Mendelssohn prudently kept himself in the background in this movement: he did not desire to have attention drawn to him as a prejudiced defender of his brethren in religion and race. He blessed the outbreak of interest in his unhappy kinsmen.
"Blessed be Almighty Providence that has allowed me, at the end of my days, to see the happy time, when the rights of humanity begin to be realized in their true extent."
However, two things induced him to break silence. He found that the arrows hurled by Dohm had been insufficient to pierce the thick-skinned monster of Jew-hatred.
"Reason and humanity have raised their voices in vain, for grey-headed prejudice is deaf."
Dohm himself did not appear to him to be free from the general prejudice, because he admitted that the Jews of the present day were depraved, useless, even harmful; therefore he suggested means to improve them. But Mendelssohn, who knew his co-religionists better, did not find them so greatly infected with moral leprosy--or differing so widely from Christians of the same class and trade--as arrogant Christians in their self-glorification were wont to assert. In a very clever way Mendelssohn made not alone the Göttingen scholars Michaelis and Hartmann, but also Dohm, understand that they had misconceived the Jewish question.
"It is wonderful to note how prejudice assumes the forms of every century in order to act despotically towards us, and place difficulties in the way of our obtaining civil rights. In superstitious ages we were said to insult sacred objects out of mere wantonness; to pierce crucifixes and cause them to bleed; secretly to circumcise children and stab them in order to feast our eyes upon the sight; to draw Christian blood for our Passover; to poison wells.
"Now times have changed, calumny no longer makes the desired impression. Now we, in turn, are upbraided with superstition and ignorance, lack of moral sentiments, taste, and refined manners, incapacity for the arts, sciences, and useful pursuits, especially for the service of war and the state, invincible inclination to cheating, usury, and lawlessness; all these have taken the place of coarse indictments against us, to exclude us from the number of useful citizens, and reject us from the motherly bosom of the state. They tie our hands, and reproach us that we do not use them.... Reason and the spirit of research of our century have not yet wiped away all traces of barbarism in history. Many a legend of the past has obtained credit, because it has not occurred to any one to cast doubts upon it. Some are supported by such important authorities that few have the boldness to look upon them as legends and libels. Even at the present moment there is many a city of Germany where no circumcised person, even though he pays duty for his creed, is allowed to issue forth in open daylight unwatched, lest he kidnap a Christian child or poison the wells; while during the night he is not trusted under the strictest surveillance, owing to his well-known intercourse with evil spirits."