Moses Mendelssohn famously penned his Jerusalem; or, On Religious Power and Judaism Footnote 1 in response to a public challenge. Mendelssohn had declared “ecclesiastical power” to be a contradiction in terms, and had thus come out strongly against the use of coercion in religious life, and against the ban of excommunication by rabbinic authorities, in particular.Footnote 2 In the anonymously published The Search for Light and Right, August Cranz defies Mendelssohn to explain how he could reconcile this liberal view of religion with his continued commitment to—and his insistence that Jews were still obligated to observe—Jewish law. “As reasonable as all you say [about religious power] may be, to just that degree it contradicts the faith of your fathers . . . and the principles of its church . . . expressly set down in the books of Moses,” Cranz argues. “The theocratic ruling staff drove the whole people . . . with force and punishment.”Footnote 3 True, Cranz concedes, exile reduced the capacity of Jewish authorities to enforce Jewish law, “but these ecclesiastical laws are there even if their exercise is no longer a must.”Footnote 4 Cranz challenges Mendelssohn to explain his apparently irreconcilable commitments: “How can you persist in the faith of your fathers and shake the whole structure by clearing away its cornerstones, dear Mr. Mendelssohn, when you contest the ecclesiastical law given as divine revelation through Moses?”Footnote 5
While the book Mendelssohn wrote in response to Cranz's challenge is widely regarded as the first great work of modern Jewish philosophy, it has by no means been clear to Mendelssohn's readers through the ages exactly how Jerusalem answers Cranz's challenge, or whether Mendelssohn in fact succeeds in reconciling his seemingly opposed commitments. One might think that Mendelssohn's answer lies in the distinction he draws between law and belief, between the domain of the state and that of religion. While the state can and must enforce just action, Mendelssohn argues in the first part of his book, religion can in no way compel beliefs or convictions. But, Mendelssohn claims in the book's second part, Judaism presents itself as “divine legislation,” and not as “revealed religion”; it commands actions, not beliefs. The critique of ecclesiastical law might thereby be understood as not undermining Judaism, for Jewish law does not seek to enforce what is properly “ecclesiastical.”Footnote 6
Although the distinction between “divine legislation” and “revealed religion” is often taken to be the heart of Mendelssohn's view of Judaism, it is difficult to see how it helps Mendelssohn reconcile his commitments to enlightened religion and Jewish law. For if Judaism is law and not religion—if it is more state than church—then it would appear that Jewish law should be identified with the particular law of the ancient Israelite state. But then it would seem to follow—as Spinoza concluded—that the law ceased to hold with the demise of that state. If, on the other hand, Mendelssohn views the authority of Jewish law as still binding upon Jews after the destruction of ancient Israel, then Cranz's question remains intact: how can he claim to maintain his commitment to the law while calling for an end to the rabbinic authority to enforce that law?
Perhaps it is in part due to these problematic consequences of Mendelssohn's separation of church and state that many recent scholars have found basis for Mendelssohn's answer to Cranz's challenge not in his support for the contemporary separation of church and state, but, to the contrary, in his depiction of the original Mosaic constitution as a unique religio-political unity. “In this original constitution, state and religion were not united, but one,” Mendelssohn writes, towards the end of Jerusalem. “Man's relation to society and his relation to God coincided and could never come into conflict.”Footnote 7 According to this account, Judaism, at its supreme political moment, was the perfect unity of state and religion, a “theocracy”—although Mendelssohn did not like this term—in which duties to others were at one and the same time duties to God. In the ancient Israelite state, the observance of ceremonial laws was indeed enforced, but only because in this unique religio-political entity, such ceremonial laws doubled as civil laws, and were punishable as civil laws. Scholars who interpret Mendelssohn's response to Cranz as rooted in this account of original Judaism suggest, however, that with the destruction of the ancient Jewish state, the political side of Judaism fell away, leaving behind a system of ceremonial laws that still had religious substance and significance, but that could no longer be enforced as state law.
Many contemporary scholars—Alexander Altmann foremost among them—take this account of the ancient Israelite state to be the key to Mendelssohn's answer to Cranz's challenge.Footnote 8 But as Allan Arkush has argued, if this is Mendelssohn's answer, it would appear to miss the very point of Cranz's attack. For when Cranz challenged Mendelssohn, it was precisely the original Judaism of the Torah from which he claimed Mendelssohn deviated in rejecting religious coercion. As Arkush points out, “Cranz had stressed this point” that “even if it were true that postexilic Judaism had entirely abandoned all forms of religious coercion, this would not change the fact that the old, original Judaism had indeed condoned the use of force to compel Jews to obey religious law.”Footnote 9 If Mendelssohn rejected this aspect of original Judaism because it conflicted with his liberal values, hadn't he embarked down a slippery slope that would ultimately lead him away from Judaism altogether?
The tensions that plague Mendelssohn's position when understood in this fashion have led some of the scholars who advocate this explanation to suggest Mendelssohn does not really reconcile enlightened religion with the original form of Jewish law, but rather gives primacy to one or the other. Thus Michah Gottlieb and Shmuel Feiner suggest that Mendelssohn would ultimately privilege his modern liberal values over his allegiance to the original Mosaic law. Gottlieb muses that “if pressed, Mendelssohn probably would have conceded that the separation of civil and religious law in the modern state was preferable to their unification in the ancient Israelite state. . . . He does not claim that this is the ideal state of affairs,”Footnote 10 and Feiner likewise suggests that “Mendelssohn felt that this historical breaking point [i.e., the exile] actually effected a qualitative leap in the Jewish religion. . . . From this stage onward Judaism represented the best of Enlightenment values.”Footnote 11 On the other hand, Gideon Freudenthal opines that Mendelssohn's true allegiances lie with the original Jewish theocracy, and that his liberal pronouncements are simply concessions to contemporary reality. “Mendelssohn does not forsake Judaism in denying the right of the church to punish transgressions of the commandments. He merely accepts the post-Mosaic status quo,” Freudenthal writes. “Mendelssohn's ideal, to which he alludes in Jerusalem . . . is not a liberal state with a separation of powers but, on the contrary, the restitution of the Mosaic constitution, the identity of state and religion.”Footnote 12
The ambiguity of Mendelssohn's response to Cranz has, finally, led a number of scholars to wonder whether his modern justification of Jewish law is simply a failure. “As perhaps Mendelssohn knew full well,” Leora Batnitzky suggests, “he did not in the end provide a philosophical justification of Judaism and Jewish law.”Footnote 13 While he “tries very hard to disguise this failure,” Arkush concludes, “what he does not succeed in doing, in the end, is reconciling his own absolute commitment to liberty of conscience and his insistence that God could never desire coerced worship with the undeniable fact that the God of Israel is reported in the Bible to have required just such a form of worship.”Footnote 14 And Altmann wonders whether Mendelssohn's personal loyalties clouded his thought: “Did he perhaps sense that the views he had expressed in this work were in the final analysis held together less by the force of incontestable logic than by a concatenation of personal convictions and loyalties?”Footnote 15
The aim of this essay is to present an alternative account of Mendelssohn's view of “original Judaism,” one that supports a different response to Cranz's challenge than those that have dominated the literature and that so many scholars have found wanting. I will claim that the portrait of the Mosaic constitution in Jerusalem may most fruitfully be understood as a political expression of Mendelssohnian perfectionism, a perfectionism Mendelssohn develops elsewhere in metaphysical, ethical, and aesthetic terms, as well. Insofar as original Judaism can be understood as a manifestation of political perfection, I claim, it can be shown to project an ideal that may be shared by ancient Israelites and modern liberals alike. It permits Mendelssohn to reject Cranz's claim that original Judaism was a coercive theocracy, and thereby to show how his enlightened view of religion and his commitment to Jewish law are reconcilable.
