The Mendelssohn Houses in Berlin

It took me forever to find this illustration of what seems to be the house where Felix Mendelssohn and his family lived when he was growing up in Berlin. Huge, isn't it?? This is a house, not a royal palace or government building or a university or a posh apartment complex!

But the German caption translates this as "The Mendelssohn House on Leipzig Street, Berlin." The official address of the house Abraham Mendelssohn purchased in 1825 was 3 Leipziger Strasse, Berlin. This is where the Sunday musicales took place and where the great minds of Berlin came to be entertained by music and conversation.

Behind the house were "several guest houses," as one source described it, plus a large park with sub-gardens where the family could walk and where Felix rode his horse.

This sketch (right) is labeled "Garden House in Leipzig Street where Mendelssohn's youthful works were [written]." It is officially undated and the artist is uncredited.

The caption's words aufgeführt wurden translate literally as "rose up" which doesn't sound good in English. However, it reminded me that Felix wrote to his sister Fanny that he was sitting in the garden reading Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream when he decided he would write a piece of music inspired by it. Maybe that's how this one "youthful work" rose up and became reality?

It gets very confusing because the house Mendelssohn lived in in the city of Leipzig is also called "The Mendelssohn House." The fact the Berlin house was located on Leipzig Street makes it even more confusing.

WARY OF WIKIPEDIA: A WARNING

I'm no fan of recommending Wikipedia as an on-line resource because it can be so inaccurate, but that's where I found this picture. Unfortunately, the person entering the data couldn't even translate a simple German caption correctly: he labeled it "The Mendelssohn House in Leipzig" when the German clearly says "in der Leipziger Strasse in Berlin" or "on Leipzig Street in Berlin." Well...

My question is - is the date 1900 correct? And why can't I find any information about when the house was demolished?

I knew, from several biographical sources, that his father Abraham bought a new, larger house on Leipzig Street in Berlin away from the busier part of the city and I knew that it no longer exists. But I've read nothing about when and why - was it torn down by the Nazis in the 1930s or was it bombed out during the Fall of Berlin in 1945? Was it demolished earlier in the century to make way for some other building? That often happens, too - ask anyone who's gone back to their old neighborhood and seen a familiar house or store replaced by a parking lot...

THE MENDELSSOHNS' HOUSE IN BERLIN

Anyway, today I was tooling around Google looking for any illustrations about Leipzig associated with Mendelssohn.

I had seen several photos of the house he lived in after he moved to Leipzig in 1835. But then I found this photograph (above) taken of the Berlin Mendelssohn House in 1900. If this is true, then this is the house Abraham Mendelssohn moved into in 1825, the year Felix Mendelssohn composed his Octet for Strings!

The family had continued living in the house and they continued to work in the family banking business until the 1930s. These were descendants of the youngest child, Paul Mendelssohn who went into their father's banking business. There were also descendants of Felix Mendelssohn's uncles who managed the company until 1938.

In 1888, a 2nd cousin of the composer (grandson of his Uncle Joseph) was "elevated" to the nobility, meaning they could add the 'von' to their name. And so a grandson of the composer became Otto von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the oldest son of Felix's brother Paul became Ernst von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy in 1896.

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THERE ARE TWO MENDELSSOHN HOUSES IN BERLIN

Here is a tourist travelogue video posted on YouTube - in German - about the Mendelssohn House - this one is the Bank Building and the house where other members of the Mendelssohn-Bartholdy family lived and worked. It was built by one of Felix's uncles. It is located at 51 Jäger Strasse about two blocks from Leipzig Street but perhaps in a different neighborhood from where Abraham Mendelssohn's house was located on 3 Leipzig Strasse.

At 0:14-0:27 you can see images of the Mendelssohn & Co. Bank with a sequence of the interior
of the house - a staircase - beginning at 0:40 with a shot of the building's main entrance (see photo). Felix Mendelssohn is mentioned but I think as a visitor to the house of his uncle and cousins. At 1:53-1:58, during an aerial view of this section of "the heart of" Berlin, they highlight The Mendelssohn House - in this case, this is where the bank building still stands.

This is a recent photograph of the doorway of the building that used to house the Mendelssohn Bank which was built in 1820 which can be seen at 0:41 for a couple of seconds before you go through the front door into the staircase leading up to the family's living quarters.
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This is a photograph that had been labeled "Mendelssohn House Berlin" but must refer to the banking house: it looks like a modern boardroom.

More photographs about the Leipzig House will be posted in a separate post.

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn, the Person

People might assume, because their parents were wealthy, the Mendelssohn children had it easy.

THE FAMILY SCHEDULE: HOME SCHOOLING in the EARLY 1800s

They were awakened at 5am.

They were taught at home with private tutors but music was just a fraction of the curriculum. In addition to German (their own language) they also were taught Latin, Greek, mathematics, a lot of European history, geography, aesthetics (Felix's teacher was the great philosopher Hegel), political philosophy, German and foreign literature and also drawing and water-coloring. They also learned to speak fluent French and English. Later, Felix also learned Italian.

On Sundays, they could sleep in till 6.

They would go for long hikes and ice-skated or rowed on the near-by river. They were excellent swimmers. As a child, Felix loved to ride a horse. Even when he was 24 and living away from home, he wrote to his father asking for permission to buy a horse (permission granted).

The garden was often the scene of out-door parties, the trees hung with paper-lanterns the children had made. The children even published their own in-house newspaper.

In addition, there were many music lessons. The younger daughter Rebecka sang and the younger son Paul played the cello. For both Felix and his older sister Fanny, there were piano lessons and composition lessons. Felix also studied the violin and the viola.

Very frequently they were among the performers for the family's Sunday afternoon musicales. So they had to rehearse, as well.

Around this schedule, Felix somehow found time to compose a great deal of music.

THE RESPONSIBILITY OF FAMILY

The house became an intellectual center in Berlin: many of the greatest minds in the city or visiting artists and professors would come to their musicales which included more than just music-making. Lea Mendelssohn was a very fine hostess and the food was first-rate. The Mendelssohns loved English customs, so great amounts of tea were consumed. And of course, with all these eloquent guests and great minds the conversation was especially lively.

Like the Kennedy Family, the children of the Mendelssohn Family knew they represented a leading Berlin family and therefore German culture. They were taught to speak well and to listen well. The girls were supposed to combine charm with knowledge. The boys were supposed to be able to do more than 'hold' a conversation.

Mendelssohn read a lot – for instance, Homer (in German) and Plato (in Greek). He read most of the novels of Sir Walter Scott, then all the rage, and Shakespeare (who was not all the rage) in both English and German. He also owned a copy of The Decameron, a 14th-Century collection of often bawdy love-stories (it was a gift from his mother-in-law). He read the novels of Charles Dickens and his library included large collections of the works by his mentor Goethe and his grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn.

Like many people in Berlin in the 1820s, the family was not outwardly religious – they did not attend temple before the children were converted to Christianity and they didn't really attend church on a regular basis afterward. That doesn't mean they didn't have a sense of faith. In fact, in one letter, Felix complained about people who were overly pious: he couldn't see himself that way.

TIME & MANNERS SHAPE THE PERSONALITY

He found England much to his liking. The British attitude of the “stiff upper lip” suited him as well as its manners and sense of reserve. Mendelssohn could be described as gentle, happy, charming, polite – above all, polite. One biographer described him as “a polite man who wrote polite music.”

Beethoven may have raged against the inhumanity of the Napoleonic Wars or the old-fashioned nobility or having his breakfast served late. Beethoven may have written music that “stormed the heavens” and opened new worlds to mortal men. None of this was Mendelssohn's style.

Many people think classical composers are a rather serious bunch, writing all this serious music. Mendelssohn had a sense of humor and loved lively conversation. He loved listening to and telling jokes, though compared to the off-beat and often dirty humor of Mozart or Beethoven, Mendelssohn's jokes would all be G-rated.

