Mendelssohn & His Jewish Heritage

Felix Mendelssohn was born in the Jewish faith two hundred years ago. His grandfather was the famous philosopher, Moses Mendelssohn. His great-grandfather had been born in a Jewish ghetto in the German city of Dessau.

As you've read in previous posts, the attitude in much of Europe was anti-Semitic. During the course of the 19th Century this may have lessened somewhat but it was never far from the surface.

Even when laws and social attitudes were more tolerant of Jews, still the Prussian government could declare than any Berlin Jew, when he married or bought a house, had to purchase a certain amount of porcelain from the Royal Porcelain Factory. They couldn't even choose what they might have preferred: they were just handed something and told to pay for it. That's how Moses Mendelssohn became the owner of a set of 20 porcelain monkeys. These monkeys became a symbol to future generations of the family until they disappeared in the years before World War II.

TOLERATION, ASSIMILATION & CONVERSION

During Mendelssohn's life, there was some toleration of the Jews but it did not mean there was an end to discrimination. He saw that if his children were to “get ahead” in the world, they would have to do it as a member of the state-supported religion which, in Berlin, was Protestant Lutheranism.

And so Felix's father, Abraham decided his children should be converted to the Lutheran faith. After all, Moses Mendelssohn had supported the idea of “assimilation,” which meant that Jews would leave the ghettos, blend into the society around them. It didn't mean they should necessarily convert but by placing less emphasis on certain aspects of their heritage and adopting those of the culture they lived in, they would become another faith living among many rather than something more easily scorned.

When Felix was 7 years old, he and his brother and sisters were baptized. It was actually several more years before Abraham and his wife converted.

FELIX MENDELSSOHN BARTHOLDY

An maternal uncle who had already converted suggested they adopt the name “Bartholdy,” after a property he had purchased from an important Protestant merchant of that name. And so, Felix became “Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy” (with or without a hyphen).

As an adult on the verge of international fame, Felix was advised by his father to drop the Mendelssohn altogether and just be Felix Bartholdy, but Felix refused, using both names officially (see his signature, left). I'm not sure when it happened that people began to drop the Bartholdy instead, but it was relatively recent and not a decision on Mendelssohn's part, himself.

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MENDELSSOHN as a MAN OF FAITH

They had never been exactly “religious Jews.” Mendelssohn never had firm roots in the faith he was born into. He grew up, basically, as a Lutheran but not a profoundly religious one. Today, the world is full of people who profess a faith but may not go to church. How many people today go to church twice a year, only at Christmas & Easter? In Germany in the 1800s, it was very similar.

MENDELSSOHN & ANTI-SEMITISM

But that didn't change the fact that Mendelssohn was born a Jew or “looked Jewish.” His parents were both Jewish and their families had long traditions in the faith, culture and ethnic heritage.

In 1830, Mendelssohn wrote a symphony (later called his “Reformation” Symphony) to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of Martin Luther's Augsburg Confession, an important event in the history of the Lutheran Church. It was not performed even though it included in its last movement one of Martin Luther's most famous hymns, “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” It was rejected from the festival celebrating the event probably because the composer was considered a Jew but it may also have been because it was a little too over-the-top for what the people organizing the festival were looking for. Most likely, it was a little of both. (Anyway, Mendelssohn only performed the symphony once. No one else heard it until it was published and performed again in 1868, over 20 years after his death.)

There is a belief among musicians and scholars that Mendelssohn felt “unanchored” because he had converted to Christianity. Two of his oratorios were inspired by Biblical characters – his most famous was Elijah, one of the greatest of all Jewish prophets; the second was a New Testament figure, St. Paul, who had originally been a Jew persecuting the early Christians until he was converted in a blinding flash "on the Road to Damascus." At the time of his death, Mendelssohn was also working on a new oratorio called Christus.

Mendelssohn was brought up in the Protestant tradition and loved the music of Bach, one of the greatest Lutheran musicians of the 18th Century. He brought Bach's music back into public awareness with a performance of Bach's St. Matthew Passion when he was 20 years old. This was a dramatic work telling the story of Christ's crucifixion, using the Gospel of Matthew as the basis for its text.

When he was 28, he fell in love with the daughter of a French Protestant minister. In fact, it was many months after the wedding until he took his wife home to meet the family.

Throughout his life, Mendelssohn was neither dogmatic nor pious about his religion, new or old. Just as they never attended temple when he was a child, he rarely attended church as a Christian. He might chose a church to attend more on the basis of what music was being performed, how well it was being performed or if they had a good pipe organ he wanted to hear or play, rather than how the faith was interpreted to the congregation by its preacher.

