In the course of the book, I have chosen consistency and facility as guiding principles for translation and transliteration. Translations of Hebrew and German texts are my own, unless otherwise noted. When using existing translations, I have occasionally made minor changes to ensure contextual consistency. Quotes from Hebrew Scripture generally follow the English translation of the Jewish Publication Society (Tanakh: The Holy Scriptures, Philadelphia, 1985); occasional modifications reflect contextual usages or paraphrases in the quoted text. The translation of quotes from the Talmud and other texts of rabbinic literature, including commentaries, follows, with slight modifications where suitable, the William Davidson Digital Edition of the Koren Noé Talmud, with commentary by Rabbi Adin Even-Israel Steinsaltz, which is available at https://www.sefaria.org/texts/Talmud. Transliteration of Hebrew words follows the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Judaica, edited by Fred Skolnik and Michael Berenbaum (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007). Exceptions are conventional spelling forms of proper names and certain terms (e.g., melitsah, rather than melitzah). Books of Hebrew Scripture are abbreviated according to the second edition of the SBL Handbook of Style (Atlanta: SBL Press, 2014).
The English translation of Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew writings is largely based on Moses Mendelssohn’s Hebrew Writings, translated by Edward Breuer and annotated and edited by Breuer and David Sorkin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2018). For Mendelssohn’s Jerusalem (1783), I have used the English translation by Allan Arkush (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1983). The English translation of Mendelssohn’s German writings on aesthetics draws, where available, on Daniel Dahlstrom’s edition of Philosophical Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
References to Joel Bril’s 1791 introductory volume to the book of Psalms with Mendelssohn’s German translation, Sefer Zemirot Yisra’el (Berlin: Ḥinukh Ne’arim, 1791), are cited from the English translation in the bilingual edition: Book of the Songs of Israel: Three Introductions to Psalms on Aesthetics, Translation, and Music by Joel Bril (Berlin 1791), translated and edited by Yael Sela (Leiden and Boston: Brill, 2024).
The Hebrew term melitsah (