In what follows, I will first examine Mendelssohn's depiction of the ideal political situation in the first part of Jerusalem, and then show how this political ideal is rooted in the account of perfection Mendelssohn endorses in other writings. I will then show how the Mosaic constitution presented in the second part of Jerusalem embodies political perfection, or what Mendelssohn designates as “heavenly politics.” I will suggest the perfectionist background to the Mosaic constitution implies an account of Jewish law as inherently—and originally—noncoercive, and I will explain, in conclusion, how Mendelssohn could understand Jewish religion as the proper heir to this perfect original Jewish polity. Finally, I will address the failure of “actual” Jews, in Mendelssohn's account, to live up to the ideal of political perfection.Footnote 16
I argue that the perfectionist background to Mendelssohn's politics brings a compelling degree of coherence to his position on Jewish law. But there are central statements in Jerusalem that stand in tension with the position I will advocate here. I will address these statements, in the text and in the notes, as I develop my argument.
Political Perfection
Let us begin by exploring Mendelssohn's account of the origins and purpose of political life, and of the grounds for the separation of state and church. In the first section of Jerusalem, Mendelssohn asserts that a person “cannot become perfect except through mutual assistance, through . . . active and passive connection with his fellow man.”Footnote 17 It is through the awareness that human beings cannot perfect their individual selves without entering into society and contributing to a collective good, according to Mendelssohn, that political life emerges from out of the state of nature:
As soon as man recognizes that outside of society he can fulfill his duties toward himself and toward the author of his existence as poorly as he can fulfill his duties toward his neighbor, and, hence, can no longer remain in his solitary condition without a sense of wretchedness, he is obliged to leave that condition and to enter into society with those in a like situation in order to satisfy their needs through mutual aid and to promote their common good by common measures.Footnote 18
There are two key distinctions Mendelssohn makes in spelling out the individual's political path towards perfection:
(1) Actions and Convictions: Perfection in the political context involves proper actions (first and foremost beneficent actions that promote the common good), and proper convictions (motives for proper action, as well as knowledge or beliefs about God necessary for self-perfection). Society directs its members’ actions towards the common good through government and instills proper convictions through education.
(2) State and Religion: There are two different kinds of relations that mark out the domains in which an individual acts and develops convictions: relations between one individual and another, which make up the domain of the state, and relations between the individual and God, which make up the domain of religion.
These distinctions are essential to the story Mendelssohn will tell about the relationship between religion and state. But it is important to note from the beginning that government and education, state and religion, are all institutions or means that serve one and the same goal for Mendelssohn: individual and collective human perfection.Footnote 19 The concrete split between the methods of governance of church and state occurs as a result of the difference in the enforceability of certain kinds of actions. Interpersonal actions can (and often must) be enforced by the state, and Mendelssohn explains how the state comes to serve the role of enforcing contractual relations among its citizens. On the other hand, convictions cannot be enforced at all—and neither can religious actions, i.e., actions that fall under the domain of relations to God. Religious actions, like religious beliefs, serve the “mutual edification” of religious community members, and religion thus “bears the same relation toward actions and toward convictions. . . . It does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love.”Footnote 20
I will set this distinction regarding the enforceability of action under the state and under religion to the side for now. This is because Mendelssohn makes it abundantly clear, as he develops his account of the political context for individual and collective perfection, that in the ideal political case, neither actions nor convictions are compelled. In the ideal community, Mendelssohn argues, the arms of government and education are identical, and individuals are governed pedagogically rather than through force. “Hail to the state which succeeds in governing the nation by education itself,” Mendelssohn writes. “That is, by infusing it with such morals and convictions as will of themselves lead to actions conducive to common need, and need not always be impelled by the spur of law.”Footnote 21
In the ideal state, where there is little to no need to use force to secure proper interpersonal actions, Mendelssohn suggests here, citizens are guided towards individual and collective perfection pedagogically. Since the replacement of compulsion with education eliminates the root of the distinction between state and religious governance, moreover, state and church unite in a pedagogical approach to inculcating proper actions and convictions, and there remains little to distinguish the domain of interpersonal relations from that of relations to God.Footnote 22 For “in reality,” Mendelssohn claims, “in the system of human duties, those toward God form no special division. Rather, all of men's duties are obligations toward God. Some of them concern ourselves, others our fellow men.”Footnote 23 In such an ideal state, “religion should come to the aid of the state, and the church should become a pillar of civil felicity, . . . show[ing] people that duties toward men are also duties toward God.”Footnote 24
Pedagogical governance is noteworthy for the way it enables the free self-perfection of individuals. The importance of freedom in Mendelssohn's conception of the ideal polity is especially clear in his account of benevolence. For reasons I will explain in what follows, Mendelssohn presents benevolence as the preeminent sociopolitical virtue, essential to individual and collective perfection. To understand the way the ideal state uniquely fosters this virtue, we need to look briefly at the problems benevolence encounters in the ordinary, nonideal state. According to Mendelssohn, benevolent action is a natural duty human beings have to one another. In the state of nature, after you have secured the basic means for survival, it is incumbent upon you to give over some of your surplus goods to others in need, and these other needy individuals have, in turn, a natural right to your benevolent giving. On the other hand, within the state of nature, according to Mendelssohn, how much you give to others is up to you. Indeed, Mendelssohn suggests that this right to determine how much of one's surplus goods one will give to others “constitutes man's natural freedom, which makes up a great portion of his felicity.”Footnote 25 Now, as essential as Mendelssohn believes this basic freedom is to natural human happiness, it has a downside. As one might imagine, in the state of nature, not everyone will freely choose to give over enough of their surplus goods to enable the needy to survive. The need for social contract thus arises, in the typical political case, in order to ensure that everyone receives the goods they are entitled to receive, and the primary role of the state in such a case is to enforce the contracts of its citizens. The problem with such a formalized system of the distribution of justice, according to Mendelssohn, is that giving to others in such a context is no longer benevolent. For a benevolent action to be benevolent, it cannot be compelled, but rather must be willed freely (as is implicit in the word itself, i.e., bene-volent, Wohl-wollen). Indeed, Mendelssohn writes, “benevolence is no longer benevolence, and has neither value nor merit if it does not flow from the free impulse of the benevolent individual.”Footnote 26 When the nonideal political body thus ensures the equal distribution of goods among its citizens by enforcing the contracts between them, it at one and the same time takes the benevolence out of acts of goodness and—since benevolence is essential to individual and collective perfection—prevents its citizens from attaining that perfection that is the very goal of politics. Given the realities of actual political life, Mendelssohn concedes, the state often must make this trade-off: “If the inner felicity of society cannot be entirely preserved, let at least outward peace and security, in any case, be compelled.”Footnote 27
The state that is governed pedagogically is thus to be hailed, in large part, because within it individuals are taught the value of benevolence, and directed towards good actions without having their freedom eliminated. It is in such a pedagogically governed state that the individual can hope to attain to the perfection of her actions and convictions in her relations to herself, to God, and to others. As a result, although Mendelssohn notes that communities at different levels of enlightenment will require different forms of government, he simultaneously claims that the excellence of state governments should be evaluated according to the degree to which they govern pedagogically rather than through compulsion: “Under all circumstances and conditions, I consider the infallible measure of the excellence of a form of government to lie in the degree to which it achieves its purposes by morals and convictions; in the degree, that is, to which government is by education itself.”Footnote 28
One might ask at this point: why does Mendelssohn consider a state governed pedagogically to be an ideal polity? Why does he take freedom and benevolence as the keys to human perfection, and why then does he consider the degree of pedagogy in a state's governance to determine that state's measure of excellence?
As a first step towards answering these questions, let me highlight two qualities of Mendelssohn's pedagogical polity. It is, first of all, unified. We have noted how in Mendelssohn's ideal state, government and education are one and the same, and that without the usual state's engagement in contract enforcement, the distinction between state and religion has fallen away as well. This state is unified in other important ways. All of its members are united, we might suggest, in the enlightened pursuit of perfection. They share, through avenues of teaching and learning, enlightened convictions about God and about the means to attain goodness in the world. They are bound together into a unity through reciprocal benevolent action. But while Mendelssohn's ideal state is most certainly a unity, it is at once the political unity of a manifold in an important and meaningful sense. Since the ideal state's members are not compelled to have proper convictions or to perform good actions, but are rather educated to do the same, each member of the state is a free individual in a way that members of nonideal states are not. Thus, we can say that the ideal state of the first part of Jerusalem is both more of a unity and more of a manifold than ordinary states.
I think these observations can give us insight into why Mendelssohn considers a state governed pedagogically to be an ideal polity. To see how, we need to take a detour through some of Mendelssohn's other writings and to pinpoint thereby Mendelssohn's general account of perfection. What I want to show is that Mendelssohn's account of pedagogical governance amounts to a political expression of the same perfectionist vision we find in his metaphysical writings. Once we have explored the metaphysical basis for Mendelssohn's political views, we will be in a position to return to his account of original Judaism and to ask what he believes the Mosaic constitution has to teach us.
In his “On Sentiments” (1755), Mendelssohn at one point has his character Theocles accept as a working definition of perfection “the harmony of a multiplicity.”Footnote 29 I will claim that this formal definition is essential to Mendelssohn's view, but for reasons I hope will become clear in what follows, Mendelssohn sometimes uses the term perfection to name the content that is shared over the harmony of a multiplicity. Mendelssohn's conception of perfection is deeply indebted to Leibniz, Wolff, and Baumgarten,Footnote 30 and we can say that what he generally means by the term is something like the most reality or divinity spread harmoniously over the broadest possible manifold.Footnote 31 In “On Sentiments,” Mendelssohn distinguishes rational perfection from beauty, by claiming that in the latter one finds merely “sameness” across a manifold, whereas in the former one finds “harmony,” that is to say, a unity that preserves the multiplicity of the manifold. Here, for example, is how Mendelssohn presents the world's perfection as revealed in the order that unites the world's manifold phenomena:
I come to you, the heavenly most splendid perfection! . . . You preserve multiplicity, but no uniformity in those manifold things; there is nothing simple about the activity. You leave these slighter enhancements over to your sensuous emulator, beauty. . . . You, however, demand rational cohesion, agreement, perspicacity. On the basis of a common final purpose it should be comprehensible why things in all their multiplicity are next to one another in one way rather than another. You preserve not simply representations, but rather representations combined and grounded in one another. In your determinations nothing must be superfluous, nothing dissonant, nothing missing. In such features the philosopher recognizes your divinity, mother of heavenly love! And he must beware of confusing this heavenly Venus with the earthly, namely, with beauty.Footnote 32
Notice here Mendelssohn's stress on both the diversity and the unity in the perfection of the world. To grasp the world's perfection, one must view things in their multiplicity without reducing that multiplicity to a dull uniformity; but one must at once uncover the “agreement” across that multiplicity, the ways in which particular representations are “combined and grounded in one another” on the basis of “a common final purpose.” Beauty may make manifest a certain sensible sameness across the world's phenomena. But Mendelssohn suggests that this sameness is merely the mundane imitation of a rational harmony that is divine. Just as Plato distinguishes between an earthly and a heavenly love, Mendelssohn suggests, so we must learn to recognize the heavenly ideal of true harmony across multiplicity.Footnote 33
It is to this same harmonious interconnection of particular beings in the world that Mendelssohn points when he explains Leibniz's claim that God has created the best of all possible worlds.Footnote 34 Moreover, in the Bi’ur, when he comments on God's sixth-day recognition that the world was “very good,” Mendelssohn stresses once more the way the world's perfection is reflected in its form as a harmonious unity of diversity. Citing the Zohar, Mendelssohn sees the harmony and wholeness of the created world hinted at even in the Bible's highlighting this last day of creation as “the sixth day”: “everything was one, complete, attached and included and linked one in the other. As it says in the Zohar, ‘What is different about all the other days where it does not say ‘the’? Here . . . all is included together as one. [“And they were completed” (Gen. 2:1):] completed from all, and perfected in all [
].’”Footnote 35
What is so perfect about the world's form as a harmonious unity of diversity? One way to understand Mendelssohn's conception of the world's perfection is to think of the world as a reflection of or imitation of God. God is an absolute unity even though God combines within himself all compossible perfections. When God creates the world, according to Mendelssohn, God thinks himself “with the infinite variety of limitations under which his properties are conceivable,” and chooses the best “configuration of interconnections between limited beings.”Footnote 36 That is to say, the “best” world that God creates, according to Mendelssohn, reflects God's own qualities directly: it is just that the qualities that are absolutely united within God are spread across the myriad interconnected limited beings of the world. Thus, we might say that the unity of diversity manifest in the world is a direct reflection of the absolute unity of God. Wolff was fond of precisely this image of the world's manifold mirroring divine unity; and he had identified in this harmonious mirroring of divinity the very revelation of the glory of God that he claimed was the purpose of creation:
The world represents God's perfections as in a mirror. This is the intention that God can maintain through the world, and one can attend to calling this the revelation of the glory of God, so that one can say: God has made the world in order to reveal his glory. Namely, the glory of God will name the whole domain of his perfections taken together.Footnote 37
This idea that the best world is one in which the manifold particular beings within it form a harmonious unity that directly reflects divine unity has important ethical and political consequences for Mendelssohn, which he drew out well before he wrote Jerusalem. Once we recognize that the perfection of the world lies in the greatest unity of and greatest distribution of goodness in it, as a reflection of God, then it becomes incumbent upon us to create in our interpersonal lives a community that reflects the same unity and diversity, and that likewise reflects divinity. In his “Notes on Abbt's Correspondence,” Mendelssohn declares his “vocation” as a human being to be “first and foremost worship and beneficence,”Footnote 38 that is to say, actions that unite human beings together, and an acknowledgment of the divine unity the human community should seek to reflect. In his 1763 Prize Essay, Mendelssohn follows Wolff in asserting that the “first law of nature” is to
make your intrinsic and extrinsic condition and that of your fellow human being, in the proper proportion, as perfect as you can. If one has discovered this general source, then one can derive from it the duties towards oneself, towards one's neighbor, and even towards God.Footnote 39
Here too we find Mendelssohn highlighting the same perfectionist features: the self must be an independent particular expression of perfection; he must act for the goodness of others and thereby unite with others to form a unified community; and the community as a whole must attend to the divine unity that it mirrors. Wolff had explained how one's judgment of actions according to this first law of nature advances the cause of perfection:
one investigates whether the condition that follows from the action stands in harmony with the essence and nature of man and his previous condition. . . . If through our action a complete harmony is maintained, then we make ourselves and our condition more perfect.Footnote 40
