar

71. Mary, Douglas, Purity and Danger (London, 1966), p. 62.Google Scholar

72. Turner, Victor, Process, Performance and Pilgrimage: A Study in Comparative Symbology (New Delhi, 1979), chap. 1.Google Scholar

73. Funkenstein notes that Thomas Aquinas divided divine law into moralia, caerimonialia, and judicialia and believed the second group to entail “the recognition that everything man has, he has from God as first and last principle.” Funkenstein, Theology, p. 240. The rabbis would have approved of that sentiment, but could not have accepted the threefold division, or indeed the rendering of mitzvot as ceremonies.

74. Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 45, 114.

75. Geertz, Clifford, “Religion as a Cultural System,” in The Interpretation of Cultures(New York, 1973), pp. 87–125.Google Scholar See in particular p. 119.

76. Quoted in Altmann, Mendelssohn, pp. 758–759.

77. This is, to my mind, a weak point in the theory. On the other hand, how could Mendelssohn argue the variability of meanings to observances and then do anymore than suggestmeanings that he personally had found compelling? Mendelssohn in fact does the latter in the Be′ur, quite traditionally. Here he offers only a theoretical “surmise” (p. 117), avoiding the danger that he will dissuade his readers from observance because his particular rationales are unconvincing. For Maimonides′ awareness of this danger, and his choice to explicate particular mitzvot nonetheless, see Twersky, Code, p. 418.