How Did Athens Contribute To German Enlightenment

“His life our standard, his teaching our light” Isaac Euchel wrote about Moses Mendelssohn. Moses was a model for Jews in Germany during the late 1770’s, and a dominant figure in the emergence of the Haskalah. The Haskalah borrowed many forms and categories from the already existing European Enlightenment, but its contents were largely derived from medieval Jewish philosophy and biblical exegesis. Within the novel, Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, David Sorkin conveys how Moses made the German Enlightenment compatible with Judaism, and shows Moses to be a more consistent thinker than previously believed; his views on Judaism, natural laws, and natural rights developed early and remained consistent throughout his lifetime. Sorkin accounts Moses’ contributions to Jewish thought in three successive phases: philosophical, exegetical, and political. First, in the philosophical phase, Sorkin reveals the foundations of Moses’ thought. At an early age, Moses read the bible, memorized passages, studied Hebrew grammar, and wrote biblical poetry. All of these activates later were key in the Haskalah. In 1743, at fourteen, Moses moved to Berlin, which was at the center of the German Enlightenment, and theorist Christian Wolff was a dominating influence. Wolff’s focus was to natural theology,
Sorkin implies that Moses’ advocacy of rights was fundamentally new, yet there was also substantial continuity with his earlier thought. Moses demonstrated that history plays an even more important role in his political thinking than in his biblical exegesis since human liberties were the issue rather than divine work. In order to understand Jews’ situation in terms of rights, Moses translated Rousseau’s Discourse. Moses maintained a balance between individual rights and absolutist state, and asked Christian Wilhelm Dohm to write a tract advocating emancipation of the Jews, and it was widely