page_title: Jerusalem (Mendelssohn)
section_title: Mendelssohn's philosophy during the Age of Zionism
hierarchical_section_title: Jerusalem (Mendelssohn) / History of reception / Mendelssohn's philosophy during the Age of Zionism
caption_attribution_description: Martin Buber (1878-1965)
context_page_description: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism is a book written by Moses Mendelssohn, which was first published in 1783 – the same year, when the Prussian officer Christian Wilhelm von Dohm published the second part of his Mémoire Concerning the amelioration of the civil status of the Jews. Moses Mendelssohn was one of the key figures of Jewish Enlightenment and his philosophical treatise, dealing with social contract and political theory, can be regarded as his most important contribution to Haskalah. The book which was written in Prussia on the eve of the French Revolution, consisted of two parts and each one was paged separately. The first part discusses "religious power" and the freedom of conscience in the context of the political theory, and the second part discusses Mendelssohn's personal conception of Judaism concerning the new secular role of any religion within an enlightened state. In his publication Moses Mendelssohn combined a defense of the Jewish population against public accusations with contemporary criticism of the present conditions of the Prussian Monarchy.
context_section_description: Karl Marx's point of view that the idealistic hopes for religious tolerance will be disappointed in the field of politics, and soon the political expectations will disappear in a process of economical evolution and of secularization of their religious values, was finally confirmed by the failure of the 1848 revolution. Though the fact that revolutionary antisemitism was used frequently by left and right wing campaigners, for him it was more than just rhetoric. His own cynical and refusing attitude concerning religion was widespread among his contemporaries and it was related with the own biography and a personal experience full of disappointments and conflicts within the family. Equal participation in political decisions was not granted by a national law as they hoped, the participation was merely dependent on privileges which were defined by material values and these transformations cause a lot of fears and the tendence to turn backwards. Even in France where the constitution granted the equal status as citizens since 100 years, the Dreyfus affair made evident that a lot of institutions of the French Republic like the military forces were already ruled by the circles of the ancien régime. So the major population was still excluded from participation and could not identify with the state and its authorities. Social movements and emigration to America or to Palestine were the response, often in a combination. The utopies of these movements were sometimes secular, sometimes religious, and they often had charismatic leaders.
  1897 there was the First Zionist Congress in Basel (Switzerland), which was an initiative by Theodor Herzl. The Zionist Martin Buber with his rather odd combination of German Romanticism (Fichte) and his interest in Hasidism as a social movement was not very popular on the Congress, but he finally found a very enthusiastic reception in a Zionist student association in Prague, which was also frequented by Max Brod and Franz Kafka. In a time when the Jewish question has become a highly ideological matter mainly treated in a populistic way from outside, it became a rather satirical subject for Jewish writers of Yiddish, German, Polish and Russian language.
  Franz Kafka learned Yiddish and Hebrew as an adult and he had a great interest for Hasidism as well as for rabbinic literature. He had a passion for Yiddish drama which became very popular in Central Europe that time and which brought Yiddish literature, usually written as narrative prosa, on stage mixed up with a lot of music (parodies of synagogue songs etc.). His interest corresponded to Martin Buber's romantic idea that Hasidism was the folk culture of Ashkenazi Jews, but he also realized that this romanticism inspired by Fichte and German nationalism, expressed the fact that the rural traditions were another world quite far from its urban admirers. This had changed since Maskilim and school reformers like Israel Jakobson have settled to the big towns and still disregarded Yiddish as a "corrupt" and uneducated language.
  In the parable of his romance Der Process, published 1915 separately as short story entitled Vor dem Gesetz, the author made a parody of a midrash legend, written during the period of early Merkabah mysticism (6th century), that he probably learned by his Hebrew teacher. This Pesikhta described Moses' meditation in which he had to fight against Angelic guardians on his way to the divine throne in order to bring justice (the Torah) to the people of Israel.
  Somehow it also reflected Mendelssohn's essay in the context of the public debate on the Jewish question during the 1770s and 1780s, which was mainly led by Christian priests and clerics, because this parable in the romance was part of a Christian prayer. A mysterious priest prayed only for the main protagonist "Josef K." in the dark empty cathedral. The bizarre episode in the romance reflected the historical fact that Jewish emancipation had taken place within Christian states, where the separation between state power and the church was never fully realized. There were several simil
caption: Martin Buber among his students
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