Moses Mendelssohn: edited correspondence with Friedrich Nicholai

The principal editor (and probable creator) of this collection, Richard Wolff, is thought to have been one time chairman of the so-called 'Paulus Bund', a representative organisation for Jewish mixed-race Germans (See Werner Cohn "Bearers of a Common Fate? The Non-Aryan Christian 'Fate-Comrades' of the Paulus-Bund, 1933-1939" in Leo Baeck Yearbook XXXIII1988). He was born in 1886, emigrated in 1938 and since 1947 was a naturalized British citizen. He lived in Nairobi during the mid 1950s. He died 9 March 1985. The following biographical information is taken from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Moses Mendelssohn (b. 1729, d. 1786) was a creative and eclectic thinker whose writings on metaphysics and aesthetics, political theory and theology, together with his Jewish heritage, placed him at the focal point of the German Enlightenment for over three decades. While Mendelssohn found himself at home with a metaphysics derived from writings of Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten, he was also one of his age's most accomplished literary critics. His highly regarded pieces on works of Homer and Aesop, Pope and Burke, Maupertuis and Rousseau, to cite only a fraction of his numerous critical essays, appeared in a series of journals that he co-edited with G. F. Lessing and Friedrich Nicolai. Dubbed "the Jewish Luther," Mendelssohn also contributed significantly to the life of the Jewish community and letters in Germany, campaigning for Jews' civil rights and translating the Pentateuch and the Psalms into German. Not surprisingly, as a Jew with an unwavering belief in the harmonizing effects of rational analysis and discourse, Mendelssohn rankled both institutional and self-appointed advocates of Christianity as well as Judaism. Thus, Johann Lavater infamously challenged him to refute the arguments of the Pietist theologian, Charles Bonnet, or convert to Christianity (a challenge that Mendelssohn effectively disabled with a plea for tolerance and a series of reasons for refraining from such religious controversy). Similarly, some Jewish thinkers took exception to Mendelssohn's Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism and its argument for conceiving Judaism as a religion founded upon reason alone. In addition to the "Lavater affair" and his work as editor and critic, Mendelssohn was probably best known to his contemporaries for his penetrating accounts of the experience of the sublime, for lucid arguments for the soul's immortality and God's existence, for his close association with G. F. Lessing and, in the protracted "pantheism dispute" (Pantheismusstreit) with Jacobi during the 1780s, for his insistence that Lessing was not the Spinozist that Jacobi portrayed him to be. To posterity he is perhaps best known as the model for Nathan der Weise, the protagonist in Lessing's famous play of the same name, championing religious tolerance.

The original letters, which were thought to be lost, turned up in the possession of the great nephew of a son of Mendelssohn (c1930s?). Nothing is known about the provenance of this collection.

Mendelsohn, M: Moses Mendelsohn’s letters to Friedrich Nikolai; doc.

Donated July 1998

Donor: Re-accession