Mendelssohn on Reason and Revelation

As in medieval Jewish philosophy, the central question for Moses Mendelssohn is the

relationship between reason and revelation. However, in addressing this question, Mendelssohn

parts ways with his forebears. Whereas medieval philosophy sought to bring the teachings of

revelation into accordance with reason, Mendelssohn sought to separate the two realms.

Mendelssohn was more concerned that the “eternal truths” which are necessary for man's

salvation should be accessible to all, and therefore demonstrable by common sense alone, than he

was interested in the rationality of revelation. This was a topic not only of philosophical interest

to Mendelssohn, but of moral concern, which reflected his belief in and advocacy for religious

toleration. In his best known work, Jerusalem, Mendelssohn lays out his case for reason as a

sufficient condition for salvation:

I therefore do not believe that the powers of human reason are insufficient to persuade men of the eternal truths which are indispensable to human felicity, and that God had to reveal them in a supernatural manner. Those who hold this view detract from the omnipotence or the goodness of God, on the one hand, what they believe they are adding to his goodness on the other. He was in their opinion good enough to reveal to men those truths on which their felicity depends, but not omnipotent, or not good enough to grant them the powers to discover these truths themselves. Moreover, by this assertion one makes the necessity of a supernatural revelation more universal than revelation itself. If therefore, mankind must be corrupt and miserable without revelation, why has the far greater part of mankind lived without true revelation from time immemorial? Why must the two Indies wait until it pleases the Europeans to send them a few comforters to bring them a message without which they can, according to this opinion, live neither virtuously nor happily? To bring them a message which, in their circumstances and state of knowledge, they can neither rightly comprehend nor properly utilize? According to the concepts of true Judaism, all the inhabitants of the earth are destined to felicity; and the means of attaining it are as widespread as mankind itself, as charitably dispensed as the means of warding off hunger and other natural needs.1

Mendelssohn consistently repeated this position throughout his career, from his “Prize

1 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem: or On Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush, introduction and commentary by Alexander Altmann, (Brandeis University Press, 1983), p. 96.

essay,” in which he had argued that moral principles can be deduced in the same manner as

geometric principles, to the very end of his life, in his defense of his friend Lessing which he

completed days before he died:

Now it seems to me that the evidence of natural religion is as clear and obvious, as irrefutably certain to uncorrupted common sense that has not been misled, as is any theorem in geometry. At any station of life, at any level of enlightenment, one has enough information and ability, enough opportunity and power, to convince himself of the truths of rational religion.2

For Mendelssohn, “uncorrupted common sense,” which leads man to “natural religion” is

sufficient to bring man to eternity. Judaism, according to Mendelssohn, recognizes the concept of

“natural religion” in its idea of the seven Noahide laws. Mendelssohn maintained, contra

Maimonides, that the Noahide commandments lead to salvation on the basis of reason alone.

Maimonides' opinion, according to which the Noahide must fulfill his commandments on the

basis of revelation, was a subject of much consternation to Mendelssohn, to which we will

return.

For Mendelssohn the concept of revelation is troubling because revelation which occurs

at a given point in history is by its nature exclusive. If revelation is a necessary precondition for

salvation, only those who are recipients of the revelation or who have received this tradition can

merit eternity. As a man of the Enlightenment, Mendelssohn could not accept that the universal

God would reveal Himself to a particular people in a way which would exclude the rest of

humanity from eternity. Here, Mendelssohn was influenced by John Locke, who likewise

criticized the Christian doctrine of salvation, which requires belief in a particular individual,

namely Jesus:

What shall become of all the rest of mankind, who having never heard of the promise or news of a Savior, not a word of a Messiah to be sent, or that was come, have had no

2 Mendelssohn, To Lessing's Friends, qtd. in Michah Gottlieb, Faith and Freedom: Moses Mendelssohn's Theological-Political Thought, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), p. 45.

thought or belief concerning him? To this I answer that God will require of every man according to what a man hath and not according to what he hath not. He will not expect the Improvement of Ten Talents where he gave but One nor require any one should believe a Promise of which he has never heard.3

This “universalist” impulse was the source of the appeal of eighteenth century Deism, which

denied revelation in favor of a God who did not interfere in the affairs of mankind. This

ambivalent attitude toward revelation was well articulated by Mendelssohn's contemporary who

was to be the second president of the United States, John Adams:

