The affair had an effect opposite from what its instigator intended, for it gave Moses an opportunity to reaffirm his Judaic faith. There were further tests: Moses was asked to intervene on behalf of several Jewish communities—in Altona, near Hamburg, against authorities who had falsely accused the rabbinic court of defaming Christian holidays (1769); in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, against the prohibition of Jewish burial practices (1772); in Switzerland, against a proposal to prohibit Jews from procreating (1775); in Königsberg, against the censorship of a Jewish prayer (1777); and in Dresden and Alsace, against the threat of expulsion (1777). 13 With each intercession Moses argued for the oppressed’s civil rights, consistent with his agendum of advancing the emancipation of German Jewry. Meanwhile, during the 1770s, he also embarked upon an educational project encouraging the study of the Torah and the Psalms. Initially, his goal was to facilitate his sons’ religious education by producing new German translations and commentaries. But as the work progressed, he determined to disseminate his efforts, in order to revive the study of Hebrew and the Bible, and to render the scriptures accessible to German Jews. Published by subscription, the Pentateuch appeared with Masoretic commentary between 1780 and 1782; the Psalms, in 1782. Reaching throughout Europe to Russia, the landmark edition was criticized in some Jewish communities as a sacrilegious blending of the sacred and profane, and banned. But the translations’ impact in promoting the moral education of German Jewry was probably incalculable.
While preparing the editions, Moses was also meeting a new challenge to convert to Christianity. In Jerusalem (1783), he reexamined the relationship between church and state, and argued that Judaism was compatible with the idea of the liberty of conscience, which had been under attack, owing to imprecise lines drawn between secular and ecclesiastical affairs. The earlier excesses of the Catholic Church, having secured for Montesquieu only a “dreadful calm in a fortress about to be assailed during the night,” had been mitigated somewhat by the Reformation, only to yield to new forms of religious fanaticism. For Moses, before mankind had left the state of nature to enter into a social contract, “might and right” had been “heterogeneous ideas” that could not be linked. 14 Even the libertarian politics of John Locke, who had defended religious tolerance, were not completely satisfactory. In the Lockean world, the state concerned itself with its citizens’ temporal welfare; the church, their eternal welfare. Moses registered his objection: “To whom are we to entrust the care for the eternal? To the church? Now we are, once again, back at our starting point…. The state is, therefore, subordinate to religion, and must give way whenever a collision arises.” 15
His solution was to recognize that society represents a complex “matrix of both state and church.” 16 While the state depended upon a social contract, the church’s domain was the relationship between the individual and God. Confusion about these roles had permitted the church to make illegitimate incursions. In short, the church could have no claim to property, no power of excommunication, and could not require oaths, a “torture of the soul.” By entering into a religious society, man had not agreed to a specific kind of social contract; rather, he was solely interested in his moral edification and that of his neighbors. In the second part of Jerusalem Mendelssohn demonstrated that “Judaism, qua religion, was suited to the secular state.” 17 Judaism was not a theocracy based upon strict Mosaic laws but a voluntary association—not a revealed religion, as was Christianity, but a revealed legislation. As such, Judaism was compatible with the interests of the ideal secular state, because it was based upon natural rights and “eternal truths of reason.” 18
Two years before publishing Jerusalem , Moses eulogized the deceased Lessing as “more than one generation ahead of his century.” 19 Sadly enough, now, in Moses’ waning years, a new controversy arose, ostensibly about Lessing’s beliefs (was he an adherent of Spinoza, manifesting atheist sympathies?) but manipulated to pose yet another test of Moses’ religious convictions. He answered this challenge in a final effort, Morgenstunden (Morning Hours, or Lectures on the Existence of God , 1785). Designed to guide his son Joseph toward “a rational knowledge of God,” 20 the volume comprised seventeen lectures in dialogue form and laid out justifications of God, among them Moses’ own a posteriori proof: our very existence, he reasoned, is contingent upon things that exceed the limits of our perception; nevertheless, the concept of our existence must be fully apprehensible by some form of intellect, an “infinite intellect that thinks all things real and possible.” 21
In the preface to the Morgenstunden Mendelssohn acknowledged his struggle with the work of Immanuel Kant, whose monumental Critique of Pure Reason (1781) had just upended metaphysics. The “all-crushing Kant” was how Moses described his colleague. Undoubtedly, Moses realized at the end of his life that metaphysics was in jeopardy of systematic dismantlement from Kant’s vigorous probing. Nevertheless, Moses remained optimistic that somehow Kant would find a way to restore the traditional branch of philosophy to its earlier prominence. For his part, Kant respected the Morgenstunden , even if he found it “a masterpiece of the self-deception of our reason.” 22 When Moses died in Berlin, on January 4, 1786, he remained a “dogmatic” metaphysician to the end, a pious Jew, and an unflagging defender of the Enlightenment.
