Mendelssohn, Moses (1729–1786)

German philosopher and scholar, the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn. He promoted Jewish emancipation and is recognized as an important Jewish and rationalist thinker.

He was a close friend of the German dramatist and critic Gotthold Lessing, who published Mendelssohn's Philosophische Gesprache anonymously in 1755 and made him the hero of his verse play Nathan der Weise (1779).

Mendelssohn was born in Dessau on the River Elbe, endured great poverty in early life, and was largely self-educated. In 1750 he entered the service of I Bernhard, a wealthy silk merchant.

He translated the Pentateuch and other parts of the Bible into German in 1783, published a German version of Manasseh Ben Israel 's Vindiciae judaeorum, and wrote Jerusalem (1783), a plea for freedom of conscience and a demand for the total separation of church and state. Other works were Über die Evidenz in den metaphysischen Wissenschaften (1764), Phädon, in support of immortality of the soul (1767), and Morgenstunden, in refutation of Pantheism and Spinozism and in defence of Lessing (1785–86).