Moses Mendelssohn

Born 6 September 1729 to a poor family in Dessau and set for the rabbinate, Mendelssohn instead educated himself in German thought and literature, a self-made scholar outside the traditional track. His writings on philosophy and religion made him a leading cultural figure among Christians and Jews across German-speaking Europe, a rare position for a Jewish thinker in the eighteenth century. His ideas on Jewish religion and identity became central to the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment that reshaped Jewish life through the nineteenth century. He also worked in Berlin's textile industry, the…