Mendelssohn goes so far as to suggest that by acting according to this first law of nature, one imitates God and contributes to the creation of the best of all possible worlds: “I conform to the great final purpose of creation and become an imitator of divinity whenever I render a creature, myself or another, more perfect.”Footnote 41
The vivid picture at which we have arrived of a perfect community of diverse individuals united in mutual beneficence and acknowledgment of God is most explicitly conjured by Mendelssohn in two texts he wrote prior to Jerusalem. In “Rhapsody” (1761, 1771), Mendelssohn identifies the ideal political community in terms that highlight both the unity and diversity that define perfection, as well as the centrality of God we have come to expect of such a community. Here is Mendelssohn's description of the City of God in “Rhapsody”:
Human politics strives for a goal that is attained to the highest possible degree in God's wise and peaceful government, namely, the goal of having each member advance what is best for the community by working on his own well-being. For no rational being can promote his true happiness without becoming a benefactor of the entire creation—so precisely, so inseparably do particular interests and universal interests hang together in the state ordained by God.Footnote 42
Mendelssohn depicts the polity governed by God as that form of state that most successfully attains the goals of politics. We have here a political expression of the very perfection Mendelssohn attributes to the best of all possible worlds. Each member of the community advances her own well-being while serving the common good. Each finds happiness in benevolent action towards others. God rules over the community in peace and wisdom, and the community mirrors the unity of its divine ruler. Mendelssohn's account of the ideal polity here also intimates why individuals advance their own perfection while attending benevolently to others. Since I become more perfect the more perfect the objects that I encounter are, my perfection increases as I freely produce perfection in the beings who surround me: “we become more perfect, if everything that surrounds us is perfect.”Footnote 43 Through my benevolent action I contribute to the creation of the world as the best possible; I can then know the world in its greater perfection, and as the objects of my knowledge become more perfect, I do as well.Footnote 44 In the “Phaedon” (1767), Mendelssohn hails this model of the harmony of the collective under divine rule in the Wolffian terms of the glory of God we encountered earlier:
Look at him, my friends, the well-disposed citizen in the state of God, how all of his thoughts, wishes, inclination and passions harmonize among themselves, how they all aim towards the true well-being of the creature, and to the glorifying of the Creator! If the world had shown this perfection to only one single creature, would we want to hold back from seeking in this copy of the Godhead, in this object of divine delight, the last and final goal of creation?Footnote 45
We asked: why does Mendelssohn consider a state governed pedagogically to be ideal? Mendelssohn's account of perfection leads us to the following answer: a pedagogically governed state enables a manifold of free individuals to unite harmoniously through benevolent action and commitment to God, and thereby to actualize on the political plane the perfect unity in diversity that is inherent to the world as a whole. Moreover, when such a state is governed by God, the community partakes of the perfect unity of the divine, and serves the very intention of the world's creation, the glorification of divinity itself.
The “Heavenly Politics” of Original Judaism
Armed now with the perfectionist background to Mendelssohn's account of pedagogical governance in the first part of Jerusalem, let us turn at long last to the description of original Judaism in the book's second part. Here, as a number of scholars have noted, Mendelssohn highlights the unity of that polity that was founded upon the Mosaic constitution. “In this original constitution,” Mendelssohn claims,
state and religion were not united, but one; not connected, but identical. Man's relation to society and his relation to God coincided and could never come into conflict. God, the Creator and Preserver of the world, was at the same time the King and Regent of this nation; and he is a singular being such as not to admit the least division or plurality in either the political or the metaphysical sense. Nor does this Regent have any needs. He demands nothing from the nation but what serves what is best for it and advances the felicity of the state.Footnote 46
Mendelssohn depicts the original Jewish state here as a polity governed by God, one in which an individual's relations to others and relations to God are in perfect harmony. According to Mendelssohn, state and religion were not merely united together in this original Mosaic constitution, they were one and the same institution. Mendelssohn clearly seeks to root the unity of this original Jewish polity in the unity of the one God who is, Mendelssohn tells us, Creator of the world and King of the Jewish people at one and the same time: “He is a singular being, such as not to admit the least division or plurality in either the political or the metaphysical sense.” The divine monarch “has no needs” of his own, but rather “demands” only that which advances the goodness and felicity of the nation. God's absolute unity is reflected in the harmonious interrelations of members of the community, who act to advance their personal and collective fulfillment.
In Mendelssohn's account of the original Jewish theocracy, he draws on a long tradition within Jewish political thought that views the period prior to the emergence of human kingship with Saul as a period in which God governed the Jewish people directly, and thereby the covenant was lived out in its purest form.Footnote 47 But Mendelssohn is also drawing on the perfectionist views we have seen him articulate in earlier writings. What we appear to have here is a version of what Mendelssohn suggests in his “Rhapsody” is the perfect realization of the goals of politics, a political manifold harmoniously united through acknowledgment of God and bonds of benevolence, a political actualization of the perfection implicit in the best of all possible worlds.Footnote 48 Given what we have learned about Mendelssohn's view of perfection, it is noteworthy that the account of original Judaism here suggests both that the original Jewish polity reflected the unity of God, but also that God's demands call simply for the self-fulfillment of each member of the community. If we recall Mendelssohn's suggestion, in the first part of Jerusalem, that the ideal state entails both collective unity and individual freedom, we might well draw from Mendelssohn's description of God's demanding only what is best for each individual the conclusion that the divine rule of ancient Israel fostered the freedom of its members. Indeed, there is good reason to think that on Mendelssohn's view, the ideal divine governance of the community is precisely governance without coercion. In the first part of Jerusalem, Mendelssohn argues that the church cannot enforce actions in the domain of human relations to God in the way that the state can enforce actions in the domain of interpersonal relations, because God's “rights can never come into conflict with ours.” God “wants only what is best for us, what is best for every single individual.”Footnote 49 Mendelssohn goes so far as to claim that in an actual state that governs coercively, religion must “withdraw its support even from civil actions”: “the state can expect no further help from religion, once it can act only by means of rewards and punishments; for insofar as this is the case, man's duties toward God no longer enter into consideration, and the relations between man and his Creator are without effect.”Footnote 50 It would appear to follow that divine rule of a perfect polity would be free of the coercion that is required in the governance of ordinary states.Footnote 51 In this vein, it is noteworthy that Mendelssohn devotes considerable space within the second part of Jerusalem to arguing that the securing of proper actions and convictions within original Judaism occurred, by and large, pedagogically rather than coercively. Proper doctrines were instilled, according to Mendelssohn, not in fixed written form, but rather
they were entrusted to living, spiritual [geistig] instruction, which can keep pace with all changes of time and circumstances, and can be varied and fashioned according to a pupil's needs, ability, and power of comprehension. One found the occasion for this paternal instruction in the written book of the law and in the ceremonial acts which the adherents of Judaism had to observe incessantly.Footnote 52
