Philosopher. He was a German-Jewish philosopher and theologian. His writings on the Jewish faith have become the central element in the development of "Haskalah" or "Jewish Enlightenment" of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He also wrote on the subject of metaphysics and aesthetics as well as political theory. He was dubbed "the Jewish Martin Luther." His writing transformed Christian as well as Jewish inhabitants of German-speaking Europe. He was the grandfather of artist Philipp Veit, an ancestor of the composer Felix Mendelssohn and friend of the dramatist Gotthold Lessing, who based his character "Nathan the Wise" on Mendelssohn. Of his six children, only two remained in the Jewish faith. Born into a poor Jewish family, he had hopes of becoming a Rabbi but a formal education was not available for him. By reading German books, he was self-taught and with the addition of others, he was tutored in mathematics and languages. His father was Moses Ben Mendel Dessau. He and his brother were the first to use the surname of Mendelssohn. His family became wealthy with his involvement in the textile industry as well as later becoming involved with banking. He was known for his interactions with Johann Lavater, a Swiss author and philosopher, who was ordained in the Swiss Reform church. In March of 1771 his health declined and although not clearly diagnosed, he did recover to the point of sufficiently being able to write the major works of his later career. He died fifteen years later. He was buried in the Jewish Cemetery of Berlin, which was largely destroyed during the Nazi era and World War II. After the 1990 German reunification, the cemetery was reestablished in 2007 with monuments to the cemetery's past, including Mendelssohn's gravestone, which is inscribed on one side in Hebrew, on the other in German. His complete works have been published in 19 volumes