Part 7

In September 1729, under a very humble roof, in a very poor little street in Dessau, was born the weakly boy who was destined to work such wonderful changes in that weary state of things. Not much fit to hold the magician’s wand seemed those frail baby hands, and less and less likely altogether for the part, as the poor little body grew stunted and deformed through the stress of over-much study and of something less than enough of wholesome diet. There was no lack of affection in the mean little Jewish home, but the parents could only give their children of what they had, and of these scant possessions, mother-love and Talmudical lore were the staple. And so we read of the small five-year-old Moses being wrapped up by his mother in a large old shabby cloak, on early, bleak winter mornings, and then so carried by the father to the neighbouring ‘Talmud Torah’ school, where he was nourished with dry Hebrew roots by way of breakfast. Often, indeed, was the child fed on an even less satisfying diet, for long passages from Scripture, long lists of precepts, to be learnt by heart, on all sorts of subjects, was the approved method of instruction in these seminaries. An extensive, if somewhat parrot-like, acquaintance at an astonishingly early age with the Law and the Prophets, and the commentators on both, was the ordinary result of this form of education; and, naturally co-existent with it, was an equally astonishing and extensive ignorance of all more everyday subjects. Contentedly enough, however, the learned, illiterate peddling and hawking fathers left their little lads to this puzzling, sharpening, deadening sort of schooling. Frau Mendel and her husband may possibly have thought out the matter a little more fully, for she seems to have been a wise and prudent as well as a loving mother; and the father, we find, was quick to discern unusual talent in the sickly little son whom he carried so carefully to the daily lesson. He was himself a teacher, in a humble sort of way, and eked out his small fees by transcribing on parchment from the Pentateuch. Thus, the tone of the little household, if not refined, was at least not altogether sordid; and when, presently, the little Moses was promoted from the ordinary school to the higher class taught by the great scholar, Rabbi Frankel, the question even presented itself whether it might not be well, in this especial case, to abandon the patent, practical advantages pertaining to the favoured pursuit of peddling, and to let the boy give himself up to his beloved books, and, following in his master’s footsteps, become perhaps, in his turn, a poorly paid, much reverenced Rabbi.

It was a serious matter to decide. There was much to be said in favour of the higher path; but the market for Rabbis, as for hawkers, was somewhat overstocked, and the returns in the one instance were far quicker and surer, and needed no long unearning apprenticeship. The balance, on the whole, seemed scarcely to incline to the more dignified profession; but the boy was so terribly in earnest in his desire to learn, so desperately averse from the only other career, that his wishes, by degrees, turned the scale; and it did not take very long to convince the poor patient father that he must toil a little longer and a little later, in order that his son might be free from the hated necessity of hawking, and at liberty to pursue his unremunerative studies.

From the very first, Moses made the most of his opportunities; and at home and at school high hopes began soon to be formed of the diligent, sweet-tempered, frail little lad. Frailer than ever, though, he seemed to grow, and the body appeared literally to dwindle as the mind expanded. Long years after, when the burden of increasing deformity had come, by dint of use and wont and cheerful courage, to be to him a burden lightly borne, he would set strangers at their ease by alluding to it himself, and by playfully declaring his hump to be a legacy from Maimonides. ‘Maimonides spoilt my figure,’ he would say, ‘and ruined my digestion; but still,’ he would add more seriously, ‘I dote on him, for although those long vigils with him weakened my body, they, at the same time, strengthened my soul: they stunted my stature, but they developed my mind.’ Early at morning and late at night would the boy be found bending in happy abstraction over his shabby treasure, charmed into unconsciousness of aches or hunger. The book, which had been lent to him, was Maimonides’ _Guide to the Perplexed_; and this work, which grown men find sufficiently deep study, was patiently puzzled out, and enthusiastically read and re-read by the persevering little student who was barely in his teens. It opened up whole vistas of new glories, which his long steady climb up Talmudic stairs had prepared him to appreciate. Here and there, in the course of those long, tedious dissertations in the Talmud Torah class-room, the boy had caught glimpses of something underlying, something beyond the quibbles of the schools; but this, his first insight into the large and liberal mind of Maimonides, was a revelation to him of the powers and of the possibilities of Judaism. It revealed to him too, perchance, some latent possibilities in himself, and suggested other problems of life which asked solution. The pale cheeks glowed as he read, and the vague dreams kindled into conscious aims: he too would live to become a Guide to the Perplexed among his people!

