A volume of the works of Moses Mendelssohn, the great German Jewish philosopher, has been removed from the Schiller Museum at Weimar by the Nazi authorities, it was reported here, although the book belonged to Schiller and bears the poet’s signature.
The 150th anniversary of Mendelssohn’s death will be observed on Jan.
The volume was displayed in the Weimar museum, said local papers, together with a volume of Shakespeare and Plutarch. The governor of Thuringia ordered its removal. Commenting on this, Praha papers quote a letter written by Mendelssohn in 1780 to a friend named Weinkop:
“I sometimes take a stroll in the evening with my wife and children. ‘Papa,’ one of my children asks, ‘why does that boy call us names? Why do they throw stones at us? What have we done to them?”
“‘Yes, papa,’ another of my children chimes in, ‘they always pursue us in the street and insult us by shouting: Jews. Do people consider it insulting to call a person a Jew? And anyway, what harm do we do them?’
“Ah, I close my eyes and sigh to myself: people, people, to what a pass have you brought things”
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
