The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  IV.

  As a study of the resonance that Spinoza has had for secular Jewish intellectuals, this book can be considered an inquiry into his “Jewish reception.” But what exactly is meant by this phrase? Beyond the problem of parameters—the difficulty of determining how broadly or narrowly to circumscribe Spinoza’s Jewish reception—there is also the question of just how singular it truly is. Spinoza, after all, has been claimed not only as a harbinger of Jewish secularism but of secularism, period. A prototype for sundry constructions of modern Jewish identity, he has also been credited with anticipating everything from militantly atheistic to “God-intoxicated” pantheistic forms of free thought, from democratic liberalism to Marxist materialism to the fashionable “bio-politics” of today’s radical critics of neoliberalism. By what right, then, do we treat the Jewish appropriation of Spinoza as anything more than a variation on a theme? For some, the very fact that Spinoza became an icon among Christian authors first might seem reason enough to chalk up the Jewish rehabilitation of Spinoza to the old Yiddish saying, Vi es kristelt zikh, azoy yidelt zikh. As it goes among Christians, so among Jews.

  The challenge to the uniqueness of the Jewish encounter with Spinoza has grown even more pointed with the new interpretation of the Enlightenment and the origins of “philosophical modernity” proposed by the historian Jonathan Israel over the last decade. Starting with his Radical Enlightenment (2001), Israel has assiduously argued that the Enlightenment, wherever it took root, divided into two warring factions: a one-substance “Radical Enlightenment” that reduced God and nature as well as mind and body to the same thing and jettisoned tradition, refusing to paper over its rupture with the past, and a two-substance “Moderate Enlightenment” that sought to promote greater rationality in increments but was reflexively accommodating of traditional religious belief, scriptural authority, and the status quo.17 Spinoza, per Israel, was central to both: He was “the intellectual backbone” of the Radical Enlightenment on the one hand, both source and symbol of its metaphysical and political secularism, and on the other, the ultimate bête noire of mainstream moderates, who opposed him as strenuously and obsessively as their more militant foes celebrated him. These two intellectual camps and the controversies between them, moreover, were remarkably cosmopolitan, contradicting, according to Israel, what was, for a time, the conventional wisdom that the “Enlightenment” was, in fact, a panoply of smaller “Enlightenments,” divided by region, nationality, culture, denomination, and discourse. Though Israel has yet to target it expressly, there is little doubt that, on the basis of this global approach, the idea of a distinctively Jewish reception of Spinoza—like the ideas of a distinctively Jewish Enlightenment, Jewish secularism, and Jewish modernity—would meet with skepticism.

  Whatever the merits of Israel’s thesis regarding Spinoza’s colossal impact on modern Western thought in general, it certainly resonates with his impact on Jewish culture. As we will see in chapter 4, attitudes toward the Amsterdam philosopher did catalyze a division of the nineteenth-century Haskalah into “radical” and “moderate” camps. Overall, however, I contend that Israel’s pan-European model goes too far in effacing the peculiarities of Spinoza’s Jewish reception, in large measure because of the preoccupation of the latter with the theme of identity, with the question of whether Spinoza was, in fact, a “Jewish thinker,” or “one of us.” All the thinkers to be dealt with in this book acknowledged, indirectly or overtly, that Spinoza had a more loaded significance for them given their common Jewish origins. Some pursued, others resisted, still others dithered over a domesticating of Spinoza’s image within modern Judaism; yet they all believed that Spinoza had a special charge and relevance for them as Jews and “intellectuals.” To whitewash this specificity—to treat their receptions of Spinoza as a mere copy, or even a variant of a broader cultural phenomenon—would simply be a bad approach to the study of history. At the same time, in forming their impressions of Spinoza, these thinkers were not only in dialogue with earlier or contemporary Jewish reactions to the Amsterdam heretic. They were also absorbing, building on, tweaking, revising, and sometimes outright repudiating non-Jewish framings of Spinoza’s “Jewishness” and “modernity.” Jews were shaped by—but they also in turn shaped—the shifting cultural memory of Spinoza; contra that Yiddish saying, there is no question here of one-sided influence and imitation. More so than with any archetypal “Jewish” figure with the exception of Moses and Jesus, the battle for control over Spinoza’s image has occurred not simply within Judaism, but within an intellectual field occupied by both Jews and non-Jews. It is thus a central contention of this work that the individuality of a “Jewish reception” of Spinoza must be sought within, and not radically apart from, a reception where Jewish and non-Jewish voices have long been intertwined.