My friend, again! the question before mankind is,—how shall I state it? It is, whether authority is from nature and reason, or from miraculous revelation; from the revelation from God, by the human understanding, or from the revelation to Moses and to Constantine, and the Council of Nice. Whether it resides in men or in offices. Whether offices, spiritual and temporal, are instituted by men, or whether they are self-created and instituted themselves. Whether they were or were not brought down from Heaven in a phial of holy oil, sent by the Holy Ghost, by an angel incarnated in a dove, to anoint the head of Clovis, a more cruel tyrant than Frederic or Napoleon. Are the original principles of authority in human nature, or in stars, garters, crosses, golden fleeces, crowns, sceptres, and thrones? These profound and important questions have been agitated and discussed, before that vast democratical congregation, mankind, for more than five hundred years. How many crusades, how many Hussite wars, how many powder plots, St. Bartholomew’s days, Irish massacres, Albigensian massacres, and battles of Marengo have intervened! Sub judice lis est. Will Zinzendorf, Swedenborg, Whitefield, or Wesley prevail? Or will St. Ignatius Loyola inquisitionize and jesuitize them all? Alas, poor human nature! Thou art responsible to thy Maker and to thyself for an impartial verdict and judgment. 4

3 John Locke, The Reasonableness of Christianity, qtd. in Alexander Altmann's introduction to Jerusalem (note 1 above), p. 21.

4 John Adams, The Works of John Adams, Second President of the United States, Volume 10 (Little, Brown and Co., 1856), p. 170. The significance of the example of the fledgling American democracy should not be overlooked in discussion of Mendelssohn's views on religious toleration. “There is good reason to assume that Mendelssohn was emboldened to advance his strikingly progressive ideas because the principle of religious equality was just then being implemented in the wake of the American Revolution. That he closely followed the events across the Atlantic is obvious from a footnote at the end of Jerusalem: 'Alas, now even the Congress in America rehashes the old slogan and speaks of a dominant religion.' This remark clearly shows that until this latest news reached him he had been greatly encouraged by the American example” (A. Altmann, “The Philosophical Roots of Mendelssohn's Plea for Emancipation,” Jewish Social Studies, Vol. 36, No. 3/4 (Jul. - Oct., 1974), p. 200.) Likewise, Allan Arkush notes the reception of Mendelssohn's Jerusalem in the newly founded nation: “In the course of the nineteenth century, Jerusalem became a popular book in certain places, particularly in Thomas Jefferson’s country. Already in 1838, when there were fewer than 50,000 Jews in the United States, the first leader of American Orthodox Jewry, Isaac

Adams echoes the question under debate between Maimonides and Mendelssohn, “whether

authority is from nature and reason, or from miraculous revelation; from the revelation from

God, by the human understanding, or from the revelation to Moses. ” For Adams, the question

before him is whether to abandon revelation altogether in favor of the “authority of nature. ”

Mendelssohn, as a believing Jew, could not reject revelation in its entirety, but he needed to find

a way in which revelation was not a challenge to reason. In addition to establishing the autonomy

of reason, Mendelssohn sought to establish freedom of religion, by freeing religious belief from

compulsion of the state. This provides the backdrop for Mendelssohn's theory that that reason

and revelation are two non-overlapping realms:

Judaism boasts of no exlusive revelation of eternal truths that are indispensable to salvation, of no revealed religion in the sense in which that term is usually understood. Revealed religion is one thing, revealed legislation, another. The voice which let itself be heard on Sinai on that great day did not proclaim, “I am the Eternal, your God, the necessary, independent being, omnipotent and omniscient, that recompenses men in a future life according to their deeds. ” This is the universal religion of mankind, not Judaism; and the universal religion of mankind, without which men are neither virtuous nor capable of felicity, was not to be revealed there. . . Anyone who did not know this, who was not imbued with these truths indispensable to human felicity, and was not prepared to approach the holy mountain, could have been stunned and overwhelmed by the great and wonderful manifestations, but he could not have been made aware of what he had not known before. No! All this was presupposed. . . And now the divine voice proclaimed: “I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of the land of Mizrayim, who delivered you from bondage, etc.”5

Here, Mendelssohn addresses the well known exegetical question which R. Yehudah

Halevi asked of R. Abraham ibn Ezra, namely: Why did God identify Himself to the Jewish

people as their Redeemer from the land of Egypt and not as the Creator of heaven and earth?6 In

his Beur, Mendelssohn explicitly states that he intends to answer this question: “This will explain

to you the reason why God did not say: I am the Lord thy God who created heaven and earth and

Leeser, translated it into English and touted its ideas” (A. Arkush, “Theocracy, Liberalism, and Modern Judaism,” The Review of Politics 71 (2009), p. 645).

