The First Modern Jew

by Daniel B. Schwartz

  For the growing number of nineteenth-century German Jews eager to acquire German high culture and almost religiously devoted to the value of Bildung, the bidding up of Spinoza’s stock made a claim to his inheritance in principle attractive, and thus his quasi baptism in need of a rejoinder. Even those, like Fränkel himself and the vast majority of his generation of Jewish enlighteners, who remained leery of Spinoza’s pantheism and biblical criticism could increasingly take pride—Jewish pride—in the perceived saintliness of his character and in his newly prototypical image in modern religion and philosophy.29 Moreover, we know of at least one early-nineteenth-century German Jewish thinker beholden to Idealist thought who took the step of asserting the equivalence of Spinoza’s monistic metaphysics with the “essence of Judaism.” His name was Immanuel Wolf (Wohlwill), and he was one of the founders, in 1819, of the Berlin-based Verein für die Cultur und Wissenschaft der Juden (The Society for the Culture and Science of the Jews), the group credited with originating the movement for scientific study of Judaism (Wissenschaft des Judentums). In his essay “On the Concept of a Science of Judaism,” which opened the first and only volume of the scholarly journal published by the short-lived Verein, Wolf identified the cardinal and distinguishing idea of Judaism as “the unlimited unity of the all.” Chronicling the evolution of this concept, Wolf singled out “Benedict de Spinoza” for praise for his landmark role in translating the Jewish idea of the unity of God from a revealed truth originally “posited as a datum . . . at a time when man’s mind was far from ready to grasp it in all its universality” into the language of “pure speculative thinking.” He described Spinoza as “a man whose subtlety and profundity were centuries in advance of his time, whose highly significant influence on the more consistent and profound philosophies of the present day is unmistakable, who did indeed renounce the external rites of Judaism but who had understood all the more its inner spirit.”30

  Finally, and arguably at the most basic level, Fränkel’s branding of Spinoza as a “good Jew” reflected the transformation, over time, of a negative into a potential positive. “[I]n spite of everything, he remained what he was”: Spinoza, in other words, had not converted to Christianity. Antagonists and admirers alike had long seized on this fact to argue that Spinoza remained, in some sense, Jewish, though whether this formed a part of his self-identity after the ban is still a moot question. But for this non-apostasy (or, at least, nonconversion) to furnish evidence that Spinoza was not simply a Jew, but a “good Jew” required the rise of a new—and from the standpoint of a committed Jewish enlightener like Fränkel, profoundly worrisome—cultural tendency.

  From 1770 to 1830, the Jews of Berlin—the city of Mendelssohn, the cradle of the Haskalah movement and the early struggle for emancipation—suffered what came to be known as a Taufepidimie, or “epidemic of baptisms.”31 However hyperbolic this label has come to seem in retrospect, the scale of the attrition over a sixty-year period—some sixteen hundred Berlin Jews overall, including one in seven Berlin Jews born after 1800—was without parallel in German Jewish history. Adding to the shock was the fact that the wealthy business elite—the supposed bedrock of the community—were, especially after 1800, heavily represented among the class of converts. “In fact,” writes Steven Lowenstein, an expert on German Jewish history, “one could even say that becoming a Christian was a kind of fashion among certain prominent Berlin Jewish families of the period.”32 All who converted felt estranged from traditional Judaism; most were also left cold by the Haskalah’s effort to create an “enlightened” alternative; few, however, were driven by genuine Christian piety and conviction. On balance, the decisive motivation was more social than religious, and testified above all to the stymieing of the efforts at emancipation. The patriarch of a Berlin Jewish family might seek finally to be rid of the stigma of Jewishness and to enjoy a status, legally and socially, commensurate with his affluence. The daughter might be compelled to convert in order to marry a non-Jewish suitor. The son might find that, without baptism, his path to an academic career, or to a professional position in the law, was blocked. Whatever the specific reasons case by case, by 1832 one could speak of a “who’s who” of notable German Jews turned Christian. The roster included Rahel Varnhagen (1771–1833), née Levin, a Romantic poet and legendary salonnière; Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), né Lob Baruch, a left-wing political journalist, polemicist, and satirist; and Eduard Gans (1797–1836), a professor of law at the University of Berlin, who, before his conversion in 1825, had been Zunz’s colleague in the early Wissenschaft des Judentums movement. There was, of course, Heine—like Gans, a former participant in the Verein as well as an 1825 convert—who famously referred to his baptism as an “entry ticket to European culture.” Yet it was the family Mendelssohn that became most synonymous with the Taufepidemie. Of Mendelssohn’s six children, four converted, all following their father’s death in 1786. Of his grandchildren, only one went to his grave as a Jew.33

  Against this backdrop, it is understandable that a lifelong reformer like Fränkel, distressed at the loss of many of the “best and the brightest” to Christianity over the previous three decades, might eye Spinoza’s Jewishness in a newly favorable light. The market, after all, had not stood still. “Spinoza lived such that today he would be considered a good Jew”—today, when his refusal to adopt the Christian faith set him apart from the legions of prominent and not-so-prominent German Jews who had done so since Mendelssohn’s time.

  These three shifts—the flagging attachment to Jewish law among urbanizing German Jews, the mitigation of Spinoza’s insurgent image in German thought, and the rash of conversions to Christianity—formed a crucial context for Auerbach’s reception of the Amsterdam philosopher. Together they seemed to point to the possibility of reclaiming Spinoza—the “God-intoxicated man” who had rejected the Halakhah but never converted to another religion—for Jewish identity without being considered ipso facto an atheist or an apostate. One could conceivably embrace Spinoza while still working for the reform, not the repudiation of Judaism. And Auerbach, as we will see, appeared especially keen early in his career to remain on the side of the reformers.

  III.

  Auerbach discovered Spinoza in the summer of 1830, while he was living on his own in Stuttgart, trying to gain admission to gymnasium. In many ways, it was love at first sight. Writing that summer to his cousin Jakob Auerbach, the eighteen-year-old Berthold (né Moses Baruch) remarked that he had recently “read some Spinoza” and learned that “he too was originally named Baruch and had latinized his name into Bendict.” Out of reverence for the “great thinker,” he decided to do likewise: “My name,” he announced, “is now Moses Baruch Berthold Benedict Auerbach, and truthfully it’s enough to have one distinguished name, and I should have so many?”34

  The psychological distance Auerbach had to travel from his rural boyhood to the brink of entering a German gymnasium may explain the intensity of his attachment to the Amsterdam philosopher who, like him, had started out as Baruch.35 Auerbach, the ninth of eleven children, spent his formative years in the Black Forest hamlet of Nordstetten, immersed in the traditional way of life of village Jews.36 At age thirteen, immediately following his bar mitzvah, he left Nordstetten for an old-fashioned Talmudic yeshiva in the nearby town of Hechingen, where it was expected he would study to become a rabbi. But the school made a very negative impression on Auerbach: He felt alienated from the single-minded focus on Talmud along with the subject matter itself. After two years he left Hechingen for the more cosmopolitan setting of Karlsruhe, where he could continue his reading of Jewish texts in preparation for the rabbinate while auditing classes in the humanities at the local gymnasium.

  His decision to shun the traditional milieu for the training of future rabbis and pursue an education combining traditional with secular learning proved far-sighted. In 1828 a new Jewry law in the southern German principality of Württemberg was issued that placed the rabbinate fully under the supervision of the civil
bureaucracy, stipulating among other things that all future rabbinical candidates hold a university degree.37 To qualify for university, one first had to receive a diploma from gymnasium. Thus, in 1830, at the advanced age of eighteen, Auerbach headed to the capital city of Stuttgart to try to gain admission to gymansium. That August, after having failed in his initial attempt, Auerbach passed the entry exam and was admitted.

  During his two years at gymnasium, Auerbach grew steadily more radical in his religious views. According to his biographer Anton Bettelheim, reading Goethe’s Two Biblical Questions as well as Spinoza’s Treatise shook his belief in the unassailability of the Bible and revelation.38 In a letter to his cousin, who was also planning on becoming a rabbi, Auerbach chided him—“a youth of my Jacob’s talents”—for engrossing himself in the study of Talmud, the “Jewish Koran.”39 To his former teacher in Nordstetten, he confessed his ambivalence about pursuing the rabbinate.40 Indeed, when he entered the University of Tübingen in the summer of 1832, it was as a law student. Yet in the winter semester Auerbach switched back to theology, perhaps as a result of the impression made on him by David F. Strauss, the rising star of the Tübingen faculty, recently arrived from Berlin, where he had been a student of the late Hegel. Strauss’s Life of Jesus was still a few years away, yet his reputation for Hegelian unorthodoxy was already forming.41 His lectures on Hegel and philosophy appear to have drawn Auerbach back to the ambition of becoming a Jewish reformer, inspiring him with the goal of achieving a theological synthesis of “pure Mosaism” with the dominant Hegelianism.42

