Moses Mendelssohn beat Immanuel Kant in a Berlin Academy essay contest
He walked into Berlin at 14 through the one gate open to Jews and cattle, a poor scribe's son with a curved spine. Within two decades Moses Mendelssohn had outscored Kant for an academy prize, been hailed as the German Socrates, and become a guiding light of the Jewish Enlightenment.
Mendelssohn was born in Dessau on 6 September 1729. His father Mendel copied Torah scrolls for a meagre living, and the local rabbi David Fränkel taught the boy Talmud and introduced him to Maimonides. When Fränkel moved to Berlin in 1743, Moses followed. Largely self-taught, he learned mathematics from a Polish refugee, Latin from a young physician, and worked through Locke's Essay with a dictionary. A silk merchant, Isaac Bernhard, hired him as a tutor in 1750 and later made him bookkeeper and then partner. He and his brother were the first to take the surname Mendelssohn, meaning Mendel's son, a change his son Abraham called small but decisive.
Around 1754 he met the dramatist Lessing, reportedly over a game of chess, a scene echoed in Lessing's Nathan the Wise. Lessing published Mendelssohn's Philosophical Conversations in 1755 without asking him. In 1763 his essay on applying mathematical proof to metaphysics took the Berlin Academy's prize, with Kant placing second, and that October the king granted him protected residence in Berlin, a privilege that did not extend to his wife or children. His Phaedo of 1767, a defence of the soul's immortality modelled on Plato, became one of the most widely read German books of its day.
Fame brought pressure. In 1769 the Zurich theologian Johann Kaspar Lavater publicly dared him to refute a defence of Christianity or convert. Mendelssohn replied that he could admire a Confucius or a Solon without trying to convert them. The dispute drained him, and from 1771 he suffered attacks his doctor blamed on strain, which modern writers suggest may have been a heart rhythm problem.
He died on 4 January 1786 after catching a cold delivering a manuscript to his publisher on New Year's Eve. His descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and the founders of the Mendelssohn and Co. bank.
Source: Moses Mendelssohn
