Description: Moses Mendelssohn (1729-96), 'the German Socrates', was the most celebrated figure of the German Enlightenment: deeply rooted in the Jewish tradition, he was also a scholar versed in the Talmud and Hebrew literature who would come to be recognized as the inaugurator of a new phase in Jewish history.

To what extent these disparate worlds jostled each other in his mind and how successful he was in harmonizing them are questions that admit of no facile answer. In an attempt to articulate Mendelssohn's attitude, Altmann quotes widely and at length from personal letters and other contemporary documents. Drawing upon a wealth of previously unknown and/or unpublished archival material, he has written an absorbing and compelling narrative. Altmann's analyses of these materials, and of Mendelssohn's published writings, are extraordinary in their discernment, subtlety, and clarity of expression.

In introducing the reader to the philosophers? theologians, men of letters, artists, and politicians with whom Mendelssohn was in contact, and often in conflict, Altmann brings a whole epoch alive; for Mendelssohn's life, with its devotion to reason and tolerance, was a kaleidoscope of the European intellectual scene, Jewish and non-Jewish, in a period of ferment.

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