X-Nico

unusual facts about Moses Mendelssohn


Elise Reimarus

Elise Reimarius was known as one of the most erudite women of Hamburg and she was in epistolary contact with notable intellectuals of her time, including Moses Mendelssohn, Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, Carl Leonhard Reinhold.


Avraham Danzig

When he was fourteen his father sent him to study at the Prague yeshivah, after exacting a promise from him "that he would not mingle with the Moderns" who were then gradually coming into prominence through the influence of Moses Mendelssohn.

David Veit

His father Joseph Veit was a banker and his brother Simon Veit was the husband of Moses Mendelssohn's daughter Dorothea Schlegel, making David uncle to the painter Philipp Veit.

Jewish music

As another example, Felix Mendelssohn, the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, continued to identify himself as a Jew, even though he was baptized as a Reformed Christian at the age of seven.

Johann Kaspar Lavater

In the same year (1769), Lavater tried to convert Moses Mendelssohn to Christianity, by sending him a translation of Charles Bonnet's Palingénésie philosophique, and demanding that he either publicly refute Bonnet's arguments or convert.

Schutzjude

For example, in October 1763 King Frederick II of Brandenburg-Prussia granted Moses Mendelssohn, until then under protection by being employed by a Patentjude, a personal, uninheritable privilege, which assured his right to undisturbed residence in Berlin.


see also

Boy Leading a Horse

Julius Schoeps, director of the Moses Mendelssohn institute for European Jewish studies on the University of Potsdam near Berlin, as speaker of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy heirs, sued the Museum in 2007 for the painting, and Jed S. Rakoff ruled that Mendelssohn-Bartholdy had been forced to sell the painting by the Nazi Party.

Isaac Abraham Euchel

Alexander Altmann: Moses Mendelssohn, London 1973, especially p.