Barely a week before his sudden death in January 1786, one of the most prominent Jewish figures in Sara Levy's world, the celebrated philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, offered the following thoughts in a letter to his non-Jewish friend Sophie Becker:

Appearing in his last extant letter, Mendelssohn's comments invoked two themes that figured prominently in his writings: the value of aesthetic phenomena such as poetry and music, and the existence of common ground between different religious communities. Mendelssohn is remembered today as one of the German Enlightenment's leading theorists of aesthetics, and his remarks to Becker reflected his long-standing concern with that field, casting “song” as irresistible even for a philosopher and describing the biblical Psalms as poems that offer “true edification” and have “sweetened many a bitter hour.” And while Mendelssohn famously refused to endorse the creation of a “union of faiths” and claimed, instead, that religious “diversity is evidently the plan and purpose of Providence,” he is widely known for emphasizing the existence of points of agreement between seemingly disparate religious traditions—for insisting, for example, that there are “fundamental principles on which all religions agree.”