Forming a Liberal Coalition of Reason: Political Theology in the Mendelssohn-Lavater Affair
Abstract
Thus far, scholars have discussed the Mendelssohn-Lavater affair from a liberal perspective: Mendelssohn’s reply to Lavater has been principally read as a defense of toleration. The broader context of conversion discourse in eighteenth-century Germany drew little attention. Taking issue with such apologetic-liberal readings, this paper interprets the Lavater affair as a polemical engagement with contemporary heterodox groups that regarded conversion as a necessary precondition for redemption. Mendelssohn’s reply, it argues, was a calculated political theology on the part of Enlighteners who sought to form a coalition of reason–including the Jewish and the Protestant orthodoxy, enlightened theologians, the state of Prussia and the Jewish financial elite. This coalition would fight Pietistic, Sabbatean, Frankist and other “enthusiastic” groups, for which the notion of redemption through conversion then became metonymic. Thus, the Lavater affair marks a turning point in the cultural, political and economical reconfiguration of eighteenth-century Germany.
© 2014 by Walter de Gruyter Berlin Boston
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Forming a Liberal Coalition of Reason: Political Theology in the Mendelssohn-Lavater Affair
- “Is Judah indeed the Teutonic Fatherland?” The Debate over the Hebrew Legacy at the Turn of the 18th Century
- Elisha Ben Abuya, the Hebrew Faust: On the First Hebrew Translation of Faust Within the Setting of the Maskilic Change in Self-Perception
- Gotthold Weil, die Orientalische Philologie und die deutsche Wissenschaft an der Hebräischen Universität
- From Leipzig to Jerusalem: Erich Brauer, a Jewish Ethnographer in Search of a Field
- Unerwünschte Rückkehrer. Staatsbürgerschaft und Eigentum deutscher Juden in der Nachkriegstschechoslowakei
- Herbert A. Strauss’s Über dem Abgrund Inquiries into the History, Narratology, and Poetics of a Jewish Historian’s Autobiography
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Editorial
- Forming a Liberal Coalition of Reason: Political Theology in the Mendelssohn-Lavater Affair
- “Is Judah indeed the Teutonic Fatherland?” The Debate over the Hebrew Legacy at the Turn of the 18th Century
- Elisha Ben Abuya, the Hebrew Faust: On the First Hebrew Translation of Faust Within the Setting of the Maskilic Change in Self-Perception
- Gotthold Weil, die Orientalische Philologie und die deutsche Wissenschaft an der Hebräischen Universität
- From Leipzig to Jerusalem: Erich Brauer, a Jewish Ethnographer in Search of a Field
- Unerwünschte Rückkehrer. Staatsbürgerschaft und Eigentum deutscher Juden in der Nachkriegstschechoslowakei
- Herbert A. Strauss’s Über dem Abgrund Inquiries into the History, Narratology, and Poetics of a Jewish Historian’s Autobiography
