ng into doubt the foundations
of Revealed as well as of Natural Theology. It was a bold thing to do,
for since he was come to Berlin, and had read more of his books, he
had gathered that Mendelssohn still professed Orthodox Judaism. A
paradox this to Maimon, and roundly denied as impossible when he first
heard of it. A man who could enter the lists with the doughtiest
champions of Christendom, whose German prose was classical, who could
philosophize in Socratic dialogue after the fashion of Plato--such a
man a creature of the Ghetto! Doubtless he took his Judaism in some
vague Platonic way; it was impossible to imagine him the literal
bond-slave of that minute ritual, winding phylacteries round his left
arm or shaking himself in a praying-shawl. Anyhow here--in logical
lucid Hebrew--were Maimon's doubts and difficulties. If Mendelssohn
was sincere, let him resolve them, and earn the blessings of a truly
Jewish soul. If he was unable to answer them, let him give up his
orthodoxy, or be proved a fraud and a time-server. _Amicus Mendelssohn
sed magis amica veritas._

In truth there was something irritating to the Polish Jew in the great
German's attitude, as if it held some latent reproach of his own. Only
a shallow thinker, he felt, could combine culture and spiritual
comfort, to say nothing of worldly success. He had read the
much-vaunted _Phoedon_ which Lutheran Germany hailed as a
counterblast to the notorious "Berlin religion," restoring faith to a
despondent world mocked out of its Christian hopes by the fashionable
French wits and materialists under the baneful inspiration of
Voltaire, whom Germany's own Frederick had set on high in his Court.
But what a curious assumption for a Jewish thinker to accept, that
unless we are immortal, our acts in this world are of no consequence!
Was not he, Maimon, leading a high-minded life in pursuit of Truth,
with no such hope? "If our soul were mortal, then Reason would be a
dream, which Jupiter has sent us in order that we might forget our
misery; and we should be like the beasts, only to seek food and die."
Nonsense! Rhetoric! True, his epistles to Lavater were effective
enough, there was courage in his public refusal of Christianity,
nobility in his sentiment that he preferred to shame anti-Jewish
prejudice by character rather than by controversy. He, Maimon, would
prefer to shame it by both. But this _Jerusalem_ of Mendelssohn's!
Could its thesis really be sustained? Judaism