Moses Mendelssohn - Youth

Youth

Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau. His father's name was Mendel and he later took the surname Mendelssohn ("Mendel's son"). Mendel Dessau was a poor scribe—a writer of torah scrolls—and his son Moses in his boyhood developed curvature of the spine. His early education was cared for by his father and by the local rabbi, David Fränkel, who besides teaching him the Bible and Talmud, introduced to him the philosophy of Maimonides. Fränkel received a call to Berlin in 1743. A few months later Moses followed him.

A refugee Pole, Zamoscz, taught him mathematics, and a young Jewish physician taught him Latin. He was, however, mainly self-taught. He learned to spell and to philosophize at the same time (according to the historian Graetz). With his scanty earnings he bought a Latin copy of John Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, and mastered it with the aid of a Latin dictionary. He then made the acquaintance of Aaron Solomon Gumperz, who taught him basic French and English. In 1750, a wealthy silk-merchant, Isaac Bernhard, appointed him to teach his children. Mendelssohn soon won the confidence of Bernhard, who made the young student successively his bookkeeper and his partner.

Either Gumperz or Hess (it is not known which) introduced Mendelssohn to Gotthold Ephraim Lessing in 1754, who became one of his greatest friends. The story goes that the first time Mendelssohn met Lessing, they played chess; therefore, in Lessing's play Nathan the Wise Nathan and Saladin first meet during a game of chess.

The Berlin of the day—the day of Frederick the Great—was in a moral and intellectual ferment. Lessing had recently produced the drama Die Juden, whose moral was that a Jew can possess nobility of character. This notion was then generally ridiculed as untrue. Lessing found in Mendelssohn the realization of his dream. Within a few months of the same age, the two became brothers in intellectual and artistic camaraderie. Lessing also brought Mendelssohn to public attention for the first time: Mendelssohn had written an essay attacking Germans' neglect of their native philosophers (principally Gottfried Leibniz), and lent the manuscript to Lessing. Without consulting the author, Lessing published Mendelssohn's Philosophical Conversations (Philosophische Gespräche) anonymously in 1755. In the same year there appeared in Danzig (Gdańsk) an anonymous satire, Pope a Metaphysician (Pope ein Metaphysiker), which turned out to be the joint work of Lessing and Mendelssohn.