Unlike Franz Liszt and many other musicians of the era, Mendelssohn was not a ladies' man. He loved his wife and was very much at home in a domestic setting.

He was also a workaholic which no doubt contributed to his early death. He worked hard as a composer, a conductor, a pianist, even an organist as well as music director and music teacher who in his spare time organized music festivals and founded music schools.

He loved to travel. He made ten trips to England, mostly concert tours but they all included time to see the country, not just perform. He climbed Swiss mountains and took long hikes in the German countryside.

Luckily for him, he could fall asleep quickly and take a cat-nap on a couch in the middle of a party if he needed to.

Everything he did seemed effortless.

ALL THIS BUT STILL FULL OF DOUBT

But for some reason, he was often full of doubt about his own talent. He frequently revised his music. Sometimes it was written quickly, other times it took a long time to take shape. He worked hard and was suspicious of composers (or any creative artist) who “waited for the Divine Spark” of trance-like inspiration. He also was suspicious of a lot of technical talk about music: the important thing was not how it was composed but that it was composed well.

Not surprisingly, his manuscripts are very clean, usually free of corrections. But still, when he “finished” his Italian Symphony in 1833, he set it aside to revise it. That didn't keep him from playing it – it was a very popular work in his lifetime – but when he died 15 years later, he still hadn't published it.

He'd begun working on the “Scottish” Symphony when he was 22, not long after his trip to Scotland – he already had ideas for it written down while he was there – but he didn't actually “finish” it until he was 33.

The numbering of his works is very confusing. He never published the Reformation Symphony either, though it actually was the second of the mature symphonies he composed. It ended up becoming No. 5, making it look like it should be a late work. The second string quartet he composed was sent to the publisher before the first one.

Music publishers used a catalog system of “Opus Numbers” - opus is the Latin word for “work” - and we usually think of it as a chronological list: a composer finishes a piece, sends it to the publishers and then writes the next piece. That isn't always the case. A string quintet Mendelssohn published as his Op. 18 looks like it should've been written before the Octet, Op. 20 – but it was really written a year after the Octet.

Many people have different opinions about Mendelssohn's music. Just the other day, a friend on Facebook told me “If you can't recognize who wrote it, it must be Mendelssohn.” Meaning, I guess, that if it didn't sound like anybody else, it must be him!

Another friend told me recently that he didn't think much of his first two symphonies but figured that's because they were early works “and he hadn't found his voice yet.” I pointed out that that 2nd Symphony was written when he was 31 but two of his most famous pieces which my friend agreed definitely sounded like “mature Mendelssohn” were written when he was still in his mid-teens!

A LITTLE OF THIS, A LITTLE OF THAT

In a post about “classical vs. romantic,” I mentioned that Mendelssohn was a little of each, not one or the other. He preferred “classical” clarity and design but enjoyed “romantic” story-telling and pleasure (not so much the over-the-top emotionalism of someone like his friend Hector Berlioz whose “Symphonie fantastique” tells the story of a man having a bad experience on opium, imagining he's killed his girl-friend and then goes to Hell for her murder - oh, and he wrote this work to impress the woman he loved...).

Mendelssohn's music is primarily happy music – the finale of his Violin Concerto (written when he was 35) is just as exuberant as the opening of his Italian Symphony (begun when he was 22) or the whole Octet (composed when he was 16). (Check out the music videos, here.) When he wrote more emotional, sad or tender music, some people called it “sentimental” or “maudlin” - never tragic.

In another post - about Math, Science & Philosophy - I wrote about one of his teachers, the philosopher Hegel who is remembered today primarily for his “Hegelian Dialectic.” You take a statement or idea – call it a thesis – and then you take the opposite of that statement or idea – call it an antithesis (anti-thesis) – then take the best parts of both of them to create a kind of compromise – call it a synthesis.

Perhaps Mendelssohn himself was a living example of this: two parts classical (thesis) + one part romantic (antithesis) = Felix Mendelssohn (synthesis).

Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn's Family on his Mother's Side

This post is about the family of Felix Mendelssohn's mother, Lea Salomon Mendelssohn (see left).

In earlier posts, I wrote about Felix Mendelssohn's paternal grandfather, Moses Mendelssohn, a famous philosopher in the 2nd half of the 18th Century. I've written about the banking company his sons built and how Abraham became a member of the upper-class society. I've mentioned the house they lived in with its large music salon where they could hold private concerts where the children Felix and his sister Fanny performed.

THE MENDELSSOHN HOUSE

The Mendelssohn House in Berlin has long since disappeared – at first, I couldn't find any images or descriptions of the house, beyond this:

Abraham Mendelssohn bought a mansion in 1825 in a quiet section of Berlin. The property “included not only the main house of many rooms, but several guest houses” and a spacious park complete with large gardens where Felix enjoyed taking walks and riding his horse. “The main house contained large salons in which Sunday musicales were given to invited audiences as well as amateur theatricals.”

All of this would imply it was a pretty large house on a pretty large property (and Felix had a horse). After his sister Fanny married Wilhelm Hensel, they moved into one of the guest houses which then became their family home (so clearly, this one, at least, was not like a cottage in the park).

Later, I found a few images posted on-line that appear to be the house Mendelssohn grew up in. You can see them and read more about the house in this post. Somewhere I'd read (but cannot verify, now) that the house was demolished by the Nazis in the 1930s but it may have been torn down earlier. The photograph I found was apparently taken in 1900.

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MENDELSSOHN'S MOTHER, LEA

I had not read much about Felix's mother's family before. I knew she was descended from a wealthy Jewish family in Berlin. But here's what I found today while researching information about Mendelssohn's love of Bach's music.

Abraham's wife, Lea Salomon, was the granddaughter of Daniel Itzig (see left) whom I had seen described somewhere as “an important merchant.” That left out two important details in his life. One was his being appointed to be the Director of the Prussian Mint by King Frederick the Great; under his successor, Itzig was appointed the court banker. Considering neither king was especially tolerant of the Jews – they were not consistently anti-Semitic, either - it was an unusual situation. Daniel Itzig died in 1799, one of the wealthiest men in Berlin.

He had 13 children, most of whom lived to adulthood (unusual in those days of high infant and childhood mortality rates).

His daughter Bella (a.k.a. Babette) Itzig married Levin Salomon. Their son Jakob Salomon (see right) converted to Christianity during the Napoleonic Wars. He had recently purchased a garden estate from a man named Bartholdy, so he adopted that as his Christian family name. He advised his brother-in-law, Abraham Mendelssohn, to convert and take the name Bartholdy, too.

During the last years of Napoleon's wars, Bartholdy became a Prussian consul-general in Rome. He was a great patron of the arts, especially interested in the old art of fresco painting which still survived in Italy. He commissioned several German painters to learn this skill which had long been forgotten in Northern Europe.

Bella and Levin Salomon's daughter Lea married Abraham Mendelssohn. It was Bella (Babette) who gave her grandson Felix a score of Bach's “St. Matthew Passion.”

Daniel Itzig's son, Isaac Daniel Itzig, founded the “Jewish Free School” in Berlin in 1778, the first of its kind.

Susanna Itzig Friedlander's husband helped Moses Mendelssohn's sons found the Mendelssohn & Friedlander Bank which later became Mendelssohn & Co. In 1812, it was “one of the 20 most important banks in Berlin;” by 1823, one of the top 3.

Another son was the father of an architect who built many important buildings in Berlin, including the Stock Exchange (see illustration, right), built in 1859 on the site of the Itzig Family's house (see end of post). The Stock Exchange was a target of the Allied bombing raids and destroyed in 1945.

Sarah Itzig (see left) married Solomon Levy. She studied piano with W.F. Bach, the oldest son of Johann Sebastian Bach. She was a well-known musician in Berlin, performing at the Sing-Academy. She was Lea Salomon Mendelssohn's aunt and a strong musical presence in Felix Mendelssohn's early years.