Poor little lad! his brave resolves were soon to be put to a severe test. In the early part of 1742, Rabbi Frankel accepted the Chief Rabbinate of Berlin, and thus a summary stop was put to his pupil’s further study. There is a pathetic story told of Moses Mendelssohn standing, with streaming eyes, on a little hillock on the road by which his beloved master passed out of Dessau, and of the kind-hearted Frankel catching up the forlorn little figure, and soothing it with hopes of a ‘some day,’ when fortune should be kind, and he should follow ‘nach Berlin.’ The ‘some day’ looked sadly problematical; that hard question of bread and butter came to the fore whenever it was discussed. How was the boy to live in Berlin? Even if the mind should be nourished for naught, who was to feed the body? The hard-working father and mother had found it no easy task hitherto to provide for that extra mouth; and now, with Frankel gone, the occasion for their long self-denial seemed to them to cease. In the sad straits of the family, the business of a hawker began again to show in an attractive light to the poor parents, and the pedlar’s pack was once more suggested with many a prudent, loving, half-hearted argument on its behalf. But the boy was by this time clear as to his vocation, so after a brief while of entreaty, the tearful permission was gained, the parting blessing given, and with a very slender wallet slung on his crooked shoulders, Moses Mendelssohn set out for Berlin.

It was a long tramp of over thirty miles, and, towards the close of the fifth day, it was a very footsore, tired little lad who presented himself for admission at the Jews’ gate of the city. Rabbi Frankel was touched, and puzzled too, when this penniless little student, whom he had inspired with such difficult devotion, at last stood before him; but quickly he made up his mind that, so far as in him lay, the uphill path should be made smooth to those determined little feet. The pressing question of bed and board was solved. Frankel gave him his Sabbath and festival dinners, and another kind-hearted Jew, Bamberger by name, who heard the boy’s story, supplied two everyday meals, and let him sleep in an attic in his house. For the remaining four days? Well, he managed; a groschen or two was often earned by little jobs of copying, and a loaf so purchased, by dint of economy and imagination, was made into quite a series of satisfying meals, and, in after-days, it was told how he notched his loaves into accurate time measurements, lest appetite should outrun purse. Fortunately poverty was no new experience for him; still, poverty confronted alone, in a great city, must have seemed something grimmer to the home-bred lad than that mother-interpreted poverty, which he had hitherto known. But he met it full-face, bravely, uncomplainingly, and, best of all, with unfailing good humour. And the little alleviations which friends made in his hard lot were all received in a spirit of the sincerest, charmingest gratitude. He never took a kindness as ‘his due’; never thought, like so many embryo geniuses, that his talents gave him right of toll on his richer brethren. ‘Because I would drink at the well,’ he would say in his picturesque fashion, ‘am I to expect every one to haste and fill my cup from their pitchers? No, I must draw the water for myself, or I must go thirsty. I have no claim save my desire to learn, and what is that to others?’ Thus he preserved his self-respect and his independence.