When a German critic complained about the “Hebraic elements” and music from the synagogue he heard in Mendelssohn's music, the French composer Hector Berlioz wrote in one of his newspaper articles if the critic would have made “such a foolish statement” is he hadn't known the composer of St. Paul and Elijah was a grandson of a man named Moses? “It is hard to see,” he continued, “how these [Jewish musical traditions] could have influenced the musical style of Felix Mendelssohn since he never professed the Jewish religion. Everyone knows he was a Lutheran and an earnest Lutheran at that.”

When he conducted at a German music festival in a city on the Rhine, there were demonstrators, students, who paraded in front of the concert hall with a placard reading “Christian Music for Christian Musicians.” They were dispersed by the police and probably Mendelssohn never even knew about it. Such public attitudes may not have been rare but they weren't the standard reaction to Mendelssohn or his music.

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WAGNER & MENDELSSOHN

Richard Wagner, who was openly anti-Semitic, was no great friend or supporter of Mendelssohn during his lifetime (by then Wagner had completed his opera, Lohengrin). A few years after Mendelssohn's death, Wagner published a newspaper article under a pseudonym entitled “Judenthum in Musik” which is best translated as “Jewishness in Music” though to be less offensive it's often called by the less pejorative word, “Judaism in Music.”

He attacked two composers in particular – Mendelssohn (who was already dead) as well as Giacomo Meyerbeer, a Jewish composer of German birth who preferred the Italian form of his first name, Jakob, and had added his maternal great-grandfather's name Meyer to his original last name, Beer (his father was also a banker; in fact, Meyerbeer also studied for a time with Zelter who had been Mendelssohn's principal teacher).

Wagner expanded and republished it as a book in 1869, about five years after Meyerbeer's death. The original article, published in a magazine with a circulation of about 1,200 readers, was mostly an embarrassment to Wagner's friends (like Franz Liszt who thought it was a passing phase) and an annoyance to Mendelssohn's fans. Wagner had hoped it would create a sensation and advance his career as a writer and make him lots of money. In this sense, it failed completely.

Wagner felt that Mendelssohn's conservative musical style was “in the way” of his own more advanced style which some were already calling “Music of the Future.” Meyerbeer was one of the most powerful men in the European musical world and had a great deal to do with the failure of Wagner's earlier operas to get produced, especially in Paris where he ruled the opera house. With many of his other essays and articles discriminating against Jewish musicians and their supporters, this book became an embarrassment to people who supported him or liked his music, several of whom were Jewish. Many people dismissed Wagner's prose writings (and with it, these political manifestos) with the expression, “He was a great composer but a terrible writer.” Most people dismissed it as “sour grapes” and musically political, trying to destroy the music of his detractors, than anything socially viable.

It also isn't likely these writings, not well known to later generations, were ever part of Hitler's readings or those of anyone formulating the politics of the growing Nazi party. Though it had been reprinted in the 1930s in Germany, there was little interest in it until after World War II.

But still, looking back on the history of the 19th Century, the attitude of Wagner remains. It was also a symptom of the society he lived in. Not to be too light about it, it is another form of discrimination and one that had tragic consequences difficult to analyze rationally.

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

A Little Bit about Religion in Germany

It is very difficult to tell just the facts of someone's life without giving the background of the times that person lived in. This project barely scratches the surface of what life was like in Germany two hundred years ago and even that has to be "led up to" with more background.

Mendelssohn was born in the Jewish faith.

This one observation and the impact it had on his life needs some background about the attitude toward Jews in Germany then and about the religious attitudes of the culture in general. What I'm writing about or quoting in these posts reflects the ideas and beliefs at the time and were not necessarily the ideas and beliefs of everybody. Any discussion of religious attitudes today could not possibly cover everything in a few pages - or not manage to offend someone.

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BEFORE 1800

The Protestant Reformation – “protesters” breaking away from the Roman Catholic Church – began in Germany in 1517 with Martin Luther. In the decades that followed, Catholic princes tried to destroy the Protestant princes, mostly through warfare. But it was the people who suffered, especially during the devastating 30-Years War (1618-1648).

(See the European map, left, showing the German States in 1648 at the end of the 30-years War. Notice all the different smaller principalities - some 300 of them - making up what we know of as Germany, today. Compare them to the larger nations like France; Poland at the time was one of the largest countries in Europe - by 1795, it had been partitioned between its neighbors, Austria, Prussia and Russia, and no longer existed.)

