Abraham Mendelssohn Letter To His Daughter Summary

Rachel Varnhagen’s view of her Jewish identity is a drastic contrast of Heinrich Heine’s and even Abraham Mendelssohn’s views on their Jewish identity. She always saw her Jewish heritage as a burden, a source of pain and suffering because she believed that she had been “pushed out of the world” by this heritage of hers (Varnhagen). Varnhagen, wanting nothing more than to assimilate into German society, felt that it was her Jewish identity that prevented her from doing so and thus decided to change her last name, marry a Protestant, and convert to Protestantism. While Varnhagen saw her Jewish identity as “a source of great shame,” Abraham Mendelssohn’s view of his Jewish identity was less bitter and harsh (Varnhagen). In a letter to his daughter, Abraham Mendelssohn expressed his less emotionally driven reasoning for converting to Christianity and

Mendelssohn’s conversion to Christianity was not done out of bitterness or animosity to the faith by which he was raised, rather, it was calculated and measured move in which he weighed the benefits of publicly belonging to the Christian faith against the costs of publicly belonging to the Jewish faith and found the Christian faith to provide better chances in life for himself and his family. Like Varnhagen, because he viewed his Jewish identity from more of a national component angle rather than from a religious angle, Mendelssohn had little-to-no trouble with converting to Christianity, his logic being that both Judaism and Christianity required one to be a good person. Mendelssohn didn’t convert because he believed in the Christian faith, rather, he believed that one must go through the motions because of what society dictated. Heinrich Heine shared Mendelssohn’s sentiment regarding his conversion to