He worked hard, and, first of all, he wisely sought to free himself from all voluntary disabilities; there were enough and to spare of legally imposed ones to keep him mindful of his Judaism. He felt strong enough in faith to need no artificial shackles. He would be Jew, and yet German--patriot, but no pariah. He would eschew vague dreams of universalism, false ideas of tribalism. If Palestine had not been, he, its product, could not be; but Palestine and its glories were of the past and of the future; the present only was his, and he must shape his life according to its conditions, which placed him, in the eighteenth century, born of Jewish parents, in a German city. He was German by birth, Jew by descent and by conviction; he would fulfil all the obligations which country, race, and religion impose. But a German Jew, who did not speak the language of his country? That, surely, was an anomaly and must be set right. So he set himself strenuously to learn German, and to make it his native language. Such secular study was by no means an altogether safe proceeding. Ignorance, as we have seen, was ‘protected’ in those days by Jewish ecclesiastical authority. Free trade in literature was sternly prohibited, and a German grammar, or a Latin or a Greek one, had, in sober truth, to run a strict blockade. One Jewish lad, it is recorded on very tolerable authority, was actually in the year 1746 expelled the city of Berlin for no other offence than that of being caught in the act of studying--one chronicle, indeed, says, carrying--some such proscribed volume. Moses, however, was more fortunate; he saved money enough to buy his books, or made friends enough to borrow them; and, we may conclude, found nooks in which to hide them, and hours in which to read them. He set himself, too, to gain some knowledge of the Classics, and here he found a willing teacher in one Kish, a medical student from Prague. Later on, another helper was gained in a certain Israel Moses, a Polish schoolmaster, afterwards known as Israel Samosc. This man was a fine mathematician, and a first-rate Hebrew scholar; but as his attainments did not include the German language, he made Euclid known to Moses through the medium of a Hebrew translation. Moses, in return, imparted to Samosc his newly acquired German, and learnt it, of course, more thoroughly through teaching it. He must have possessed the art of making friends who were able to take on themselves the office of teachers; for presently we find him, in odd half-hours, studying French and English under a Dr. Aaron Emrich.[33] He very early began to make translations of parts of the Scripture into German, and these attempts indicate that, from the first, his overpowering desire for self-culture sprang from no selfishness. He wanted to open up the closed roads to place and honour, but not to tread them alone, not to leave his burdened brethren on the bye-paths, whilst he sped on rejoicing. He knew truly enough that ‘the light was sweet,’ and that ‘a pleasant thing it is to behold the sun.’ But he heeded, too, the other part of the charge: he ‘remembered the days of darkness, which were many.’ He remembered them always, heedfully, pitifully, patiently; and to the weary eyes which would not look up or could not, he ever strove to adjust the beautiful blessed light which he knew, and they, poor souls, doubted, was good. He never thrust it, unshaded, into their gloom: he never carried it off to illumine his own path.

Thus, the translations at which Moses Mendelssohn worked were no transcripts from learned treatises which might have found a ready market among the scholars of the day; but unpaid and unpaying work from the liturgy and the Scriptures, done with the object that his people might by degrees share his knowledge of the vernacular, and become gradually and unconsciously familiar with the language of their country through the only medium in which there was any likelihood of their studying it. With that one set purpose always before him, of drawing his people with him into the light, he presently formed the idea of issuing a serial in Hebrew, which, under the title of _The Moral Preacher_, should introduce short essays and transcripts on other than strictly Judaic or religious subjects. One Bock was his coadjutor in this project, and two numbers of the little work were published. The contents do not seem to have been very alarming. To our modern notions of periodical literature, they would probably be a trifle dull; but their mild philosophy and yet milder science proved more than enough to arouse the orthodox fears of the poor souls, who, ‘bound in affliction and iron,’ distrusted even the gentle hand which was so eager to loose the fetters. There was a murmur of doubt, of muttered dislike of ‘strange customs’; perhaps here and there too, a threat concerning the pains and penalties which attached to the introduction of such. At any rate, but two numbers of the poor little reforming periodical appeared; and Moses, not angry at his failure, not more than momentarily discouraged by it, accepted the position and wasted no time nor temper in cavilling at it. He had learnt to labour, he could learn to wait. And thus, in hard yet happy work, passed away the seven years, from fourteen till twenty-one, which are the seed-time of a man’s life. In 1750, when Moses was nearly of age, he came into possession of what really proved an inheritance. A rich silk manufacturer, named Bernhardt, who was a prominent member of the Berlin synagogue, made a proposal to the learned young man, whose perseverance had given reputation to his scholarship, to become resident tutor to his children. The offer was gladly accepted, and it may be considered Mendelssohn’s first step on the road to success. The first step to fame had been taken when the boy had set out on his long tramp to Berlin.

