Friendship and Tolerance

Michael Bloom writes about the importance of Lessing’s play Nathan the Wise, the first play performed in Germany in 1945 after the fall of the Nazis. In discussing the reception of the play, Bloom focuses on two different reactions by Hannah Arendt, who came to see Lessing as the great thinker of political friendship. 

In the 20th century Nathan the Wise ran into the opposition of various religious and intellectual figures for purportedly diminishing the specificity of the tribe in favor of a common humanity. Most famously, Hannah Arendt wrote that Lessing could never have argued for an emancipation of Enlightenment-era Jews as Jews. For her, tolerance was understandably a low bar, and Lessing’s “humanity” was an abstraction that implicitly supported the illusory Jewish dream of assimilation in 18th-century Germany.

But the word tolerance is mentioned just once in Nathan the Wise—and in a negative light. Reading the play as a plea for tolerance mistakenly represents Nathan to be compliant and submissive, nullifying the humanism he represents. It also disregards the multi-religious Jerusalem created by the Sultan Salah ad-Din, where all are free to practice their religions.
Later in her career, Arendt changed her mind about the play and Lessing. She quoted Nathan addressing the Templar Knight, who has no interest in being thanked by a Jew for saving his daughter’s life in a fire. But Nathan will not be deterred. He insists: “We must, must be friends.” Arendt recognized that rather than just a personal appeal for acceptance, Nathan’s overture is a social and political act that dignifies difference. “Friendship,” Arendt wrote, is the “central phenomenon in which alone true humanity can prove itself.”

Nathan the Wise is not just the “classic drama of friendship” but arguably the first multicultural play. Though we now tend to overuse the term to denote a plurality of cultures, Lessing’s play urges not just coexistence but mutual respect. In keeping with that ethos, the play presents the first positive portrait of a Muslim leader in Western theatre.