Antelman to eliminate the opiate vol1

Dr. Simon Noveck, editor of Great Jewish Personalities in
Modern Times, says of the Haskala that it was among the
Jews of Berlin, 27
"... that secular interests made their greatest progress. Here
existed the largest Jewish community in Germany, totaling
around 4,000 Jewish immigrants, even before Mendelssohn's
death, It was in Berlin that the organized Haskala movement,
representing the first systematic attempt of Jews to meet the
challenges of the modern world, grew up. The leader of the
movement around whom the enlightened gathered and to
whom all looked for inspiration was Moses Mendelssohn."
The historian Max Dimont tells us something else about his
opinions of Mendelssohn, which belie not only Mendelssohn's
true position with respect to authentic Judaism, but Dimont's
attitude towards religious Jews. Dimont's view, in his Jews,
God and History, is that religious Jews are like refuse. Says
Dimont,
"Mendelssohn clearly saw the dilemma of and the danger to
the Jews. If they remained in the ghetto, they would stagnate
into a meaningless existence. If on the other hand they were
catapulted out of the ghetto by the new social forces
shattering feudalism without being prepared for the
Enlightenment, they would be swallowed up by the dominant
Christian majority. Mendelssohn saw his task as two-fold: first,
to give the Jews a tool for their own emancipation; second, to
prepare a new basis for the Judaic values once the old
religious norms were rejected. The way Hercules diverted the
flow of the two rivers into the Augean stables to clean out
decades of accumulated refuse, so Mendelssohn channeled
the currents of the "Aufklarung" into the ghetto to sweep out
centuries of accumulated orthodoxy." 28
All these citations are just exemplary of the popularly held
view that Mendelssohn is the original "Maskil" (Enlightener) of
the Haskala. What, however, were the salient messages and
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