"In the fall of 1743, a fourteen-year-old boy entered Berlin at the Rosenthaler Tor, the only gate in the city wall through which Jews (and cattle) were alllowed to pass. The boy had arrived from his hometown of Dessau, some one hundred miles away in the small independent principality of Dessau-Anhalt. For five or six days he had walked through the hilly contryside to reach the Prussian capital.
We do not know whether he was wearing shoes; it is more likely that he was barefoot. The boy, later famous throughout Europe as the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, was frail and sickly, small for his age. Early years of poverty had left him with thin arms and legs, an awkward stutter, and a badly humped back.
(...)
The boy was all but penniless and traveled alone, carrying his few possessions in a satchel on his hunched back. In 1743, the movements of Jews - many of whom where wandering peddlers - were tightly regulated and controlled. Only a limited number of rich jews (occasionally, a scholar) were allowed to settle in Berlin, but peddlers were barred.
(...)
At the time of his arrivel, Mendelssohn knew only Hebrew and Judendeutsch, a raw medieval German dialect mixed with Hebrew. German suffixes attached to Hebrew verbs produced the infinitives; the limited, rudimdsmentary vocabulary of Judendeutsch permited only the simples exchanges. On the rare occasions when it was written, Judendeutsch was spelled in Hebrew letters read from right to left. Non-jews derided it as a mongrel and barbaric dialect, a form of mauscheln, whinning, "the accents of an unpleasant tongue (Goethe). Mendelssohn's education had been exclusively religious. He was still unable to speak German or read a German book. Less than two decades later, almost entirely self-taught, he had become a renowned German philosopher, philologist, stylist, literary critic, and man of letters, one of the first to bridge the social and culural barrier between Jews and other Germans.
His life suggests a saga not only intellectual but human and dramatic. No fabulist would have cast this stuttering ghetto hunchback as the central character in a unique drama of language and Kultur. Mendelssohn's great ambition was to end the age-old social and intelectual isolation of Judaism, some of which had become self-imposed. In some ways he fully succeeded. (...)
He was the first of a long line of assimilated German Jews who worshiped German culture and civilization and whose enterprise, two centuries later, would come to such a horrendous and abrupt end."
Amos Elon, The Pity Of It All - A portrait of the German-Jewish Epoch 1743 -1933, Picador, 2002, pp.1- 5
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| the "German Socrates" p.34 |