5 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, pp. 97-98. 6 See Ibn Ezra's commentary, Exodus 20:2.

who also created you. The question [why did He not say this?] was put to Rabbi Abraham ibn

Ezra by Rabbi Judah Hallevi, of blessed memory.” To understand Mendelssohn's position, it is

helpful to contrast his solution to that of Halevi himself, who offered a very different solution to

his question.

At the beginning of the Sefer ha-Kuzari, the Rabbi replies to the Khazar king's inquiry

about the faith of the Jews, that they “believe in the God of Abraham, Isaac and Israel, who led

the children of Israel out of Egypt with signs and miracles; who fed them in the desert and gave

them the land, after having made them traverse the sea and the Jordan in a miraculous way; who

sent Moses with His law, and subsequently thousands of prophets, who confirmed His law by

promises to the observant, and threats to the disobedient.”7 When the king expresses his surprise

that the Rabbi did not identify his God as the Creator, the Rabbi responds that God too revealed

Himself this way:

He did not say The God of heaven and earth nor my Creator and thine sent me. In the same way God commenced His speech to the assembled people of Israel I am the God whom you worship who has led you out of the land of Egypt but He did not say I am the Creator of the world and your Creator. Now in the same style I spoke to thee, a Prince of the Khazars, when thou didst ask me about my creed. I answered thee as was fitting and is fitting for the whole of Israel who knew these things first from personal experience and afterwards through uninterrupted tradition which is equal to the former.

The king continues to inquire to the particularism of the Jewish faith, and the Rabbi responds in

kind:

Al Khazari: If this be so, then your belief is confined to yourselves?

The Rabbi: Yes, but any Gentile who joins us unconditionally shares our good fortune without however being quite equal to us. If the Law were binding on us only because God created us the white and the black man would be equal since He created them all. But the Law was given to us because He led us out of Egypt and remained attached to us because we are the cream of mankind. 8

7 Halevi, Kitab al Khazari (Kuzari) 1:11, trans. Hartwig Hirschfeld, (Routledge, 1905), p. 44. 8 Halevi, Kuzari, 1:25-27.

To this the king remarks, “Jew, I see thee quite altered and thy words are poor after having been

so pleasant. ” Thus Halevi accepts the challenge of Jewish chosenness. For Halevi, the

formulation of the first commandment, “I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the

land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery,” expresses the superiority of historical experience

over philosophical argument, and thus it is with such an historical appeal which God reveals

Himself to the Jewish people. Mendelssohn reverses this position entirely. The “particularist”

manifestation of God is not evidence of the inadequacy of philosophy, that experience is

epistemically superior to philosophy as a means to convey religious truths. Rather, for

Mendelssohn, it is evidence that philosophic truths cannot be conveyed by means of revelation.

That revelation must express itself in contingent, historical terms is a weakness of revelation

which cannot express universal truths.9

9 Mendelssohn's allusion to R. Yehudah Halevi is the subject of a scholarly debate. In his review of David Sorkin's Moses Mendelssohn and the Religious Enlightenment, Lawrence Kaplan critiques Sorkin for failing to recognize this basic difference between Mendelssohn and Halevi:

Referring to Mendelssohn's commentary on Exodus 20:2, "I am the Eternal, your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt," Sorkin argues that, "Mendelssohn's insistence on the centrality of the Exodus and the revelation at Sinai reveals his proximity to Judah Halevi and thus his distance from Maimonides" (p . 129). But in the very same passage in the Biur, Mendelssohn specifically criticizes Halevi's understanding of the significance of this verse. Nor should this be surprising. For Halevi, the reason why God identified Himself at Sinai as the redeemer from Egypt and not the creator of the world is that a rational approach to God based on creation leaves us only with the highly inadequate notion of the God of the philosophers, while the true God, the God of Abraham, may be known only on the basis of His miraculous acts in history. For Mendelssohn, by contrast, natural religion, based on reason, provides us with a perfectly adequate conception of God. In his view—and here he follows Maimonides' position as set forth in Laws of Idolatry, chapter 1—Abraham arrived at his knowledge of God through reason and not through prophecy, and consequently the God of Abraham is the God of the philosophers. The significance of the book of Exodus, for Mendelssohn, is that God, by redeeming the Israelites, became their sovereign, which sovereignty, in turn, endows the law God revealed to them with authority. I would have thought that this fundamental difference between Halevi and Mendelssohn was a truism, but it seems that scholars sometimes, in their understandable desire to set forth new and bold theses, forget basic truisms (Lawrence Kaplan, AJS Review, Vol. 23, No. 2 (1998), p. 303).

See also: Adam Shear, “Judah Halevi's Kuzari in the Haskalah,” Renewing the Past, Reconfiguring Jewish Culture: From al-Andalus to the Haskalah, Ross Brann and Adam

Halevi and Mendelssohn are representative of two opposite positions in the history of

Jewish philosophy. For both Halevi and Mendelssohn, revelation is particular whereas reason is

universal. But for Halevi, revelation is superior to reason and therefore need not rely on reason.

Mendelssohn, confronted with the same problem, argues to the opposite conclusion. Reason's

superiority to revelation means that revelation cannot be expressed in the universal terms of

reason.

In fact, in this position, Mendelssohn echoed Spinoza who likewise denies the possibility

of revelation to “demonstrate” philosophic truths:

It seems hardly reasonable to assume that a created thing, depending on God in the same way all other created things do, would be able to express or explain God's essence or existence de facto or verbally by applying God's words to himself, declaring in the first person, “I am the Lord, your God” etc. . . . I fail to see how such a verbal assertion, “I am God,” by a creature whose relationship to God is not different from that of any other created thing, and which is not part of the divine essence, can satisfy the desire of people who previously knew nothing of God except His name and who wished to commune with Him in order to be assured of His existence.10

For Mendelssohn, removing dogma from the realm of revelation allowed for freedom of

thought, because beliefs could not be compelled in the act of lawgiving. But Mendelssohn had

not yet established religious freedom of action as a principle of Judaism—after all, Jewish law

punishes violators severely. How could Mendelssohn claim that Enlightenment principles of free

practice of religion can be identified with Judaism? As Julius Guttman puts the problem, “By

rejecting every kind of coercion in religious matters, he appeared radically to oppose biblical

legislation, which threatens harsh punishment for the violation of strictly religious

commandments. When he first expressed this view in his introduction to the German translation

Sutcliffe, eds., (University of Pennsylvania, 2004), pp. 77-80. 10 Spinoza, Theological Political Treatise, qtd. in Julius Guttman, “Mendelssohn's Jerusalem

and Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise,” in Studies in Jewish Thought: an Anthology of German-Jewish Scholarship, ed. A. Jospe, (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1981), p. 365.

of Manesseh ben Israel's Vindiciae Judaeorum, he was emphatically reproached for it.”11

In Jerusalem, Mendelssohn resolves this issue, again turning to an idea first put forward

by Spinoza, but neutralizing it of its objectionable content. Spinoza had argued that the

legislation of Judaism was political legislation, necessary for the conduct of a state. Thus, for

Spinoza, the end of Jewish sovereignty made the law of Judaism irrelevant. Mendelssohn

rejected Spinoza's position on the solely political nature of Jewish law, but he accepted from

Spinoza that Jewish law had a political dimension, which was applicable only under the

condition of Jewish sovereignty. According to Mendelssohn, in ancient Israel, “state and religion

were not conjoined, but one; not connected, but identical. ” Thus, Mendelssohn argues,

Since God was Israel’s Lawgiver and Regent of the nation, civil matters acquired a sacred and religious aspect, and every civil service was at the same time a true service of God. The community was a community of God; its affairs were God's; the public taxes were God's; and everything down to the least police measure was part of the divine service.12

Allan Arkush has argued that Mendelssohn's solution is inadequate:

It in no way alters the fact that under the arrangements prevailing in ancient Israel, whatever they are called, religious offenses were subject to punishment in a manner completely inconsistent with Mendelssohn’s principles. It was of no essential importance, either, that these punishments were rarely inflicted. . . Punishment, however infrequent and mild, was still punishment.13

