By these means he shattered Judaic, as Luther had shattered Christian, catholicism; for the Talmud is, in fact, the catholicism of the Jews." Later years and legacy Mendelssohn grew ever more famous, and counted among his friends many of the great figures of his time. But his final years were overshadowed and saddened by the so-called pantheism controversy. Ever since his friend Lessing had died, he had wanted to write an essay or a book about his character. When Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, an acquaintance of both men, heard of Mendelssohn's project, he stated that he had confidential information about Lessing being a "Spinozist", which, in these years, was regarded as being more or less synonymous with "atheist"—something which Lessing was accused of being anyway by religious circles. This led to an exchange of letters between Jacobi and Mendelssohn which showed they had hardly any common ground. Mendelssohn then published his Morgenstunden oder Vorlesungen über das Dasein Gottes (Morning hours or lectures about God's existence), seemingly a series of lectures to his oldest son, his son-in-law and a young friend, usually held "in the morning hours", in which he explained his personal philosophical world-view, his own understanding of Spinoza and Lessing's "purified" (geläutert) pantheism. But almost simultaneously with the publication of this book in 1785, Jacobi published extracts of his and Mendelssohn's letters as Briefe über die Lehre Spinozas, stating publicly that Lessing was a self-confessed "pantheist" in the sense of "atheist". Mendelssohn was thus drawn into a poisonous literary controversy, and found himself attacked from all sides, including former friends or acquaintances such as Johann Gottfried von Herder and Johann Georg Hamann. Mendelssohn's contribution to this debate, To Lessing's Friends (An die Freunde Lessings) (1786), was his last work, completed a few days before his death. Mendelssohn's complete works have been published in 19 volumes (in the original languages) (Stuttgart, 1971 ff., ed. A. Altmann and others) Family Mendelssohn had six children, of whom only his second-oldest daughter, Recha, and his eldest son, Joseph, retained the Jewish faith. His sons were: Joseph (founder of the Mendelssohn banking house and a friend and benefactor of Alexander von Humboldt), Abraham (who married Lea Salomon and was the father of Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn), and Nathan (a mechanical engineer of considerable repute). His daughters were Brendel (later Dorothea; the wife of Simon Veit and mother of Philipp Veit, subsequently the mistress, and then