Born to an unremarkable Jewish family in Germany, Moses Mendelssohn (1729-1786) acquired both Jewish and general educations and became an active participant in Berlin’s Enlightenment circles, while remaining a strictly observant Jew. He was also a major early proponent of the Haskalah, or Jewish Enlightenment. Throughout his career, he maintained a close friendship with the Gentile philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. Yuval Levin, noting the tremendous impact of this friendship on both thinkers, explains the connection between friendship and tolerance in Mendelssohn’s work:

During the recent round of fighting between Israel and Hamas, a few left-wing members of Congress not only condemned the Jewish state, but repeated libelous claims about “attacks” on al-Aqsa mosque. Worse still, their rhetoric seemed to imply, in classic anti-Semitic fashion, that Israel is not just a particularly problematic country, but one somehow at the root of all the world’s other problems. Seth Mandel writes: