all that is known as culture,
Mendelssohn changed the whole aspect of Jewish life. And he produced
this reformation by books and by books alone. Never playing the part of
a religious or moral reformer, Mendelssohn became the Jewish apostle of
culture.

The great event of his life occurred in 1754, when he made the
acquaintance of Lessing. The two young men became constant friends.
Lessing, before he knew Mendelssohn, had written a drama, "The Jews," in
which, perhaps for the first time, a Jew was represented on the stage as
a man of honor. In Mendelssohn, Lessing recognized a new Spinoza; in
Lessing, Mendelssohn saw the perfect ideal of culture. The masterpiece
of Lessing's art, the drama "Nathan the Wise," was the monument of this
friendship. Mendelssohn was the hero of the drama, and the toleration
which it breathes is clearly Mendelssohn's. Mendelssohn held that there
was no absolutely best religion any more than there was an absolutely
best form of government. This was the leading idea of his last work,
"Jerusalem"; it is also the central thought of "Nathan the Wise." The
best religion, according to both, is the religion which best brings out
the individual's noblest faculties. As Mendelssohn wrote, there are
certain eternal truths which God implants in all men alike, but "Judaism
boasts of no exclusive revelation of immutable truths indispensable to
salvation."

What has just been quoted is one of the last utterances of Mendelssohn.
We must retrace our steps to the date of his first intimacy with
Lessing. He devoted his attention to the perfecting of his German style,
and succeeded so well that his writings have gained a place among the
classics of German literature. In 1763, he won the Berlin prize for an
essay on Mathematical Method in Philosophical Reasoning, and defeated
Kant entirely on account of his lucid and attractive style.
Mendelssohn's most popular philosophical work, "Phaedo, or the
Immortality of the Soul," won extraordinary popularity in Berlin, as
much for its attractive form as for its spiritual charms. The "German
Plato," the "Jewish Socrates," were some of the epithets bestowed on him
by multitudes of admirers. Indeed, the "Phaedo" of Mendelssohn is a work
of rare beauty.

One of the results of Mendelssohn's popularity was a curious
correspondence with Lavater. The latter perceived in Mendelssohn's
toleration signs of weakness, and believed that he could convert the
famous Jew to Christianity