ENGLISH

Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment

By Arthur Hertzberg , David Sorkin

Book information

Publisher
Halban
Year
2012
ISBN
9781905559510
Language
english
Format
EPUB
Filesize
404 kB (413704 bytes)
Series
Jewish Thinkers
Pages
242\0
Time added
2014-06-19 12:43:04

Description

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) was the premier Jewish thinker of his day and one of the best-known figures of the German Enlightenment, earning the sobriquet ‘the Socrates of Berlin’. He was thoroughly involved in the central issue of Enlightenment religious thinking: the inevitable conflict between reason and revelation in an age contending with individual rights and religious toleration. He did not aspire to a comprehensive philosophy of Judaism, since he thought human reason was limited, but he did see Judaism as compatible with toleration and rights. David Sorkin offers a close study of Mendelssohn’s complete writings, treating the German, and the often-neglected Hebrew writings, as a single corpus and arguing that Mendelssohn’s two spheres of endeavour were entirely consistent.

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