The mission of Moses

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The Sendung Moses is an essay by Friedrich Schiller that first appeared in the tenth issue of the Thalia magazine in 1790 and was based on a lecture given by the Freemason Carl Leonhard Reinhold the year before at the University of Jena . In it he describes the emergence of Judaism with regard to the concept of God. Due to its after-effects on Ludwig van Beethoven and Sigmund Freud , among others , Jörg Robert describes the font as one of his most effective theoretical writings . The work is in the context of a Europe - wide anti-Semitism discourse , in which Schiller hereby takes part. It is the only work by Schiller in which Judaism plays a significant role.

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Peter Anton von Verschaffelt: Statue of Moses by Michelangelo in San Pietro in Vincoli (1737).

In this text, Schiller presents his own interpretation of the biblical story of the Exodus from Egypt and begins his description with the capture of the " Hebrews ". These are initially forced to work and used by the Pharaoh , but are still increasing in number. In order to avoid a revolt, the Pharaoh finally forces them into isolation from the Egyptians. In this isolation, the disease leprosy spread among the Hebrews, which on the one hand led to the Egyptians being repulsed by them and on the other to a moral and intellectual decline of the Israelites.

Finally, Moses has the role of saving his people: he is given a trick by his mother into the care of the Pharaoh's daughter and is educated at court, later he goes to school with the priests and learns the "Mysteries of Isis " know that was known only to a small group of initiated priests. In these mysteries the doctrine of the one almighty deity and the immortality of the soul has been preserved for centuries. Since this secret is so alien to people due to the decline in values, only a small group has access to it.

Nevertheless, Moses sees that his people are suffering and finally kills an overseer, so that he has to flee into the desert. In this desert he thinks up a plan to lead his people out of captivity: First he invents a new god, Jehovah , on the basis of the deity from the mysteries , who is supposed to be the only god but whose story contains all sorts of "superstitions" . Moses tells his people about this God and gives them enough courage to flee the country. The Legislation of the Old Testament is also based on this invented God, but actually only a reproduction of the laws of reason from the Mysteries.

reception

The text has long been classified by literary scholars as a marginal work, as a mere "summarizing paraphrase of Reinhold's book" and cannot be found in all of Schiller's complete editions. Dieter Just sees an anti-Semitic "abyss" in the work, which, however, has so far hardly been illuminated. He sees Schiller in connection with a debate within German intellectuals and in particular in connection with a dispute between Immanuel Kant and William Warburton over the question of the extent to which the Old Testament can serve as a starting point for a fundamental criticism of Judaism and whether it is Jews are "the rawest, most vicious, most depraved people on earth".

According to Schiller, the true God of reason is the God of the Deists, and this God should therefore have been adapted to the “stupidity and wickedness” of the Hebrews. Nevertheless, it is noteworthy that despite this anti-Semitism, Moses was seen as the "father of the modern Enlightenment", whereby he criticized the existing religions at the same time: The God found by Moses in the mysteries is even older than the God of the Bible and therefore also older than the god who was worshiped in the churches in Schiller's time. In order to avoid direct criticism of the churches and in particular to escape the blasphemy laws , Schiller related the criticism directly to Judaism.

The tradition in which he found himself is therefore the Kantian criticism of Judaism, which accordingly is not even a religion because there is no belief in the hereafter.

Print output

  • contained in: FS, Smaller Prosaic Writings. Collected and improved by the author himself from several magazines. Series: Bibliotheca Anna Amalia , 10th Süddeutsche Zeitung Neue Produkte, Munich 2007 ISBN 3-86615-414-3 (with 251 pages)

Web links

literature

  • Jörg Robert: An aggregate of fragments - fragment and fragmentarism in the work of Friedrich Schiller (with the collaboration of Marisa Irawan). Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann 2013.
  • Alexander Mathäs: Faith and Reason: Schiller's "Die Sendung Moses" . In: The German Quarterly . tape 81 , no. 3 , 2008, p. 283-301 , JSTOR : 27676195 (English).

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jörg Robert: The mission of Moses - Egyptian and aesthetic education with Lessing, Reinhold, Schiller . In: Wolfgang Riedel (Ed.): Würzburger Schiller Lectures 2009 . Königshausen & Neumann, 2011, p. 109-174 ( academia.edu ).
  2. ↑ J. Robert, op. Cit. , P. 110
  3. ↑ a b c d e f Dieter Just: The anti-Semitism of "reason". (PDF) 2006, accessed April 6, 2019 .
  4. ↑ Jan Assmann in the epilogue to Jan Assmann (Ed.): Carl Leonard Reinhold, Friedrich Schiller, The Hebrew Mysteries or the oldest religious Freemasonry . Edition Mnemosyne, Neckargemünd 2001, p. 188 .
  5. ↑ Schiller, The Mission of Mose, 1790
  6. ↑ Also included are: Philosophical Letters ; The criminal of lost honor ; Game of Fate , the lecture What does it mean and at what end do you study universal history? ; the "Letters about Don Karlos ", the essays "Something about the first human society" and "About the migration of peoples, the crusades and the Middle Ages"