Dear Avira,
“You�re vastly overstating mendelssohns reach; he had his circle of naskilim, but klal yisroel were not moved by him very much, and in later years his books woild fall into obscurity, preserved mostly by bloggers who are obsessed with deviant jewish figures.
For the record, shadal had a bigger impact on jewry than mendelssohn, and he came earlier. He influenced Italian jewry towards secular things, and had some ideas which were apikorsus, but he was still not as divergent as mendelssohn.”
You never did cover your history.
Shadal was born well after Mendelssohn’s passing. He was a contemporary of Hirsch. They even had a correspondence.
Mendelssohn had the greatest reach of any askan ever in Europe. He had nobles clamoring to meet him. His word carried great weight at a time that the governments were interested in the education of the Jews.
Mendelssohn’s primary worry was preservation of the Torah and the primacy of it’s study. He would be sorely disappointed by the low standards of our day. Torah learning fell off in his day, and besides for some localized short lived exceptions, has never been returned to it’s glory.
The teachings in his books have been preserved inall the subsequent sefarim. You can find his teachings on your bookshelf in any sefer written in the last 150 years on the chumash. And all the recent seforim that use for haskafa are repackaging his ideas to a small or large extent.
Shadal was an acedemic and Rosh Yeshiva who just learned and taught. Italy ghad already been secularized for centuries.