In Mendelssohn's view of the Mosaic constitution, the written Torah serves as a springboard for the kinds of pedagogical activities that form and foster the Jewish polity. As Mendelssohn argues, the ceremonial law “which the adherents of Judaism had to observe incessantly” is in fact the key to Jewish pedagogical governance. As Freudenthal has recently explained, Mendelssohn views written forms of teaching as prone to idolatry: words are written signs which too often become fixed in the eyes and minds of followers, and are always liable therefore to become objects of worship, rather than signifiers of what is truly worthy of worship.Footnote 53 The “main purpose and the fundamental law of the [Mosaic] constitution,” Mendelssohn claims, was that “the truths useful for the felicity of the nation as well as of each of its individual members be utterly removed from all imagery.”Footnote 54 The special form of instruction that fended off the threat of idolatry as best as was possible was teaching through practice.Footnote 55 Here once again law and education are claimed to be united in Jewish political life:
The ceremonial law itself is a living kind of script, one that rouses the spirit [Geist] and heart, is full of meaning, and never ceases to inspire reflections or to provide the occasion and opportunity for oral instruction. What a student himself did and saw being done from morning till night pointed to religious doctrines and convictions and spurred him on to follow his teacher, to watch him, to observe all his actions, and to obtain the instruction which he was capable of acquiring by means of his talents, and of which he had rendered himself worthy by his conduct.Footnote 56
In everything a youth saw being done, in all public as well as private dealings, on all gates and on all doorposts, in whatever he turned his eyes or ears to, he found occasion for inquiring and reflecting, occasion to follow an older and wiser man at his every step, to observe his minutest actions and doings with childlike attentiveness and to imitate them with childlike docility, to inquire after the spirit and the purpose of those doings and to seek the instruction which his master considered him capable of absorbing and prepared to receive. Thus teaching and life, wisdom and activity, speculation and social context [Umgang] were most intimately connected; or rather, thus should it be, according to the initial plan and purpose of the lawgiver.Footnote 57
In these idyllic descriptions of how Jewish communal life was intended to be, Mendelssohn paints a picture of the unity of “teaching and life, wisdom and activity, speculation and social context.” Communal practice of the ceremonial law creates an educational context in which every action teaches, because every action is a living symbol that directs community members to inquire, to reflect, and to discuss matters of doctrinal wisdom.Footnote 58 Mendelssohn is making a strong statement about enlightenment here: the best way to educate towards truth and wisdom is through a communal life of ceremonial practice, and not through the writing and reading of books. But he is also pointing towards the political ideal he spells out in the first part of Jerusalem: the best way to govern a community is through pedagogy. In Mendelssohn's rosy account, young Jews need not be coerced to follow the commandments of Torah or to believe in its teachings. They are rather instructed through their constant interrelations with others in the community to perfect their actions and convictions. Practices the student observes and undertakes “point to religious doctrines and convictions,” and give him occasion to observe and “imitate” the “minutest actions and doings” of “an older and wiser man” and then “to inquire after the spirit and the purpose of those doings.” Moreover, the ceremonial law hereby serves to unite the members of the community in their shared reflection, practice, and instruction.
Mendelssohn has thus set before our eyes a picture of original Judaism as a perfect political community. This community is governed pedagogically and thereby fosters both the individual freedom of its members and communal unification. The community is ruled by the one God, and divine rule in this case is precisely a governance without coercion, for God has no needs of his own that require enforcement, and God's “commands” serve simply to make manifest the path to individual and communal perfection community members seek to attain. Through their collective worship of God, finally, the members of this original Jewish polity may be said to reflect collectively the unity of the divine and thereby to take part in the actualization of perfection in the world.
Mendelssohn intends this picture to be of Judaism in its ideal form. He acknowledges that his depiction of original Judaism as a perfect polity may not conform to accounts of the political with which his readers are familiar. But this is only because, Mendelssohn argues, his readers “are accustomed to regarding the true interest of human society” from a “false point of view.” Here Mendelssohn implies that the Mosaic constitution brings into view nothing less than a reflection of divinity itself:
Just as, according to Plato, there is an earthly and also a heavenly Amor, there is also, one might say, an earthly and a heavenly politics. Take a fickle adventurer, a conqueror of hearts, such as are met with in the streets of every metropolis, and speak to him of the Song of Songs, or of the love of erstwhile innocence in Paradise, as Milton describes it. He will believe that you are raving, or that you wish to rehearse your lesson as to how to overwhelm the heart of a prude by means of Platonic caresses. Just as little will a politician a la mode understand you if you speak to him of the simplicity and moral grandeur of that original constitution. As the former knows nothing of love but the satisfaction of base lasciviousness, the latter speaks, when statesmanship is the subject, only of power, the circulation of money, commerce, the balance of power, and population. . . . If we look at it directly, we shall see in genuine [ächte] politics, as a philosopher said of the sun, a deity [Gottheit], where ordinary eyes see a stone.Footnote 59
Just as someone who understands love to be a matter of physical, matter-bound pleasure and conquest will fail to understand love in its true, ideal form, Mendelssohn claims, those who view politics as nothing but the domain of power will not understand “genuine politics” when it is shown to them. If we fail to appreciate the “simplicity and moral grandeur” of original Judaism, it is because we are too accustomed to “earthly politics,” and do not grasp the sublimity of “heavenly politics” when we see it. But if we look at original Judaism in the proper way, Mendelssohn suggests, in a most striking formulation, we will see in it nothing less than divinity. Our course through the perfectionist background of Mendelssohn's political views can, I think, explain how Mendelssohn can claim we see divinity if we look aright at original Judaism. Just as our world, as the best of all possible worlds, has the potential to reflect the absolute unity and perfection of God through its myriad particulars, so the perfect political community, governed pedagogically by God, both preserves for all its members their freedom and individuality, and reflects across this collective the unity and perfection of God. In identifying the political harmony made possible by the Mosaic constitution with “heavenly politics,” finally, Mendelssohn alludes back to his identification of the rational harmony uniting the worldly manifold with the “heavenly Venus,” to which he contrasted the sensible beauty of the earthly, as its copy, in “On the Sentiments.”
Divine Rule and Its Exceptions: Mendelssohn's Response to Cranz I
Now that we have explored the perfectionist background to Mendelssohn's account of original Judaism, let us return to Cranz's challenge, and begin to formulate Mendelssohn's response to that challenge. Cranz questions how Mendelssohn can remain committed to a Jewish law that is at ground a coercive theocracy and simultaneously reject the very notion of ecclesiastical power and, consequently, call for the end of the rabbinic ban of excommunication. I propose Mendelssohn's answer is the following: the Judaism to which I remain true is precisely the noncoercive, pedagogical rule of God through the ceremonial law that defined Judaism at its origins. That original Mosaic constitution fostered the very value of individual freedom and taught the very truth of divine unity to which I am committed as an enlightened liberal modern.
I am suggesting that recent scholars have by and large been correct in viewing Mendelssohn's account of original Judaism as the key to his response to Cranz's challenge. But I argue that Mendelssohn's response could not have been to claim that the original Jewish polity in its ideal form was legitimately coercive in a way that the Judaism of his day could no longer be. It is precisely this misunderstanding that has led scholars to judge Mendelssohn's response incoherent or to impute to him the privileging of one of his commitments over the other.
