Die fünf Bücher Mose is Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation of the Torah—the Pentateuch—covering Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy. It is a translation of the Hebrew biblical text rather than a paraphrase or retelling, and it follows the five books in their traditional order. The German is printed in Hebrew characters, so the translation is read in the same alphabet as the Hebrew Scriptures. This choice of script is central to the work’s character: it presents German biblical text in a form accessible to Jewish readers literate in Hebrew but not necessarily in Latin letters.
In the fuller edition known as Netivot HaShalom, Mendelssohn’s translation is accompanied by a Hebrew commentary, the Bi’ur. The translation and commentary were produced by a group of scholars headed by Mendelssohn, with Solomon Dubno, Hartwig Wessely, Herz Homberg, and Aaron Friedenthal among the collaborators. The commentary proceeds in the order of the biblical text and attends to lexical and grammatical difficulties, clarifies syntax, and explains the plain sense of verses, often with reference to earlier Jewish exegesis. It is designed to accompany the Hebrew text and translation rather than to replace them.
The Genesis volume of the full edition includes preliminary materials that frame the project: Mendelssohn’s introductory work Or LiNetivah, rabbinic endorsements, Hartwig Wessely’s introductory poem Mahalal Re’a, and Solomon Dubno’s introduction. These materials present the translation as a serious scholarly and educational enterprise and prepare the reader for the verse-by-verse translation and commentary that follow.
The work’s scope is strictly the Five Books of Moses. It does not extend to the later biblical books, and it ends with Deuteronomy. Its central contents are the German rendering of the Pentateuch and, in the Netivot HaShalom form, the accompanying Hebrew Bi’ur on the same five books.
The translation and Bi’ur together function as a study text: the German aims to stay close enough to the Hebrew that the reader can see the underlying wording, while the commentary supplies what is needed to construe difficult or ambiguous verses. The translation therefore tends to preserve Hebrew idiom, repetition, and sentence structure where German can bear them, rather than smoothing the text into a free paraphrase; the commentary then explains what a literal rendering leaves obscure. In this way the work treats biblical Hebrew as a language with its own grammar and system, not merely as a code to be converted into German.
The Bi’ur also presents the Pentateuch as a coherent text whose plain sense can be explained rationally without abandoning traditional Jewish interpretation. It attends to narrative transitions, genealogies, chronology, geography, legal terminology, and ritual institutions, and it explains Hebrew expressions by comparing their uses elsewhere in the Bible. Earlier Jewish exegesis is used selectively, with midrashic and homiletical material subordinated to the explanation of the verse’s plain sense. The result is a commentary that is both pedagogical and interpretive: it teaches the reader how to read Hebrew and how to understand the Torah as the foundation of Jewish learning and practice, while the German translation remains an instrument of access to the Hebrew original rather than a replacement for it.
