#Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study

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Herr Moses direct ancestor of Madeleine Miller confirmed

Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study, p. 149

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Semianonymous publication in the 18th century is fantastic.

According to Altmann, Mendelssohn writes a criticism of W from Zürich, only to learn that the author was not Wieland, as he had supposed, but someone named Jakob Wegelin. Who had read Mendelssohn's critique and thought it was by his friend Lessing: "only a Lessing could poke fun at so serious a theme" (142)!

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Charmed by the way Altmann's Moses Mendelssohn: A Biographical study introduces Nicolai:

Presumably this is because he did not die in his 50s like Mendelssohn and Lessing, but superlative success by default is still success.

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the main difference between the content of R. Alexander Altmann's Moses Mendelssohn: a biographical study and Heinz Knobloch's Herr Moses in Berlin is not (I think) a result of the authors' different backgrounds or the language of publication, but the form & intention: Altmann's is a biography of one man & Knobloch's is the palimpsest of a city.

Altmann is more thorough, critical and "academic" with his relation of events, whereas Knobloch has the liberty to go on tangents, to take legends as legends, to examine their implications & generally to stroll around. He's occupied so movingly with themes of memory, haunted narratives & what constitutes a public afterlife.

Not that Altmann ignores this entirely

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New guy to care about!

Altmann, Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study, p. 21

Senior year of high school I read Brecht's Leben des Galilei and while I remain indifferent to both Bert and Galileo I did become utterly normal about the implications of being an Acolyte to an Apostate. It didn't hurt that I subsequently read Endō's Silence and developed the pet suspicion that the "astronomical texts" translated by the protagonist's apostate mentor were Galileo's treatises.

Anyway I've never heard of del Medigo before but it looks like he got around! NYPL has this bilingual frontispiece ft. a particularly wistful portrait:

I hope R. Altmann keeps up the astronomic history; this topic does not appear at all in Herr Moses in Berlin!

Anyway by now it's pitchdark out so if I don't post again tonight I wish all my observing mutuals a tolerable fast.

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Oh wait. I have two really long PDFs on my computer. This is not Morrison's recognition of the use of Phaedo and 18th-century progressive imagery. This is Moses Mendelssohn: a Biographical Study by R. Alexander Altmann.

I delude myself yet again.

Thank you Prof. Mobdick and thank you Nobel Prize-winning Prof. Toni Morrison :)