Now, scholars who have attributed to Mendelssohn the view that coercion under the original Mosaic constitution was uniquely legitimate stand on what appears to be solid exegetical footing. Mendelssohn himself claims that in the ancient Israelite state
every sacrilege against the authority of God, as the lawgiver of the nation, was a crime against majesty, and therefore a crime of state. . . . Under this constitution these crimes could, and indeed had to be punished civilly, not as erroneous opinion, not as unbelief, but as misdeeds, as sacrilegious crimes aimed at abolishing or weakening the authority of the lawgiver and thereby undermining the state itself.Footnote 60
Mendelssohn here clearly judges as legitimate the use of coercion and punishment to enforce the laws of the original Jewish polity. How can Mendelssohn hold such coercion to have been a legitimate part of original Judaism while simultaneously claiming the Mosaic constitution embodied a “heavenly politics” in which governance was exercised pedagogically and freedom and proper conviction were fostered through communal practice of the ceremonial law? According to Mendelssohn, we have found, divine rule is definitively noncoercive. God has no contractual claims that must be enforced; God only demands of individuals the self-perfection they themselves seek. “Man's duties toward God no longer enter into consideration”Footnote 61 when proper action is enforced through rewards and punishments in the ordinary state. How then could a crime against God permit or even require civil punishment?
By way of answering these questions, let me first note how far Mendelssohn appears willing to go in arguing for the pedagogical character of the Mosaic constitution, even with respect to its treatment of criminals. Mendelssohn suggests that even punishments for corporal and capital crimes against the law were dealt with, shall we say, as “pedagogically” as possible under the circumstances. Thus, he exclaims,
with what leniency were even these capital crimes punished! . . . According to an unwritten law, corporal and capital punishment could not be inflicted unless the criminal had been warned by two unsuspected witnesses with the citation of the law and the threat of the prescribed punishment; indeed, where corporal or capital punishment were concerned, the criminal had to have acknowledged the punishment in express words, accepted it and committed the crime immediately afterwards in the presence of the same witnesses. Footnote 62
That is to say, criminals were only punished, proper actions were only coerced—according to Mendelssohn—in the rare cases when the criminal could be demonstrated to have understood both law and punishment and to have transgressed the law intentionally. Moreover, Mendelssohn emphasizes that crimes were met with coercive punishments in cases where “the sacrilege exceeded all bounds in its unruliness and came close to rebellion.”Footnote 63 In all other cases, we might suggest, such transgressions too were opportunities for further instruction.
Recall that when Mendelssohn claims that the ideal state “succeeds in governing the nation by education itself” he maintains that such a state would “infuse it with such morals and convictions as will of themselves lead to actions conducive to common need, and need not always be impelled by the spur of law.”Footnote 64 Far-fetched as it may sound, Mendelssohn seems to wish to claim that when the Mosaic constitution is functioning in its ideal form, there is indeed no need for compulsion at all. God wants what is best for all the citizens of his state, and this is nothing more than the individual and collective perfection towards which they themselves strive. The commandments of the Torah—again, in this ideal situation—provide a system of pedagogical governance that allows for the realization of such perfection. What happens when an individual rejects the path to self-perfection that the commandments of the Torah construct, refuses to be taught by other community members, and knowingly acts to undermine authority in such a way that threatens the very existence of the state? Punishment. As Mendelssohn asserts in his discussion of the ideal pedagogical state in the first part of Jerusalem, “If the character of a nation . . . and other causes make it impossible to govern the nation by convictions alone, the state will have to resort to public measures, coercive laws, punishments of crime, and rewards of merit.”Footnote 65 In such a case, civil authorities must indeed judge that “the inner felicity of society cannot be entirely preserved” and thus “at least outward peace and security [should], in any case, be compelled.”Footnote 66
I am proposing that the Mosaic constitution governs pedagogically, and embodies political perfection, in its ideal form. But in the actual world, with actual people, not even the perfect polity can be perfect all the time. I suggest that in those moments when criminals act in a manner that threatens to undermine the very existence of this perfect pedagogical system, the original Jewish constitution ceases—at least in these moments—to embody the ideal. In such cases, God—whose rule is by definition noncoercive—ceases to govern, and criminal acts are taken as “crimes of state” and are “punished civilly,”Footnote 67 that is to say, by those worldly civil authorities who govern and coerce and punish in ordinary, nonideal states.
I am thus suggesting that when sacrilegious transgressions are punished in the original Jewish political context, this is not due to the unique legitimacy to coerce which that original Jewish polity possessed as a religio-political unity. Rather, I suggest that such transgressions—in the infrequent event that they occurred, according to Mendelssohn—were exceptions to the practice of political perfectionism in that state, required for the preservation of that state. It is true that the exercise of coercion in such rare cases was condonable on a basis—i.e., the need to ensure the security of the actual Israelite state—that could not be recreated after the state's destruction. But this cannot mean that the original Jewish polity was legitimately coercive when it embodied the ideal of divine pedagogical governance it was meant to embody.
Mendelssohn's response to Cranz may thus be summarized as follows. The Mosaic constitution of original Judaism was perfect. The original Jewish polity was governed pedagogically, through the ceremonial law, as much as was possible; and to this very extent, the Mosaic constitution produced a worldly community whose unity across diversity, and whose commitment to benevolence and to divine worship, reflected divine unity. But during that period in which the original Jewish polity doubled as an actual state, it had to invoke civil punishments every once in a while that deviated from the ideal that it otherwise succeeded in embodying. With the demise of the state, the Torah was indeed left as a system of religious actions that could not be coerced. But coercion is not the “cornerstone”Footnote 68 of Judaism, as Cranz asserts, and indeed it never was. Coercion in the original Jewish polity was, to the contrary, the exception that proved the rule of political perfection. Thus, a commitment to the “heavenly politics” of original Judaism in no way has to conflict with a commitment to an enlightenment view of religion as noncoercive. Freedom and pedagogy, communal harmony and divine worship, may be upheld as ideals by ancients and moderns alike. There may be moments in which both ancients and moderns fail to live up to these ideals. But this unfortunate fact should not confuse us about the enduring nature of that ideal or our duty to strive to uphold it.
Judaism as Religion: Mendelssohn's Response to Cranz II
In fact, as Mendelssohn explains in the first part of Jerusalem, actual states must often give up on the ideal of pedagogical governance and settle for the political stability that coercion can ensure. In such cases, Mendelssohn suggests, the church must “withdraw its support” from the state's actions and pronouncements, and “the only aid religion can render to the state” in such a situation “consists in teaching and consoling, i.e., imparting to citizens, through its divine doctrines, such convictions as are conducive to the public weal, and in uplifting with its otherworldly consolations the poor wretch who has been condemned to death as a sacrifice for the common good.”Footnote 69
Given our new grasp of Mendelssohn's account of pedagogical governance, it is remarkable to find that in cases where the state is forced to engage in coercion, and church and state must be separated, Mendelssohn asserts that religion continues to stand at its pedagogical post. Indeed, Mendelssohn defines the aims of religion in terms that vividly recall his ideal of political perfection: “the most essential purpose of religious society is mutual edification [gemeinschaftliche Erbauung],”Footnote 70 that is to say, education or self-construction through harmonious communal relations.
I wish to draw the following conclusion from Mendelssohn's insistence on the pedagogical and noncoercive character of religion: in cases in which the state cannot actualize the ideal of the perfect pedagogical polity, in which it must exercise force in order to preserve peace and security, it is religion that preserves the ideal of perfect politics. That is to say, in a world where “earthly politics” reigns, Mendelssohn sees it as the task of religion to advocate for “heavenly politics,” by forging communities in which individuals seek truth and self-fulfillment freely and in unison.