Bernhardt was a kind and cultured man, and in his house Mendelssohn found both congenial occupation and welcome leisure. He was teacher by day, student by night, and author at odd half-hours. He turned to his books with the greatest ardour; and we read of him studying Locke and Plato in the original, for by this time English and Greek were both added to his store of languages. His pupils, meanwhile, were never neglected, nor in the pursuit of great ends were trifles ignored. In more than one biography special emphasis is laid on his beautifully neat handwriting, which, we are told, much excited his employer’s admiration. This humble, but very useful, talent may possibly have been inherited, with some other small-sounding virtues, from the poor father in Dessau, to whom many a nice present was now frequently sent. At the end of three or four years of tutorship, Bernhardt’s appreciation of the young man took a very practical expression. He offered Moses Mendelssohn the position of book-keeper in his factory, with some especial responsibilities and emoluments attached to the office. It was a splendid opening, although Moses Mendelssohn, the philosopher, eagerly and gratefully accepting such a post somehow jars on one’s susceptibilities, and seems almost an instance of the round man pushed into the square hole. It was, however, an assured position; it gave him leisure, it gave him independence, and in due time wealth, for as years went on he grew to be a manager, and finally a partner in the house. His tastes had already drawn him into the outer literary circle of Berlin, which at this time had its headquarters in a sort of club, which met to play chess and to discuss politics and philosophy, and which numbered Dr. Gompertz, the promising young scholar Abbt, and Nicolai, the bookseller,[34] among its members. With these and other kindred spirits, Mendelssohn soon found pleasant welcome; his talents and geniality quickly overcoming any social prejudices, which, indeed, seldom flourish in the republic of letters. And, early disadvantages notwithstanding, we may conclude without much positive evidence on the subject, that Mendelssohn possessed that valuable, indefinable gift, which culture, wealth, and birth united occasionally fail to bestow--the gift of good manners. He was free alike from conceit and dogmatism, the Scylla and Charybdis to most young men of exceptional talent. He had the loyal nature and the noble mind, which we are told on high authority is the necessary root of the rare flower; and he had, too, the sympathetic, unselfish feeling which we are wont to summarise shortly as a good heart, and which is the first essential to good manners.

When Lessing came to Berlin, about 1745, his play of _Die Juden_ was already published, and his reputation sufficiently established to make him an honoured guest at these little literary gatherings. Something of affinity in the wide, unconventional, independent natures of the two men; something, it may be, of likeness in unlikeness in their early struggles with fate, speedily attracted Lessing and Mendelssohn to each other. The casual acquaintance soon ripened into an intimate and lifelong friendship, which gave to Mendelssohn, the Jew, wider knowledge and illimitable hopes of the outer, inhospitable world--which gave to Lessing, the Christian, new belief in long-denied virtues; and which, best of all, gave to humanity those ‘divine lessons of Nathan der Weise,’ as Goethe calls them--for which character Mendelssohn sat, all unconsciously, as model, and scarcely idealised model, to his friend. It was, most certainly, a rarely happy friendship for both, and for the world. Lessing was the godfather of Mendelssohn’s first book. The subject was suggested in the course of conversation between them, and a few days after Mendelssohn brought his manuscript to Lessing. He saw no more of it till his friend handed him the proofs and a small sum for the copyright; and it was in this way that the _Philosophische Gespräche_ was anonymously published in 1754. Later, the friends brought out together a little book, entitled _Pope as a Metaphysician_, and this was followed up with some philosophical essays (‘Briefe über die Empfindungen’) which quickly ran through three editions, and Mendelssohn became known as an author. A year or two later, he gained the prize which the Royal Academy of Berlin offered for the best essay on the problem ‘Are metaphysics susceptible of mathematical demonstration?’ for which prize Kant was one of the competitors.

Lessing’s migration to Leipzig, and his temporary absences from the capital in the capacity of tutor, made breaks, but no diminution, in the friendship with Mendelssohn; and the _Literatur-Briefe_, a journal cast in the form of correspondence on art, science, and literature, to which Nicolai, Abbt, and other writers were occasional contributors, continued its successful publication till the year 1765. A review in this journal of one of the literary efforts of Frederick the Second gave rise to a characteristic ebullition of what an old writer quaintly calls ‘the German endemical distemper of Judæophobia.’ In this essay, Mendelssohn had presumed to question some of the conclusions of the royal author; and although the contents of the _Literatur-Briefe_ were generally unsigned, the anonymity was in most cases but a superficial disguise. The paper drew down upon Mendelssohn the denunciation of a too loyal subject of Frederick’s, and he was summoned to Sans Souci to answer for it. Frederick appears to have been more sensible than his thin-skinned defender, and the interview passed off amicably enough. Indeed, a short while after, we hear of a petition being prepared to secure to Mendelssohn certain rights and privileges of dwelling unmolested in whichever quarter of the city he might choose--a right which at that time was granted to but few Jews, and at a goodly expenditure of both capital and interest. Mendelssohn, loyal to his brethren, long and stoutly refused to have any concession granted on the score of his talents which he might not claim on the score of his manhood in common with the meanest and most ignorant of his co-religionists. And there is some little doubt whether the partial exemptions which Mendelssohn subsequently obtained, were due to the petition, which suffered many delays and vicissitudes in the course of presentation, or to the subtle and silent force of public opinion.