Thanks for this useful and interesting post.
On January 4, 1786 many enlightened people of Berlin mourned the death of the once most prominent German Jewish thinker and father of the German Jewish Enlightenment, Moses Mendelssohn. The first in a long line of great Berlin personalities died at 56 in his house in Jägerstraße surrounded by his wife, Fromet, and their six children. The cause of death was stroke, which would later also kill several other members of his family.
Portrait of Moses Mendelssohn by Johann Gotthard Müller.
Mendelssohn´s life-long aim was to bring enlightenment to Orthodox Jewish people locked up in ghettos and treated as non-citizens in most of the communities – also in Berlin – and in this way to allow them to become part of the society they shunned and they were shunned by. Having grown up in a small Jewish ghetto in Dessau himself, he decided that only by opening up, learning German…
View original post 1,125 more words
penwithlit 