“A More Noble Excellence”: Moses Mendelssohn on the Musical Origins of Biblical Poetry

Moses Mendelssohn’s writings on biblical poetry, from some of his earliest essays in German from the 1750s and up to his Hebrew commentary on the Pentateuch (Bi’ur) and the political-theological essay “Jerusalem” almost three decades later, emphasize the aesthetic qualities and nature of the Hebrew Scriptures. While Mendelssohn’s engagement with biblical poetry has received much scholarly attention, the place of music in his conception of biblical poetry has largely been overlooked.

Offering a contrapuntal reading of the introduction to the Song of the Sea (Exodus 15) in Mendelssohn’s Biur and of his discussions on music and poetry in the aesthetic writings, written in German, the paper explores Mendelssohn’s conception of the musical origins of biblical poetry and his contention regarding its inherent embeddedness in the art of music, one of the wisdoms of the ancient Hebrews that was lost in exile. As the paper suggest, the heuristic role of music in Mendelssohn’s explication of the aesthetic particularity of Hebrew poetry, compared to European (Greco-Roman) poetry, ascribes to music a pivotal role in what can be described as a theory of the origins, particularity, and essence of Judaism.

The paper demonstrates how while Mendelssohn continues a tradition of medieval Jewish commentators such as Judah Halevi and Azariah de’ Rossi, his conception of the musical origins of biblical poetry (and arguably of Hebrew Scripture as a whole) rather contributes to a modern poetics of Hebrew, which ultimately should be seen within the broader context of Mendelssohn’s critique of European modernity.