This volume of thirteen essays on Moses Mendelssohn developed out of two conferences held six years ago, “a decade after the attacks of September 11, 2001,” as the editors pointedly note. They apparently mean to suggest that one can obtain a better understanding of the divisions in the post-9/11 world through a “sympathetic, yet critical” exploration of the ideas of the thinker who, among other things, blended “religious faith with intellectual openness and tolerance” (vii). Most of the book's essays (the majority of which must necessarily be left out of consideration here) seem to be with the program or at least not against it. For instance, Gideon Freudenthal (author of the recent No Religion without Idolatry: Moses Mendelssohn's Jewish Enlightenment [Notre Dame University Press, 2012]), devotes the bulk of “Idolatry Everywhere, Idolaters Nowhere” to the explanation of Mendelssohn's conviction that, in Freudenthal's words, “everybody and every community should reflect on their religious practices and critique its idolatrous elements, and nobody may accuse and shame his neighbor or a foreigner as an idolater” (222). But he also seeks to explain how, in apparent contradiction to this principle, Mendelssohn wrote what Alexander Altmann called an “impressive testimonial” (225) to the Aleinu prayer, which stigmatizes those non-Jews who “worship vanity and emptiness and pray to a god who cannot save” (224).

Freudenthal argues convincingly that Mendelssohn's defense of the prayer was in fact “flawed in every respect” (225), a “weak and insincere attempt” (226) to cover up its real bias against gentiles, including Christians. Although he comes close to branding Mendelssohn as a hypocrite for writing it, he has a sympathetic understanding of his predicament. His piece on the Aleinu was composed, after all, on behalf of a community subjected to severe external pressure, and it is “hence understandable that Mendelssohn chose to deny that Christians were meant and suggested that the addressees were instead ancient heathens” (232). But if he thought that no harm could come from condemning peoples that were no longer in existence, he failed to anticipate how in a future century the prayer might contribute to the abuse of the innocent. In 2015, Freudenthal notes, a series of attacks by fanatic religious nationalists on churches and mosques in Israel culminated in the setting on fire of a church on the shore of the Sea of Galilee. “The perpetrators seared on a wall: ‘and false gods will utterly be cut off,’ taken from the second part of the Aleinu prayer” (233). Freudenthal regrets, in retrospect, that Mendelssohn did not candidly admit the defects of the prayer, but he regrets even more that “enlightened Jews in our century did not cleanse Jewish liturgy of the many expressions of depreciation and hatred directed at believers of other religions” (232). He doesn't claim, of course, that if Mendelssohn had been more forthright things would necessarily have turned out better.

Yitzhak Y. Melamed's “Mendelssohn, Maimon and Spinoza on Excommunication and Toleration” differs from the rest of the book's essays in being heavy on criticism and utterly devoid of sympathy for Mendelssohn. Any support Mendelssohn evinces for religious liberty rings false, according to Melamed, in light of his allotment to the state, in his Jerusalem, of the right to meddle with the propagation of certain convictions. Mendelssohn does, to be sure, allow the state “to see to it from afar” that atheism and other doctrines that subvert the public welfare do not take root and spread. Melamed dubiously translates this into an assertion, on Mendelssohn's part, “that the state should interfere and uproot certain beliefs” (54). He produces a still greater exaggeration four pages later, maintaining that Mendelssohn “argued for the political persecution of those who denied the three dogmas of the religion of the bourgeoisie” (58).

Melamed fails to note, as Michah Gottlieb does in the immediately following essay, that Mendelssohn reiterates, in the very passage from which they both quote, that “it is only from a distance that the state should take notice” of the disseminators of dangerous doctrines, “and only with wise moderation that it should favor” true ones (71). His repeated accusations that Mendelssohn was an agent of the bourgeoisie conveniently overlook the philosophers, such as Maimonides, who upheld the same three dogmas (God, providence, and immortality) long before there was any such thing as a bourgeoisie. But this mistreatment of Mendelssohn pales in comparison with his claim at the very end of the essay that he paved the way, together with other Enlightenment philosophers who purveyed the “dogma of the hierarchy of cultures,” to such catastrophes “as the genocide of the Maori in New Zealand” and Auschwitz (60). For some reason, Melamed doesn't blame Mendelssohn and his ilk for 9/11, not even indirectly.

For Lawrence Kaplan, Mendelssohn seems to be neither part of the solution to modernity's problems nor one of the causes of them. He is concerned with something much smaller: me. In the first part of “Was Mendelssohn a Deist or a Theist? And Does it Matter?,” he firmly rejects my attempt in Moses Mendelssohn and the Enlightenment (SUNY Press, 1994) to cast doubt on the genuineness of Mendelssohn's faith in revelation. Lacking the space to respond here to his thoughtful but contestable arguments against what I have said on this subject, I will focus instead on the second and much longer part of his essay, where he expresses views somewhat closer to my own. Kaplan agrees with me that there is a real tension between Mendelssohn's acclamation of the ancient, religiously coercive Mosaic constitution and his unreserved defense of what he considered to be the eternally valid principle of religious freedom. But where I see an insoluble contradiction that Mendelssohn sought to evade through rhetorical stratagems, Kaplan sees a problem that only caused him some “discomfort.” According to Kaplan, Mendelssohn could justify the punishments meted out under the original Mosaic constitution because the order that it reinforced, although it had a religious character, “was imposed by coercion qua political law, not qua religious law” (191). My dissatisfaction when I encountered this argument in the middle of Kaplan's essay nearly dissolved when I read in one of his last footnotes that “Arkush, I believe, is correct in sensing that this technically valid distinction would not serve to allay Mendelssohn's concerns” (202–3). To this I would emphatically add that it is not merely a question of concerns but of Mendelssohn's philosophically grounded, vital opposition to religious coercion. I therefore remain more inclined to believe that Mendelssohn wished to see the Mosaic constitution forever relegated to the past than that he might have hoped, as Kaplan speculates in his last footnote, that God would in the long run act in accordance with the dictates of reason and include in any “future public revelation of the divine law” not “even the most limited” religious coercion (203).