The family includes his grandchildren, the composers Fanny Mendelssohn and Felix.
Moses Mendelssohn was a significant figure in the Age of Enlightenment in Germany.
[1] Abraham Mendelssohn, because of his conversion to Reformed Christianity, adopted the surname Bartholdy at the suggestion of his wife's brother, Jakob Salomon Bartholdy, who had adopted the name from a property owned by the Salomon family.
[citation needed] Mendelssohn's wife, Fromet (Frumet) Guggenheim, was a great-granddaughter of Samuel Oppenheimer.
In 2004 relatives of the banker Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1875–1935), led by his great-nephew Julius H. Schoeps (born 1942), tried to reclaim paintings once owned by him and later sold in the 1940s by his widow, in breach of his will.