Nowhere could I find any explanation why it was okay for Sarah Levy to perform in public (whether she was paid or not) but it wasn't for her great-niece, Fanny Mendelssohn. Perhaps it was a generational thing...

Two other daughters married Viennese bankers and were friends and patrons of Mozart's.

Here is a photograph of the Itzig House (right) taken in 1857 (making this also a fairly early photograph)/ Two years later, it was demolished and replaced by the Stock Exchange (see above), designed and built by Daniel Itzig's grandson.

How does it compare to the Mendelssohn Family House? You certainly do get the idea that it's a big house and this is a very wealthy family. No wonder Felix Mendelssohn never had to worry about personal finances...

- Dr. Dick

Mendelssohn's Sister and Her World

Felix Mendelssohn's older sister, Fanny, was also a pianist and compoer. She had begun piano lessons as a child and was taking composition lessons with Carl Friedrich Zelter before Felix did. She quickly exhibited admirable talent in both areas.

However, the prevailing prejudice toward women in the public eye at this time in history meant that while it was fine for Felix to pursue a career in music as a performer and a composer, it was not for his sister.

When she was 15, her father Abraham told her that music might be a career for Felix – he was only 11 years old at the time – “but for you, it will be only an ornament.” In other words, she could play and compose as much as she wanted to but she couldn't make a living at it. Her primary role in life was to be a wife and mother. The men earned the money.

In fact, it wasn't so much as “making a living at it” as that she would not be able to earn money by it. She could perform privately as often as she wished – as in their Sunday musicales – but not in public where people would pay to hear her and she would be paid or that critics would criticize her playing in public newspapers.

Two years after his father Abraham died and Felix was now 28 and recently married, his mother Lea asked Felix to help Fanny get her music published. He declined but explained that publishing meant a commitment to continuously be supplying new works to be published. Fanny was not in the habit of writing a great deal (though one wonders if she could have been, given the opportunity). He would assist her if she really felt it necessary (or to please her husband) but he wrote “I cannot encourage her to do what I do not deem right myself.”

People point out that Clara Wieck Schumann had long been one of the major pianists of the day. While she no longer wrote very much music as the wife of Robert Schumann and the mother of eight children, still, she was busy concertizing all across Europe, especially following the final illness and eventual death of her husband.

The difference is primarily one of class. While Berlin was more conservative (and conventional) than Leipzig, Clara was also not from a wealthy upper-middle-class family. Her father, Friedrich Wieck (pronounced VEEK) had planned a musical career for her when she was a child (in fact, he had plans to turn her into a concert pianist even before she was born, but that's a long story and doesn't concern us, here). He even took Schumann to court to keep them from getting married because he did not want him interfering with Clara's career (or the money he would've made from it). But Robert was the composer in the family and when he was busy writing, she couldn't even practice because it would disturb him. And of course there were the children...

In Fanny Mendelssohn's case, being from a wealthy family, it was just unseemly that a woman should earn money, especially upon the concert stage.

It's not the she chafed under this, though at times it irritated her.

There are a series of letters between her and Felix while he was in Paris, complaining about all the music he had to hear and all the composers he had to meet. She practically exploded, being cooped up in the house back in Berlin. What she wouldn't have given to be there with him!

She continued to compose as well as perform at the family musicales. When she married her husband, Wilhelm Hensel – technically, we should refer to her as Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel, by the way – they lived in one of the former “guest-houses” on the Mendelssohn House's property in Berlin. Though given privacy, she was essentially her parents' neighbor and could easily take over managing the Sunday musicales. That was to be her outlet.

Even though she had known Hensel for at least five years - an artist, he had sketched portraits of everybody in the family but tone-deaf (they used to joke, in this musical family, that Hensel couldn't even hum a popular old Christmas carol) - she wasn't sure how her new married life would affect her musical life. Would her husband forbid her to compose music?

The story is told that the day after their wedding, Hensel asked her to sit down at the piano. He placed a blank piece of manuscript paper in front of her, implying she could write whatever she wanted.

