On March 26, 2025, 色花堂 hosted Dr. Edward Breuer for a lecture titled 鈥淢oses Mendelssohn鈥檚 Jerusalem: Conceiving Modernity in Jewish Terms.鈥 The event was co-sponsored by the Zahava and Moshael J. Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought and the Jay and Jeanie Schottenstein Yeshiva College Honors Program.
Breuer, a professor in the department of Jewish history at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, returned to studying Mendelssohn after more than a decade focused on other scholarly pursuits. He took students and faculty on a rich journey through the eighteenth-century political and religious controversies that shaped Mendelssohn鈥檚 famous work.
The lecture centered on Mendelssohn鈥檚 response to a 1782 polemic challenging the compatibility of traditional Judaism with modern civic life. Breuer explored how Mendelssohn鈥檚 Jerusalem鈥攑ublished the following year鈥攚as less a defense of Jewish ritual than a bold philosophical treatise arguing that civic belonging should never require religious conformity.
Through a close reading of Mendelssohn鈥檚 political philosophy, Breuer explained how Jerusalem stakes out an 鈥淓rastian鈥 view of religion and politics: one in which civil authority is supreme, but religious life retains autonomy in matters of belief and practice. Drawing on thinkers like Hobbes and Grotius, Mendelssohn insisted that while governments may regulate actions, they have no rightful claim over individual conscience.
Breuer further showed how Jerusalem interprets the Torah as a fundamentally non-coercive legal tradition. Rejecting the idea that Judaism compels belief through force, Mendelssohn instead emphasized the Torah鈥檚 educational and ethical aims鈥攊ts mitzvot (commandments) meant not to compel conformity, but to cultivate reflection and communal cohesion.
In the spirited Q&A that followed, Breuer engaged questions about rabbinic authority, contemporary religious coercion, and Mendelssohn鈥檚 place on the spectrum between tradition and modernity. The event exemplified the Straus Center鈥檚 mission by bringing a classic Western text into conversation with Jewish thought.
