Growing emancipation of European Jews in the eighteenth century was matched by an intellectual movement that came to be called the Jewish Enlightenment or Haskalah. Jews started to enter the mainstream of European society, in particular in major German cities such as Berlin, and Jewish thinkers had to accomplish two tasks. They needed to show their Gentile peers that they were just as committed to rationality as anyone else, and they needed to persuade other Jews that they should establish links with the local non-Jewish cultures in which they lived.

The main embodiment of this movement was Moses Mendelssohn, who participated fully in German philosophy and culture, and lesser thinkers were Marcus Herz (1747–1803), Salomon Maimon (1753/4–1800), and Nachmun Krochmal (1785–1840). Mendelssohn first of all emphasized the importance of mastery of the local secular language, and of the contemporary culture. But this did not imply abandoning Judaism; he argued...