The present study seeks to present Moses Mendelssohn in strictly biographical terms. It does not attempt to assess his significance from the hindsight of historical perspective or to trace his image in subsequent generations, which have either idolized him as the most perfect embodiment of the modern Jew or abused him as the false prophet of a de-Hebraized, denationalized, assimilated Judaism. It is the life of Moses Mendelssohn, and nothing else, that I have tried to describe, and to this end my sole endeavor was to observe this life from within the period in which it was set. The picture that emerged will have to speak for itself and answer such questions as the historian or the partisan may care to ask.

In confining myself to a portrait of Mendelssohn I have not narrowed my vista to a single person or, for that matter, to a single society or culture. Mendelssohn's life is a kaleidoscope of the European intellectual scene, Jewish and non-Jewish, in the second half of the eighteenth century. In portraying his life I have had to populate my canvas with a great variety of people, famous and otherwise. No other Jew of his period was so deeply rooted in the sphere of Jewish tradition as well as in the Berlin Enlightenment. If, in Eduard Zeller's often quoted phrase, he was “the noblest representative” of German Enlightenment, he was, at the same time, a scholar versed in Talmud and Hebrew literature. In his time, the age of Frederick the Great, Berlin was teeming with statesmen, scientists, artists, and liberal theologians. Mendelssohn was part and parcel of the local scene, which included the Jewish community on its fringe. To what extent the two disparate worlds of Judaism and modern Enlightenment jostled each other in his mind and to what degree he could harmonize them are questions that admit of no facile answer. It is only in the aggregate of a multitude of accounts of experiences, reactions, and statements on his part that his attitude becomes fully articulate. His reply to Lavater's challenge, his formidable Bible project, his tussles with the rabbis, the formulation of his view of Judaism in Jerusalem, his response to Lessing's Nathan the Wise, the way he educated his children-these and many more items in his biog raphy add up to the final answer to the question: what was his Judaism like?