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Moses Mendelssohn Quotes

Moses Mendelssohn was a German-Jewish philosopher to whose ideas the Haskalah, the 'Jewish enlightenment' of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, is indebted.

Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau, Principality of Anhalt, and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature and from his writings on philosophy and religion came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Christian and Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe and beyond. He also established himself as an important figure in the Berlin textile industry, which was the foundation of his family's wealth.

His descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn; Felix's son, chemist Paul Mendelssohn Bartholdy; Fanny's grandsons, Paul and Kurt Hensel; and the founders of the Mendelssohn & Co. banking house. Wikipedia  

✵ 6. September 1729 – 4. January 1786
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Moses Mendelssohn: 3   quotes 0   likes

Famous Moses Mendelssohn Quotes

“The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence. The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.”

Moses Mendelssohn

Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 45

“Divine religion … does not prod men with an iron rod; it guides them with bands of love. It draws no avenging sword, dispenses no temporal goods, assumes no right to any earthly possessions, and claims no external power over the mind. Its weapons are reason and persuasion; its strength is the divine power of truth.”

Moses Mendelssohn

Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 73

“The state gives orders and coerces, religion teaches and persuades. The state prescribes laws, religion commandments. The state has physical power and uses it when necessary; the power of religion is love and benificence.”

Moses Mendelssohn

The one abandons the disobedient and expels him; the other receives him in its bosom and seeks to instruct, or at least to console him.
Source: Jerusalem, or on Religious Power and Judaism (1783), p. 45

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