The Brockhaus collection of a philosopher’s metaphysical, Jewish and literary writings
A Seven-Volume Collection Issued Decades After the Author’s Death
The Gesammelte Schriften is the collected edition of Moses Mendelssohn’s writings in German, issued in seven volumes by the Brockhaus publishing house; its first publication date is given as 1843, and library records date the set to 1843–1845, with the fourth volume divided into two separately paged parts. Mendelssohn (1729–1786), one of the leading philosophers of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment, had been dead for well over half a century when the collection appeared, so the edition is posthumous and retrospective in character. Cataloguing for the set places it under German philosophy and German letters, reflecting a body of work that moves between metaphysics, religious controversy, literary criticism and translation. The name associated with the edition in library records is that of Georg Benjamin Mendelssohn.
Biography and Introductions as the Entry Point
The first volume does not begin with Mendelssohn’s own texts but with a life of him by Joseph Mendelssohn, followed by a general introduction to his philosophical writings by Ch. A. Brandis, before the philosophical writings themselves are given in two parts. The set is thus framed from the outset as both a monument and an introduction: the reader is offered a biographical account and a scholarly orientation before encountering the treatises, and the ordering makes clear that the edition was conceived as a whole rather than as a loose accumulation of reprints.
Metaphysics, the Immortality of the Soul and the Existence of God
The second volume gathers the speculative heart of Mendelssohn’s output. It contains the treatise on evidence in the metaphysical sciences; Phädon, oder über die Unsterblichkeit der Seele, his dialogue on the immortality of the soul; a treatise on the incorporeality of the human soul; Morgenstunden, oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes, the lectures on the existence of God; a treatment of the scientific concepts of God’s existence; and Sache Gottes, oder Die gerettete Vorsehung, a defence of providence. Taken together, these titles show the range of his philosophical project: questions of philosophical method and proof, the nature and destiny of the soul, and rational theology.
The Lavater Affair, Judaism and Religious Power
The third volume is the collection’s most concentrated body of religious and political writing. It opens with An die Freunde Lessings, the address to Lessing’s friends, and with the open letter to Johann Caspar Lavater of Zurich, printed together with Lavater’s reply and Mendelssohn’s own afterword — the exchange in which Mendelssohn was publicly pressed either to refute Bonnet’s arguments or to convert. Around it the volume assembles his correspondence with Lavater, with Bonnet and with the hereditary prince of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, his reflections on Bonnet’s Palingenesis, and his German version, made from the English, of Manasseh ben Israel’s Vindication of the Jews. It also contains Jerusalem, oder über religiöse Macht und Judenthum, his treatise on religious power and Judaism. Placing the polemical letters, the translation and the treatise side by side lets the reader see the defence of Judaism and the argument about the limits of religious authority as one continuous engagement rather than as isolated episodes. The volume closes with the first instalment of shorter writings already published in Mendelssohn’s lifetime.
Literary Criticism, Aesthetics and Correspondence
The two parts of the fourth volume continue the shorter pieces and add writings not previously printed, including remarks on the fine sciences and the liberal arts, and they document his activity as a critic through his contributions to the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend and to the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek. The fifth volume turns entirely to letters: the correspondence with Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, accompanied by Friedrich Nicolai’s annotations, the correspondence with Thomas Abbt together with annotations on Abbt’s Freundschaftliche Correspondenz, letters to various recipients, letters to Herz Homberg, and letters to Elise Reimarus, Johann Albert Heinrich Reimarus and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. This pairing of criticism with correspondence gives the set a documentary dimension, preserving the networks through which Mendelssohn’s ideas circulated.
Ritual Law, Poetry and the German Pentateuch
The final two volumes shift to Jewish law, liturgy, poetry and Bible translation. The sixth contains the Ritualgesetze der Juden drafted by Mendelssohn, his verse translations of the Song of Deborah from Judges 5, the Psalms and the Song of Solomon, together with poems, a formula of admonition for the Jewish oath, a peace sermon dated 1763, a devotional exercise, and an occasional piece on Professor Kypke’s accusations against the Jewish community of Königsberg with particular attention to the Alenu prayer. It also includes translations from a work by Rabbi Jedaja Hapnini Badraschi, a rendering of Judah Halevi’s elegy to Zion, samples of rabbinic wisdom, and a letter preserved in Hebrew. The seventh volume is devoted to the Pentateuch: Mendelssohn’s introduction to his translation of the Five Books of Moses, the translation itself, and corrections and additions.
A Later Collection Under the Same Title
The title Gesammelte Schriften was later given to a separate scholarly enterprise, the Jubiläumsausgabe, which reproduces the 1929 edition in facsimile. Begun by Ismar Elbogen and carried forward by Alexander Altmann and Eva J. Engel, in cooperation with Fritz Bamberger and others, it is organised by subject rather than by the older volume scheme: writings on philosophy and aesthetics, writings on Judaism, Hebrew writings, the Briefe, die neueste Litteratur betreffend with commentary, the Pentateuch translation and commentary, correspondence, and documentary volumes including early Mendelssohn biographies and a volume of portraits and pictorial documents. Readers encountering the title should therefore distinguish the nineteenth-century Brockhaus set from this later, annotated edition.