Now, religion cannot make use of coercive means to achieve its ends: recall Mendelssohn's claim that neither religious convictions nor religious actions may be coerced. But this is not to say that religion is powerless in Mendelssohn's eyes. Mendelssohn contrasts state and religion as follows: “The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary. The power of religion is love and beneficence.”Footnote 71 Mendelssohn chooses his words carefully here. Religion does possess power: it has tools at its disposal to achieve its goals. Religion can teach and persuade; it can command; it can love and promote acts of beneficence between its constituents. Mendelssohn clearly views such activities as noncoercive but as forceful all the same. He makes a similar claim when he alludes to Cranz's assertion that Moses governed with “an iron rod”:
Divine religion is far from all this. . . . Its rights imply no coercions. It does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love. It draws no avenging sword, dispenses no temporal goods, assumes no right to any earthly possessions, and claims no external power over the mind. Its weapons are reason and persuasion; its strength is the divine power of truth. The punishments it threatens, just like the rewards it promises, are the effects of love—salutary and beneficial for the very person who has to endure them. By these signs I recognize thee, daughter of Divinity! Religion! Who alone, in truth, grantest bliss on earth even as in heaven.Footnote 72
In denying that religion is coercive, Mendelssohn is careful here too not to claim that religion has no power. To the contrary: religion possesses strength, it has weapons at its disposal, and it even threatens punishments. But its strength is “the divine power of truth,” its weapons are “reason and persuasion,” and its rewards and punishments are the “effects of love” that help individuals perfect themselves. Mendelssohn suggests these noncoercive means of enforcement are markers that identify religion as the “daughter of Divinity,” as that which “grants bliss on earth even as in heaven.” Pedagogical forms of power allow religion to give its constituents a taste of “heavenly politics,” one might say, even as they remain mired within earthly political states.
These descriptions of religious power are important because they open up a window for us onto a domain of religious actions, rules for religious actions, and what we might loosely call the enforcement of religious actions, that Mendelssohn considers pedagogical and noncoercive. When he distinguishes between “bands of love” and “an iron rod,” weapons of “reason and persuasion” and an “avenging sword,” or even “commandments” and “laws,” he aims to isolate a set of obligations we are encouraged to take freely upon ourselves under certain conditions of rule giving and rule enforcing. Religious actions cannot be coerced. My conscience must remain free to assent to those religious convictions and to undertake those religious actions that I choose to carry out. But Mendelssohn suggests at the same time that if religious actions are not commanded, if they are not encouraged through love, if religious convictions are not inculcated through instruction and persuasion, I may not—all else being equal—take up these actions and convictions freely as my own, despite the fact that they are for my own good. This is still pedagogy and not coercion, for Mendelssohn, but again—pedagogy is not powerless.
Recall that for Mendelssohn duties to God are not ultimately distinguishable from the duties to ourselves and to others through whose fulfillment we advance towards perfection. “Religion, the relations between God and man, does not demand other duties; it only gives those same duties and obligations a more exalted sanction,”Footnote 73 Mendelssohn insists. Members of the religious community may thus be commanded, instructed, and persuaded to fulfill their religious duties. But these duties themselves designate nothing more than a sanctified pursuit of the very same individual and collective self-fulfillment that the ideal state was intended to achieve.
Thus when the state cannot achieve political perfection through pedagogical governance, religion preserves that perfection as an ideal for its constituents. It “governs” its members pedagogically, instructing and persuading them to live in such a way that they will advance towards self-fulfillment and felicity. It aspires to the same kind of communal harmony and devotion to divine unity that the perfect state seeks to achieve in its actualization of the political expression of the best of all possible worlds. It can afford to do so precisely because it need not concern itself—in the way that the state must—with the outward peace and security of its community!
I think this role Mendelssohn assigns to religion in a nonideal political world can illuminate for us Mendelssohn's continued commitment to Jewish law 1700 years after the demise of the ancient Jewish state. Mendelssohn maintains a position that Cranz—and in his wake many others—found to be incoherent: he claims Jews are still obligated to live according to Jewish law, but he denies Jewish authorities the right to enforce that obligation. Mendelssohn's account of the unique task of religion in a nonideal political world can help explain Mendelssohn's position. Religion preserves the ideal of political perfection when actual states cannot realize that ideal. It does so through pedagogical means, but, as we have seen, these pedagogical means include forms of noncoercive force meant to ensure the fulfillment of duties: commands, acts of persuasion, instruction, love. Jewish law continues to obligate Jews after the fall of their state, I wish to argue, in just this noncoercive way. As religion, Judaism persists in preserving the ideal of a harmonious unity of human beings under God in a world in which that ideal is no longer actual; and it persists in promoting that ideal through the pedagogical force of the ceremonial law.Footnote 74
Thus for Mendelssohn Jewish law in its original ideal form was noncoercive, and Jewish law continues to be noncoercible in his own time. But that law still binds Jews through its commands and its teachings. When Mendelssohn insists on the abiding obligation that Jews have to live according to the law, it is noteworthy that he nowhere suggests Jews should be forced to do so. Rather, Mendelssohn himself employs persuasion to convince his fellow Jews to abide by the law—e.g., “Persevere, remain unflinchingly at the post which Providence has assigned to you”Footnote 75—and he repeatedly speaks of obedience to the law as a matter of conscience. “I cannot see how those born into the House of Jacob can in any conscientious [gewissenhafte] manner disencumber themselves of the law,”Footnote 76 Mendelssohn writes. “Personal commandments, duties imposed upon a son of Israel . . . must be observed strictly according to the words of the law, until it shall please the Most High to set our conscience at rest.”Footnote 77 These statements consistently reflect Mendelssohn's conviction that Jewish law after the destruction of the ancient Israelite state designates a set of religious obligations, i.e., obligations that are binding upon Jews, that promise to guide Jews towards individual and communal fulfillment, but that nevertheless address each individual Jew in her freedom. That is to say, for Mendelssohn, Jewish law continues to govern Jewish life pedagogically; it still aims to unify the Jewish community harmoniously, and to direct Jews towards reflecting divine unity in the world, just as it did when Jewish law was the perfect constitution of ancient Israel. But Jewish law does so now as religion, preserving the ideal of “heavenly politics” for as long as the political realm itself does not live up to that ideal. Aside from the difficulties inherent to trying to live harmoniously as a community of individuals who are dispersed over the globe, what Jewish religion is missing that was part of original Judaism is the responsibility for the peace and security of the Jewish polity, and hence the right and the need to use coercion, in the exceptional case, in order to ensure the continued existence of that polity.Footnote 78
Judaism's Ideal and Actual Jews
It should be obvious, at this point, that in Mendelssohn's view, Judaism has been a religion promoting the ideal of perfect politics for far longer than the span of time during which it was an actual perfect polity. What is puzzling is why Mendelssohn goes so far, in Jerusalem, in limiting the historical existence of original Jewish political perfection. Immediately before he suggests the Mosaic constitution embodies “heavenly politics” and brings divinity itself into view, Mendelssohn asserts, “This constitution existed only once; call it the Mosaic constitution, by its proper name. It has disappeared, and only the Omniscient knows among what people and in what century something similar will again be seen.”Footnote 79
Mendelssohn insists on the uniqueness of the Mosaic constitution. It existed only once. It cannot be classified as a “theocracy” because it is utterly distinct, and thus can be known only by its proper name, as the unique political phenomenon that it was. What are we to make of this one and only actual instantiation of the political ideal?