Though hailed during his lifetime as the German Socrates, Moses Mendelssohn’s posthumous reception followed two widely diverging paths. First, Lessing’s idealized image in Nathan der Weise was appropriated to affirm the philosopher’s position as a model Jew who had successfully reconciled Judaism with modern German culture. In the mid-nineteenth century, Moritz Oppenheim commemorated Mendelssohn’s friendship with Lessing in a painting depicting the two enjoying a game of chess (plate 1 , 1856). Ironically, as a result of his “assimilation,” Mendelssohn became the symbol of the “regenerated” Jew, a “status” bolstered by Sebastian Hensel’s Die Familie Mendelssohn (1879), which portrayed the Mendelssohns as fully emancipated, virtuous members of the German bourgeoisie. On the other hand, the opponents of assimilation “made Mendelssohn the symbol for everything thought to be amiss with Judaism and the Jews.” 23 At one extreme, in the closing decades of the century, proponents of Zionism rejected Mendelssohn as a “false prophet of assimilation.” 24 Hero worship and denigration thus solidified into opposing poles of the philosopher’s Rezeption , contrasting reactions to his life and work, ironically enough, not unlike those later accorded the philosopher’s grandson, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy.
II
If Moses Mendelssohn won renown in German letters, a few other Berlin Jews amassed great fortunes. The most successful was Frederick the Great’s court banker, Daniel Itzig (1723–1799), whose father, a horse merchant, had achieved a “tolerated” status in Berlin. Along with two partners in 1755, Daniel Itzig won the lease of the Prussian state mints and began to receive royal commissions for coinage. These were trying years for the fledgling Prussian state: in 1756, Frederick invaded Austrian Silesia, touching off the Seven Years’ War. Before Frederick emerged victorious as the absolute monarch of a new European power, Prussia suffered severe hardships. To finance his campaigns the king ordered the devaluation of the Prussian currency. He seized foreign currency, melted it down, retained its precious metal for his own treasury, and reminted the coins with impure alloys before recirculating them. Itzig and his partners received handsome compensation for overseeing these currency manipulations.
In 1761 Daniel Itzig became the third Berlin Jew to receive the “general privilege.” With his new wealth, he began purchasing fashionable Berlin properties: in 1765, a mansion overlooking the Spree River; 25 in 1769, a house near the Royal Palace, later the residence of his daughter Sarah Levy (a maternal great aunt of Felix Mendelssohn); and during the 1770s, the Bartholdy Meierei , a spacious garden near the Schlesisches Tor. 26 Itzig enlarged the mansion by acquiring adjacent buildings to create an impressive edifice with symmetrical wings. It contained a private synagogue and a room with a retractable roof. Among the
mansion’s treasures was an art gallery with paintings by Rubens, Ter Borch, and Watteau. No less impressive was the garden, landscaped by the royal gardener, with tree-lined walks and orchards, and an open-air theater appointed with sculptures on subjects from Greek mythology. 27 Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s mother, Lea, later reminisced about her childhood haunt, its “comfortable little country house, buried in vines, mulberry and peach trees, in which I occupy a neat but very simple little room with my piano, bookcase, and desk as furniture … Here my feelings developed, here my youthful mind ripened, … here I read my favorite poets with a higher enjoyment, … and I even fancy that the weak notes my unskilled fingers produced are here more melodious and pure”—all this on the “meager soil” of Brandenburg, utterly lacking in “anything romantic.” 28
Daniel Itzig’s rise to wealth was as exceptional as it was rapid. By 1765 he owned several foundries, and leather and silk factories. He was a cofounder of the Prussian state bank and late in life served as inspector of roads. In dress, speech, and manner he aspired to full assimilation into Prussian high society, a goal underscored by the proximity of his second residence to the royal palace, from which ordinary Jews were excluded. Though a loyal servant of the court, Itzig observed his religion faithfully; in 1775 Frederick designated him “perpetual” chief elder of the Jewish community. Isolated by his enormous wealth, Itzig nevertheless enjoyed strong ties to Moses Mendelssohn’s family. Itzig and several of his fifteen children subscribed to the philosopher’s biblical translations. Daniel Itzig’s son-in-law David Friedländer became a devoted disciple of Moses; Joseph Mendelssohn was a clerk in the banking firm of Itzig’s son Isaac Daniel Itzig; and Joseph’s brother Abraham married Itzig’s granddaughter Lea Salomon.
