Moses Mendelssohn

Moses Mendelssohn was a German Jewish philosopher whose ideas indebted the Haskalah, the Jewish enlightenment of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Though a practicing orthodox Jew himself, he has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism. Through his writings on philosophy and religion, he became regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Germans and Jews. His thought influenced not only religious movements but also the German Enlightenment as a whole.