  V.

  The writing of history, as decades of postmodern criticism have made plain, is not a purely inductive process.18 Any historical narrative, however scrupulously loyal to the sources, is inevitably a result of innumerable conscious and unconscious decisions on the part of the author about what to select from an often overwhelming amount of evidence and how to structure the presentation of whatever is selected. Reception histories must be especially selective. No doubt, a “metahistorical” analysis of this historiographic genre would reveal a remarkably similar form and flow. Practically every reception study can be stripped down to a sequence of variations in the understanding of its subject, since if the memory of a historical person, object, or event merits tracing to begin with, it is likely to be diverse and protean, as otherwise it would not make for a very interesting or illuminating history. Yet any subject worthy of a reception history will also likely have a bounty of representations to choose from, ensuring that no one narrative is like another. The story of Spinoza’s Jewish reception can be told in myriad ways. What follows is a brief discussion of my methodology, or how I have opted to tell this story—and why I believe this angle is both essential and illuminating.

  To start, this is a cultural history of Spinoza’s Jewish reception. Readings, including translations of Spinoza’s works will certainly figure in our analysis, though this is emphatically not a history of the reception of a particular text or set of texts; and while modern Jewish philosophers of note can be found in both prominent roles and cameos, this is not a history of the Jewish philosophical response to Spinoza per se. My focus is rather on the place of Spinoza in the Jewish literary and cultural imagination. Spinoza’s reception by later Jewish philosophers constitutes only a slice—and by no means the largest slice—of a broader cultural phenomenon in which artists, novelists, dramatists, rabbis, publicists, historians, and even politicians have played a profound, even formative role. In trying to recover the Spinoza image in Jewish culture, I rely on a rich variety of sources, including not only philosophical treatises, but also things like historical novels, newspaper articles, anniversary tributes and Festschriften, visual representations, autobiographies, diaries, and correspondence. I also devote special attention to the “how” as much as the “what” in this study of cultural recuperation, considering the role played by schemas and metaphors (Spinoza as the “new” Maimonides), the rhetorical pairings of Spinoza with other historical icons, even by the sacred echoes of the Hebrew language itself in the creation of “the Jewish Spinoza.”19

  The story I tell stretches from seventeenth-century Amsterdam to eighteenth-century Germany to nineteenth-century Central and Eastern Europe to twentieth-century Israel, Europe, and America, before concluding in an epilogue that considers the current vogue in appropriations of Spinoza. After an opening chapter that analyzes the “prehistory” of the Jewish rehabilitation of Spinoza, exploring how his Jewish origins figured in fashioning him into a cultural symbol among non-Jews first, I trace his shifting image across a spectrum of modern Jewish movements and milieus, from the Berlin Haskalah to early religious Reform and Wissenschaft des Judentums (the Science of Judaism) in Germany to the East European Haskala
h, Zionism, and Yiddish culture. Yet the table of contents, structured around individual receptions of Spinoza and the reception of these receptions, compensates for this broad chronological, territorial, and ideological sweep. Five thinkers stand at the center of my narrative. Chapter 2 probes the pioneering if only partial vindication of Spinoza by the Enlightenment philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786), the first Jewish thinker, I contend, for whom Spinoza served, both positively and negatively, as a point of reference—in his own eyes, and certainly in the eyes of others. Staying in Germany but skipping ahead fifty years, chapter 3 finds the roots of the heroic and prototypical image of Spinoza in the historical fiction of the young Berthold Auerbach (1812–1882), using his engagement with the Amsterdam heretic in the 1830s as a lens for exploring tensions in early Reform Judaism between organic and revolutionary visions of religious change. Chapter 4 traces the migration of Spinoza’s Jewish reception eastward into the Hebrew Enlightenment of Central and Eastern Europe, concentrating on the writings of the Galician-born maskil (or Jewish enlightener) Salomon Rubin (1823–1910), the most zealous champion of Spinoza in nineteenth-century Hebrew letters and the first to translate the Ethics into Hebrew. Chapter 5 looks at twentieth-century Zionist appropriation of Spinoza as both a precursor and posthumous beneficiary of secular Jewish nationalism, devoting special attention to periodic efforts, first in Mandate Palestine and later in the State of Israel, to close the book on ostracism of Spinoza by formally revoking the excommunication—a campaign initiated by the protagonist of the chapter, the Russian Zionist scholar and Hebrew literary critic Yosef Klausner (1874–1958). The sixth and final chapter explores how the Yiddish writer and Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904–1991) struggled to come to terms with modern Jewish identity not by engaging with Spinoza directly, but by dealing in fiction with various Jewish understandings of, and reactions to, Spinoza as secular hero.

  My decision to study Spinoza’s Jewish reception in rival Jewish movements through the prism of individual encounters with Spinoza is not simply an aesthetic choice but relates to a central contention of the work. If the first and most obvious source of the diversity of the Jewish reception of Spinoza was the fact that he elicited a welter of ideological and discursive fashionings, there was another way in which this ambiguity was manifest not just between, but within the many permutations of his image—even within those treatments that most resembled an embrace. When we zero in on concrete “uses” of Spinoza, we find that his invocation as a precursor was rarely a matter of making him a stand-in for a flattened, already worked-out image of the “modern Jew”: Spinoza the liberal Jew, Spinoza the maskil, Spinoza the Zionist. More often than not, it was part of the construction of an identity, with all the attendant ambiguities of this process, and not its finished product. What appears from afar an uncomplicated gesture of ideological appropriation (or expropriation, as the case may be) may reveal up close a dense undergrowth of questions and tensions. This becomes clearer the more intently we interrogate the lives of those who sought to reclaim Spinoza.

  In Freud’s Moses (1993), his penetrating study of the Jewish identity of the founder of psychoanalysis, Yosef H. Yerushalmi aptly observes that “to be a Jew without God is, after all, historically problematic and not self-evident, and the blandly generic term secular Jew gives no indication of the richly nuanced variety of the species.”20 Broadening this category of the “Jew without God” to include one who has given up faith in the personal, commanding deity of biblical revelation, without necessarily repudiating the existence of God altogether—that is, someone like Spinoza—we can better understand the resonance of the Amsterdam heretic within Jewish culture. What gets obscured in the debate over whether Spinoza was the first modern or secular Jew is not simply the anachronistic nature of this perception or even of the very debate itself. We also lose sight of the driving force behind this reputation, the connection between the “historically problematic and not self-evident” nature of secular Jewish identity and the need to find a historical beginning and script for it and thereby firm it up. If the continued obsession with Spinoza in Jewish culture, as we enter the second decade of the twenty-first century, is any indication, what it means to be a modern, secular Jew remains as elusive—and the genealogical imperative that feeds on this elusiveness as powerful—as ever.

  FIGURE 1.1. Anonymous, Portrait of Spinoza, ca. 1665. Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel.

  CHAPTER 1

  Ex-Jew, Eternal Jew

  Early Representations of the Jewish Spinoza

  I.

  The year 1670 had hardly begun before the first Latin edition of the Theological-Political Treatise appeared anonymously and under false imprint in the Dutch Republic.1 And this brief for the “freedom to philosophize” had hardly begun to circulate before word spread of what one objector memorably dubbed the “liber pestilentissimus” (or most pestilent book).2 Here was a book that denied biblical prophecy was a source of truth, rejected miracles, read scripture as a human document, limited the role of religion to guaranteeing social obedience while relegating the pursuit of truth to philosophy, and argued for stripping religious communities of the right to coercive authority separate from the sovereign power. In short, here was a book that sought to displace once and for all organized religion as a bedrock of state and society.

  It took all of four months for the first published reaction to appear—a tractlet by the Leipzig philosopher Jakob Thomasius, best known as Leibniz’s teacher—blasting the “author afraid of the light” for purporting to support greater liberty in philosophy alone when in fact he sought anarchy in religion as well.3 Thomasius was genuinely ignorant of the man behind the Treatise; in this he seems to have been more the exception than the rule. “It is said that the author is a Jew by the name of Spinosa, who long ago was expelled from the synagogue on account of his monstrous opinions”: so wrote the German professor of rhetoric J. G. Graevius to the twenty-five-year-old Leibniz in the spring of 1671.4 Leibniz made sure to echo these sentiments in a letter to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld later that fall, even while simultaneously dashing off his first missive to the man he fawningly addressed as “Mr. Spinosa, celebrated doctor and profound philosopher.”5