It may be that the one-time fact of the Mosaic constitution—even if that fact is resistant to rational classification—serves to teach all peoples who live in its wake that such a realization of the ideal is possible in the world, and is thus worthy of pursuit.Footnote 80 One is struck, however, by Mendelssohn's insistence on the ephemeral character of this one-time instantiation of perfect politics. True, Mendelssohn does caution elsewhere against judging the goodness of a state constitution based on its duration.Footnote 81 But Mendelssohn appears just as interested in highlighting the disappearance of this instantiation of political perfection, in highlighting its absence from the world, as he is in celebrating its one-time appearance. Moreover, it is striking that in an essay that both celebrates the ideal character of original Judaism and defends contemporary Judaism, Mendelssohn does not draw a clearer connection between the two. Indeed, judging from Mendelssohn's account of the disappearance of the Mosaic constitution—“only the Omniscient knows among what people and in what century something similar will again be seen”—the fact that perfection may be glimpsed at the origins of Jewish politics in no way privileges Jews over any other peoples in the quest to realize such perfection again. Furthermore, given his interest in illuminating the Mosaic constitution in its ideal form, it is remarkable how frequently Mendelssohn emphasizes the Jewish fall away from that ideal throughout Jerusalem. “The Mosaic constitution did not persist long in its erstwhile purity,” Mendelssohn writes, and then points to the Israelite demand for a “king of flesh and blood” under Samuel, to stand in for the divine king, as breaking up its theo-political unity: “Already in the days of the prophet Samuel, the edifice developed a fissure which widened more and more until the parts broke asunder completely. . . . Now the constitution was undermined, the unity of interests abolished. State and religion were no longer the same.”Footnote 82 But in Mendelssohn's account of the Jewish people, this call for a human king is hardly the first break from the ideal. We learn that the very construction of the Mosaic constitution in the first place—perfect as it may have been—was necessary to contend with the decline the early Israelites had undergone since the time of the patriarchs. “The forefathers of our nation, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, remained faithful to the Eternal, and sought to preserve among their families and descendants pure concepts of religion, far removed from all idolatry,” Mendelssohn relates. But while “their descendants were chosen by Providence to be a priestly nation,” the trip down to Egypt had not treated them all that well: “misery made them nearly as insensitive to the truth as arrogance had made their oppressors.”Footnote 83 That is to say, according to Mendelssohn, the Israelites were given the ceremonial law as a medium of pedagogical governance precisely because, in their debased condition, they needed such a system to find the path back to truth and to pure concepts of religion. Moreover, for all of the perfection of the Mosaic constitution and for all that it purports to solve the problem of idolatry through ceremonial law, the Israelites reverted to idolatry almost immediately upon receiving it! Mendelssohn bemoans the Israelites’ immediate fall away from political perfection:
But the ways of God are inscrutable! Here, too, within a short period, things took the road of corruption. It was not long before this brilliant circle, too, had been completed, and matters again returned to a point not far from the low level from which they had emerged as, alas! has been evident for many centuries.
Already in the first days after the lawgiving that had been so miraculous, the nation relapsed into the sinful delusion of the Egyptians, and clamored for an image in the shape of an animal.Footnote 84
Perfect as the Mosaic Law may have been, Mendelssohn here again notes that the Jewish people could not abide by it for long. But now, Mendelssohn suggests the rule of the perfect Mosaic constitution lasted not the few hundred years between Moses and Samuel, but rather a mere number of weeks! In their clamoring for the golden calf, the Jewish people immediately relapsed into the idolatry of their former oppressors, and fell back down to the low level of culture from which they had just been redeemed. Mendelssohn here hints that the very low level of culture to which the Jewish people fell at that time is matched by their sorry status in his own time, indeed that the Jews may have remained in such decline all the way from Sinai to Berlin! “The ways of God are inscrutable!”: i.e., how is it possible that the Jewish people could have fallen thus when they had been privileged with the perfect law?
There is an evident disconnect, then, between the ideal polity that Mendelssohn wishes us to catch a glimpse of through the Mosaic constitution of original Judaism and the actual Jewish community that was subject to this constitution. The Mosaic ideal may have remained constant in its perfection, but the followers of Moses are depicted as ascending and falling—but mostly falling—along the continuum of enlightenment and cultural decline and it is unclear to what extent they ever truly actualized the perfect state that the Mosaic constitution should have made possible.Footnote 85
What are we to make of the disconnect Mendelssohn underscores between the ideal of the “heavenly politics” of original Judaism and actual original Jews, who could not quite get it together to actualize that ideal? Here is one possible answer: perhaps the primary purpose of the political perfection of original Judaism—however ephemeral its actuality may have been—is to serve precisely as an ideal. As an ideal, “heavenly politics” is intended to orient the political world. It presses human beings to critique the actual political states in which they live and to strive to realize a political community that more closely approximates the harmony of political perfection than do the actual states in which they live. Perhaps then it is the task of the Jewish people not to revel in the fact that they once had it perfect, but rather to highlight political perfection—through their failings just as much as through their law itself—as the ideal towards which all political communities must strive. Mendelssohn in fact implies as much when he claims the Jewish people is meant to teach “sound and unadulterated ideas of God and his attributes” to the nations of the world. Mendelssohn asserts that the Israelites
were chosen by Providence to be a priestly nation; that is, a nation which, through its establishment and constitution, through its laws, actions, vicissitudes, and changes was constantly to call attention to sound and unadulterated ideas of God and his attributes. It was incessantly to teach, to proclaim, and to endeavor to preserve these ideas among the nations, by means of its mere existence, as it were.Footnote 86
Mendelssohn here determines the vocation of the Jewish people as calling attention to philosophical truths not simply through its ideal constitution, but even through its “actions, vicissitudes [Schicksale], and changes” throughout the ages. The Jewish people was meant to preserve philosophically sound ideas “among the nations by means of its mere existence, as it were.” Such statements suggest that Mendelssohn views the philosophical teaching of the Jewish people for the nations of the world to come not simply from the perfect political ideal it may have actualized at an early moment, but rather throughout its rise and fall, through its own actions and the actions it has suffered, through the changes it has undergone. The Jewish people's very “existence” is meant to teach, and if so, this teaching may highlight the very ideality of political perfection as much as it does its one-time actualization among original Jews.Footnote 87 Put differently, Mendelssohn may be said to present political perfection, first and foremost, as a religious ideal Jews have to uphold, which instructs the peoples of the world regarding the goals of political life, and consoles the peoples of the world—Jews included—over their failures to realize it.
Mendelssohn thus understood himself to be committed to the very ideal of perfect politics that Jewish law had originally made manifest, an ideal he was convinced should be shared by ancient Israelites and moderns alike. Cranz's challenge missed the mark, for Mendelssohn viewed the ceremonial law of original Judaism as part of a pedagogical political system that advanced human perfection, and not as a theocracy in which coercion was uniquely legitimate. Mendelssohn held that this ceremonial law was still binding upon the Jews of his day. In the political conditions under which Mendelssohn lived as a Jew, however, such ritual actions were neither instilled as part of an ideal pedagogically governed state, nor compelled as were just civil actions in ordinary states. Such ritual actions fell under the domain of religion, serving—together with religious belief—the “mutual edification”Footnote 88 of Jews living imperfect political lives.Footnote 89
