Mendelssohn’s Upending of Canonical Appropriation

Abstract

Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism cites a passage from the Psalms as prooftext to demonstrate that one of the key canonical texts—the literary corpus serving as the repository for the church songs every German Christian of the period would know by heart and sing in church—supports his central philosophical argument. Mendelssohn does so by offering his own translation of the opening of Psalm 19. With the inclusion of his translation he counteracts the assimilatory force of Luther’s canonical rendering. Inserting his own translation that recovers a canonical text as a voice of difference—in this case that of King David—Mendelssohn highlights the dynamics of canonical pressures and liberates an otherwise domesticated voice as that of political emancipation.

Keywords:

• canon
• Luther
• Moses Mendelssohn
• Psalm 19
• psalms

Notes

1 For a succinct discussion of the Greek term see in this issue Anthony Curtis Adler, “Hölderlin’s Heraclitean Canon,” 36–37.

2 Willi Goetschel and Gilad Sharvit in their introduction to Canonization and Alterity: Heresy in Jewish History, Thought, and Literature, ed. Sharvit and Goetschel (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2019), 1–14, 7.

3 For a discussion on Mendelssohn’s political philosophy see the section on Mendelssohn’s political philosophy in “Enlightenment” in The Cambridge History of Jewish Philosophy: The Modern Era, ed. Martin Kavka, Zachary Braiterman, and David Novak (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 35–74, 58–64, and the chapters “State, Sovereignty, and the Outside Within: Mendelssohn’s View from the ‘Jewish Colony’” and “Mendelssohn and the State” in Willi Goetschel, The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Philosophy (New York: Fordham, 2012), 178–209.

4 For a discussion of the ‘theological-political complex’ see the chapter “Jewish Philosophers and the Enlightenment” in Willi Goetschel, The Discipline of Philosophy, 150–77, 163–66 and Willi Goetschel, “The Hyphen in the Theological-Political: Spinoza to Mendelssohn, Heine, and Derrida,” Religions 10, no. 1 (2019): 21. https://doi.org/10.3390/rel10010021.

5 For a discussion of Mendelssohn’s theory of the living script see the special theme issue “Moses Mendelssohn’s “Living Script” and the Question of Translation,” Bamidbar: Journal for Jewish Thought and Philosophy 9, no. 1/15 (2022) and in particular Willi Goetschel, “Meaning and Translation: Mendelssohn’s ‘Living Script,’” 48–69.

6 Die Psalmen, übersetzt von Moses Mendelssohn (Berlin: Friedrich Maurer, 1783), in Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1929–2022), vol. 10.1, 1–228.

7 Heinrich Heine, Sämtliche Schriften, ed. Klaus Briegleb, 2nd ed. (Munich: Hanser, 1975–1985; Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuchverlag, 1997), vol. 3, 544f. and Franz Rosenzweig, “Scripture and Luther,” in Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig, Scripture and Translation, trans. Lawrence Rosenwald and Everett Fox (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 47–69.

8 See Mendelssohn, Jerusalem, in: Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, vol, 8, 168–86.

9 Moses Mendelssohn, Jerusalem or on Religious Power and Judaism, trans. Allan Arkush (Hanover and London: University of New England Press, 1983), 102f.

10 Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 8, 169.

11 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2019&version=LUTH1545 (accessed May 22, 2023).

12 https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Psalm%2019&version=KJV (accessed May 22, 2023).

13 Mendelssohn, Gesammelte Schriften: Jubiläumsausgabe, vol. 8, 191f.

14 Alexander Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical Study (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), 514.

15 Mendelssohn, Die Psalmen, 31.

16 https://biblehub.com/jps/psalms/19.htm (accessed May 22, 2023).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Willi Goetschel

Willi Goetschel is a professor of German and Philosophy at the University of Toronto and the author of Heine and Critical Theory (2019), The Discipline of Philosophy and the Invention of Modern Jewish Thought (2013), Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. (2004), and Constituting Critique: Kant’s Writing as Critical Praxis (1994).