The German lands were now divided between the largely Protestant north and the Catholic south, dominated by Austria. During the 1700s, Prussia (once just part of Brandenburg) – initially ruled by a duke who then decided to call himself a king – quickly became a powerful military force and took on a leading role among the northern princes. A “soldier-king” created a military-like bureaucracy. His son, who loved to play the flute and enjoyed writing his own music, turned out to be an even greater military ruler, expanding the boundaries of Prussia in wars with Austria, Russia, Poland and France and earning in his lifetime the nickname “Frederick the Great” (see picture, right).

In addition to his passion for music, he was a close friend of the great French philosopher Voltaire who once quipped that “other states have an army: the Prussian Army has a state.” He called Frederick “the Philosopher King.” His capital, Berlin, had been a kind of sleepy back-water city that was suddenly thrust into the lime-light by its sudden rise to power in the late-1600s. To improve the culture there, he invited artists and philosophers to live there, including a well-known Jewish philosopher named Moses Mendelssohn, the grandfather of the composer Felix Mendelssohn.

This was an age called “The Enlightenment” when rulers governed more by reason rather than religious faith, making reforms by moral principles based on a set of values than political or religious ideas. Many of its principles found expression in the French Revolution as well as in the founding of the United States of America.

His nephew Friedrich Wilhelm II, who succeeded him, was more interested in entertaining himself. He also enjoyed music, maintaining a fine orchestra and a string quartet, often playing the cello in it. Mozart wrote his last string quartets for the Prussian king, hoping to be given a job in Berlin as a court composer (he wasn't). Beethoven dedicated two cellos sonatas to the king (he gave him a nice ring as thanks).

Friedrich Wilhelm II also became a Rosicrucian, a member of a secret society that claimed to date back to the Medieval Ages built on “esoteric truths,” though in reality it probably developed around 1600 during the years of fighting between the Catholics and newly-formed Protestant churches.

The Masons were also a society founded on secret rituals with social intent that meshed well with the Enlightenment, but Rosicrucianism as observed by the Prussian king seemed less capable of working in a rational atmosphere and as a result, Prussia ended up becoming bankrupt by the time the king died and was much diminished in size and international prestige after losing war after war. When he died in 1797, his nickname could be translated “The Fat Fool.”

Even though many of the wars fought between the German states started in religious rivalries, both churches needed military protection, especially in the smaller states, and so essentially became subservient to the civil powers and secular states. The Catholic states became less attentive to the Pope's authority in Rome. The Protestant states became less centralized about their faith, preferring family prayers to eloquence from the pulpit.

This led to a variety of other Protestant sects – a movement called Pietism (after the word 'piety') which included the Moravian Brotherhood who had been banished from Catholic Bohemia but found a home in Protestant Germany (they also eventually found a home here in Pennsylvania).

This sense of religious mysticism was contradictory with the standard philosophies of the Enlightenment. The late-1700s was becoming an Age of Doubt. As Will & Ariel Durant explains in the 11th volume of their “History of Civilization”:

“The Prussian Protestant clergy had by that time... come to think of Jesus as a lovable mystic who proclaimed the approaching end of the world. In 1800, a hurried observer reported that religion was dead in Germany and that 'it is no longer the fashion to be a Christian.' ... Such reports were emotionally exaggerated... it hardly touched the German masses. ...Faith always recovers and doubt remains.”

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THE QUEST for "JEWISH EMANCIPATION"

As faith weakened, toleration grew.

Like much of Europe, Germany had long been an anti-Semitic country, but (continuing to quote Durant) “it became impossible for an educated Christian to hate a modern Jew because of a political crucifixion eighteen centuries ago,” perhaps recalling those same Jews had met Jesus with palm leaves when he entered Jerusalem on Palm Sunday.

Before the Enlightenment, Jews were forced (either politically or socially, sometimes by law, other times for their own protection) to live in ghettos.

In the 1770s, freed by Emperor Joseph II in Austria and later in the Rhineland and in Prussia, they emerged from the ghettos and “assimilated” to became part of many cities' society.

This was, at least, the attitude of most of the educated classes: among the uneducated poor, this was not the case.

In some areas, resentment lingered, mostly because of economic competition in trade and banking. In 1810, Napoleon, who then controlled most of the Confederation of the Rhine, applied his own laws granting freedoms to the Jews of France to the Jews of Germany. In many countries, this was referred to as "Jewish Emancipation."

But as Jewish doctors and scholars and scientists mingled with Christians, intellectual Jewish women held salons where philosophy was discussed with some of the finest minds in the country.

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While this post reflects events mostly in the 18th and early-19th Centuries, it does not reflect the attitudes and events of the second half of the 19th Century or the 20th Century and the 2nd World War, times when Jews were once again forced (socially or politically) back into the ghettos.

The story continues in the next post about Mendelssohn's grandfather, the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

- Dr. Dick