David Friedländer, an enterprising son-in-law of Daniel Itzig, merits further comment. For the students of the Freie Schule , which he and Isaac Daniel Itzig founded in 1779, Friedländer published a Jewish reader to which Moses Mendelssohn contributed. A successful businessman, Friedländer served for five years on the Berlin City Council. Active in the Jewish community, he came to adopt liberal, indeed radical views, nevertheless tethered to the Enlightenment ideal espoused by Moses Mendelssohn, that all revealed religious faiths were grounded in reason, even if, for Mendelssohn, Judaism conformed most closely to the idea of a rational religion (Vernunftreligion ). 29 And so, in 1799, the year of Daniel Itzig’s death, Friedländer proposed in an anonymous pamphlet that if Prussian Jews could secure emancipation, they would receive baptism into the Protestant Church, provided the conversions could be accomplished “without disturbing their reason, without harming their moral feeling.” Animating Friedländer’s startling proposal was an optimism that “the two religions would merge sometime in the future.” 30
The Itzig family’s female issue also produced noteworthy proponents of assimilation, though their influence was less public than that of their brothers. Three Itzig daughters, Sarah, Fanny, and Cäcilie, presided over Berlin salons, which became a neutral meeting ground—accessible to Jews and gentiles, commoners and nobility—for aristocrats, wealthy merchants, intellectuals, writers, and artists. During the heyday of the salons (between 1780 and Napoleon’s conquest of Prussia in 1806), some Berliners imagined the salons might achieve the German ideal of Bildung , a broad concept that encompassed education and moral development. For well-to-do Jews, the attainment of Bildung represented a significant step toward assimilation. 31
Sarah Itzig Levy (1761–1854), who married the banker Solomon Levy, maintained an active musical salon, 32 where she developed a J. S. Bach cult. Squinting from nearsightedness and physically unattractive, she possessed, according to Fanny Lewald, “a rather unbecoming masculine aspect.” 33 Her habitués included the Protestant theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and poetess Bettina Brentano, later the wife of the writer Achim von Arnim. Among Sarah’s early visitors were Mozart, who came to Berlin in 1789 in search of royal commissions, and Haydn, whose early biographer G. A. Griesinger gave Sarah the autograph of the Heiligmesse (1796), which she later passed on to her most famous great nephew, Felix Mendelssohn. 34 An accomplished musician, she had studied harpsichord with J. S. Bach’s eldest son, Wilhelm Friedemann Bach, who had arrived in Berlin in 1774 and won some success as an organ virtuoso before dying impecunious ten years later. As W. F. Bach’s main student, Sarah actively promoted the Bachs’ music. Thus, she transmitted an autograph of her teacher to Felix, who later made use of it in a Lied 35 (unfortunately, the autograph and Felix’s allusive song have eluded detection). Sarah also became a patroness of C. P. E. Bach by commissioning works, subscribing to editions of his music, and acquiring manuscripts, including the autograph of one of his last compositions, the Double Concerto in E ♭ major for harpsichord and fortepiano (1788, H. 479). 36 Sarah may have commissioned this peculiar experiment, which sets the refined timbres of the baroque harpsichord against the graduated dynamics of the new fortepiano; 37 she performed it with one of her sisters for connoisseurs assembled at her salon. When Emanuel Bach died the same year, Sarah offered to underwrite a memorial bust and to put his Nachlass in order. 38 Sarah Levy’s ties to C. P. E. Bach may help explain one singular facet of Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy’s early compositional development: several of his string sinfonie from the 1820s recall this Bach’s highly mannered style.
