his ecumenical fashion Mendelssohn went out of his way to summarise the good that Jews had to say about the founder of Christianity. Once again he was deliberately making the best of it. In his coffee-house circle where Jews and Christians met as friends, doubtless the former had no trouble in praising the goodness of Jesus as moral teacher. Opinions on that subject might have been ruder had he listened in the Frankfurt ghetto or the backstreets of Brody. Jews, Mendelssohn insisted, accepted the ethical core of Jesus’ teachings and the inspiring innocence of his life and preaching. But by that
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