  If Auerbach was in fact back to his original plan of becoming a rabbi, he was soon to be disappointed. In the summer of 1833, while studying in Munich, he was arrested for membership in one of the nationalistic student fraternities at Tübingen, part of a crackdown following the failed Frankfurt putsch earlier that year.43 Though only briefly detained, he was placed under investigation and shortly thereafter expelled from Tübingen. Eventually he was permitted to enroll at Heidelberg, though without the stipend he had enjoyed earlier. While living in Stuttgart in the fall of 1835, where he was preparing for the exams in theology that were a prerequisite for his rabbinical candidacy, Auerbach learned of a further price for the ongoing investigation of his case: He would not be allowed to sit for the exams, and as a result would not be able to be certified for the now state-sponsored rabbinate. The 1828 Württemberg Erziehungsgesetz—the same law that years before appeared to have vindicated his flight from the Hechingen yeshiva—now blocked the path to his chosen career. In early 1837 the criminal investigation finally came to an end. Auerbach was found guilty and given a mild sentence, a seven-week imprisonment in the Hohenasperg fortress outside Stuttgart.

  By this time, Auerbach had begun accepting writing commissions as a source of much-needed income. In 1836 he issued the first work in his own name, a sixty-eight-page pamphlet against contemporary forms of antisemitism entitled Das Judenthum und die neueste Literatur [Judaism and Recent Literature]. The immediate background to this piece was the scandal that had been caused by Young Germany, a militantly secular and avant-garde literary faction that included the emigrés Börne and Heine and the novelist and playwright Karl Gutzkow (1811–1878). The frank discussion of sexuality and caustic treatment of organized religion in works such as Gutzkow’s most notorious novel, Wally, die Zweiflerin [Wally, the Skeptic], were offensive to German liberals and conservatives alike.44 Thanks to the Jewish origins of both Börne and Heine, the notion that Young Germany was a Jewish movement—epitomized in its dubbing by the famous critic Wolfgang Menzel as “Young Palestine”—quickly took root.45 Like the Young German writers, Auerbach was also contemptuous of the often reactionary nature of late German Romanticism. Yet he was equally wary of the strident secularism and heretical image of the movement—a discomfort made even more acute by the anti-Jewish sentiments its appearance had provoked. He wrote Das Judenthum mainly to refute the suspected Jewishness of Young Germany, though the essay took the form of a much broader counterattack on the treatment of Jews and Judaism in German literature. As a statement of Auerbach’s views on the “Jewish Question” written only a year prior to his Spinoza novel, it warrants discussion.

  In Das Judenthum, Auerbach offers the first glimpse of a political and religious liberalism that would characterize much of his oeuvre. While embracing the ideals of universalism and humanity, he insists that progress toward these goals be evolutionary as opposed to revolutionary. On these grounds, Auerbach rebukes those radical secularists committed to a “war of extermination against everything prevailing in religion, the state, customs and morals.”46 He is especially biting in his criticism of Heine, whose sensualism—and apostasy—he deplored. Against Heine’s vision of “a new religion,” a “so-called pantheism” that will bring about a “rehabilitation of the flesh” utterly emancipated from the “spiritualism” of Judaism and Christianity, Auerbach argues that progress can and should occur within the framework of the revealed religions.47 This is the only course compatible with the historical process rightly understood: Since “[w]e cannot go back, we must go forward,” Auerbach wrote. “[I]t is necessary to penetrate the old forms and wed the new spirit to the old, and thereby . . . bring about a . . . renaissance of the positive religions in keeping with the times.48

  In taking this stance, Auerbach was signaling his support for a German liberal tradition that viewed the steady advance of reason and freedom not as an abandonment, but as a development of the legacy of the past, including its religious aspects.49 Lessing’s Die Erziehung des Menschengeschlechts [The Education of Humankind] of 1777, with its vision of human history as the progressive translation of revealed truths into truths of reason, was perhaps the most salient expression of this tendency. Indeed, Auerbach pays tribute in his essay to the “humanists” of the German Enlightenment—Lessing and Herder, Goethe and Schiller—contrasting their “practical liberalism” favorably to the haughtiness of the eighteenth-century Encyclopedists and, by implication, the French-influenced Young Germany. Unlike those Germans affected by Gallomanie, these were “real Germans” (echt deutsche Männer), who “sought equal recognition for the demands of reason and those of the religious spirit.” Committed to advocating the cause of Enlightenment among the common citizenry rather than against them, they tempered their zeal with discretion, tailoring their appeal to the Christian beliefs and sensibilities of their target audience.50 It was the gradualism of their approach to social and religious change, their commitment to shepherding the particular in the direction of the universal without disowning the former entirely, that appealed to Auerbach so strongly.