In 1847, when she was 41, she was in the midst of rehearsing an up-coming performance of one her brother's choral works when she had a stroke and died later that day. Felix himself was so distraught at this early and sudden death, it affected his own health in such away that he never recovered, and he deteriorated until, six months later, he had a series of strokes and died as well.

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BROTHER & SISTER

They had been very close all their lives. They used to joke about being twins, they were so much alike. He was proud of her musicianship and specifically showed some of her songs to Goethe's wife who then sang them for the great poet during one of his visits.

In order for some of her music to reach a wider public, he even published some of her songs and piano pieces as his own. This wasn't meant that he was trying to steal it or gain anything by not telling the truth about who wrote it: it was just “unseemly” or “unlady-like” for it to have been published under her own name. In fact, Fanny was quite flattered by it. Only a few people knew the true identity of these songs.

(This portrait, right, of Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel was made in 1842).

He wrote to her to tell her an amusing story. When he was in London in 1842, he met Queen Victoria and her husband, Prince Albert, for a social afternoon of talk and music-making. When the Prince mentioned that she loved to sing his songs, Mendelssohn asked her to choose her favorite and sing it for him. The song she chose was actually one that Fanny had written. He told his sister how it delighted him to know this but he was unable to confess the truth to the Queen of England!

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PUBLIC vs. PRIVATE

Fanny Mendelssohn performed once in public, playing her brother's 1st Piano Concerto (the work Stuart Malina will be performing with the Harrisburg Symphony in February 2010).

There is another story I had read in program notes for her one substantial orchestral work, a 10-minute overture called, simply, “Overture.” I've not seen it mentioned anywhere else so I'm not sure if it's true but it would be possible.

It was the only time she conducted any of her music in public, at a concert in a city in East Prussia where she was visiting friends. In her honor, the orchestra had programmed an Overture she had composed around 1830 (in fact, it is only known as “Overture”) and at the concert, the conductor asked her to lead the orchestra for it. Whether it was because she was far from Berlin and her social circle, a few years after her father had died and was no longer around to disapprove.

Despite all this, she composed about 250 songs, 125 piano pieces, an occasionally heard piano trio, a string quartet I've never heard, four cantatas and an oratorio called simply “Oratorio on Biblical Themes.” All these were written for and performed in the family's Sunday afternoon musicales.

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SOME OTHER COMPOSERS WHO HAPPEN ALSO TO BE WOMEN

If the Mendelssohns had lived in Paris or London, it's possible Fanny's life could have been different. But the class role of a woman in society might not have been very different in a different country.

In the United States, there was a young woman who had been a child prodigy, able to sing counter-melodies to the songs her mother sang to her when she was 2 and composing waltzes at the piano when she was 4. Amy Marcy Cheney only had one year of training in composition, but made her debut as a concert pianist when she was either 16 in Boston. One of the works she performed was a piano concerto by a friend of Felix Mendelssohn's, a German composer named Ignaz Moscheles (pronounced MOH-sheh-less).

Her plans for a career, however, came to a halt when she was married to a Boston physician named Dr. Henry Beach who was 24 years older than she was. She agreed to limit her concertizing to one performance a year, donating the money she'd earn to charity. But he didn't say she couldn't compose.

So that is how she realized her musical needs. She wrote lots of piano music and a large number of songs which could be played at home for her own musicales. But she also composed a large Mass for chorus and orchestra was had quite a public success in 1892 and four years later she composed the first symphony ever written by an American Woman (it's called the “Gaelic” Symphony because it uses Irish and Scottish tunes as the basis for its themes). She signed herself Mrs. H. H. A. Beach.

But soon after her husband died in 1910, she was back on the road, concertizing across the USA and Europe, continuing to perform and compose until she died in 1944.

It is only recently that composers who are women have begun being treated on more equal footings with those who are men. One of the busiest composer today is Jennifer Higdon. A string quartet of hers will be performed this season at the January 23rd concert of Harrisburg's Market Square Concerts. She has an orchestral work on the program with the Harrisburg Symphony the following weekend.

