Exegesis in Conversation: Moses Mendelssohn and the Romantics

Moses Mendelssohn’s first steps in the German republic of letters were embedded in his interventions into aesthetics and metaphysics. His early German publications on these topics evoked the interest of dominant figures of the German republic of letters, granting him, thereby, an impact that dispelled his immediate characterization as a member of a religious minority. In the following years, Mendelssohn expanded his engagement with contemporary philosophy to include overt statements on theology, ritual practices, and Christian-Jewish difference. My presentation opts to trace the links between Mendelssohn’s writings on scriptural interpretation and his early interventions into contemporary philosophy. It thus presents Mendelssohn’s exchange with early Romantic thinkers – especially Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Georg Hamann – as constitutive to his depictions of biblical reading as a practice that may hone believers’ cognitive apparatus. Mendelssohn’s early attempts to advance Kantian metaphysics by introducing it to aesthetics will thus be examined as programmatic steps leading to his late views on scriptural interpretation.