  This was only the beginning of a raucous reaction against Spinoza throughout the West. Amazingly, Western Europe continued to be beset by war, the early modern Dutch Republic grew ever more religiously fragmented, yet in regard to the philosophy of Spinoza a remarkable ecumenism prevailed: He was vituperatively attacked on all sides. The barrage only intensified with the appearance in late 1677 of Spinoza’s Opera posthuma [Posthumous Works], which contained the Ethics. Here the “hidden teaching” on which the “theological-political” critique of organized religion rested—the conflation of God and Nature—was made utterly manifest. Calvinist theologians of the Dutch Reformed Church instantly tried to have his work suppressed, branding the Treatise and later the Opera posthuma “as horrible and blasphemous as anything the world has ever seen.”6 The states of Holland banned both works; the papacy added them to the Index of Forbidden Books.7 All told, by the end of the seventeenth century, state governments and churches throughout Europe had proscribed Spinoza’s philosophy either officially or de facto. Meanwhile, Cartesians largely disowned him, fearful lest their efforts to wall off the new rationalist and mechanical science from fundamental dogmas of Christian faith be damaged by association with the unfettered “freedom to philosophize” sought by Spinoza.8 Protestant sects that on balance were more liberal than Reformed Calvinism or Catholicism, including the Remonstrants, Mennonites, and Quakers, even the staunchly nonconformist Dutch Collegiants with whom Spinoza is believed to have affiliated, at least for a time—all these groups were in the main repelled by Spinoza’s monism and determinism and were well-represented in the torrent of anti-Spinoza literature. No one could safely acknowledge any sympathy for Spinoza’s ideas and maintain a reputation as a “respectable” thinker.

  The criticism of Spi
noza’s thought went along with gibes against his name and character. Most famously, the Kiel theologian Christian Kortholt substituted “Maledictus” (the accursed one) for “Benedictus,” a swap that became a favorite of Spinoza’s many adversaries for the first century of his reception.9 The more common target of puns was the philosopher’s surname Espinosa, which means “thorn” in Spanish.10 Spinoza was also labeled an “exotic animal,” a “frivolous bird,” even a sodomizer—the latter by a Dutch Collegiant no less.11 The worst came in 1702 in an anonymous thrashing of Spinoza that ended on this vivid note: “These are the horrid teachings, the repulsive errors, that this impudent Jewish philosopher (to put it nicely) has shit into the world.”12 But the two words that were probably used to describe him most frequently could be found in the caption to a popular engraving of Spinoza from around 1700: Benedictus de Spinoza, Judaeus et Atheista.13 Benedictus de Spinoza, Jew and atheist.

  Amid this spate of polemics and vulgarities, the Jews of Holland and Western Europe largely kept to the sidelines. They held their fire despite the singling out of Judaism for especially withering treatment in the Treatise. Spinoza’s charges cut right to the heart of postbiblical Judaism. By interpreting the biblical concept of election as a doctrine referring solely to political and material prosperity, Spinoza dismissed one of the cornerstones of Judaism—the idea that even in exile, the Jews remained the “chosen people” of God. On similar grounds, he denied the identification of the Halakhah as a “divine law” and insisted that the practices instituted by Moses (the so-called ceremonial law) had a mere political significance and retained validity only so long as the ancient Jewish commonwealth stood. Spinoza also portrayed Moses in a less flattering light than Jesus, used the Hebrew Bible rather than the New Testament as the basis for his biblical criticism, and on several occasions referred to the Jews as Pharisees in a manner that seemed designed to capitalize on the negative Christian connotations of the label. Yet none of this elicited a reaction. For the period between 1656 and 1755, the year that Mendelssohn’s Philosophical Dialogues appeared, there is but a single work by a Jewish author that is a rejoinder to Spinoza’s philosophy, the Certamen philosophicum (1684) of the Portuguese converso turned Sephardic apologist Isaac (Balthazar) Orobio de Castro (1617–1687).14 And even this treatise was written solely at the behest of a Dutch Collegiant troubled by Spinoza’s geometrical proofs in the Ethics for a metaphysical monism and determinism.15 It dealt only obliquely with Spinoza and not at all with the devastating criticism of Judaism in the Treatise.