Moses Mendelssohn Jewish History Lecture by Dr. Henry Abramson

This is a video of a lecture on Moses Mendelssohn, a hugely influential thinker in 18thcentury Germany. An unusually gifted intellect, he became the primary spokesperson for the emancipation of Jews in the 18th century, and his cause was championed by many nonJewish liberals of the era. Heralded as the founder of the Reform movement even though Mendelssohn himself maintained an observant lifestyle, his activity spawned a wholesale abandonment of traditional Judaism. Within a century of his death, his str