Sarah Levy’s influence extended to one of Berlin’s most venerated institutions, the Singakademie, founded by C. F. C. Fasch in 1791 for the promotion of sacred German choral music. With a rapidly expanding chorus in which Sarah participated (by 1800 it had grown from 27 to 148 members), Fasch specialized in the study of J. S. Bach’s motets. When Fasch died in 1800, the directorship passed to Carl Friedrich Zelter (1758–1832), whom Abraham Mendelssohn Bartholdy engaged (probably on Sarah’s recommendation) nineteen years later as music tutor for Felix and his sister Fanny. At the Singakademie, Zelter concentrated on Bach’s sacred choral works and was ambitious enough to rehearse parts of the B-minor Mass and the Passions. Zelter also resurrected older instrumental music: the Ripienschule, established in 1807 with ten members, met on Fridays to rehearse overtures, concertos, and string sinfonie of Handel, J. S. Bach, C. P. E. Bach, Quantz, and Franz Benda. Sarah Levy frequently performed keyboard concerti of the Bachs; thus, in 1807 and 1808, she appeared as soloist in J. S. Bach’s Fifth Brandenburg Concerto and Concerto in D minor for harpsichord. 39 Childless, she survived her five siblings, the Revolution of 1848, and the determined effort of Frederick William IV to buy her stately home behind the Packhof to make way for a new museum. 40 Likened to Methuselah, 41 she died at the august age of ninety-three in 1854, seven years after Felix’s death. Upon her demise, her priceless collection of Bach manuscripts was donated to the Singakademie library. 42
While Sarah Levy remained in Berlin, her sisters Fanny von Arnstein (1758–1818) and Cäcilie von Eskeles (1760–1836) settled in Vienna. There they married court bankers, among the first Viennese Jews to receive patents of nobility; both Fanny and Cäcilie were ennobled as baronesses. (Felix’s sister Fanny Cäcilie, 1805–1847, was named after these two great aunts.) In 1823 Beethoven recorded in Cäcilie’s album a short Goethe setting. 43 Her sister, Fanny, who displayed stronger musical interests, arrived in Vienna in 1776. Five years later, the Emperor Joseph II relaxed restrictions upon Jewish subjects by promulgating the Edict of Tolerance, easing Fanny’s entrance into high Austrian society. She was a trained pianist who moved comfortably in musical circles. She attended Mozart’s concerts and in 1812 helped organize a charity concert that led to the founding of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. During the Congress of Vienna (1814–1815), she held lavish musical soirées that featured foreign musicians such as the young Giacomo Meyerbeer, then an aspiring piano virtuoso. Among the many celebrities visiting her salon were the Schlegels, Madame de Staël, Lord Nelson, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Goethe, and the Berlin song composer J. F. Reichardt. Fanny’s daughter, Henriette von Pereira Arnstein (1780–1859), with whom Lea Mendelssohn Bart
holdy corresponded, was an accomplished pianist who knew both Haydn and Beethoven.
As one of the few Berlin Jews to receive the “general privilege,” Daniel Itzig had enjoyed an exalted status. Still, the protection of the court by no means applied to his entire family or descendants, nor did it confer rights of Prussian citizenship. This situation changed dramatically in May 1791, when Frederick William II took the unprecedented decision to naturalize Daniel Itzig’s family and grant them “all the rights of Christian citizens in our sundry states and dominions.” 44 The Itzig family thus won exemption from the onerous concessions normally extracted from Jews holding the general privilege. Henceforth the court treated the Itzigs as Christian subjects, even though they freely continued to practice Judaism. But the king tempered his generosity with two qualifications. On the female family side the rights of citizenship extended only to the grandchildren, so that Lea was granted citizenship while her unborn children, including Felix, were not (similarly, they did not enjoy the privileged status extended in 1787 to Moses Mendelssohn’s widow and children, although they would be protected by the Prussian emancipation edict of 1812). Second, the king admonished that the rights could be revoked; if any of the Itzigs or their issue “should fall into the Jewish petty dealing that is still common among a great part of the Jewish nation and linked with deceitful frauds, or should even have anything to do with usurious practices, such a person shall be deprived of the benefit of naturalization and the rights bound up therewith in this document, and consequently return into the state of a common Jew.” 45 Still, by 1791 the Itzig family had attained a level of emancipation toward which other Berlin Jews could only aspire.
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