Whatever Happened to Moses Mendelssohn?

The great German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1781) was and remains a perplexing, rather sad, enigma. One of Jewish history's most original philosophers—the expression, "From Moses to Moses there arose none like Moses," initially coined to honor Maimonides, was extended by admirers to accommodate this third Moses—he was also a valiant pioneer of European Jewry's struggle for acceptance into the larger society. Yet within a generation after his death he was already an obscure figure, and is now almost entirely forgotten except by academic historians. Despite having been crowned the "Father of the Haskalah" (the Jewish Enlightenment), the alleged father founded no movement or religious denomination and left behind no true ideological heirs.