Lessing was an open-minded and modern type of freemason and he himself had a public theological dispute (Fragmentenstreit) about the historical truth of the New Testament with the orthodox Lutheran Hauptpastor Johann Melchior Goeze in Hamburg during the 1770s.

[4] Moses Mendelssohn was asked by Herz Cerfberr, the communal leader of the Alsatian Jews, to react with a Mémoire about the legal discrimination of the Jewish population as it was common practice of the Prussian administration.

[5] In this respect Moses Mendelssohn proved in his book Jerusalem which was published in the same year, that the "amelioration" of the civil status of the Jews could not be separated from an urgent need to modernize the Prussian Monarchy as a whole.

The reason, why Moses Mendelssohn as one of the most recognized philosophers of Haskalah was from the Kingdom of Prussia, has to be understood by the fact that the state of Jewish emancipation there was on the lowest level in comparison with the neighbour countries.

On the other hand, a lot of historians concerned about Haskalah criticized the heroic image about Moses Mendelssohn in which he appears as the starting point of Jewish enlightenment without any respect to earlier attempts around the beginning of the 18th century.

Montesquieu's more recent political theory remarked a change in the contemporary situation, when this conflict caused finally the decline of the church and also hopes and fears about the expected end of the ancient régime: Der Despotismus hat den Vorzug, daß er bündig ist.

Freylich nur jene fürchterliche Ruhe, wie Montesquieu sagt, die Abends in einer Festung ist, welche des Nachts mit Sturm übergehen soll.

[…] So bald aber die Freyheit an diesem systematischen Gebäude etwas zu verrücken wagt, so drohet Zerrüttung von allen Seiten, und man weis am Ende nicht mehr, was davon stehen bleiben kann.

Moses Mendelssohn followed a simple judicial advice, when he described the subject of this contract as "perfect" and "imperfect" "rights" and "responsibilities": Es giebt vollkommene und unvollkommene, sowohl Pflichten, als Rechte.

This was his polite way to say that its regent was centuries behind his own philosophy: Ich habe das Glück, in einem Staate zu leben, in welchem diese meine Begriffe weder neu, noch sonderlich auffallend sind.

Der weise Regent, von dem er beherrscht wird, hat es, seit Anfang seiner Regierung, beständig sein Augenmerk seyn lassen, die Menschheit in Glaubenssachen, in ihr volles Recht einzusetzen.

Noch gehören vielleicht Jahrhunderte von Cultur und Vorbereitung dazu, bevor die Menschen begreifen werden, daß Vorrechte um der Religion willen weder rechtlich, noch im Grunde nützlich seyen, und daß es also eine wahre Wohlthat seyn würde, allen bürgerlichen Unterschied um der Religion willen schlechterdings aufzuheben.

After this preparation, the finding of the preconditions in his political theory (the key or better: the ring in his whole argumentation), the first step was to comment the misconceived points of view: the adaptation to despotism, as it was postulated by many Christians discussing the "amelioration of the Jews".

While Christians like to regard the crisis of Judaism, Mendelssohn regards the present situation – in the eve of the French Revolution – as a general crisis of religion: Wenn es wahr ist, daß die Ecksteine meines Hauses austreten, und das Gebäude einzustürzen drohet, ist es wohlgethan, wenn ich meine Habseligkeit aus dem untersten Stokwerke in das oberste rette?

Nun ist das Christentum, wie Sie wissen, auf dem Judentume gebauet, und muß nothwendig, wenn dieses fällt, mit ihm über einen Hauffen stürzen.

Moses Mendelssohn created a syncretism which combined contemporary humanistic idealism and its deistic concept of a natural religion based on rational principles with the living tradition of Ashkenasic Judaism.

Mendelssohn referred to an anecdote of the Hillel school of Mishnah which has in itself an own theological formulation of the categorical imperative as Kant would later call it on: Ein Heide sprach: Rabbi, lehret mich das ganze Gesetz, indem ich auf einem Fuße stehe!

Samai, an dem er diese Zumuthung vorher ergehen ließ, hatte ihn mit Verachtung abgewiesen; allein der durch seine unüberwindliche Gelassenheit und Sanftmuth berühmte Hillel sprach: Sohn!

As long as the state did not follow John Locke's requirement concerning the "freedom of conscience", any trial of an ethic education would be useless at all and every subject would be forced to live in separation according to their religious faith.

[32] While better conditions were provided by the constitution of the French Republic, the conflict between Orthodox Rabbis and wealthy and intellectual laymen of the reform movement became evident with the radical initiatives by Mendelssohn's friend and student David Friedländer in Prussia.

His 1787 attempt of a German translation of the Hebrew prayerbook Sefer ha-Nefesh ("Book of the Soul") which he did for the school, finally became not popular as a ritual reform, because 1799 he went so far to offer his community a "dry baptism" as an affiliation by the Lutheran church.

This perspective followed some fundamental ideas which Hegel developed in his dialectic philosophy of history, and it was connected with hopes that finally an enlightened state will secularize religious traditions and fulfill their responsibility.

[38]Even though I am a Radical in Britain and a Carbonari in Italy, I do certainly not belong to the demagogues in Germany—just for the very simple reason that in case of the latter's victory some thousand Jewish throats will be cut—the best ones first.In the last two years Prussia passed many restrictive laws which excluded Jews from military and academic offices and as members of parliament.

1835, when Karl inscribed as a student, Hegel's book Leben Jesu was published posthumously and its reception was divided into the so-called Right or Old and the Left or Young Hegelians around Bruno Bauer and Ludwig Feuerbach.

He hardly foresaw that the rhetorical use of Judaism as a metaphor of capitalism (originally a satirical construction of Heinrich Heine, talking about the "prophet Rothschild") will be constantly repeated in a completely unsatirical way in the history of socialism.

While the humanists felt threatened by the industrial revolution, also because they simply feared to lose their privileges, it was no longer the parvenu (as Bernard Lazare would call the rich minority later) who needed to be "ameliorated".

Even in France where the constitution granted the equal status as citizens since 100 years, the Dreyfus affair made evident that a lot of institutions of the French Republic like the military forces were already ruled by the circles of the ancien régime.

His interest corresponded to Martin Buber's romantic idea that Hasidism was the folk culture of Ashkenazi Jews, but he also realized that this romanticism inspired by Fichte and German nationalism, expressed the fact that the rural traditions were another world quite far from its urban admirers.

In the parable of his romance Der Process, published 1915 separately as short story entitled Vor dem Gesetz, the author made a parody of a midrash legend, written during the period of early Merkabah mysticism (6th century), that he probably learned by his Hebrew teacher.

Hannah Arendt's political theory is deeply based on theological and existentialist arguments, regarding Jewish Emancipation in Prussia as a failure – especially in her writings after World War II.