However, this criticism is not wholly valid. According to Mendelssohn, what calls for

punishment is not the crime against religious values but the crime against the state. In the exilic

state, the Jewish people are still bound by the religious nature of the law but are no longer

subject to the political consequences of transgression.14

11 Guttman, “Mendelssohn's Jerusalem and Spinoza's Theological Political Treatise,” p. 381. 12 Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, p. 134. 13 Arkush, “The Liberalism of Moses Mendelssohn,” in The Cambridge Companion to Modern

Jewish Philosophy, Peter Gordon and Michael Morgan, eds., (Cambrige University Press, 2007), p. 42.

14 Arkush's theory (which he elaborates on in his book Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment, SUNY Press 1994) that Mendelssohn's commitment to Judaism was merely an “exoteric” position is uncompelling. On the other hand, Michah Gottlieb's observation that “while the historian often sees the theologian as reshaping tradition, the theologian sees himself as uncovering the deep truth of his received tradition” (Faith and Freedom, p. 58)

Returning to the question of natural religion, Mendelssohn argued that adherence to the

Noahide code required nothing beyond what is readily available to man by his common sense

alone. However, this presents a problem for him because Maimonides in the Laws of Kings

(8:11) rules that only one who adheres to the Noahide laws because they are commanded by

Moses receives a share in the world to come:

כל המקבל שבע מצות ונזהר לעשותן הרי זה מחסידי אומות העולם. ויש לו חלק לעולם הבא. והואויעשה אותן מפני שצוה בהן הקב"ה בתורה והודיענו על ידי משה רבינו שבני נח שיקבל אותן מקודם נצטוו בהן. אבל אם עשאן מפני הכרע הדעת אין זה גר תושב ואינו מחסידי אומות העולם

ולא מחכמיהם. Maimonides expressly qualifies the status of “hasidei ummot ha-olam” to one who observes the

Noahide laws because they were commanded by Moses, but not one who observes them because

of “hekhra ha-da'at, or his own reasoning. This passage was already invoked by Spinoza in his

attack on Judaism as a narrow-minded faith. Spinoza concludes the fifth chapter of his

Thelogico-Political Treatise with an attack on “the Jews” based on this statement of

Maimonides:

The Jews however thought very differently on this matter for they maintain that sound moral views and a good life profit a man nothing if embraced from natural reasons and not as principles and practice prophetically revealed to Moses. Maimonides dares openly to declare that, “Every one who takes to heart the seven precepts and diligently follows them out is to be reckoned among the pious of his nation and the heir of the world to come, that is to say if he adopts and practices what they enjoin because they were prescribed by God in the Law and revealed to us by the mouth of Moses, though they were already precepts to the sons of Noah; but if he have been led by his reason to be what he is, he is not a true denizen, not one of the pious and learned of the nations. ” These are the words of Maimonides to which Rabbi Joseph son of Shem Tob in his book entitled Kebod Elo-him or Glory of God appends what follows: That “although Aristotle,” (whom he thinks indited consummate principles of ethics and whom he esteems above all other writers,) “omits nothing that is within the scope of true ethics in his writings on this subject, although all the precepts he enjoins were carefully observed, this nevertheless would avail nothing towards salvation; because what Aristotle teaches is not embraced as a divine command prophetically revealed but only as dictated by natural reason. ” But all these conclusions of Maimonides and Rabbi Joseph son of Shem Tob are mere figments

contains some truth. For another defense of religious freedom from within the Jewish tradition, see N. L. Rabinovitch, Darkah shel Torah: peraḳim be-mahshevet ha-halakhah uva-aḳṭuʼaliyah (Maʻale Adumim: Maʻaliyot, 1998).

grounded neither on reason nor to be found in Scripture, as any one who diligently reads it may readily convince himself. It seems indeed to be sufficient to mention such narrow views to have found their refutation.15

In his discussion of this passage, Mendelssohn took note of the fact that the commentators on

Maimonides were unable to locate a source for this ruling. Thus, R. Joseph Karo, in his Kessef

Mishneh, claims that this was a Maimonidean innovation: כך מסברא" אומר לי שרבינו נראה

It seems to me that our master [Maimonides] says this based on his own“ :"דנפשיה ונכוחה היא

reasoning, and it is straight.” For Mendelssohn, this was a possible escape route from his

perplexity. If this was indeed Maimonides' innovation, it need not be accepted as the true version

of Judaism. Mendelssohn turned to the great rabbinic authority R. Jacob Emden for guidance.