  It appealed to him as both a German and a Jew, for if there was one point about which he deviated from virtually all German thinkers in this period it was over the ability of Judaism to adapt to modernity. Within German Idealism, it was more or less a consensus that while a reformed Christianity could serve as a basis, or at least a vehicle, for a modern religion of reason, Judaism could not provide such a foundation. As the religion of a single people, it was seen as intractably chauvinist and exclusive, and with its strict legal character, it seemed totally at odds with a modern ethos stressing human autonomy.51 For Hegel and other German thinkers, Judaism was a fossilized relic of history, incapable of progress or development. While this did not rule out the granting of civil rights to Jews as individuals, most believed that Judaism itself could not survive the encounter with modernity.

  Auerbach disagreed. Sketching in broad strokes the evolution of the Jewish spirit, he described Judaism as a religion whose nature and history vouched for its capacity for progress. In this he echoed an argument with roots in the Verein of the early 1820s, which the rabbi and religious reformer Abraham Geiger (1810–1874) had recently revived. An extraordinarily precocious scholar of history, philosophy, and theology, with a doctorate from the University of Marburg and a rabbinic post in the small town of Wiesbaden, Geiger emerged on the scene in the mid-1830s as the lead voice in the effort to ha
rness Wissenschaft in the service of Reform and thereby endow the movement with more clear-cut conceptual underpinnings.52 His ambition was clear—to evaluate Jewish religious literature with the same philological and historical methods used by radical Christian theologians like Strauss of Tübingen to study the New Testament. In this goal, however, he was guided by the Idealist assumption that through a sympathetic understanding of sources in their specific contexts—a kind of reasoning almost entirely foreign to traditional Judaism—one would ultimately penetrate to the original and animating idea behind them.53 He believed, moreover, that a grasp of the development of this idea in history would enable one to distinguish the “essence of Judaism” from its litany of outward forms, the value of which was only relative. The Halakhah, Geiger indicated, was one such form. From this, it followed that the project of modernization should seek theoretical orientation not within the normative framework of Jewish law, but by connecting itself to the spiritual core at the heart of Judaism—a connection that could only be forged by the scholar trained in Wissenschaft. Though undeniably radical in his rebellion against halakhic authority, Geiger nevertheless insisted that change occur not via a total rupture with the past, but in continuity with the determining Geist of Jewish history. “[S]alvation will be found,” he wrote, in the lead essay to the first volume of his journal, “not in a violent and ruthless break with tradition, but in careful research into the deeper decisive factors in history.”54

  Soon, Auerbach would strike up a lifelong friendship with Geiger, yet already here he showed himself to be impressed by the latter’s Reform philosophy, with its emphasis on the tracing of a telos immanent to Judaism.55 Countering the myth that Judaism had essentially stood still after the loss of its political sovereignty, Auerbach insisted that Judaism had demonstrated itself throughout its history as a religion capable of adaptation and development. If this notion had frequently served to legitimate reform against its internal opponents, here it was directed externally, testifying to the ability of Judaism to adjust to the opportunities afforded by emancipation and integration. Auerbach offers no program for change, but this is incidental to his concerns here. Whatever form change takes, he appears to be suggesting, it should occur not through radical leaps, but in fundamental continuity with the vital core of Jewish history, for “only when we attach ourselves to the inheritance of the past can it be advanced . . . according to nature.”56 Echoing Geiger, he argues that the task of distinguishing the essential from the peripheral in Judaism belongs to Wissenschaft. He remains confident, however, that Judaism can endure such scrutiny, contending, “The unification of faith and knowledge is, to Judaism, no mere fleeting demand of the times, but an eternal law.”57 However it may evolve, “Judaism can and will satisfy all the higher needs of mankind for all time.”58