She has many new works being commissioned, including an opera to be written for the San Francisco Opera. Women of the previous generation were breaking through the “glass ceiling,” sometimes having their music performed or getting commissions for new ones because they were women. Composers of this generation are getting performances and commissions because they're composers: the fact they also happen to be women is less of an issue.

Dr. Dick

Moses Mendelssohn, the Composer's Grandfather

Into our story, now, comes Moses Mendelssohn, born in 1729 to a poor Jewish peddler known locally as Mendel. German Jews had no right, at that time, to “formal names” and so when the boy was given the name Moses (perhaps the most common boys' name among the Jews of his town), neighbors called him “Moses, Mendel's son.”

Regardless of the family's poverty, the father was determined the boy would have as much education as possible. Eventually Moses studied law – which is what most students studied if they wanted to achieve the most well-rounded education available.

Trained in the art of speculation in the Talmud, Moses found the Enlightenment – where you examined a question “like an insect imbedded in amber, put under the microscope, turned this way and that, disassembled and reassembled before you could be sure of the answer” – a natural fit for him.

(In this drawing, Mendelssohn, seated on the left, discusses an idea with two fellow philosophers.)

While treating religion this way may affect a person's faith, philosophers found the Enlightenment gave them nothing to believe in instead, having taken away the comfort of even a mild faith where religion – if not its dogma – gave comfort and meaning to the “big questions” of our existence and our direction.

But in his Phaedo (written in 1767), “three dialogues [after Plato] on the Immortality of the Soul” – essentially a translation of Plato into German but with up-dates – Moses Mendelssohn argued that Reason in fact led to Religion, that God did exist (when others argued, because He could not be seen, He did not exist) but that “the religious instinct may not serve as a reason to enforce acceptance of any one specific religious doctrine.” He believed in Judaism because, to him, no other religion contained as many admonitions to lead believers toward “justice, piety, obedience to law and state, human warmth (humanity).” In reality, he wrote, it made no real difference what religion one chose:

“All religions are partly theoretical and partly practical. Their theoretical side has no influence on morality. Men often have constructed false moralities from true theories and true morality from false theories... Religion makes it easier to do good because it cites motives for doing so. Any religion does that if it holds out the promise to man that doing good will please God and the evil will displease Him. Yet the definition of what is 'good' is impeded by the prejudices of various religions. You ask me which religion is least impeded? I answer, the religion which permits the greatest freedom to Reason.”

Later, he also wrote that he believed the Jews had helped separate themselves from the society they lived in by holding their services in Hebrew. He felt they should adopt the language of the country they lived in rather than the language of their heritage. Keep in mind Catholicism still maintained its religious services in Latin – the use of the “vernacular” or language of the location was still controversial when it became a reality following the 2nd Vatican Council (Vatican II) which met in the 1960s.

Moses Mendelssohn also opposed the idea of a Homeland – the Zionist dream of returning to what is now Israel was already gaining popularity in the 18th Century – believing that “Home lies where your home is.” “The wall of the ghetto must be torn down by men working from inside as well as from outside.”

He began translating the first five books of the Bible (the Pentateuch) into German. But rabbis declared this translation an act of heresy (it should be read only in Hebrew), proposing a series of punishments for Jews caught reading it. The Danish king, Christian VII, for one, came out in favor of Mendelssohn's work and made it illegal to carry out the rabbis' plan.

(By the way, in 1820, Franz Schubert set Moses Mendelssohn's translation of the 23rd Psalm to music for women's voices and piano.)

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THE MONKEYS

Though these ideas were controversial, Moses Mendelssohn's works were popular with the general German public and he was highly regarded. That didn't mean people like Frederick the Great or members of his government couldn't still get away with anti-Semitic statements and acts.

For one, it had been decided early in 1761, that when Jews married or bought a house, they were required – by royal edict – to buy certain amounts of porcelain from the Royal Porcelain Factory in Berlin. The Jewish buyer could not even choose what they might want: it was just handed to them.