After citing the comment of R. Joseph Karo, Mendelssohn remarks:

ולי הדברים קשים מצור חלמיש, וכי כל שוכני ארץ ממזרח שמש עד מבואו זולתינו ירדו לבאר שחת והיו דראון לכל בשר, אם לא יאמינו בתורה שנתנה מורשה לקהלת יעקב לבד, ובפרט בדברכי אם בא בקבלה לסגולות העמים, או נדרש לחכמיה מכלל דברי שאינו מפורש בתורה כלל, התורה, מקרא דויצו ה' אלקים וכו', כאשר כתב הרב בעצמו, פרק ט, שכולן קבלה הן בידינו ממשה רבינו ומכלל דברי התורה יראה שעל אלו נצטוו, עיין שם. ואף אם יהיה מדרש חז"ל באחת מי"ג מדות, הנה גם המדות ההן לא נתקבלו אלא לישראל לא ליתר האומות הבאים בשם בני נח, ולר' יהודא דקאמר לא נצטווה אדם הראשון אלא על עבודה זרה, הנה לא הוזכרו שש המצות כלל. ואין בידינו על זה כי אם קבלה מאבותינו, ומה יעשו . בתורה, אף שנצטוו לבני נח אחרי כן. האומות אשר לא זרח עליהם אור התורה כלל, ולא הגיעה אליהם הקבלה כי אם מאבות בלתי נאמנים אשר אין לסמוך עליהם וכי בטרוניא בא הקב"ה חס ושלום עם בריותיו להאבידם ולמחות את שמם, על לא חמס עשו? הלזה יקרא סברא נכוחה? . . . ועתה אם מצאתי חן בעיניו אל ישיב

16את פני ריקם, כי תורה היא וכו'.

“But to me, Maimonides' words are harder than flint. Must all the inhabitants of the world beside us from the East where the sun rises to where it sets descend to a pit of annihilation and be an abhorrence for all flesh if they do not believe in the Torah which was given as an inheritance to the Congregation of Jacob alone? And especially something which is not explicit in the Torah at all, rather it is a tradition received by the chosen nation, or derived by its sages from the implication of the Torah's words. . . ”

In his letter to Emden, Mendelssohn offers his explanation for Maimonides' ruling, arguing that

Maimonides followed his philosophical premises according to which morality is not rationally

achievable. Mendelssohn cites Maimonides' explanation in the Guide (I:2) for the “tree of

15 Benedict Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-Politicus: A Critical Inquiry Into the History, Purpose, and Authenticity of the Hebrew Scriptures, (Trübner, 1862) pp. 118-119.

16 Mendelssohn's letter is excerpted in I. Twersky, Halakhah ve-hagut, (Tel Aviv: The Open University of Israel, 1995), Vol. 2, p. 295.

knowledge of good and evil.” Maimonides distinguishes between two classes of knowledge,

mefursamot and muskalot. The former correspond to convention, and only the latter are

demonstrable. Mendelssohn had already rejected this view in his “Prize essay” in which he

argued that ethical laws are no less demonstrable than mathematics. In Mendelssohn's words, the

first premise of ethics is “make your intrinsic and extrinsic condition and that of your fellow

human being in the proper proportion as perfect as possible,” where 'extrinsic' and 'intrinsic' refer

to man's body and soul. From this principle, Mendelssohn claims, the rest of ethics follows.17

Marvin Fox has argued that although Mendelssohn's interpretation of Maimonides is

correct, his own argument is deeply flawed. His critique is worth quoting at length, for its clear

distillation of the issues at hand:

In his correspondence with Lavater, Mendelssohn explicitly identified the Noahide laws with the law of nature. Presumably, then, these seven commandments are the basic rules of an autonomous rational ethic, the very same rules which he had asserted in his prize-essay could be demonstrated with the rigor of a geometric proof. Whoever observes these is one of the hasidei ummot ha-olam and is assured of salvation. Now we must ask, as hardly any commentator seems to have done, just what sense can be made out of the claim that the Noahide laws are rationally demonstrable. Even if we grant to Mendelssohn his claimed 'law of nature', namely, that we ought always to seek to make ourselves and others as perfect as possible, we cannot see how it would lead us to the seven Noahide commandments. What, for example, is the relationship between human perfection and not eating a limb torn from a living animal? Or, how do we move from the principle of seeking human perfection to the rule that homosexual relations are forbidden on pain of death, or that sexual relations with one's sister are similarly forbidden and on pain of the same penalty?. . . He understands correctly that Maimonides makes this ruling because he holds that moral principles are not subject to any kind of rational demonstration and that, in fact, they have no truth-value. Consequently, unless one can depend on revelation, there is no source for morality except social convention. Mendelssohn's response is that, contra Maimonides, he has "clear and sound demonstrations concerning good and evil, right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, showing that they are all truly rational principles. " To our sorrow, neither in this letter, nor elsewhere in his writings, does he set forth for us these demonstrative principles. If the Noahide commandments are examples of what Mendelssohn considers to be rationally demonstrated moral rules, he completely fails to

17 Mendelssohn, Philosophical Writings, qtd. in Gottlieb, 47. See Steven Schwarzschild, “Do Noachites Have to Believe in Revelation,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 52, No. 4 (Apr., 1962), pp. 306-308.

show how he arrives at the conclusion that they are, in fact, rationally demonstrable. It is not difficult to see what moves Mendelssohn to these patently untenable positions. He cannot allow a natural law without God or he will make all religion superfluous. He cannot allow revealed religion without natural law, or he will betray the liberal humanitarianism to which he is committed. In bringing them together he has attempted to save both ethics and the law. He hopes to provide us with an independent ethic, yet at the same time, show it to be intimately connected with divine law. . . Though we may sympathize with his objective, we cannot escape the conclusion that Mendelssohn failed once he separated ethics from the law. Maimonides, the greatest of the Jewish medieval philosophers, is completely clear about these issues. . . At best, [the commandments] may seem reasonable to us in light of our own understanding of man's highest possibilities. They can, however, never be rationally demonstrated. 18

According to Fox, Mendelssohn has correctly interpreted Maimonides position regarding one

who performs the Noahide commandments because of hekhra ha-da'at. Maimonides thus

subscribes to a dichotomy between reason and revelation, inasmuch as reason has no access to

the “truths” of morality. Two considerations, however, militate against this view, and lead us to a

more nuanced critique of Mendelssohn.

The first concerns the Maimonidean text on which Mendelssohn and Spinoza were basing

themselves. The weight of manuscript evidence points to their text as corrupt. Whereas both of

these critics of Maimonides read “ ולאאבל אם עשען מפני הכרע הדעת, אינו מחסידי אומות העולם

”,מחכמיהם “not one of the righteous of the nations nor one of their wise men,” in most

manuscripts, the text reads: ,מחכמיהםאלאאינו מחסידי אומות העולם —he is not one of their pious

but he is one of their wise men.19 According to this version, Maimonides does not deny that

reason alone can lead to observance, but he does deny that following these laws by reason alone

leads to eternity. Although Maimonides distinguishes between “mefursamot” and “muskalot,”

apparently he does not deny that the “hekhra ha-da'at” can lead us to the former.20 The second

18 Marvin Fox, “Law and Ethics in Modern Jewish Philosophy: The Case of Moses Mendelssohn,” Proceedings of the American Academy of Jewish Research, Vol. 43, (1976), pp. 8-12.

19 Jacob Dienstag, “Natural Law in Maimonidean Thought and Scholarship,” Jewish Law Annual VI, pp. 75-77.

20 Fox argues at length for the printed version of מחכמיהם" ."ולא See his Interpreting Maimonides (University of Chicago Press, 1995), Ch. 6. See Oliver Leaman, “Maimonides

consideration is Maimonides' source, which was discovered only in the twentieth century. This is

the Midrash called “Mishnat R. Eliezer,” published by H. G. Enelow in 1934:

הפרש בין חסידי ישראל לחסידי אומות העולם. חסידי ישראל אינן נקראין חסידים עד שיעשו כלוכל בני נח עליהן, הן כיון שהן עושין שבע מצוות שנצטוו התורה, אבל חסידי אומות העולם, נח מפי ואומרין, מכח שצוה אתנו אבינו דקדוקיהן, הן נקראים חסידים. בד"א, כשעושין אותן הגבורה אנו עושין, ואם עשו כן, הרי הן יירשו העולם הבא כישראל, ואע"פ שאינן משמרין את השבתות והמועדות, שהרי לא נצטוו עליהן. אבל אם עשו שבע מצוות ואמרו, מפי פלוני שמענו, או

אין לוקחין שכרן, או ששיתפו שם ע"ז, אם עשו כל התורה כולה, שכך הדעת מכרעתמדעת עצמן, 21.אלא בעולם הזה

The revelation of this source refutes the suggestion that Maimonides came up with this ruling on

his own, but it also enables us to understand Maimonides' ruling, and the true source of his

dispute with Mendelssohn. According to the Midrash, a gentile who observes the Noahide

commandments based on reason receives his reward in this world. This parallels Maimonides'

classification of the individual who keeps the Noahide commands based on reason as “

.”מחכמיהם According to Maimonides, keeping the commandments purely on the basis of

practical reason leads to practical benefits—he is a wise man, who naturally benefits from his

prudence. However, according to Maimonides, this is insufficient to achieve immortality. In the

apt formulation of Benzion Netanyahu, Maimonides' conception of law:

differs from the Aristotelian theory in its insistence that political society cannot meet satisfactorily all of man's natural requirements, particularly the spiritual, which are more important. According to Aristotle, man, through the forces of his own nature, can achieve

and Natural Law,” Jewish Law Annual VI, pp. 78-93, who disputes Fox's account. See also Jonathan Jacobs, “Judaism and Natural Law,” The Heythrop Journal, 50:6 (2009), pp. 938-939: “With respect to moral matters being ‘commonly agreed’ I think Fox may be ignoring an important justificatory sphere between the conventional (as merely stipulated or a matter of custom) and the rationally demonstrable. Common agreement may be a reflection of reason and shared comprehension of the grounds for something even if this is not a matter that is demonstrated. Agreement may register convergence of rational understanding without the agreed upon proposition being deductively inferred from premises known to be necessarily true. In fact, I think this is Maimonides’s view of the issue.” This seems to me to be correct.

21 Mishnat R. Eliezer, H.G. Enelow, ed., (New York: Bloch Publishing, 1934), p. 121. See Dienstag, pp. 73-74. (Maimonides' discrepancy with the Midrash over the source of authority of the commandments — according to Maimonides it is Moses whereas for the Midrash it is Noah — is based on his position regarding the status of non-Mosaic prophecy. See Maimonides, Guide I:63, II:39 and Commentary on the Mishnah: Hullin 7:6.)

the most perfect standard of law, while in the conception of Maimonides, man's nature, if left to itself, would produce only a partial and defective form of law; and it is because of the limitation of man's nature in this respect that Revelation is necessary. God through Revelation, grants man an addition to his nature, which, in fact, raises man above nature itself.22

This is the core of the dispute between Maimonides and Mendelssohn. The difference between

Mendelssohn and Maimonides is not whether nature alone can bring man to a better life.

Maimonides concedes to Mendelssohn the benefit which a life lived according to “natural law”

will accrue to man. But for Maimonides, revelation is necessary to “raise man above nature.” By

allowing man to achieve transcendence, revelation grants man the possibility of eternity.

Mendelssohn could not accept that revelation is necessary because Mendelssohn accepted

Spinoza's premise that in the universal realm of nature man can find all that he needs to achieve

perfection.

The contrasts between Mendelssohn and Maimonides, as well as between Mendelssohn

and Halevi, are not merely instructive as examples of how a later Jewish philosopher deals with

his antecedents. Mendelssohn differs not only in particulars from his predecessors, but in his

whole outlook, and in his philosophical concerns. Thus the contrast between the view of Moses

Mendelssohn and Moses Maimonides is significant because it highlights a fundamental

difference between medieval and modern Jewish philosophy. Mendelssohn's preoccupation with

the particularity of revelation is not a significant problem for Maimonides, and even less for

Halevi. Mendelssohn marks a turning point in Jewish thought, as an observant Jew who

struggled to establish Judaism in accordance with Enlightenment values, which is what marks

him as a distinctly modern Jewish philosopher.

22 Benzion Netanyahu, Don Isaac Abravanel: Stateman and Philosopher, (Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 156.