When Moses Mendelssohn married, he had to buy twenty porcelain monkeys which became a symbol in the Mendelssohn family, passed on from father to son as a reminder, until the 1930s and the rise of Hitler. After that, the monkeys disappeared.

(I don't know if these are similar to the Mendelssohn Monkeys or not - they were also made at a different porcelain factory - but they date from around the period. I saw a trumpet-playing monkey from this set listed on-line for sale at $1,862. I also doubt it was the Mendelssohn Monkeys that were the inspiration for Warren Zevon's 2000 song, 'Porcelain Monkeys' from his album "Life'll Kill Ya".)

This edict was repealed in 1787 and in 1808, “deserving Jews” in Berlin were awarded citizen's privileges, including the right to be elected to honorary posts. In 1812, shortly after Abraham Mendelssohn brought his family to Berlin, Prussia issued the “Emancipation Edict” declaring all Jews full-scale citizens.

Moses Mendelssohn, who had earned the king's favor as a “Protected Jew,” had died in 1786.

In 1813, his son, Abraham (see drawing, right), was honored as a public benefactor for helping to finance the army that defeated Napoleon in that year's war. He was then appointed to Berlin's Municipal Council. Imagine what his own grandfather, Mendel the Peddler, would have thought of that!

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MOSES MENDELSSOHN MEETS HIS WIFE

The story passed down in the Mendelssohn family about how Moses met his future wife may or may not be true, but it's a wonderful story.

In 1762, when Moses was 33 years old and already well-known, he visited Hamburg where he met a 24-year old blonde, blue-eyed Jewish girl named Fromet Gugenheim, the daughter of a merchant. She knew him by reputation and had read some of his books but was surprised when she first saw him. He was short, frail-looking and humpbacked. She burst into tears.

Mendelssohn asked her, “Is it my hump?” he asked. She nodded. Then he continued, “Let me tell you a story, then.”

“When a Jewish child is born,” he began, “proclamation is made in heaven of the name of the person that he or she is to marry. When I was born, my future wife was also named, but at the same time it was said that she herself would be humpbacked. ‘O God,’ I said, ‘a deformed girl will become embittered and unhappy. Dear Lord, let me have the hump, and make her fair and beautiful.’”

Fromet (see drawing, left) was touched by the story, and in June 1762, they were married. They had nine children, six of whom grew to adulthood (considering the mortality of children in the 18th Century, this was a luckier family than many).

Another story was told, that when Moses was out walking with two of his young sons, they were attacked by some men who called them names and threw stones at them. One of his sons asked his father, “Papa, is it such a disgrace to be a Jew?” He wrote to a friend that he lowered his eyes, sighed and thought to himself, “Men, men – where have you led yourselves?” On the other hand, he was able to rent a large private garden where he and his family could walk without being molested.

The eldest child, a daughter named Brendel (later changed to Dorothea), married a merchant chosen for her by her father (typical of the day but rather old-fashioned for a modern thinker like Moses Mendelssohn). After bearing four children to her husband, she met the young philosopher and writer Friedrich Schlegel, son of a Protestant clergyman. They fell in love and she ran away with him, living together until they got married four years later. They both converted to Catholicism a couple of years after that. Dorothea also became a writer and novelist.

The family's three sons founded a banking corporation in Hamburg, the main German port. This became one of the major banks in Germany. The second youngest son, Abraham, established himself with the firm in Paris in 1797 before moving back to Hamburg in 1804, then moving back to the family's home in Berlin in 1811 (see A Mendelssohn Chronology). It was in 1809, during their years in Hamburg, that Abraham's son Felix, the composer, was born. (The photograph at left shows the entrance to the Mendelssohn Bank, in a building opened in 1820.)

Once Felix had become one of the most internationally famous composers and a busy conductor, Abraham Mendelssohn (whose own success in the field of commerce was considerable) quipped “I am the son of my father and the father of my son.”

A biographer later wrote of the three generations of Mendelssohn men: “One wrote books, one wrote loans, the other wrote music.”

- Dr. Dick